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fpbThe nearly insane and completely distorting hatred with which the Bush II presidency has been treated by a considerable part of the public and the media, and for which Republican supporters have found an apt and amusing name – Bush Derangement Syndrome – is, in itself, not a good thing; but it is a symptom. People resent Bush in a way they resented nobody before, save perhaps for the searing hatred that some Republican circles felt for Bill Clinton in his prime. Of course, American politics has always been open to overstatement and unscrupulous rabble-rousing. Washington himself was the target of some astonishing name-calling, and European refugees who reached safety after barely survived the murderous attentions of their domestic governments were astonished, and often disgusted, to hear conservative Americans describe Franklin D.Roosevelt as being as dangerous as Hitler. But that was not often intended. At best, it was the froth on partisan anger; at worst, the calculated intent to exploit such anger. It is true that – thanks to the supposed “right to bear arms” – some American presidents have died by violence; but, except for one, none had to do with a domestic partisan debate grown as poisonous as it is today. President McKinley was killed by a Hungarian anarchist, and President Kennedy by a Communist; both more to do with foreign subversion than with native political struggle. President Garfield’s murder had something to do with contemporary politics, but more with what I would regard as something essentially non-political – corruption in public office. (His murderer, who was not quite sane, felt that Garfield was standing in the way of members of his own party being hired en masse by the state. He would have been hideously disappointed had he lived to find that his successor Chester Arthur, in spite of being a creature of the same corrupt system, put an end to it and generally acted above party lines.)
The only real parallel – though one that does Bush II more honour than he honestly deserves – is with the murder of Lincoln. There has been no civil war, and, with any luck, there will be no violence of that kind; but there is a fundamental resemblance between our time and his. In my first essay I pointed out that the classic form of American politics, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats, lasted from the eighteen-fifties to the nineteen-sixties, when it began to alter out of recognition. In other words, then and now, the United States were at a stage of great political change, when new forces became focused in new formations. Even had there been no civil war, the Lincoln presidency would effectively have counted as a revolution – the first triumph of the party that was from then on to stand for the “republican” virtues of the leading classes of the country. But the forces that were losing in that historical change had seen the change coming, and had long made it clear that they would not tolerate it. Indeed, a friendly foreign observer, the French Count Agenor de Gasparin, saw the 1860 election as “the uprising of a great people” – the revolt of the American majority, indubitably Northern in manners and moral, against the blackmailing veto of the South, which, in his view, affected the country like a tyranny.
Of course, the south hardly saw it the same way. The south felt that the America they knew, the America they had wanted to belong to, was no longer the America in which they were forced to live. Within a human lifetime – Lincoln’s “fourscore and seven years” – the Union had gone from a grouping in which Virginia was the leading state and the south at least an equal partner, to one in which the south was being reduced to minority in numbers – as the count of states on either side showed in 1860 – and irrelevancy in business, where the growth of the industrial and agrarian north was answered by the apparition of a previously unknown southern poor white class.
The truth is that there were physical limits to the possible expansion of southern society; limits that corresponded to the area where slave labour could be profitably used. To the contrary, a “northern” kind of society could be set up anywhere, so long as there were no masses of slaves, and, indeed, few blacks altogether. The entry of Texas in the Union as a southern state was more than counterbalanced by the entry of California and Oregon – states that had nothing geographically to do with Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but that had no slaves and little need for any.
They reacted with rage. Their sense of disorientation, deprivation and humiliation grew yearly stronger. Indeed, southern rage became institutional; all American politics from about 1830 to 1860 was calculated on the need to appease the southern bloc, which had already once, in the Nullification crisis of 1837, come close to secession.
It is the bitter, distorting fury of the south that seems to me mirrored, interestingly enough, in the attitudes of both parties today. I see this same sense of not recognizing the political landscape, of having had your country stolen from you, that emanates both from Democrats and from Republicans. They say as much: both a Michael Moore and a Michelle Malkin will say quite frankly, “The America that these people want is not the country I grew up in. It is not the country I know and love.”
And this rage seems to me diagnostic. It is my thesis that it is exactly to a semi-revolutionary process of this kind, and to the displacement it causes, that current Democrats and Republicans are reacting with such fury. The fierce hatred of many Republicans for the Clinton administration surprised and bewildered the rest of the world; only to give way to the equally bewildering hatred of Bush II among most of his opponents. It is my view that this is caused by a major genetic mutation that has struck both parties, and indeed much of American society.
The only real parallel – though one that does Bush II more honour than he honestly deserves – is with the murder of Lincoln. There has been no civil war, and, with any luck, there will be no violence of that kind; but there is a fundamental resemblance between our time and his. In my first essay I pointed out that the classic form of American politics, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats, lasted from the eighteen-fifties to the nineteen-sixties, when it began to alter out of recognition. In other words, then and now, the United States were at a stage of great political change, when new forces became focused in new formations. Even had there been no civil war, the Lincoln presidency would effectively have counted as a revolution – the first triumph of the party that was from then on to stand for the “republican” virtues of the leading classes of the country. But the forces that were losing in that historical change had seen the change coming, and had long made it clear that they would not tolerate it. Indeed, a friendly foreign observer, the French Count Agenor de Gasparin, saw the 1860 election as “the uprising of a great people” – the revolt of the American majority, indubitably Northern in manners and moral, against the blackmailing veto of the South, which, in his view, affected the country like a tyranny.
Of course, the south hardly saw it the same way. The south felt that the America they knew, the America they had wanted to belong to, was no longer the America in which they were forced to live. Within a human lifetime – Lincoln’s “fourscore and seven years” – the Union had gone from a grouping in which Virginia was the leading state and the south at least an equal partner, to one in which the south was being reduced to minority in numbers – as the count of states on either side showed in 1860 – and irrelevancy in business, where the growth of the industrial and agrarian north was answered by the apparition of a previously unknown southern poor white class.
The truth is that there were physical limits to the possible expansion of southern society; limits that corresponded to the area where slave labour could be profitably used. To the contrary, a “northern” kind of society could be set up anywhere, so long as there were no masses of slaves, and, indeed, few blacks altogether. The entry of Texas in the Union as a southern state was more than counterbalanced by the entry of California and Oregon – states that had nothing geographically to do with Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but that had no slaves and little need for any.
They reacted with rage. Their sense of disorientation, deprivation and humiliation grew yearly stronger. Indeed, southern rage became institutional; all American politics from about 1830 to 1860 was calculated on the need to appease the southern bloc, which had already once, in the Nullification crisis of 1837, come close to secession.
It is the bitter, distorting fury of the south that seems to me mirrored, interestingly enough, in the attitudes of both parties today. I see this same sense of not recognizing the political landscape, of having had your country stolen from you, that emanates both from Democrats and from Republicans. They say as much: both a Michael Moore and a Michelle Malkin will say quite frankly, “The America that these people want is not the country I grew up in. It is not the country I know and love.”
And this rage seems to me diagnostic. It is my thesis that it is exactly to a semi-revolutionary process of this kind, and to the displacement it causes, that current Democrats and Republicans are reacting with such fury. The fierce hatred of many Republicans for the Clinton administration surprised and bewildered the rest of the world; only to give way to the equally bewildering hatred of Bush II among most of his opponents. It is my view that this is caused by a major genetic mutation that has struck both parties, and indeed much of American society.
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Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2006-12-05 08:25 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2006-12-05 11:04 pm (UTC)I am not sure if this is true. Members of the arms bearing classes in European monarchies did not have the opinion that they could use them whenever it seemed right to them. The peers and nobles and armed freedmen bore weapons in their sovereign defense, and both in theory and in law, the use was not a matter of private opinion.
All that is going on here is that the Englishmen who founded America took the established right of free-born Englishmen to bear arms and prohibited the Congress of the general government from making any law to abridge the same. In effect, everyone in America is of the knightly class.
It is also alien to Enlightenment political theory to speak of the Second Amendment as an abdication of the State of its most basic right. We, the people, we are the state. The governments of the several states are merely our servants and administration, who serve for fixed periods of time, but at our pleasure. The general government is a federation of these several sovereign states. We, the people, can no more be said to have abdicated the exclusive right of violence than we can be said to have denied ourselves of the police power or the right to free speech. Our government is the opposite of a monarchy: our administration receives a grant of power to use on our behalf which comes from us. We are sovereign.
Considering the stability of our government over and above any government in Europe, with the possible exception of the English Monarchy, to chide us for violence seems a difficult proposition to maintain, unless you restrict your comments to a carefully sculpted period of years. The dynastic wars of France and England, the endless brutal fighting among the Italian city-states, the oppressions, wars, and Inquisitions of the Spanish Monarch do not speak favorably of restricting the use of arms to a special noble class. We have had one Civil War and one peaceful usurpation of power by FDR. New Hampshire has never fought Maine, despite the alleged "natural consequent" that we all think we have a right to use them "whenever it seems right".
Let us see what another brilliant Italian political theorist has to say on the matter:
"And experience has shown ... it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free."
This is Machiavelli, THE PRINCE, Chap 12, which I assume you read in grammar school. He goes on to speak of using mercenaries to fight for you as something which has brought Italy into slavery and contempt.
I assume the same sort of comments as apply to mercenaries would apply to a situation where we restricted the use of arms to special groups, the bodyguards of the rich and powerful, the military and the police. Having special cadres ruling over an unarmed population of plebeians (for, if they are unarmed, we cannot call them citizens) is something Machiavelli would not approve of.
Since your main point, which I think is very clear and well said, is to warn of the emergence of a new aristocracy among the United States, I ask you if matters would be better for us if the use of arms was restricted only to them and to their supporters? If guns were banned in the USA, whom do you think would have the power and prestige to get special permits to carry them, aside from the very wealthy and their bodyguards and sentries? Do you think all these new palaces being erected will go undefended?
I am asking a serious question. It is the Democrats here who usually back gun control, and the Republicans who usually back the NRA. This strikes me as one of the paradoxes similar to what you analyze here: restricting arms to the well-to-do should be a Republican scheme, and protecting poor blacks from predation by arming them should be a Democrat rallying point. Instead we see the opposite.
Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-01-01 08:13 pm (UTC)Machiavelli wrote in a time of catastrophe, as the states of Italy, which had been for centuries the cultural and economic heartland of Europe, were being ravaged and colonized by far less civilized but militarily far stronger enemies from across the mountains. Machiavelli himself had taken a leading part in the heroic last stand of the Florentine republic, which was destroyed by a (mercenary) imperial army; three years later, that same army stormed and destroyed Rome. Nothing on earth could have stopped that collapse: given that the King of France, the Emperor/Archduke of Austria/King of Bohemia and Hungary, and the King of Castile, could each raise more than a hundred thousand trained fighting men from their own resources, with the latest in cannon and weaponry, no Italian state or coalition of Italian states except Venice had the power to resist. Venice had two aces to play: its impregnable position in the swamps (as late as 1849 the victorious armies of Field-Marshal Radetzky were unable to storm the city and had to starve it into submission) and its tremendous naval strength. Even so, she had repeatedly to use both almost to destruction in its struggle to survive repeated French, German and Spanish assaults between 1505 and the early 1600s. Venice, strategically positioned and militarily strong, did not particularly need a citizen militia to survive; Florence, in spite of the heroic struggle of all its citizens in the grim year 1524, fell like a ripe apple.
Clearly, to argue that this is due to anything except relative force in arms is nonsense. But Machiavelli could not admit it, because he could not bring himself, a citizen of the noblest and loveliest town in the loveliest country in Europe, to admit that nothing but facts and balance of power had doomed Florence. His attitude, in fact, was pretty much that of modern Communists. Communism hasn't failed, comrades; it has just never been put to the test. The remedy to the failures of Communism is more and purer Communism. Just so, as Machiavelli insisted in believing, city militias had not failed to save Florence; they had just never been tried - not properly. A more thorough-going city militia, a more thoroughly trained populace, an even more extensively armed manhood, could have.... er, could it really have driven back the imperial hordes? Not really, but don't tell old Niccolo' that. He won't listen. And I have to add that his whole imagination of a superhumanly shrewd, all-conquering, never tired, never miscalculating, always betraying but never betrayed Prince was just another such fantasy - an attempt to imagine a way in which the catastrophe of Renaissance Italy could have been avoided. It is enough to say against it, that the most genuinely successful and - in the popular sense - machiavellian politician in history, Frederick II of Prussia, condemned Machiavelli's writings beyond appeal. Just by being a classically machiavellian plotter, he knew that the machiavellian image of the plotter is a fantasy.
I have a lot more to say about your post, but I wonder whether I will find the time. This whole "plague on both your houses" thing is becoming a plague in more than one sense.
Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 06:49 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 07:59 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 08:01 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 08:05 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 08:12 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-28 09:14 pm (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-29 12:01 am (UTC)Re: Gun Control and Assassinations
Date: 2007-04-29 07:44 am (UTC)