Is Elizabeth Warren too conservative for America?

In the eighteenth century the French centralized despotism was viewed as the vehicle of reform and progress; only conservatives such as Montesquieu could see advantages in what was generally held to be the corrupt, disorganized, fractionated and backward English political system.

– Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968)

I’m reading a seminal work of conservative sociology — Robert Nisbet’s 1952 book The Quest for Community — and that context makes me view Elizabeth Warren as what would be either party’s most conservative presidential candidate. Nisbet argues against the forces that substitute power for community. View Facebook and its times through Nisbet’s eyepiece:

All too often, power comes to resemble community, especially in times of convulsive social change and of widespread preoccupation with personal identity, moral certainty, and social meaning.

Fearing a loss of the local community and, with it, freedom, conservatives used to challenge liberalism’s embrace of laissez faire economics. They argued that the unregulated marketplace flattened local life and eliminated public life. The result, they sometimes warned, would be a form of equality one often finds in despotism — the one against all.

Warren’s proposal to break up the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon is an unexpected flowering of this old-time civil religion. As conservatives used to argue, the effects of unchecked market forces go beyond economics. Warren points out that these giant tech companies adversely affect democracy. This insight and her other economic policies seem to make Warren Tocqueville’s candidate. Indeed, after reading Robert Kuttner’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, which is largely a nostalgic view of America’s postwar economic consensus around Bretton Woods, I’m about ready to wear a “Make America Great Again” hat in her honor.

° ° °

Attempts at reconstructing local communities involve difficult choices, ones beyond closing Facebook accounts and patronizing local shops and farmers’ markets. A friend of mine passed along to me a criticism of John Brown: instead of sticking with the intentional community he helped to begin, he got involved in national politics. Brown’s struggle, thus expressed, led me to buy an old biography of him.

The tug between the draw to intentional communities and the draw to national politics also got me re-interested in Bonhoeffer, and I just finished Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. As the first director of the first Confessing Church seminary, Bonhoeffer sets out to make disciples instead of preachers. He preaches instead of instructing in homiletics, he prays long prayers in contravention of Lutheran sensibilities, he promotes music, and he insists on recreation. The seminary’s routines and activities suggest both a monastery and my more idyllic memories of the neighborhood I grew up in.

Oddly, in the context of the biography, Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot against Hitler’s life seems a natural outgrowth of his focus, wherever he travels and works, on the local community. I wonder how that tension will play out in Brown’s biography.

Meanwhile, in our own longstanding community of disciples, we wait. Or to use that Old High German cognate, we abide.

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The point of caprice

As we all know, just after declaring a national emergency, the president said that he didn’t need to. Many think his comment undermines his declaration because emergencies tend to be compelling. These critics, however, assume the rule of law.

In saying that he didn’t need to declare an emergency, the president merely stated the facts of life under an autocracy: the autocrat’s will is the only drama, the only question before the body politic. His will, in fact, constitutes the entire public realm.

The distinction between the rule of law and of one man’s will is the point of the emergency. Hamilton refers to this distinction in the Federalist in an ironic oxymoron: “favourable emergency.” A tyranny, he warns, can start with an emergency declaration. We know it happened later in Germany.

The president’s comment this week about the primacy of his will is similar to his last-minute change of heart in December concerning Congress’s compromise. An autocrat’s caprice draws attention to his will, and this earlier caprice shut down the government, costing our economy tens of billions of dollars. Many call this cost a waste, but not so: those billions, far exceeding the cost of the wall funding he then sought, helped to fund our education in autocracy.

The president’s comment after his declaration frames the issue properly. The question is not whether an emergency exists at our southern border; the question is whether the president wills that an emergency exists.

The president’s proper framing of the emergency declaration gives every senator, congressperson, judge, and justice that may be asked to vote or rule on the matter a stark choice: do we remain under the rule of law, or are we now ruled by one man’s will?

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All the king’s men

We who appear guilty today are in fact those who stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people; we gave the devil his due without selling our soul to him, whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls.

– Hannah Arendt, from “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964), summarizing a defense made frequently at the Nuremberg trials

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Executive function

I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Politics,” 1844)

The president, the headlines have said off and on for weeks, may or may not declare a national emergency. It’s an off-again, on-again kind of possible national emergency. How, some ask, could there be a national emergency if the president himself must mull over whether the situation around our southern border is, or is not, a national emergency? Isn’t a national emergency, by definition, compelling?

Not according to the president. What is compelling, the president wants you to know, is his will. The president’s mulling, and not events at the border itself, generates suspense and focuses our attention. The declaration or non-declaration of a national emergency will be as much of a “big reveal” as a presidential Supreme Court nominee. The president is deliberately equivocal, in this as in most other policy matters, contradicting and reversing himself so as to focus our attention on his will. We are being trained in autocracy.

The president, of course, has the Constitutional authority to make court nominations. He does not have Constitutional authority to override Congress’s action or non-action by declaring a national emergency at the southern border. But we participate with the president in overriding our Constitution’s balance of powers by understanding his role as that of “the decider,” in the words of President George W. Bush. Obama, after Bush, riled half the country with executive orders that, because they generally lacked constitutional authority, were easy enough for his successor to reverse. All of this is part of our tragic project of replacing our Constitution’s balance of powers with a hegemony of function.

Is the executive “the decider”? The issue predates Bush, Obama, and the current president, and even our Constitution. When Thomas Aquinas argued for the primacy of man’s intellect over his will, he described the will, in Hannah Arendt’s words, as “an executive organ, necessary to execute the insights of the Intellect” and subservient to that intellect.1 Our seventh-grade shorthand for our government’s separation of powers reflects this Thomistic understanding: the legislature is the brains of the outfit, and it makes the laws. The executive merely enforces what the legislature passes.

We’re losing our civics-class understanding of the executive. Our modern understanding of the executive is more like that of Duns Scotus, Aquinas’s near contemporary during the thirteenth century. Scotus believed that (again, Arendt’s words) “the Intellect serves the Will by providing it with its objects as well as with the necessary knowledge; i.e., the Intellect in its turn becomes a merely subservient faculty.”2 Scotus’s notion of the executive, then, is that of Bush’s “decider.” Because the president has become “the decider,” Congress is becoming merely one of the president’s advisory boards.

Both Aquinas’s and Scotus’s understandings were variations on Augustine’s theme: man is memory, intellect, and will. One can see these three elements respectively in our Constitution’s three branches of government: the Supreme Court (memory), Congress (intellect), and the presidency (will). By making Congress the first among equals, the framers expressed their preference for Thomas’s view of the intellect’s primacy.

Thomas’s view of the intellect’s primacy, for instance, shows up in our Constitution’s requirement that Congress declare war. The president and the Armed Forces in his charge then execute that declaration. But Thomas’s cumbersome balance between the powers of the intellect and the will seems outdated in our push-button-annihilation age. And national emergencies, even slow ones and nonexistent ones, seem to be going the way of modern wars, becoming strictly executive prerogatives to declare as well as to execute. Is our Constitution out of date?

Yes, fortunately: our Constitution was out of date before it was even ratified. The theory behind the American constitutional arguments leading up to the Revolutionary War, as A. F. Pollard has pointed out, “was essentially medieval.” According to Samuel Huntington in his essay “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” the American colonies maintained the Thomistic notion of the rule of law over the more modern and Scotian notion of sovereignty:

In seventeenth-century Europe the state replaced fundamental law as the source of political authority, and within each state a single authority replaced the many that had previously existed. . . . In America, human authority or sovereignty was never concentrated in a single institution or individual but instead remained dispersed throughout society as a whole and among many organs of the body politic. . . . The continued supremacy of law was mated to the decisive rejection of sovereignty.3

This medieval understanding, according to Huntington, led the framers to create three coequal branches of government with blended functions but balanced powers. Our president, though, if we may use Huntington’s distinction, wants to bring our government fully into the modern age in which sovereignty is vested in what was formerly a single branch of government.

And our government could become modern. Huntington, who wrote his influential essay in 1966, begins its conclusion with this warning: “Divided societies cannot exist without centralized power; consensual societies cannot exist with it.”4 We are a divided society. Our doom seems complete, and only love can save us. Just as one man must love himself to maintain a balanced mind, so our polity must recreate what Lincoln in his First Inaugural called the Union’s “bonds of affection.”

Love seems a naive concept with which to end a piece on politics. But Emerson ended his essay “Politics” with this very proposition: see the above epigraph. (Who was Emerson talking to? I’d love to talk to that man.) And Augustine said that his man of memory, intellect, and will couldn’t present himself as a single constitution without love:

This will of Augustine’s, which is not understood as a separate faculty but in its function within the mind as a whole, where all single faculties – memory, intellect, and will – are “mutually referred to each other,” finds its redemption in being transformed into Love.5

Covenants, such as our Constitution, are grounded in, and provide the grounding for, the rule of law. But constitutions are like marriage covenants: they happen only in love. If our people, as Emerson put it, “can exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments,” then perhaps we can covenant again and save ourselves from this modern scourge of one man’s will.

And my Augustinian prayer for our president is that his will would “mutually refer to” the other branches and parts of local, state, and federal government, and that his will would find “its redemption in being transformed into Love.”

  1. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, at 126. ↩
  2. Id. ↩
  3. Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” World Politics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Apr. 1966), at 382. ↩
  4. Huntington, supra, at 405. ↩
  5. Arendt, supra, at 104. ↩
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A history of Jupiter

I’m reading a biography of Emerson to help me through another book, a good history of Transcendentalism. The people who seem to be in constant contact in the latter book – Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Everett, Alcott – seem miles apart in the bio. That’s understandable: a bio puts people at home. They write letters, they kiss their children, they read the paper while sipping coffee. They walk with friends; they have fallings out with friends. Emerson had long fallings out even with Thoreau and Carlyle.

Like histories, timelines bring figures and events into close contact. I remember the planets, also, large and close, strung out like beads above the timelines in my childhood classrooms. Walking home, I sometimes expected Jupiter to rise as big as the moon.

Emerson is the American champion of subjectivity. He said that there is “no history, only biography.” But subjectivity alone is lonely. History and its claims to coherence permit a public life.

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Mice!

This morning I found three of our dark chocolates under the cages covering the stove’s burners. Little pieces of foil had been torn away, and the chocolate had been chewed. It’s a new condo. How did we come to have mice?

“It’s cold out,” Victoria said as we cleaned up.

I thought of the few of us, blogging still or blogging again.

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Ilk & elk

Is there a correlation among high ceilings, high church, and the highbrow? Among low ceilings, low church, and the lowbrow? I’m returning to a delicious, low-ceilinged affair on Groundhog’s Day, Graves Mountain Lodge’s annual Wild Game Night. Venison, buffalo, and bear with steak sauce. The last time I was there, February of 2016, I saw a sprinkling of red MAGA hats, the first ones I’d seen.

Our little condo boasts nine-foot ceilings. But where I’m from, high ceilings echo the big house. The indentured servants and the slaves didn’t live there. Most of the country still sleeps beneath low ceilings.

Emerson believed that Napoleon became “the idol of common men, because he had in transcendent degrees the qualities and powers of common men.”1 This is why, I think, European highbrows thought Elba his end. They considered Napoleon common. But the lowbrows found him common to a transcendent degree.

Emerson on Napoleon brings to mind Arendt on the Nazis:

…they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system.2

The highbrows didn’t consider this: many lowbrows owed their political awakening not to the French Revolution but to a dictatorship. Elba was mere interlude.

  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (EriK, 2017), at 113. ↩
  2. Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Houghton Mifflin, 1968), at 311. ↩
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Chipping away

Bethany dug out most of my car yesterday. We have a two-hour delay this morning, so I’ll finish.

Bethany’s jewelry party went well Saturday. Victoria and I invited three or four circles of friends. Early on, hosting a party seems like a lot of shuttling among circles.

I remember this church in England: plexiglas had replaced a wall bombed off during World War II. From the sanctuary we could see the fields.

Posted on by Peter 2