The Chair of Abraham Lincoln

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 9 February 1864, by Anthony Berger. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Assume for a moment that the present status of undocumented immigrants in the US is exactly what we want it to be: except for the criminals, we want them working in the country (in spite of our self-righteous talk about walls and mass deportations); but we don’t want to legalize their status—no amnesty and no path to US citizenship. In these times of deplorable political rhetoric, one does well to find guidance in the bosom of Abraham Lincoln, who was once branded “Abraham Africanus I” by a Copperhead political pamphlet.

Lincoln understood the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court as a cog (“piece of machinery so to speak”) in an effort by the Southern states to “declare the perfect freedom of the people, to be just no freedom at all.”

Here is Lincoln’s analysis of the decision:

Discourse of the People

South side of the United States-Mexico border wall in Progreso Lakes, Texas. 21 March 2016. (Credit: Rebajae / Wikimedia Commons)

J. Dionne, Jr., an opinion writer for the Washington Post, prefers civility over boorishness in politics. Most of us concur that contemporary politics are degraded more than usual, even if we are suspicious of the ideal of civility, which too readily serves the interests of the already overly privileged. Of course, boorishness can serve that same undemocratic purpose.

Dionne worries specifically about Donald Trump’s racism in the current presidential campaign. Drawing from Lee Drutman, Dionne writes that Trump is not an aberration of Republican Party politics but is instead a historical culmination of a strategy grounded in racial affect. Trump’s “indifference to truth and consistency” is what happens when the necessary balance between reason and emotion in politics devolves into “absolute cynicism . . . about voters, their attention spans and democracy itself.”

So what is at stake here? In Dionne’s opinion, “the democratic idea is in grave jeopardy when citizens simply shrug over being manipulated and don’t expect more from their political leaders than posturing, positioning and captivating media circuses.”

Waiting for Monica

Mónica Puig at the 2014 China Open. (Credit: Tatiana / Wikimedia Commons)

Two weeks ago, after writing a series of posts about Puerto Rico for our Hunt the Devil blog, I sat at the bar of the Caribe Hilton in San Juan nursing a drink and watching the sunset on the beach. At such times, it is easy to understand how the first explorers believed they had found Paradise when they discovered the Caribbean islands.

Suddenly my contemplation was disturbed by a storm of police sirens, fire trucks blaring, PA systems screeching, TV news reporters and a mob of hotel guests rushing towards the entrance of the hotel. To the anxious question what is happening? the bartender answered with Beckettian simplicity: “Monica’s here.”

He was referring to the arrival of Monica Puig, first athlete to ever win a gold medal playing for Puerto Rico, fresh from her victory at the Rio Olympics in the single women’s tennis event. She was staying in the hotel complex to train for the upcoming US Open tournament, and to attend a scheduled parade in her honor. At this point in time my wife Margarita, who is a native born Puerto Rican, left the seat beside me to join the rushing crowd trying to get phone pictures of Monica.

Three-Dimensional Democracy

“Stump Speaking,” oil on canvas, by George Caleb Bingham, 1853-54. (Credit: St. Louis Art Museum)

“. . . faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Hebrews 11.1 (Holy Bible NRSV)

Surely, faith in democracy is a steadfast hope for a condition of self-rule that so far remains unrealized—a belief in the unseen.   What passes for democracy these days is more akin to oligarchy than self-rule, with democracy reduced to the conceit of ritualized voting.

The political imagination, as Sheldon Wolin holds, is a function of vision, of “seeing” a phenomenon in political space from a particular angle or perspective. Such vision can be descriptive or, more to the point, imaginative. As an act of imagination, it expresses fundamental values and seeks to transcend history. It is a multidimensional image that projects “the political order into a time that is yet to be”—an aesthetic vision of “political society in its corrected fullness, not as it is but as it might be.”[i]

An image of the people engaged in self-rule is the essence of the democratic faith. Two of its three dimensions, as I indicated in “Democracy with Property,” are the twin populist principles of increased political decentralization and adequate distribution of personal wealth, enough to keep elites from dominating the citizenry.  

Democracy with Property

Official Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Democracy is impossible without an adequate distribution of personal wealth. This is a fundamental premise too easily lost in the political fog of radical individualism and too easily confused with the collectivism of socialism. It is a populist vision of the path to real democracy. Adrian Kuzminski’s history of populism traces this vision back to ancient Greece and forward to modern times.[i]

What is an adequate distribution of personal wealth? It means a degree of economic independence, enough to enable citizens “to come together more or less as political equals.” It presumes a right to possess private property, not just an opportunity to struggle for it.[ii]

Populism’s Democratic Excess

Cleisthenes, the father of Greek democracy. (Credit: ohiochannel.org)

“To various degrees and in various ways, more traditional politicians have used elements of Trumpist ‘reasoning’ to whip up populist enthusiasm. In that sense, he [Donald Trump] does not represent some wholly new spirit in U.S. politics, but he is a reflection of its worst incentives and a magnification of its worst pathologies.”

Stephen Stromberg, Washington Post, July 22, 2016

Populism, as we discussed in our previous post, is commonly invoked to warn of a democratic deficit (the canary in the tunnel of elite rule) and/or to pronounce a slur against democracy (the irrationality of mobocracy). The invocation is a ritual of naysaying that sustains the rule of elites.

Either way (as a warning or a slur), political theorist Ernesto Laclau observes that populism typically is “linked to a dangerous excess.” It is described in this way so that “the kind of rationality inherent to its political logic [is] excluded a priori.” Populism is constituted in negative, rather than positive, terms as a vague, imprecise, manipulative, and emotional deviancy from conventional reason and wisdom. This prejudice clouds the possibility of seeing populism as “a performative act endowed with a rationality of its own” and, thus, as a “legitimate way among others of constructing the political bond.” Indeed, Laclau affirms, populism and the construction of a “people” are integral to democracy, “the sine qua non of democratic functioning.”[i]

Populism and the Democratic Imagination

“The Demagogue,” oil on canvas, by José Clemente Orozco, 1946. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

“Populism is the canary in the coal mine of American representative democracy.”

Robert Westbrook, “Populist Fever”[i]

John Lukacs, in his book on Democracy and Populism, ominously observes that Hitler was a populist and in some ways a democrat.[ii] Representative democracy, grounded in the political principles of liberalism, is one thing. Raw democracy is another. As Lukacs puts the matter: “Majority rule is tempered by the legal assurance of the rights of minorities, and of individual men and women. And when this temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism” (p. 5).

The populist “fever” is a political “fury,” an “outburst,” in Robert Westbrook’s words. George Packer, writing in the New Yorker, remarks on “the volatile nature of populism.” It is a rhetoric, he says, that can “ignite reform or reaction, idealism or scapegoating . . . . It speaks of a battle of good against evil, demanding simple answers to difficult problems.” Populism can take a “conspiratorial and apocalyptic bent,” Packer observes. It is “suspicious of the normal bargaining and compromise that constitute democratic governance.” The populist politician—whether Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump—presumes to “articulate what ordinary people feel.”

By this reckoning, Trump’s rhetorical volatility is the mark of his populist appeal, his demagoguery.

Hunt the Devil on Summer Vacation

Looking eastward over Lake Monroe southeast of Bloomington in Monroe County, Indiana, United States. The scene is on the western edge of the Hoosier National Forest; the photograph is taken from the northeastern corner of Clear Creek Township, and the distant shoreline is located in Salt Creek Township within the Paynetown State Recreation Area. (Credit: Nyttend / Wikimedia Commons)

Hunt the Devil is on holiday through the month of July.

The good life—a concept Kenneth Burke associates with the project of getting along with people—requires “adequate physical expression.” Otherwise, we become “bad poems.”

Physicality balances mentality. Aristotle’s anti-sedentary school of peripatetic philosophy, Burke held, was on the right track in this regard. Physicality helps to cultivate the sentiments and curb the overly ambitious passions, to enrich the social texture and live a more ecological life.

Burke’s idea of the good life is to channelize militaristic passions by transcending into a constructive, creative, cooperative way of being, which is the moral equivalent of war.

Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, pp. 256-260.

RLI

Puerto Rico: Dance Under the Sun (Epilogue: Dead Time)

The Caribbean side of the island, Rincon, Puerto Rico, 31 December 2007. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The isle is full of noises,

Sound and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not….

                                         And sometime voices

That, if then I had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again. 

Shakespeare, The Tempest

The magic that Shakespeare’s Caliban sensed in his island is known to all Puerto Ricans. In the ancient isle of Boriquén there is not a hill, a small mountain or a hidden cave where the ocean cannot be seen, heard in the distance, or smelt in the evening’s air. It is an island of “subtle, tender, and delicate temperance,” where “the air breathes upon us … most sweetly.” (The Tempest, I.ii.44-49). If you come from the desert to the island, you will find its vegetation so lush and green that your eyes will hurt for days. The same divinity that Walt Whitman found in the North American landscape was a living presence to Julia de Burgos (1916-1953) in her poerm “Río Grande de Loíza”:

Coil around my lips and let me drink from you

to feel you mine for a brief moment,

and hide you from the world

and hide within you

and hear bewildered voices in the mouth of the wind.[1]

The spiritual bastion that is Puerto Rico—much more than its old Spanish fortresses—gives to the people courage in the face of hurricanes: there is always, in the words of the old plena song, “an aroma of coffee and hope for tomorrow.”

Puerto Rico: Dance Under the Storm (Part III: The Gimmick)

USS Iowa (BB-61) fires a full broadside of her nine 16″/50 and six 5″/38 guns during a target exercise near Vieques Island, Puerto Rico. (Credit: U.S. Dept. of Defense)

The “gimmick,” Juan Manuel García Passalacqua (aide to two Puerto Rican governors during the 1960s) wrote in a newspaper column over a decade ago, was as follows:

To produce jobs here so that our population could be kept domesticated to prevent social disorder to protect law and order in the archipelago that was essentially and only a very important naval and military base for the United States. We all ended that in Vieques.[i]

Passalacqua was warning of economic disaster given the impending end of Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which gave “mainland United States companies an exemption from Federal taxes on income earned in Puerto Rico, whether it comes from operations or interest on local bank deposits.” In the aftermath of the closing of the naval artillery range in the small contiguous island of Vieques, and of the closing of the impressive Roosevelt Roads naval base, Passalacqua relayed the conclusion of several economic reports from the US mainland: “Tax exemptions to multinational corporations are not needed anymore” (The San Juan Star, July 9, 2006).