Category: Politics

Many folks of mixed will are still busy opining on what transpired at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I, only half-jokingly, referred to that entire 24-hour period as “the stupidest day in American history.” A friend of mine, Kevin, replied, “The stupidest day so far.”

I have not, admittedly, digested the full range of photos, videos, and first-hand accounts of what transpired in Washington, D.C. two days ago. No matter how convincing (or damning) a particular clip or anecdote may be, there are always those who will say that the entire debacle needs to be placed in its “proper context.” For instance, there are more than a few voices on social media saying what occurred “wasn’t that bad” compared to, say, the French Revolution or the storming of this-or-that government/royal building in the Middle East. Maybe, just maybe, what happened wasn’t “that bad” when compared to the wave of protests that rocked most of the United States during the summer months of 2020. Certainly, those protests, which are commonly (though perhaps not accurately) referred to in the collective as “Black Lives Matter protests,” resulted in more property damage than what occurred in D.C. The human toll was higher, too. Still, I am unconvinced that even those out-of-control escapades carried the same symbolic purchase that storming the Capitol and interrupting an active session of Congress did.

When flipping through the news channels on Wednesday, I heard words like “insurrection,” “sedition,” and “rebellion” spewed casually by a range of anchors, pundits, and everyday folks on the street. The two learned hosts of a law podcast I listen to ran through a host of U.S. statutes criminalizing such behavior while speculating which could be applied to not only those who breached the Capitol building, but President Donald Trump and his cohorts as well. At the same time, there were other voices, mainly from what might broadly be called the Right, which downplayed the whole affair. These were not, I should say, the voices of pure hacks who labeled the intrusion, violence, and destruction as a “false flag” operation staged by a consortium of “deep state” agents and Antifa. These voices were of those who, despite all the evidence, believe they cannot wholly abandon the spectacle of the last four years without sacrificing a piece of their political souls. These voices admit that something disruptive was afoot the other day, but at the close of business it really did not matter. The United States is still standing! The transition of power will occur! What is there to worry about, really?

Then there are those such as me who are left to wonder what this all means not just for the future of any particular political ideology in America, but the ways and means of the country itself. It is raw silliness to presume that Trump’s exit from the White House will reset the political field to where it was 10-20 years ago. “Trumpism,” meaning simply an admixture of the politics of resentment with fear mongering, posturing, and buffoonery, is here to stay for the immediate future. It could, I suppose, fade away in the coming years just as the so-called “Tea Party” movement faded. I doubt it. Already there are those at the local and national level looking to repeat what Trump did, namely turn politics into a pretty plaything for their own personal service while heaping the hopeless masses with unfulfillable promises. Why certain types of persons, specifically certain types of Catholics, find these promises so personally warming when the good Lord Jesus Christ has promised eternal life is a question worth considering, but I will leave that for another day.

Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt is a provocative thinker who, in the course of his storied career, has managed to smash the “broken windows” theory of policing and exposed the internal contradictions of “neoliberal penality” in his excellent study, The Illusion of Free Markets. Harcourt is also known for his pro bono work on behalf of death row inmates, including Doyle Hamm, an inmate that Alabama attempted to brutally execute via lethal injection last year and failed. Part of Harcourt’s ongoing work at Columbia includes hosting a series of critical seminars with academics from around the globe, covering such topics as Nietzsche, Foucault, and uprisings. His latest venture, a 13-part series entitled “Critique & Praxis 13/13,” dealt in part with the so-called alt-right and similar surrounding movements. A video of the 2 ½ hour seminar, plus supporting readings and blog posts from contributors, is available here.

For the moment I want to look at Harcourt’s own analysis of the seminar, entitled “Neo-Fascist-White-Supremacy-Ultranationalist Counterrevolutionaries.” Harcourt struggles to develop a working catch-all definition for the alt-right, thus leading him to bifurcate the American and European iterations of this movement into two clumsily labeled categories: neo-fascist-white-supremacy-ultranationalist counterrevolutionaries (American) and neo-fascist-European-nativist-counterrevolutionaries (European). I do not expect either of these labels to catch on.

Regardless, Harcourt’s linguistic wrestling match unveils inadvertently the fact that the alt-right is hardly a uniform movement that is internally coherent. While there is something to be said that “white supremacy” could be the glue that holds the whole movement together, at least in the United States, one finds substantial divergences among the alt-right on questions ranging from economics to international relations. There is further difficulty to be found with applying a term like “fascist” or “fascistic” to the alt-right movement. For Harcourt, “fascist” post-1933 contains a genocidal element that was not present when fascism first came into being during the latter decades of the 19th century. Now it is impossible to speak of fascism without genocide, though no fascist movements after World War II have practiced genocide. (I would argue there have been no truly fascist movements until the last decade and even then they have not attained the requisite degree of political power and control to operationalize genocide (if they are even interested in it at all)). Why bring up genocide at all?

To speak of genocide in the context of the alt-right adds a horrifyingly sinister angle to the entire movement even if its goals do not (yet?) appear so “lofty” (if that is the right word for it). In the American context, the alt-right is far more reactionary than it is constructive, and if President Donald Trump is the movement’s de facto (if not de jure) leader, then it is a troubled movement indeed. Trump appears to have as much use for the alt-right as he does for any other potential base of support. If it helps keep him in power, good; if it does not, life goes on. Harcourt, like many on the Left, reads more into Trump’s hamfisted grip on presidential power than it deserves.

While there are several other points in Harcourt’s piece worth considering, I think a word is in order concerning Harcourt’s citation to Leo Strauss. The passage Harcourt quotes is from Strauss’s controversial Persecution and the Art of Writing where, among other things, Strauss presents his esoteric/exoteric hermeneutic. For Strauss, only very capable and learned men, particularly philosophers, avail themselves of esotericism, not for the purpose of changing a society’s opinions, customs, and political life, but to conceal the disrupting, if not revolutionary, character of their thought. The exoteric teaching is almost invariably conventional; the esoteric teaching is almost invariably heretical. It would be a bridge too far, I think, to extend Strauss’s hermeneutic to the alt-right, particularly the American alt-right whose writings Harcourt acknowledges are “boorish” and “crass.”

Movement shifting, the sort Georges Sorel engaged in during the sunset of his atypical and prolific writing career, is a luxury reserved to those who live long enough to see everything they believe in fall apart. Depending on who you ask, Sorel spent the end of his life shifting from his idiosyncratic brand of Marxism to syndicalism to integral nationalism and back to Marxism (albeit of a more conventional sort) one last time. Sorel has been so intellectually quirky by some that some now suppose “Sorelianism” to be a “thing” even if it’s unlike that Sorel, despite his eccentricities, was terribly interested in founding a school. Neither a friend of liberal democracy nor capitalism, Sorel looked to the day when the working class would be liberated, when it would achieve a particular renewal uniquely its own, untainted by bourgeois decadence. While critical minds such as Carl Schmitt saw in Marxism/socialism little more than the fulfillment of liberalism, Sorel’s willingness to harness myth, conflict, and ultimately violence in the service of class liberation set him and his ideas a few steps apart from the discussion-based, entertainment-infatuated liberalism that so horrified Schmitt.

Sorel, in the view of thinkers such as Leszek Kolakowski, retained the Jansenist mentality he inherited from his upbringing. However, given that Jansenism was well on the decline in 19th century France, it stands to reason that Sorel’s radical rejection of hedonism and materialism was more than a relic of his childhood. With little-to-no faith to speak of (not even faith in historical determinism and the final triumph of communism), it’s probably not worth speculating too much on the extent to which Jansenism qua Jansenism shaped Sorel’s soul. Asceticism does not demand a fleeting form of Catholic heterodoxy to give it vitality.

It is perhaps safe to say there are no men in Sorel’s mold living today, though certainly there are still some who retain Sorel’s single-minded dedication to a liberating cause. And yes, while both the far Right and far Left have men of violence within their ranks, how many of these things are men of principle? Sorel was not an intellectual. He was learned, even deeply so, but he did not make a living off trading ideas and certainly not off of academia. Even if he was unwilling during his lifetime to acknowledge the benefits of his top-tier secular French instruction, Sorel invested more than enough time in solitary study to credit him with being a self-educated man. The only element missing from Sorel’s biography are some choice tales of direct action, of moments where thoughts of violence gave way to acts of violence, and all in the service of his cause (whatever that happened to particularly be at one point or another). Had Sorel been a politically violent man, he would today be a romantic figure. Maybe he would have even come to be elevated to the status of a legend, like Che Guevara. Instead, Sorel remains something of a lonely figure in radical intellectual history, blamed for normalizing violence for the Left and anticipating fascism in the Right.

If there is anything to be learned from Sorel’s example, it seems to be this: to advocate and agitate for the success of a cause, particularly one dedicated to the liberation of men from something (poverty, racial oppression, sin, etc.), demands not simply personal certitude, but complete self-sacrifice. There can be, or at least ought not to be, any trace of self-interest or personal gain to be found. How difficult this would be to actualize in our social media-saturated age where even the most honest sentiments are hardly ever given without the hope of Likes, up-votes, and re-Tweets. The radical intellectual, certain he has the “answers”—the sort that can only be printed and bound by a university press—never has tenure or paid sabbatical far from his mind. We are not accustomed to calling the sorts “frauds,” though I imagine a good number of persons struggle to admire them. If anything, the Twitter-star Leftist or the posturing academic who landed an Ivy League post via a derivative work that happened to appear at the right time are objects of envy and scorn, not adulation. May they be taken down at the masses’ earliest possible convenience.

In a letter penned in 1907, Sorel, opining on the social power of myths, had this to say: “Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.” Catholicism, as we all know, is not a myth. What is a myth, at least for the moment, is the idea that Catholics are never discouraged. Now history has become a tale of losing battles where the war is more likely to be lost than won. I dare say that when it comes to comparing the faith of the contemporary Catholic and Sorel, dear Georges possessed far more.

We are certainly not alone in questioning if society can exist with the liberty of the press, a scourge unknown to the world before the latter half of the seventeenth century, and restrained until the end of the eighteenth, with scarcely any exceptions but England–a part of Europe separated from the continent by the sea, as well as by her language and by her peculiar manners.

– Klemens von Matternich, “Confession of Political Faith” (1820), in Memoirs (1881).

Freedom of the press and its annoying sibling, freedom of speech, are today perceived to be cornerstones of a healthy liberal society (if any liberal society can, in fact, be deemed healthy). The idea, which has taken on new vitality in the digital age where every man with Internet access allegedly has “a voice,” is that people have an inherent right to express themselves regardless of talent, training, or temperament. While most who made it out of middle school should know that the right to one’s opinion does not mean a right to having it respected or even not laughed at, there are still far too many adults who accept, on faith more than anything else, that the unhindered expression of thought conveys a vaguely understood good for humanity. Even those who do not accept such nonsense still maintain that while it is no loss that Ben the Baker is restrained from pontificating on politics or Ernie the Economist ought to keep his mouth shut on art, who decides who speaks, when, and under what conditions? Censorship may not be evil per se, but men are evil and will use the power to silence others for their own personal advantage. Better, then, to have a very low signal-to-noise ratio in print, on blogs, and on television than dare allow any authority, spiritual or temporal, to police speech.

The great Austrian diplomat Klemens von Matternich didn’t see it this way, of course. He lived at a time when there was still a glimmer of hope that the revolutionary forces of liberalism, secularism, and nationalism could be thwarted. By 1848, the battle was all but lost and Matternich saw himself going from Austria’s top statesman to a political exile. The Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, one of the chief accomplishments of Matternich’s storied career, had some success in quelling rebellion throughout Continental Europe, though rampant distrust of Russian actions in Western Europe coupled with inconsistent policies toward nationalistic movements (e.g. Greek independence), soon fractured the various alliances against liberalism that Matternich and others constructed throughout the first half of the 19th century.

In the hopes of stomping out the flames of revolution before they could spread, Matternich advocated for tighter strictures on the press. He knew all too well the dangers of the printing press–dangers that first manifested themselves in the lead-up to the Reformation centuries earlier. Pay no mind to Protestant polemics. It was not the printing of the Bible that undermined the “superstitions” and “heresy” of Catholicism; it was the dissemination of false interpretations of Holy Scripture, including the pernicious and untenable belief in sola scriptura, that poisoned the Corpus Mysticum. By the 19th century, the publication of religious heresy was matched in volume by the printing of what Matternich saw as political heresy, namely the overthrow of the natural order of monarchs, religious institutions, and the imperial system as a whole. Believing, with perhaps more empirical evidence than we recognize today, that some peoples were meant to rule while others had to be ruled, the nationalistic fervor that spread across Europe during Matternich’s lifetime was an abomination, one that Matternich and the imperial powers of his time were ultimately unable to put down.

Today, the liberty of the press and freedom of speech are less the agents of macro-level political revolution and more the pretty playthings of capitalists and other liberal ideologues who seek to dismantle the last vestiges of decency in morality in the name of power and profit. Liberalism, secularism, and, in a modified sense, nationalism are no longer seen as revolutionary but normative. If there is still a revolution to be had, it is against the possibility of restoration, and that will only be successful if truth is diluted with such a frightening volume of error that there will be little hope ever distilling the former from the latter. Matternich, during his time on earth, likely could not comprehend such a catastrophe, for despite his own personal shortcomings, he no doubt believed that the Church and the intellectual fruits of Christendom would continue to witness for the truth, empowering those with eyes to see and ears to hear to halt and eventually overcome the revolution. But since when does the Church bother to speak the truth? What remains of Christendom but some chapters in history books?