The Republican Party (minus Bolton) as “crowd”: ideas on a Senate Impeachment Trial

Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater import than the real.[1]

It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought to notice.  It is necessary that by their condensation, if I may thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind.  To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.[2]

From the dawn of civilisation onwards crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions.  It is to the creators of illusions that they have raised more temples, statues, and altars than any other class of men.[3]

The masses have never thirsted after truth.  They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.  Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.[4]

 

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together, whether they be animals or men, they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief.

In the case of human crowds the chief is nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part.  His will is the nucleus around which the opinions of the crowd are grouped and attain identity.  He constitutes the first element towards the organisation of heterogeneous crowds, and paves the way for their organisation in sects; in the meantime he directs them.  A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.[5]

Juries, like all crowds, are profoundly impressed by prestige, and President des Glajeux very properly remarks that, very democratic as juries are in their composition, they are very aristocratic in their likes and dislikes: “Name, birth, great wealth, celebrity, the assistance of an illustrious counsel, everything in the nature of distinction or that lends brilliancy to the accused, stands him in extremely good stead.”[6]

“Debates in the House of Commons,” says the English philosopher Maine, “may be constantly read in which the entire discussion is confined to an exchange of rather weak generalities and rather violent personalities.  General formulas of this description exercise a prodigious influence on the imagination of a pure democracy.  It will always be easy to make a crowd accept general assertions, presented in striking terms, although they have never been verified, and are perhaps not susceptible of verification.”[7]

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896).

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[1] Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896 [Filiquarian Reprint, 2005]), p. 60.  Originally published in French in 1895.

[2] Ibid., p. 64.

[3] Ibid., p. 104.

[4] Ibid., p. 106.

[5] Ibid., p. 114.

[6] Ibid., pp. 166,167.

[7] Ibid., p. 192.

Trump on Obama and Iran in 2011

https://youtu.be/8ecqMwLjTqQ

Hume on Trump’s “reason”

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.[1]

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)

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[1] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Toronto: Penguin, 1985), p. 462.

Trump, “the exercise of power”, and the assassination of Soleimani: Foucault on “law”

… power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.  Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.  Would power be accepted if it were entirely cynical?  For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation.  Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom – however slight – intact?  Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.

There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this.  The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages – monarchy, the state with its apparatus – rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the direct or indirect domination over the land,, to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage.  If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if by profiting from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy. … Doubtless there was more to this development of great monarchic institutions than a pure and simple juridical edifice.  But such was the language of power, the representation it gave of itself, and the entire theory of public law that was constructed in the Middle Ages, or reconstructed from Roman law, bears witness to the fact.  Law was not simply a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchy, it was the monarchic system’s mode of manifestation and the form of its acceptability. In Western societies since the Middle Ages, the exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of law.

A tradition dating back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century has accustomed us to place absolute monarchic power on the side of the unlawful: arbitrariness, abuse, caprice, willfulness, privileges and exceptions, the traditional continuance of accomplished facts.  But this is to overlook a fundamental historical trait of Western democracies: they were constructed as systems of law, they expressed themselves through series of law, and they made their mechanisms of power work in the form of law.[1]

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[1] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 86, 87.