Well So Much for That

 

Here are a few takeaways from the last couple weeks. The first is that the removal of Trump from office was an absolute imperative. I know some of you on the left will not see it that way. Some of you will say that Biden and Trump are interchangeable. I know some on the right who will say that, yes, Trump is awful but that he is the lesser evil. The first group are opposed in principle to all ‘lesser evil’ reasoning. They want a ‘woke’ ‘progressive’ worker’s paradise now and regard all results short of that as basically equivalent. The others regard Trump and the Republican Party as the last bastion of ‘traditional values’ and will overlook literally ANY character flaw or flagrant crime in Trump and literally ANY misstep in policy to keep another white, Christian septuagenarian out of the white house on the grounds that he is not quite white and not quite Christian enough. If such people are educated (and a certain number of them are) they see the Republicans as the party of Allan Bloom and the Great Books and Trump as defender of Western Civ. against negro poets, eco-feminist interlopers and other such riff raff. They also think they are in a battle to save Christianity against a man who quotes Catholic hymns in his victory speeches. Such people hold their noses and vote Trump or, if they cannot quite stomach this, do nothing to oppose him beyond a bit of hand waving. 

I’m here to explain to both groups why today is a better day in spite of the fact that Joe Biden may not be “healing America” any time soon. As a boring Canadian I am a firm believer in unspoken norms and a spirit of professionalism in the public service. I am a firm believer in limits. I believe, with Aristotle, that lawfulness is a virtue and that the law is not just an obstacle for the ambitious to work around and subvert at their pleasure. I believe social progress and the amelioration of harms is more likely to occur under strong institutions than to emerge out of chaos and violence. I believe in constitutional and legal frameworks as the best guarantee of basic rights. Even vigorous street protests and mass movements serve the function of goading things like parliaments and courts into taking certain actions. If their actions do not at some point pass through such legal and political structures they do not have the form of legitimacy and are simple assertions of force.  

Of course, the aggressive and acquisitive energies of society can hollow out institutions to the point where they cannot be saved and then all bets are off. At that point things like revolutions occur and we might be tempted to cheer on the degradation and destruction of civic instructions in the hope that their final collapse will herald a glorious new dawn. Revolutions cannot be precluded a priori. They are a historical fact and a live option when societies are too corrupt to save. Catastrophism, though, is not generally my cup of tea. I do not share the belief of some that out of the collapse of the liberal state will emerge (by some necessity dialectical or otherwise) a new Eden rising like a beautiful phoenix. For all I know such a thing MIGHT happen but I see no reason why it necessarily WILL happen and it’s probably better not to roll the dice. It’s probably better not to let things get that far and the primary reason for this is time. We face time sensitive challenges on climate and the environment which must be dealt with NOW and we cannot sit around waiting for after the always immanent but never actually arriving ‘revolution’ to fix them. The planet may be dead by then. If we survive it is far more likely to be on an Amish-like agrarian (and rigidly communitarian) scale anyway. In such a society personal liberties and indeed subjective freedom such as the West conceives it may well be luxuries we can ill afford (and of course those unfit for such austerities will turn to banditry). For now, it seems we have to work in the framework of what we have and that means constitutional democracy with mixed public and private sectors and a legal framework of civil liberties. If this does not work, and it may not, then I suppose we can wish the Amish better luck than us.      

The greatest danger to this and any other political order is the cult of personality and any leader who embodies such a cult must be removed by any means necessary. The Ancients recognized this with their practice of ostracism: any man whose personality became bigger than the city had to be banished from the city. He could play no productive role in its life no matter how illustrious or charismatic he might be. He could play no productive role no matter how right he happened to be. The one man who CANNOT rule the city is the hubristic man. The city can tolerate any vice in a politician which represents a common human failing but it cannot tolerate THAT ONE. President Trump is a case in point. He is a man who has no limiting principle internal OR external. The cultish devotion of his followers means there are no standards to which he can be held. This would be dangerous enough in a competent politician but it is intolerable in a crass, buffoonish one. A man who cannot be shamed and cannot earn the contempt of his followers by literally any means is the paradigm case of a man who must be banished from office if not from the city itself (by criminal charges preferably). No free society can be ruled by a man who is not responsible to anything or anyone. This is so both for the damage he can do in office and for the dangerous way in which he lowers the bar for ALL his successors. This is evident from the fact that Joe Biden has become president not for any special insight or wisdom he has shown but simply for performing minimal decency. This fact by itself makes a Biden presidency a moral imperative whatever other failings he may have as a candidate. He, at least, will preserve the forms of governance till they can be handed off to younger, better people.  

Because, make no mistake, Biden belongs to the now crumbling neo-liberal world of the 90’s, the era in which Francis Fukayama declared history had reached its terminus with globalization and privatization. Biden is far too old to have any new ideas now and will govern like it is 1994 as anyone who matured in that time period would. The prime political purpose of death is to weed out ideas that otherwise would go on failing forever. That, however, is not to say his presidency is useless in a transitional sense. It buys time for one thing. Another Trump term would have been a national and indeed global catastrophe. It would have unleashed a spirit of resentment and revenge that would have corrupted civic life in and indeed outside of the U.S. Flunkies and sycophants loyal to the leader and not the nation would have routed what was left of the civil service and judiciary and the checks and balances they represent. No second Mark Esper would have demurred at using the military to crush internal dissent. The leader would have become the party and the party the state as in any garden variety authoritarian society with public institutions and norms shredded and governance rendered toothless by the subversion of its culture and internal discipline. The neo-Liberal ploy of degrading government so that it can convincingly claim to the electorate that government is useless would have reached its final fulfillment. This means that there would be no mechanisms for more progressive people to use to enforce policy changes like single payer health care. A Biden presidency will keep the external institutions of a free press so that others can make it actually free. He will preserve the external forms of public regulatory bodies so that others can use them to aggressively regulate. He will preserve a minimal spirit of professionalism in the judiciary so that others can legitimately hope to win court cases. Most and best of all, Biden can fire Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, Scott Atlas, Ben Carson and a host of other creeps and sycophants and if that is not victory I don’t know what is.