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“Stand Back and Stand By”: The Demands of Loyal Opposition

photograph of miniature US flag with blurred background

An incendiary essay is currently making the rounds. Glenn Ellmers’s “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough” is a call to arms: “The United States has become two nations occupying the same country.” The essay details a kind of foreign occupation:

most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term. […] They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

Given this dire situation where there is “almost nothing left to conserve,” “counter-revolution” represents “the only road forward.” Those brave enough to grasp this grave truth also possess the clarity of vision to see that “America, as an identity or political movement, might need to carry on without the United States.” For if true patriots fail to find the courage to mobilize and take action, “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured. See you in the gulag.”

While it may seem irresponsible to grant such obvious propaganda additional attention, Ellmers’s essay is worthy of consideration for two reasons. First, this is not your run-of-the-mill internet debris. It bears the seal of a prominent conservative think tank. Published by The American Mind with direct ties to the Claremont Institute (where Ellmers graduated and serves as fellow), the essay is endorsed by a body with not insignificant cachet. The various fellows and graduates, for instance, have ties to major universities. It would be a mistake to see this as obscure preaching to a small flock; this narrative is emblematic. It’s an intellectualized hard-right manifesto serving as mission statement for the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy whose name Ellmers invokes.

Second, the essay provides a compelling framework by which to understand the motivations behind a number of recent events — the various efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election, the January 6th Capitol riot, as well as voting legislation in Georgia (and elsewhere) attempting to restrict the franchise to “real” Americans. Like Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” (another Claremont fellow whose work was published by the same body), Ellmers’s essay paints the current political moment as a desperate choice: fight or face extinction, rush the cockpit or die.

Ellmers’s essay has received attention in no small part due to its eerie similarity to Weimar-era German political writings. Echoing the kind of language used by Carl Schmitt – the constitutional scholar and jurist who embraced National Socialism – Ellmers emphasizes the need to declare a state of emergency and purge those who have infiltrated the state and subjected American politics, all in an act of restoration and purification. “What is needed, of course,” Ellmers claims, “is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure” — a pronouncement which seems strikingly similar to Schmitt’s explanation of the role of the sovereign to normalize the situation by embracing the responsibility to deliver the miracle of the decision – that is, the extra-legal authority to say whether everyday legal norms should apply.

Likewise, Ellmers’s essay seconds Schmitt’s conviction that the basis of politics rests on distinguishing friend from foe and treating them accordingly. For any state to continue to be, it must be willing and able to forcibly expel those who might undermine its fundamental homogeneity in order to save itself from corruption from within. Again, following Schmitt, Ellmers issues a dire warning on the supposed political virtue of tolerance and questions our blind faith in democracy’s ability to assimilate conflicting and antagonistic viewpoints and house them under the same roof.

Lost in all the fascist rhetoric is an important philosophical problem. The challenge is familiar to students of political obligation: how can citizens feel any tie to the law when it isn’t their team who’s making the rules? It is what David Estlund has called the “puzzle of the minority democrat”: how can those in the minority consider themselves self-governing if they are subject to laws they have not explicitly endorsed?

This is no small thing; resolving this tension is the key to the bloodless transition of power. Ensuring citizens can adequately identify with the law and see themselves sufficiently reflected in their government is a necessary component of the exercise of legitimate political authority. We need a compelling answer for how citizens might still see themselves as having had a hand in authoring these constraints even when their private preferences have failed to win the day. Why should those in the minority sacrifice their own sense of what is right simply because they lack numbers on their side on any particular occasion?

Our answers to this puzzle often begin by emphasizing that democratic decision-making is essentially about compromise. Majority rule acknowledges our basic equality by publicly affirming the worth of each citizen’s viewpoint. It privileges no single individual’s claim to knowledge or expertise. It grants each citizen the greatest share of political power possible that remains compatible with people’s basic parity. From there, explanations begin to diverge.

Some accounts emphasize the duty to live by the result of the game in which we’ve been a willing participant. Others highlight the opportunity to impact the decision, voice concerns, and engage in reason-giving. A few maintain faith in the majority’s ability to come to the “correct” decision.

Regardless of the particulars, each of these accounts makes a virtue of reciprocity; individual freedom must be balanced against the equally legitimate claims to liberty by one’s fellows. When we refuse to acknowledge this, we usurp others’ right to equal discretion in shaping our shared world and thus violate our moral commitment to the fundamental equality of people.

These considerations about how best to accommodate deep, and potentially incompatible, disagreement have important implications for our politics today. For example, the ongoing debate over reforming the filibuster is a conversation about, among other things, the appropriate portion of power those in the minority should wield. Different people articulate different visions of the part the opposition party needs to play. But we seemingly all agree that this role must be more robust than one wherein those in the minority simply bide their time until they can rewrite the law and install their own private political vision. Instead, we must continue to articulate the significant demands the concept of loyal opposition makes on all of us. Responsible statesmanship is not solely the burden of those who wear the crown.

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The Capitol Coup and the Rhetoric of Essentialist Exceptionalism

photograph of a burning tire with the feet of a crowd of protestors in the background

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college win for a few hours. Law enforcmenet deployed tear gas in the Capitol Rotunda, and at least four people died; one woman was shot and killed. It was a deeply depressing spectacle that underscored two facts: that millions of Americans live in an alternative reality in which President Trump, the nemesis of shadowy, rootless “globalists” and other vaguely Semitic “swamp-dwellers,” won a second term in a landslide; and that Trump himself, pathologically fixated on his electoral loss, will gladly incite violence against his own government in order to cling to power.

Even as it was happening, media commentators registered their bewilderment that something like this was happening here, and not some other place — Iraq, maybe, or perhaps (as CNN’s Jake Tapper imagined) Bogotá. The by now well-worn cliché that it was something that might happen in a “banana republic” was trotted out. Echoing these sentiments, in his remarks on that day, President-elect Biden said that “the scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America.”

There is, I think, a deep connection between the commentators’ surprise and Biden’s rhetoric. Many people in this country seem to subscribe to a metaphysics of America, or of American political culture, that is essentialist in that it says that there is something that the culture essentially or truly is — that there are qualities which define America and without which America as we know it would not exist. Usually, the outlines of this conception of America’s essence are drawn by exclusion: by saying what America is not. Thus, Biden tells us that the “true” America is not whatever-it-is that the Capitol insurrection represents — probably that it is not violent or lawless. Other invocations of America’s essence have claimed that America is essentially liberal or conservative, or essentially tolerant. In general, we can say that American essentialism defines what America is in terms of what the one doing the defining thinks it ought to be. Frequently combined with this claim about America’s essence is the idea that this essence is exceptional; that America has a unique essence that distinguishes it from other countries. Thus, those who hold to American essentialism often define America not only by what it is not, but they suggest that what it is not is what other countries are. 

Put these two beliefs together — that America has an essence, and that this essence is unique — and you can readily explain why it should seem shocking or unbelievable that something like the Capitol coup occurred. If America is essentially not what, say, Iraq is — violent, lawless, prone to coup attempts — then what happened at the Capitol is almost unthinkable.

But American essentialist exceptionalism is doubly untrue. First, even if America’s political culture had an essence, it would be implausible to claim that this essence is peaceful or law-abiding. Since its founding, America has been the site of extreme political violence. Periods of relative peace have, if anything, been the exception, not the rule. Second, it is simply implausible to think that political cultures have essences. What makes this particular political culture American is simply that it is comprised of the political beliefs and practices of citizens of the United States, a particular political entity. Those beliefs and practices can (and have) changed dramatically over time and yet remain American. 

Defenders of the rhetoric of essentialist exceptionalism might call on Plato or Government-House utilitarians for support, arguing that even if untrue it is a “noble lie” that helps bind the political community together. On this view, saying that America is essentially good motivates its citizens to love it, thus making it more likely that they will help preserve it across time.

However, we must balance this benefit against the costs, which in my view are considerable. First, the exceptionalist aspect of American essentialist exceptionalism encourages Americans to view the political cultures and systems of other countries with unthinking disdain. That disdain was on full display in commentators’ casual invocation of Iraq, Ukraine, and other countries as examples of places where a Capitol coup would somehow be more appropriate. In fact, Americans likely have much to learn from the struggles of other democracies.

Second, the essentialist aspect of American essentialist exceptionalism may encourage complacency about America’s prospects: if America is essentially democratic, non-violent, tolerant, law-abiding, and so on, then the acts of individual political actors seem to matter less in the scheme of things — it just can’t happen here. Put another way: if in some sense we already are what we ought to be, then what’s the point in struggling to achieve our ideals? It is perhaps just this sort of complacency that was at play in the acts of the Republican congressmen and -women who chose to contest Biden’s electoral win, or the failure of the Capitol police to anticipate the possibility that Trump supporters might assault the building. Now the costs of that complacency are available for all to witness.

Third, the idea that there is a true America can easily be hijacked to serve nefarious political ends. Instead of arguing that American political culture is essentially tolerant, liberal, and democratic, some on the far right believe that it is essentially white, Christian, and patriarchal. Thus, the belief in American essentialism can motivate the exclusion of many members of actual American society as fundamentally “alien” to the culture.

The best course, then, is to jettison both our essentialism and our exceptionalism. There simply is no “true” America, and there are no qualities, good or bad, which define our political culture for all time. There are only the beliefs and practices of Americans in their roles as citizens, jurors, office-holders, and the like; and whether these beliefs and practices are, on the whole, good or bad depends upon the choices of each and all of us.

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Under Discussion: Democracy Demands More than Your Vote

photograph of protesters occupying Brookyln Bridge

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: Democracy’s Demands.

It took roughly thirty minutes for people to start arguing about what to do once reports of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death became public on the evening of September 18th. With fewer than two months left before Election Day, it was not immediately clear that Ginsburg’s replacement could — or should — be rushed through the confirmation process before November 3rd. And many were quick to say, in no uncertain terms, that they thought it inappropriate for the president to nominate another justice, given the political circumstances. Consider this tweet from author and producer Reza Aslan:

Nevertheless, it quickly became clear that partisan interests would indeed take center stage in the final weeks of the election cycle with (eventual nominee) Amy Coney Barrett’s name circulating as a likely contender for the seat even before Ginsburg’s body had been laid to rest. Despite public opinion polls indicating that a consistent majority of voters want the winner of the 2020 presidential election to nominate RBG’s replacement, President Trump and Senate Republicans have worked hard to pack up the Supreme Court before November, nonetheless.

And, despite Mr. Aslan’s September suggestion, nothing has been burned down.

While some protests, both in Washington and at the homes of several Senate leaders, have materialized, the dominant prescription to voice public opinion on the matter has pointed towards one place: the ballot box. In a manner reminiscent of former President Obama’s famous “Don’t boo; vote” call, politicians, pundits, and other media personalities have, with increasing fervor, exhorted the American people to get to the polls. And though it is hard to measure the impact of a “Souls to the Polls” event or a special reunion of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, early calculations suggest that Americans are indeed voting in record-shattering numbers, with voter turnout in 2020 already matching 12% of total voter turnout in 2016.

Of course, for someone specifically interested in voicing their displeasure at the partisan abuse of the currently-vacant SCOTUS seat, pleas to vote in an election that won’t be decided (and whose winners won’t be installed) until well after Judge Barrett becomes Justice Barrett might seem beside the point. Furthermore, even if the timeline were different, the SCOTUS-motivated voter would be casting her ballot in support of a candidate who would also receive support from thousands of other voters and it’s far from clear that the entire group would be voting for exactly the same reasons. Politicians frequently aim to build coalitions of differently-motivated voters for precisely this reason: opinions vary, not only about answers to political questions, but about which questions are most important to ask in the first place. For all its virtues, the “one vote, one voice” mantra fails to account for the unavoidable homogenization of voter’s voices in support for a single candidate.

This is roughly why the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called voting a “trap for fools” that prevents people from exercising their true power as citizens. Championing instead the formation of interest groups that can wield political power about the specific values around which they unify, Sartre saw voting as an institutional mechanism for “serializing” the citizenry into complacent powerlessness. According to Sartre:

“When I vote, I abdicate my power — that is, the possibility everyone has of joining others to form a sovereign group, which would have no need of representatives. By voting I confirm the fact that we, the voters, are always other than ourselves and that none of us can ever desert the seriality in favor of the group, except through intermediaries. For the serialized citizen, to vote is undoubtedly to give his support to a party. But it is even more to vote for voting…that is, to vote for the political institution that keeps us in a state of powerless serialization.”

By assimilating variable support for a panoply of initiatives and desires into the discrete affirmation of only a handful of individual politicians, Sartre saw representative-based voting as a flattening of a person’s public agency.

And, indeed, the drafters of the U.S. Constitution would seem to agree. Writing in the Federalist Papers, James Madison warned about the dangers of public sentiment forming “factions” that could ultimately overthrow the system he and his friends were constructing. To Madison, this was a problem for two reasons: firstly, populist forces could easily be swayed by the manipulative power of demagogues (a point Alexander Hamilton discusses at length in Federalist No. 68), and, secondly, voters could form factions — what Sartre would call “groups” — that would threaten the “various and unequal distribution of property” within the United States. In Federalist No. 10, Madison outlines a defense of what would become the Electoral College as a cooling mechanism that could prevent popular ideas from being quickly turned into federal policy, saying “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.” Indeed, Madison’s “republican remedy” looks strangely similar to Sartre’s “powerless serialization,” but whereas the former views it as a solution to a problem, Sartre sees it as a problem of its own.

But, for all their disagreements, I think that Madison and Sartre would nevertheless agree on at least one thing: the practice of voting is not the chief duty of a democratic citizen. When not plagued by manipulative efforts to suppress voter turnout, the standard electoral process is a relatively easy responsibility that takes — again, in ideal circumstances — only a short amount of time every few years. But Sartre ridiculed those who “have been persuaded that the only political act in my life consists of depositing my ballot in the box once every four years,” arguing instead that the life of the political agent is suffused with a constant responsibility to attend to, speak up about, and organize both supports and protests in service of public issues.

In a similar way, later in his life, Madison defended not only public education, but specifically for “the poorer classes to have the aid of the richer by a general tax on property” so that, among other things, the electorate would be both more informed and more equipped to engage in political life; indeed, to Madison, the operation of such “learned institutions” to enlighten the public is “the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.” So, for both Madison and Sartre, politics was not simply a matter of semi-annually marking a ballot, but required diligent, regular attention to important matters of public concern, educating oneself and others so as to bring about the overall best state of affairs.

To be clear: my point is not to cast doubt on the value of suffrage, but to recognize that whatever virtues (pragmatic or otherwise) it may hold, the general election does not exhaust the duties of a responsible citizen in a modern democracy. Protestors, educators, and other servants of civic welfare who care for justice to be understood and upheld are just as crucial for the vibrant operation of our republic as are poll workers and voters.

As Hamilton himself wrote in The Farmer Refuted, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature.” Democratic citizens who take that identity seriously should exercise these human rights and responsibilities in ways that far exceed the always-soon-to-be-musty ballot box.

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Should Americans Hope for a President Pence?

A little over a month into Donald Trump’s presidency, chaos continues to swirl around even the most basic of the administration’s operations. High profile controversies – most notably, the emerging details about Trump surrogates’ contact with members of the Russian government during the campaign – continue to roil the nascent administration. From within, leaks to the press abound, painting a portrait of a chaotic White House even more defined by power struggles and botched policy rollouts than usual. And all the while, Trump continues to make inflammatory statements, most recently asserting without evidence that then-President Barack Obama ordered wiretapping of Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

Continue reading “Should Americans Hope for a President Pence?”