WEEK 14

WEEK 14 NO LONGER DAILY

Labels.

Labels matter because we understand the reality through words and some words are labels.

There is a frequent reference to Trump's measures or even the "Trump regime" as "authoritarian." This term was introduced into political science by the late Juan Linz and then drifted to ordinary language. I find it to be a source of an important confusion. The power to be obeyed may originate from different sources. Leaving aside theories of political obligation, which are purely normative, we are left with authority and force. Force is not the same as authority: in a classical example, someone wielding a stiletto has the power to cause me to obey but someone who gives me good reasons need not brandish a stiletto for me to obey. The puzzle of why we obey without being threatened by force was raised first by a nineteenth century German historian Theodore Mommsen, who wondered why the Roman Senate evoked compliance even though it had no power to coerce. His answer was that the Roman Senate had authority: Romans believed the Senate was guided by the common good, salus publica, and that it had good reasons to order them to take or not to take particular actions.

Reason-giving is ubiquitous in politics. All rulers -- those selected in clean elections, those who hold this ceremony without placing their power at stake, and those who do not even bother to hold them -- claim to have reasons to be obeyed and people are willing to obey them if they believe these are good reasons. Reliance on force is then unnecessary. The rulers does not even need to specify the reasons: it is sufficient that people believe that they could do so if asked. When I see a warning sign saying "35 mph" when approaching a curve, I slow down because I believe that whoever posted the sign must know better than I do what may happen if I speed. I do even not stop to call the Transportation Department to ask why it posted the sign; I just assume that it must have had a good reason to have posted it. The sign is not a speed limit -- I will not get a ticket if I exceed the posted speed -- so that my compliance is purely voluntary. I comply with the message only because I believe that the Transportation Department cares about my safety and that it must have a good reason to have posted it. This is "authority."

The Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar claimed in a 1934 speech that "The return of the State to a well-constituted order, rational as an expression of the nation organized, just in subordinating particular interests to the general, strong because of having as its basis the authority that cannot be rejected and should not be rejected [is] the highest achievement of civilization...." Yet his authority was rejected by many. Reasons valid for some may well appear wholly irrational to anyone outside the particular belief or value system. Non-Catholics do not accept the authority of the Pope because they do not share the belief that the Holy Ghost can prevent someone from erring. Fundamentalist Christians do not accept the authority of scientists when it conflicts with the letter of the Bible. Power would be based exclusively on authority only if everyone accepted the same reasons. No political leader has such self-evident authority. Benito Mussolini's claimed that "strictly speaking, I was not even a dictator, because my power to command coincided perfectly with the will to obey of the Italian people." Yet he did not dare to hold competitive elections. He did not dare because the mere fact that no one is ever elected unanimously in clean elections is prima facie evidence that no one has a monopoly of authority. Indeed, this is why we have elections: to decide whom we should obey.

Trump is not an "authoritarian." The reasons he adduces for his orders are flimsy and almost invariably accompanied by threats of force. If I knew that the road sign was posted by his administration, I would slow down only because I would expect to see a police car behind the bend. As Hanna Arendt (1954) pointed out, "All those who call modern dictatorships 'authoritarian' ... have implicitly equated violence with authority...." I think "authoritarianism" is a misleading label. The ceasarist claims made by Trump and his acolytes to which I referred some weeks ago, his repeated references to "emergency," his belief that he is infallible all point that he is a budding dictator. His authority is limited to his base.

Another label is "democracy." In a NYT opinion piece, Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt invent a new criterion for deciding whether a regime is democratic: how "costly" is opposing the government. It is a useful criterion but they spring it ad hoc: neither they nor anyone else has ever used it before to classify political regimes. There are numerous ways to conceptualize democracy and several methods to classify regimes as democratic. Some classifications are dichotomous: democracies and non-democracies, whatever one calls them, "authoritarian regimes," "dictatorships," "autocracies." Other measures attach precise numbers to the extent a particular regime is democratic, numbers such 83.9, with the second decimal. I never succeeded in understanding how such numbers are generated. By the classification I used in the past, the US is still a democracy but now I wonder whether it matters whether the Trump regime is labeled as a democracy or what score it should be given. What I think does matter is a slight modification of Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt: What is the prospect that Republicans would be defeated in an election if majorities in the congressional districts (albeit gerrymandered according to the current rules) would so wish? The defining feature of democracy for me is that incumbents may lose elections and would yield office peacefully if defeated. So I would be willing to say that the Trump regime is not a democracy if it cannot be defeated in elections regardless of what people want. But as of today, nobody knows.

This is just an aside but an important one for me. Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt conclude by claiming that "America's slide into authoritarianism is reversible." Perhaps they just wanted to end upbeat, perhaps the NYT opinion editor forced them into it (I have had experiences with such editors) but neither they nor anyone else has any idea at this moment whether or not it is reversible. I vaguely remember reading a long time the French socialist leader Jean Jaures who compared his more revolutionary allies to captains who guide their ships with maps that do not show the threatening reefs. "Optimism of the will," to use an expression of Antonio Gramsci, must be tempered by the "pessimism of the intellect." Exhortations are not enough.

Unimaginable.

There is a sentence in Uwe Wittstock's February 1933 that haunts me: "It is probably in the very nature of a breakdown of civilization to be difficult to imagine it." Germans could not imagine what Hitler would do. Or could they imagine but failed to do? Even more, perhaps they should have imagined?

Transported into our current situation, the question is whether we are able to imagine what Trump might do. We still need a distinction between imaginable but not possible. Some weeks ago I asked myself this question: What is imaginable, imaginable because it happened in other countries at other times, but impossible in the United States? My list comprised not holding elections, massive incarceration of political opponents, and employing the armed forces against civilians.

I asked Chatgpt what political events are impossible in the US. The answers were (1) Session of a State, (2) Emergence of a viable third party, (3) Nationalization of private industry, (4) Establishment of a non-partisan federal government, (5) Implementation of proportional representation. Then I asked it what events are unimaginable in the US. This question was deliberately intended to be unanswerable: how can one determine what is unimaginable? And, indeed, the answers were prefaced by "In recent years, the United States has experienced political events that were once considered unimaginable, challenging long-held democratic norms and institutions. Here are some notable examples:...." So the items on the list of unimaginables are not of those that we cannot imagine now but only those that we could not imagine in some past. The answers were (1) Erosion of democratic norms and rise of executive power, (2) Challenges to constitutional principles, (3) Political violence and assassination attempts, (4) Weaponization of cryptocurrency for political gain, (5) Redefining America's democratic status. The list is questionable but the point of Wittstock is made: we cannot imagine the unimaginable. I conclude that we can answer the question of what is imaginable but impossible but we should be not be surprised to be confronted with events we could not have imagined.

Miscellaneous.

Trump has an unusual ability to retreat in face of defeats. He begins negotiations with some outrageous demands but he knows that what he can get is less, so getting a part of what he starts with is not a defeat. This is true of tariffs. But his failure to induce Putin to cease fire is a defeat. And here his position seems be that if something cannot be achieved, this is way it is, and there is no sense in pursuing it. Now suddenly the war in Ukraine is a "European problem." If you cannot get what you want, blame others, and move on to something else.

The Department of Justice will charge a House representative LaMonica McIver (Dem) with assault. It is also after Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York State and now a mayoral candidate.

In several recent elections young men voted disproportionately for the far Right. Data European elections show that young (16-29) men vote for the extreme Right at rates similar to older men but young women are more likely to vote Left than older women. An intriguing explanation was offered by Paola Bergallo in a zoom meeting with several people in Buenos Aires. She thinks that young women are better off in terms of their life chances than were their mothers while young men do not have opportunities better than their fathers. In the light of the data I cited some weeks ago, this must be true in the United States and I am sure it is true of most other countries. The question is how this difference translates into the gender gap in voting. It merits being investigated.