An email from a conference panel chair has rearranged my working week, so most of what I’m writing this week is Stata and R code rather than, say, this newsletter.
Still, I have some thoughts about what’s happening right now. In particular, I want to return to one of my longstanding themes: the inescapability of politics.
Longtime readers know I’ve been critical of how various factions have received news of investigations into Donald Trump, both during and after his presidency. The hype for the Mueller investigation is difficult to recall at this remove, but rather a lot of folks hoped that the procedure would get him, and get him fairly and squarely. The various lawsuits brought by Michael Avenatti similarly elicited a degree of glee. More recently, the New York county indictment of Trump (also on Stormy Daniels related issues!) led well-paid liberal opinion-makers to celebrate accountability at last.
I’ve written about Mueller and the Manhattan DA; you can review those if you want. The general tenor of those pieces is pretty pessimistic, mostly because I think the Mueller investigation (and especially the massaging of the investigation by Bob Barr, but those are inseparable) hindered anti-Trump efforts and the Manhattan DA one reflected what was, at the time, an inability of the system to come to grips with Trump.
Suffice it to say that I think that Jack Smith’s (most recent) indictment of Trump does promote the kind of accountability that I called for earlier in the year. This is not an Al Capone / tax evasion dodge; this is going after Trump for the real offenses he committed against the constitutional system. That it took more than two years for the Department of Justice to reach this point is, well, curious, given that rather a lot of what’s alleged happened in plain sight—but I’m not going to look this gift horse in the mouth today.
Rather, I want to briefly address the continuing desire for an extrapolitical solution to politics. Tocqueville somewhere observed that “There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question”. As true today as it was then!
The impetus for turning politics into lawsuits has to do with a desire to return everything to the orderly world of childhood: a world in which there are arbiters of rules, rules that are knowable and enforceable. I’m skeptical that this tendency reflects any particularly American exceptionalist strain of thought. Quite a few cultures with which I’m more or less familiar evince similar desires to escape politics—to refer ultimate questions about how power is ordered to some external authority. That might be the wisdom of the ancients, or the teachings of the Church Fathers, or (here’s a provocation) external forces said to be to blame for how all this power has been misused. The common thread is the same: there are rules and order emerges when rules are enforced. Actors who break the rules merit punishment, and they will receive it.
Stated like this, it’s clear that this is a variant of a just world fallacy—although it’s an unusual one, since it normally comes with an addition that if the unjust prevail, it’s because someone, somewhere isn’t doing their job. The world is disordered because the super-authorities have let it become so. If only the czar knew …
The practical manifestation of this belief comes in the form of disbelief that actors can exercise their powers, that actors’ powers are indeed great in extent, and that the rules will prevent actors from breaking them. During the early months of Trump, the Washington Post even launched a podcast called Can He Do That? because the first months of Trumpism were so disruptive in their use of presidential powers that rule-followers were astonished to learn what was in the rules. The disbelief of extent comes (in my experience) when one has to explain that an absolute and unrevieweable pardon power (for instance) means absolute and unreviewable, or that presidential launch authority over nuclear weapons means the president has authority to launch nuclear weapons. Surely, interlocutors insist, there must be someone who can stop an abuse of the system.
That belief flows naturally from experiences in an increasingly stultifying bureaucratized society. Corporations, universities, town governments, state governments—everyday life is full of rules and reviews and exceptions, many geared to thwart action. When a political actor does something, it’s a surprise: who knew you could get things done in this environment? It’s even suspicious that someone has done something in the first place: surely this is against the rules.
For many, constructing and layering those rules represents a political project to manifest the external arbiter in social life. And who can blame the impulse? After generations of revelations about the abuse of power by institutions and authorities, binding Leviathan seems to be the better answer. Yet the confusion enters from the belief that this is an apolitical project: that it is possible, in essence, to cure politics, if only we say the right words and write the correct interpretations.
And here we come back to Jack Smith. Smith’s indictment is not just a legal act; it is a deeply political one—not in the partisan sense that defenders of the ex-president will use the word, but in the sense that it is a defense mechanism employed by the body politic against a threat. As such, it requires not just legal foundations but political ones—a sense that this is a legitimate exercise of power. The conditions for that, in turn, were sustained and made difficult to resist by actors like the January 6 Committee, whose public and very non-judicial character made possible political action that had been more or less taken off the table.
Political action requires embracing politics, not seeking to reject it. That entails a deeper conception of politics as the ordering of society and life, not a simple focus on the tactical advantages of officeholders and aspirants. This is a moment to insist on such an interpretation, not to pat ourselves on the back that “the system worked”—the system did not work, from at least 2017 until 2021, and if it is working now that functioning is not at all autonomic.
The folks who look for extra-political answers to political problems are a particular group of dominant centrist-liberal thinkers who are either proximate to existing political authority or who would like to be/flatter themselves that they are. Sometimes I think they view politics the same way that the guy in the Monty Python sketch who keeps bombarding another man with sexual innuendo--"Your wife, is she a goer? Does she go?" only to admit at the end that he's a virgin. They are horrified by politics because they have not the faintest idea how to actually do it--they only know how to invoke procedures and rules against politics roughly the way Transylvanian peasants put garlic in window to keep the vampires away.
The other more self-aware group avoid actual politics because they're entirely aware that they bring relatively little to any genuine coalition and are likely to have some of their own interests, prestige and performative authority badly abraided or corroded if they really do join in some kind of coalition that puts together meaningful social formations and constituencies. (This is kind of the Lincoln Project guys: sure, they can't stand to be Trumpist, but my god, they're not actually going to sheepishly walk into the Big Tent of Democratic coalition-making with their hat in their hands, they just want the Republican Party back under their control.)
This makes sense to me and gets why efforts to build up the Afghan or Iraqi police forces kept failing. Policing is a highly political act. The same is true of militaries, though I think the politics there are a least a little easier to manage or the U.S. is just better at it, as the militaries for both states were somewhat able to function (if often only with direct support of the United States as shown in the collapse of Afghanistan).
That said, I do think different venues of politics have different rules in a way that matters. Which is to say that I'd reject a legal realism approach that says all judges are just legislators in robes. There's something to that, and even a sympathetic accounting of Roberts ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court-statesman.html ) gets at the way he acts more as a statesman than his self-description as a umpire. But at the same time Jack Smith exercises legitimate power in a very different way than the January 6th committee even though they're mutually reinforcing.
I think I'm still being naive about politics in some ways that this post helps unpack. I look forward to any more thinking or recommended reading along these lines.