The state of exception has become the norm in Western democracies.

Evidence

According to the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ambivalence—the ability to regard the same act as both unjustifiable and necessary—is central to the sovereign power of modern democracies. Such a breech in logic comes to be reasoned through “exceptional” moments of crisis, which the state uses to suspend established codes and procedures and to legitimize government abuses of power. Agamben claims that what characterizes modern democratic Western politics is that the exceptions have become the rule. The state of exception, he writes, becomes “the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rest[s].” Thus the United States was not necessarily in an exceptional state of crisis during George Bush’s War on Terror but rather operated through a perpetual “state of exception”—from the Cold War through the continued War on Terror. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 363 (#expands, via linked claim)

What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, James McTeigue’s 2005 V for Vendetta). In the PD. James novel on which the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 7 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The diabolical aspect of this setting was that the beliefs and convictions it sanctioned, and the actions it encouraged, supplied legitimacy to the Nazi masterplan and made it digestible to most, the victims included. While fighting for petty privileges, exempted statuses or simply the stay of execution which the overall design of destruction provided for, the victims and those who tried to help them tacitly accepted the premises of the design. Arguing, for example, that this or that person has a right to be exempt from the professional bar on the ground of his past merits, one admitted in practice that without such special merit, the professional bar was uncontestable. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 370 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The state of exception is structurally lodged within, not outside, the normative legal order; Democratic states govern through a permanent state of exception rather than true crisis — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 363; The permanent state of exception predates Nazism in colonial formations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1753 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Democratic states govern through a permanent state of exception rather than true crisis #expands (0.95) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 363
• Authoritarian measures can persist within nominally democratic structures via normalized crisis #corroborates (0.92) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 7
• Contesting exceptions legitimates the very rule being fought #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 370