Zack Beauchamp's "Long 2020" theory

A Durkeimian Analysis

Something caught my eye this weekend that sent me down an analytical rabbit hole. I’ll try to write my way back out of it.

The Washington Post had a story about tech billionaire Mark Andreessen, founder of Netscape. Andreessen was railing about DEI in elite universities on X in a series of tweets. He suggested that universities “declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price.” I’m not sure how he calculates his 70% and why he thinks techbros like him are the victims of discrimination from the powers that be. JV Last tried to make sense of it in his Triad post today.

One of the tweets in Andreessen’s X thread caught the attention of Vox’s Zack Beauchamp. Andreessen had written:

But then the insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded [his[ complacency. And now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore.

Again, I’m baffled as to who “my people” refers to. Tech billionaires? People from Wisconsin? People in their 50s? And I don’t know what happened in 2017 other than we didn’t appropriately celebrate the first Trump administration.

Beauchamp shared Andreessen’s text and wrote this on BlueSky.

This leaked text from Mark Andreessen, explaining his right-wing radicalization, is a perfect illustration of my "long 2020" theory — that the current right-wing coalition is defined by its shared hostility to the events of that year.

He then linked to this piece he wrote for Vox last month.

This vision [of the tech bros] has deep philosophical roots on the right, which has always positioned itself around defending elements of the status quo from its enemies on the left. But the 2025 American right tells itself a very particular version of that general story, one that focuses on the events of summer 2020.

In their minds, the combination of Covid restrictions, mainstream calls for wide-ranging social change, and mass street upheaval was the terrible terminus of modern progressive politics. Whatever their internal disagreements on issues like trade or spending or even immigration, the modern right agrees that the left must never be permitted another year like 2020 — and that Trump is the best vehicle for stopping it.

I think Beauchamp is onto something important. There was a convergence of events in 2020 unlike anything we had seen in fifty years. I think “Long 2020” makes sense in the same way we talk about “The Sixties”, which I always consider running from 1965 to 1974. What were discrete events in that period — assassinations, race riots, anti-war protests, the sexual revolution, Watergate — are often referenced rhetorically as a period where there was constant chaos and damage to the social fabric.

In the same way, 2020 brought together a pandemic, government response to the pandemic, isolation from others, supply chain fears, the murder of George Floyd, street protests with isolated violence, and a contentious presidential election campaign.

Reading Beauchamp’s analysis made me realize that we had a name for what he was describing: Emile Durkheim’s notion of anomie or normlessness. Since I decided not to include my sociological theory books in my retirement library, I had to go on some internet sluething to see what Durkheim had to say. Otherwise, I’m relying on memory from an excellent seminary on Durkheim in grad school and years of teaching about him.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

One article I found in my internet digging was this one in a magazine called Sociological Review.¹ It was written by Nupur Pattanaik, sociologist at the Central University of Odisha in Koraput, India. She wrties:

The pandemic worsened the mental health of many, while also damaging the available support and solidarity structures. As the social structure changes rapidly, such transitions can alienate individuals from the very moral compasses and social bonds associated with everyday interactions: those social gatherings, outings, shopping, dining, those lost connections which create a sense of solidarity and whose absence underpins anomie or normlessness, disconnection with a dearth of collective confidence.

In my teaching on Durkheim, I argued that there were at least three initiatives of concern to him. First, he was attempting to carve out a space for the unique value sociological analysis brought to academia. Second, he was interested (as were all of the classical sociologists) in the transition from traditional to modern forms of society. Third, he was interested in articulating the relationships between individuals and subgroups of society with the larger whole.

In this latter regard, two social forces (which he called social currents) were integration and regulation. Integration dealt with the degree of solidarity subgroups felt with the larger society. Regulation dealt with the degree to which general behaviors were controlled through conformity to norms and social mores.

He elucidated this in his 1895 study of Suicide. In an attempt to explain the stability of suicide rates over time² he drew upon these forces, arguing that when social currents moved toward the extreme positions of the two forces, then suicide rates increased. Too little integration and you get egoistic suicide. Too much integration and you get altruistic suicide (i.e., for the good of the group). Too much regulation and you get fatalistic suicide (only addressed in a footnote). Too little regulation, and you get anomic suicide.

Anomie, then, is a situation where people feel unconstrained by the norms of society.³ That’s what Beauchamp is seeing in the long 2020 and what we saw in “The Sixties”. In both eras, the social changes were too rapid to incorporate into the smooth transition of social currents Durkheim posited (Make American Great Again!}.

But we also had issues with the social force of integration. Subgroups felt more or less connected to the whole. Not only did Covid mean that we were literally isolated from each other, but subgroups rebelled against the larger society. Government was seen as the enemy, with “them” trying to harm “us”. Those protesting police violence, even using a phrase like “defund the police” were raising an issue of injustice. But others saw lawlessness and support for rioters destroying private property.

Durkheim identified the ways in which extreme integration and extreme regulation were damaging to individuals and subgroups. Andreessen’s attacks on universities suggests a desire to move the social currents toward that level of extreme conformity.

One more thing I’ve been pondering: the interaction between lessened integration and lessened regulation is particularly problematic. It allows groups to not only feel unconstrained by social forces but to imagine things as much worse that they are. Critics talk about the damage of “The Sixties” or “2020” in ways that aren’t accurate because it justifies the behavior of the in-group while minimizing the legitimacy of the out-group.⁴

Durkheim argued in Division of Labor that the interdependence of social structures and economics would keep our social forces in balance. This is what allows modern society to function in ways that traditional kinship structures no longer could.

But economic inequality, political dysfunction, polarization, authoritarianism, and social media algorithms all mitigate against that appropriate balance. Countering those centrifugal forces will require a lot of work on all fronts. I’m not optimistic but I’m certain it is important work that needs our immediate attention, as my friend Ben and I discussed yesterday after church.

1. Not to be confused with the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.

2. Individuals only appear in suicide statistics once!

3. It’s worth noting that both Trump administrations have been characterized by wide-ranging violation of norms.

4. Last week, I was incensed to hear a left-leaning commentator refer to “the student anti-war riots”, which didn’t happen.