Augustus of Prima Porta, Ist century, Vatian Museum. Wikicommons/ Till Niermann. Some rights reserved.As Donald Trump rampaged through the Republican
primaries last March, I argued here and on the New York National Public
Radio station’s Brian Lehrer Show that neoliberal
Democrats as well as free-marketeering Republicans were leaving it to Trump to
do what his Inaugural Address has left him no choice but
to do: to become the dictator of the nationalist, plutocratic regime that he is
installing under the banner of what he called “a historic movement the likes of which the
world has never seen before.”
He has vowed to vindicate forgotten Americans and, through
them, American greatness: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the
people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of
our country will be forgotten no longer…. I will never, ever let you down.
America will start winning again, winning like never before.”
Never? Ever? Like never before? As Trump puts his
forgotten Americans to work while rolling back overtime pay, benefits, and union-organizing
rights, and while protecting those who have already enriched themselves, and
channels resentment against only certain neoliberal elites who
were complicit in the theft, the word “dictator” will be no euphemism. Let me
explain why, in the days ahead, we’ll be left breathless by swift, forceful
moves (or lurches) toward an authoritarian, Constitution-warping
presidentialism.
Trump’s Inaugural denunciations of “politicians who
prospered as jobs left and factories closed” – coupled with his vow that “the
American carnage” caused by the hiring and buying of non-American
people and products and deepened by crime, gangs, and drugs, “stops
right here, stops right now” – leave him no choice but to humble or destroy all
those “politicians” who resist him.
It won’t matter whether they’re principled
conservatives defending the Constitution itself or neoliberal Democrats who
long ago betrayed the New Deal by draping a thin raiment of “diversity” over an
increasingly self-serving and, yes, sometimes smug, elitism.
Violence
We’ve already seen Trump threaten violence and the
imprisonment of his political adversaries and fierce critics. And we’ve watched
some of them, from Chris Christie to Mitt Romney, crawl to him virtually on
their hands and knees and be humiliated publicly. We’ve watched Trump grab Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by some other part of his anatomy by turning
his wife Elaine Chao, into a cabinet member whom he can fire in a heartbeat.
We’ve heard Trump say that he could stand in the
middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing his supporters. We’ve
watched him call on “Second Amendment People” to deal with Hillary Clinton,
whom he also vowed to prosecute and “lock up,” only to declare, even more
frighteningly, after defeating her, that “I don’t want to see her hurt,” as if
that were his seigneurial prerogative, not a matter for an independent
judiciary.
What we may not have noticed is that this frightening
course has become path-dependent, and historically very familiar. For one
thing, he’s less a challenger than the would-be savior of the American (and
global) “regime” of casino-style financing, predatory lending, and degrading,
intrusive consumer marketing that has made this financer of casinos and a
predatory self-marketer its president.
Past regimes
Some leftists and liberals, among them the leftist writer Corey Robin and the Constitutional law
professor JackBalkin have explored the possibility that
Trump may fit somewhat normally into the political scientist Stephen
Skowronek’s illuminating paradigm, in The Politics Presidents Make, of
regime-changing or regime-supporting American presidents. Robin at times seems
almost sanguine that Trump is throwing a monkey wrench into neoliberal/market
consensus. Balkin comes closer to acknowledging the possibility of
dictatorship.
Many presidents have struggled to balance public
mobilizations with effective, pragmatic governing, all while coping with their
historical moments’ particular clusters of interests and ideologies (“regimes,”
as Skowronek calls them), such as the New Deal or Reaganomics. Some come to
office, as did FDR and Reagan, championing ‘regimes’ that are rising. Others
have to shore up the faltering regimes they inherited because no clear
alternative seems viable.
Right now, neither the Reaganite nor New Deal regimes
seem viable in a rapidly changing, globally interdependent, democratically
fragmenting world. Obama was caught between, on the one hand, the cluster of
Reaganites and neoliberals, whose faltering but still powerful markets uber
alles regime he helped to bail out and stabilize, and, on the other hand,
his own base of seekers of a new New Deal whose time had not yet come. Trump broke through… with a purely
electoral mobilization trading in hatred, deceit, and delusion -– a triumph of
marketing, not governing.
Trump broke through that paralysis in public
imagination and discourse with a purely electoral mobilization, trading in
hatred, deceit, and delusion – a triumph of marketing, not governing. It’s all
well and good to put some of the blame (as I’ve
often done) on smug neoliberals who betrayed the New Deal itself by draping
a thin veneer of “diversity” over a self-serving, self-righteous elitism that
has divided “affirmative action” blacks from most blacks and “lean in,”
corporate-managerial women from most other women, all while forgetting and even
openly dismissing Trump’s “forgotten” (and “deplorable”) Americans.
But stoking those Americans’ legitimate
resentments cannot produce a better regime, and Balkin acknowledges that Trump may
default to ever-more dictatorial measures to channel popular disillusionment.
Trump clings to the elements of the failing Republican market orthodoxy that
have profited him personally, but when he faces Americans who’ve been screwed
by those same elements, he lurches back to old nationalist, protectionist,
statist compensations that Reaganism simulated but sapped.
National
greatness
Trump’s emphasis on national greatness (like that of
David Brooks and William Kristol, who touted “National Greatness Conservatism”
a decade ago) was plausible for America when World War II had flattened most
other national economies. It flourishes now only in populist denials of new
realities.
And it casts a very dark shadow on Skowronek’s
observation that “The strongest political leaders in the American presidency,
those who have had the most durable political impact, have been those, like
Lincoln, who came closest to changing things on their own terms…. [T]he only
way for an American president to keep control over the meaning of his actions
in office and stamp that meaning on the nation is to reconstruct government and
politics fundamentally, in effect marginalizing those who hold an alternative
view and compelling their deference.” Trump’s emphasis on national greatness…
was plausible for America when World War II had flattened most other national
economies. It flourishes now only in populist denials of new realities.
I’ve mentioned some instances of that compelled
deference, but a lot of the deference to Trump is more pathetically slobbering
than it is compelled. We need to understand why, and perhaps the
best guide to what lies ahead is Chapter III of Volume I of
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire. Historical analogies can be facile and
sometimes dangerous, and Gibbon had biases, enemies, and agendas peculiar to his
eighteenth century England. But as his volumes came off the presses in the
1770s, the founders of the American republic were reading intently his account
of how Augustus eviscerated what was left of the Roman republic’s premises and
liberties even as he persuaded them that he was restoring their freedoms, using
both guile and brutality to enslave them in “an absolute monarchy disguised by
the forms of a commonwealth.”
James Madison’s, Alexander Hamilton’s, and John Adams’
prophetic skepticism about their new republic was richly informed by Gibbon’s
uncanny prescience in passages like this:
“Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by
names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would
submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still
enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully
acquiesced in the pleasing illusion…”
Gibbon sketches the Romans’ varied motives for exchanging
robust citizenship for servility. You may be able to locate some Americans
including Trump's heartland supporters and even yourself, in the following:
“The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the
republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the
master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome,
viewing, with a secret pleasure, [Augustus’] humiliation of the aristocracy,
demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the
liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians [today’s New Yorker
readers?], who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus,
enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the
pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous
freedom."
Especially chilling is Gibbon’s account of how
Augustus “reformed” the Senate. For all the differences between ancient Rome’s
Senate and ours, and between their Constitution and ours, the hairs on the back
of your neck will stand on end when you read Gibbon’s account of how Augustus
blackmailed and brutalized certain Senators, so terrifying the rest that they
passed laws that passed prerogative after prerogative from the people and the
Senate to him:
“The reformation of the senate was one of the first
steps in which Augustus laid aside the tyrant, and professed himself the father
of his country. He… expelled a few members, whose vices or whose obstinacy
required a public example, persuaded [others] to prevent the shame of an
expulsion by a voluntary retreat,… But whilst he thus restored the dignity, he
destroyed the independence of the senate. The principles of a free constitution
are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
"Before an assembly thus modelled and prepared,
Augustus pronounced a studied oration, which displayed his patriotism, and
disguised his ambition. …[He said that] the humanity of his own nature
had sometimes given way to the stern laws of necessity… He was now at liberty
to satisfy his duty and his inclination. He solemnly restored the senate and
people to all their ancient rights; and wished only to mingle with the crowd of
his fellow-citizens, and to share the blessings which he had obtained for his
country.
"It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of
Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous. The respective
advantages of monarchy and a republic have often divided speculative inquirers;
the… greatness of the Roman state, the corruption of manners, and the license
of the soldiers, supplied new arguments to the advocates of monarchy; and these
general views of government were again warped by the hopes and fears of each
individual.”
You may have noted news reports that Trump was
considering creating his own private security force, independent of the Secret
Service, a move which The
American Prospect has rightly dubbed, “a precedent-breaking decision" that "raises troubling questions about transparency
and accountability.”
When Trump’s transition team discovered that the President also has
complete command of the National Guard unit of the District of Columbia, it informed that unit's commander, Errol Schwartz, that his dismissal would be effective precisely
at noon on Inauguration Day, in the middle of the ceremony, so that he wouldn’t
even be able to welcome back the troops he’d sent out that morning. (Two days
before the Inauguration, that decision was reconsidered, and Schwartz was granted
enough time to finish the ceremony and wrap up his affairs.)
All this is eerily similar to Gibbon’s account of the
formation of Augustus’ Praetorian guard after the Senate granted
him “an important privilege:… By a
dangerous exception to the ancient maxims, he was authorized to preserve his
military command, supported by a numerous body of guards, even in time of
peace, and in the heart of the capital.”
Prove me wrong
I don’t see anything in Trump’s record, character or
“regime” circumstances to discourage
or curb such trends. More important, many Americans, after decades of being
trapped like flies in a spider’s web of 800-numbered, sticky-fingered,
pick-pocketing and surveillance machines, remind me that Gibbon’s Romans were
slow to discover “the latest causes of decay and corruption,” the subtle
introduction of “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” until Rome's citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of
independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the
habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their
sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army….” “By a dangerous exception to the ancient
maxims, he was authorized to preserve his military command, supported by a
numerous body of guards, even in time of peace, and in the heart of the
capital.”
The more subtly impoverished and imprisoned we
Americans become in the regime that has given us Donald Trump, the more we also
resort to palliatives in pills, vials, syringes and empty spectacles that leave
us, as Cicero said of his fellow Romans,
“too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures,” capable only of occasional,
mob-like eruptions and cries for a strongman who boasts that, having already
bought the politicians whose deregulatory excesses and corporate welfare
payments have stupefied and imprisoned America, he can “fire” them.
I hope that we Americans will find ways to do whatever we can
to prove me wrong. For starters, I commend Six Principles for Resisting the Presidency of Donald
Trump.
