Disordered Institutions Make Disordered Publics

In 1905, the rulers of Meiji Japan—the fourteen men with functionally absolute authority to negotiate their nation's future—had just pulled off what they considered an extraordinary geopolitical coup. Over the prior two years, they had made war against one of the great powers of Europe on land and sea, a power three times their size in population, three in GDP, and fifty in land area. And then, despite a war situation that had developed to their disadvantage, they leveraged their early victories into a negotiated peace that achieved all of their essential war aims, including pre-eminence over the vast and resource-rich terrain known as Manchuria.

To celebrate their achievement, these men asked the streetcar companies of Tokyo to outfit several streetcars in special victory banners, as the historian Shumpei Okamoto documents in The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (p. 184). To their dismay, the companies refused...because the operators’ union threatened to set the cars on fire. Not because they were opposed to the war, but because they were opposed to the peace. Anti-treaty activists demanded that the government tear up the treaty, restart the war, and demand that Russia cede not just the Liadong Peninsula, not just the South Manchuria Railway, not just the south half of Sakhalin Island, but all of Sakhalin, one or perhaps three billion yen in war indemnity, and maybe some more besides (pp. 163, 172). The protests against peace were so vehement that they eventually spiraled into a multi-day riot known as the Hibiya Incendiary Incident, with a dozen dead and thousands arrested.

This would all be an interesting enough story on its own. But in the febrile terrain of Imperial Japan, we can see unnerving echoes of our own time, of what Anton Jäger has so memorably called “hyperpolitics.” Hyperpolitics is a state of extreme politicization and extreme disorganization. Mass interest in politics and mass energy for action combines with a total lack of organizing structures, leading to jacquerie, chaos, horizontalism.

Civil society, Meiji style

At first glance, Meiji Japan is an odd candidate for hyperpolitics. As Okamoto documents, by 1904 Japan was replete with the organizing institutions we call civil society: newspapers (p. 53), political parties, and a bewildering array of political agitation organizations with names like the Amur River Society (p. 61), the Anti-Russia Comrades Society (p. 81), the ‘Six Professors’ (p. 59), and later the ‘Seven Professors’ (p. 63), and so on and so forth.

Many of these groups took it as their mandate to inform and organize the mass population of Japan (though not all of them; some were explicitly elitist societies, aimed at advocating within the government rather than mass action, such as the Kogetsukai—named after the restaurant warehouse where they first met in secret (p. 72)). Yet the net result still has a whiff of hyperpolitics about it: enraged, misinformed, diverted into ill-aimed riots rather than disciplined action.

It's strange. This is that vaunted world dense with civic associations, still all full of gemeinschaft, with the structures that ought to have channeled energy into productive action. And, of course, not a smartphone in sight.

So what gives? Why was Japanese politics so disordered?

The (deliberate) fog of war

It is important to understand the actual state of the war situation to appreciate just how disordered was the public response to the Treaty of Portsmouth. 

During active hostilities, the Japanese Army had won shocking victories on land. At the Battle of Mukden, perhaps 250,000 Japanese soldiers confronted perhaps 300,000 of the tsar’s men. The Japanese prevailed, driving the Russians from the field and inflicting perhaps 90,000 casualties, including tens of thousands of prisoners of war—but at the cost of 70,000 casualties of their own. Shoestring supply lines meant the Japanese were unable to pursue and annihilate the remaining Russians. A glorious tactical victory, but a strategically perilous position. Japanese supply lines were stretched to their limit, the war industry could not keep up, and the state was kept afloat only by immense loans drawn in London.

The Battle of Tsushima, a shocking victory of the Imperial Japanese Navy over the Russian Baltic Fleet, in which all 11 of the Russian battleships were lost, stepped in to save Japan's position by creating an occasion for peace talks. Meanwhile, the Russians had begun rapidly reinforcing their land position, bringing massive numbers of troops from Europe to Manchuria along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In other words, despite a string of tremendous victories—victories which astounded the world, the first victories of a modernizing Asian nation over a European one—it was quite obvious to Japan's leaders that if the war were to resume, they would likely lose, and lose badly. In the event of a resumption of the war, they might not merely fail to achieve their war aims: they might lose Korea, their foothold on the continent, and what they regarded as a “dagger” aimed at the heart of Japan. The stakes, in other words, were quite high.

However, the oligarchy had also heavily manipulated the media environment. They had tightly controlled access to information from the front. Stories of victory and individual heroism were permitted; stories of the dire logistical, strategic, and financial situation were not. This extended not just to the popular press, but to politicians and officials as well. The true war situation was known only at the highest levels.

Disordered institutions

The institutions of Meiji Japan were profoundly disordered. This was not an accident of history or a mistake made by activists. Rather, it was a structural feature of the Meiji constitution. This constitution was written to marry two irreconcilable mandates: to adopt the modes and orders of Western constitutions, like parliaments, prime ministers, and political parties, and yet also to preserve the absolute sovereignty of the emperor. The net result was a political system that had the outward trappings of Western liberalism, but in practice was run by a byzantine network of councils, cabinets, and general staffs, all of which were in turn cross-cut by conspiracies, cliques, and patronage networks.

As Okamoto documents, this was a situation in which political parties had functionally zero power to affect national policy. For this reason, the government felt no pressure to keep the heads of political parties informed as to the actual strategic situation of Japan or the actual progress of the war with Russia (p. 88). As such, the political parties were unable to play their essential mediating role between popular energy and policy platforms.

“The [oligarchs] did not, however, lead [public opinion]. Rather, they virtually disregarded it” (p. 228). The oligarchs did not lead the people because they did not have to. Their position did not depend on mobilizing popular opinion in favor of their preferred policies.

There is a lesson here. It is not enough to have ‘organizations.’ It rather matters whether these organizations have an intelligible connection with power. If the connection is unintelligible or nonexistent, disordered politics is the result. 

Return to the Hibiya Incendiary Incident. It was meant to be just a few political speeches at a park. Attacked by the police, it became a riot (p. 208). Yet the riot had a target: the Nijubashi Bridge, close enough to the Imperial Palace that the unseen emperor, lurking in a hallway, might hear them playing the national anthem and shouting “Banzai!” (p. 212). Indeed this notion of bypassing ‘the government’ ‘the system’ and appealing directly to the emperor recurs throughout the political media of this period: “We are determined to have the present cabinet members and the plenipotentiaries reject the peace agreement and apologize for their conduct to the Emperor above and the people below” (p. 203, but see also pp. 170, 182, 186, 193, 195, etc.). The mediating institutions didn’t work and people knew it. We see the uncanny echo of this today in calls for a strong executive to simply bypass a gridlocked system and Do Something.

Power clarifies

Powerlessness is intellectually debilitating. If nothing you do can affect the outcome, then there is no need to discipline your actions. Policy becomes posture. Reason degenerates into social signaling. Why not simply take the most radical course?

Power clarifies.

I have felt this myself, stepping into the executive editor role here at Liberal Currents. As an amateur author one has the luxury of thinking only of the Ideas and the Craft. As an editor I am ever-conscious of the fact that unless enough money comes in the door to pay our authors, our staff, and our hosting services, Liberal Currents will cease to exist. So I have no luxury of being sentimental: I need to publish what people will read.

Power clarifies. Unless, of course, it is power without accountability. Power unchecked yields a different kind of stupidity: “Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it’s probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day.” What is essential is the feedback cycle between the exercise of power and accountability to results. In extremis this cycle removes you from power. But in normal operation, you discipline yourself ahead of time, knowing of such possibility.

This principle applies on the population scale. People who believe their choices don’t matter choose poorly. Parties that know they will never be held accountable have no interest in educating or leading the people, no interest in facts and reality. They may give in to whatever fever dream suits them, tell whatever flattering lies they like, and remain intact.

This is the cycle that has broken down in our day, as it was broken in the days of Imperial Japan. Our institutions have become dysfunctional, and this has produced a dysfunctional politics and most of all a dysfunctional public.

It’s not the phones

Hence my conclusion. It is not the phones. It is the institutions. It is not social media. It is a dysfunctional political system in which the feedback mechanism between power and the people has broken down. The back-and-forth transmission of information and effective control has jammed up.

This dysfunctional institutional environment has of course enabled the malignant growth of social entrepreneurs. The most central of these, of course, is the right-wing disinformation machine, which spends all day pumping the people’s veins full of lies that flatter their egos, outrage their sensibilities, and provide convenient scapegoats upon which to heap all the fear and anger in the world.

The right-wing lie machine is itself a creature of a disordered ecosystem. We cannot outcompete lies with lies and evil with more gridlock. We need to do the simultaneous work of rebuilding institutions and publics on the basis of truth, accountability, and effective governance. Parties must lead the people, but they can only do so when they can put their ideas into practice while in power and then face the music at the ballot box.

Featured image is "Hibiya Incendiary Incident," 1905. Author Unknown.