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It's Marvels Superheros, all the way down; today, we're all just actors
There's a peculiar post-modern quality to many events these days. A sense that we perform history rather than act out (and in, and on) history. The appearance that we curate our actions for our social media feeds, rather than conducting ourselves for the sake of the act itself.
Perhaps the truth is that we've internalized the camera, the truest emblem of our present moment. We act to see ourselves acting rather than act in order to do.
You see this in farces such as Prigozhin's pseudo-putsch, and whatever Yoon attempted in South Korea. You see this in every protest since camera phones and file sharing became ubiquitous. The people present don't behave like live players - like people who hold history's balance in their hands. They aren't fully committed. They haven't burnt their ships, or cast the die by crossing the Rubicon. Their actions aren't real: they're performative, with an eye to how others will view them, and to create an indelible record of your presence, your participation, in the happening that you're currently in the midst of. It's a scene. What it isn't is History.
Contrast this with (to take but two signal examples) Mussolini's March on Rome, and Franco's pronunciamiento.
In 1922, Mussolini declared before a crowd of tens of thousands that he wanted power and then sent a column of Blackshirts to Rome while he received delegations from the Italian great and good. He was invited to form a government by the king in short order.
In 1936, Franco took direct command of the Spanish Army of Africa, then moved 30,000 men into Spain directly, initiating a brutal civil war in which he ultimately emerged the victor.
What neither of these men did - and there are many other examples I could cite - was spend their time printing out handbills or filming blurbs for the cinemas or faffed around polishing how their actions were memorialized. They simply did.
Today, however, our Men of Action aren't made of the same stern stuff. Prigozhin certainly looked like a tough guy, but tough guys don't back down at the gates of Moscow. They take the Kremlin.
Yoon is supposedly this tough patriarch - he won in part on a wave of popular backlash to feminism - but he doesn't have any children (though he does have plenty of pets), and his declaration of martial law lasted barely a few hours, his special forces got pushed around by tiny unarmed women on the steps of the South Korean legislature, and he folded almost immediately in the midst of arguing over points of proper procedure for lifting military control. If this is the patriarchy, it's fallen on very hard times.
The truth is, under modern information conditions, it is very hard to build institutions of lasting value. Contrast the success of the gay rights movement (a slow process of incremental gains over many decades) versus the (to-date) failure of trans activism. Entirely separate theories of change were behind each of these; one worked, and one didn't.
A coup is hard work. In the 20th century, you needed careful planning. You couldn't WhatsApp someone. You needed to figure out a way to communicate clandestinely in person; you needed to identify likeminded individuals. All this was hard. The friction points were numerous, and very real.
Now guys just issue a press release, and get spicy in the DMs.
I blame Marvels. Partially tongue-in-cheek, but also partly in complete earnestness. Capesuit stuff is the great cultural unifier of our times. Everyone has seen at least some examples. These are the pictures that people have in their heads. What they imagine they are acting like. It's very shallow stuff of course, and completely deracinated and ahistorical. But it's nonetheless real. This is how people imagine themselves to be.
No wonder they all fail.
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