The U.S. as a party-state

Yesterday on Twitter, I ventured the hypothesis that the U.S. form of government is, most fundamentally, not a constitutional republic, but a variant on the party-state form — the difference being that there are two parties instead of just one. This can be difficult to see, because the predominant analysis of the great party-state forms of the 20th century, namely fascism and communism, has focused on the misleading concept of “totalitarianism.” Interpreting the party-state phenomenon through liberal democratic norms, the “totalitarian” analysis decides that since something like civil society or the private sphere no longer has the desired autonomy, we can only conclude that the state, as the only other available center of power, is over-dominant. This is a profound misreading of the situation, however, as Foucault points out in Birth of Biopolitics. The problem in party-states is not that the formal state structures are too strong, but that they’re too weak to restrain the party-movement that instrumentalizes them. In China, for instance, formal state structures “exist,” but the Communist Party essentially ignores them — indeed, the Party is not even recognized as a legal organization.

In the U.S., the party-state operates by pretending that it’s not a party-state. Constitutional norms and the division of power are given continual lip-service, as when Obama castigates “Congress” rather than the Republicans, and the Founders’ desire to prevent factions is presented as an operative norm of contemporary politics. Nevertheless, the constitutional division of powers is less important to the functioning of the government than the party structure. Indeed, both parties instrumentalize American constitutional quirks whenever the opportunity presents itself. More broadly, both parties seek to cover up their own corruption or incompetence by pointing toward the other party’s illegitimate “partisanship” — and the much-vaunted “bipartisanship” mainly serves as a mechanism to allow them to congratulate themselves for subverting the will of the American people.

More important than the rhetorical and political strategies, however, is the sense that the party duopoly is above the law — both in the sense of instrumentalizing it to maintain its hold on power and in the sense of evading legal sanction.

Time to reboot?

This semester, we’ve been discussing documents relating to the American Founding in my Social Sciences 2 class, and I asked both my classes: “Should we tear out and start fresh?” There was widespread discomfort with the idea, mostly based in the fear of who would be tasked with writing the new Constitution. I understand that fear, but I think that a lot of the pitfalls could be avoided by means of a ratification process — if the New Founders knew that a two-thirds majority of all American citizens had to approve it, that would presumably keep them from enshrining fetal personhood as a Constitutional principle, for instance. Even in the worst case where the CEO of Goldman Sachs simply dictates the form of the document, I assume the most crazy and unworkable aspects of our system — the recognition of a weird form of quasi-sovereignty for the states and the anti-democratic Senate — would be eliminated just for the sake of simplicity. (I would note that as difficult as amending the Constitution is in any case, state sovereignty and the Senate are two aspects of the Constitution that are nearly impossible to effectively amend away because of clauses stipulating that no state can be involuntarily deprived of equal representation in the Senate. Hence any state that held out and didn’t ratify an amendment to introduce equal representation would still get as many senators as California — and I can’t even imagine the logical paradoxes that would arise with any amendment proposing to do away with the Senate altogether.)

At the same time, I’m reminded of what Bruce Rosenstock has told me on more than one occasion when this topic has come up: the saving grace of the American political system is that the founding document has the status of Scripture, and one should never throw that away. If you attempt a reboot, all bets are off. (I’m paraphrasing — if I’m misconstruing, hopefully he will show up in comments to more accurately portray his views.)

What do you think, dear readers?

Why did we invade Iraq?

The question continues to baffle me after all these years. (It seems that conventional wisdom is settling on “access to oil,” but we have this brilliant new technology that gives us access to as much oil as we need — it’s called “money.”) David Graeber’s recent piece in The Baffler provided me with fresh insight:

Checks and Balances

We discussed Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in class yesterday, and I brought up a point that proved to be quite controversial among the students — despite being one of the foundational documents of the American Revolution, Common Sense includes what appears to be a principled argument against the idea of “checks and balances.”

The point comes up in his discussion of checks on royal power in the British system. My initial reading, and many students’ as well, was that he was talking about how it didn’t actually work in practice in the British system — but he seems to make more absolute criticisms of the very idea. Most notably, he asks: “HOW CAME THE KING BY A POWER WHICH THE PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO TRUST, AND ALWAYS OBLIGED TO CHECK? Such a power could not be the gift of a wise people, neither can any power, WHICH NEEDS CHECKING, be from God; yet the provision which the constitution makes supposes such a power to exist.” Earlier on, he seems to propose his alternative: have frequent elections and let the representatives mingle with the people as much as possible, so ” that the ELECTED might never form to themselves an interest separate from the ELECTORS” — because they realize that they will be back among the people soon enough and will always think of themselves as being subject to the laws that they pass.

I got enough push-back on my reading that I’m having doubts. What do you think, dear readers?

The legacy of Chávez

The Nation has a good article up about Chávez’s legacy. He was a beacon of hope in a world dominated by the nihilism of neoliberalism, and consequently he’s been called the next Stalin — if you’re inclined (as I once was) to believe that U.S. propaganda about foreign leaders is opportunistic but basically accurate (i.e., there were many rulers as bad as Saddam Hussein, but he at least genuinely was bad), this article might be a good place to start reconsidering that view.

Hobbes’s critique of the European Union

This Thursday, Shimer College hosted a lecture by Bob Keohane, a Princeton professor of international relations (and an alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees). The lecture started from Hobbes (which Shimer’s Social Science 2 students were reading just before the lecture) and discussed ways that liberal realists have attempted to develop international organizations to turn the international sphere into something other than a “war of all against all” even in the absence of any realistic prospect of a global sovereign. It was an engaging and interesting lecture, and the juxtaposition of Hobbes and contemporary international relations got my mind churning on a weird question: What would Hobbes think of the European Union?

It occurred to me that we do have one point of reference for Hobbes’s view of “international organizations,” given his extensive discussion of the one truly international institution of his time: the Roman Catholic Church.

What is education actually for?

Among readers of this blog, I’m confident that there is a consensus on what education is not for: namely, it is not exclusively for job preparation. While working is part of life and education has to contribute to that, I doubt that anyone here is willing to say that education should be geared solely toward work.

That said, then, what is it actually for?

From the Cold War to the War on Terror

Conventional wisdom has it that after the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US enjoyed an interim period free of major conflicts (roughly the Clinton years), which was ended with the beginning of the War on Terror in the wake of 9/11. It increasingly seems to me, though, that there is a basic continuity in US foreign policy. In essence, we are continuing the Cold War even in the absence of an opponent. In fact, this continuity might be all the more pronounced precisely because we did not actually “win” the Cold War — we were deprived of a clear victory by the unexpected and seemingly random dissolution of the USSR, which US intelligence famously failed to predict.

From this perspective, the 90s were an attempt to extract some kind of victory by impoverishing and humiliating Russia — inviting former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and even flirting with the possibility of including former Soviet Republics, launching a major intervention in Russia’s traditional “sphere of influence” (Kosovo), and of course imposing “shock therapy” on the Russian economy itself, including the liquidation of essentially the entire centrally-planned economic apparatus.

Meanwhile, we have seen the selection of a new enemy — a monolithic “terrorism” to replace the monolithic “communism” of the Cold War years. This had begun under Clinton, but terrorism only got the full Cold War treatment with the Bush administration, which was of course staffed entirely by Cold War veterans. The one major exception was Condi Rice, Bush’s most trusted advisor and the proud holder of a PhD in Sovietology. (In an alternate timeline where Bush did not successfully steal the election, one can assume that environmentalism would have come to the fore — a cause that would itself have been a continuation of a project of cooperation begun under Gorbachev and brought to an abrupt end with the fall of the USSR.)

But wasn’t this in many ways an even better Cold War, one in which the US military apparatus finally had the free hand it had been denied by the policy of containment? Reagan’s “Star Wars” program was an attempt at an end-run around the iron logic of Mutual Assurred Destruction — and now isn’t that fantasy finally fulfilled with the doctrine of unilateral war, with drone strikes that are completely indifferent to the sovereignty even of nominal allies, and with the absolute determination to prevent Iran from achieveing a nuclear deterrent? Finally, we get to release all that energy that was pent up over the Cold War years, vent all that aggression that had become so confusing and aimless when our enemy mysteriously vanished into thin air!

In short, I am tempted to declare the transition from the Cold War to the War on Terror the greatest example of “first as tragedy, then as farce” in world history.

Sexual Violence: An American Problem

The Steubenville rape case along with the horrific gang rape in India has brought sexual violence to the media’s attention. Of course, we had GOP politicians who felt compelled by some ungodly force to speak about rape victims in demeaning and bizarre ways during the previous election. I know that my posts over the last six months have centered on the terribly depressing topic of sexual violence but I find that I am up to my ears in sexual violence as a soon-to-be-psychologist working in a public mental health setting. Last week I led a group with some women who had recently experienced sexual violence and they asked me a simple question: “Jeremy, you’re a guy. Do you know why guys think it’s OK to rape women?” This is a very difficult question and one that I had trouble answering. I responded with some vague statements about the ways in which our culture makes men feel entitled to have sex with women.

Fear of the state

It has always puzzled me that some people can look at something like public provision of health insurance and see a fateful step toward tyranny and oppression. What this requires is a suspicion of “the state” simply as such, and it seems to me that Foucault was right to say that the greatest achievement of the early neoliberal theorists was to convince seemingly everyone in the world that the lesson to be drawn from the experience of “totalitarianism” is the dangers stemming from excessive state power.

In fact, if there is anything to be gained by placing the Nazi and Soviet experiences under the same conceptual heading, it cannot be a lesson about the dangers of state power — indeed, it has to be just the opposite: the dangers of a weak and impotent state that cannot restrain the power of a para-state movement.