An Unsolvable Problem

The Existence of an Unsolvable Problem


As a thought, I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Roosevelt and Taft in Bully Pulpit.  Although for the most part narrative history, she does make one analytical point – Roosevelt was able to push through progressive reforms – that is to say, trust busting reforms – for a number of reasons, the most salient being his informal partnership with the journalists of McClure’s Magazine.  The journalists successfully exposed the abuses of power associated with the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and Roosevelt was able to leverage that exposure to develop popular (almost populist) pressure against the entrenched forces of wealth.  As many have noted, we live in a new Gilded Age, with enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few people, though there are some salient differences, one of which is the influence of the press. 

We have a muck-raking press just as thorough, just as evidence-based as McClure’s, one of the most pertinent being ProPublica.  On its front page today, it has several headlines, each of which, one feels, I feel, ought to cause outrage in the public forum.  One is “Donald and Ivanka Trump Were Involved in Inauguration’s Inflated Payments to Family Business, New Suit Says;” another is “Who’s Afraid of the IRS? Not Facebook;” still another is “The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft.  Microsoft got Tougher;” and finally “Trump Pushed for a Sweetheart Tax Deal on His First Hotel.  It’s Cost New York City $410,068,399 and Counting.”  Another article, points out that “the top-earning 1% of taxpayers are audited at about the same rate as those who clam the earned income tax credit (ETIC), a group that has an average household income of $20,000 a year,” the difference being of course that the top-earning 1% have a legion of tax lawyers to assist in their audits, while those with an income of $20K are mostly at the mercy of whoever audits them.  It goes on to point out that “a recent analysis found that a rural county in the Mississippi Delta was the highest-audited county in America, despite the fact that more than a third of its mostly African-American population is below the poverty line.  Also, the five counties with the highest audit rates are all predominantly African American, rural counties in the deep South.”  All of this contributed to the “signature issue of our time,” the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%, but none of this will generate the public or media outrage that, say, the reprehensible sexual predation of a Harvey Weinstein has generated with the #MeToo movement. 

That said, the problem of concentrated wealth seems unsolvable, not conceptually unsolvable – several economists, most notably Thomas Picketty, have proposed solutions, almost all of them through reform of the tax codes – but politically unsolvable.  We seem to have reached a tipping point beyond which the problem of income inequality can be readily solved, though it seems to be a primary cause of many social maladies.  I should make an important qualification – cannot readily be solved within the current US polity.  It seems to be an object of faith among many conservative thinkers that a free-market economy and a democratic polity go hand in hand, that each leads inevitably to the other, but such thinking ignores two important realities, the first famously being the tendency of free market economies to collapse into recession or worse depression without government control.  Although the solutions are not perfect, we have come to terms with on-going government intervention in an economy that remains “mostly” a free-market economy.  As the last great recession demonstrated, however, such direct interventions tend to favor large, too-big-to-fail business, particularly in finance, over small business or individuals.   There are obvious and rational explanations.   The “bailout” of a large mortgage lender will have greater impact across the economy than the bailout of any one mortgage holder or even class of mortgage holders.  Within a utilitarian calculation, that is, the bailout of a large business will do the greatest good for the greatest number even though it only indirectly addresses individual needs, if at all.  As the last great recession also demonstrated, the “bailouts” necessary to control for the business cycle did nothing to address income inequality and likely did a great deal to exacerbate it.  While the “Occupy Wallstreet” movement, for a brief and shining moment, expressed some populist outrage at the “bailouts” – that the perpetrators of the recession were not held to account and, in many cases, rewarded despite their malfeasance – it quickly fizzled.  The US government behaved as if we were an oligarchy directly responsive to the interests of the wealthy few, not as a democracy directly responsive to the needs of “the people,” except perhaps in some tangential and abstract way.

The second reality flows from the first.  The tendency of free-market capitalism is toward cartelism and monopoly.  Perhaps the best example of a pure, free-market capitalism can be found in the illegal drug trade.  Because it is illegal, it exists outside government control.   While one might argue that government wants absolute control over the drug trade – that is to say, it wants to abolish it entirely – the government is simply an impediment to doing business, to be ignored, circumvented, bought off, intimidated, or failing all else, coerced.  The real competition for any drug cartel, however, is not the government, but another drug cartel.  One need only look briefly at the history of the drug cartels to know that the competition between drug cartels for control of the “market” is fierce and the free exercise of violence is the primary means to secure one’s place and property in the “market.”  The principle difference between the illegal drug trade and the legal drug trade is that the latter turns to the state’s monopoly of violence to secure its place and property in the “market.”  This difference is not inconsiderable, in part because the state exercises its monopoly of violence, its police power, within the parameters of the law, and presumably the law, or at least those who create the law, are under the supervision of the people, most of whom do not want to live in a violent narco-state.  We don’t have CVS and Walgreens doing open battle on American streets for the might enforced rights to distribute statins or anti-depressants or for that matter opioids.  While the government has thrown up roadblocks to what had been the unchecked “legal” distribution of prescription narcotics, mirroring its prohibitions of illegal narcotics,[1] it has not in any way changed the fundaments of the “legal” drug trade.  It continues to underwrite monopoly over certain necessary drugs through the enforcement of patent and intellectual property rights.  To borrow a phrase from Niebuhr, “a society in which the power factors are obscured is assumed to be a ‘rational’ rather than a coercive one,” and our putative democracy, our assumption that “the people” have the final say, serves mostly to obscure power relations that continue unabated and create the illusion of a rational society.  As Niebuhr also reminds us, however, “all social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion,” and the US government exercises its measure of coercion for, not against, big business.   It would occasionally like to get paid for its service, as demonstrated by the tax suit against Microsoft mentioned above, but as also demonstrated by the tax suit against Microsoft, even then Microsoft is able to ignore, circumvent and buy off legislators that impede its immediate interests. 

We can argue the structural and other reasons for the current state of affairs, all of which suggest solutions, none of which can be politically effectuated, in part because they will bump up against the economic interests of business too big to fail and consequently too large for the government to effectively coerce.  I am suggesting that we have gone past the point of no-return, the bingo point, and despite the almost comic protestations of a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, to turn away from an oligarchic polity, dedicated to the further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, toward a more democratic polity, dedicated to the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the many, is no longer possible short of collapse.  Prognostications are almost always wrong, and I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but there is an irony, a contradiction, an anomaly that has not been addressed.  At one point, Niebuhr writes that we were saved by “various factors in our culture”  We were “saved” from “the prevailing ethos of a bourgeoise culture” that gave itself over to the “dangerous illusions about the possibilities of managing the whole of man’s historical destiny.”  Here I might suggest that it is not so much the possibility of, but the duty to manage man’s historical destiny, a duty which conferred certain basic rights to power.  It was not an eschatological illusion – that is to say, an illusion predicated on an idea about the “ends” of history – more an attitude that simply assumed bourgeoise interests were in fact the general interests of the country.  In order to secure those interests and, consequently, serve the greater interests of the country as a whole, “those who own the country should run the country.”[2]  At one level, it allowed for democracy, but a limited democracy of the bourgeoise, by the bourgeoise, and for the bourgeoise. 

One factor that “saved” us from the “prevailing ethos of bourgeoise culture” was the contradictory illusion “that human history would bear us onward and upward forever by forces inherent in it” – what Niebuhr at another point referred to as “the fortuitous and the providential element in our good fortune.”   One might think of this as simply good luck, but for others, of course, the good luck is not simply a matter of chance, but a direct result of God’s grace.  We are, in effect, an instrument of God’s will, serving God’s ends, as his favored nation.  We were saved, in part at least, by an eschatological illusion.  Here again I might suggest it was not so much that history would, but that history could and should bear us toward the ideal state.  Although history might be an ineluctable force bending toward an ideal state – the prophecy of Christ’s return and his millennial reign – that ideal, once conceived, could and should be hastened along.  Our good fortune could and should be expanded by another sort of “human resolution or contrivance” – by attending more diligently to God’s will, by strictly maintaining the “moral conduct and social respectability” demanded by God.   As Niebuhr has suggested, our “good fortune” has led to considerable moral confusion in the US, in part resulting from the inherent (and unresolved) contradiction between the ascetic religious practice of American Protestantism and a bourgeoise economic system predicated material self-interest.  To borrow a phrase from Bell, “the protestant ethic and the Puritan temper were codes that emphasized work, sobriety, frugality, sexual restraint, and a forbidding attitude toward life,” which  included, if not sumptuary laws, then sumptuary attitudes that served to maintain order within a work force, but did little to serve the consumption necessary within an industrial economy.[3]   Nevertheless, American Protestantism served not only as a moral check, balancing out, so to speak, the hedonism implicit to consumption.   It saved us, that is, not from bourgeoise culture as such, but the excesses of bourgeoise culture – that is to say, the excesses of free-market capitalism – and in so doing saved bourgeois culture from not only from itself, but also those competing ideologies that would have overthrown it.   

Niebuhr, of course, was focused on the secular religions of fascism and communism, and he posed an argument against them in part because they did present an eschatological view of history.  In this he echoes and is echoed by writers like Isaiah Berlin for whom any eschatology was dangerous because, in positing ideal ends, it devolved sooner rather than later into an ethos where the desired end justifies the means, and the means themselves devolve sooner rather than later into coercive uses of state power –if not the Inquisition or Salem Witch trials, then the SS and the gulag.   Moreover, any eschatology was profoundly anti-democratic, at least in part because the ideal, any ideal, to include a Christian ideal, once posited as a possibility, was not to be contravened or questioned.  Although American society has flirted with fascism, where nationalism tips into race- and ethnicity-centered visions of national superiority and destiny, it has rejected communism rather profoundly.  This rejection stemmed in part from communism’s insistence on its scientific secularity and in part from a scientific determinism, which fundamentally contradicted a core tenant of American Protestantism, the sanctity of the individual as an individual.   To use Durkheim’s division between the sacred and the profane, creedal Communism, as a secular religion, held a scientifically and economically defined social class, the proletariat, as sacred.  If the individual existed as an individual, he did so in opposition to and as a willful profanation of the ideal social order, which in turn justified state suppression of any dissent and any expression of “individuality.”  Conversely creedal American Protestantism, as a religion proper, held the individual sacred, in Niebuhr’s words the “mystery of the individual’s freedom and uniqueness” – or “that integral, self-transcendent center of personality, which is in and yet above that stream of nature and time and which religion and poetry take for granted.”   If the “individual becomes most completely himself as his life enters organically into the lives of others,” the resulting community remains “grounded in personal relations,” and society itself profane to the extent that it abrogates the freedom and uniqueness of the individual.  If religion itself is inherently eschatological – that is to say, if religion itself posits an ideal individual within an ideal moral order – then traditionally that ideal moral order would be created, not within, but in its distinction from an inherently “immoral society.”  If an ideal moral order could emerge, it would do so “organically,” not from state imposition, but from the free choice of individuals entering the “personal” relations that form community.   Central to American Protestantism is the assumption that pre-eminent among the “personal relations” was the individual’s relation to God, and in this respect contemporary conservatives are correct in asserting that the founders assumed that America would be predominantly a Christian nation.  Moreover, they assumed an asymmetrical relation between church and state resting, to borrow a phrase from Durkheim, on “the principle that the profane should not touch the sacred.”[4]  There were those among the framers who felt that the new state should declare a religion and, along with it, a moral eschatology, but for pragmatic reasons the prevailing sentiment maintained the distinction between the profane state and the sanctity of the individual and his freely  chosen religious community.  A stronger state was needed and created, for the most part to regulate and protect commercial interests, but as a pragmatic reaction to a populace already divided among competing sects, divisions of the sort that had fueled a century of bloodshed in Europe still fresh in the minds of the framers, the resulting American constitution was famously “godless.”  It did not so much reject religion, or any one postulate of the ideal moral order, but simply affirmed that the profane state should not interfere in the sacred.  From this perspective, the American polity is profoundly “liberal” in its protection of the individual conscience as a right, and “democratic” by default.

I say, “by default,” for several reasons. Niebuhr suggests that another factor saving American society from “dangerous illusions about the possibilities of managing the whole of man’s historical destiny” was “the very force of democracy.”  He goes on to suggest that “the freedom of democracy makes for a fortunate confusion in defining the goal toward which history should move.”   I might suggest that there is a subtle reversal of precedence.  Niebuhr assumes that the freedom of democracy comes first and the fortunate confusion after as a result, but one might also suggest that the fortunate confusion came first and the freedom of democracy after as a result.  American society was fortunate in two respects.  On the one hand, it was fortunate that wealth and economic power as such was not as concentrated in American society as it was in European society.   There are any number of reasons why it was not as concentrated – perhaps most significant, in the early, more agrarian days of the republic, being the wide availability of land to the west, and the ever-present possibility of “new” wealth – but it remained that wealth was distributed widely both among the individuals in possession of that wealth and among the interests generative of additional wealth.  The framers, in short, abjured hereditary and oligarchic aristocracy, in part because they were not members of any recognized hereditary aristocracy, in part because they were not economically positioned to become members of a purely oligarchic aristocracy,[5] and so, to maintain their status and influence, they opted, by default, for a limited, laissez faire democracy of the bourgeoise.  On the other hand, it was fortunate that religion and cultural power was likewise broadly distributed within American society.  Although overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant, no one sect carried a majority within the states and throughout the Republic to establish itself as the religion.  Here again, there are any number of reasons why cultural power was not concentrated in a specific religion – perhaps the most significant being what Bell called an “hostility to civilization” implicit to Protestantism itself, the founding sense that “the society of the time was corrupt, and one had to return to the primitive simplicity of the original church, which drew its will directly from God rather than man-made institutions,”[6] to include ultimately their own man-made institutions – but it likewise remained that the cultural power of no one church was ever sufficiently homogenous throughout the Republic to establish itself.  And so, likewise, the framers opted, by default, for a limited, laissez faire democracy in quite another sense.   In both cases, as Niebuhr put it, “the distribution of power in a democracy prevents any group of world savers [or, for that matter, world owners] from grasping after a monopoly of power.”     

I should say, democracy has historically prevented any group of world savers or owners from grasping after a monopoly of power.  The great danger to contemporary society is the convergence of world owners and world savers in a single political party, the Republican Party.  This convergence has been coming for some time, and one can enumerate the economic and other factors that have led to what writers like Alan Abromowitz has called the “Great Alignment.”[7]  Among the other factors, racial attitudes hold a preeminent place, and it’s hardly profound to suggest that the unresolved contradiction between the American ideal of “all men are created equal” and the American reality of racial discrimination remains a fault line in American politics.  Historically, one might begin with Johnson’s betrayal of the “southern way of life” and his passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and one might look to the likes of Strom Thurmond as the bellwether of the great (re)alignment.  Principally in opposition to civil rights, as a state’s rights candidate, Thurmond abandoned the traditional Democratic party in support of the Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a bellwether for a new, more radical conservatism.[8]   Writing for the New York Times, Ezra Klein notes that “American politics has been dominated by the Democratic and Republican Parties since the Civil War,” evolving into a two-party system that “gives us the illusion of stability – that today’s pollical divisions cut roughly the same lines as yesteryear.”[9]  They do not.  Part of the difference is racial and wrapped up in racial identity.  It makes some uncomfortable, though not uncomfortable enough to abandon the party, the Republicans have become the party of white identity and the racial resentment that has attached itself to many social welfare programs.  The Democratic party having staked its future on the uneasy coalition of racial minorities that will soon enough comprise a majority of the US population.  Part of the difference is ideological.  The Republican party has moved to the right in the direction of Barry Goldwater. The Democratic party has moved left, though with considerable dissent still in the center.  Altogether, as Klein points out, “the changes are compositional: Democrats have become more diverse, urban, young and secular, and the Republican Party has turned itself into a vehicle for whiter, older, more Christian and more rural voters.”   I suspect that Klein is correct when he notes that “the changes have not affected the parties symmetrically.”  As Klein goes on to suggest, “put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans.  They can move to the left – and they are – but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power.”  In other words, along the line suggested by Niebuhr, “Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy.  Republicans are not.”

Klein enumerates the reasons Republicans are not restrained by diversity and democracy, not least a constitutional order that was always intended to provide constraints on pure democracy.  Ian Millhiser writing for Vox, makes a similar set of points.  Those constraints on pure democracy, motivated by fears of large states dominating the interests of small states, not to mention fears of a demagogic populist uprisings resulting in a “tyranny of the majority” are well known.   While, of course, the framers could not have intended the current political impasse and likely would be chagrined were they alive today, the difficulty boils down to demographics and four peculiarities of our constitution.  The principle divide is the difference between rural and urban areas.  Insofar as “more than half the US population lives in just nine states,” it suggests that a majority of the populace is “represented by only 18 Senators,” while less than half the population controls about 82 percent of the Senate.”  This disparity is driven by urbanization.   Rural states tend to be whiter and more conservative in their Christianity, and consequently, “the Senate does not simply give extra representation to small states, it gives the biggest advantage to states with large populations of white, non-college-educated voters – the very demographic than is trending rapidly toward the GOP.”   The advantages multiply from there, particularly in the electoral college, where a Democratic presidential candidate “could potentially win the popular vote by as much as 6 percentage points and still lose the Electoral College to a Republican,” and as the most recent Presidential election demonstrated, the loser of the popular vote and winner of the Electoral College is empowered to appoint Supreme Court justices that support conservative positions out of step with a broader consensus.  Finally, of course, the constitutional order is almost impossible to change, at least in ways that would move the country in a more democratic directions most of which significantly disadvantage the conservative party by removing their advantage.  The Democrats, in short, cannot win against the Republican advantage unless they capture Republican voters, a prospect that has grown less and less likely since the Johnson betrayal began the exodus of the Dixiecrats into the promised land of the Republican party.   

Klein posits “democratization of our political process” as a solution to the current impasse, and as he put it, “a democratization agenda isn’t hard to imagine.”  One could disband the Electoral College and directly elect the president, pass proportional (rather than regional) representation.  Although the devil would be in the details, it isn’t difficult to imagine a group of reasonable men and women, reasoning together to work the devil out of the details, to achieve a new set of compromises that would promise a government more representative of the people.  None of this will happen, of course, as Klein notes, “precisely because the Republican Party sees deepening democracy as a threat to its future” and “will use the power it holds to block any moves in that direction.” It will do so, buttressed not only by disproportionate political power, but the assertion of economic and cultural power as well. 

As Niebuhr presciently put it, “when economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom,” and it will “use the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots.”  It will, not without irony, choose economic freedom over personal freedom, and will “justify the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of [personal] liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.”   Likewise, when cultural power desires to be left alone it uses a version of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon “religious freedom,” and it will likewise use the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its heretics.  It will, again not without irony, choose religious freedom over personal freedom, and will justify the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of personal liberties by insisting that moral probity is more precious than freedom and that is only desire is public morality.  One hears its echoes in the speech William Barr made to the law school and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame when he suggested that “the problem is not that religion is being forced on others.  The problem is that irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.”  He bemoaned “the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion.”  He characterized it as “organized destruction,” perpetrated by “secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’” who have “marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”   Unwittingly tying the economic and religious doctrines of laissez faire together, Barr cites as one example of this “organized destruction” a particular action of the Obama administration. It sought, as he put it, “to force religious employers, including the Catholic religious orders, to violate their sincerely held religious views by funding contraceptive and abortifacient coverage in their health plans.”  Ultimately, the employer’s rights to act on its religious conscience, at the expense, both literally and figuratively, of the employee’s rights to act on her conscience.

Although it is a shibboleth, here again I would suggest that power abhors a vacuum, and this doctrine of laissez faire, whether economic or cultural, is ultimately concerned with the nature and locus of power.  Several have argued, of course, that laissez faire, whether economic or religious, underwrites not democracy per se, but freedom against democracy and the tyranny of the majority.  Laissez faire, that is, has always been a minority doctrine, at the extreme an oligarchic doctrine concerned with the unrestrained use of power by those few who wield the instruments of economic and cultural power.  It is, however, one of the great ironies of US history that, to restrain political power, one must hold the reigns of political power.  The US polity is ostensibly democratic – ostensibly insofar as its liberal restraints on democracy are well known and documented, but there is nevertheless the prevailing belief that ultimately the legitimacy of the US state rests on the will of the people expressed democratically as the will of a majority.  When it acts against the will of the majority, the state may be acting constitutionally, but it is no longer acting with complete legitimacy.  Although the emergent Republican party has little use for democracy per se, to attain legitimacy, it must give at least the appearance of a democratic mandate.  It is for this reason that Republicans acquiesced to Trump’s outlandish fiction that he had achieved not only the greatest electoral college victory ever, but a popular victory stolen by millions of illegal votes – a fiction that served not only to bolster acts aimed at the suppression of voting rights among those likely to vote Democratic, but also to undermine any question that Trump held the presidency illegitimately.  Trump won the election constitutionally, but he has never acted with complete legitimacy, and it is in this sense that, as Klein points out, “Republicans are trapped in a dangerous place.”  They are a minority party representing “a shrinking constituency” that nevertheless “holds vast political power.”  It is also something of a shibboleth to suggest that those who hold power wish to retain power, and the threat of losing power has, again as Klein put it, “injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy.”   You hear the urgency in Barr’s speech cited above and in exhortations like the “Flight 93 Election.”   Its author writes that

the election of 2016 is a test – in my view, the final test – of whether there is any virtu left in what used to be the core of the American nation.  If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite … then they are doomed.  They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.[10]

The election was not, of course, the final test, nor was the impeachment be the final test, and there will be another test now that the disproportionate Senate, representing a minority of the American populace, has voted effectively to nullify the impeachment.  One might suggest that, at the core of Trump’s pledges, is the “organized destruction” of the federal  government, an abdication of power to those extra-governmental corporate and religious centers of power that will, ostensibly at least, cure America of its litany of ills, and do so, one might add, as any in loco parentis might, for their own good, against their own self-destructive will.

It is, again, one of the great ironies of US history that, for the Republican party to cede power to the corporate behemoths and mega churches that will cure restore American greatness, one must cling to political power with apocalyptic urgency, each crises the last crises before an ever-impending Armageddon.  How far the urgency will take the Republican party is anyone’s guess.  The equal and opposite reaction to Republican urgency is a Democratic urgency that foretells the doom of democracy itself and the rise of fascist oligarchy.  The people may not deserve the fate that will befall them – economic servitude, environmental catastrophe, an oppressive moral regime not unlike the one portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale – but they will suffer it regardless.  Neither sense of urgency is entirely misplaced.  Both can be dismissed as polarized hyperbole.  Nevertheless, it is a useful to remember that, as Klein points out, “the alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization.”  The real threat is “a legitimacy crises that could threaten the very foundation of our political system.”  If the legitimacy of the state is not predicated on “we the people,” then what should it be predicated upon?  The Republican party offers two answers, both of which have been tried and both of which have failed.  The first is economic corporatism, a version of economic might makes right – that is to say, economic might confers the right to rule.  This version holds greater promise for a number of reasons to be discussed in another venue, but can be summed up, on the one hand, by the need for a mass market which helps insure some concern for the prosperity and welfare of “the people” and, on the other hand, by the need for what Michael Lind has called the “managerial class.”  It is, essentially, monarchy redux, replacing, as Lind put it, “the old mostly hereditary class system consisting of landlords and peasants with a new, mostly hereditary class system consisting of managers and proles, in which degrees are the new titles of nobility and diplomas the new coat of arms.”[11] 

The second is religion, which has traditionally been used to buttress hereditary class systems, an omniscient and omnipotent God conferring on those in power the right to be in power. The fetishization of economic power in US culture is well known, and one might suggest that part and parcel of Trump’s allure is the degree to which he encourages his acolytes to see wealth, his literally “untold” wealth, as an indication of an almost superhuman superiority.  He may not be “godlike,” but as “the chosen one,” he certainly portrays himself as a superior being, one on whom the nation depends for its well-being.  Trumps popularized image, bound up with traditional symbols of strength and patriotism and Christianity, has become totemic, sacralized, and, to paraphrase Durkheim, creates for his acolytes a powerful sense of community and moral obligation within the community.[12]  If Nixon, Reagan, Bush the elder, and Bush the younger, all attended to the politics of religion, seeking to capture the votes of Christian conservatives to confer legitimacy on their presidencies, Trump attends to politics as religion and his own apotheosis.  Trump, in and of himself, confers legitimacy, evidenced in the impeachment arguments of his attorney, Alan Dershowitz, who argued for a president, like Trump, who wants to be re-elected, who thinks he’s a great president – indeed the greatest president there ever was – and who believes the national interest will suffer greatly if he is not re-elected,  if that “president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”         

In the end, it is interesting that Republican senators fell back on democratic legitimacy to explain their votes blocking witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial.  While many of those same Senators may find Trump personally objectionable and may recognize the facile speciousness of Dershowitz’ argument, particularly if it were made in defense of a Democrat, Trump’s acts nevertheless serve the economic cause, at least domestically, bit by bit dismantling the federal regulatory bureaucracy.  His popular support among that 30% of the population – mostly rural and rust belt, mostly without secondary or post-secondary education, mostly white, mostly nationalist and Christian in their world view – is unwavering.  For them, the issue is not Trump’s legal or moral probity, but whether he continues to assert, if not serve, their cause.  By challenging Trump, many Republican Senators, in short, risk alienating both their donor class and their own electoral base.  Although pundits of various stripes are free to point this out, the Senators themselves must be more modest in their public statements. So, it is not surprising that those same Senators fall back on arguments pertaining to democratic legitimacy, the only defense remaining.  Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is a representative example.  He said, “the question then is not whether the president did it,” whether he asked for a corrupt “deal” to help secure his re-election, “but whether the United State Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did.  I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.”[13]  Here, of course, is what Senator Lamar does not say.  He is abdicating his own power, a power provided in the Constitution, not to the American people, but to the President, at least in the short term, which he no doubt believes (or fears) will be the long term.   As many have pointed out, for at least the remainder of his term, and should he be re-elected, for the next four years as well, we will have Trump unchained.  The Constitutional check on power, House impeachment and Senate conviction, has been rendered null and void.  By abdicating his own power, Senator Lamar has declared the Senate to be what many among the American people already believe it to be, certainly not an august deliberative body, but a pointless morass, the place where the will of the people goes to drown in petty partisan squabbling.  

The deeper irony (or hypocrisy) is that the “the people” will not decide in the coming presidential election, or at least not a majority of the people, any more than they did in the last election.  It will be decided within a Constitutional order significantly stacked in favor of the Republican constituency.  It will be decided by an election already tainted, at least for Democrats, by the exposure of one corrupt deal and the likelihood of many more, not to mention all the usual and unusual suspects that taint an election – the malign influence of money, the meddling of foreign autocrats through direct “hacking” and social media influence, to cite just the obvious.  It will be decided, in short, by an election whose legitimacy is already deeply questionable.  Whether the results will be accepted depends upon the results.  If Trump is re-elected again without a popular mandate, his legitimacy will be dismissed, and not without reason, by many Democrats. If Trump is not re-elected, many among his supporters will question the legitimacy of the election, not only out of suspicion of meddling or millions of illegal votes, but because it did not affirm what has become for many the source of legitimacy itself, Trump himself.  It will be interesting to see, come November, if Trump loses, whether Trump himself will accept the results of the election.  If he holds the sincere belief that the national interest will suffer greatly if he is not maintained in office, will that also justify holding onto power should he lose the election?            

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[1] One might cynically suggest it did so, in part, not out of altruistic concern for the people, but because so many of the addicted were on the public dole through disability and other forms of welfare.  The government was acting, less on the people’s behalf, more on its own behalf.      

[2] Writers like Michael J. Klarman in The Framer’s Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution have suggested that this attitude was formative of the constitution. 

[3] Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 55.

[4] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans Carol Cosman, Oxford World’s Classics, 2001, p. 224.

[5] At least in the northern states.  An economic model, predicated on slavery, allowed for the illusion of a land-owning aristocracy in the South that has been mythologized culturally within depictions of the antebellum South like, famously, Gone with the Wind.  I am suggesting, in part, that the Civil War was fought, at least in part, to maintain an illusion, the foundations of which had already been eroded by commercial and manufacturing interests to the North and abroad.   

[6] Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 57. 

[7][7] Alan Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump.

[8] Cf. for example, New York Times, September 16, 1964, under the headline “Thurmond to Bolt Democrats Today: South Carolinian will Join G.O.P. and Aid Goldwater – to Tell Plans on TV.” 

[9] Ezra Klein, New York Times, January 24, 2020.

[10] Publius Decius Mus, “The Flight 93 Election,” The Claremont Review of Books, September 5, 2016.  The author’s choice of pseudonym is itself interesting.

[11] Michael Lind, The New Class War, 7. 

[12] Cf. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Oxford, 154. 

[13] Zach Montague, The New York Times, January 31, 2020.