American Samizdat: The Cognitive and Human Divide

It isn't partisan. It isn't equal.

The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation | Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (iasculture.org)

How shall we understand the present moment in American history, which is, by the implications of American power and the political relations among nations, a moment in world history? Political scientists, historians, philosophers and thinkers of all kinds have been considering the question. None simply by professional pedigree brings any reliable wisdom to bear. Though expertise is preferable to amateurism, foolish experts of unsound judgment abound. The unsound judgement of amateurs, however, poses a different kind of problem because there are so many of them. We are all amateurs on a stroll along most avenues of our lives, which means the unsound judgement of amateurs aboundeth. Tenfold.

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? the constitutionally contrarian Slavoj Žižek — a professional thinker but not thereby immune to foolishness— argues that totalitarianism, “far from being an effective theoretical concept” is actually a “stopgap” against thinking. (We all have our peculiar upsurges of disruptive, anti-liberal theorizing.) A little less daringly, and closer to right, I claim that the phrase partisan divide is such a stopgap.

Even today, nine years into Trumpism, many in the journalistic wisdom pool and among the collected sages of the commentariat will gather themselves up in waves of sameness to lament or less daringly comment on the “partisan divide” between Trump supporters and those who are – well, let’s say, not Trump supporters.

A pat mediocrity of thought, limp with facile moralizing — an empty dress of virtue with a Church bonnet on it — the phrase misses almost everything.

The question occurs in the face of it — what exactly is a partisan divide?

A “partisan” is a “firm adherent of a party, faction, cause, or person,” especially, “one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance.” The word’s etymology returns us to Middle French and north Italian dialect. A partizan was a 16^th century weapon constituted of a long shaft and broad blade. The partizan was devised to reach far and cut a wide swath. A partisan, meaningfully understood, is not simply a person on one side of a reasonable and reasoned disagreement.

By definition, a partisan is quite the contrary– and to reduce intellectually coherent, morally bounded, good faith and well-intentioned ideas to the label of the partisan is to diminish the hope we place in human discourse.

Conversely, to raise up, in the same balanced parallelism, rabidly resentful and reactionary movements, personified by crude, cruel, ethically unbounded populist figures – what is the very iconography of historical authoritarianism – is to denigrate discourse and the whole enterprise of human intellectual exchange.

In principle, anyone, of any belief system, can demonstrate partisanship when allegiance to a faction overwhelms reasoned analysis and good faith argument. Žižek, in his willingness to spank and upset his own progressive admirers, far outstripping them in independence of thought, is no partisan. He thinks, he reasons, he argues, not as emotional outburst but as intellectual exchange. He’s wrong, in so many ways, but he’s wrong in the right ways. Progressives and liberals, just as conservatives and any other political brand, can behave as partisans, and do.

It isn’t hard to recognize such people. In the U.S., prominently, they spin, on payroll, for political candidates and office holders. In the media, their heads talk for the modern-day political Roman circus of unyielding dispute. No matter the unsupportable act or position, they will support it. Catch their candidate with a hand in the till, and they will what about you all day long about some other candidate on the other side who also has hands. Sniping partisans fill the ranks of Tweeters, have appeared now as Notes posters. They never met a point from a different view to which they’d concede a value.

So sure, there are partisans. Sure, they demean politics. They pollute the conversational air. But that isn’t what people mean when they invoke the partisan divide as two-bit sociological analysis. And by “people,” I mean analytical journalists, I mean cable-TV-era political talking heads — the ultimate overachieving amateurs. They imagine they identify a social affliction, a disease of the polis, and they claim the disease is partisanship itself. They claim it regarding divisions over Donald Trump, and they claim it most saliently, they believe, because of the intensity and numbers of the division. Sixty or seventy million people, with such upset over the state of things as his supporters display, can’t all be wrong.

They can’t?

Most outstanding in American history, the Civil War presented the country at a period of deadly division. In more modern times, the Vietnam War era, amid Civil Rights activism and racial unrest, and the Sixties counterculture, showed the nation deeply socially, culturally, and politically divided. No doubt, sometimes, something is seriously wrong amidst us, with dangers present.

But the cataclysm of the American Civil War was not, simply, that a nation was divided against itself — the catastrophe lay in why it was divided against itself, what it was divided over. The sad song of the partisan divide — the bogus wisdom of its invocation and the decrial of its destructive effects — is like telling a man with a fever that he’s burning up and needs to cool down.

Would an appropriate resolution to avoid Civil War have been a moderate, both sides proposal of slavery on Saturdays only and the granting of Southern States’ right to secede — but only in their dreams — in order to make everyone equally unhappy?

To declare that we are all too divided and need to come together is to confuse symptom for disease.

In the time of Trump, we are a long way from W.B. Yeats’s fearful “Second Coming,” in which “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” How quaint and easy, compared to current times, to live in a world in which the neatly identifying polarities are so clearly reversed. In the time of Trump, passionate intensity flows like the tweetstorm — at as little cost — and conviction, in the form of endless expressions of personal opinion, is the simulacrul mark of a self.

Even still, among his supporters, there are those who will say of Trump that he is a straight shooter, blunt and direct — about a man empirically, quantifiably by far the greatest liar ever to occupy public political space in the history of the country. What cognitive disrepair is necessary to commit this confusion? Trump is crude, bombastic, and foul, with a New York accent, and this appearance is taken, in surprising homage to New Yorkers from the rest of the country, for the straight talk of genuine conviction. (Thank you. What took so long?) He is relentlessly insulting in his own egocentric defense, and this is taken for passionate intensity. But in the twenty-first century, who outstrips for passionate intensity and demonstrated conviction the Islamist suicide-bomber fanatic?

In the time of Trump, one can judge nothing of a person or cause by those attributes.

Ideas, including political views, are not reasonably judged by the passionate conviction behind the grievances they express. As “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is an empty, uncritical exercise in relativism, so too is the characterization of “partisanship” applied to strongly held and contending views.

Critical judgments must be made. Deeply examined virtues and verities need to guide us.

As populist demagogue, Trump inherently acts as a prime divider, pointedly for and against supporters and opponents, to foment social division as the source of his political power. As the charlatan salesman that is his most talented self, he divides people even from their own best interests, and, dividing them from each other, from their own best selves. It is not uncommon for a Trump supporter to concede the man’s personal weaknesses in order to stipulate that support for him, then, is predicated more importantly on the values and national vision he advances and the enemies (for so they are seen) Trump opposes.

The first psychic split or division a Trump supporter may undergo, then, from a best or ideal self — as a Christian, perhaps, or a proponent of “traditional values” — is to imagine the presence or advancement of these virtues in Trump, who lives as a boldly embodied antithesis of virtue itself.

A second division is to employ that psychic and argumentative discrimination between the admittedly flawed Trump and the more perfect nation to which supporters dream he can return them. But for Trump supporters to imagine this meaningful difference presents Trump opponents with that profound disruption in moral values that confounds them.

One simply cannot be “Christian” and support Donald Trump.

One cannot contain within oneself any kind of clear understanding of what constitutes human character virtue — the foundation for any civic virtue — and support, rather than abhor, Donald Trump.

One can claim these labels. Many do. But a claim is not a contract with the truth, whatever the delusion.

Yet there are millions, many millions, so deluded. How can that be? They were friends. They are neighbors and family. We are confounded.

Still, the fact that tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump, that among his supporters may be found people of education and experience, and that an entire political party that did not want him weakly succumbed to him — these are not, as superficial weights on a scale of pro and con, arguments for the equivalent features of a partisan divide. They are reasons for historic anguish, as always before — in the cheering masses for any of history’s great demagogues and tyrants.

From cover, The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini

If millions of Italians for Mussolini, millions of Venezuelans for Hugo Chavez, why not millions of Americans for Trump?

What are Americans but a mix of all those other peoples of the world, drawn to, then born to, that exceptional idea that half of them have now roundly abandoned? And their compatriots, Americans who still cling to it, simply cannot believe it.

In his 2020 play Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard offers a rich picture of the civilized, bourgeois, significantly assimilated Jewish world of late Austro-Hungarian Vienna, in which those lucky citizens could not begin to imagine what would happen — and one need not have been Jewish to lack that imagination. There is always a time, ten years before, five, one, when people cannot believe it might happen, or that their fellows — friends, family — could do such things, or just cooperate, or turn away.

It happens. They do such things. They turn away. The rest of us must face it.

This video and others like it intrigue me. It shows the operation of what was known in Nazi Germany as the People's Court, a "special court" established in 1934 with jurisdiction over a "political offenses." It frequently handed down death sentences. Here we see a scene from the trial of the conspirators in the 20 July plot of 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler, in which Claus von Stauffenberg, most famously, attempted to plant a suitcase bomb at Hitler’s feet.

A wide array of conspirators, of varied political views had been nervously planning since before the war prior to the attempt. By the time of the first trial, early August 1944, the Allies, post D-Day were advancing through Normandy and rebuffing a first German counteroffensive near Mortain, in France. Surely, many Germans, with their military well set back on its heels from the heights of its wartime conquest, were thinking themselves bound now, possibly, to lose. Still, over the next half year, nearly 5000 people were executed in response to the assassination attempt. The person you hear barking at the defendants like the perfect Nazi monster is the court’s Judge-president, the notorious Roland Freisler. Freisler participated in the Wannsee Conference that planned the Final Solution. He also represents one of those rare instances of divine justice in this world. During a 1945 Allied bombing raid over Berlin, a column in that very court room collapsed and fell on him, crushing him to death.

For me, the greater interest, now, is in the courtroom audience of military personnel and civilians and the court employees. I do not know who anyone is. I simply observe and attempt to enter into the space of that time and occasion. Very early, there is the officer up front who turns and smiles at someone behind him. The smaller faces that are people now dead, in the background. There are guards and clerks and pretend counsel recording notes.

What was going through each of their minds, there in the courtroom, I wonder? What did each of them, eleven years into the Third Reich, think and believe? Some had spent those years getting along however they could. Nazism had happened. They weren’t going to be able to do anything about that. They were no heroes. (Look at what happened to the conspirators! von Stauffenberg!) They were doing the best they could to survive. Differently, others, next to them, were calculators: you believe this, you believe that — the point is to succeed in life. The Nazis were the wave. They swam with it. Did pretty well, too. Look where it had taken them, to that courtroom. And how great Germany had become — great again after the humiliation, and the carnage, of the First World War.

Still others, scattered about the room — others believed. They sat in that courtroom, after all the years of growling incivility, of the racist dehumanization and the violence, even a vastly destructive continental war, and still they believed. For every charge against, they had a counter charge. For every complaint about … they had a “what about.” How they hated the communists, the decadent liberals. How the strength of der Fuhrer had made them feel strong again, had made Germany great again.

Probably few of them would ever have believed they would do or see the things they had done and seen over those years. And even so, still they could shed a sorrowful tear at a Schubert sonata. They were not a bad people. They were the Germans of Mozart and Beethoven, of Goethe and Hegel, of Bismark!

It cannot happen here is an arrogant faith too ingrained in too many American psyches: Americans (that motley citizenry), they unquestioningly believe, are in some mystical way too good a people to fail as others have failed. But how many believed eight years ago that so many millions could vote for a man like Trump or that now, after all he has said and done — promising “dictatorship” on “day one,” calling people “vermin,” and touting “the largest deportation program in the history of the country” — so many millions more will vote for him again? The Germans, too, thought they were a great, world-historical people and culture.

When does self-denial exert a foul energy great enough to shatter the looking glass?

Truths, unlike election results to the conspiratorially minded, are almost always clearer in retrospect, but they are not in the meantime determined by polls or electoral vote. At the time of his resignation from the presidency, 24%, nearly a quarter of the nation, still approved of the job Richard Nixon was doing; no more than 57%, not an overwhelming majority, thought he should resign. There are those still who believe Nixon was wronged. Unsurprisingly, they are among those who now laud Trump. Many Russians sill admire Joseph Stalin. There is always someone to support any position, and as always, to feel strongly about it.

But that passionate intensity and conviction, the righteousness of one’s grievances — they are the markers of evil as much as of good. Few but the homicidal psychopath conceive themselves as intending wrong, and even Milton’s Satan had a grievance. Evil, to revise Graham Greene in The Quiet American, on innocence, “is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” How many of Marx’s Twentieth Century adherents intended at the start, Slavoj Žižek notwithstanding, to do the damage they did?

There is another sad and bracing truth to be recognized, too. In the short run, in times of crisis, reason and virtue often aren’t the determining factors of any outcome. Over the history of the world — look around it — from Frech republics to constitutional monarchies, from Asia to Africa to Latin America to the United States, the birth of liberal democracy has more often been delivered or rescued through the deadly labor of conflict, in revolutionary or civil wars or throwing off invaders. Enlightenment values inspire people, but against the enemies of tolerance — the partisans of intolerance — that will always revolt against them, the Enlightenment fields no armies. Who wants to imagine the pathetic or tragic future of a United States in the Twenty-First Century that has lost its democracy?

Trump has his partisans, yes, but let history show they were opposed by millions who were not blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning adherents of a party, faction, cause, or person. They were opposed, and Trump was resisted, by people who saw a demagogue for what he was and sought to prevent him, who see him now for what he is and could further become and resist him. They are not partisans, but, instead, believers. They believe in classic virtues — honesty, human decency toward other human beings — that still receive lip service in the Sunday morning pews of people who voted for, and will again, a hate-mongering liar and corrupter of all he touches. The believers will be slandered by some, for whom defense of the indefensible is mission. They will be diminished by others, through shallow political analysis and facile labels. But at the critical time, choices were made. And history will judge them all.

AJA

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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

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