La pensée unique (American-style)

Je ne connais pas de pays où il regne moins d’indépendance et de véritable liberté de discussion  qu’en Amérique. … En Amérique, la majorité trace un cercle formidable autour de la pensée.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 353

The Three Powers

The impeachment struggle  has been a three-cornered contest, among the three branches of government.   Such a delicate triangular balance  is what keeps things interesting; a contest between but two  comes down to arm-wrestling, and is quickly settled, though maybe settled amiss.

Elizabethan times witnessed a similar struggle among a triad, with monarch corresponding to the Chief Executive, Parliament to the Congress, and the third, robed branch, the clergy, replaced now with the judiciary.

In Elizabeth’s time, the puritans had endeavoured to bring ecclesiastical grievances before the House of Commons;  this, the queen resented, as it seemed that the commons were endeavouring to go outside their province  and legislate on matters which could only be constitutionally dealt with by the clergy in convocation, and by the crown.  In this way, the religious question assumed a constitutional form.

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV: North to Drayton (1909), p. 305

The parallels here are more than we would have expected, right down to the detail about the “puritans”, neatly re-incarnated in our own day  by the Woke brigade.  And that of the monarch being a Queen -- like our POTUS, though he is  of the drama kind, and not of Tudor blood.

~

The motif of the “Trivet of Conflict” finds its supreme cinematic embodiment in the final scene-sequence of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” -- not a circular firing-squad, but an equiangular shoot-out.   The act plays out, as ideally in the  Seventh Art, without words or sudden motion  till the fatal climax, silent but for the tinkling melody of an antique music-watch  winding down.  Here too, for our own amusement (or that of the blog-observing gods) we may match personages across the spheres:  here,  Good (a.k.a. Blondie) is the Supreme Court (granted, partisans carp at decisions that do not go their favorite way, but that branch is surely the most dignified and even relatively impartial);  Bad  is our naughty POTUS;  and Ugly -- who could that be, but our quarrelsome Congress.

To spare our readers further metaphor, we shall not be drawing comparisons between the branches as enumerated in the Constitution, and the Persons of the Trinity (as explicitly enumerated  nowhere in Scripture, but now held dear).

~

[Update 8 Feb 2020]  For any who deem the Elizabethan analogy  too ennobling for our present sticky pickle, look ye rather to that trio of Stooges, who, in simpler days, brought delight to tots and idlers.  Our pushful POTUS is perfectly cast  as Moe.

[Update 9 Feb]  What sketch of the American polity, with any pretentions to, well, pretentiousness, could be considered complete, without the obligatory obeissance to Tocqueville?  We must check the Tocqueville box.

The basic dynamic of the first two branches of government, whether monarch and parliament, or President and Congress, is a matter of politics and power.   It is the third, robed element, whether the Church or the Judiciary, that is less obvious: with goals and methods less tangible, more nearly timeless.

Historically, as the sway of the Church retreated from the secular sphere, in general  it was not replaced by another body.  America, it seems, was an exception:

Aucun peuple n’a constitué  un aussi grand pouvoir judiciaire  que les Américains.

Chez toutes les nations policées de l’Europe, le gouvernement a toujours montré une grande répugnance à laisser la justice ordinaire  trancher des questions qui l’intéresent lui-même. … A mesure, au contraire, que la liberté augmente, le cercle des attribtions des tribunaux  va toujours en s’élargissant.  …Chez les nations de l’Europe, les tribunaux n’ont que des pariculiers pour usticible;  mais on peut dire que la cour suprême des Etats-Unis  fait comparaître des souverains à sa barre.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 225-6

[Update]  To have three pre-eminent and even quasi-coequal powers within a polis, is inherently metastable and dramatic, and indeed has found its way into drama.  Cf. the Scottish poet David Lindsay’s morality-play A Pleasant Satire of the Three Estates (Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, in contemporary spelling), 1552

[Update / Antedating]  The structural theme appears in a play of the sixteenth-century dramatist John Haywood.  "The climax to the triangular duel  which forms the main episode of The foure P.P.  is an effective piece of dramatic technique." 

(Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. V: The Drama to 1642, Part One (1910), p.95)

Managing an Orderly Succession

The Constitution foresees the possibility of a President’s being unable to fulfil his duties (whether because ill, or dead, or sitting in Sing-Sing), and specifies his successor; and further deals with the case in which the Vice President should be similarly indisposed.  And a good thing, too, since much this scenario did in fact eventuate during the unsavory Nixon administration (before the shaming memory of which, Clio averts her gaze).   And although that foresightful document does not explicitly provide for the case that now confronts us, something analogous is afoot:  the Republicans in the House of Representatives have lost their reason.

As we argued earlier, it is time for that body to be declared legally incompetent.  And, as of yesterday, moves in this direction are afoot (Senate Leaders Take Reins on Shutdown Talks), with the (mostly) grown-ups in the Senate finally (belatedly) moving in to clean up the mess of spilled milk and broken crayons left in the soiled sandbox of the House.  Indignantly, some from the junior, or lower, body, have demanded that their betters and seniors should condescend to stand alongside the nursery miscreants, and (in their phrase)

“Grow a Backbone”

Now, to anyone who lived through the Nixon shambles, this phrase immediately calls to mind another, famous at the time:

“Grow a Penis”

which referred anagrammatically to Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s crude and nescient Veep, who was removed in tandem -- ostensibly for his sordid misdemeanors (which were real enough) but in actuality for his manifest unfitness to be President (a fact reportedly not lost on Nixon himself when he selected that portly nonentity as his back-up -- “Nixon’s insurance plan” against impeachment).

Ideally, the Congressmen would simply be dismissed, their offices left untenanted for a time, like the seats on the NLRB  kept vacant by the mulishness of Senate Republicans.  But out of charity (even to the least of God’s creatures) we might rather remove them to a sunny and brightly-painted Sheltered Workshop somewhere up in the western mountain meadows, where they can happily potter about and, I dunno, debate stuff, pass “laws” or something, and -- all passion spent -- docilely lie down on their blankies at nap-time.

~

The question of “Two-Tier Voting”

 The question then arises, how ever we came to such a pass.  And the first thing to realize is, these ills are not of recent date.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America for just shy of a year, 1831-2, and who found much to admire in our republic, noted with surprise  the low quality of the Congressmen:

Lorsque vous entrez dans la salle des représentants … vous vous sentez frappé de l’aspect vulgaire de cette grande assemblée. … Ce sont, pour la plupart, des avocats de village, des commerçants, ou même des hommes apparentant aux dernières classes.

-- De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835)

The more surprising to him, then, was the contrast with the vastly superior quality of the Senators:

A deux pas de là s’ouvre la salle du sénat, dont l’étroite enceinte renferme une grande partie des célébrités de l’Amérique. … Toutes les paroles qui s’échappent de cette assemblée  feraient honneur aux plus grands débats parlementaires d’Europe.

What could explain the disparity?

A contemporary American, puzzling, might think of the six-year term, which insulates the Senatorial incumbent against the swift-shifting winds of idle fancy;  and the statewide suffrage, so that the peculiarities of District 13, where everyone is everybody’s spouse and “cousin” (a category including sister and daughter, mayhap), get washed-out some in the statistical accumulation of the state as a whole.   Neither of these, however, suffice to explain the gap that yawned before Tocqueville, and which he explained quite otherwise:

Je ne vois qu’un seul fait qui l’explique : l’élection qui produit la chambre des représentants est directe;  celle dont le sénat émane  est soumise à deux degrés.

For, when the Republic was born, Senators were not elected directly by the sons of the soil, but by their legislative representatives in each state. 

Tocqueville emphasized that there was nothing undemocratic about this:  said representatives were not appointed by the Federal government, or the Supreme Court, or the Pope or what have you:  They were the freely chosen legislators of the people.   Yet somehow, this intermediate layer of filtering -- of refinement -- produced better result than the arithmetic sum of popular knee-jerks.   After all, the average voter had to go slop the hogs;  he didn’t have time to go working his way through The Wealth of Nations, whereas it was the job of elected solons  to dwell upon such things.

Tocqueville drew the necessary lesson:

Il est facile d’apercevoir dans l’avenir, un moment où les républiques américaines  seront forcées de multiplier les deux degrés dans leur système électoral,  sous peine de se perdre misérablement  parmi les écueils de la démocratie.

Famous last words!  So far from generalizing this successful experiment, the nation abolished it, by the Seventeenth Amendment (1913).

~

It was recently reported that, in response to a cockeyed Supreme Court ruling that illegal aliens could vote in Federal elections (why not penguins?  why not let the penguins vote!), certain states have introduced what the journalists called “two-tier” balloting, with state and local elections requiring proof of voter identity, whereas Federal elections will remain open to fraud:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/2-states-plan-2-tier-system-for-balloting.html

This use of the term “two-tier”  is perhaps something of a misnomer,  however, as it principally refers to structured and generally sequentially ordered subdivisions of a unity:  apprenticeship vs. journeyman status;  primary vs. general-election balloting.  Here, rather, the reference is simply to independent non-intersecting areas of elections, which have always existed and whose separateness did not spring into being with the Supreme Court ruling or the local response thereto.   The two-tier or two-stage system of pre-1913 Senatorial elections is much more substantial.

~

The bicameral legislature is a highly non-obvious invention.   And it pains us to report, that the public schools I attended -- elementary, junior high, and senior high -- tasked  to educate us in the practices and logic of the democratic republic or republican democracy, here signally failed.   Having two different chambers was apparently just an oddity -- a bit of inexplicable Yankee tradition like Groundhog Day -- which led to duplication of effort and necessitated time-consuming Senate/House conferences to resolve the differences in their respective bills.   It seemed as arbitrary a dichotomy as the “shirts” and the “skins” as which we (just the lads, s’entend) were divided for scratch teams in sports.

One can only put forward, in the schools’ excuse, that the original sharp difference as conceived by the Founding Fathers, was blunted by the 17^th Amendment.

~

In the astonishingly clear-sighted vision of the Founders (and here I’m not being just traditionalist or pious -- they really did a darned good job) these ultralocally-elected Congressmen, changed as frequently as socks, were to serve, not only to represent the people -- to serve as their representatives -- but to be -- statistically, sociologically -- representative of the people, in all their parti-colored and manic variety.   They were to serve as a sort of locally-penned, scientific stool-sample of what-all was going on in the hearts and minds back in the hills and hollers of an expanding nation that at first was mostly frontier (and without fiber-optic Internet service to bring the distant news to the Capital;  the Founders had to make do with dial-up).   And the Founders fully anticipated that that chamber would be a bubbling cauldron of emotions, fantasies, factions, conspiracy theories, quack nostrums, and wacky (and sometimes brilliant) proposals.   The Senatorial party, having coolly faced-down the Redcoats, were prepared to face even this.   

In the reigning metaphor of the day the Senate was to serve as “the saucer in which to cool the hot tea” that the House could be expected to serve up.  That imagery no longer works in our own latte-sipping era -- I’ve never actually seen anyone use a saucer in that fashion (though come to think of it, a scalding black veinte  really could use one).  

~

Having brought us to the brink, and now losing their nerve, Republicans are now trying to scoff the whole thing aside as a non-issue:

Representative Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican, played down the importance of this week’s deadline  and said the White House “is trying to scare the markets.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-13/effort-shifts-to-senate-leaders-to-resolve-fiscal-impasse.html

The slightest acquaintance with the foreign press would suffice to disabuse him of that notion.   To quote simply the broadcast I happen to be listening to in the background at this very moment -- one very far indeed from White House control --  consider the (basically pro-Arab, and Islam-friendly) site Medi1.com, a joint French-Moroccan venture (and very professionally run),  which (by its writ) by no means focuses on America, but rather the francophone and arabophone pourtour of the Mediterranean -- the way they characterized l’enjeu this morning was:  “Eviter un Armageddon économique pour toute la planète”.   Perhaps somewhat dramatically phrased, that, but the point is:   The whole world is watching, and taking this very seriously indeed.

~

For more from this pen, try these:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 24 January 2015]  Precedents from European history, ca. 1900:

Parliamentary minorities now wielded a new weapon … : obstruction. … Here, the old idea that the rights of minorities must be protected  was extended into the absolute refusal to allow the expression of unwelcome opinions. … Open discussion was the chief pillar of parliamentarianism, but as soon as the chamber admitted biter enemies of the regime  as well as polite dissenters, parliamentary debates  degenerated into farce.  It had all started in the Mother of Parliaments, with Parnell and his Irishmen in the 1880s;   but in the Hungarian and Austrian parliaments, too, there were many who felt too strongly about their cause  to play the parliamentary game.

-- Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:  Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. 138

.

Economic Sit-in Strike (prolonged)

There is a curious parallel between the anti-war movement of late-60’s youth (in which I played a part), and the Teabagger antics in the House.

This is not a palinode.  About the Vietnam War, we were right.  Time and retrospection have only deepened the details of that fiasco, which indeed (as most of us somehow did not realize at the time) was just a re-run (cum napalm) of the fiasco begun by the French.  It was -- to use the technical term favored by my current servicemen friends -- a classic cluster-fuck. 

We ourselves, however, by and large had no idea of any way forward, apart from a vague and lazy all-you-need-is-love (bzw. socialism) utopianism.   A tight Marxist core actually thought strategically and programmatically,  but unfortunately, by the late 60’s -- post-Kronstadt ’21, post Hamburg ’23, post purges and show-trials ‘37ff, post Hitler-Stalin ’39, post Hungary ’56, post Czechoslovakia ’68 -- you pretty much had to close your eyes to what had happened in actual History, to retain an optimistic faith in the wise workings of Historical Materialism.

And so we fell back upon obstruction, sit-ins, passive-aggressive resistance.  For this, we do not collectively apologize, any more than we apologize for having soiled our diapers as infants, or sprouted pimples as a teen.  On Vietnam, I repeat:   We were right.  We simply had no clue what to do about it.  So we lay down in front of military vehicles, chained ourselves to army-base fences, occupied buildings, and (the fun part) made love-not-war.

~

So now the poor Republicans -- and this is spoken with some genuine empathy -- under the crushing pressure of inexorable advances of the juggernaut of History, which has robbed them of their reason, have backed themselves into a corner, and worked themselves into a dissociative state.  Emotionally, intrapsychically, their quandary is not that different from what we suffered from.  That we were, with hindsight, right, is psychodynamically irrelevant:  we could not have known that at the time.

That said, the Tea-types have chosen a very strange issue to raise atop their battle-standards:  bitter opposition to the Affordable Care Act -- something that, in some form, both parties have been working towards for decades, an evolutionary combination of Medicare, Romneycare, and Social Security (the latter, as regards the young earners subsidizing the old and sick), and which was passed by this very Congress, was found sound by the Supreme Court, and has weathered dozens of lost-cause challenges in the House.  It is as though hordes of hippies and SDS activists had been flooding the streets in protest against, I don’t know, Radio Free Europe, or General Foods.  

[The French observer Tocqueville noticed this kind of disconnect  already over a century ago:

Pour un étranger, presque toutes les querelles domestiques des Américains  paraissent, au premier abord, incompréhensibles ou puériles.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), p. 260 ]

But again:  That does not matter within the cleidoic pressure-cooker that the Teabaggers now crouch in;   they do not see themselves as others see them;  and with that, they are subject to the evolutionary dynamics of any fringe sect, such as the Trostskyist or Mao-oid splinter-groups on the left:  though the nosological particulars for this cohort  more likely will resemble those of the Branch Davidians, Jonestown/People’s Temple, or the Heaven’s-Gate doomsday group.

If the psycho-ideological parallels with Marxist sectarianism here posited, have any validity, then we may expect to witness (and here, in making a testable prediction, I am giving empirical hostages to fortune) a spectacular implosion, with fractures and splits along unpredictable microscopic socio-ideological fault-lines:  defections, recriminations, and general bewilderment.  

Not a pretty sight.  The lads & lasses in The Weathermen had at least their youth to excuse them.  But what is the excuse for Michelle Bachmann and Ted Cruz?

Mark Rudd & Bernadine Dohrn, redivivi

~

For a selection of individual detective stories,

available for your Nook or Kindle,

visit this site:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Update 3 October 2013] Another historical parallel:

The President spoke of the absurdity of the nation’s being held hostage by a minority of one party in one house of one branch of government.  This morning, this Tea Party hard-core is being referred to as “The Thirty”, based on their numbers.  But to anyone steeped in history, the phrase amusingly echoes the name of those appointed by Sparta to rule over Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War -- the “Thirty Tyrants”.

~

In the annals of Communist sectarian, my favorite among the party-names is the

Tesnyaki

These were Bulgarians.   (Bulgarians are sort of like Russians without the Old World charm.)  Their turn upon the stage of history was brief and inglorious, but the name is worth examining.

Beginning with the Bolsheviks -- the word means “majoritarians”, though that was objectively an overestimate at the time -- Communist and Socialist parties, and even groupuscules,  have usually tried to name themselves in ways that made them sound substantial.  (E.g. the grandly and fancifully named sect “National Causus of Labor Committees”).   In America, especially during the Popular Front, CPUSA front groups often had broad bland big-tent titles -- “Workers Party”, “American League for Peace and Democracy” --  sometimes almost comically so: “Mother’s Day Peace Council”, “League of Women Shoppers”.

But Tesnyaki means …. “the Narrow Ones”.   And for a group that at least nominally aimed at rule by the majority -- the workers and peasants -- the choice of name was odd indeed.

It pointed, however, to a key consideration, whose often underestimated importance would be ratified by time.  The implication was:  tightly knit.  (As Greta Garbo said in “Ninotcha”, defending the Stalinist purges, “There will be fewer but better Russians.”)  And indeed, by being tightly knit, following orders without question though it meant turning on a dime, the parties of the Comintern achieved influence well out of proportion to their numbers.    In America, the CPUSA never amounted to anything numerically,  yet by the 1930’s they managed to control many union front organizations bureaucratically -- packing the leadership, and always showing up in force for votes.   The surprising extent of their behind-the-scenes success, especially during the period of the Popular Front, can only be explained by such discipline.  After all, there have been many movements of or for workers in this country, from the Knights of Labor and the Wobblies on;  the CP had no monopoly on that.   And unlike any of their rival groups, the CP labored under the incredible burden of (in the 1920s) geographically insensitive dictation from Moscow, and (in the ‘30s) increasingly insane activity, noxious from a Left perspective especially:  the purges, the show trials, the gutting of the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, and finally (can’t make this stuff up) the Hitler-Stalin pact that gave the green light for WWII.

We are currently witnessing something similar in the House.

The hard core of Republican freshman fanatics, mostly hailing from the boondocks that God forgot,  have nevertheless somehow managed to stymie the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House, and bring much of the nation’s business to a halt, even threatening a Samson-gambit on the debt ceiling that could really pull the temple down.   (Cf. Howe & Coser on the CPUSA: “the damage wrought by the party in its passion to conquer, or to destroy what it could not conquer”.)

The Teabaggers’ ‘Moscow’ in this case consists of behind-the-scenes manipulators like the billionaire Koch brothers and (gawd, is he still not dead?) the ineffable Edwin Meese:

   A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning

And the lesson of history here is:  No matter how scatterbrained their ideology, how reckless their actions, if they keep tight and hang tough, they might just get away with it.

~

The rather far-fetched parallel with which we began this post,  was offered in a ludic spirit, largely to tweak the Tea Party’s nose.  But if someone had the time and the inclination, it would be worth pursuing further.

For:  To any student of labor history, the remarkable thing about the Stalinoids’ role is how utterly remote it was from the everyday interests of workers.   Many is the strike they subtly sabotaged, since a labor victory (in the Third Period view) would only foster illusions of reformism.   But more:  As the years progressed, you could not make sense of the actions by the CPUSA (and other sections of the Comintern) in terms of labor vs. capital at all.   Nor was the truth behind the façade always just self-interested Soviet raison d’état:  sometimes even the basic welfare of Russians and other Soviet bloc citizens -- even the security of the state itself, as in the Red Army purge on the eve of World War II -- was sacrificed to obscure factional infighting within the ruling clique.

Thus, consider the possibly yawning disconnect, between the aims at the level of the Koch brothers, and the vein-popping hayseeds who are their public face.  The sort of emotional issues that move the latter to fury, such as abortion, are unlikely to be hot buttons chez the Kochs.   The key coup for them is not Roe v. Wade, but Citizens United.  In fact, my hunch is that the Kochs and their henchmen would just as soon that Roe v. Wade remained in effect, so as to keep the yokels in ebullition, distracting attention from structurally more crucial matters such as the upcoming double-tap sequel to Citizens United, re recess appointments, soon to appear before the Supreme Court.

We really don’t know what their game is.  Possibly something as simple (and semi-publically acknowledged) as rolling back the Great Society and the New Deal.  (The minimum wage in particular  seems to stick in their craw.)   Or possibly something a bit more esoteric …