Corey Robin's Blog, page 33

Trump is a Tyrant: The Devolution of an Argument

I’ve noticed an interesting evolution—perhaps devolution—in the “Trump is a tyrant” line of argument.

Originally, the claim was robust and ambitious: Trump was like the classic fascist rulers of the twentieth century, readying to lead not only a repressive and violent state apparatus, under the unified control of his party, but also a street-based mass movement that channeled a broad and scary consensus of the majority of the nation. It soon became apparent that despite his electoral victory, Trump in fact had very little ability to control popular opinion.

Not only has he had the worst approval ratings of any president at this point in his term, but he’s also been singularly incapable of moving the needle of public opinion toward his positions. As I pointed out in my Guardian article last Tuesday, two of Trump’s signature positions—against immigration and free trade—are today more unpopular, almost by record levels, than they were when Trump was elected. Ironically, for all the talk (from people like Jeet Heer) that Trump’s words are a form of action, the main action that his words, qua words, have produced in the realm of public opinion is a movement away from his positions.

So then the claim became more modest: Trump is an authoritarian. Here the claim is less that Trump has some intuitive ability to manipulate and control public opinion or to ride the wave of a mass movement than that he’s got control over the state and is using his control to smoothly execute his will. The problem with this argument is that Trump has not in fact consolidated his control over the state. In many cases, he hasn’t even tried.

Judged by the standard of previous presidents, in fact, Trump has been remarkably lax about consolidating his power. And not just because of opposition in the judiciary, which, contrary to Heer, shows no signs of being intimidated by his tweets (quite the opposite, in fact), but because of divisions within his party, divisions that he has proven himself singularly incapable of overcoming. Trump has given up or has been beaten back on multiple fronts of foreign policy, on free trade, on infrastructure spending, on the Wall, and more. He suffered, at the hands of his party, a humiliating defeat on health care, which despite Thursday’s House victory, he still has a long long way to go to reverse. (And it’s not at all clear, given the Senate’s response, that he’ll be able to.) He’s been forced to rely on executive orders, some of which—as the ACLU pointed out with respect to his recent EO on the Johnson Amendment— are as rhetorical as his speeches. They neither execute nor order much of anything.

(Even this article about how Trump has installed commissars throughout the executive branch and its agencies, which some folks offered to me as a counter to my claim about his failure to make appointments to the executive branch, provides little evidence of that approach actually working, and one of the cases it cites is of the executive branch resisting the intrusion of these commissars. The article also claims that Trump’s approach is consistent with what Obama tried to do with the Departments of Justice and Defense.)

So now the claim has become this: Trump may not be ruling as a fascist, Trump may not be ruling as an authoritarian; the real problem is that, in his heart of hearts, he wants to rule as an authoritarian. Trump’s gestalt, says Heer, is “authoritarian in its aspirations.” His intentions are fascist; his motives are repressive; his personality is authoritarian. “The fact that he wants to” undo the Constitution, writes Josh Marshall, “matters a lot.” Whatever the public reality of his rule, we know that the inner aspiration is autocratic. (“Aspiration” is a word that I now see a lot.) This is the kind of focus on intentions that Hannah Arendt, whose name often gets thrown around as the guiding intelligence of our times, thought was so toxic to any true understanding of politics.

I find this a fascinating and remarkable turn of the argument. If you step back and look at the trajectory of the claim, what you see is that the scope and scale of Trump’s politics has dramatically shrunk. It’s gone from a demagogic mass movement in possession of state power—that is, the entire field of state and society—to a more a limited field of the consolidated state, to, now, not just one man, but something even more removed from the public realm, something more interior: one man’s motives and intentions. The setting is no longer a polity; it’s a psyche. As if public life itself now transpires—and can be understood by what happens—in one man’s head. And in this regard, I think Trump’s critics mirror what Trump thinks about himself: he is the terrain of politics.

As Montesquieu understood, that is the hallmark of a despotic regime: all of politics is reduced to the space of the tyrant’s head. In such a regime, politics is focused entirely on a “man whose five senses constantly tell him that he is everything and that others are nothing.” The irony is that the only ones, besides Trump, who seem to believe that this implosion of political space describes or can account for our current moment are his critics.

His Mother’s Son

“Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he’d say. ‘Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.’ My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.”

—Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal

 

What we talk about when we talk about Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon says Trump’s election may help the revolution. Liberals scream, “IRRESPONSIBLE!”

The Democrats say that Trumpcare’s victory in the House will help the Democrats in 2018. Liberals say, “Strategy.”

Bernie Sanders says abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals cry, “SOCIALIST CLASSBRO HATES WOMEN!”

Nancy Pelosi says—twice, second time even more strongly—abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals say…almost nothing at all.

It’s almost as if we’re not really having an honest conversation about our disagreements.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me (sort of): look at what Trump does, not what he says

A wise psychoanalyst once told me, “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” I wish journalists applied a similar rule to Trump.

Yesterday, Trump said some whatever about the “archaic” rules of Congress, and this is what Aaron Blake, a journalist at The Washington Post, has to say in response:

Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind of attitude. He wants more power — and he wants it quickly. It’s not difficult to connect this to his past admiration for authoritarian leaders, and these comments are likely to give Democrats (and even some in the GOP establishment) plenty of heartburn. This is a demonstrated pattern for him, for all the reasons listed at the top of this post.

Oy. I know journalists (and academics like Timothy Snyder) love this narrative of Trump as authoritarian, but again, look at what he does, not what he says.

If Trump were serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power. Because while Trump talks, this is what he’s doing, or not doing:

The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees….

That was according to a piece the other day in The Washington Post, the very newspaper Aaron Blake writes for. And this failure to consolidate executive power isn’t just in the agencies and departments Trump wants to gut. This is also in agencies and departments Trump wants to expand and empower. (I won’t even get into all the legislative battles Trump has lost. Some of which Blake has reported on.)

Whatever fantasies Trump may have about the presidency unbound, this man has almost no agenda for consolidating the power of the presidency. It’s a slogan, a rhetoric, a performance, but that’s it.

So for the last time: Look at what Trump does, not what he says.

On liberals, the left, and free speech: Something has changed, and it’s not what you think it is

When I was in college and in graduate school (so the 1980s and 1990s), the dividing line on free speech debates was, for the most part, a pretty conventional liberal/left divide. (I’m excluding the right.) That is, self-defined liberals tended to be absolutists on free speech. Self-defined leftists—from radical feminists to radical democrats to critical race theorists to Marxists—tended to be more critical of the idea of free speech.

What’s interesting about the contemporary moment, which I don’t think anyone’s really remarked upon, is that that clean divide has gotten blurry. There were always exceptions to that divide, I know: back in the 1980s and 1990s, some radical feminists were critical of the anti-free speech position within feminism; some liberals, like Cass Sunstein and Owen Fiss, were more sensitive to how power differentials in society constrained speech, and thus were more open to more regulatory approaches to speech; some Marxists were always leery of the critiques of free speech. Even so, there was a divide. That divide hasn’t now reversed, but it’s no longer the case that it maps so easily onto a simple and clear divide between liberalism and the left.

From what I see online, a lot of mainstream liberals today are far less absolutist in their defense of free speech, particularly on campuses; indeed, that absolutist position increasingly seems like the outlier among liberals. And parts of the left are now taking the more absolutist position. Once upon a time, a Jonathan Chait would denounce leftist campus critics of free speech, and it all made sense. Today, when he does that, he seems completely out to lunch: a lot of the people he’s talking about are conventional liberals just like him.

(On a related note, there was a funny moment on Twitter yesterday, when the ACLU defended Ann Coulter’s right to speak at Berkeley. Twitter liberals freaked out in surprise: the ACLU, defending Ann Coulter’s right to speak! How could that be? None of them seemed to remember or realize that it was the ACLU that defended Nazis—as in real members of the American Nazi Party—marching in Skokie, a Chicago suburb whose residents included many Holocaust survivors, back in the 1970s.)

Just so we’re clear. Nothing in this post is meant to be normative or prescriptive; I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.

All I’m doing here is making a simple, and I believe non-normative empirical observation: that something new is happening on the divide between liberalism and the left over the question of free speech. Unlike the recent past, the free speech argument now cuts right across that divide. And to that extent, it takes us back to an earlier moment, in the 1930s and 1940s, when American liberals and the left were also in dialogue, and taking a mixture of cross-cutting positions, on the question of free speech.

The Language of Pain, from Virginia Woolf to William Stanley Jevons

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill:

English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself…

William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy:

In this work I have attempted to treat Economy as a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain…

I hesitate to say that men will ever have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these feelings which is continually prompting us to buying and selling, borrowing and lending, labouring and resting, producing and consuming; and it is from the quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their comparative amounts. We can no more know nor measure gravity in its own nature than we can measure a feeling; but, just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets….

Many readers may, even after reading the preceding remarks, consider it quite impossible to create such a calculus as is here contemplated, because we have no means of defining and measuring quantities of feeling, like we can measure a mile, or a right angle, or any other physical quantity. I have granted that we can hardly form the conception of a unit of pleasure or pain, so that the numerical expression of quantities of feeling seems to be out of the question. But we only employ units of measurement in other things to facilitate the comparison of quantities; and if we can compare the quantities directly, we do not need the units.

Events, dear boy, events

Events, dear boy, events. That’s what Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said when he was asked what it was that a prime minister most feared. Like most of these famous statements, Macmillan probably never said it. But these days, events are, for me, something, on the whole, that I welcome rather than fear.

Our political conversations are so stuck, with people rehearsing the same lines of the same arguments; it doesn’t matter how bitter those arguments are, the familiarity of the lines are a comfort. It’s like a church hymnal.

But then something comes along—an Occupy, a Black Lives Matter, a Sanders, a BDS, and long before that, a Seattle—that no one who was not involved in the planning or organizing, expected, and the conversation is pushed out of that groove. Suddenly we’re talking about something else; suddenly, we think something else is possible, there is an alternative. Suddenly everything we thought we knew, we no longer know.

I know the counter to this: Trump. But Trump, however unexpected, hasn’t changed the conversation. He’s just intensified the conversation we’ve been having since the 1970s (the fear of the radical right, the sigh of the neoliberal settlement). Ironically, despite so many of us saying Trump couldn’t win, his election has simply confirmed everything we already knew.

So while everyone continues that conversation, reading from the same hymnal, arguing about the same things we always argue about (and the left has its own stuckness when it comes to these arguments), I remain watchful, hopeful, for that event. What other choice do I have?

Have You Never Been Mello? On Bernie and Abortion in Omaha

I think Sanders’ defense on NPR of supporting candidates who are anti-abortion is completely wrongheaded. The bottom line commitment of the left is to freedom, to emancipation from all manner of domination, and reproductive freedom is a critical part of that program of emancipation. I simply don’t see how the state or a parent or a husband or a boyfriend or anyone can force a woman to carry a fetus to term and bear a child against her will. I don’t think the left should compromise on that. At all.

(Though the left makes all manner of ugly compromises all the time, so it would be a big mistake to cast this entire discussion as strictly about political morality. Like many leftists, I supported Sanders despite his backing, in word and deed, of the State of Israel, which is a comprehensive regime of systemic human domination and degradation. Liberals who think abortion is non-negotiable don’t think support for illegal or immoral wars is non-negotiable, and wars can also be the instruments of domination and degradation, particularly of women. This business of lines in the sand gets tricky.)

I also think Sanders’ statement may have been completely unnecessary, since according to this article, Mello’s position on abortion seems to have “changed” in a more progressive direction. The potential gratuitousness of Sanders’ statement calls to mind that cliché about it being worse than a crime, it was a blunder.

What I find a little hard to swallow is the liberal freakout on Twitter over Sanders’ decision to endorse Mello. Mello’s position, as described here, is virtually identical to Tim Kaine’s position. Like Kaine, Mello has taken bad positions on abortion in the past. (Before he went to the Senate, Kaine voted for parental notification laws and bans on late-term abortions and funding for centers that tried to dissuade women from having abortions. And don’t forget: immediately after Clinton chose Kaine as her VP candidate, he came out—explicitly in defiance of Clinton’s position—in favor of the Hyde Amendment.) Like Kaine, Mello has “evolved,” claiming that his position now is that while he personally opposes abortion, he would never translate that view into policy. And according to a seemingly credible Twitter thread I read (I know, I’m laughing at that oxymoron myself), Mello had an abortion rights advocate speaking powerfully in favor of reproductive rights on stage with him during his campaign.

A lot of liberals were either silent on Kaine’s positions on abortion or drafted extended apologetics about his “evolution” on abortion or claimed that basically his position didn’t matter because even if he eventually became President, the Democratic Party as a whole was pro-choice. Regardless of how they got there, these folks wound up enthusiastically supporting Kaine for VP. (Just go back and read NARAL’s or Cecile Richards’ statements on the selection of Kaine or the reports in Vox and the Center for American Progress on Kaine.) Yet now liberals are going after Sanders because he endorses a candidate for mayor of Omaha—mayor of Omaha; as opposed to that trifling position of Vice President of the United States—whose “evolution” is similar, if not identical? It’s hard not to think that this is about something other than abortion.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is a better guide to Trump Time than is Origins of Totalitarianism

I’ve argued many times that I think Eichmann in Jerusalem is a much better guide to fascism—and, to whatever extent that mode of politics is relevant today, to our times as well—than is Origins of Totalitarianism. There are many reasons I believe this, but three stand out.

First, Origins sees totalitarianism as essentially a mass phenomenon, by which Arendt means not only the rise of the mass but also the liquidation of all familiar institutions, established elites, and traditional hierarchies. Eichmann completely dispenses with that view, emphasizing instead how fascism is much more of an elite affair dependent upon long-standing social hierarchies.

Second, Origins sees totalitarianism as the liquidation of the individual agent and individual action; even the regime’s leaders, Arendt argues there, are unthinking automatons, having squandered their selfhood long ago. Eichmann emphasizes the persistence of the individual, personal agency and personal action—from the topmost perpetrator down to the most abject victim. The particular agent Arendt has most in mind is the collaborator, a self who stands somewhere in between the perpetrator and the victim (and thus unsettles all of our most cherished dichotomies), and how these collaborators make particular decisions—under conditions of great constraint, yes—and thereby perpetuate regimes of evil.

But the last reason why I think Eichmann is such a great book, and so helpful at this particular moment, is that it mounts a devastating critique of intentionality—the inner state of mind, the personal motive, that allegedly gives rise to an action—as the primary way of understanding political life. Against the focus on intentions and motives, Arendt insisted that we attend to actions, to what people do, and the institutional setting in which that action occurs.

I wrote about this in a long piece for The Nation a while back:

Even if Eichmann was a rabid anti-Semite, one had to be mindful of the gulf between his thoughts and his actions: ”extermination per se,” Arendt added in the letter to McCarthy, “is more important than anti-semitism or racism.” Attending to Eichmann’s motives risked a loss of focus. It threatened to drown him, with all his undetermined agency and criminal excess, in the stream of his intentions…

By erecting a wall between anti-Semitism as a motive and the execution of the Holocaust, however, Arendt was less interested in making a claim about Eichmann or even the Nazis than she was in mounting a philosophical argument about what Susan Neiman has called, in Evil in Modern Thought, “the impotence of intention.” Against centuries of moral teaching and jurisprudence, which assumed that the nature and extent of a wrongdoer’s guilt are determined by his intentions, Arendt suggested that inner states of mind—ideologies, beliefs, intentions, motives—could neither mitigate nor aggravate an offense. They simply didn’t matter. The body count of the Holocaust was so massive that it rendered any intention, no matter how malignant, moot. In Neiman’s words: “What counts is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.”

That is why Arendt proved so willing to entertain Eichmann’s most outlandish claims about himself: that “he ‘personally’ never had anything whatever against Jews,” that “he had plenty of ‘private reasons’ for not being a Jew hater.” If Eichmann was lying, then he had failed to confront the reality of his deeds. Did he seriously think his role in the Shoah might be mitigated if he could show that he bore the Jews no ill will? If he wasn’t lying, then his honesty was a piece of almost comic lunacy—a self-confessed mass murderer insisting that he never meant anyone any harm—made all the more terrible by the fact that it was true.

In the literature of ancient Greece, a smallness, a blankness, can tear a hole in the world: Hector doesn’t slay Achilles, Paris does. There is a cold, almost cruel, accent on the disproportion between actors and actions, intentions and consequences. Arendt’s insistence on the blankness behind Eichmann’s actions—“except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” she wrote, Eichmann “had no motives at all”—issued from a similarly chilly outpost of antiquity….

Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s evil—with its leeriness of his inner state and ideology, its almost archaic attention to the fullness and finality of his deeds—was a natural extension of her return to the Greeks. “In every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity,” she told Günter Gaus in 1964; what a person does was all she—we—needed to know. Hence her contemptuous references to Eichmann’s “private reasons,” his “personally” not feeling any hatred for the Jews: Whatever Eichmann’s feelings or intentions, all his railroads led to hell. What further proof of his criminality, his evil, did one need?

So much of our discussion of Trump (and before that, of Obama) focuses on what are his true aims, what are Bannon’s real goals. The problem here is that in our probably fruitless quest to divine the ultimate truth of Trump’s inner self, we completely lose track of the political field, what actually happens, which often bears almost no resemblance to what we imagine might be animating Trump.

I noticed this last week in a panel discussion on Trump that I was a part of. There was a lot of discussion of the power of Trump’s tweets and communiques, what they revealed about his intentions. But as I pointed out, while Trump likes to make a big rhetorical to do of his antipathy to the courts, and likes to gin up his base and scare liberals with some terrifying plan to eliminate the autonomy of the judiciary, the actuality of his rule is that he has consistently been pushed back by the courts. And unlike FDR, who got so fed up with the judiciary’s challenges to his rule that he sought to completely restructure the Supreme Court, the most Trump has done is to threaten to appeal a court’s ruling. Which is exactly what most presidents do.

When Trump or Bannon is pushed back, the focus is not on their being pushed back but on what it is they wanted to do in the first place. (And again the same kind of discourse often dominated our discussions of Obama: not on the field of action in which he led, but on his deepest intentions and motives, what he really wanted or not.) That just seems like an extraordinarily unhelpful—and from an Arendtian view, entirely apolitical and antipolitical—way of viewing things.

In just a few passages in Eichmann, Arendt eviscerates that way of thinking: the point is not what one aims to do, it is what one does; the point is not the inner motive, but the field of action; not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.

 

Why, when it comes to the Right, do we ignore events, contingency, and high politics?: What Arno Mayer Taught Me

One of the many reasons I resist the Trump-as-fascist argument is that it often leads to (or accompanies) an inattention to or eclipse of matters of high politics and elite action: the jockeying for position at the highest levels of state, the coalitions and fractures within the dominant regime, the day-to-day events in which policy gets formed and unformed. There’s no intrinsic reason that an invocation of fascism should require that inattention; the best historical studies of fascism don’t ignore these questions at all. In the American context, however, the invocation of that parallel—whether to McCarthyism or now to Trump—often does.

The reason for that, I suspect, is that most people tend to think of fascism as primarily a form of mass politics, that most of the action is on the ground and at the grassroots, far away from the centers of elite power, and that fascism is best studied as a question not of events or policy or elite action but as a simple and straightforward reflection of deep, structural changes in culture, psyche, economy, and society. So the Trump parallel leads people to focus on questions of popular mobilization, the circulation of racist ideas and affects among the working class or lower middle class, long-term changes in the economy, and so on. The point is not that those questions shouldn’t be studied; they absolutely need to be, not only with respect to fascism but conservatism more generally, which I’ve always insisted is both an elitist politics and a populist politics, an elite politics that mobilizes the mass, often more skillfully than the left does. But I think for many people, when it comes to fascism and the right, the question of high politics almost seems irrelevant: it’s just the tail, everything else is the dog.

As my family was driving home this morning from my niece’s bat mitzvah up in Boston, I was thinking about this relationship between the Trump-as-fascist argument and the inattention to elites and elite action—and behind that, to the day-to-day changing polices and configurations of power in the Trump regime—and reflecting back on a panel I was on last week about Trump, which featured many of these sensibilities and assumptions, and I remembered this passage from Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, a book that—like Michael Rogin’s The Intellectuals and McCarthy—had a profound influence on my approach to politics, even at, particularly at, moments of great political evil:

Moreover, the mass murder of the Jews, more than any other single event, points up to the importance of returning to the contextual study of short-term events. In the wake of Treblinka and Auschwitz it is difficult not to scorn Fernand Braudel’s characterization of short-term events as mere “dust.” Braudel went so far as to imply that short-term events were not worth studying since, unlike long- and medium-range events, they “traverse history as flashes of light” destined instantly to “turn to darkness, often to oblivion.” Pace Braudel and his epigones, I have tried not only to contemplate the circumstances in which millions of Jews—along with millions of non-Jews—were reduced to “dust” in seconds of historical time but also to recapture the evanescent “light” of their torment to illuminate the historical landscape in which it occurred.

As we see the Trump regime begin to erode under the weight of the day-to-day events, as the weaknesses in the regime slowly begin to appear amid its crumbling edifice, and as the regime’s remaining strengths will undoubtedly be revealed in that same day-to-day calculus of power, I hope we can heed Mayer’s dictum. Which applies, as he makes clear, not only to fascism, but to politics more generally.