On Political Experience and Vengeance

Regular readers know that I am not the greatest admirer of Pierre Manent’s (2015) Beyond Radical Secularism (translated in 2016 by Ralph Hancock). But the preface starts with an arresting paragraph that I partially quote:

Members of society devote much of their energy to informing and educating themselves, but it seems that the being that they constitute together learns nothing at all. Only one thing seems really able to educate nations, and that is political experience, when that experience is sufficiently brutal, penetrating, and overwhelming. Eventually, as Machiavelli said, some "extrinsic accident" such as war or revolution forces the members of a nation to "recognize themselves" and to take up again the frayed reins of common life. (p. 3)

That collective entities like society and the nation do not learn is a bedrock axiom of people (like myself) who accept with melancholic sadness a species of Platonic liberalism. Platonic liberals understand that public life, including its politics, is governed mostly by opinion; that the production of public truth is a costly and time-consuming matter limited to science and systems of justice, and certain public, authoritative institutions.* This means that in so far genuine political knowledge is possible — and better minds than myself have doubted it — it is without mediation of some sort of no use to society or nations as such.

My present interest is in the idea of political experience. Let’s stipulate that Manent’s Machiavelli is right that only extrinsic accidents like war or revolution are capable of educating a political order as such. Such political experience marks a generation among a people.

As an aside, when at the start of Discourses on Livy (3.1) Machiavelli introduces the significance of extrinsic accidents (here). He only speaks of war not revolution. But crucially Machiavelli also treats such political experience as an opportunity for political renewal in the context of the corruption of the body politic (of the Roman republic), and that the instrument of renewal is (what in The Prince) he calls a ‘New Prince.’

Be that as it may, my interest in Manent’s preface should be clear to regular readers. The American republic is corrupted (recall; and also here). Corruption is not just about illegal and legal bribery, and insider trading, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined.

I became alert to a significant feature of this corruption when (recall) I started reading about the Madoff scandal. My college friend, Erin Arvedlund, first broke the story. One of the more important reasons to be interested in the scandal is "that [on average] the victims were [relatively] wealthy and educated." (David M. Levy & Sandra Peart (2013) "Learning from Scandal about what we Know and What we Think we Know," p. 302) In particular, most of his victims were sophisticated investors. And what’s very striking about their attitude is that many were not without suspicion that the returns Madoff achieved were fishy. But most of them assumed that he was their crook. This indicated that these wealthy investors, which also including many Europeans, alread assumed they were operating in a crony capitalist environment.

Okay, so much for set up.

One of the more interesting features of our epoch is that neither war nor revolution has marked the political experience of much of the American public alive today. (I do not deny that plenty of American soldiers have seen war rather up close.) And, yet, in re-electing President Trump it seems to have rejected the political elites and constitutional practices that governed the Republic for several decades.+ I think this was the effect of political experience.

For, on my view The Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the accompanying bank bailouts were the political experience par excellence of our age. This was no war or revolution, so if Manent is right it could teach nothing. But it was significant, nevertheless. For, from the public’s perspective these showed that the well-connected could socialize risk and by and large escape the consequences of their reckless behavior. (Yes, folk at Lehman and some at Bear Stearns did not.) And, while governments were preaching austerity, the music on Wall Street started up again as if nothing had happened. The central bankers, who were mostly asleep at the wheel as a community in the period before The Great Recession, were actually rewarded with much larger formal powers after.

Now, one of the redeeming features of liberal democracy is that by holding regular elections a public has the ability to send the bastards packing. That is, somebody or some party is held to account at least symbolically or ritualistically for whatever has gone awry. (In parliamentary systems this is played out at a more mundane scale with the fiction/practice of ministerial responsibility, where a politician pretends to be responsible for departmental malfeasance.) And while this does not fully satisfy the all-too-human desire for vengeance, electoral cleansing goes some way to meeting it. For the ritual to work qua ritual there is no reason to assume that the public is sufficiently knowledgeable about who it sends packing. Let’s call this the ‘scapegoating view of elections.’

On my view, then, the seminal political experience of the age left a void where some form of symbolic vengeance was supposed to be. (The possibility of legal vengeance on political enemies was popular in discussions during the most recent American Presidential election; but this is the wrong sort.) To be sure, the elevation and election of Obama was not without significant symbolic consequence; but for all kinds of reasons that need not detain us here he refused to cleanse the stables and renew the republic. He used to occasion to pass Obamacare and avoided being a New Prince. Instead, he self-consciously provided cover for the Ancien Régime to continue as before. Obama was, in fact, proud to stand between Wallstreet and ‘the pitchforks.’

By contrast, Donald Trump’s promise to ‘drain the swamp’ speaks to that void. And while he is indeed governing as a New Prince —shredding political practices at a very high speed—, there is, judging by his ongoing erratic actions, no reason to think, despite what some of his learned supporters claim, he will produce a restoration or renewal of the Constitution (as opposed to accelerate its spiral of corruption).

I don’t deny that the Covid lockdowns may well be another generational political experience. But politically they built on the experience of The Great Recession of 2007-2009. What’s common between the great bailouts and the Lockdowns is extraordinary action by the executive (where the legal basis was generally provided post hoc) and, during the Covid lockdowns, a general willingness to encroach on civil liberties in the name of public security/health.

Even if one is willing to quibble over my description in the previous sentence/paragraph, there is no doubt that in these episodes a kind of political decisionism was entrusted and delegated to the executive without legislate deliberation. It’s pretty clear that the new presidency is aiming at rule by executive order as a kind of new normal. Rather than the rule of law, we obtain rule by decree (with post hoc approval or disapproval of the Supreme Court). This is what its supporters call the ‘unified executive theory,’ that is, Bonapartism.

Back in the day (1950), in the context of her analysis of (English) imperialism, Hannah Arendt discussed rule by decree. She understands this as a “bureaucracy as a form of government.” She notes that behind “its inherent replacement of law with temporary and changing decrees, lies this superstition of a possible magic identification of man with the forces of history. The ideal of such a political body will always be the man behind the scenes who pulls the strings.” (p. 313); see also Arendt (1945) p. 449 here.)

Our age is more nihilist and so we don’t accept forces of history at all. But as the popularity of conspiracy theories suggests, we have not abandoned hope that there is a man behind the scenes who pulls the strings. That is the underlying rational behind the hyper-activity of the American Presidency, which with the photo-ops signing of one executive order after another, appeals to the collective desire of the sense of control. And, yet, simultaneously by its dependence on the ungrounded will of a single individual makes no common life possible.

Arendt was not hopeful about where rule by decree led, although thought moderation not impossible. But if we hastily return to Manent’s use of Machiavelli, we recognize with some delicate irony that the Omaba administration’s ability to prevent the pitchforks of exacting their vengeance also prevented the nation of learning anything worth learning.

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*I doubt that Manent is a liberal in any sense as anyone who has read Beyond Radical Secularism can attest. But that’s irrelevant for what follows. Obviously, the axiom of Platonic liberalism will also be accepted by non-liberals like Arendt and Madison.

+Here I remain agnostic on to what degree this should be viewed, as Marxists and Afropessimist might claim, as an unveiling of what was there all along.