ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Civics Test for would-be members of Congress

It is now painfully obvious that newly elected members of Congress from both houses should be required to take, and pass, the “naturalization”/civics test that immigrants seeking citizenship are required to pass before the former are sworn into high public office. It need not be identical to that test, indeed, perhaps it should be a bit more difficult. I am quite certain that more than a few Republican members of the House of Representatives could not pass the current test.

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Beyond Capitalism: a democratic, socialist, and ecological call to arms

(The ‘call to arms’ is meant—as is often the case—in a metaphoric and nonviolent sense.)

“Since there is no national organization around anymore that can set doctrinal boundaries for the left, there is today more room for expressing and acting upon the full range of issue and perspectives that actually constitute the radical, democratic, critical tradition. One can more easily be a Marxist in the morning, a pacifist in the afternoon, an environmentalist at dinner, and a feminist in the evening while going to church on Sunday [or the mosque on Friday, the synagogue on Saturday, the Humanist Society meeting on Monday…] and voting Democrat on election day.” — Richard Flacks, Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life (Columbia University Press, 1988): 221-222.

At bottom, in the end, or structurally speaking, “capitalist democracy” refers to the contradictions and distortions of the ideal, principles, and practices of democracy by capitalist logic, by capitalist exploitation, by capitalist corporations and capitalist markets, by commodification, etc., etc. To the extent capitalism was an improvement on several fronts over feudalism and earlier forms of economic organization it evidenced real and symbolic progress in both general emancipation and individual freedom (as Marx himself appreciated, although of course this or that aspect of the former world worth saving went up in smoke as well), and thus it found sufficient political sanction and fortuitous correspondence with Liberalism as a political philosophy. In time, however, it became clear that political Liberalism itself (distinguishable from the Liberalism of J.S. Mill, John Dewey and John Rawls), which represented the historically progressive evolution of democracy, could not sufficiently constrain or effectively determine the power of capitalism in society, in particular, the industrial and technological character of capitalism, which in time has become more or less subordinate to the global forces of finance capitalism (this does not mean we throw out the baby—Liberalism—with the proverbial bathwater). In any case, whatever adjectives we find to more accurately describe this or that form of capitalism, its fundamental structure, logic and processes that constrict, distort or deform participatory, deliberative and representative democracy remain firmly or obdurately in place. And insofar as Neoliberalism is the regnant political ideology among political and economic elites who cannot imagine a world beyond capitalism, democratically inspired and suffused aims, purposes, ends, desires, dreams, and wishes of anarchists, socialists and communists will recede from view, and among those who have yet to see or entertain them, these will continue to be either elusive or nonexistent.

Of course we can and should continue to agitate, educate, and organize, to critique and experiment, to live the social and economic revolution here and now insofar as that is possible or meaningful, as a principled, ethical, and embodied prefigurative social and political praxis. But we need to explain to ourselves and those whom we are obligated to bring into our circle of solidarity, precisely why and how our anarchist and socialist ideals, values, and programs are necessary and substantial improvements that add up to a transcendence of capitalism, why and how they fill out the principles and practices of democracy such that the vast majority of us will no longer be alienated from or “used” by the prevailing economic order in a way that runs roughshod over human dignity and the triune principles and virtues of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Our symptomatic diagnosis of what ails us, the primary (yet not only) causal variable in the etiology of our collective illness—which makes for the pathology of normalcy—and our prescribed therapeutic regimen, must all be found rhetorically persuasive and compelling because they are sound in theory and have, here and there, then and now, been shown to work in praxis, at least insofar as we can construct and live on islands of anarchism and socialism in the rising sea of capitalism. We need to help our brothers and sisters (this includes our political foes) to see not only the big-picture, immediate and longer-term consequences of the frenzied pursuit of profit, ruthless competition between firms, and the global search for and construction of cheap and cheaper labor markets, but the corresponding vices and harms of conspicuous consumption as well. Environmental degradation and global climate change need not assume an imminent apocalyptic form. We must demonstrate to our brothers and sisters at home and abroad just what is wrong with the consequences of capital’s unbridled exploitation of technological innovation and intellectual property by way of supplanting (the costs of) labor, indeed, by way of dehumanizing both work and the discretionary or leisure time precariously perched just outside the labor market.

No U.S. president, whether Democrat or Republican, can play a messianic role in saving us from the mortal sins of contemporary capitalism (please do not infer from this statement an insinuation that there is any sort of equivalence, morally or politically speaking, between the two principal parties, or that I am naive as to the immense and anti-democratic political power that has accumulated in the post-WW II office of the presidency). Yes, states—or the State—can intervene directly in the balance of power between capital and labor, but when they (or it) systematically intervene on behalf of the former over the latter (with the collusion or collaboration of non-governmental global institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO, the last being the most progressive of these institutions) the poor, working people, and those in the middle class will suffer (hence neoliberals need the power of the State to implement deregulation, fiscal conservativism and monetarist policies). “[E]ven in the best welfare states [be they social democratic, corporatist, or even liberal] social expenditures and taxes serve more to redistribute the living standard of labor than to change its average level. As a whole, labor largely pays for its own social benefits” (Anwar Shaikh). In short, the power of states to intervene in the operations of capitalism is severely constrained in a world of deregulated capital markets: states no longer have the same degree of power they once held in the period of “national capitalism” (a term that reminds us of the diminished power of Keynesian-inspired states to robustly ‘steer’ the economy and the reason why Claus Offe wrote about the ‘Contradictions of the Welfare State and Disorganized Capitalism’). The current round of (neoliberal) globalization is a conspicuous “combination of deregulated capital movements, advances in information/communication/transport technologies, and a shift in ideology away from social statism towards neoliberalism and libertarianism.” “One consequence of this new phase,” writes Meghnad Desai, “is that the state no longer controls the economy, but is one player (a major one of course) among many. The state has to adapt and adjust to forces which it cannot control but must respond to.”

When working people in the wealthier northern states understandably but myopically lament the effects of capitalist globalization on their lives (all the while failing to appreciate the disastrous effects of such microeconomic policies as deregulation and privatization), they seem to outsiders still looking in or those awaiting a seat at the table a tad self-centered, unabashedly selfish or simply unrealistic insofar as they are forgetting, deliberately ignoring or unintentionally neglecting (a result, in part, of debilitating psychological mechanisms that go hand-in-hand with ideology construction and maintenance) the historic effects of earlier forms of globalization on far more vulnerable and poorer peoples on our planet: “colonization, force, pillage, slavery, slaughter of native [‘indigenous’] peoples, the targeted destruction of potential competitors, and a huge transfer of wealth into the rich countries.” A diminution in their power and wealth is hardly comparable to the historical experiences of peoples now getting, so to speak, a bigger slice of the pie. This is not to ignore or deny the injustice of those in the affluent nations heretofore enjoying middle class lives (or the aspirations thereto) having that life cut out from under them. But the paramount fact is that capitalist globalization has reduced “three worlds” (as in ‘first,’ ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds) to one, as millions around the globe are materially gaining at the expense of the middle classes in the affluent countries, even if this is not, to be sure, the “one world” of principled or democratic cosmopolitans who subscribe to the equal distribution of equal liberties. Most governments did not plan this, however much they have since capitulated to these economic forces: it is the predictable result of the global consolidation of turbo- and finance-capitalism, of the increasing power of transnational corporations. And while economic globalization has an upside in some parts of the world and has been responsible for a significant reduction in poverty (directly related to the economic downturn in the affluent countries), substantial local, regional, and international inequality persists, indeed, it’s often growing, particularly within countries. Once more with Shaikh: “One could easily well argue that the inequality and lack of democracy on a global scale is abetted by the political institutions and interests of the ‘democracies’ of patrimonial capitalism.” But the power of these institutions and those interests are diminishing, hence the ascendance of xenophobic nationalism, right-wing populism, and fascist authoritarianism, all of which represent in part a frantic and frightening attempt to regain the political powers that made for “national(istic) capitalism,” albeit sans any knowledge or appreciation of the historical sources and sociological nature and context of those powers. It is nostalgic and dangerous phantasizing for a bygone world, and its tenacious grip on the minds among many in the masses bodes ill for all of us, let alone the natural world.

The Golden Age of capitalism for the “club of the advanced capitalist countries” is over (and with it, the ‘national capitalism’ that flourished during this period). Looking back with Desai: “The Keynesian quarter-century had indeed been a party. Everything had stayed high—employment, hours worked, vacancies—or grown steadily—income, wealth. The public sector—central government, local government, public enterprises—had grown without causing any problems.” We may look back, but there’s no turning back. And there is no golden-like age on the visible horizon, despite the contrary proclivities and desperate yearnings among those of us old enough to be intimately familiar with this history. In other words, Keynesianism, post- or otherwise, is behind us, at least in the long term and globally speaking (it was Keynes, after all, who ‘made capitalism safe for democracy’). The current conditions are, Desai provocatively suggests, “analogous to sailing a ship on high seas. The ship has some machinery for control, but in navigating it, the captain does not control the waves or the wind. These forces can be studied, but they cannot be controlled. The captain who ignores or defies these forces may well run the ship aground or sink altogether.” Put differently, “[c]ycles, with their mania, crashes, and panics” are here to stay, as they undoubtedly “are endemic to capitalism” (Desai). And thus it seems implausible if not reckless to speak of the “imminent collapse” of capitalism, given its staying power through and beyond the duration of these cycles: at present and in the near-term, there are only different types or versions of capitalism, some meaner and some more beneficent than others. One reality North Americans and Europeans are alike compelled to confront, in spite of recalcitrant ideological blinkers or blinders: the current phase of capitalist transformation and entrenchment is truly global. In the words of Desai,

“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have been experienced by all the worlds: First, Second, and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”

It is this fear that has been canalized by the Right (and projected on ‘the Other’), its ideological and political project facilitated by a considerable number of working class voters punch-drunk on a cocktail of denial, self-deception, and wishful thinking, if not illusions, delusions and phantasies. The fears, anxieties and anger of those workers in the (global) metropolis will not be assuaged, let alone overcome with the accelerated privatization of public goods, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the evisceration of remnant unionized workers.

We must once and for all forswear the perverse motivations and incentives (these are not the only motivations and incentives common to capitalism) associated with capitalist democracy (in its neoliberal iteration or otherwise), while avoiding the visceral and reactionary moods and frustrations of those—of late—economically disenfranchised (while the poor are subject to purely punitive policies). No substantive “public benefits” or significant “common good” will follow from such motivations and incentives. But we can predict with some confidence more pain and suffering for the poor, the disenfranchised, the vulnerable, and the working class in this country, that is, those outside the privileged pantheon of a political and economic plutocracy marked by kleptocratic pretensions.

Again, the Left must exemplify, in theory and praxis, the triune principles and virtues of liberté, égalité and fraternité. Tenacity, courage, and imagination will likewise be critical in breaking through the authoritarian social-character armor that has been fashioned from the more regressive and aggressive socio-cultural and political materials found in this country’s history: conformism, homophobia, (white and ‘Christian’) ethno-nationalism, militarism, parochialism, racism, sexism, conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness, unbridled ambition, celebrity worship and fame-seeking, the will to dominate others, in short, the “false consciousness” well-captured in Erich Fromm’s clever locution, “the pathology of normalcy.” We will need to avail ourselves of the best of democratic theory and praxis found in liberal, (democratic and utopian) socialist, anarchist, and communist traditions, taking inspiration from the many men and women who went before us, including those principled communists who fought against apartheid in South Africa, or came to power in the Indian state of Kerala, or struggled for civil rights and on behalf of organized workers in U.S. history. These traditions are chock full of lessons for fighting the demonic forces of xenophobic nationalism and fascism, the evils incarnate in white supremacy, religious fanaticism and authoritarian populism, indeed any ideology or movement that embodies the perverse logic of doctrines and dogmas that deny the fundamental premises of inherent human dignity and fundamental human rights, that thwart the untrammeled democratic representation of the will of the people consistent with same, or that evidence little or no concern with sustainable living in harmony with the ecological and natural processes on our planet. We will continue to fight the latest iterations of these backward historical forces. There may be periodic setbacks and localized defeats in the progressive realization of emancipatory ends, in the extension of democratic principles and practices beyond electoral politics proper (e.g., in the economic realm), but the purification of a “realist,” statist and right-wing politics, increasingly beholden to fascist or fascist-like sentiment must continue apace, animated by a compassionate combination of reason and passion capable of transforming conventional power politics into something consistent with or at least closer to the kind of life found in the daily round outside the Platonic cave. Thus we envisage a life, and various forms of that life, within the nourishing and warm light of what Iris Murdoch, after Plato, called the “sovereignty of the Good,” a life in which gains in global distributive justice, the exercise of equal freedoms and the realization of the full spectrum of human capabilities means everyone can find a seat at the bountiful table, a life in which individual and collective flourishing complement and reinforce each other. Thus what we aspire to is a life … and lives, made possible by the moral parameters of a democratic, socialist, and ecological society, a society at once sane, humane, and convivial.

References and Further Reading

• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Statist Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• O’Connor, James. The Fiscal Crisis of the State (St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
• Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, 1984).
• Offe, Claus. Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (MIT Press, 1985).
• Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).

Socialist Imagination, Thought, and Praxis

• Albert, Michael and Robin Hahnel. Marxism and Socialist Theory: Socialism in Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999.
• Alperovitz, Gar. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
• Baer, Hans A. Democratic Eco-socialism as a Real Utopia: Transitioning to an Alternative World System. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
• Bahro, Rudolf. The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978.
• Bahro, Rudolf. Socialism and Survival. London: Heretic Books, 1982.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red To Green. London: Verso, 1984. 
• Bayat, Assaf. Work, Politics and Power: An International Perspective on Workers’ Control and Self-Management. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991.
• Benn, Tony. Arguments for Socialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980.
• Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
• Bernstein, Henry, et al., eds. The Food Question: Profits Versus People. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.
• Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
• Blum, Mark E. and William Smaldone, eds. Austro-Marxism—The Ideology of Unity, Vol. 1: Austro-Marxist Theory and Strategy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books (reprint), 2017 (Brill, 2016).
• Blum, Mark E. and William Smaldone, eds. Austro-Marxism—The Ideology of Unity, Vol. 2: Changing the World: The Politics of Austro-Marxism. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
• Borgnäs, Kajsa, et al., eds. The Politics of Ecosocialism: Transforming Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Bottomore, Ted and Patrick Goode, eds. Austro-Marxism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994.
• Buchanan, Allen. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984.
• Burkett, Paul. Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009.
• Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Carter, Alan. A Radical Green Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes & Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960 and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Cohen, G.A. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Cohen, G.A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, expanded edition.
• Cohen, G.A. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Dahl, Robert A. A Preface to Economic Democracy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
• Danto, Elizabeth Ann. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
• Dobb, Maurice. Welfare Economics and the Economics of Socialism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Eatwell, John, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, eds. Marxian Economics. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990.
• Edmundson, William A. John Rawls: Reticent Socialist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Elster, Jon and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
• Foster, John Bellamy. The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.
• Fung, Archon, Erik Olin Wright, et al. Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (The Real Utopias Project, Vol. 4). London: Verso, 2003.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012. [I have included this title because I think both Marxists and environmentalists (and by implication, ecologists), can benefit from examining Gandhi’s principles of moral and spiritual political economy.]
• Gornick, Janet C., Marcia K. Meyers, et al. (Erik Olin Wright, ed.) Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (The Real Utopias Project, Vol. VI). London: Verso, 2009.
• Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994.
• Gruber, Helmut. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Harrington, Michael. Socialism: Past and Future. New York: Arcade/Little, Brown & Co., 1989.
• Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. London: Verso, 2006 ed.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. New York: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Hudis, Peter. Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013 (Brill, 2012).
• Kovel, Joel (Quincy Saul, ed.) The Emergence of Ecosocialism: Collected Essays by Joel Kovel. New York: 2Leaf Press, 2019.
• Löwy, Michael. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015.
• Lebowitz, Michael A. Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2^nd, 2003.
• Levine, Andrew. Arguing for Socialism: Theoretical Considerations. London: Verso, 1988.
• Lieten, Georges Kristoffe. Continuity and Change in Rural West Bengal. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1992.
• Lieten, Georges Kristoffe. Development, Devolution and Democracy: Village Democracy in West Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.
• Luntley, Michael. The Meaning of Socialism. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990.
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Miller, David. Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989.
• Ness, Immanuel and Dario Azzellini, eds. Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Nichols, John. The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism. London: Verso, 2011.
• Nove, Alec. The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Revisited. London: Allen & Unwin, 1991.
• O’Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1998.
• Ollman, Bertell, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• Peffer, Rodney G. Marxism, Morality and Social Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Przeworski, Adam and John Sprague. Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Rabinbach, Anson. The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927-1934. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
• Rabinbach, Anson, ed. The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austro-Marxism, 1918-1935. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985.
• Roemer, John. A Future for Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
• Roemer, John, et al. (Erik Olin Wright, ed.) Equal Shares: Making Socialism Work (The Real Utopias Project, Vol. 2). London: Verso, 1996.
• Roemer, John, ed. Analytical Marxism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Ryle, Martin. Ecology and Socialism. London: Radius/Century Hutchinson, 1988.
• Saito, Kohei. Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
  
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos, Vol. 1). London: Verso, 2007.
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos, Vol. 2) London: Verso, 2007.
• Sassoon, Donald. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2014 edition.
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
• Schweickart, David. After Capitalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
• Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 3rd ed., 2008.
• Thomas Isaac, T.M., Richard W. Franke, and Pyaralal Raghavan. Democracy at Work in an Indian Industrial Cooperative—The Story of Kerala Dinesh Beedi. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 1998.
• Thomas Isaac, T.M. (with Richard W. Franke) Local Democracy and Development: People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning in Kerala. New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000.
• Wallis, Victor. Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism. Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2018.
• Williams, Chris. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010.
• Williams, Michelle. The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• Wright, Erik Olin, ed. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.

See too these compilations:

• Anarchism: Philosophy & Praxis
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Blacks on the Left
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
• Democratic Theory
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Elections and Voting
• Global Distributive Justice
• The Great Depression & The New Deal
• Toward Green Democratic Socialism
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
• The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• Human Rights
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy and Law
• Sullied (natural and social) Sciences
• Social Security & The Welfare State
• Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

The QAnon Myth, Phantasy, Delusion … but NOT “Theory”

Mike Theiler/Reuters

Here is the introduction to the term “theory” from Wikipedia. It is fine for our purposes save one error which I will explain below:

“A theory is a contemplative and rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking often is associated with such processes like observational study, research. Theories may either be scientific or other than scientific (or scientific to less extent). Depending on the context, the results might, for example, include generalized explanations of how nature works. The word has its roots in ancient Greek, but in modern use it has taken on several related meanings.

In modern science, the term ‘theory’ refers to scientific theories, a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature, made in a way consistent with scientific method, and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science. Such theories are described in such a way that scientific tests should be able to provide empirical support for it, or empirical contradiction (‘falsify’) of it. Scientific theories are the most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge, in contrast to more common uses of the word ‘theory’ that imply that something is unproven or speculative (which in formal terms is better characterized by the word hypothesis). Scientific theories are distinguished from hypotheses, which are individual empirically testable conjectures, and from scientific laws, which are descriptive accounts of the way nature behaves under certain conditions. Theories guide the enterprise of finding facts rather than of reaching goals, and are neutral concerning alternatives among values. A theory can be a body of knowledge, which may or may not be associated with particular explanatory models. To theorize is to develop this body of knowledge.”

This sentence is, I believe (along with a handful of contemporary philosophers) to be mistaken:

“Theories guide the enterprise of finding facts rather than of reaching goals, and are neutral concerning alternatives among values.”

This makes an untenable separation between facts and values, and thus values and theories, values and rationality, values and truth. The late Hilary Putnam, for example, quotes E.A. Singer saying four things:  

“(1) knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values; (2) knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts; 3) knowledge of theories presupposes knowledge of facts; and 4) knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories.”

Here we see a “triple entanglement” of theory, fact, and value. Another way of saying this is to argue that facts, values, theories, rationality and truth are more or less interdependent notions. Thus, while we can—and often have perfectly valid reasons for doing so—make distinctions between these three concepts (or conceptions thereof), there is no impermeable boundary or dichotomy between them, and thus to claim that theories “are neutral” among possible values is simply wrong, for values are implicated in both facts and theories (which, in turn, involve presuppositions or assumptions about truth), as Putnam famously illustrated in the passage, “the cat is on the mat” from his book, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981). Other philosophers have likewise helped us appreciate the aforementioned entanglement, including David Wiggins, Iris Murdoch, Amartya Sen, and Michael P. Lynch.

Consider this extract from one of Murdoch’s books:

“The moral point is that ‘facts’ are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.”

Finally, related thoughts from David Wiggins:

“The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.”

I’ve provided this material for your consideration because I am still bothered by the fact that all relevant parties in the mass media as well as the rest of us continue to refer to QAnon as a “a far-right conspiracy theory,” one that peddles any number of such “theories” (that is, myths, phantasies, delusions, illusions, etc.). As I wrote in a blog post in October of last year,

“We should get rid of the word ‘theory’ in this description or definition (at best, it is a pseudo-theory). It accords this specific (and ever-changing) cluster of socially or culturally and politically incoherent and irrational ideas with some semblance of respectability: calling to mind the rationality, facts, hypotheses, evidence, abstract or principled thinking that bear upon or directly involved in explanation and understanding, not only in the sciences, but in everyday life and practical reasoning as well (e.g., no part of this putative ‘theory’ is based on fact). QAnon is not a theory, a term that accords this clusterfuck too much credence or plausibility when it is, in fact, completely bereft of same. It is rather a full-fledged collective phantasy (unfortunately, there is comparatively little literature on this subject) … and that is how it should be described.”

QAnon is not a theory of any kind, so let us (with James Brown: ‘please, please, please’) stop calling it such. Today, and for good reason, we often hear the refrain “words matter.” Here is an opportunity for us to demonstrate the veracity of our belief in that maxim.

Ilham Dilman: a neglected philosopher

       

This is from an archived blog post (roughly three years goal) that I thought to post—lightly edited—afresh because I continue to find otherwise very bright people writing on psychoanalytic theory and therapy, from both philosophical and psychological vantage points, which appear not to have read Ilham Dilman, or at least his titles never appear in the citations and bibliographies. This is rather disconcerting, for his luminous works could save these selfsame individuals from claiming or repeating a lot of nonsense, or simply stuff that is neither well-reasoned nor true. Dilman wrote clearly and his material was well-argued, albeit in a modest if not deceptive way, thus it was nowhere near as pompous, assertive, or ostentatious as arguments among professional philosophers often are or can be (particularly when arguing with each other).

 *          *           *

Occasionally one comes across a philosopher who, one believes quite strongly, was unduly neglected when alive, and thus virtually forgotten or ignored after his or her death (of course some philosophers receive posthumous attention or fame). Ilham Dilman (November 4, 1930 – January 17, 2003) perfectly illustrates such a case. I was surprised to discover some years ago from my former teacher and dear friend, Nandini Iyer, that Dilman, a philosopher par excellence, taught for a brief period at UC Santa Barbara. I doubt they made an offer to keep him, given the philosophical or ideological orientation of the department in those days, although I imagine he might have gotten along well with Herbert Fingarette (for whom I was a Teaching Assistant in his introductory course to Asian philosophies). It turns out my speculative inference was mistaken, I am happy to correct the record: as Dilman himself notes in the posthumously published collection of essays, Philosophy as Criticism (Continuum, 2011), after one year at UC Santa Barbara, he “was offered an Assistant Professorship.”

Among the titles by Dilman in my “library,” three of them I bought “used” after being drawn to their cover art while browsing in The Book Den in downtown Santa Barbara many years ago, thereby providing proof of a sort that, at least sometimes, and albeit inadvertently and in part retrospectively, one can judge a book by its cover.   

       

I invite you to consider four books in particular by Dilman that treat various dimensions of Freudian philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis (sometimes in comparison to what is termed ‘academic,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘empirical,’ or ‘experimental’ psychology, that is, that sort of psychology that dominates the academic discipline in the U.S.), and therapy in a manner that is at once incisive, elegant, and accessible if not simply brilliant (one of those adjectives of assessment and praise that, alas, are all-too-frequently employed for hyperbolic rhetorical effect, thereby diminishing its intentional semantic effect and power):

• Freud and Human Nature (Basil Blackwell, 1983).
• Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984).
• Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988)
• Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).

Other works by Dilman (not an exhaustive list):

• Morality and Inner Life: A Study in Plato’s Gorgias (Macmillan, 1979).
• Love and Human Separateness (Basil Blackwell, 1987).
• Philosophy and the Philosophic Life: A Study in Plato’s Phaedo (Macmillan, 1992).
• Existential Critiques of Cartesianism (Macmillan, 1993).
• Free Will: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 1999).
• Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution (Palgrave, 2002).
• Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick (Continuum, 2011).

The relief of suffering and “ordinary unhappiness” in psychoanalytic therapy

What follows is a vivid and compelling clinical vignette that, among other things, testifies to the manner in which psychoanalysis proffers us “hope for better coping with life’s challenges, traumas, fears, and such.” It does this primarily through making available to us “a different way of attending to one’s lived experience by offering a place of refuge in which to go deeper into [the likely causes of our] suffering” (Sara L. Weber). In this instance, we have a brief glimpse into one person’s unique and—at first—rather opaque “emotional constellation.” (The bracketed comments are by yours truly.)

“The patient is a woman who hated her father. Apparently he accused her of things that she had not done, was rude and vulgar, and created scenes in the home. This ‘caused’ her to leave home as soon as she could, carve out a career for herself as a lawyer, putting no demands, financial or otherwise, upon her father. She married when she was 21. She had eczema, bronchitis and frequent bouts of coughing. She came to analysis because after she had tried a medicine chest of remedies her GP [‘general practitioner’] suggested to her that her condition might be psychologically based [for any number of reasons, I suspect many of us might strongly resist such a diagnostic interpretation, although we do not learn if she in fact first did so]. On undergoing analysis she found breaks in treatment either at weekends or during holidays panic-making [so it appears that the analytic setting, which includes first and foremost the analyst, provided a sense of security and solace] and she had bouts of tussis nervosa as soon as the analyst went away [‘dry cough,’ one of the ‘symptoms’ diagnosed and interpreted by Freud in the (in)famous ‘Case of Dora,’* the name being a pseudonym]. In his absence he existed in her mind as an object fixed in the consulting-room, and she knew for certain that she did not exist in his mind. The tie between her and the analyst was felt be her to be physical and not mental and this was strengthened when he gave her extra sessions at weekends and during breaks in the early stages of treatment [from the outside looking in, this change in the regular schedule may have been a mistake in clinical judgment]. She would often sit eating on a park bench near our London home. The interpretation that she was a baby clinging desperately to Mummy—holding onto her physically—made sense to her. ‘When the session ends and I push you out the door—out of the bedroom—little Mary is not going to be beaten and stays on Mummy’s lap (bench).’ This interpretation also enraged her because she hated the analyst being able to see the child in her. She believed she was a mature and independent woman [she certainly had acquired many of the outward signs of same].

Now these factors—a physical clinging to the analyst, inwardly tortured by believing that the analyst would seduce her sexually; an idealization of the analyst; an inner omnipotence; an indignant self-righteousness; the eruption of eczema; the absence of mental representation for outer figures and the consequent absence of a capacity for thinking—are all elements in an emotional constellation. It is part of psychoanalytical experience that it only becomes possible to understand an emotional constellation when it begins to cede to a different pattern. Now in this patient a different pattern did emerge. Its constituents were as follows: a de-idealization (seeing the analyst as a person who made a mistakes); a confidence that the analyst would not seduce her; an image of the analyst as a person existing with others; a substitution of humility for omnipotence; a capacity to accept responsibility for ‘bad’ things that had happened between herself and others; a significant decrease in asthma attacks and a diminution of eczema; a mental representation of the analyst and the development of a capacity to think [Some would argue these are, in the main, indicative of ‘mind over body’ placebo effects, a plausible view which I believe is in part true, and yet these effects can at the same time constitute or represent very real moral psychological and developmental insights into one’s character, mind (including the unconscious), and behavior that can be achieved with such therapy.] In light of this new pattern she sees that her previous perceptual system was distorted. However, in her new emotional constellation she becomes aware of realities which did not burden her before: regret that she had governed her life to date on these false perceptions; guilt about the way in which she had treated her husband, father and mother; sadness that she had been cut off from several avenues of ‘possibility.’ She had to bear personal regret, guilt and sadness. She was stuck in the first emotional constellation, feeling unable to bear these ‘dark’ emotions. This suggests some inner sense of their presence. There is here the emergence of truth and with it a dawning of hope. The change occurs in a decision to face pain [and suffering] rather than [attempt to] evade it. The analyst can witness a patient changing from evading pain to facing it but not the reason for doing so.” — Joan and Neville Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion (Routledge, 1996).

One lesson the Symingtons would like us to derive from this clinical case involves a critical appreciation of Freudian ideas, one is obligated to separate the wheat from the chaff, or the living from the dead, in the Freudian corpus. Thus the factors active in the inner life of the individual are not, strictly speaking, “compatible with drives or instincts conceptualized as impersonal forces that cause this condition or that symptom” [it is still arguable that Freud actually believed in such a form of unmediated or direct causation in these matters].

Freud was devoted to the relief or amelioration of suffering, not to its elimination (as the Buddhists, among other Indic worldviews believe possible) insofar as it thought to be intrinsic to the human condition. Thus, unlike Buddhism, psychoanalysis does not have as an ultimate goal the elimination or transcendence of suffering (the ‘fourth noble truth’), but rather, to paraphrase Freud, an exchange of ordinary “unhappiness” for neurotic misery or suffering. This does not mean of course that Buddhists would have no interest in such amelioration or relief insofar as that can take place short of absolute transcendence. Put in positive terms and in the words of Ernest Wallwork, Freud sought to “enabl[e] the patient to enjoy life as fully as possible and to ‘make the best of him[self] that his inherited capacities will allow.’” In this regard, Freud was committed to the modern or European Enlightenment notion of moral psychological notion of “autonomy” (this concept is often misunderstood and abused, particularly when the various situations and contexts of its use are ignored or ill-understood, as when it is conflated or confused with crude or ideological conceptions of individualism or thought to be in fundamental conflict with, or even subsumed within, community; importantly, it is what animates if not undergirds the democratic ideal of ‘self-rule’**):

“Once the analyst’s interpretive work succeeds in relieving suffering by improving access to and control over disavowed motivations, the analyst leaves it up to the patient to decide what he or she wants to do with the newly one self-knowledge. The analyst refrains from directing the analysand as to how to act, out of respect for the intrinsic worthy of patient autonomy, or self-determination. This means that even if the analysand chooses to acts as a scoundrel, the analyst will not intervene, in order to allow the patient to act in light of who he has come to be. The assumption is that the patient is an autonomous person with his or her own values and that he or she deserves the respect which autonomous persons are rightfully accorded. As Freud says regarding the value of autonomy: ‘The analyst respects the patient’s individuality and does not seek to remold him in accordance with his own—that is, according to the physician’s personal ideals; he is glad to avoid giving advice and instead to arouse the patient’s power of initiative.’” — Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991): 212-213

See too, passim, Jeremy Holmes and Richard Lindley, The Values of Psychotherapy (Oxford University Press, 1989) and especially, again passim, a brilliant philosophical and psychological analysis of autonomy in Freudian psychoanalysis by Ilham Dilman in Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988). There are some excellent essays on autonomy and mental illness in Lubomira Radoilska, ed. Autonomy and Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2012).

* For this early case, these studies are the crème de la crème:

• Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane, eds. In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (Columbia University Press, 2nd ed., 1990).
• Decker, Hannah S. Freud, Dora, and Vienna—1900 (The Free Press, 1991).
• Mahoney, Patrick J. Freud’s Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (Yale University Press, 1996).

** As Meta Mendel-Reyes writes in the abstract for her article in the journal Polity, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn 1999), “The tension between the individual and the collective within the concept of self-rule has significant implications for democratic practice, but has been neglected in democratic theory. Democratic theorists have yet to explore thoroughly the distinction between the rule of the self over itself, and the rule of the self as a member of the collective over itself and other selves. Democratic movements have tended to conflate the two dimensions of self-rule in practice, leading to extremes of individual independence or collective solidarity.” For exceptions to this rule, at least with respect to democratic theory, and in addition to the works of J.S. Mill, see David L. Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991), Alan Gilbert’s Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Raghavan Iyer’s Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).

Wilfred Bion’s normative phenomenology and philosophy of mind derived from clinical experience: the analyst’s need for non-attachment with regard to mental states or afflictions (hence the capacity for ‘free association’ or reverie)

It appears the great English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) had Yogic- and Buddhist-like sensibilities with regard to mental states or, in the Buddhist case, states of consciousness, specifically the role of saṃskāras (which, among other causes, produces memory) and kāma,* or more broadly, at least in Buddhism, tṛṣṇā.**

       

“Bion said that to be without memory or desire is the mental state which prepares the analyst best for the forthcoming clinical session.”

“The state of relaxation or reverie, to use Bion’s word, or free floating attention [or ‘free association’], to use Freud’s term, is that which best disposes the mind to make the transition from the sensual to the mental. To be attached to the sensual prevents that transition from one to the other and therefore blocks understanding. Bion makes it clear that it is not the memory as such that blocks understanding but rather the attachment [in Buddhism, upādāna, ‘attachment, clinging, grasping,’ and in Yoga, rāga, which also means ‘attachment,” with connotations of strong desire or passion]. What Bion recommends is that the analyst place on himself a discipline [cf. spiritual ‘exercises’ or practices, like concentration of the mind or meditation, in other words: ascesis, abhyāsa, sādhana, and vinaya in Buddhism] where he detaches himself from an addictive attachment to memory. Bion says that it is the psychological state of attachment to the sensual that needs to be relinquished. He says, for instance, that there can be just as injurious attachment to ‘forgetting:’ ‘I do not mean that ‘forgetting’ is enough [as when one, say, is self-conscious or aware that one is ‘forgetting’ or at least, more accurately, striving to forget]: what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.’ If, for instance, in the state of reverie a memory floats into the mind of the analyst, then that memory as a symbol of a psychic reality is extremely relevant. It is the state of mind which is extremely crucial here. What Bion is recommending is very closely allied to what Buddhists refer to as nirodha. Nirodha means the cessation of thirst for all this is transient [or impermanent]. The Buddha said we have to strive for the cessation of dukkha (in Pāli). Dukkha has often been translated as ‘suffering,’ but this is not correct [technically, it is indeed correct!]. Dukkha means rather that attachment to the transient aspects of this world that brings about suffering [here our authors are conflating what Buddhists rightly distinguish: the cause(s) of suffering from the condition or state of same that is the effect or result of the cause]. That attachment is known as tanha, which means ‘thirst’ for the sensual things of life [again, technically this ‘thirst’ or craving is of wider scope: it can entail a thirst for mental objects, or for continued existence, or even for non-existence; our authors proceed to acknowledge this, at least in part]. … [In psychoanalysis] it is also attachment to inner imaginative impressions and it is our clinical observation that these hidden attachments have a much greater pull over the psyche than outer physical things.” – This and the first quote above are from Joan and Neville Symington’s book, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion (Routledge, 1996).

In the words of Sara L. Weber, echoing Joan and Neville Symington, Bion believed that “the mind grows through exposure to the truth of, and acceptance of, suffering [this of course does not mean one need be content with this state of affairs, that one cannot work to eliminate the various kinds of suffering].” See her essay, “A clinical encounter: a mind without walls,” in Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion, edited by Axel Hoffer (Karnac Books, 2015): 115-133.

       

* kāma is translated as “’desire, wish, or longing’ in “Hindu and Buddhist literature,” and while it often connotes sexual desire and longing in contemporary literature, the concept can refer to any desire, wish, passion, longing, pleasure of the senses, affection or love (sans sexual connotations), and sensual and erotic desire.

** tṛṣṇā (taṇhā in Pāli) is often translated as “thirst, desire, greed, craving,” although I think craving is the best translation in the context of the “four truths [known by the spiritually] noble,” namely, their unique insight into the nature of reality, metaphysically speaking. The third of these truths is “cessation”/nirodha, meaning the suppression or cessation of kleśas or “mental afflictions” that disturb the mind and thus often lead to unwholesome deeds of the body, speech, and/or mind. Tṛṣṇā, which we might define as inordinate desire or craving, is one important such affliction (ignorance/avidya being another). Thus tṛṣṇā is among the causes of duhkha in Buddhism, that is, “suffering,” or an existential state of being “ill-at-ease,” or a psychological condition of “unsatisfactoriness,” or lack of contentment or the absence of fulfillment or eudaimonia.

Recent and related posts: (i) Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies; (ii) Buddhism and psychoanalysis: two rather different “therapies of desire” fashioned for the relief of suffering; and (iii) Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and therapy: an introduction to its therapeutic model and “science of subjectivity.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• Buddhism
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Emotions
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Human Nature and Personal Identity

Toward a Symptomatic Diagnosis of the Foremost Threat to a Liberal Democratic Republic

This is the preface to what I hope to be an ongoing series of posts in which I (further) introduce the significance of psychoanalytic and social psychological perspectives on individual and group pathologies (especially in conjunction and interaction) that are either clearly corrosive of (over a period of time) or imminent threats to the values, principles, and practices intrinsic to a Liberal* democratic order.

* This democratic order need not be welfare capitalist, as it is perfectly compatible with both social democracy as well as socialism, a point well-argued in the works of J.S. Mill, John Dewey and the later works of John Rawls, among others.

In a letter to the New York Times in March, 2017, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman warned readers of “Trump’s dangerous individual psychological patterns: his creation of his own reality and his inability to manage the inevitable crises that face an American president. He has also, in various ways, violated our American institutional [and constitutional] requirements and threatened the viability of American democracy. Yet, because his is president and operates within the broad contours and interactions of the presidency, there is a tendency to view what he does as simply part of our democratic process—that is, as politically and even ethically normal. In this way, a dangerous president becomes normalized and malignant normality [what Erich Fromm earlier called the ‘pathology of normalcy’ and Arno Gruen referred to as ‘realism as sickness’] comes to dominate our governing (or, one could say, our anti-governing) dynamic.” Robert Jay Lifton, in the Foreword to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017). There is a 2^nd edition (updated and expanded) of this volume published in 2019.

This letter was uncannily prophetic and I want to rely on its insights by way of addressing why it is that “we” appear unable to appreciate the psycho-political and social psychological phenomena and dynamics that have been and are taking place between Donald Trump and his most perfervid supporters, those who constitute the pathological cult of Trump. Of course we are now, at last, hearing such words as “narcissistic,” “delusional,” “phantasies” and so forth being used by mass media journalists and political pundits to help make sense of the political behavior of Trump and his authoritarian-minded acolytes which numbers in the millions and includes Republican members of Congress, especially in the House of Representatives. One obvious reason so many otherwise intelligent and well-informed people in public life have been reluctant to use such language is the obdurate and pervasive power of various kinds of ideological individualism, which are not prone to descriptive and analytical accounts based on group psychology that speak to the reciprocal relations and reinforcing mechanisms that take place between the “leader” (or ‘leaders’) and the “led.” To the extent we are familiar with material along these lines, it involves, say, fascism and Party-State Communism, or perhaps even religious nationalism, but only as it exists among “others” (in India, Poland, and Myanmar, for example) and as it has existed outside our geopolitical borders. In other words, we have precious little (thus there is some) rhetorical experience speaking about these mass social, cultural and political psychological pathologies in our own country, the hold of “American exceptionalism” lurking stubbornly in the back of our minds.

We rightly believe that, at least philosophically and theoretically, that participatory, deliberative and representative democracy—as ideals, methods, and processes—add up, more or less, to the voice of reason (as rationality and reasonableness) in political fora (be they informal or institutionalized), a voice capable of crowding or drowning out the more dangerous passions if only because this democracy permits and encourages free discussion, the settling of (at least some) differences and disputes, thus coming to agreement on means of governance and legislation through dialogue, debate, and argument, through negotiation and bargaining. These processes are thought, at least in some measure, to lead, in dialectical fashion, to consensus sufficient for achieving responsible and accountable government and governance such that political power becomes indissolubly wedded to the common good, to generalizable liberté, égalité, and fraternité, to “universal” welfare and well-being and, should we be fortunate, eve to widespread individual flourishing or eudaimonia, perhaps even meaningful and enduring happiness. To use, after one of my former professors, the language of Lenin, democracy is a “talking-shop” as well as a “working-shop.” This professor of political philosophy, the late Raghavan Iyer, wrote:

“… [I]t is easy for any government to remain both responsive and responsible to those who brought it into existence as well as those who desire its downfall. How to secure intelligent popular participation and to safeguard against indifference and inertia, how to preserve freedom and to prevent anarchy, how to obtain strong and popular leadership and to avoid demagogic and despotic tendencies—these problems face every democracy in the context of its own internal contradictions and inner tensions. It is helpful to remember that democracy, in its present form, is of relatively recent origin and is frequently in a state of internal crisis, or of emergency caused by external forces. Democracy in wartime or under the stress of an economic crisis or national emergency, in the face of bankruptcy or breakdown, demands so many restraints on itself as a process or as a method that it remains chiefly an ideal that lives by the faith of votaries in itself, its past and its future. Thus democracy may be seen as a faith as much as anything else. It presupposes faith in the possibility of securing responsible government through representative institutions, of reducing arbitrary action and achieving equity and equality through legislative and judicial means, and of inducing voluntary cooperation and popular support in a free society. Democracy has its own distinctive approach to the three crucial problems of politics, centered on social power and human wisdom—the problem of authority, the problem of law, and the problem of obligation. The democratic approach must be governed by genuinely democratic conceptions of welfare, justice, and freedom.” From Iyer’s book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979): 176.

I earlier addressed some of the topics broached above in a post based on James M. Glass’s book, Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995), as well as a couple of posts addressing public rhetoric, reasoning, and debate in a democracy. These posts will form the basis of further explorations of themes and arguments Glass treats in a manner that enables us to get a better understanding of how individual and group psychological phenomena corroborate so as to cause noxious and nefarious multiplier effects in a democracy, especially when, as in this instance, the head of government is a man obsessed with if not utterly possessed by authoritarian ambition and gravely impaired psychologically so as to be manifestly unfit for his high office.

What has motivated and moved President Trump?

A Facebook friend understandably posted the following observation this morning:

“Never in my life would I have guessed that I would have to compete against TWO impeachment trials of the President in the same year: but that is a consequence of electing a person who put his own interests ahead of the country, who refused to tell the truth about the election and caused chaos in our own house.”

I’ve picked out the phrase, “a person who put his own interests ahead of the country,” to comment upon.

       

Stephen Holmes* has helped us appreciate a notion of “self-interests” that had a rational and indispensable role to play in the history of Liberal democratic thought and politics. Today, as Holmes points out, the notion of self-interest has often been reduced by those hostile to Liberalism as a political philosophy of cool if not cruel calculation, “niggling selfishness, and indifference to spiritual values and the common good.” And to make matters worse, conceptions of interest and self-interest in both every day and intellectual discourse (e.g., in economics, psychology, and politics) have a wide range of connotations that frequently make it difficult to understand its precise meaning apart from its specific communicative context and social setting, among other things. That said, I think we can justifiably claim that unless we choose to use the term in a wholly pejorative sense, to speak of or refer to Trump’s “own interests” in the above manner fails to do his motivations and related actions justice. Before explaining why, permit me to say a few things about the notion of interest in Holmes’ book in the chapter, “The Secret History of Self-Interest.”

Holmes reminds us that, “Bentham aside,” classical Liberals such as Locke, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith, and Madison “all assumed, quite realistically, that passions crowd out interests.” These authors, representative of a larger class of writers, held to a conception of self-interest that was largely rational in a broad sense. It was fashioned in opposition to the “aristocratic ideal of glory” and “disenchantment with the Christian dogma of original sin.” Finally, and ambiguously, “the postulate of universal self-interest, although logically incompatible with insight in to the rich variety of human motives [17th and 18th century Liberal thinkers like Smith and Hume in fact ‘analyzed the human psyche’ with ‘considerable finesse], first rose to cultural prominence because of its unmistakably egalitarian and democratic implications.” Mankind is prone to being moved by a richly diverse and often contradictory list of motives, and self-interest, oddly enough (particularly in light of how often it is invoked), is often quite elusive, trumped by other sub-rational, irrational, non-rational or even allegedly supra-rational motivations.

For this reason alone, I would say it’s at least arguable that Trump placed “his own interests ahead of the country.” That is far too innocuous or anodyne a description of what motivated and moved Trump. After Hume and with Holmes, “we can construct a … list of the sub-rational motivations to which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers contrasted the calculating pursuit of private advantage [in our case: Trump’s ‘own interests’]. Here is Hume’s catalog […]: the intolerant adherence to abstract principle [not something we need worry about with Trump!], inherited animosity, love of imitation, psychological infatuation with a leader [as with members of Trump’s cult, but also Trump’s narcissistic love of himself], and psychological identification with a group. To these motives, he also adds a craving for approval, anger, envy, fear, grief, shame, depression, melancholy, and anxiety.” Smith had a similar yet distinct list of dangerous passions, which intriguingly included “[i]rrational ‘obsequiousness’ toward the rich and the powerful … the flip side of libido dominandi. These unsocial motivational passions make, to put it mildly, “reasoning difficult,” and those “in the thrall of such unsocial passions [like Trump and his militant sycophantic followers] do not act from rational self-interest….”

To be more precise with regard to Trump’s motives and corresponding behavior (here I depart from those who refuse the attempt to ‘read Trump’s mind’ as it were, as if his motivations are hidden and opaque and cannot be reasonably inferred from his words and actions), I would argue that what Trump placed ahead of sworn duties to his oath of office and the country are not “his own interests” (his transparent inability to engage in self-examination and self-reflection rule out the capacity to comprehend just what those are) but rather a frightening or disturbing motley of dangerous passions and vices, megalomaniacal narcissistic needs, perverse desires, delusional will and phantasies, all of which are immeasurably worsened by his “unbridled and extreme present hedonism” and a dispositional penchant for psychopathy and sociopathy. Psychiatrists are now willing to publicly state that they think Trump has a “delusional disorder,” one of whom describes this illness as “unique among psychiatric conditions in that the area of dysfunction can be highly circumscribed. An individual with this disorder often has a single fixed delusion and otherwise functions normally.” However, I do not think this is “highly circumscribed” in Trump’s case or that he “otherwise functions normally,” given his malignant narcissism and “unbridled and extreme present hedonism” (which is a twisted take on the spiritual admonition to ‘be here now,’ the presentism in this case ongoing, sans self-reflection or self-examination ‘looking backwards,’ as well as an inability to have (consistent, coherent, and reasonable) goals, aims, and plans that are by definition ‘looking forward’).

* See his Passions & Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977), Albert O. Hirschman has a nuanced historical and conceptual discussion of the notion of “interests” which Holmes largely treats with favor although he concludes his analysis with three pointed criticisms.

Arguments against presidential “self-pardoning”

First, a bit of context and background from Jane Meyer:

“Well, so, as we all know, there is a very broad pardon power in the Constitution that the president has. He can issue pardons almost without any kind of guidelines to whomever he wishes. And one of the questions that people, legal experts, have, and historians, watching all of this, this incredible spectacle, is whether Trump might try to pardon himself. It has not been done before in our history. An earlier corrupt president, Richard Nixon, thought about it and thought that he had the power to do it. The Justice Department at the time looked into it. And there’s just a sort of a relatively flimsy, quick opinion that suggests that the Justice Department found at that time that they didn’t think it could be done, because just it’s illogical, as the paper says. The opinion just says no man can stand in judgment of his own trial. But it’s never really been tested before. And a number of experts who I interview suggest that they think it’s possible that Trump could try to pardon himself, and might even get away with it if he did.

But what’s interesting is that the pardon power he has is to be able to pardon himself against federal charges. And that might be able to wipe the slate clean for himself of many, many possible criminal charges, but it would not reach the New York state charges that he may be facing from the DA’s Office or from the Attorney General’s Office in New York, because those are state charges. So he might still have to go ahead with some kind of process there, and he wouldn’t be able to get himself off the hook.”

*           *           *

“One of the most important recent degradations of our constitutional order has arrived in the form of Donald Trump’s claim that he can pardon himself. That threat is even more worrisome in light of the rapid acquiescence by Trump’s enablers in agreeing with his outlandish claim. This acquiescence is not, moreover, limited to the spineless Republicans in Congress. In The Washington Post, for example, a Stanford Law School professor (who once had a reputation as a principled conservative) ran through the suddenly-standard Trumpist excuses to say that Trump is ‘not wrong’ about self-pardons. This is nonsense.”—Neil H. Buchanan (from a 2018 ‘Dorf on Law’ blog post)

Some Republican members of the cult of Trump, with some support among law professors and lawyers, believe it possible the President possesses the power of self-pardon as part of his general and fairly broad constitutional power to pardon (in addition to pardons, commutations, reprieves, and amnesties, a particular person as well as entire classes of people). Such “nonsense” is taken seriously by these folks and it would not be the first time that something nonsensical acquired legal respectability or plausibility.

Nemo judex in causa sua (or nemo judex in sua causa) is a Latin phrase that means, literally, ‘no-one is judge in his own cause [or case].’ It is a principle of natural justice that no person can judge a case in which they have an interest. In many jurisdictions the rule is very strictly applied to any appearance of a possible bias, even if there is actually none: ‘Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.’ This legal maxim crystallized in the British common law system. This principle may also be called:

• nemo judex idoneus in propria causa est
• nemo judex in parte sua
• nemo judex in re sua
• nemo debet esse judex in propria causa
• in propria causa nemo judex

The legal effect of a breach of natural justice is normally to stop the proceedings and render any judgment invalid; it should be quashed or appealed, but may be remitted for a valid re-hearing. Cf. “Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.”

*           *           *

I would argue that the act of “self-pardoning” is a pragmatic contradiction, analogous to the attempt to “will what cannot be willed” (as in cases, for example, attempts to bring about, say, happiness, courage, faith, or wisdom by the sheer force of will) a conceptually incoherent notion bereft of legal justification and political precedent. In other words, we should consider the notion absurd, silly, or ridiculous. Alas, although not surprisingly, more than a few legal experts (i.e., lawyers and law professors) believe otherwise if only because they cannot find sufficient legal precedent stating explicitly otherwise.

Talking heads in mass media, those with influence on social media, journalists, political pundits, historians, and legal experts are frequently heard making reference to the possibility of Trump acting so as to grant himself a “self-pardon.” In discussing the topic, they routinely refer to the “unlimited” power to pardon granted the President in the Constitution. Many of these individuals may not believe it is right to do such a thing, but they don’t see how it is or might be constitutionally and legally ruled-out. From my vantage point, this sort of talk, repeated now on a daily basis, has an unintended perverse side-effect: it lends an air of possibility, plausibility and thus probability if not a putative sense of legitimacy to the President “pardoning himself.” However, this notion is utterly without any linguistic or rational or constitutional warrant. What is more, it is quite likely that, historically, there does not appear to be “single instance in which a king, royal governor, or any similar official purported to pardon himself.” It will not be an easy task, however, to once and for all banish the legal plausibility of the notion of self-pardon. One attempt in that direction comes from Frank O. Bowman in an essay at the Just Security blog (November 24, 2020; now posted as a longer essay on SSRN). Bowman analyzes three kinds of argument: (i) from Constitutional text, (ii) from “original understanding,” and (iii) “Constitutional structure.” I find these arguments both sound and persuasive. They deserve to become well-known in public fora, but especially those connected to mass and social media in which millions of people are paying at least some attention. We need to, once and for all, and in the best interests of our constitutional democratic republic, completely de-legitimize the notion of Presidential self-pardoning.

*           *           *

[….] “The idea that President Trump would try to pardon himself is hardly fanciful. Back in 2018, when the Mueller investigation was nearing its end, an apprehensive Trump declared, ‘As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have an absolute right to pardon myself….’ The claim of scholarly support was not a complete invention. A few respectable figures have concluded that such an act would be constitutionally permissible. I think they are wrong. Indeed, a presidential self-pardon is antithetical to the language and structure of the Constitution, contrary to the evident intentions of the Founders, and a very real danger to republican government.

The Arguments from Constitutional Text

All of the arguments favoring a self-pardon rest heavily on the apparently open-ended text of the Constitution’s pardon clause, which reads: ‘The President … shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.’ Regardless of any attendant bells and whistles, the pro-self-pardon arguments boil down to the assertion that the words of the clause grant power without limit, and because the words do not expressly say that the President can’t pardon himself, then the opposite must be true — he can.

But even if we were forced to interpret the pardon clause using only the words in the text, those words contain multiple limits. Linguistically, the word ‘offenses’ in the phrase ‘offenses against the United States’ might mean any sort of injury to the country, or at least any sort of violation of the laws of the country, whether civil or criminal. But the Anglo-American history and practice of executive clemency were understood from the beginning to limit ‘offenses’ in this context to crimes. Similarly, the phrase ‘against the United States’ could be read to refer to the country as a whole or any of its constituent states. But from the outset, the pardon clause has been interpreted to cover only federal and not state crimes.

The phrase, ‘grant pardons,’ contains the same sort of implicit, but well-understood, limitation. Both the etymology of the word ‘pardon’ and our ordinary usage of it necessarily imply two persons. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the English word ‘pardon’ as both a noun and a verb is a borrowing from the French language and derives from two Latin roots: per, meaning ‘by,’ and donum, a gift, or dōnāre, meaning to make a donation or gift. Thus, a pardon is a type of gift, and to pardon is to give such a gift. The act of gift-giving requires both a giver and a recipient. Although we sometimes loosely speak of giving ourselves a gift, in the sense of permitting ourselves an indulgence of some sort, the ordinary sense of the word gift, and thus of the act of pardon, requires two parties.

We scarcely need this etymological excavation to understand the point. In ordinary English, now and for centuries past, if I walk round a corner too quickly and collide with you, I say, ‘Pardon me,’ or, if I am feeling a bit more formal, ‘I beg your pardon.’ This formula (which is very old) acknowledges my fault, to be sure, but so would, ‘I’m sorry.’ To beg the other party’s pardon goes further and asks both for her recognition of my acknowledgement of fault and for the gift of her forgiveness. Asking for pardon necessarily implies two parties and the judgment of one about the conduct of the other.

The word ‘grant’ also implies two persons. In dictionaries known to be owned by the Framers, the verb form of grant is defined as, ‘To bestow something which cannot be claimed of right,’ or ‘to … give, bestow.’ The transactional, two-party character of the noun form of grant is emphasized by the existence of two derivative words – grantor (the person who makes a grant) and grantee (the person who receives it) – which were in common usage at the time of the founding. (All other instances of the word ‘grant’ in the Constitution confirm this understanding.)

More importantly, throughout Anglo-American history from Magna Carta to the time of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, a pardon in law always involved two parties – an executive (or sometimes legislative) grantor and an individual grantee. I have been unable to discover a single instance in which a king, royal governor, or any similar official purported to pardon himself. That is important because both the ordinary usage of the words ‘grant’ and ‘pardon,’ and the universal, invariable, and centuries-old bilateral understanding of the concept of ‘granting a pardon,’ would have informed the way the Framers understood the words they wrote into the Pardon Clause and rendered an exclusion for self-pardon superfluous.

To illustrate the point, imagine the Constitution said, ‘The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor.’ Those words empower the president to donate a kidney to anyone. Grammatically, they could be construed to permit the president to donate a kidney to himself. But no one would read them that way because that’s not the way kidney donation works. It requires two people – a donor and a recipient. That being so, no sensible person would write the Kidney Donation Clause to say: “The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor, but may not donate his kidney to himself.” For the Framers, to speak of granting a pardon was necessarily to speak of one person judging and remitting the punishment of another. No explicit exclusion of self-pardon was required because the universal understanding of what it meant to grant a pardon self-evidently excluded such a possibility.

Arguments from Original Understanding

Even more importantly, it is not the language of the Pardon Clause alone, but how the pardon power fits into the Framers’ design of the presidency and the Constitution’s structural limitations on presidential power that should conclusively rule out a self-pardon.

Pardons are not an American invention. Rather, the Framers inherited an English legal tradition of executive clemency rooted in the ancient idea that the will of the king was the source of law, and thus, with a pardon, the king could release a subject from the law’s rigors as an act of royal grace. A corollary of this principle was that the king, as the source of law, was not personally subordinate to law, and thus was immune from either civil or criminal judgments by the courts.

The Framers considered, but explicitly rejected, proposals for an American king. The American constitutional structure was purpose-built with no monarch, and constructed on a theory of separation of powers between an elected executive, elected legislature, and appointed judiciary, combined with inter-branch checks and balances. In the Framers’ system, the elected president has no ancestral claim that law is rooted in his will, and thus has neither an inherent right to issue pardons to others nor an inborn personal immunity from the ordinary operation of the law. In the American constitutional order, the presidency is a creation of law, its powers are specified by law, and each temporary occupant of the office is subject to the law. If we knew nothing more about the Constitution and the presidency than this, it would be sufficient to reject the idea of a self-pardon. If a president can pardon himself, he can, by an unreviewable exercise of his own will, render himself effectively immune from the operation of national law. That kind of immunity was a critical attribute of kingship, and it is quite plain that the Framers intended no American king.

Precisely because they were determined that the office of president not be a kingship, the Framers rejected the idea of a president-for-life and opted instead for a president elected to set terms of four years. They also worried that even an elected president could become corrupt or tyrannical, and they rejected the argument that elections alone would be a sufficient remedy in such a case. Therefore, they added two other protections against an egregious presidential malefactor.

First, the Framers provided for removal by impeachment. Impeachment was another inheritance from Great Britain, but American impeachment differs in critical ways from its British ancestor. Parliament could not impeach the monarch, only royal ministers, judges, and lesser fry. American impeachment was consciously designed for removal of a misbehaving chief executive. And to make sure that a president cannot nullify an impeachment threat with a pardon, the Constitution expressly excludes impeachment cases from the pardon power.

Second, the Framers were well aware that British impeachment was a hybrid political and criminal action in which Parliament could impose characteristically criminal penalties, including imprisonment and death. The Framers wrote our impeachment mechanism to be exclusively political by limiting the consequences of conviction to removal and disqualification. But – and this is critical — they expressly provided that additional penalties might be exacted in separate proceeding before ordinary courts. Article I, Section 3, declares:

‘Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law.’

In short, the Constitution says that Congress may not impose criminal penalties on a president, but the president is nonetheless subject to federal criminal prosecution through the ordinary courts. To my mind, this provision alone is dispositive of the self-pardon question. As a matter of original intention, the implicit threat in Article I of criminal court action against a crooked or tyrannical president would be a nullity if the Framers entertained any notion that a president could pardon himself. Indeed, we have very good evidence that they saw the threat of prosecution as an important constraint on presidential misconduct and never imagined a president could pardon himself out of that threat.

Both during and after the Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and others complained that the pardon language was too broad because it permitted a pardon even for treason, and therefore, as Mason said, it ‘may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom [the President] had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.’ James Iredell, one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, responded to Mason, saying, ‘The probability of the President of the United States committing an act of treason against his country is very slight …. Such a thing is however possible, and accordingly he is not exempt from a trial if he should be guilty or supposed guilty, of that or any other offense.’ Notice that both Mason’s complaint and Iredell’s response assume no self-pardon is possible. If it were, the president would not need to pardon others to prevent either his own detection or any subsequent prosecution. He could simply pardon himself out of liability for any crime alleged by others.

Arguments from Constitutional Structure

But far more important than what the Framers thought is how the availability of self-pardon would affect our contemporary constitutional regime for deterring and redressing presidential crime. Remember, there are only three constitutional mechanisms for dealing with grave presidential misconduct: quadrennial elections, impeachment, and criminal prosecution. In 1788, the Constitution placed no limit on the number of presidential terms. The Founders may have imagined that presidents would keep running indefinitely and would continue to be constrained by fear of the offending the electorate. But at least since 1951, when the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms was ratified, all second-term presidents have known they will never face voters again. So, for them at least, that constraint is gone. And, as our current circumstances illustrate, a first-term incumbent president who loses a bid for re-election retains the pardon power for two-and-one-half months during which the fear of electoral backlash has been rendered meaningless.

I suspect the Framers imagined impeachment would prove a more meaningful check on presidents than history has shown it to be. In over 230 years, one president, Richard Nixon, left office due to the near-certainty that he would be both impeached and convicted. Only three presidents – Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump — have actually been impeached. All were acquitted. The acquittals of both Presidents Clinton and Trump demonstrate that so long as a president can hold the loyalty of a mere thirty-four senators of his own party, conviction is impossible. And Senator Mitt Romney, by casting the only impeachment vote in American history against a president of his own party, reminded us of how easy it is in an era of extreme two-party polarization for a president to hold that line. To put it in terms the Founders might have used, the power of ‘faction’ has all but erased the legislative weapon of impeachment.

Which leaves the criminal law: so long as the Justice Department maintains the position expressed in memoranda of the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president may not be criminally prosecuted, a president will be, practically if perhaps not constitutionally, immune from federal prosecution while in office. If a departing president can issue himself a pardon for all he has done before, then a president really is a creature above the national law, or at least the most important and most powerfully deterrent portions of that law. He could loot the Treasury, bribe judges, steal elections, commit treason itself, and be at no legal risk for any of it. Such a creature would no longer be the president of a free republic, but a dictator in all but name.

So far as I know, in all of Anglo-American history, no monarch, royal governor, president, or other executive officer has tried to pardon himself. The reason, I think, is that the idea of a self-pardon is so antithetical to the constitutional structures of England and the United States, and to the purpose that executive pardon power serves in those structures, that no one has ever had the effrontery to try it. A president who tried to pardon himself would not be relying on some deep, if heretofore unappreciated, reservoir of constitutional authority. He would instead be trying to slither through a heretofore untried loophole. In the case of an ordinary criminal defendant, one might merely shrug at the audacity of the dodge. But a miscreant president is no ordinary malefactor. And permitting presidential self-pardons would not merely allow individual miscarriages of justice, but would erase a structural barrier to tyranny. I do not believe the Supreme Court would countenance that result.”

See too this post, “Executive Branch Legal Process and the Self-Pardon,” by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith at the Lawfare blog (January 9, 2021).

Downplaying or trivializing sedition and the Trump-incited insurrectionary mob at the U.S. Capitol building

“Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy [written on Jan. 7, 2021]. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’).”— Mike Davis, in the first paragraph from his post for Sidecar, a blog of the New Left Review.

In the words of one of my FB friends, Ben Manski,

“Too many people who should know better are downplaying what happened on Wednesday [that is, the insurrectionary assault on the nation’s Capitol building on January 6 during a joint session of Congress]. In the hundreds of mass protests and dozens of occupations and other direct actions I’ve been a part of we none of us ever killed anyone. These people did. Many of those at the Capitol had murderous intent, many had military training and paramilitary experience, and had they gained access to members of Congress, it [c]ould have been much, much worse. Among those who they were targeting were members of the Progressive Caucus. Get a clue.”

I count Mike Davis among those on the Left bright enough to “know better.” His comments downplayed if not trivialized the insurrectionary actions and attempted coup by this motley mob of right-wing fanatics belonging to the anti-democratic and perfervid cult of Trump. Something bordering on a consensus has emerged among political pundits, cable news network journalists, politicians, public office holders, psychologists and psychiatrists, and intellectuals that finds President Trump manifestly unfit for office, and although the reasons may vary, I would argue they stem in large measure from the fact that he is a megalomaniacal narcissist, afflicted with “extreme and unbridled present hedonism,” and dispositionally prone to both psychopathy and sociopathy. In layman’s terms, he is completely “unhinged.” Both Trump and his followers subscribe to rather incoherent (or at least inconsistent) ideologies that are suffused with phantasies and delusory conspiracy scenarios of one kind or another and evidence no abiding concern for the democratic rule of law, the Constitution, human rights, or participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy.

(click on to enlarge)

This post is not about Trump however (or those who, on behalf of Trump, like Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Jr., or Republican members from both Houses of Congress who inspired and incited the mob), but about those on the Left who have downplayed the insurrectionary and violent behavior of white supremacists, fascists, Christian nationalists, Proud Boys, anti-Semites, Q-Anon nut-jobs, and so forth and so on. The point being that these people were not acting on behalf of the Constitution, democracy, human rights or human dignity, justice (be it racial, economic, what have you), or a more benevolent and humane world. While we do not yet have a complete catalog of their intentions and aims, we can certainly make inferences from the slogans on their clothing, the words they screamed and shouted, the military garb, their Confederate flags, their acts of violence, the construction of a gallows outside the Capitol, the discovery of two pipe bombs and a cooler full of Molotov cocktails, and the fact that five people died during this insurrection. What Davis describes as “essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians,” while aestheticizing the actions of this mob, fails to come close to accurately depicting what occurred on that day. Less surprisingly, news reports find Trump spontaneously reacting to the clothing and costumes of some in the mob, believing it reflected negatively on him, detracting from his own putative sense of exquisite sartorial taste and class as a wealthy and powerful person. To repeat, Davis—and not alone, according to Manski—definitely downplayed if not trivialized the insurrectionary assault and coup attempt at the Capitol building. Members of this mob did not hesitate to use violence, being motivated by ideologies dependent on a plethora of phantasies and delusions. The fact that some of them looked clownish or buffoonish in no way diminishes their ongoing threat to participatory, deliberative and representative democratic principles, values, procedures, and institutions, including a democratically suffused rule of law.

Right-Wing Evangelical (and some Catholic) Christians as Members of the Cult of Trump

“ … ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ …”

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

‘I think this is the start of the second American revolution,’ said Terry McCord of Michigan, one of the Trump supporters. She said her Catholic faith brought her to the scene. ‘We have to stop Biden. He is not a good Catholic, and he cannot be our president. We are here for President Trump,’ she said.— Woman interviewed who was a member of the Pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021

It may be true that, as Pascal thought, the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason (and whatever Pascal believed or thought about ‘reasons of the heart,’ these were not intended to be warrants for irrationality; even a non-religious person can find meaningful space for ‘reasons’ generated by the intuition or sentiment of love, care and compassion); and Kant, while quite appreciative of the powers of reason, was aware of, and attempted in some measure to delineate its constraints (his pietistic upbringing and sensibilities, it appears, never left him). But that neither means nor implies that faith, especially religious faith, should run roughshod over the powers of reason which, after all, is a God-given power for even the theist. Most religious worldviews I’ve studied, be they of Abrahamic or non-Western provenance (i.e., largely but not exclusively Asian), find formulas, if you will, in which reason and faith are collaborative (or at least not incompatible) ingredients or powers. Faith, sans reason, that is, blind or irrational faith (faith can be non-rational and rational as well), is more often than not, intellectually, emotionally, and morally irresponsible … and occasionally criminally negligent or liable.

The kind of faith displayed by Christians—be they Protestant or Catholic—at pro-Trump rallies and right-wing evangelical Christian events is narcissistic and thus stunningly selfish (and perhaps pathological, given the dispositional penchant for indulging in phantasies and delusions), as well as ethically reckless and thus irresponsible to the effect—one of high statistical probability—of causing harm and possible death to others, given the especially virulent nature of our nation’s pandemic. It is just this irrational and delusional faith (soaked in conspiracy phantasies) that we find prominent among right-wing Christian evangelicals in this country (the exception to the rule, alas, is small but not insignificant), a faith that is often, oddly enough, suffused with xenophobic nationalism and militant self-righteousness, with beliefs and behavior that are egregiously distant from what Jesus is said to have taught and exemplified in the Gospels. This kind of Christian faith is dangerous for sundry reasons, all of which we cannot canvass here, so we should bear in mind that there are other expressions of Christian faith and belief (e.g., leftist evangelicals!), even if they are not in the mass media spotlight, well-known, or comparatively fewer in number. Christian faith is not made stronger, is not made deeper, is not made genuine, when mixed with self-deception, denial, wishful thinking, illusions, and even delusions (these being the conspicuous psychological components of populist right-wing ideologies). Being religious, however adamant or vociferous, does not provide immunity from sheer madness, or being complicit with evil, for that matter.

Should these evangelicals endeavor to be real or true Christians, they might take the trouble to read and ponder the Sermon on the Mount, and the various sayings and parables of the Gospels, to reflect deeply on them, while bearing in mind these, like most religious scriptures, are second hand testimony as it were. This calls for a basic knowledge of the relevant history, including religious history, as well as learning from the hermeneutic endeavors of others who have used the powers of reason in conjunction with their faith in an attempt to understand what Jesus was trying to tell both his disciples and the various groups of people he spoke to about his own Jewish belief and faith. For my part, I have the temerity to recommend one supplement a reading of the Gospels with Anna Wierzbicka’s brilliant volume, What Did Jesus Mean? (Oxford University Press, 2001).

[While I was raised a Catholic, attended Catholic schools until college (save for one semester after we moved to California in 1969), and am quite grateful for my Catholic education. I am no longer either a Catholic or a Christian. Instead, I remain an ardent student of religions (better: religious and non-religious worldviews), including Christianity (that is, the myriad forms of Christianity). My lifeworld, should anyone be interested, happens to be circumscribed largely but not exclusively by Marxism and Buddhism.]

Christians and non-Christians alike might learn something from the following titles:*

• Bortolotti, Lisa. Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Brakel, Linda A.W. Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Diamond, Sara. Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (The Guilford Press, 1998).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017).
• Radden, Jennifer. On Delusion (Routledge, 2011).
• Radoilska, Lubomira, ed. Autonomy and Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Segal, Julia. Phantasy (Icon Books, 2000).
• Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
• Taylor, Gabriele. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Wierzbicka, Anna. What Did Jesus Mean?

* Had I the time, I would have included titles on pathological group phenomena, some of which was identified in the pioneering work of W.R. Bion and the Kleinian psychoanalyst, R.D. Hinshelwood, as well as those who have endeavored to combine the best of Marxism and psychoanalytic philosophy and praxis, such as Erich Fromm, endeavors which, importantly, are often grounded in robust commitments to participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy.

Sedition, Treason, and Coup attempt in the Nation's Capitol: remove Trump from office!!!

Sedition, treason, and attempted coup (including acts, attempted and successful, of domestic terrorism): all of which have been directly incited by the President (as well as people like Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr., and Republican members of Congress from both houses of Congress) of the U.S., who is not only a megalomaniacal narcissist prone to both psychopathy and sociopathy, but transparently evil (when not immoral) as well (the most glaring example of which is his deliberate mishandling of our country’s pandemic). He should be immediately removed from office per the 25th Amendment (or impeached forthwith, which seems unlikely) and incarcerated.

 

Where was the National Guard?! Why did not responsible office holders and national security bureaucrats plan for this? Had this mob been anyone else, that is, not right-wing nut-jobs—proto-fascists and fascists—they would have been gassed, arrested, and shot with deadly force (as occurred during Black Lives Matter protests). All those in Congress who have been supporting Trump’s psychotic-like beliefs and delusional phantasies (including those of a conspiratorial nature) should be held to account (at the very least they are complicit, but in many respects aiding and abetting). Yet more concrete evidence of actions (violent and otherwise) in furtherance of an insurrectionary deconstruction of a Liberal democratic republic, a deconstruction that assumed sundry anti-democratic modes (illegal, unconstitutional, and political in the basest sense) with the onset of Trump’s tenure in office. This deconstruction was undoubtedly set in motion long before Trump, but the President and his sycophants have shamelessly and gleefully accelerated it, adding fuel to a smoldering fire, thereby igniting a conflagration, authoritarian arsonists behaving, to date, with absolute impunity.

Tort Law bibliography

       

I could not help myself, as I have put together a new bibliography in line with a group of law-related compilations on my Academia page. The latest list is on the law of torts, with titles ranging from the philosophical (as in the books pictured above) to the practical.

Mystery Book Recommendations

My daughter Seana gave me a  wonderful mystery set in Los Angeles, entitled An Old Man's Game. It is smart, funny, and richly entertaining. I am now reading the second in the series (in both Amos Parisman is the detective - Andy Weinberger is the author). So far, another winner. Highly recommended.