Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VIII

Disbelief; Dread; Scylla and Charybdis Explained; Switching Poles; Glennon

Supermoon setting today. My bare feet are very cold. Make of that what you will.

Today is October 18^th.  There are 18 days until the U.S. Presidential election.  Wet snow.  Both this exercise in trying to explain the election and the campaign itself are coming to an end. 

There is a hell of a lot of thought here, but my apologies for the writing, not up to my usual standard.  I do want to wrap up this series, but I’m under a lot of pressure and it is the best I can do under the circumstances. 

Many people are writing things I’m thinking, so I don’t have to.   I am trying to hit the high points here, assuming a pretty media savvy audience, and provide something you won’t read elsewhere.  Also, frankly, a lot of this is for me, making my peace. A book would require more consistent flow. Again, sorry.

Today I revisit the central metaphor of this inquiry, the opposition between the rock and the whirlpool, or Scylla and Charybdis.  I didn’t use the Greek in the series title because it was a bit high falutin’.

On the other hand, without time to “turn this into haiku” as my wife recently said, this text might be more approachable.  Anyway, here goes.

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What are we talking about?  The (mostly liberal) press is full of expressions of disbelief.  Even genial David Brooks, the New York Time’s idea of a conservative (a Canadian?) asks: “Why the Heck Isn't She Running Away With This?  Baffled by the stability of the polls despite all sorts of things that might change people’s minds, Brooks maintains that the parties have become essentially religious groups, and the Democratic priesthood (DNC, Biden Administration, NYT) is so far to the “left” (uggh, but you know what I mean) that 50% of Americans cannot bring themselves to vote for the Dems.  There’s truth in it, but I think it doesn’t go very far toward explaining the analogous political currents across Europe.  As is so often the case, we look at American politics and see Trump.  Thinking stops.

Here’s mild mannered political scientist Damon Linker at Persuasion:

How is it possible that a louche Manhattan real estate mogul, tabloid celebrity, and reality-show television star launched a successful hostile takeover of one of the two major parties in the most powerful nation on earth, managed to get himself elected president, served out a single chaotic term, attempted a hapless self-coup to keep himself in office after losing his bid for re-election, became a convicted felon and faced numerous additional charges in several different jurisdictions, and then returned to run for president for a third time, all the while keeping himself within a couple of points of his opponent?

Rather than answer that question, Linker wanders through a perfectly ordinary discussion of the policies in Trump’s first term, and how a second term would be much more radical.  He, for what must be the millionth time, articulates reasons for voting against Trump.  These are statistically unlikely to be anybody’s actual reasons, as we’ve been discussing.  The arguments are not bad, but seem to be, and I do not mean this (too) unkindly, superficial.  They have nothing to do with the heart of the matter for Dems.  And with regard to Trump’s supporters, Linker literally does not try.  It’s kinda strange.  He makes no attempt to answer the question he himself puts forth rather cleverly.

If that’s all you got, well, clearly, more people need to be reading Intermittent Signal!  Think, don’t argue.  The times call for interpretation of what we don’t understand, not reiteration of positions we think we can defend.  (There will be a quiz.)

As I noted on the last outing, much depends on what “the candidate” is thought to be a candidate for.  A good flesh and blood person?  Merely a symbol?  An executive attempting to execute a political plan?  A leader who inspires others?  A political functionary, needed to fulfill certain roles, sign bills and meet foreign dignitaries?  A placeholder for party politics, decided by others? Else?  Obviously, the answer is some sort of mixture, but a great deal depends on where one puts the emphasis.  Most argument assumes one or another of these roles, and then argues for, or usually against, the candidate’s ability to fulfill that role, leaving the field to the other candidate.  Ho hum. No wonder we don’t understand what motivates our political opponents.

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Dread; Scylla & Charybdis explained.  How to get deeper?  How do we interpret the strange stability of the polls, pretty much regardless of what happens?  The intuition at the heart of this series of essays is that both campaigns are motivated, mostly by fear.

That is why the campaigns have been almost entirely negative, indeed political discourse has been almost entirely negative.  Hence my metaphor: do you want to risk dying by climbing up an icy rock wall?  Or by attempting to jump clear, albeit into a whirlpool full of boulders?  Either way, you’re risking dying, afraid.  Or there is a third position: you risk freezing to death, sitting on your ledge.  Not voting, but still afraid. Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part I

But fears are often inchoate.  Sometimes, you wake up in a sweat.  Shudder for no reason.  “Dread” may be a better word.  So, I’m trying to think through each party’s dreads, the fears beneath the fears they know how to say.  And as is often the case when sneaking up on something as elusive as a big animal or an inchoate fear, I’m going to have to take the long way ‘round.  Bear with me.

Humans often think in terms of oppositions, which are used to organize our experience of reality, and so our ability to conceptualize our lives, not least in physical space.  Consider, in no real order: light/dark; up/down; left/right, or North/South & East/West; inside/outside; near/far.  Or we can think of our lives vis-à-vis one another: male/female; good/bad; Yin/Yang; Apollonian/Dionysian, and of course conservative/liberal (progressive), for examples.  You will note that most of these oppositions can be mapped onto our political contest, though different folks will map things in different ways.

In the United States, this natural (and I do think it is natural) instinct to think in terms of opposition is politically institutionalized by the two-party system.  This system, obviously, is not natural, not necessary.  Many countries have multi-party systems.  From time to time, a third party emerges in the United States, does badly, and disappears.  Political scientists have offered explanations for the durable duality of US politics that you might find convincing, but for now, there it is, the Democrats and Republicans.

And a number of oppositions have emerged in this election, and have been extensively reported.  Of particular interest to me, and I think associated at some deep level: old media/new media; female/male; college educated/not college educated.  The Democrats dominate the first set of categories, the Republicans the second.

With regard to media, let me recommend

Sam Kahn

Trump, New Media King.  The argument is that liberals, the Dems, control the legacy media, or what is left of it after the great concentration.  The NYT as black hole.  Hard to dispute.  Beginning with talk radio, conservative voices moved to alternative media.  Rush Limbaugh emerges as a seminal figure.  (Imagery intended.  Guy going to work in a pickup springs to mind.)  Trump was the first to conduct entire campaigns through alternative media, directly reaching people.  It has been, well, democratic.

Of course, “democracy” and “good” are not synonyms.  Whether or not better than all the alternatives, as the saying goes, surely democracies can make mistakes, and have an unfortunate tendency to become mobs.  A great deal of the US legal tradition is concerned with corralling democratic enthusiasms.  But talk radio, and the internet, and podcasts are all about arousing enthusiasms.  They are exciting!  Which raises the question of whether a stable democracy requires something more boring, like a newspaper tradition?  If the medium is the message, do we need people to sit and read and think – to be both alone and in public, as it were – before we can trust them with voting?  Or are poop emojis and podcasts enough? 

From this perspective, the collapse in American trust in media is disastrous for democratic self-governance.  Weirdly, the NYT openly and intentionally moved from being the paper of record to a moral crusader.  (Not worth discussing here.)  So, the Republic (“if you can keep it” – Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention) survived the Civil War, the Nazis, the Commies, and was overcome by the iPhone, alternative media, moral dudgeon?  If so, we need to get to work on a political theory, because we don’t have one.

Which brings us to female/male.  As has been widely reported, females tend to support Harris, and males Trump, by statistically significant margins.  It’s tempting to make an old school feminist argument, centered on abortion rights, and the Harris campaign is certainly committed.  But it does not get us very far.  Lots of Americans of all sexes have complex feelings about abortion, at different stages, and so the binary breaks down in practice.  And, again, discussing Roe v. Wade says absolutely nothing about the rest of the G-7.  America is so big it is hard to remember that our particulars are just that, particular.  Nor does the Democratic effort to make Roe central to the campaign tell us anything much about the last 9 years, when Roe was law and Trump dominated discourse.

So, we have to look deeper.  The college educated are overwhelmingly more likely to vote Democratic; the not-college educated are more likely to vote Republican.  Second, females are increasingly likely, vis-à-vis the population, to have educational success, from kindergarten through graduate school.  (This does not apply to few fields, most STEM and utterly dominated by international students.) 

Trigger warning for my more progressive readers, hell even I was taken aback by this: John Carter: Academia Is Women's Work.  Carter makes an explicitly sexist, that is, rooted in biology, argument about what women and men seek, and how they get it.  Breeding imperatives make men focus on how women look; rearing imperatives make women focus on men’s status.  Men can only achieve status in competition with other men.  (Fighting with a girl is lose/lose.)  Once something becomes female-coded, men cannot achieve much status in that field, and leave.  Conversely, women want to do well enough; they are focused on other things.  So, (i) excellence, therefore, is male; and (ii) the feminization of the academy is self-fulfilling.

I suppose this is an incel argument?  Putting the argument itself to one side (tbh, I’m not entirely sure where I get off the train), it seems undeniable that it is an expression of profound alienation from a central, arguably the central, generative institution in US society.  We fit people to their places through academic credentialing.  And so, we have males saying that the academy is not for them.  Whether or not it cannot be, along the lines Carter suggests, is politically beside the point. 

At the same time, straight white males without mental health issues have no plausible victim narrative.  But much of our culture, and especially the education industry, takes a therapeutic stance towards any problem.  Much of this is self-aggrandizing.  For recent random example, a few days ago, Columbia barred one of its professors, Shai Davidai, from campus.  Davidai has been very critical of Columbia’s actions with regard to the Gaza protests; Columbia said he harassed employees.  But, Columbia insisted, the professor wouldn’t be fired.  Instead, he would be allowed to return to campus after he “undertakes appropriate training on our policies governing the behavior of our employees.” Columbia Bars Davidai From Campus. The University does not seek action against a man by firing him; the University seeks to unman him, while retaining control, by infantilizing him, “training.”  Therapy/Training/Drugs = > HR = > Jurisdiction.  Truly Orwellian.  And, of course, there is a huge amount of money to be made.

It’s just too poetic to note that Abelard was castrated.  Now, there were other issues, but the academic fight was whether the University of Paris would be centered on the professoriate, or on the students, which would benefit popular teachers like Abelard.  With Abelard unmanned, as it were, the professoriate won.  And for the burden of a millennium, the central figure of the University was the professor.  All the way back in the late ‘70s, however, Lyotard could declare that the central figure of the contemporary university was the administrator.  Oddly, Quebec had asked him to prepare a report, which became The Postmodern Condition.

Bureaucracy, and hence the modern state, but a lot of affiliated enterprises, law, banking, the medical industrial complex, rest on claims to expertise.  Which, as a practical matter, means education.  So now we have a set of things that hang together, that are ever more strongly associated, even if not logically necessary. 

One the one hand, we have old media, women, education, and bureaucracy.  The Democratic Party.  (How many DEI officials do you think are Republican?)  More broadly, we can say that the Democratic Party represents a current version of modernity, the post-Vietnam era synthesis.  Bureaucratic rationality.  Apollonian.  Scylla the Rock.

On the other hand, we have new media, men, lack of education, and more physical labor.  The Republican Party under Trump.  Conversely, the Republican Party under Trump, represents discontent with this synthesis.  Those who see the country, and are unhappy.  Make American Great Again – even if we have to burn something down.  Again, we see the same thing in Europe.  Dionysian (guns, conservatives are more fun, “grab her pussy,” etc.)  Charybdis the Whirlpool.

At least that’s the vibe, the symbolization, the meaning in some implicit if not entirely rational way.  Such things are not entirely rational.  That’s what interpretation means.

So, this election is about whether or not you think modernity is working, and insofar as you have doubts, whether you think the system can heal itself, or something more radical is in order. 

Do you fear bureaucratic tyranny or mobs? 

In some versions, Charybdis is the monster who lives inside the whirlpool.  And a lot of people feel that this and other populist movements may give rise to strongmen, and there seem to be a number about.  Maybe a new Hitler will arise, my German friends and family often say.  Maybe.  But it is also the case that Eichmann, not Hitler, was the real innovation.  Innovation is good, says my administration.  But they would.  At any rate, it was bureaucracy the made the Holocaust go.

Question stands.

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Switching Poles.  The Democratic Party (like the establishment parties in Europe) is essentially conservative, in the simple sense that the Party represents and is committed to the existing order. 

The “progressive” language confuses matters.  It mostly means personal, and especially, sexual liberty.  There is no serious theory of history here, except for an implied tautological assertion that more liberty means “progress,” belied by the facts (MeToo, trafficking, wide spread unhappiness).  One might recall that Hobbes, in exchange for surrendering power to the sovereign, promised a commodious private life.  Hard to see Hobbes as progressive.]

The Republican Party, for a long time, was for the most part pretty conservative, again in the simple sense of satisfied with the status quo.  Republicans were the party of small town bankers, businessman and country clubs, and, at a grander level, of international trade.  The “populist” revolution, in this and other countries, upended all of that.  As has been widely remarked Trump seems to have remade the Republican party.  The hostile takeover imagery is apt; hostile takeovers work through direct appeals to shareholders.  Trump’s supporters still call themselves conservative, at least on talk radio.

Every few hundred thousand years, on what appears to be a random basis, the magnetic polarity of the earth shifts.  Something similar happened to the political parties in the United States.  (Indeed, something similar happened in Europe, though of course the particulars are different.)  

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Glennon, Double Government, and Alienation.  How did we get here?  I’m not sure, but I stumbled on a place to start.  Ten years ago, before Trump dominated politics, I read Michael Glennon's "National Security and Double Government.”  I liked it, and gave it a rave to friends and colleagues. Modestly reedited, here’s what I wrote then.  

“brilliant, deep, sad, and vastly learned across multiple fields -- a work of Weberian power and stature.  Glennon begins by asking why Obama's security policy is so similar to that of Bush.  His argument, in short, is that the President does not really set security policy.  Elected officials, and high judges -- the visible aspects of government, which Glennon names "Madisonian," are so dependent on bureaucratic (especially military and "intelligence") expertise -- which Glennon names "Trumanite" -- that policy is set, commitments are made, long before the President or anyone else has a chance to think.  In a nutshell, Glennon maintains that the democratic republic has been hollowed out by its bureaucratic apparatus.

But if the President is not really in charge of security, then who is?  Following 19th century English political economist Walter Bagehot, Glennon maintains that America has two governments, a visible government for public consumption (legislative, executive, judicial, the first three articles of the Constitution), and another bureaucratic government that actually formulates and implements policy, presenting it as political objective, to be "legitimated" after the fact when circumstances require.   Unfortunately, we only know how to think, talk, act in terms of the first, our political tradition -- which is increasingly irrelevant.  We speak Madisonian, but we are ruled by Trumanites.  [Deep state, anyone?  Too big to fail?  Crypto?  Etc.]

By way of background, Glennon is professor of law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, most famous for powerfully arguing that the UN Charter does not actually govern the law of war, and the text has fallen into desuetude, vide Kosovo, Libya, and so forth, to say nothing of the Syrias of the world.  He was also Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Encapsulations of serious arguments, such as the foregoing, tend to render the arguments superficial.  After all, worries about bureaucracy, "the headless fourth branch," are hardly new.  What is difficult to convey -- especially to those of you who are not trained in the law -- is how solidly, learnedly, soberly Glennon makes his argument.  He doesn't simply argue that bureaucracy has a great deal of power, too much discretion, so perhaps we should revise the Administrative Procedure Act.  Instead, Glennon shows how bureaucracy constrains and ultimately vitiates democratic possibility.  In doing so, the security state not only disenfranchises, but discourages, "Joe Sixpack."   We watch football, and elections as football, but we cease to be democratic actors -- we the people are not overthrown, but dissolved, and each make our separate ways.  What res publica?

The relations between the governments are complex, and explored at some length.  Each is subject to serious constraints.  In particular, the forces of conformity and rivalries within the Trumanite security community mean that real thinking, serious strategy, is rarely done.  And so we have a metastatic drone policy, an NSA run amuck, an inability to shut down various prisons or grant folks habeas, a disingenuous policy in Libya, etc., etc. 

As his disapproval of our actual security policy suggests, Glennon's two governments should not be conceived of as substance and form, the avant garde or the technocrats or the guardians vis-a-vis the people they both serve and rule.  Glennon does not believe that the Trumanite elite is wise, but must sell its positions to a rather apathetic and stupid people, as Acheson or Machiavelli might have hoped, and as Orwell caricatured.  Recent political events demonstrate rather conclusively that our elites inside the beltway are hardly wise, and should not be imagined as struggling to save the rubes from themselves.  Instead, the picture Glennon paints is of two different kinds of politics: one based on expertise and interstitial rivalry, that occasionally needs national legitimation, and one based on celebrity and careerism, that occasionally must do something (what to do is the job of the experts).  That is, the relationship between Madisonian and Trumanite elements of the national government has been, generally, symbiotic.  They have needed each other.

This symbiosis appears to be breaking down.  Elected officials are wrapped in scandal; judges are viewed as partisan hacks.  Madisonian government does not have the dignity it once did.  As a result, it is increasingly difficult for our "public" government, e.g., the Obama administration, to legitimate the actions of its bureaucracies, e.g., the NSA.  Indeed, the two aspects of government increasingly disavow one another . . . leading to greater discontent with government, and perhaps a greater paranoia on the part of government officials.  Observe everyone!  Classify everything!  Anyone could be a terrorist!

Glennon cites a great number of current events, academic learning, judicial opinions -- the amount of "social" and "empirical" support here makes the text rather dense.  Fundamentally, however, Glennon is offering a constitutional and even philosophical argument, taking issue directly with the Federalist Papers.  Can the project of enlightened self-governance work, if it requires the construction of a mandarin class along the lines that, since the New Deal or at least WWII, we have in fact constructed?  It's a breathtakingly ambitious, and successful, text.

Assuming one agrees with the analysis, it is not clear what is to be done.  Glennon argues that we are approaching (as Madison feared we might), the limits of lawyerly/structural devices like checks and balances.   At some point, democracy is dependent on the virtues of the people, the demos.  And maybe this nation of so many millions is losing its capacity to instill civic virtue  -- which is after all a paternalistic, and in that sense illiberal, task -- in a sufficient number of its people to produce "a people" capable of self governance.  [Back to earlier discussion of raising babies.]

Glennon, in short, is discussing how the American project may end, and doing so with great clarity and power. 

A final thought: by thinking through double government, we may see how US politics often converges (the bureaucratic function) while giving rise to radically different hopes and enthusiasms among the people (the celebrity function). The stability of this structure is open to question.

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Eighteen days, citizens.  Be well.

— David A. Westbrook

Here’s where we are so far.

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?  Part I A Decision as Mosaic

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part II Why is this election so hard to think, and why does it matter for a diverse polity?

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part III Does Political Speech Matter? The Problem of Demographics

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part IV Critique of Pure Liberalism: Raising Babies; Choosing Kings I; How Serious is Philosophy?

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?  Part V Crises of Representation: Accounting; Poetic Bullshit & Graphic Silences

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VI Political Language, Two Confessions, and an Old Poem

Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part VII Disbelief; Dread; Scylla and Charybdis Explained; Switching Poles; Glennon