Maybe crucial days for Trump ...

 

Danger: a definition for the Jan. 6 committee – in a Tweet

… ‘danger’ comes etymologically from Latin, dominus, ‘lord’ – to submit to another.[1]

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[1] See Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1992), p. 159.  Or any good dictionary.

The president's precedent (216 years ago today) - if Trump pardons himself

 
The Self-Coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France
on 2 December 1804
Painting by Jacques-Louis David 

    
    

Enemies of the People:

 

Peroration - A Definition

The peroration is the bellow of the mediocre actor upon the last verse of the tirade.

Francisque Sarcey, Recollections of Middle Life (1892)[1]

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[1] Francisque Sarcey, Recollections of Middle Life, tr. Elisabeth Luther Cary (London: William Heinemann [Scholar Select Reprint], 1893), p. 162.  Originally published in 1892 as Souvenirs d’âge mûr. Sarcey was France's most prominent drama critic over four decades in the last half of the nineteenth century.  

A penny for his thought - a tweet

Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes and is defended by a man named Pence!

Hubris and hospitalization: Trump's nemesis is himself

 

     Trump mocking Biden's mask-wearing at the first

     presidential debate on Tuesday, September 29.

     

Incompetence as a Contagion

I have already compared this, our desire to worship incompetence, to an infectious disease.  It has attacked the State at the very core, in its constitution, and it is not surprising that it is spreading rapidly to the customs and to the morals of the country.[1]

Émile Faguet, The Cult of Incompetence (1910)

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[1] Émile Faguet, The Cult of Incompetence, tr. Beatrice Barstow (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), p. 123 [Bibliolife Reprint].   Originally published as Le Culte de l’Incompétence in 1910. 

Aristotle on demagogues and Trump’s penchant for decrees

 

A fifth form of democracy … is that in which, not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees.  This is a state of affairs brought about by demagogues.  For in democracies which are subject to the law, the best citizens hold the first place and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up.  For the people becomes a monarch, and is many in one; and the many have the power in their hands, not as individuals but collectively …. At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour; this sort of democracy being relative to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy.  

The spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens. The decrees of the demos corresponds to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other.  Both have great power; – the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing.  The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all things to the popular assembly.  And therefore they grow great, because the people has all things in their hands, and they hold in their hands the votes of the people, who are too ready to listen to them. … Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution.  The law ought to be supreme over all ….  So that if democracy be a real form of government, the sort of system in which all things are regulated by decrees is clearly not even a democracy in the true sense of the word, for decrees relate only to particulars. [1]

Aristotle, Politics (c. 350 BC)

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[1] Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 2001), pp. 1212, 1213 [Politics, Book IV, Ch. 4].  This edition of Politics was translated by Benjamin Jowett.  

Montaigne on the loathsomeness of liars

Experience has often shown me that – amusingly so, at the expense of those kinds of men whose profession is never to utter a word without trimming it to suit whatever business is being negotiated at the time, thereby pleasing the great ones with whom they are speaking.  Such men are prepared to make their honour and conscience slaves to present circumstances: but circumstances are liable to frequent change, and their work must vary with them.  They are obliged to call the very same thing first grey then yellow, saying one thing to this man, quite another to another.  If the persons, who receive such contrary advice happens to compare their haul, what becomes of their fine diplomacy? ….

Lying is an accursed vice.  It is only our words which bind us together and make us human.  If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.  I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanors, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace.  It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness.  These faults grow up with the children.  Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give up.  That is why some otherwise decent men are abject slaves to it.  One of my tailors is a good enough fellow, but I have never heard him speak the truth, not even when it would help him if he did so. …

I cannot guarantee that I could bring myself to tell a solemn, bare-faced lie, even to ward off some obvious and immense danger.  One of the old Church Fathers says that even a dog we do know is better company than a man whose language we do not know. … How much less companionable than silence is the language of falsehood. [1]

Montaigne, Essays (1582)

 

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[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, tr. M.A. Screech (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), pp. 34, 35.

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 as England’s Oliver Cromwell, or “Lord Protector”

The government of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging.

I. That the supreme legislative authority of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, shall be and reside in one person, and the people assembled in Parliament; the style of which shall be the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

II. That the exercise of the chief magistracy and the administration of the government over the said countries and dominions, and the people thereof, shall be in the Lord Protector, assisted with a council, the number whereof shall not exceed twenty-one, nor be less than thirteen.

III.  That all writs, processes, commissions, patents, grants, and other things, which now run in the name and style of the keepers of the liberty of England by authority of Parliament, shall run in the name and style of the Lord Protector, from whom, for the future, shall be derived all magistracy and honours in these three nations; and have  the power of pardons (except in the case of murders and treason) and benefit all forfeitures for the public use; and shall govern the said countries and dominions in all things by the advice of the council, and according to these presents and the laws.

IV. That the Lord Protector, the Parliament sitting, shall dispose and order the militia and forces, both by sea and land, for the peace and good of the three nations, by consent of Parliament; and the Lord Protector, with the advice and consent of the major part of the council, shall dispose and order the militia for the ends aforesaid in the intervals of Parliament.

V. That the Lord Protector, by the advice aforesaid, shall direct in all things concerning the keeping and holding of good correspondency with foreign kings, princes, and states; and also, with the consent of the major part of the council, have the power of war and peace.

The Instruments of Government (December 16, 1653)[1]

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[1] “The Instruments of Government” in Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1628-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889 [Franklin Classics  Reprint]), p. 314.

Milton on the power of “Kings”

For in raising the power of kings immeasurably above the laws, by the same means you remind almost all nations of their slavery, which they had not suspected.  You also drive them more violently into suddenly shaking off  that sluggishness in which they idly used to dream they were free men, by reminding them of something they didn’t realize: that they were the slaves of kings.  And they will judge the power of kings to be the less bearable to them the more successfully you persuade them that such unlimited power grew not as the result of their own sufferance of it, but that it originated from the beginning with its present nature and extent just because of the right of kings.  So you and this defence of yours, whether you convince the people or whether you don’t, will needs be destructive, deadly and accursed for all kings hereafter.  For if you convince the people that the right of kings is all-powerful, they will no longer bear a monarchy; if you do not convince them, they will not endure kings who obtain such illegal power as if it were their right.

Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1651)[1]

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[1] John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, tr. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 129.  Note: A Defence of the People of England was originally published in Latin as Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio two years after the execution of King Charles I which was on January 30, 1649.  The above selection appears at the beginning of Chapter IV.

From Dreyfus to Donald: Racism and Public Degradation of ‘the other’

France’s infamous Dreyfus Affair has bearing on Donald Trump’s apparent racism – particularly when comparing the element of public degradation, which was imposed by the French Army at a ceremony on the former Alsatian Jew, and which Donald Trump frequently chooses for his political enemies, notably: the Somali-born Ilhan Omar and Elijah Cummings, who is African-American.

The Dreyfus Affair began in the autumn of 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and charged with high treason.  The first Jew to do duty on the General Staff, and likely because of this – and his traits of non-conformity - he was considered the culprit and author of the bordereau (memorandum) containing information on French war plans, secrets that had actually been communicated to Germany.  Two handwriting experts determined that only Dreyfus could have authored the bordereau, and at the court-martial a secret dossier, supported by Commandant Henry, was presented to the jury while the court was adjourned (but not presented to the defendant or to his lawyer).  The Affair did not come into full public light until Emile Zola published “J’accuse” in 1898: the famous writer was quickly convicted of libel, Commandant Henry, who admitted to forging the secret dossier, was arrested and later committed suicide in jail, after slashing his throat, and the true author of the bordereau, Major Esterhazy, fled to England.  In 1899 Dreyfus returned to France from Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, to face another court-martial at Rennes in August where he was again condemned “with extenuating circumstances” but later pardoned in September of that same year.[1]

The Affair divided the nation – almost to the point of civil war – between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.  The defenders of the honour of the Army faced off against the defenders of Truth, for the facts proved an injustice had been done. Below is an excerpt from Alfred Dreyfus’s memoire Five Years of My Life, and I have chosen to focus on the Dreyfus degradation, where he was publicly paraded and stripped of his rank.  The atmosphere in France at the time of the Affair (even before and especially after) was rife with anti-Semitism, and the “howls of a deluded mob” as experienced by Dreyfus in January 1895 compare to the racist pro-Trump rally chanting “send her back” in July 2019. Also at work in each case is the similar effort by ‘official’ dimensions of the respective Republics which are supposed to unite the nation – France’s Army recalling the glory of the Revolution’s levée en masse and the American Presidency as the so-called leading voice of the ‘free world’ – end up dividing the country which is in no small degree pitted against ‘the other’.

Dreyfus’s degradation was made almost complete by five years of solitude on Devil’s Island, baking in the heat of a confined space close to the equator, cooking for himself without proper utensils and eating out of tinned cans, guarded day and night (often immobilized in irons), deprived and censored throughout, a physical and near mental wreck by the end, but he never quite gave up hope – military man that he was - that his honour would be restored to him.  While Donald Trump has not gone this far  in terms of degrading his domestic political ‘enemies’, who tend to be elected Democrats, he is inducing violence and hate crimes against them: most recently, for example, two police officers from Louisiana posted on Facebook suggesting that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.[2]  Members of Congress, notably four freshman women of colour known as ‘the squad’, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar among them, now require extra security precautions because Trump sees ‘white supremacy’ as the path to the White House in 2020.  This pattern continued when Trump called Congressman Elijah Cumming’s constituency in Baltimore in a Twitter rant a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live”.[3] This is how the President likes to treat his foes.

In other words, the traditional Left-Right horizontal axis of political competition since the French Revolution is gone, replaced by Populism’s vertical axis with a so-called uncontaminated people standing above ‘the other’ which intrudes from below.[4]  Revolutionary equality has been replaced by the idea of rank, with white men at the top of the hierarchy, and who better to epitomize this shift in mood than a misogynist and racist billionaire President - ‘the lying King’- of the U.S.A. who happened to inherit wealth, as well.  Here is Dreyfus remembering his own very public loss of rank at a ceremony of degradation in fin-de-siècle France well over a century ago.  Just imagine the crowd wanting to chant “send him back” to Alsace, then in German hands, where Dreyfus's father was born:

A Sergeant of the Republican Guard came up to me.  He tore off rapidly buttons, trousers-stripes, the signs of my rank from cap and sleeves, and then broke my sword across his knee.  I saw all the material emblems of my honor fall at my feet.  Then, my whole being racked by a fearful paroxysm, but with body erect and head held high, I shouted again and again to the soldiers and to the assembled crowd the cry of my soul.

“I am innocent!”

The parade continued.  I was compelled to make the whole round of the square.  I heard the howls of a deluded mob, I felt the thrill which I knew must be running through those people, since they believed that before them was a convicted traitor to France; and I struggled to transmit to their hearts another thrill, - belief in my innocence.[5]

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[1] Alfred Dreyfus, Five Years of My Life, 1894-1899. (Cambridge, MA: University Press, nd [Wentworth Press Reprint]), p. 307.  See the Editor’s Preface for a general introduction to the Affair.  See also: Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), pp. 1, 2 ff.  Also helpful is: Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 332 ff.

[2] Lawrence Martin, “Trump is in full bigot mode,” The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, p. A11.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Marco Revelli, The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, tr. David Broder (London: Verso: 2019), p. 15.

[5] Dreyfus, Five Years of my Life, pp. 50,51.

Aristotle’s advice to Americans

Along with a number of different ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, Aristotle (384-323 B.C.) is known for moderation and avoidance of extremes of left and right in his classic work Politics, as well as in other writings.  His thinking has bearing on Donald Trump, who has divided Americans with his amoral and cruel ways, invoking crude and racialized rhetoric to mobilize populist followers and whose aim it is to retain power after the 2020 elections by these same means.    It is worth pointing out that the edition of Politics quoted below was translated by Sir Ernest Barker in England throughout most of World War II: it began in the autumn of 1940 and was finished some months before the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in May 1945.  The culture of the excluded middle prevailed throughout much of 20^th century history and thought, but not in the USA – unlike today.  Perhaps America should once again take heed of Aristotle where he warns against putting “the will of the people” ahead of the “rule of law” (See footnote 1).  Below is a discussion of some of the prerequisites to a strong constitution - among them a citizenry educated in its spirit. 

Three qualifications are necessary to those who have to fill the sovereign offices.  The first is loyalty to the established constitution.  The second is a high degree of capacity for the duties of office.  The third is the quality of goodness and justice, in the particular form which suits the nature of each constitution. (If the principle of justice varies from constitution to constitution, the quality of justice must also have its corresponding varieties.) ….

In addition to all these things, there is another which ought to be remembered, but which, in fact, is forgotten in perverted forms of government.  This is the value of the mean.  Many of the measures which are reckoned democratic really undermine democracies: many which are reckoned oligarchical actually undermine oligarchies.  The partisans of either of these forms of government, each thinking their own the only right form, push matters to an extreme.  They fail to see that proportion is as necessary to a constitution as it is (let us say) to a nose.  A nose may deviate in some degree from the ideal of straightness, and incline towards the hooked or the snub, without ceasing to be well shaped and agreeable to the eye.  But push the deviation still further towards either of these extremes, and the nose will begin to be out of proportion with the rest of the face: carry it further still, and it will cease to look like a nose at all, because it will go too far towards one, and too far away from the other, of these two opposite extremes.  What is true of the nose, and of other parts of the body, is true also of constitutions.  Both oligarchy and democracy may be tolerable forms of government, even though they deviate from the ideal.  But if you push either of them further still in the direction to which it tends, you will begin by making it a worse constitution, and you may end up by turning it into something which is not a constitution at all ….

The greatest, however, of all the means we have mentioned for ensuring the stability of constitutions – but one which is nowadays generally neglected – is the education of citizens in the spirit of their constitution.  There is no profit in the best of laws, even when they are sanctioned by general civic consent, if the citizens themselves have not been attuned, by the force of habit and the influencing of teaching, to the right constitutional temper – which will be the temper of democracy where the laws are democratic, and where they are oligarchical will be that of oligarchy.  Licentiousness may exist in a state as well as in individual persons, [and training is thus needed for states as well as for individuals].  The education of a citizen in the spirit of his constitution does not consist in his doing the actions in which the partisans of oligarchy, or the adherents of democracy delight.  It consists in his doing the actions by which an oligarchy, or a democracy, will be enabled to survive.  Actual practice, to-day, is on very different lines.  In democracies of the extreme type – the type which is regarded as being particularly democratic[1] – the policy followed is the very reverse of their real interest.  The reason for the aberration is a false conception of liberty.  There are two conceptions which are generally held to be characteristic of democracy.   One of them is the conception of the sovereignty of the majority; the other is that of the liberty of individuals.  The democrat starts by assuming that justice consists in equality: he proceeds to identify equality with the sovereign of the will of the masses; he ends with the view that ‘liberty and equality’ consist in ‘doing what one likes’.  The result of such a view is that, in these extreme democracies, each man lives as he likes – or, as Euripides says, For any end he chances to desire.  This is a mean conception of liberty.  To live by the rule of the constitution ought not to be regarded as slavery, but rather as salvation.[2]

Aristotle, Politics (Book V, Chapter IX)

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[1] [W]here it appears that these democracies are of the type in which the ‘will of the people’ is superior to ‘the rule of law’. [Editor’s footnote: See Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed., and tr. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 233, fn. 3] .

[2] Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed., and tr. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 230-234.

Oedipus Rex and the Partial U.S. Government Shutdown

Pride breeds the tyrant
violent pride, gorging, crammed to bursting
     with all that is overripe and rich with ruin --
clawing up to the heights, headlong pride
crashes down the abyss – sheer doom.[1]

Sophocles, Oedipus the King, circa. 428 BC

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[1] Sophocles, Oedipus the King, tr. Robert Fagles in The Norton Anthology of Drama. Shorter Third Edition, J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner Jr, Martin Puchner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), p.  117. These are the words of the Chorus in the play.

Liberalism and the Critique of Democracy: Ortega y Gasset on the tenor of today’s politics

Liberalism and democracy happen to be two things which begin by having to do with each other, and end by having, so far as tendencies are concerned, meanings that are mutually antagonistic.  Democracy and Liberalism are two answers to two completely different questions.

Democracy answers this question – “who ought to exercise the public power?”  The answer it gives is – the exercise of public power belongs to the citizens as a body.

But this question does not touch on what should be the realm of public power. It is solely concerned with determining to whom such power belongs. Democracy proposes that we all rule; that is, that we are sovereign in all social acts.

Liberalism, on the other hand, answers the other question – “regardless of who exercises the public power, what should its limits be?”  The answer it gives is – “whether the public power is exercised by an autocrat or by the people, it cannot be absolute; the individual has rights which are over and above any interference by the state.”  This, then, tends to limit the intervention of the public power.[1]

Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, 1937.

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[1] José Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, tr. Mildred Adams (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937), pp. 125-126. Invertebrate Spain was originally published in 1921.

Fake News

I know the press only too well.  Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thoughts of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.

          Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

-        Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)[1]

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[1] Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, preface by Robert Bothwell (Oakville, ON: Rock’s Mill Press, 2016), p. 60.  Zero Hour is the fictitious work written by the imaginary populist and demagogue, Buzz Windrip (somewhat resembling Huey Long), in the book written by Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, where he suggests that fascism might even reach the highest office of the United States, as it already did in Germany and Italy at the time.  Of particular note here is Windrip’s attack on freedom of the so-called establishment press.

"Patriotism" and the U.S. Election

Was Hillary Clinton considered not “patriotic” enough by some? Patriot derives from the ancient Greek meaning “of one’s fathers”, or originally “father”, hence the familial word “Pa”.[1] Greek citizens were first termed patres and this is carried on by Romans whose senators were considered the “fathers” of the city.[2]  In other words Hillary Clinton was not considered a viable Presidential “patriot” by enough male voters simply because she is not a father.  Similarly the ‘birther’ movement triumphed by Trump targeted President Obama because his father was Muslim.

Our police are here to serve and protect, another masculine role in the binary world, and the FBI Director James Comey’s interference in the American election just 10 days before the vote, skewed the vote in Donald Trump’s favour, despite Secretary Clinton being ‘cleared’ a mere two days before November 8.  Similarly in Canada the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, unknown to many, tilted the federal election in favour of a Harper Conservative minority government in 2006, after Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Finance Minister Ralph Goodale was investigated – and later exonerated, but following the vote.

Sadly, Hillary Clinton lost to the Pa’s and Grandpa’s of the United States, whose “patriotism” was rooted in an ancient – and stubborn - image of themselves as “fathers of the land.”

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[1] Oxford Canadian Dictionary (2001).  See also Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2015), p. 24.

[2] Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, p., 27.

Donald Trump's speech day in two phrases.

“Lock her up”

“Locker-room talk”