Author Archives: Larry Franz

Becoming a God: An Exercise in Public Relations

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Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine is a new book by Anna Della Subin that deals with men — and a few women — being considered gods, unwittingly or not. This excerpt concerns Rome and Jesus:

In ancient Rome, the borders between heaven and earth fell under Senate control, as deification by official decree became a way to legitimize political power. Building upon Greek traditions of apotheosis [or deification], the Romans added a new preoccupation with protocol, the rites and rituals that could effect a divine status change. For his conquests, Julius Caesar was divinized, while still alive, by a series of Senate measures that bestowed upon him rights as a living god, including a state temple and license to wear Jupiter’s purple cloak.

Yet if it seemed like a gift of absolute power, it was also a way of checking it, as Caesar knew. One could constrain a powerful man by turning him into a god: in divinizing Julius, the Senate also laid down what the virtues and characteristics of a god should be. In their speeches, senators downplayed domination and exalted magnanimity and mercy as the divine qualities that defined Caesar’s godhood. As a new deity, Julius would have to live up to his god self, to pardon his political enemies and respect the republican institutions of Rome. On the Capitoline Hill, the Senate installed an idol of Julius with the globe at his feet, but ‘he erased from the inscription the term “demigod”,’ the statesman Cassius Dio related. Caesar sensed that state-sanctioned godhood could be at once a blessing and a curse.

When, not long after his deification, Julius was stabbed to death twenty-three times, Octavian rose to power as Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, yet he and subsequent emperors would demur from being turned into living gods. Divinity had become ominously tinged with death, whether through the threat of provoking human jealousy, or a connection more existential. Augustus blocked the construction of a sacred ‘Augusteum’ [and] Claudius forbade sacrificial rituals to himself… Vespasian resisted claims of his divinity, though even the animal kingdom seemed to acknowledge it – it was said that an ox once broke free from its yoke, charged into the emperor’s dining room, and prostrated itself at his feet.

After an emperor’s demise, his successor would lead the state ritual to turn the deceased into a deity. As his wax effigy burned on a funeral pyre, an eagle was released from the flames, a winged transport to the heavens. The fact of death in no way compromised the politician’s claim to immortality. Death was simply a shedding of the body, like a snake sheds its skin.

As a tool of statecraft, apotheosis consolidated political dynasties, and it was also an expression of love and devastation, often for those who perished in unexpected, tragic ways. The emperor Hadrian deified both his wife and mother-in-law, but the highest heavens were reserved for Antinous, his young lover who drowned in the Nile under clouded circumstances. When Julia Drusilla was stricken by a virus at twenty-two, she was divinized by her maximalist brother Caligula as Panthea, or ‘all the gods.’

In February of 45 BCE, when Cicero’s daughter Tullia died a month after giving birth, the bereaved statesman became determined to turn her into a god, and set his keen intellect to the task of how best to achieve apotheosis. To raise public awareness of the new deity, Cicero decided to build her a shrine, and had an architect draw up plans. Yet the senator became fixated on the question of what location would be optimal, indoors or outside, and worried about how the land in the future could change ownership. He fretted over how best to introduce Tullia to Rome, to win the approval of both the immortal gods and mortal public opinion. ‘Please forgive me, whatever you think of my project . . .’ Cicero wrote in a letter to a friend, and wondered aloud if his strange endeavor would make him feel even worse. But to the statesman, supernatural in his grief, the urge was irrepressible. Deification was a kind of consolation.

The century that reset time began with a man perhaps inadvertently turned divine. It is hard to see him, for the earliest gospels were composed decades after his death at Golgotha, and the light only reaches so far into the dark tombs of the past. The scholars who search for the man-in-history find him embedded in the politics of his day: a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome. They find him by the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist. He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem. Jesus, like many in his age, warns that the apocalypse is near: the current world order, in its oppressions and injustices, will soon come to an end and the kingdom of the Israelites will be restored, the message for which he will be arrested for high treason.

In what scholars generally agree was the first written testimony, that of Mark, Jesus never claims to be divine, nor speaks of himself as God or God’s Son. In the early scriptures, when asked if he is the messiah, ‘the anointed one’, at every turn he appears to eschew, deflect, or distance himself from the title, or refers to the messiah as someone else, yet to come. He performs miracles under a halo of reluctance, the narrative ever threatening to slip from his grasp. When he cures a deaf man, he instructs bystanders not to tell anyone, but the more He ordered them, the more widely they proclaimed it, Mark relates.

In the decades after the crucifixion, just as the gospels were being composed and circulated, the apotheosis of Roman emperors had become so routine that Vespasian, as he lay on his deathbed in 79 CE, could quip, ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.’ Refusing homage to the deified dictators of Rome, early Christians wrested the titles bestowed upon them – ‘God’, ‘Son of God’, ‘the Lord’, ‘Divine Savior’, ‘Redeemer’, ‘Liberator’ – and gave them to the man Rome had executed as a criminal.

In the writings of the apostle Paul, aglow with a vision of the resurrected Christ, Jesus appears as a new species of cosmic being, God’s eternal Son. While pagan politicians ascended to heaven, transported on the steep journey by eagle, Jesus simply lowered himself; he emptied himself, in Paul’s words, into the form of a peasant.

Although Paul was horrified when he found himself mistaken for a pagan god, the apostle preached the mystical possibility that all humankind might join in Christ’s divinity. Transcending earthly politics, the dissident turned into a deity to surpass the godlings of Rome. As the Almighty made flesh, Jesus became a power that could conquer the empire – and eventually, He did.

According to the Gospel of John, among the last to be written, on the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus compared himself to a serpent, the one Moses had set upon a pole at God’s command to save his people from the plague. Like the reptile, Christ would point the way toward the divinity ever coiled within each man. In the second century, the sect of the Ophites worshipped Jesus in his form as serpent, invoking the fact that human entrails resemble a snake. It was recorded they celebrated the Eucharist by inviting a snake onto the table to wind itself around the loaf of bread. By the third century, the Greek convert Clement of Alexandria could declare that divinity now ‘pervades all humankind equally’. All who followed the teachings of Christ ‘will be formed perfectly in the likeness of the teacher – made a god going about in flesh.’

Theologians avidly debated the possibility of theosis – ‘becoming god’ – a word coined to distinguish Christian doctrine from the pagan ‘apotheosis’. Among Christians in the second and third centuries, the notion was commonplace that each person had a deified counterpart or divine twin, whom they might one day encounter.

In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine gathered together two thousand bishops at the Council of Nicaea to officially define the nature of Jesus’s divinity for the first time. Against those who maintained he had been created by God as a son, perfect but still to some extent human, the bishops pronounced Jesus as Word Incarnate on earth, equal to and made of the same substance as God the Father, whatever it may be. Other notions of Jesus’s essence were branded as heresies and suppressed, and gospels deemed unorthodox were destroyed. Through the mandates of the Nicene Creed, the idea of divinity itself became severed from its old proximities to ordinary mortal life. In the work of theologians such as Augustine, who shaped Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come, the chasm between humankind and divinity grew ever more impassable.

Though mystics might strive for union with the godhead, veiled in metaphors, the idea that a man could transform into an actual deity became absurd. God is absolutely different from us, the theologians maintained; the line between Creator and His creation clearly drawn. Away from its pagan closeness, away from the dust and turmoil of terrestrial life, Christian doctrine pushed the heavens from the earth. ‘I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them,’ Augustine writes in the Confessions. ‘I spoke to all the things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses,’ but they said in their myriad voices, I am not God. ‘And I said, “Since you are not my God, tell me about him.”’

Fearing the Reaper or What Happens After You’ve Been Reaped

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When the philosopher Bryan Magee died in 2019 at the age of 89, The Guardian described him as a polymath, compulsive communicator, best-selling author, award-winning broadcaster and, for a decade, a member of Parliament. He was best-known for bringing philosophy to a popular audience on radio and TV. YouTube has more than 20 interviews he conducted with leading philosophers in the 1970s and 80s.

In his book, Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), he says something I think is very odd:

… the prospect of extinction terrifies me (p. 484).

Earlier in the book, he describes a midlife crisis:

The realization hit me like a demolition crane that I would inevitably die. This fear, when it came, was not an ordinary fear or anxiety but was hyper-vivid and preternaturally powerful….I felt — as I imagine a lot of the people who have confronted firing squads must have felt — engulfed by mind-numbing terror in the face of oblivion (pp. 240-241).

The prospect Magee is referring to is the possibility that when he dies, he will cease to exist. His body may still be in one piece, but his “self” will have vanished. He’d experience no life after death, no existence as himself in any way whatsoever. As the Munchkins required of the Wicked Witch of the West, Magee would be legally, morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, reliably and really most sincerely dead.

Why would anyone be afraid of being dead, of no longer existing? I understand the fear of dying. Various kinds of death, especially the lingering and painful ones, are scary. It also makes sense to be afraid of what might happen to whomever or whatever we leave behind. Regretting that we’ll never experience or do certain things is natural, although that’s not really fear. It’s also understandable to be disappointed that you won’t experience eternal bliss in heaven, assuming you think that’s a possibility. But those aren’t Magee’s concerns. He is simply afraid that he will no longer exist — at which point his fears, regrets and disappointments will all have vanished.

I think he fears what Epicurus described 2,500 years ago in his “Letter to Menoeceus”:

Death is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain.

Epicurus thought that “the fear of death arises from the belief that, in death, there is awareness”. But Magee seems to have been afraid that he would no longer be aware of anything.

His fear of extinction is tied up with his idea of “the self”. He isn’t certain, but he’s fairly well convinced that he has a “self” that is somehow separate from his body. He doesn’t call it a “soul”. He thinks his self makes decisions, moves his body around and is morally responsible for his actions.

Yet he agreed with David Hume that his “self” is not something he actually perceives. This is part of Hume’s famous discussion of the self in A Treatise of Human Nature:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic’d reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.

Nevertheless, Magee is pretty sure he’s got a self and he’s very afraid that his self might no longer exist when he’s dead.

As for myself (not “my self”), I’m pretty well convinced that you and I are biological organisms, alive enough and sufficiently complex enough to be conscious, but that when our lives end, our consciousness ends too. People who have thought about it a lot haven’t been able to agree on what makes us the specific people we are, what makes me myself and you yourself. It’s not as simple as having a certain set of parents or memories or DNA. It’s what philosophers call the problem of “personal identity”, of being a “self”. I don’t think the problem has a solution that fits every circumstance. Most of the time it’s clear who a person is, but there are difficult cases. A person’s identity (is that Bryan Magee?) can be hard to establish. If you disagree, the article on personal identity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is 9,000 words long. It begins:

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy….)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance…. The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.

I’m not sure what Magee meant by his “self”, even after reading his whole book. Whatever it was, the thought of it disappearing bothered him a lot. Unlike Magee, what scares me is that we might still be conscious after we die. I’m with Epicurus on that: “the fear of death [which is different from how we die] arises from the belief that, in death, there is awareness”. I hope he’s right when he says “when death is, we are not”. When I’m done here, I want to be done.

Setting the Stage for a Future Coup

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Two years after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, while we wait for more conspirators to be indicted, it’s worth considering why the coup failed and how a future coup might succeed.

Fintan O’Toole writes for the Irish Times and teaches at Princeton. His article for The New York Review of Books is called “Dress Rehearsal”. Here are some selections (the whole article is worth reading — it’s behind a relatively porous paywall):

To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to D___ T___’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented T___ with a detailed plan for the transfer of power to his incoming administration. It was literally trashed. As Christie recalled…  “All thirty binders were tossed in a T____ Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.”

T____ didn’t want an orderly transition to his own presidency, let alone to Joe Biden’s. To a raging narcissist a plan is an impertinence, a Lilliputian restraint on the inspired instincts of a giant. But for a seditious conspiracy (or what the House inquiry has characterized as an “insurrection” in its recommendation of charges that should be brought against T____) to succeed, a plan is imperative. T____’s fundamental problem was that his putative second transition was every bit as cack-handed as his first.

Two years on from January 6, the most important question about the coup is why it failed. Or to put it another way: If you were planning a future coup, what could you learn from this one? From the evidence accumulated by the House of Representatives inquiry into the attack, two aspects of this failure are obvious. Too many Republican officials in crucial states refused to subvert their own elections. And what we might call the institutional right—D____ T____’s appointees to the judiciary and the Department of Justice—did not support the conspiracy. Yet the most important factor may be one that is much more intangible. At its heart was T____’s political persona…..

In his 2004 book T____: How to Get Rich, the ersatz mogul set out his rules for success. One was “Be a good storyteller. People like stories, and they’ll remember them.” Another was:

In business—every business—the bottom line is understanding the process. If you don’t understand the process, you’ll never reap the rewards of the process…. Part of the process is doing your homework. You have to know what you’re getting into first.

In the business of staging a coup, T____ violated both these rules. He never managed to settle on a good story. And he did not do enough homework to understand and master the process of retaining the presidency after a clear electoral defeat.

A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. T____, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it …, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.” In any conceivable future coup, this will again be the necessary narrative. We won, they are stealing our victory, we need to take extraordinary measures to defend democracy.

It is important for actual democrats to understand this. Dark fantasies about martial law and mass repression may deliver a certain masochistic thrill. Yet the lesson from the events of two years ago is that, spectacularly horrifying as it was, the attack on the Capitol was not the main event. It was a poorly conceived and (by T____) badly led reaction to the failure of the much more feasible coup—which T____ just might have pulled off in November or December 2020. He lost that opportunity because he could not create the necessary heroic drama—the one in which he was not sullenly subverting the presidential election but selflessly upholding its real results.

In fashioning of this drama, T____ had one great advantage—five years of preparation. He had, from the start of his run for the Republican nomination, insisted that “our system is absolutely, totally rigged.” Before both the 2016 and the 2020 elections, he refused, on this basis, to commit to accepting the declared results. There was never any real doubt that if he lost in 2020, he would refuse to concede defeat. We know from the House committee hearings that T____’s announcement on election night that “frankly, we did win this election. . . . We want all voting to stop” had been planned well in advance…. On election day, T____ discussed … an earlier memo [that] laid out plans for the president to demand that only the votes tallied by the end of that day should count.

This was the essence of the coup. What is remarkable, however, is the absence of any real plan to enforce it. Here is the first of T____’s misunderstandings about the nature of his own power. It was not feasible for any president simply to order all voting to stop. What was important to the plot was that, having laid down this marker, T____ and his fellow plotters follow it up by creating and sustaining a story in which any vote not counted by his arbitrary deadline was illegitimate. They failed to do this because T____ stupidly believed in his own fictional creation—the mogul from The Apprentice whose orders will be obeyed unquestioningly by subordinates. It is clear from his subsequent reactions that T____ genuinely believed that those minions would include his attorney general, William Barr, his own federal judicial appointees, and the Supreme Court on which he had created a solid right-wing majority.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this institutional obstruction left T____ with no options other than the final desperate maneuvers of January 6, when he tried to get Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election results and sent an armed mob to attack the Capitol and intimidate the members of Congress. To understand what Trump could have done instead, it is necessary to revisit a long meeting at the White House on the evening and night of December 18, 2020. This episode is easy to dismiss because it was described as “unhinged” and because the proposals aired at it were called “nuts” by [January 6th committee witnesses]. These characterizations are accurate. Yet the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is that it immediately preceded T____’s fateful decision to summon his followers to Washington on January 6. The other is that one of the ideas put forward at this meeting would be of great interest to any future conspirator….

Yet somewhere amid this craziness was the nearest thing the whole plot ever got to a potentially viable plan to overturn the election. Essentially, T___ would appoint [Michael] Flynn as [the leader] of a military-led operation to oversee a hand recount of votes in the six most narrowly contested states:

General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President and the whole thing would roll. The teams would be created from the right National Guard Units, the right directives to each…

[Sidney] Powell, meanwhile, would be appointed as special counsel, with powers to seek out and prosecute those responsible for the gigantic electoral fraud….

The most basic requirement was to create a public narrative in which [a] foreign power was identified [as behind the fraud]. Since there was no actual evidence, the plotters were free to invent whatever tale they wanted. Given that T____ had decided months before the election that he was going to claim victory regardless of the actual votes, there was plenty of time to prepare a dossier full of charts and figures and fake “intelligence.” (Think Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.) But the conspirators were like a dog chasing a flock of pigeons—they ran so excitedly after so many targets that they could never catch hold of any particular one….

Having seized control of the voting machines through some kind of military task force, there would then be a live TV event in which all of the paper ballots in the six most contested states would be counted in front of the cameras…. By appearing to commit to conceding defeat if no discrepancies were found, T____ could pose, as he had to do if a coup were to succeed, as the defender of American democracy. It goes without saying that, under Flynn’s watchful eye, discrepancies would have been found … just enough in each state to flip the election.”

Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how T____s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory.

Yet [the plan had] the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection. Conspirators succeed by foiling a “conspiracy.”

The author then discusses the former president’s violent rhetoric and the events of January 6th.This is how the article ends:

In the 187 minutes between the end of T____’s speech [on January 6th] and the time he finally called off the mob, he seems to have lost all sense of the relationship between words and actions, between incitement and murder. He sat at the head of the table in the private dining room off the Oval Office watching the mayhem on Fox News. His reaction to the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” was relayed by [Mark] Meadows to [Pat] Cipollone: “You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.” Around the time that members of Pence’s security detail were making what they thought might be their last calls to their families, T____ sent an incendiary signal to the attackers, tweeting, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”

T____, at that point, was implicitly providing a mandate for murder. But this could no longer really be called an attempted coup. Neither T____ nor his fellow plotters had the slightest idea what they would do after Pence, and presumably members of Congress, of both parties, were murdered. This was not a plan for the seizing and holding of power. It was a dark fantasy of personal revenge. Oddly, T____sent that tweet at the moment he really accepted that he was a loser—that unbearable realization made it necessary that someone be sacrificed on the altar of his humiliation. When even that became impossible, there was nothing left to do but cancel the whole show.

If it happens again, it will probably not happen like this. The pilot episode was a disaster because it had no coherent script, too many ham actors, too weak a grasp on the difference between gestures and consequences. But there is much to learn from it. Next time, if there is one, the plot will be much tighter, the action less outlandish, the logistics much better prepared, the director more competent. And the show will be called Defending Democracy.

Conservative No More

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The historian Thomas Zimmer has written a series of articles that he describes as “a reflection on what we are up against”. Below is the gist of part 1, part 2 and part 3.

A reactionary counter-mobilization against egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

That is the formulation I have been using to describe what is happening on the Right (and beyond), to capture what is animating conservative politics, and to grasp what, exactly, those who envision America as a truly functioning democracy are up against.

I think it’s worth reflecting on each of these terms:

  • Reactionary – rather than conservative
  • Counter-mobilization – rather than backlash
  • Egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy – rather than just: democracy

A counter-mobilization 

Let’s start with what I think is the component that requires the least explanation: a counter-mobilization, rather than a backlash. The problem with the “backlash” narrative is that it tends to put the agency solely with traditionally marginalized groups who are ultimately at fault for causing an inevitable reaction, a predictable, near-automatic response. This makes the backlash narrative attractive to people who seek to delegitimize the supposed “excesses” of social justice activism and any kind of politics that aims to level traditional hierarchies. In such a tale, reactionaries have no agency and thus can’t be blamed, are only – and at least somewhat justifiably – reacting to marginalized groups going “too far”….

The term “counter-mobilization” … acknowledges that the reactionary ire is directed at concrete change. It is true that due to political, social, cultural, and, most importantly, demographic developments, the U.S. has become significantly less white, less Christian, more multicultural, more pluralistic over the past few decades. What the Right is trying to counter is, at least in this broad sense, real; these are not just figments of the rightwing imagination. But the key is to acknowledge that reactionaries are actively mobilizing, they are deliberately participating in a political project of preventing America from ever becoming an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy….

Egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy

Why make things complicated? Why add a bunch of qualifiers in front of “democracy” that together make for a rather clunky phrase? Because the first question we should ask whenever someone says “democracy” is: What kind of democracy, how much, and for whom?

We should recognize that, historically, the term “democracy” applied to polities and societies that differed widely in terms of who was actually allowed and enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not they extended the democratic promise to other spheres of life beyond politics, to the workplace, the family, the public square….

Democracy should be explored and assessed not as a yes-or-no proposition, but on a scale – with an emphasis on change over time and on the changing practical reality, on how democracy actually structures the lives and experiences of the people….

The American project has always been shaped by two competing, fundamentally incompatible visions for what the county should be. On the one hand, there is the idea that the world works best if it is dominated by wealthy white men [note: or simply white men, or Christians, or whatever preferred group]; on the other, the goal of creating a society in which the individual’s status would not be significantly determined by wealth, race, religion, gender, gender or sexual orientation…. Right-wingers abhor this egalitarian vision [of multiracial, pluralistic democracy]….

Reactionary

The character of the counter-mobilization against egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy is more adequately described as reactionary, rather than conservative….

More and more people on the Right – people who are at the center of conservative politics, or at least close to it in terms of their ideas and agenda – are rejecting the label “conservatism.” A few weeks ago, The Federalist – one of those supposedly / formerly conservative outlets that provide a useful window into what is happening in the rightwing pundit and pseudo-intellectual scene – published a really instructive piece… It was entitled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” According to the author, conservatism, a political project that was all about conserving and preserving the existing order of traditional American norms and values, had failed and was entirely unequipped to handle “our revolutionary moment.”

This indeed reflects a widely accepted understanding of what “conservatism” is: Conservatives focus on preserving and conserving what exists, they push back against change if it threatens the traditional order of things. That’s perhaps not an exact definition, but it captures the essence of what is usually associated with the term in the broader public discourse. It is, ultimately, a project of hierarchy maintenance (which follows directly from the preserving/conserving idea, although conservatives tend to dislike it when it’s phrased in this way).

But according to The Federalist, there is no point in trying to preserve and maintain what has actually long been destroyed – America, in this view, has been turned into a “woke dystopia,” something traditional conservatism had failed to prevent. Instead of continuing on a path that has led to destruction, those who used to see themselves as conservatives need to “claim the mantle of revolutionaries” – commit themselves to a (counter-)revolutionary, radical fight against these un-American leftist forces.

The Federalist is very explicit about what such a not-conservative-anymore fight against leftism would entail in practice: The goal is to forcefully mobilize the coercive power of the state to impose a return of the traditional order onto the country and defeat those enemies within. In the words of the author: “The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated notions about ‘small government.’ The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed”….

Republicans are trying to turn the clock back by many decades wherever they are in charge: At least to the 1950s, the pre-civil-rights era, in the political, social, and cultural sphere; even further back, to the pre-New Deal era, in the realm of economics and in terms of the state’s role in regulating the economy. And they are pursuing this vision they want to impose on the entire country in increasingly aggressive fashion.

No more conserving, preserving, certainly not in the colloquial sense. American conservatism is now taking an openly and aggressively hostile stance towards the current order, and towards “liberalism” (very loosely defined) in general. It is this specific attitude, this disposition towards liberal democracy and anything derided as “leftwing” and “woke” that characterizes today’s Right. Conservatives have given themselves permission to escalate. That’s where the center of conservative politics currently is….

Unquote.

One point: I’m not sure “reactionary” is the appropriate word to replace “conservative”. It might be better to think of the right’s project to stop progress as “radical”. One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of “radical” is “advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs”.

Prof. Zimmer promises to continue this series of articles on “what we’re up against” at his Substack newsletter “Democracy Americana”.

American Politics of the Past and Present

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Paul Krugman, economist and NY Times columnist, is a very bright person. Here, he accurately sums up where American politics used to be and where, heaven help us, it is now.

It’s 2023. What will the new year bring? The answer, of course, is that we don’t know. There are a fair number of what Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) called “known unknowns” — for example, nobody really knows how hard it will be to reduce inflation or whether the U.S. economy will experience a recession. There are also unknown unknowns: Will we see another shock like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

But I think I can make one safe prediction about the U.S. political scene: We’re going to spend much of 2023 feeling nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

As late as 2015, …, we had a fairly good idea about how American politics worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it seemed comprehensible.

On one side we had the Democrats, who were and still are basically what people in other advanced nations call social democrats (which isn’t at all the same as what most people call socialism). That is, they favor a fairly strong social safety net, supported by relatively high taxes on the affluent. They’ve moved somewhat to the left over the years, mainly because the gradual exit of the few remaining conservative Democrats has made the party’s social-democratic orientation more consistent. But by international standards, Democrats are, at most, vaguely center left.

On the other side we had the Republicans, whose overriding goal was to keep taxes low and social programs small. Many advocates of that agenda did so in the sincere belief that it would be best for everyone — that high taxes reduce incentives to create jobs and raise productivity, as do excessively generous benefits. But the core of the G.O.P.’s financial support (not to mention that of the penumbra of think tanks, foundations and lobbying groups that promoted its ideology) came from billionaires who wanted to preserve and increase their wealth.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Democrats were pure idealists. Special-interest money flowed to both parties. But of the two, Republicans were much more obviously the party of making the rich richer.

The problem for Republicans was that their economic agenda was inherently unpopular. Voters consistently tell pollsters that corporations and the rich pay too little in taxes; policies that help the poor and the middle class have broad public support. How, then, could the G.O.P. win elections?

The answer, most famously described in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” was to win over white working-class voters by appealing to them on cultural issues. His book came in for considerable criticism from political scientists, in part because he underplayed the importance of white racial antagonism, but the general picture still seems right.

As Frank described it, however, the culture war was basically phony — a cynical ploy to win elections, ignored once the votes were counted. “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” he wrote, “but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

These days, that sounds quaint — even a bit like a golden era — as many American women lose their reproductive rights, as schools are pressured to stop teaching students about slavery and racism, as even powerful corporations come under fire for being excessively woke. The culture war is no longer just posturing by politicians mainly interested in cutting taxes on the rich; many elected Republicans are now genuine fanatics.

As I said, one can almost feel nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

Oddly, the culture war turned real at a time when Americans are more socially liberal than ever. George W. Bush won the 2004 election partly thanks to a backlash against gay marriage. (True to form, he followed up his victory by proclaiming that he had a mandate to … privatize Social Security.) But these days, Americans accept the idea of same-sex marriages almost three to one.

And the disconnect between a socially illiberal [Republican Party] and an increasingly tolerant public is surely one reason the widely predicted red wave in the midterms fell so far short of expectations.

Yet despite underperforming in what should, given precedents, have been a very good year for the out-party, Republicans will narrowly control the House. And this means that the inmates will be running half the asylum.

True, not all members of the incoming House Republican caucus are fanatical conspiracy theorists. But those who aren’t are clearly terrified by and submissive to those who are. Kevin McCarthy may scrape together the votes to become speaker, but even if he does, actual power will obviously rest in the hands of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

What I don’t understand is how the U.S. government is going to function. President Barack Obama faced an extremist, radicalized G.O.P. House, but even the Tea Partiers had concrete policy demands that could, to some extent, be appeased. How do you deal with people who believe, more or less, that the 2020 election was stolen by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles?

I don’t know the answer, but prospects don’t look good.