Sources of Instability


             

SOURCES OF INSTABILIITY


By way of brief introduction, I am a reader, a somewhat compulsive reader, and what populates this blog are nothing more than my marginal notes on what I’ve read.  That said, there is a framework, one that I’ve drawn from Daniel Bell’s study, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.  In it, Bell quotes Sm M. Lipset as saying, “legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.”  Moreover, Lipset goes on to say, “the extent to which contemporary democratic political democratic system are legitimate depends in large part on the ways the key issues which have historically divided the system have been resolved,” and here I would add resolved if not permanently, once and for all, then at least temporarily.  Implicit in the notion of historically divisive issues is the understanding that such issues may be in remission, but they remain potential sources of instability within a society, challenges to the political legitimacy of the current realm.  In general, as Bell outlines it, the sources of instability fall under seven broad categories.  They are:


Existence of an insoluble problem

Existence of a parliamentary impasse

The Growth of Private Violence

The disjunction of sectors

Multi-racial or multi-tribal conflicts

Alienation of the Intelligentsia

Humiliation in War


The order is not particularly important, nor are they distinct categories.  From my own perspective, they serve mainly, as I said, as a framework to organize my thoughts on what perhaps seems obvious to many and is referenced often in the media, our current state of political divisiveness.  As I write this, the country is in the throes of impeachment.  The House of Representatives, always the “democratic” element of our government, elected under the expectation they it will represent the diversity of interests in the populace, is expected to vote for impeachment.  The Senate, ostensibly the deliberative element of our government, is expected to dismiss the charges with little or no deliberation.  I wouldn’t want to focus too narrowly on impeachment, in part because any reasonable history of this, the third impeachment, will be written at some remove in time, in part because I believe, along with many others, that Trump is a symptom of the cancer, not the cancer itself.  He is a tumor on the body politic.  He should be impeached and removed.  Doing so, however, will solve little and may even make matters worse.  It is, however, prima facia evidence for a “parliamentary impasse” or in an American context a “congressional impasse.”   With that in mind, let me refer to a recent New York Times editorial as my first post:


TOPIC: the existence of a parliamentary (i.e. congressional) impasse

Cf. Elizabeth Drew, New York Times, December 15, 2019.


Drew’s concern is the “impeachment process,” and she points out initially that “when the process of impeachment drove President Richard Nixon from office in 1974, there was widespread celebration that ‘the system worked.’  But the 1974 impeachment process may turn out to have been unique, a model for how it should work that has yet to be replicated – and perhaps never will be.”  It is questionable whether the proceedings did work.  Implicit to any discussion of impeachment is the idea of “separation of powers,” and Arthur Schlesinger, in his study The Imperial Presidency, summed it up as follows:


The greatest importance of the separation of powers lies precisely in the old theory of the Founding Fathers: to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.  The separation of powers provides the vital mechanism of self-correction in the American system.  It is the means of protection against the resurgence of the imperial Presidency.  It is the ultimate safeguard of accountability.  The Constitution cannot guarantee that wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may not fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.  But it can, through the separation of powers, guarantee that, when a President abuses power, corrective forces will arise to redress the constitutional balance.  As Senator Sam Ervin memorably put it in Watergate days, “one of the great advantages of the three branches of government is that it’s difficult to corrupt all three at the same time.”[1]


Schlesinger and Irwin were idealists, writing at a time when the impeachment process seemed to work, when congress reclaimed constitutional power from the imperial president and fulfilled its constitutional mandate to hold a “rogue” president to account.  Drew, however, points out that the current proceedings have demonstrated the fragility of the impeachment clause, and she lays the blame on our “very partisan political atmosphere.”  At one level, of course, she’s correct.  The breakdown in the process, so to speak, is the contentious divide between the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, and the Senate, controlled by Republicans, a state of affairs that is itself intractable and will remain so as long as rural and Republican Montana and North Dakota control the same number senators as urban and Democratic California and New York.   I am suggesting that the House represents population, the Senate geography, and while a majority of the US population resides in a handful of urban settings, which tend Democratic, the majority of the states are predominantly rural settings, which tend Republican.  

The reasons for these tendencies are historical, touching on everything from race to religion, but its enough to insure that, unless Republicans take specific steps to dilute and distort the Democratic majority (e.g. various gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts) the House will be reliably Democratic, the Senate Republican, and it is this partisan divide that potends the impeachment disfunction.  In some respects, this is politics as normal, and along the lines anticipated by Madison when he wrote in the 65th Federalist that offenses “which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust” are “of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”  He went on to warn “the prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.”


It is politics as normal, too, that leads Drew to suggest “it is, of course, not surprising that impeachment should be a highly partisan affair.  It’s difficult to contemplate the investigations of Nixon, President Bill Clinton and now Mr. Trump ever commencing if the same party held the House and the White House.”  True enough, but what is being contemplated, more so among the Republicans than the ever-fractious Democrats, is the on-going possibility of creating a one-party, Republican state.  The one-party state is inherently authoritarian with the Presidency as the focal point.  It is, of course, a dangerous gamble, and some Republicans are wary, in part because Trump being Trump, so to speak, offends some sensibilities, not least some real commitment to the constitutional “separation of powers” among some erstwhile Republicans, but it’s the Trump personality itself that creates the opportunity consolidate power within the single party.  Moreover, he is, for the most part, delivering.  He is clearly amenable to the oligarchic class, delivering on the tax cuts and the decimation of the “regulatory state,” and he is also amenable to a broad constituency, delivering on the Supreme Court appointments who represent culturally conservative racial and religious attitudes and who are likely to decimate the “de jure” protection of civil rights that have grown over the last half century.   Moreover, particularly with the latter constituency, already a celebrity, he has deepened his celebrity status transforming party leadership into a form cult leadership. 


There is a much longer discussion here, but let me just suggest that, at one point, demonstrating the validity of the adage “beware what you wish for, you might get it,” writers like Schlesinger were bemoaning the “decay of the traditional party system,” which had been the “ultimate vehicle of political expression,” a traditional world where “voters inherited their politics as they did their religion,” and it was “as painful to desert one’s party as to desert one’s church.”[2]   The religious metaphor is more than mere window dressing, and Drew makes reference to a similar sentiment.  “In 1974,” she writes, “as many as seven Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee broke with Nixon — and the fact that a number of Republican senators were willing to convict him led him to resign.  Today, such unorthodoxy is heresy among Republicans.”  I would quibble a bit, though I think it’s an important quibble.  As many have noted, Trumpism is more cult like than religious, and Trump himself more like a cult leader than anything resembling a religious leader.  As Bell reminds us, “when Religions fail, cults appear,” and the evangelical right’s seemingly unwavering support of Trump, one might suggest, has little to do with religion proper, despite his delivery on a court and cabinet packed with self-proclaimed Christians more than willing to act on behalf of their Christian belief.   Rather, “when theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework for religion begins to break up,” as Bell suggests, “the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.” It is, in short, the felt sense of waning religious influence by many on the evangelical right, contrary to their expectations throughout the Reagan and Bush years, that facilitated the rise of Trump.  He is, like a cult leader, “a heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox,” who has presented himself as a messianic figure from the first days of his campaign, asserting a claim to special powers as “the chosen one.”  It is difficult to see his rallies as anything other than, as Bell put it, “communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act on impulses that had hitherto been repressed” as politically incorrect and socially deplorable, creating an obverse psychological link to the late 60s and early 70s when the celebrated rock musician was the heterodox figure and the so-called counter-culture allowed one to “feel as though one were exploring novel or hitherto tabooed modes of conduct.”  What defines the cult of Trump is, in short, not simply its rejection of orthodoxy, to include even the ideological orthodoxy of the Republican party itself, but the personal tie to Trump as a guru and to the like-minded group, “rather than to an institution or a creed.”[3]   Trump is not a political leader, but rather Jim Jones or Charles Manson ascendant to the bully pulpit of the presidency.


One would not describe Trump, as Schlesinger described Nixon, as having a “conventional exterior.” Moreover, one would not describe Nixon as anything but a politician, certainly not a cult leader.  Though one might suggest he aspired to the status of cult leadership, to the sort of adoring connection Trump has created with many of his fans, but it was an aspiration denied him time and again.  To turn away from Nixon was simply to turn away from a manifestly flawed, party politician, and that ultimately facilitated his impeachment.  To turn away from Trump is to leave the cult and a rejection of the cult, cannot be redeemed through principle or concern with institutions, but only a return to the cult.  Moreover, a return to the cult with renewed enthusiasm and obedience to the cult leader.  While democrats, and I include myself in this category, are chagrined that Republicans seem little concerned with constitutional norms or democratic norms, what might be described as the American creed, we shouldn’t be surprised.   Regardless what any Republican party member might think of Trump himself, they exist in “fear and trembling” not only of the vicissitudes of the cult leader, of being branded insufficiently loyal to the cult and those who draw a strong sense of identity from it.  I don’t want to over-state the case.  One suspects that a majority of Republicans are not true believers, but if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that apathy, going along out of indifference or going along to get alone, is more often the path to perdition than glory.  It teaches us that the true believers drive change, and if Trump believes in anything, it is not institutions or creeds, not congress or constitutional niceties, but Trump himself.     


Having said that, he is like Nixon “a man with revolutionary dreams.”  Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that Trump represents a reversion to and extension of what might be called the Nixonian project.  Schlesinger’s description of Nixon could well be a description of Trump, where “structural forces tending to transfer power to the Presidency were now reinforced by compulsive internal drives,” the most salient of which are “a sense of life as a battlefield” and “a belief that the nation was swarming with personal enemies.”  Not unlike Nixon, Trump also has an “urgent psychological need for exemption from the democratic process,” particularly critique emerging from the contending party and the press, and while Nixon may have had his covert enemies list, Trump is more willing to publicly brand his personal enemies as “traitors” and “enemies of the people.”  Finally, like Nixon, his inability to countenance critique leads to a “withdrawal from external reality,” which in turn requires him “to impose his private sense of what was real on the government and, if he could on the nation.”  If “America was entering the age of the solipsistic Presidency” with Nixon, as Schlesinger suggested, then with Trump the solipsistic presidency has emerged in full bloom.

In short, not unlike Nixon, Trump “sensed an historical opportunity to transform the Presidency – to consolidate within the White House all the powers, as against Congress, as against the electorate, as against the rest of the executive branch itself, that a generation of foreign and domestic turbulence had chaotically delivered to the Presidency.”[4]   What his means ultimately, as Drew puts it, “unless our political system undergoes a radical change, we could be on the brink of having no check on the president, no matter how radically he defies the Constitution.” 

     




[1] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Imperial Presidency, 473.
[2] Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 209.
[3] Throughout, cf. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 164. 
[4] Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 216.  There are differences, of course.  Trump might well “flinch from face-to-face argument,” but he is perfectly willing to engage on Twitter. 

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