The 2020 Election

This post is about the Election. As with all my posts, it’s going to be pretty rambly. But I’m splitting this one into three sections to hopefully bring a bit more cohesion. Part I discusses my gut reaction to the election results and the sense of providence that I think was shattered by the outcome. Part II is about some of the specific outcomes that we saw from the returns, including a brief discussion of South Texas. Finally, Part III is my appraisal of the wider trends underlying the rise, and fall, of President Trump — and why I think we need to be deeply worried about our democracy.

Before I get into the meat of the post, I want to make two caveats. First, I’m not going to reference exit polling data from 2020 — there’s compelling reason to believe that those data are inaccurate and thus unhelpful for narrating the election results. Second, if this piece seems more rambly than the others, it’s because I’m still very muddled in my thinking, and I’d love for folks’ insight and critique.

I. On Providence in American Politics

“Don’t say you’re too tired to fight / It’s just a matter of time / Up there’s the finish line, / And run, and run, and run.”

—Taylor Swift, “Only the Young”

Among progressives, I think there was a sense that we’d have a moment of reckoning with this Election: that the protests for racial justice, that the energy among the young and people on the Left in organizing, that the polls showing consistent Biden leads, and that the shambolic handling of the pandemic in America would culminate in an election that strongly denounced the current Administration. I think this sense of providence goes back in the Democratic Party — I suspect the idea of a “post-racial” America had cachet not only among White conservatives but also White liberals who hoped Barack Obama could, indeed, usher in a time where “there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there is the United States of America.” Providentialism inheres in the idea of demographic destiny, that Republicans “will be hard-pressed to be competitive in national elections in a decade or two” merely because the proportion of the citizen voting-age population that is White is decreasing. And, indeed, it goes back in our national heritage. Tocqueville observed that in democratic societies, “the image of an ideal and always fugitive perfection is presented to the human mind.” Underlying the frenzied and manic behavior of Americans was a deep-seated faith in progress.

The danger with ideas of providence is that they lend themselves to a kind of apathy, since we believe the dawn of a new age is always upon us. To the providentialist, time, alone, will work wonders — the new age, ushered in by a young generation, will sweep away the shackles of the past to bring forth a better era. We may be stuck for a rough few years as we wait for that time to come, since we have a careening system designed to “refine . . . the public views” through representatives who “may best discern the true interest of their country” and avoid “sacrific[ing] it to temporary . . . considerations.” Tocqueville recalls talking to a sailor and asking him why American boats were poorly built. The response was that “the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily that the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years.” Better, in the American’s mind, to continue shoddily muddling along until we invariably reach the promised land.

Providentialism in politics, of course, is absurd. We know it’s absurd. Things don’t naturally improve without hard work and dedication. But Tocqueville’s Americans also recognized the absurdity of providence. In the America he witnessed — that frenetic society of bustling and hustling — there were, of course, failures, and setbacks, and retrogression. In the face of those failures, the American “understands only too well that a people or an individual however enlightened he may be, is not infallible.” But sometimes changes work. And in those moments, Tocqueville observed, the American “concludes from this that man in general is endowed with the indefinite faculty of perfecting himself. His reverses make him see that no one can flatter himself with having discovered the absolute good; his successes inflame him to pursue it without respite.” Tocqueville’s insight was that one could simultaneously face failure, often repeated, yet continue to hold a deep-seated faith in the fundamental goodness of the future. It’s that kind of enduring, almost absurd optimism that can lead Obama, who must have felt so personally shaken by the election of his successor and so relentlessly attacked during his time in office, to write: “I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America[.]”

But providence is not just absurd in the abstract. Our best understanding of our current politics suggests that it is deeply divided and rancorous; that people are so locked in their beliefs that our views on politics are no longer responsive to changing circumstance, even environmental shocks such as a pandemic; that we have become not only divided in terms of policy preference, but that we see each other as enemies to be beaten rather than fellow citizens with whom to deliberate. Numerous trends identified by political scientists should have suggested that this election would be close. We know our elections are highly nationalized, with high rates of partisan loyalty. We know that most people’s views of the President are baked in, and hence his approval ratings have been extremely stable. And we know that our politics are polarized not only in terms of ideology but also affect (i.e., that people dislike and fear the opposite party). All of those factors suggest that the amount of people willing to change their vote from 2016 ought to be miniscule.

The value of fundamentals-based elections forecasts and the political scientists’ long-view of the political order is that they help us bound our expectations. Polling data from this cycle were systematically off and very much underestimated support for the President, just as they did in 2016. And while I disagree with the idea that the polls are unhelpful — Nate Silver’s analysis is enlightening — I think I too readily bought the idea that polling errors were equally likely in either direction (i.e., that a Biden +12 outcome was just as likely as a Biden +4 outcome). One forecast based on fundamentals — that there’s an incumbent on the ticket who was relatively unpopular and who had a robust economy until the pandemic hit — suggested that Biden should’ve had something like a 60% chance of winning the Electoral College. The strength of negative polarization, similarly, ought to caution us against the possibility of landslides. Keeping those broader ideas in mind rather than being so caught up in the horse race, I think, would’ve helped me temper my dreams of flipping Texas or — more fantastically — Jaime Harrison or Amy McGrath taking seats in South Carolina and Kentucky.

To reject the providential view of our current politics requires a blunt recognition that our democracy is fragile and that our elections (and politics more broadly) will continue to be not just competitive but rancorously combative. The election was characterized broadly by continuity — very little seems to have changed in the electoral map. But let me spend a little bit of time thinking through two aspects of the contingencies in this election: one, the few things that did change; and two, how much we might attribute this to the figure of Trump versus the normal workings of partisanship.

II. Assessing the Change from 2016 to 2020

“The highest skill in forming dispositions is to be without form; formlessness is proof against the prying of the subtlest spy and the machinations of the wisest brain.”

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I think a useful place to start here is G. Elliott Morris’s map of counties and how much they changed between 2016 and 2020. At the top level, we’re seeing the intensification of a core trend from 2016: polarization based on place, so that the divides among rural, urban, and suburban voters really matter.

One interesting result is that we might be seeing a decline in racial polarization. If so, I think that would actually be a great boon to democracy. Perhaps the most important norm of democracy is the equal inclusion of all people within the polity, but we’ve seen over the last few decades a partisan disagreement over those questions, where the Republican Party has systematically attempted to make voting harder — to effectively disenfranchise Democratic-leaning groups, often disproportionately burdening racial minorities (especially Black Americans). Republican Party leaders are, I think, largely rational actors; they’re doing this not necessarily out of some malice, but rather, out of a strategic calculus that manipulating the terrain of the political battleground can enable seemingly legitimate victory despite the fundamentally anti-democratic action of intentionally trying to prevent their opponents from ejecting them from office. Insofar as Republicans begin to believe that they ought to try to compete for Black people’s votes rather than to try to disenfranchise them, depolarization could be a stabilizing force against democratic backsliding.

In terms of specific movement, it seems like really interesting changes happened in South Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. I won’t write about all of them, although here are some good things to look into: on organizing in Georgia, see here, and here; on Arizona, consider this piece on Native American organizers, this piece largely about Hispanic organizers, and this piece about Never Trumpers and John McCain’s legacy; I’ve also found UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative Twitter to have some helpful data for thinking through these races.

In South Texas, there were several heavily Hispanic counties that decisively broke for Trump. Clinton won Starr and Hidalgo counties by sixty and forty points — Biden won them by five and seventeen, respectively; Zapata County, going for Clinton by over thirty points in 2016, flipped to Trump, who got 52.5% of the vote. (Note that precinct-based analysis of the major cities in Texas suggest that Biden won the vast majority of Hispanic votes in the major cities in Texas.)

One way to think about this result is that it's a product of a growing urban/rural divide, or it’s a subset of divisions relating to religiosity or culture (e.g., guns). But that doesn’t seem to explain why these places especially seemed to flip compared to in 2016. The magnitude of the flip suggests we need a more contextual analysis.

One in-depth study of Hispanic political engagement in Texas was based on hundreds of long interviews with people, and it had a case study of the Rio Grande Valley that I found really interesting. The study found a few deeply ingrained ideas among its interviewees: a cynicism toward politics due to extensive corruption and a “compadrazgo” relationship among politicians, who all seem to have each other’s backs; a personalized politics, where candidates, not issues, matter (“particularly in Brownsville, they compared local races to high school elections, with people running based only on name and popularity”); and extreme poverty leading to a concern that politics simply doesn’t do anything for most people (81–84). Moreover, throughout Texas, they found Hispanic voters tended to have weak partisan and ideological identification, even among those who tended to vote consistently for a given party (4).

All of those signs suggest that many of these folks would be susceptible to moving en masse in different directions because: (1) they feel a sense of political efficacy associated with their vote (which the study found was heightened during the pandemic, because they felt like government materially affected their lives, see 5); and (2) there is a “kind of moral damage, a deeper, generalized public distrust that affects the way Latinos in [San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley] relate to politics” (77), paving the way to a populist appeal with few constraints based on prior political identification. One of the reasons why polling might have been systematically biased this cycle is due to differential willingness to respond to polls based on social trust; those with low social trust, the theory goes, skew toward Trump while being less likely to respond to calls (or, vice versa, energized liberals who trust our institutions were more willing to respond to polls). If so, I think we are liable to miss this kind of organizing by focusing on mass data rather than listening to community organizers who see and hear what goes on in the grassroots.

III. On Trump and Trumpism

“[O]ur political engagement is often a seething, partisan sort. A why-don’t-we-kidnap-the-governor-of-Michigan kind of engagement. People speak in the vapid vernacular of the partisan internet. We are quicker to see enemies than we are to see persuadable minds or future allies. We are a cynical bunch, not very sure that we ever had much in common in the first place.”

—Clare Malone, “How Trump Changed America”

I think the big question mark for me after the election was trying to figure out how to think about the results — should I be disappointed? elated? fearful? hopeful? I’m still not sure, but I think we shouldn’t overinterpret the result in terms of “73 million people support Donald Trump’s [insert bad characteristic].” Long-term trends suggest that the beliefs he advocates for, even if held by some of his supporters, are malleable, and that his support is largely attributable to partisan identification rather than support for him as an individual. Both ideas suggest that he could be replaceable by a normal Republican and many characteristics of the election would’ve been similar. That being said, I do think he has wreaked havoc on our constitutional order and that the blame is attributable to Republican elites who have failed to line up in defending our democracy.

I think at the top level, we can be relatively certain of three ideas: (1) many people, perhaps most, are not consistent ideologues, and partisan signals are extremely powerful for much of the electorate; (2) partisanship is a kind of social identity, which means imaginations of each party’s coalition have compelling effects on voting behavior independent of the party’s leadership; and (3) race is an important part of the story. Let me break each of those statements down.

Ideology and the Power of Partisanship. Empirical evidence suggests that higher awareness of politics correlates with higher issue consistency — that is, people who write and think about politics tend to be more coherently liberal or conservative across issues (e.g., Barber & Pope 2019, 41). But many people don’t think about politics that much. For them, electoral politics might be a once-every-few-years issue, since voting is their most obvious way of exercising power; or voting is a marginal activity, an aspect of good citizenship that ultimately bears little value personally or to the community (since an individual vote has a very low chance of mattering); or maybe they’re just disenchanted by the rancor in politics and thus disengage from even thinking about politics. This distinction in ideological coherence — what David Shor characterizes as the “single biggest way” that politicos are different from people who care less about politics — has two effects, I think.

First, it amplifies the power of partisanship. Experimental evidence suggests that for low-political-knowledge partisans, cues from political leaders are especially effective at swaying their views (Barber & Pope 2019, 45 fig. 2). That being said, there are contrary studies that argue that ideological distinctions do, in fact, undergird partisan differences. Steven Webster and Alan Abramowitz, in a 2017 paper, argued that partisans have become more ideologically homogeneous over time when measured by their responses to questions about social welfare (specifically, four questions: “government aid to Blacks, government versus private health insurance, government versus personal responsibility for jobs and living standards, and the tradeoff between government services and taxes,” 628). Webster and Abramowitz showed that views on social welfare correlate with “thermometer ratings” — basically, how “warmly” do a respondent feels toward a certain group — and thus argued that the rise in affective polarization (where partisans feel emotional distaste, or even hatred, for members of the other party) stems in part from ideological differences (see 632 tabl. 2; 634 tabl. 4; 638 tabl. 5). But Webster and Abramowitz measured a specific aspect of ideology rather than measuring someone’s views across policy questions. Even if it’s true that views on social welfare are more coherent over time, it’s not necessarily the case that other ideological views have fallen in line. And that matters because the external environment and political campaigns both work to selectively emphasize particular issue areas: emphasis on immigration, the pandemic, the economy, health care, racial justice, international relations, and so on, will vary based on the election cycle. So even if we can show certain ideological underpinnings of differences among partisans, I think the empirical evidence is still compelling that people on the whole are not ideologically cohesive and therefore are swayable by partisan appeals.

Second, I think the gap between the politico’s and everyday American’s views on politics means that we can get a very distorted view of politics by focusing on news or Twitter. Fundamentally, voting is an irrational behavior — people have minuscule probabilities of flipping an election, and while the margin of victory matters for how we think about an outcome (consider what this post would’ve looked like if Biden had won by 12 points!), an individual vote won’t shift that margin appreciably. I think people are driven to vote either by a kind of civic duty or because of social pressure. (Note that these two forces probably intersect — you likely feel stronger attachments to your civic duty to vote if everyone around you is doing it and you’re seeing consistent signals from your friends about the importance of voting!) If that’s correct, then it’s probably important to think through how people get pushed to vote, and by whom they’re induced to do so. If your pastor urges you to vote for Trump, and you’re a highly religious person who doesn’t follow politics much and isn’t a partisan, does it say all that much that you voted for Trump? Non-voters, I want to emphasize, certainly have views on politics; Tocqueville thought politics was our common language, and he marveled at how every American, in the time of an election, could speak like a parliamentarian about the issues of the day. Ask anyone on the street (even in the UK!) and they’ll have thoughts about President Trump, or President-elect Biden, or Obamacare. But that doesn’t mean they’re not persuadable, especially when they’re pushed to vote by a targeted prod.

In that sense, then, I suspect Biden would have been able to have a substantially larger margin if he simply did rallies and continued canvassing, rather than (responsibly!) avoiding traditional campaigning due to the pandemic. It also means that there are many channels — churches and WeChat group chats, 4chan and One America News — that traditional media and political scientists may only haphazardly be picking up on but that facilitate the mobilization and politicization of many folks. As campaigns get more sophisticated with targeted advertising and as our media fragments ever further (I did not expect, for example, the rise of an even more Trumpy television outlet than Fox News), I think traditional punditry will become more and more divorced from electoral outcomes because our social circles are simply more homogeneous, closed, and under-the-radar.

The upshot, then, is I think people’s votes are a largely ambiguous signal, that mobilization through the grassroots probably says more than ideological explanations about why Trump lost and yet Republican turnout was so high, and that many ideological undercurrents of our political debates can be shaped by partisan elites.

Partisanship as Social Identity. When we talk about how polarized our politics are, I think we tend to link that to a notion of gridlock — not just of policy stasis in Congress due to its inability to pass legislation, but also of partisan stasis, where people don’t move between parties. The Michigan School of partisanship, for example, says that party identification is a social and group-based phenomenon, and that one’s partisanship is stable and controls policy beliefs — as Lilliana Mason explains in Uncivil Disagreement, “partisans are inclined to cling to their own party, seeing it through rose-colored glasses. The real outcomes of government, and a person’s opinions about those outcomes, take a back seat to the central importance of seeing the inparty as better than the outparty. As long as the inparty is winning, partisans will have little motivation to stray” (54).

I think this oversells the stability of party coalitions; we do see appreciable movement between the parties, which suggests that party identification isn’t the only thing that matters in our politics. The obvious examples recently are the movement of the suburbs — especially highly educated White women living in the suburbs — into the Democratic Party, while non-college educated White people, especially those living in rural areas, have moved more appreciably into the Republican Party. Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, in White Backlash, similarly showed a broader movement of Whites into the Republican Party since the 1970s, which is traceable to opposition to unauthorized migration. But I think the bigger moving factor isn’t necessarily ideological (that would be roughly the Downsian School of partisanship — that people choose their party based on their values). Rather, party attachment is about the dynamics of who the party comprises. After all, the “party” itself does not exist materially; as Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood put it in a 2018 paper, “we cannot literally meet the party” (965). People instead hold stereotypes — usually wildly wrong — about the composition of the parties. Ahler and Sood found, for example, that Americans believed that 32% of Democrats are gay, lesbian, or bisexual (when only 6.3% were) and that 38% of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year (in contrast to 2.2%) (965). Moreover, they were able to show that the amount of bias in those estimates predicted animus toward the other party — and that an intervention informing people about the relative size of these coalitions can reduce such animus (975–76).

If Ahler and Sood are correct in this understanding of parties as imagined social coalitions, then partisan identification is a sliding scale based on how well our different social identities match with the party’s imagined identities. Mason and another colleague, for example, showed that the number of cross-cutting identities that a partisan holds affects how much he or she identifies with the party: a Republican who is non-White or non-Christian tends to be less attached to the Republican Party than a Republican who is both. The result: “[P]arty-group alliances drive people toward a broader sense of political identity that isn’t limited to any one issue or group, but inspires greater partisan loyalty among the most socially sorted partisans” (Mason & Wronski 2018, 260). Shifting perceptions of partisan coalitions, therefore, might be an important driver for actual movements in party identification.

There are a few implications of this theory. First, it suggests that media coverage will have a self-perpetuating effect on our politics. The more that we talk about suburban women moving to the Democratic Party, the more likely it is that we’ll see greater alignment of those groups moving forward. But it also means that we need to be watchful of media fragmentation — who are the audience for various media outlets (such as One America News, Fox News, or MSNBC) and how do they imagine the parties’ coalitions?

Second, this fragmentation should warn Democrats about their ability to maintain support among racial minorities. It’s not enough, in other words, that Democratic elites imagine themselves to be the party of the minority; it’s not enough to think that people will simply assume the Republican Party is a party of White nationalists; it’s not enough to believe that policy differences on, e.g., voting rights, healthcare, and income inequality are sufficient to deter people who would be harmed by those policies from voting for the Republican Party. When anchors of community begin to identify with a certain group, and when they spin the party in a certain way, that can easily shift folks’ imagination of the party — especially since many people are not strong partisans.

To be sure, we ought to be careful in thinking through who the “face” of the Republican Party and Democratic Party are. Barber and Pope (2019, 43) tested the effect of being told about President Trump’s views on various policies versus being told about Republican congressional leadership’s views, and they found that President Trump’s views were influential for Republicans but that Republican congressional leaders’ weren’t. I don’t think that evidence means that only the standard bearer (Biden or Trump) can shape people’s views of the party. Rather, I think it points to trust as the filtering mechanism for whether people are willing to listen and change their minds. Party leaders for partisans have that effect, but obviously so too will community leaders. That Republicans in Congress can’t shape those opinions is worrying from a constitutional perspective — our Constitution’s presidentialist system splits sovereignty and legitimacy between two elected branches, but this finding might suggest that only one of those branches (the President) commands meaningful legitimacy — but it doesn’t disprove the theory of partisanship as a social identity.

The Enduring Importance of Race. There’s compelling political science that demonstrates that racial resentment was a crucial sorting mechanism for whether White people voted for Clinton or Trump. For example, while education seems to be a strong factor splitting White voters in 2016 — those with college degrees broke for the Democratic nominee by 11 points more than they did in 2012, and those without college degrees broke for the Republican nominee by 12 points more in 2012 — Abramowitz and McCoy (2019) showed that the different in education is almost entirely explained by measures of White racial resentment (141 tabl. 1; 146 fig. 1). (If you’re interested, here’s the set of questions surveyors ask to measure racial resentment.)

To be sure, there is genuine resentment and mourning among people who support President Trump that I don’t think is simply because they’re racist. In part, I think that’s a counterproductive way of thinking about political opponents (not unlike the flag that some supporters of the President have been waving: “Fuck Your Feelings”). But also, I think the linkage of resentment to race doesn’t imply that contemporary White working-class resentment is reducible to race. Think back to Webster and Abramowitz’s claim that social welfare policies are both long-standing and fundamental to contemporary polarization (both ideological and affective). I think they’re right, in essence, that questions of distributive fairness matter, and that people do hold those ideas tightly. But I also think those ideas can be racialized even if they are also grounded in some more fundamental political theory.

For one, I think people’s self-image is tied to how much they see themselves as dependent on others or the state. The American ethos is that of the “frontiersman” — that mythic ideal of self-dependence, either by oneself or with one’s family, and surviving by the fruits of one’s labor on the frontier. It wasn’t that long ago that Obama spoke about how people “in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks . . . don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead — and they want to.” If Americans resist “socialism” today, it is, I think, because many do hold fundamentally that they ought to fend for themselves within reasonable bounds and that they don’t want “government handouts.” It is a kind of raw understanding of just outcomes, where one reaps what one sows. I don’t think that idea is simply a cover for racism; I think most Americans do genuinely hold those beliefs.

But people’s resentment about the failure of that American Dream can be tied to race. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land is illuminating in this respect. In that book, she repeatedly returns to the metaphor of “waiting in line” to help us understand the psychology of Tea Party Republicans in Louisiana. For the people she talked with — many of whom were of lower socio-economic status and were plagued by environmental disasters that have ruined a land they had lived on for generations — the American Dream was a very real idea: through hard work and self-dependence, one could find a better livelihood, and all the American Dream required was to wait in line. There’s a kind of providential aspect to this understanding of life — that our system is fundamentally just and will lead to just outcomes given enough time and hard work. Hochschild shows that these folks become resentful — they begin to feel like strangers in their own land — because they see others (immigrants, women, Black people) cutting in front of them rather than waiting for their fair share. This kind of sociological evidence is, of course, anecdotal. But I do believe that there’s something deeply correct in Hochschild’s analysis, a generalizable idea that helps us recognize why social welfare questions — distributional questions of resources in our society — are so tied to questions of race.

If this kind of economic resentment transcends, while being entwined with, race, then it enables us to see why economic resentment might be a powerful campaign mechanism for Republicans to reach voters of color — especially ones who feel left behind, like Hochschild’s White Louisianan Tea Partiers. In my view, and in I suspect many (White) Democratic Party elites’ views, there is a deep tension in the President’s willingness to embrace White nationalists and also his seeming capacity to have won people of color with higher margins than he did previously. I think the analytical flaw in that assessment is that the centrality of race in explaining politics doesn’t imply that race controls political behavior. Parties are filled with internal contradictions: the Republican Party of Mitt Romney, for example, had to balance the pro-business, libertarian-leaning, pro-immigration wing of the party with the cultural and social conservatives who wanted greater religious orthodoxy in politics and opposed globalization, and it did so for decades through a strategy of “fushionism.” Is it possible that racialized, even racist, appeals continue to be part of the Republican Party and that more people of color vote for that party? Yes, much in the same way that some 15% of Muslim voters supported Donald Trump’s candidacy, one that opened with calling for a ban of Muslims from traveling to the United States. We each hold a multiplicity of identities, and the relative importance of those different identities might help us understand why someone seems to “vote against their own interest.” (This also helps us understand the Mason and Wronski finding that the greater alignment one has between different identities and party identity implies stronger attachment to partisanship.) We must recognize the role that race plays in shaping people’s behavior without presupposing that race will determine the behavior of all Americans.

Those three factors — the power of partisanship as it interacts with ideology, the idea of partisanship as a social identity, and the role of race — are all structural dynamics far beyond the President himself. But their culmination enabled this President to torch important parts of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy rests on certain underlying values: the rule of law, the legitimacy of one’s opposition, the right of all members of the polity to equally participate in our system, a free press, mutually agreed upon truths, and so on.

Those values clearly aren’t sufficiently reinforced by the people, who are happy to cheer on the President when musing about imprisoning his political opponents, demonizing the press, or alleging without factual basis the pervasiveness of voter fraud to delegitimize the results of an election. But we shouldn’t have expected those liberal democratic values to be preserved by the people. Substantive victory — or even symbolic victory, divorced from policy outcomes — matters much more to people than the structural integrity of our constitutional order. Indeed, if the constitutional order is supposed to enable the opposition to win, and if the opposition is deemed to be evil, then why bother preserving this order?

A crucial purpose of a republican form of government is to enable stewards of the constitutional order to preserve its long-term stability in the face of democratic impulses that would serve to undermine the integrity of the system. This requires action on the part of political elites — a willingness to defend our constitutional order before it is lost. For, as Lieberman and colleagues note, “[w]hen politicians no longer observe such norms, the checks and balances of American political institutions are not self-executing” (2019, 475).

This is a point that is worth emphasizing. These last few weeks, and the next month, are times of immense danger for our democracy. The fundamental norm of democratic governance is that we believe in the legitimacy of elections and safeguard the transfer of power. The President has long signaled that he was skeptical of the legitimacy of elections — we should remember that he discounted the legitimacy of an election that he won in 2016, falsely claiming that millions of people voted illegally against him — and now is trying to refuse an orderly transition to the President-elect. I am hopeful that our institutions will hold. Courts have almost uniformly, for example, rejected the President’s borderline-frivolous lawsuits. But the greater the proportion of people who listen to him — and the more that Republican leadership enables him — the higher the risk of elections-related violence and long-term harm to the stability of our constitutional order. We aren’t going to see meaningful solutions on this front from the people; we’re too divided, too comfortable with constant lies, to be able to distinguish reality from illusion. The corollary is that we will continue to enable leaders who shirk fundamental democratic norms if they become party nominees.

Where do we go from here? The path forward, I think, rests almost exclusively in the hands of the political parties. Democratic governance rests on responsible party elites, and those elites need to consider their allegiance to fundamental democratic tenets. The Democratic Party has for the most part held the line, but it needs to resist calls for prosecution of Donald Trump after he leaves office and other such retributive policies. The demonization of political opponents enables cascading deleterious effects, and the Democratic Party must resist going up the escalation ladder. And even more, the Republican Party needs to clean house. Party elites must focus on cultivating leadership that respects democratic traditions, and they must channel their voters’ discontent toward substantive rather than procedural questions.

To be sure, one might say that the Republican Primary in 2016 demonstrated that the party tried and failed to be a responsible gate keeper. (Remember how Lindsey Graham once told Trump to “go to hell” and that Trump was “not fit to be President”?) The conventional logic today is that Trump activated tapped into a dormant authoritarianism (see, e.g., MacWilliams 2016, 719 fig. 1) — that people who seek authority and order, and who dislike diversity and “the other,” rose up to back Trump over the other Republican candidates. The thesis of the authoritarian voter theory is that threats activate latent authoritarianism; it is no accident, then, that Trump arose when fears of terrorism in the United States were at their highest point since September 11. The evidence is, I think, convincing but not sufficient. For example, we might expect latent authoritarianism to also be at their height during a pandemic — yet we have evidence that conservatives fear the pandemic less than liberals do (see Conway et al. 2020 [working paper]). I suspect two stories can help bring these two logics together. First, authoritarianism might differentiate among Republicans, but between Republicans, Democrats, and independents, party identification may be the bigger explanation for why people vote the way they do. Second, threat perception is malleable; a trusted source can prime whether a threat is, in fact, a legitimate one. Here too, then, a responsible elite apparatus might be able to channel latent authoritarianism in favor of non-system-destructive ends.

Julia Azari and Marc Hetherington wrote in a 2016 paper about the parallels between that election and the election of 1896 — how these both seem to be times of enduring partisan loyalty and highly competitive elections characterized by national policy issues. They showed how rising populism in the Democratic Party — reaching its height under William Jennings Bryan, the party’s nominee in the presidential election — eventually became diffused into intra-party fights: “The lesson of the populist-progressive period is that when political conflict between the parties becomes polarized, the same polarizing issues tend to become divisive within parties as well” (107). With the rise of the Progressive movement, both the Democratic Party and Republican Party eventually aligned on various policy questions about, for example, the desirability of trust-busting and greater governmental regulation of the economy. Jill Lepore’s These Truths quotes Woodrow Wilson: “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is” (365). If the past is an indication of what’s to come, then we’d also expect populism to be the shock to our party system. My hope is that the parties adjust together, as they did in the early twentieth century, to fold in those forces in favor of a greater redistributive politics. My gut is that antitrust litigation, especially regarding big technology companies, progressive taxation, infrastructure investment, and nationalist trade policy must be the tools for realigning populism to be less democratically destructive. Such populism might, in turn, help salve the kind of resentment that has led to and continues to enable Trumpism.

* * * * *

Rose: My flatmate and I went to a Chinese supermarket for the first time the other day, and it was quite a glorious experience. We found onions that weighed 0.8 kgs!

Goodies from the Chinese Supermarket

I also got to call and hang out with various old and new friends this last week, which was a fun time (and a welcome respite from the rest of my life this last week-and-a-half, which has been essentially reading and writing for class, for this blog, and for the letters on The Art of War). Here are some pictures from those walks.

Angel at Night (1)

Angel at Night (2)

Always Look Up in London

The Canal at Sunset

Very Color, Much Building, Wow

Street Art!

Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft

A Rock Garden

Always Look Up in London

Baked Bread!

Trees

Islington Town Hall

Bud: I have to choose where I’m going to be next year soon, so it’ll be exciting to look at the options! Also, the flat just ordered a new shipment of books for our next letters/various reading groups, which are exciting. The next books, after Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, are DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women. Plus Obama’s book will be out soon, and it’ll be fascinating to read that.

Thorn: Rising COVID rates in the U.S. are terrifying — stay safe and diligent, y’all!

Potential Future Topics:

* Behavioral economics and its way of thinking about human nature.

Roses, Buds, and Thorns

I don’t have a thematic post today — I think I’ll want to write about the election but I want to be mindful that quick takes before a full count is in can be very dubious. Better to wait at least another week, I think, before trying to write the “narrative” (if such a concept is even coherent) of the election. So instead, I figure I’ll write an extended rose/bud/thorn this week. Plus, you’ll get an extra thematic post sometime this week (see below about “Letters”).

* * * * *

Roses:

Last Friday afternoon, I got to meet another Marshall in London, and we explored the Camden Market area and then walked to Regent’s Park. (Turns out it’s a really cool part of town — very bustling, filled with art and life, right along a canal.) I’ve found meeting other Marshalls to be a uniformly positive experience: everyone is fascinating, and insightful, and passionate, and easy to talk to, and a bit intimidating. But I came away from that Friday afternoon with that rare feeling that I had found a really good person, someone who really deeply thought about how to be good and how to live a good life and who also lived it accordingly.

I’ve been thinking over this last week, off-and-on, about what made her leave such a strong impression. I’m not sure I have a good answer, but there were certain aspects of how she spoke (and what she spoke about) that were striking: she was measured when talking about others but firm (perhaps even strict) when reflecting on her own experiences; she articulated strong moral principles and asked probing, maybe even pointed, questions about their application to my decisions, but I never felt judged or under duress; she was blunt about humans’ capacity to be good, but she wasn’t defeatist and, indeed, had helpful and functional thoughts about how to deal with those shortcomings; she was genuine and open about her own vices but simultaneously showed a kind of gratitude in explaining how others help hold her to account for those vices. It’s not often, I think, that you meet someone for the first time and yet end up reflecting on the importance of grace, the dangers of pride, or our capacity for dishonesty.

I think a downside of spending a lot of time meeting people is that the conversations can tend to be impersonal, in that you might discuss academic ideas or reflections on the place around you (“so how about that rain storm, huh?”). But, to make the point stronger, I think when you discuss yourself in these circumstances, you tend to do so in a facial way — a kind of outward-facing self-reflection that enables (self-)deception, for the listener doesn’t know you and, out of politeness, wouldn’t want to contradict your portrayal of yourself. There’s a way in which these kinds of meetings feel like interviews — “so what’s your passion?”; “tell me about what you’re studying?” — which, like personal statements, encapsulate who you are but only in the ways you want to reveal. You sand the rough edges, smoothing out your personality to be more appealing and interesting and good, rather than reveling in their jaggedness. I don’t think these kinds of meetings are bad; I’m actually very grateful for the opportunity to meet new people, whether Marshalls, LSE folks, or otherwise. But it is a special kind of interaction, where you’re usually wearing some kind of mask. It’s a special experience to meet someone who doesn’t seem to be wearing that mask and whose true colors nevertheless seem profoundly good. Here are some pictures I took from our walk.

Regent's Park

'MURICA in London

Regent's Park Birds

The next day was Halloween, a holiday that, it turns out, is really big in the UK as well as the United States. I didn’t do any trick-or-treating (both because COVID and because I’m boring), but the Physics Department at Pomona did do a cute get together where alumni were invited. It was a wonderful experience to get to see so many folks again and to hear how Zoom University is going. I also think it was a helpful reminder about the nature of community and roots in a time of the Internet. There is an idea in The Discourse at Pomona where we say that students are necessarily transitory and so the only enduring entities at the College are faculty and some staff. Campus politics, at least among students, become riddled by this odd process of collective forgetting, where older students pass down impressions to younger students (“[x administrator] sucks and doesn’t care about [y group]”; “[z institution] systematically fails students”) and leave them with some kind of gut, emotive bias without a more holistic factual basis for what actually happened. I also think that students involved in campus politics might feel more willing to engage in scorched-earth tactics by the sense that they are transitory — that they’ll leave soon and, as such, do not feel obligated as repeat players to employ the kind of forbearance that you see among faculty in intra-departmental politics. The Halloween event (“Phalloween”) helped remind me that the question whether one becomes transitory is one determined by decisions, not metaphysical law. For community-building and root-maintaining is more about time and commitment than it is about physical space or proximity. That’s, I think, both the magic and downside of a Zoom-based social life; it exposes to us just how much is in our control and thus how much is our responsibility.

I was initially planning on going to Cambridge to visit a few friends on Thursday (yesterday), but with the announcement of a lockdown in England, I moved the trip up to Tuesday. I think it was a good decision, in that it helped distract me from doom-scrolling through Twitter all day on Election Day (before any votes would be coming in!). But more importantly, it was an amazing time to get to see my friends in person. They’re both at Churchill College in Cambridge, so they showed me around the premises, and we also walked around downtown. It turns out there’s a graveyard right by their houses, so we explored that space — and ran into the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein! We also got some good Italian food, which was very heart-warming (figuratively, since I was hungry and got to enjoy the food with good friends, and literally, since I was very cold), saw a beautiful rainbow, and walked by some beautiful buildings. Plus, I got a funny picture of my friend with a pumpkin she carved.

A Picture of Taking a Picture

Bernie 2016??

Architecture of Cambridge (1)

LSE at Cambridge in the 1940s

Architecture of Cambridge (2)

Architecture of Cambridge (3)

A Friend and Her Pumpkin

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Grave

Sculpture at Churchill College

The River Cam

Architecture of Cambridge (4)

Me at King's Cross

King's Cross

Happy Friends with Food

Selfie Along the River

Buds:

I’m hopeful that we’ll have a peaceful resolution to the election and an orderly transition of power (since it looks likely that Biden will win Pennsylvania, if not also Nevada and Georgia, at the time I’m writing this). I’m grateful that Election Day itself seemed to go by without any violence (honestly a bit of a surprise, given that there were meaningful indications of potential violence). Our elections administration system is dysfunctionally decentralized at times, but one of the benefits of this splintering of power is that it’s very, very hard to imagine how an individual (e.g., the President of the United States) could “rig” the election. (Rick Hasen tweeted something similar to this sentiment earlier today; if you aren’t already following him on Twitter or Election Law Blog, I would definitely recommend him.)

Also, in response to lockdown and because my flatmate and I are nerds, we’re going to write posts that I’m calling “Letters.” The idea is that we’ll read a book each week and then write a series of letters to each other about it. I think this will shape up to be somewhat similar to my thematic blog posts, which have been fairly centered on specific readings. Our first book is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and next week’s will be Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

Going into lockdown isn’t the most exciting of things, but I think it’s really important given how poorly England, especially, is doing with COVID. But there are bright sides to lockdown. For one, under our lockdown rules, we’re allowed to go to parks with up to one other person from outside our household. So, in other words, I get a nice justification to do one-on-one meetings with friends in parks, and that’ll be fun! Additionally, our flat will be making fun (perhaps terrible-for-your-health) foods under lockdown. I’ll be trying to make sandwich bread later today, and we’ll try making an apple pie and grilled cheese donuts (will they be disgusting? amazing? who knows!) soon.

Thorns:

My first thorn, of course, is Miami-Dade County and the pains of watching Florida (and also election night generally). The UK is five hours ahead of the East Coast, and so we had to stay up pretty late before numbers even began coming in. (The unfortunate reality is that we also spend many of our daylight hours refreshing the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight without any updates.) The election has also just made it difficult to concentrate on anything else, which is why this post is coming late. The lucky coincidence is my reading week was this week, so I didn’t get hurt in school by these shenanigans.

Another thorn is that our third flatmate left for India on Tuesday to go home for the holidays (translation: all of November and December). The flat feels emptier and quieter as a result, which is especially unfortunate because we’ll also have social activities become much more limited under lockdown.

Potential future topics:

* What is culture, is it a helpful concept, and what might I think of as my own culture? I’m thinking of these questions because of Patrick Deneen’s critique, in Why Liberalism Failed, of how liberalism breeds an anti-culture and also conversations we had in our BLM reading group about whether the concept of “white culture” is coherent and/or unhelpful.

* Should we be worried about rational choice theory or political psychology and the ways that those theories might naturalize ideas about, say, human self-interestedness or inherent group-based tension?

* Is election forecasting useful? Is it good for democracy?

The Human and The Presidency

A newly crowned Queen Elizabeth confronted a legal dilemma in a 1561 case called the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster. Years ago, a young King Edward VI — crowned at nine and dead by fifteen — had leased the Duchy of Lancaster. But at common law, the leasing of land requires one to be of age (specifically, twenty one). So was Queen Elizabeth bound by the lease, or could she void it “by reason of his nonage”?

The judges who were assembled at Serjeant’s Inn were unanimous: Queen Elizabeth was bound by that lease. For the King “has in him two bodies,” a “body natural” and a “body politic.” They explained that the body natural is “a body mortal, subject to all infirmities that come by nature of accident, to the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects” that afflict all humans. But the body politic is different. It is an ethereal entity — it “cannot be seen or handled” — but it comprises “policy and government,” and it is “constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public-weal . . . .” The body politic is “utterly void” of the afflictions of human bodies — of age, illness, or other “imbecilities” — and so what the King performs through his body politic “cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body.”

What is the interplay between these bodies? An individual might inherit land, and then, after being crowned King, might inherit an estate by virtue of the Crown. Are those inheritances separate? No. For “to this natural body is conjoined [the King’s] body politic, . . . and the body politic includes the body natural, but the body natural is the lesser, and with this the body politic is consolidated.” As a legal matter, the body natural becomes “indivisible” from the body politic; the dignity, estate, and sovereignty of the King is bound to the person of the King. Any actions regarding, say, the land of the individual King becomes linked to the Crown by that conjoining of the two bodies. But, despite what the judges told Queen Elizabeth, the tying of the bodies could never be so stable or simple. For example, can a King’s actions — those of his body natural — end up being opposed to the interest of the monarchy, the body politic? In the seventeenth century English Civil War, as Daphna Renan explains, this was the argument: that Charles I had engaged in high treason, but that the separation of his head from his body natural could heal the body politic of the monarchy. The bringing together of the King’s two bodies was an unstable equilibrium. We don’t have kings in America today, but Renan shows that we are still plagued by the instability of this legal construct.

Consider, to borrow an example from David Runciman, the modern nation state and its ability to borrow money. Our political leaders — our Executive Branch officials or Congresspersons — could never pay back the trillions of dollars we owe. For there isn’t a real sense in which we owe that money. It is the American state that “owes” the money. Particular people — Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, John Roberts — may represent the state at times, but they are at best manifestations of the state, and their combined bodies cannot perform that which the state can (their combined wealth would make an unnoticeable dent in the national debt). Their bodies natural are not conjoined to the body politic of the state, even as the body politic continues to be able to deal in land, and property, and money, and coercion.

To become a political leader, therefore, is to live a dual life, one that constantly feels the tension between the person and the office, the human body and the institutional body. The institutional body is something that is beyond human bounds; we think of the state as something enduring long after everyone in a government has died. James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris, and so on, brought the American state into being. Their deaths hundreds of years ago did not coincide with the end of the state. The state is some kind of machine that endures, and it is capable of great things: waging war, borrowing of debt, commandeering people’s liberty in times of pandemic, and so on. These are inhuman capabilities facilitated by an inhuman body, and they are what we commonly think of as “policy.”

In contrast, the political leader’s body is a human one: it needs food, water, shelter, affection, security, and so on. It is fragile and transient, irrational and emotional, insecure and prone to error. Yet it is through this fragile body that the power of the state is manifested.

As we close in on Election Day, almost all I can do is think about the presidential election. Tocqueville observed two hundred years ago that “feverish state” that Americans fall into, where the election is “the goal of all reasoning, the object of all thoughts, the sole interest of the present.” So, naturally, this post is about the election. And while I normally think about politics in terms of policy and major “issues” — the Supreme Court, racial justice, economic inequality, and so on — I want to spend this post thinking a bit about the body natural: the person of the President.

Why think about politics — and in particular, the Presidency — in terms of the person rather than the policy? I suspect most readers will feel two ways about the question: either it is trivial (i.e., of course we think about the candidate over their vacuous policy platform), or it is absurd.

For those who think it’s an absurd question, politics is about policy — the workings of the large, churning machine of the state. Politics is the means for creating the change (or continuity) that we would like to see in our world. Our political institutions, in James Wallner’s terms, are factories — lines of production. We elect certain leaders to achieve certain ends. Who they are, where they come from, and why they act become irrelevant. I still tend to think of politics in this way, and I suspect more and more people are thinking this way. As we grow more cynical in our leaders, our natural tendency, I think, is to focus more on the ends of politics, not their means. Choosing between two morally compromised people as if it were a meaningful choice between leaders, you might say, is farcical; your only choice is to hold your nose, voting for someone who at least represents a policy choice closer to your ideal than someone further.

To address that critique, we might start with an internal critique: the person of the President matters for achieving those policy goals. In other words, we should question the means-ends relationship. I recently read Hind Swaraj, and so Gandhi has been on mind (and he’ll flit throughout this piece). Gandhi thought the production-line understanding of politics was a deeply corrupt way of thinking about both life and politics, which he saw as coincident, because he thought it was self defeating: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.” To compromise on means is to compromise one’s ends.

Consider the personality of the President. Barack Obama, the constitutional law professor, made his administration an incredibly legalistic enterprise. (For two great pieces on this, consult Daphna Renan’s “The Law Presidents Make” and Oona Hathaway’s “National Security Lawyering in the Post-War Era”; Charlie Savage’s Power Wars also narrates the internal dynamics in the Obama Administration.) Lyndon Johnson, the towering Texan and seasoned veteran of legislative politics, shepherded through some of the most profound pieces of legislation in American history. And Donald Trump, the reality TV star whose fame derives from firing people, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, has headed a shambolic administration whose political goals have more often been thwarted by its own incompetence than by constraints from checks and balances.

But there are limits to that internal critique. It’s very hard for most people to know whether a candidate will be a good manager, or an adept leader, or any other list of characteristics that may enable or constrain a given President. So that understanding of the “personal” aspect of the Presidency is, I think, incomplete for guiding how we ought to think about the President.

The external and more fundamental critique says we ought to care about who the President is for two, non-policy reasons. First, he or she represents us individually. If you are an American, the President is your Chief Executive, and his or her actions will reflect on you as a person. As a leader, we expect the President to be among the most virtuous and best of our people purely because his or her election depends on our acquiescence, and we want to be aligned with moral people. Second, the President is the embodiment of the nation, which means his or her election ought to reflect our highest ideals as a people. The President’s conduct brings shame or pride to all Americans for that reason. The President’s power purports to derive from the people, and so the President’s actions reflect, poorly or favorably, on the people.

These are modern ideals of representation that, at least according to David Runciman, date to Hobbes, who saw modern states as characterized by a doubleness: sovereignty inheres exclusively neither in the King (Machiavelli’s principality) nor in the people (Machiavelli’s republics), but in both simultaneously — the people give the state power, but the people are subject to and governed by the state as well. Note that this idea of representation, I think, goes against what we intuitively think about American politics. Our Constitution declares that “We the People” give to the state “our” consent, forming the social contract that legitimizes the state. If our state is a self-identified republic, then we might think our state is not what Hobbes would have thought of as a modern state. If we want to think in terms of principal-agent problems (A tells B what to do, how does A ensure that B does it correctly?), then the people are the principal, and the state the agent. Yet the state certainly exercises dominion over us: it can throw us in prison and deny us liberty; it can tell us to shelter at home, wear a mask, and distance ourselves from our companions; it can kill us mercilessly in the name of law and order. In the exercise of the state’s raw coercive power, can we really say that we are the principal to the state’s agent? That, at least, is the Hobbesian view of the modern state: the state and the people are simultaneously both principals and agents. Both, and neither, rule.

We don’t have to accept this philosophy of representation. Here, I want to return to Gandhi, who thought that representation got things backward. The question of politics shouldn’t be concerned with principals and agents, for Gandhi, but with the self; to cultivate a healthy politics requires self-discipline. Swaraj, in the Gandhian sense, meant self-rule in two ways: rule over the self (the individual) in addition to rule over the collective (the nation, here, India).

Consider Gandhi’s critique of the British Parliament. Gandhi says that Parliament is incapable of doing anything good on its own, for its members “are hypocritical and selfish. Each thinks of his own little interest.” It is a space of much talk and little communication, a kind of theater devoid of substance: “Sometimes the members talk away until the listeners are disgusted[,]” and yet after all that conversation, “[m]embers vote for their party without a thought.” Moreover, because Parliament is dominated by parties, it is lacking in long-term leadership; it is “without a real master” and, instead, led only by Prime Ministers who care about their own parties and their own successes. Such leaders “cannot be considered really patriotic. . . . I do not hesitate to say that they have neither real honesty nor a living conscience.”

Gandhi traces all of these problems to structural factors in British politics. He sees the British public as beholden to partisan newspapers that are “often dishonest[,]” giving a kind of whimsical nature to British politics: the views of the people “swing like the pendulum of a clock and are never steadfast.” Parliament reflects, rather than leading, the people in this sense: “As are the people, so is their Parliament.” Gandhi sees the British as basically good people — indeed, his philosophy requires him to assume that people are basically good — but ones who have been corrupted by what he calls “modern civilisation,” which pushes people to “make bodily welfare the object of life.”

Modern civilization for Gandhi — really, Western post-industrial culture — “takes note neither of morality nor of religion[,]” and, indeed, deceives its adherents to believe that immorality is in fact morality. It is a culture built on automation and machines, and thus production and labor; where we are taught to have rights but not duties; and which glorifies splendor and gluttony over ethics and religion. Thus, for Gandhi, the ills of Parliament are the ills of the people, exacerbated by their acquiescence to modern civilization. And, indeed, in multiple parts of Hind Swaraj, he describes modern civilization as a kind of disease. The solution is a self-administered medicine, a disciplining of the body and of the mind that can enable a more virtuous and ethical politics. That medicine must start with the people: “Real home rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people. Any other rule is foreign rule [ku-raj in the Gujarati text, translated in my copy as “misrule”].”

Gandhi, as is well known, advocates for strict adherence to four traditional moral virtues to be a passive resister “for the service of the country”: one must “observe perfect chastity, adopt poverty, follow truth, and cultivate fearlessness.” Note that by identifying these personal moral virtues as prerequisites to public service, Gandhi implies that civic leadership requires self-cultivation. We would be self-deceived to think that changing Parliament is enough. We must, and can only, change ourselves. For Gandhi, the locus of power is always in the self: he says that the “key to self-rule or home-rule” is that a fully empowered person cannot be “enslave[d]” by the tyranny of unjust laws, for that person can always disobey the law and accept its consequences; he says India was under British rule not because England took India, but because “we have given it to them” (!). He is at once profoundly optimistic about the power of individuals and extremist about his understanding of responsibility, in a way that we might today characterize as victim blaming.

Gandhi errs, I think, in two ways with this analysis. First, I think Gandhi puts too much faith in a kind of root-cause analysis; though it is certainly true that the mores of the people affect their representatives, the direction is not wholly unidirectional. The Marxist perspective, for example, might consider Gandhi’s indictment of the press as an example of how bourgeois society can habituate the masses and enable elite control over the judgment of the people. The causal arrow, in other words, is not necessarily only from the people to the representatives, even as there is no doubt some truth to his argument.

Gandhi’s response, of course, would be that the ability of the press, or of politicians, to shape the people’s mind is a product of modern civilization: its machinery that enables mass production of newspapers, its heightened pace of politics that prevents people from really contemplating and understanding the big questions the state deals with, and so on. The rightly trained person, for Gandhi — and that doesn’t mean the formally educated ones, for whom Gandhi shows a kind of populist disdain (“A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. . . . He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters?”) — can see through the lies of newspapers and politicians.

The response is, I think, telling about the limits of Gandhian politics, and brings me to my second critique — that Gandhian politics asks, and expects, too much of humans. On its face, its optimism about the determinacy of religion suggests that if we were just moral enough, if we were sufficiently able to actualize swaraj, then we would no longer have falsehoods, and our parliaments would facilitate substantive debates. This view of religion denies the social nature of our truths — how most of us cannot know about the validity of the dangers of Covid-19, or the legitimacy of our elections, or even the roundness of the earth, absent trust in and connection with others. Swaraj can be translated not only as self-rule but also home rule, a fitting parallel to American home rule movements in the early twentieth century given that both called for decentralization of power to local government. For Gandhi, the more we can do with our own hands and our own feet, the more we can see the truth and live a moral, good life. This kind of decentralization is important but insufficient to respond to the bigness of our current age: not just the size of the American state, but of multinational corporations and systems of connection that tie the world together. Gandhi might be a luddite; he spends substantial parts of Hind Swaraj critiquing railroads for leading our imagination away from our local circumstances. But the genie is out of the bottle, and the truths we need (and that we grapple with today) cannot be found through the work of our hands, feet, and eyes. We cannot engage in politics without the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or Breitbart, even as Gandhi would say that all three are filled with liars and cheats.

More fundamentally, then, Gandhian politics sees our politics as a disease to be gotten rid of, for it all stems from an original sin — a displacement of ethics in favor of consumption at the core of “modern civilisation.” To recenter ethics requires uncompromising self-rule. Before we fix our politics, we must fix ourselves. But in fixing ourselves, Gandhi, as George Orwell once observed, effectively attempts to make us inhuman: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”

In thinking about the politics of representation, Gandhi calls our attention to the interlocking nature of an ethical people and its leaders. For progressives who despise Donald Trump, Gandhi would require us to think through not why the figure of Trump is bad, or evil, or incompetent, but why we — and Gandhi would have blamed all of us — have enabled Trump. Gandhi might think of removing Trump in the same way that he views doctors — as treating merely symptoms and, in so doing, enabling us to leave untreated the disease of the soul: “I have indulged in vice. I contract a disease, a doctor cures me, the odds are that I shall repeat the vice. Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice, and would have become happy.”

Such an analysis, as I have hinted at earlier, ignores the ways in which Trump has inflamed many vices of our people — how he has openly flitted with white supremacists and trampled on norms of good governance, both of which degrade the moral sensibilities of our people, too. Gandhi’s critique of the modern state thus doesn’t sufficiently grapple with its duality — how it not only derives legitimacy from the people, but shapes what the people see as legitimate (and thus how they conduct themselves).

The second way in which Gandhian politics fails — how its emphasis on swaraj would render us inhuman — is also, I think, evident in what I have suggested is the Gandhian critique of Trump. If We the People are diseased by “modern civilisation” and have therefore abandoned our ethical duties as the rightful foundation of our politics, then we have abandoned what it means to be human. For Gandhi, we should recall, believes that humans are naturally good and virtuous — that our corruption derives from the disease of modern civilization. Yet his solution of swaraj would be also to pervert our essential humanity, and, in this sense, I think Trumpian politics are not unlike Gandhian politics.

That sentence is, I think, an inflammatory one. Let me try to justify it, both to you and myself (since, to be honest, I’m not sure I fully believe it).

There are many ways to cut up and narrate this upcoming election, but I want to think through a particularly powerful image: that of Hunter Biden being kissed by his father. There are core aspects of our human bodies that, I have suggested earlier, include yearning for affection and recognizing our vulnerability. In Judith Butler’s framework, we might emphasize the precarity of our existence and thus our dependence on social structures, be it family, friends, the state, the market, or so on. The picture of the Bidens, in that sense, is intimately human; it is exposed, vulnerable, and emotional. It is in line with a broader narrative about Joe Biden: that he is a fundamentally decent person, that he is a family man, that he has dealt with immense tragedy, and that he has dedicated his life to public service. That narrative, I want to suggest, is premised on a single proposition — that Biden is, deep down, a normal person, a precarious human.

In Gandhian politics, even these kinds of familial attachments must be released: “Those alone can follow the path of passive resistance who are free from fear, whether as to their possessions, false honour, their relatives, the government, bodily injuries, death.” In his autobiography, Gandhi writes, “I am of opinion that all exclusive intimacies are to be avoided; for man takes in vice far more readily than virtue. And he who would be friends with God must remain alone, or make the whole world his friend.” This is, of course, an inhuman argument, one that greatly troubled Orwell, who thought Gandhian politics was not just absurd but abhorrent: “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.” The kind of unconditional love that Biden shows his son, thus, is not just deeply human, but it is too attached — too human — for Gandhi.

In a two-party system, campaigns and pundits alike often pit the two sides as opposite — cosmopolitan or nationalist, progressive or traditionalist, race-conscious or color-blind, and so on. It is tempting, especially for those of us who oppose Trump, to read the Biden narrative in strict juxtaposition with Trump — to contrast Biden’s decency with Trump’s indecency. (And, indeed, some of the responses to the original tweet from John Cardillo do that by posting pictures of Trump touching Ivanka Trump in ostensibly improper ways.)

But I think such a simple view elides something deeper about Trump’s image. Trump’s image does not portray him as an indecent human. It’s that he is imagined to be inhuman, that he has fully identified with and taken grasp of the awesome powers of the state. If our understanding of the modern state is that politicians have a dual identity between the human and the machine, then Biden’s identity is the human, while Trump’s identity is the machine.

Let me point to four pieces of evidence to substantiate this claim. First, we might think about his overarching campaign rhetoric — “Make America Great Again” or “Drain the Swamp.” Trump’s claim is that he will remake the American state in his image: a mighty, independent capitalist. And I mean capitalist strictly; market competition is imagined to be a deeply inhuman enterprise, in the sense that it is ruthless, cut-throat, and rational, in contrast to our human tendencies to show compassion, to collaborate, and to be emotional. If Trump was elected to remake the state in his image, then is it surprising that we elected a man who is essentially inhuman — a machine who made his fame by firing people and stoking anger, rather than appealing to others’ humanity? Trump represents a politics that connects the man with the machine, the President with the Presidency. To be a machine is to be undeterred by criticisms of the Fake News, to be unwilling to bend to standards of Political Correctness, to be irreverent of governmental norms. It is to be ruthlessly focused on achieving specific goals, like the machine learning algorithm given a single optimization criterion. For nothing else matters. “Democrat” states that voted against him are of no use to him. Cabinet secretaries and generals who resist him must be forced out of his branch. All of that is the swamp, and the only way it can be properly drained — and America’s greatness remade — is to have a machine that is unwilling to be deterred by human restraints. This is exactly how David Runciman describes the Machiavellian understanding of a principality, where the state coincides with the figure of the King: the King thus views “his state as his estate, as his possession, as a kind of property.” It is the King with two bodies inextricably bound in one. And to be an effective King, we all know Machiavelli said, was to be ruthless and feared — to be, in other words, inhuman.

Second, I think Trump’s response to contracting Covid-19 is telling and might be fruitfully juxtaposed with that of Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister of the UK. The narrative — likely oversimplified — is that Johnson belittled the coronavirus pandemic early on, but that after he caught the disease, he began to take it seriously and urged collective action in response. In contrast, the Trumpian response is to deny the dangers of the virus and, indeed, to deny its effects on his health. We might never know how serious Trump’s illness was — and I am skeptical of speculating too much — but his emphasis on his vivacity, the speed with which he returned to the White House, his refusal to take proper care to prevent the spread of the virus even after having contracted it all reflects that his image seeks to be inhuman, to eliminate the precarity intrinsic to our lives. The American state is Great, and therefore it cannot fall to the “China virus.” The President who has sought to fully embody that state, who seeks to make himself the machine, therefore cannot fall to the virus, either. And so he cannot admit to being diseased, and he must bluster his way through the virus — “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it.”

Third, we might think about depictions of Trump as a quasi-messianic figure. Sent to Washington to transform it, Trump’s mission and method must both be transcendent, above that of “politics as usual.” A normal politician — a normal human — can’t promise that kind of fundamental change, for he or she would be caught up in petty scandals over improper emails or tan suits. Revolutionaries call for deified leaders who rise above the fray, unerring in their commitment to their cause.

Fourth, and finally, let me point to the legal mechanisms by which Trump’s personal body has been blended with the body of the Presidency in an almost monarchical fashion. Think about Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, when arguing the New York grand jury subpoenas case. The argument was that the person of the president “is himself a branch of government. He is the only individual that is a branch of government in our federal system.” The crux of this unitary executive argument is that the President is a unique figure in our constitutional politics, for he is not an institution like Congress or the Court but a person in whom power is vested. Consider, too, how DOJ attempted to intervene in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump. There, the President attempted to replace himself with the government — to enter the United States as the defendant — in a lawsuit based on an alleged rape that would have happened decades before he entered office. A federal district court judge recently rejected that argument, but if it had been correct, we would have literally seen the “conjoin[ing]” (to use language from the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster) of the body natural and the body politic, the President and the Presidency, the private man and the state (what he treats as his estate).

If I am correct, then Trumpian politics, at its heart, is about denying the humanity of the current President. It is about melding the man to the machine, and, in so doing, aligning the common good with the private interest of the man in the office. The vulnerability of the President is the vulnerability of the nation-state; and just as the President cannot be diseased by Covid-19, so, too, the nation-state must be “rounding a corner.” For a nation, to be Great is for it to be powerful, to throw its weight around international politics without regard to what others think. Allegations of breaking international law or reneging on treaties are irrelevant, for our nation is not driven by humans, who do in fact care about their companions and communities, but by a machine whose only job is to further the interest of the nation-state as defined by its President.

If I am correct, then what makes Trump compelling for at least some of his supporters, what makes him supposedly “teflon,” is his brazenness — his willingness to be cruel, blunt, racist, and irreverent. It’s his willingness to speak his mind when everyone else would stay quiet out of fear of social shaming. It’s his willingness to ignore precedents set by previous presidents, such as in refusing to disclose his taxes willingly. All of these actions contribute to his inhumanity, his ability to transcend obligations that most people would feel duty-bound to follow. This is a kind of selective nihilism, a slash-and-burn politics that seeks, single-mindedly, to achieve particular goals (conservative judges, deregulation of the economy, promoting a particular brand of religious freedom) while casting everything else aside. It is the ultimate divorce of means from ends, for one ostensibly seeks a moral and free state through a quasi-authoritarian, debaucherous man. In that sense, Trumpian politics is the opposite of Gandhian politics. But Trump’s radical rejection of what society asks of us, his ability to cast aside his humanity in favor of political ends, also seems to me deeply Gandhian.

To return to the picture of Biden and his son, then, we might question the efficacy of the simple liberal narrative: “Trump supporters make fun of Biden for embracing his son.” (We can of course quibble with the veracity of that narrative; I’m not sure I believe that narrative. After all, it is too easy to screenshot a single Trump supporter making fun of a picture and then to ascribe onto his millions of supporters that supporter’s callous statement.) If I’m right, then this narrative will do little to convince many of Trump’s supporters. For his inhuman, callous politics is exactly what they seek, and it is the natural result when the man attempts to become the machine of the state.

This analysis also is important for thinking about Biden. There are often good reasons that politicians need to identify with the state rather than with their humanity. Presidents must use force, sometimes lethal, in defending their country from national security threats. Obama famously held “Terror Tuesday” meetings where he would personally sign off on so-called “targeted killings” of suspected terrorists. The moral dilemmas forced on a political leader — the need to take responsibility for risks that invariably will lead to death and destruction — require that leader to be somewhat machine-like, to make decisions on precedent, or tradition, or law, or political calculations. Identification with the state helps with absolving one’s blameworthiness, for the order to kill someone is merely “what one ought to do” as President rather than any single President’s moral judgment. Moreover, one’s personal ties cannot, and should not, cloud one’s political judgments as the head of a country. If Trump is too far in the inhuman category — if he has identified too strongly with the state — then perhaps Biden will have the opposite problem: identifying too much as a human.

What is left, then, for us? The Gandhian view of politics is one that I suspect few will fully accept, for it is extreme to the point of absurdity. But it does help remind us of the enduring relationship between our conduct and that of our leaders. Our collective commitment to morality (or our lack of it) certainly affects who is able to take power and win elections. Self-rule, whether in the Gandhian sense of swaraj or something less strong, matters for our national politics. The arrow does, however, also go in the other direction: who we are is shaped by our leaders. Our standards of conduct — what we see as acceptable — are molded by those of our leaders. We have grown accustomed to deceit and lies, for example, by the literal tens of thousands of lies from the President over the last four years.

We exist in an interlocking relationship with our leaders, a co-dependence that we call representation. How we vote and engage with politics reflects and shapes who we are. It is my view that a vote for the current President is a vote for an essentially inhuman form of politics, one that replaces caution with bluster, truth with lies, dependence with faux-immunity, patriotism with selective nihilism, and cosmopolitan empathy with nationalist anger. Driving the machine, I believe, must be some semblance of humanity, one that recognizes the inevitable precarity of our existence and that seeks to foster social solidarity rather than independent Greatness. That is the choice this year: a fundamental question about whether we should seek a human or inhuman politics.

* * * * *

Rose: Last Saturday, I made the trek to see the remaining wall of the Marshalsea prison. I have a weird interest in a few prisons in the UK — the Marshalsea, the Fleet Prison, the Tower of London — primarily because of their relationship to the history of habeas corpus. The Marshalsea came up in my readings about habeas because John Selden, an English parliamentarian who shepherded the Petition of Right in the House of Commons, was thrown in there. The traditional story of habeas in English law sees three primary documents as marking its majestic evolution — Magna Carta (originally in 1215, but subsequently reissued repeatedly), the Petition of Right (1628), and then the Habeas Corpus Act (1679). Left out of that easy history, of course, is four hundred intervening years of history and the subsequent history of habeas — most notably, the rise of parliamentary suspension.

But, to stop boring you, I’ll return back to why I wanted to go see the Marshalsea. (The Fleet Prison is now demolished, although I am on the lookout for a plaque; the Tower is of course still standing, and I hope to visit soon.) When we talk about habeas, we discuss it as a legal device — pieces of paper sent from a judge to summon a jailer and a jailed body. Habeas was about gathering information and extending judicial oversight, and it would work to centralize power in Westminster throughout its centuries-long usage by the Court of King’s Bench. But that story misses some basic, fundamental aspect of habeas — its relationship to desperate bodies hoping for freedom from captivity. Visiting these sites helps remind me of what is really at stake with habeas and its long history.

Beyond seeing the remaining wall of the Marshalsea, though, I also got to see a lot more of London, including an affecting park (Altab Ali Park) dedicated to a British Bangaldeshi man who was the victim of a hate crime in the 1970s, some beautiful street art, a chapel dating to 1320 beneath a modern market, and the grave of Thomas Bayes (of Bayes’s theorem fame!). I’m finding, as usual, that keeping my eyes open in this city can result in really wonderful discoveries.

One of these is Bayes' Grave

Count the Garbage Cans

St. Mary Spital Chapel

Street Art in a Time of Covid

A Map in a Tunnel in an Alley

Altab Ali Park

A Protest Outside City Hall

City Hall

The Marshalsea Wall

Henry VIII's Face on a Pub?

??

Take Courage

The View at Sunrise

Street Art near Borough Market

Covent Garden

The Beauty of Blue Skies

Bud: This upcoming week is my reading week, which means I have much less work! I’m planning on taking a trip to Cambridge to see two of my friends (one from college, one from high school, both Churchill Scholars!), so expect many pictures next week.

Thorn: I’ve experienced my first few rainstorms in London this last week. It’s kind of unfortunate to walk for thirty minutes in the pouring rain to get to class. But I came to the UK prepared, so it’s only bad when I’m caught off guard (i.e., when I didn’t wear my waterproof shoes in a rainstorm).

Potential future topics:

* Gandhi makes an interesting argument about the kinds of questions we ought to ask. In discussing the need to be truthful at all costs, he writes, “In this connection, academic questions such as whether a man may not lie in order to save a life, etc., arise, but these questions occur only to those who wish to justify lying. Those who want to follow truth every time are not placed in such a quandary, and, if they are, they are still saved from a false position.” I think it’s an intriguing claim, and one that I’d be interested in writing about for a future post.

* I’ve been taking pictures of playgrounds that I walk by because I’m realizing they all seem to have different toys and playing equipment than back home. (Or maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention back at home!) Eventually, I want to compile them and write about it.

I’m realizing these posts are just getting longer and longer. I suspect this will change soon, though, because they’re getting unwieldy to write. But, nevertheless, please accept my apologies. As a condolence, I will leave you with the song I have been looping while writing this piece: Taylor Swift’s “Epiphany.”