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.”