Waiting for Caesar

By Philip A. Wallach

Thursday, April 18, 2024

 

Are the American people fit to govern themselves? Our Constitution’s first words assume so. In formal discourse, both major political parties hasten to present themselves as agents of the people’s will.

 

But among the theorists of the “New Right,” it is fast becoming an article of faith that the true answer is no — that the American people do not govern themselves, and are not fit to do so. Instead, all the official prattle about democracy is a drooping façade for oligarchy. Anyone who says that we can, at this juncture, vindicate regular people’s interests through existing constitutional forms is either a knave (a knowing servant of the blob, obfuscating purposely) or a fool (a naïf or nostalgic who refuses to see the decadence, depredation, and degeneracy all around us).

 

Two books in particular prosecute this case: Michael Anton’s The Stakes (2020) and Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change (2023). Anton’s book extends his famous 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” imploring regular Americans to treat every election as a desperate attempt to wrest control of the country from a vindictive leftist elite before it is too late. He insists that while “principled” conservatives are beholden to an obsolete ideology and can only lose this fight, a realigned nationalist-populist party can win. In a similar vein, Deneen argues that America is dominated by a coalition of left and right “liberals” who fetishize progress and fear the people. “Woke capitalism” puts off the people’s righteous demands by offering “diversion, consumption, and hedonism,” but the time is coming for “the creation of a postliberal order” that may keep existing forms of government but will need to utterly transform their “ethos.”

 

Anton and Deneen aspire to vindicate the interests of the masses, but their recipe is not simply to empower the people as they currently exist. Instead, Anton and Deneen argue that, sometime in the last half century, “we the people” shed those virtues needed to make self-government function. Too many citizens have sunk into the miasma of identitarian grievance-mongering, cut off from our civilizational inheritance. And so, in the 2020s, we barely have any real politics; instead, the Bigs (Pharma, Ag, Tech) and the military–industrial complex lock in the status quo for their own benefit, bringing in hordes of immigrants to keep labor costs down while showing contempt for the concerns of ordinary people. As Anton puts it, “Californication” will soon engulf the entire country, entailing profligate social spending, indifference to urban crime, and unfathomable inequality, not to mention distasteful “overcrowding.”

 

Why do Anton and Deneen think the situation is so dire, and the American people so unable to rise to the moment? In their telling, this is all but self-evident. Cities are filthy, prices are soaring, the border is overrun, the postindustrial heartland is decaying, everything is made in China, our youth are addled by internet porn and drugs, deaths of despair are rampant — and government responses to all of these problems are incompetent or actively hurtful. In short, “American carnage” is the shared experience — except for the “ruling class,” a group that is nebulous but surely ought to be reviled. If official statistics tell us that the working class’s real wages have risen since the pandemic, that poverty has fallen significantly over the past 25 years, and that we are having a historic run of steady job growth and low unemployment, well, can you really trust official, elite-collected statistics?

 

For those of us who experience contemporary America as a complicated mixture of good and bad trends, Anton’s and Deneen’s depiction of our country as a hellscape and our fellow citizens as sybaritic husks may seem downright bizarre. But it is understandable if we take it seriously rather than literally and consider what purpose it plays in their broader project.

 

If the country is a disaster and the citizenry deeply corrupted, then we cannot hope to right things through normal politics. Conservative persuasion is hopeless when there is so very little worth conserving and the whole education of so many wrong-thinking inhabitants has turned them against sound policy. Benjamin Disraeli may have been able to form a workingman’s Toryism, but we have fewer materials at hand and must look to more radical means.

 

What we need, as Deneen puts it, is “an elite cadre skilled at directing and elevating popular resentments” so as to turn the masses into an effective political force that will strike fear into the hearts of any who lack an appropriately solidaristic mind-set or a willingness to “redistribut[e] social capital.” Likewise Anton: “The most important thing we need to do is unquestionably the hardest: create, and elevate, a new elite.” If members of this new elite can win some elections, so much the better, but the more important task is to fundamentally reeducate the people, freeing them from the false consciousness that has brought them low. Anton, quoting Sam Francis, says that the “Middle American Right” must “create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted.”

 

In short, they are calling for a vanguard of the proletariat to purge false consciousness from the land. Whereas Lenin said “the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory,” and had Marxism in mind, Anton and Deneen want “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends.” Their peculiar sort of revolutionary is to be thinking of Thomas Aquinas as he scales the ramparts of debased institutions, but the practitioner of Bannonism-Leninism will share certain characteristics with his French and Russian forebears. He is, as Deneen puts it, to disclaim any ambition “to achieve ‘balance’ or a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances,” instead relentlessly advancing the common good over the protestations of its enemies. Divergence from the party’s program ought to be regarded as inimical to the people; disagreement is ipso facto bad. Ruthless persecution of class enemies is to be relished.

 

If the right revolutionaries fail to seize the commanding heights, Anton is ready to consider darker alternatives, many of which he labels dystopian. He also flirts, rather kittenishly, with the possibility of a “red Caesar” who would respond to the “breakdown of the republic” with “authoritarian one-man rule.” Outwardly, Anton disclaims this as a serious possibility — “prospects for red Caesarism seem fanciful, the stuff of cheap political thrillers and big-budget summer blockbusters.” But he concedes that the arrangement might have many merits. A “good Caesar” will rule as Xenophon’s Simonides urges Hiero the tyrant to rule: to see the country as his estate and the people as his children and friends.” He points out “that Roman civilization peaked under the original Caesars.” (As if to confirm this, he then cites prosperity under the “five good emperors.” But they did not come into power until a.d. 96, more than a century after “the original Caesar.” Coming from a Straussian, this sort of error is perhaps meant to convey some deep and probably dark intimation, but who knows.) Caesarism would be a risky business, of course, but “a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must be ruled.” In the same vein, others of the New Right have adopted a vocabulary of “subjects” rather than “citizens.” And where Anton, at least in 2020, was either coy or genuinely ambivalent about Caesarism, some of his followers are much more open. In a typical example, one writes for the American Mind, a Claremont Institute publication, that a Caesar “who at least militates for order rather than further chaos and recrimination” would be a welcome change, since “America today is increasingly an empire not of laws but of corrupt men.”

 

***

 

Colorful as these discussions are, they lead down blind alleys.

 

First, if citizens are already debased, assuring them that a chosen class or a single strongman will swoop in and save them is just about the worst conceivable way to regenerate their virtue. If “aristo-populists” will do the hard work of self-government, doesn’t that imply ordinary people should content themselves with bread and circuses? That way lie the dystopias of The Hunger Games or WALL-E, depending on how good artificial intelligence turns out to be.

 

If regenerating virtue is the goal, a completely different tack is needed. Deneen is an admirer of Christopher Lasch, who was also a regime skeptic and a withering critic of the betrayals of educated elites. But Lasch thought that virtue could come only from the exercise of responsibility. Waiting for the people to be virtuous before entrusting them with self-government was a recipe for permanently disempowering them.

 

To be a friend to the people, one must actually believe in their capacity to decide for themselves, mistakes and all. And in the age of a professionalized service economy, that must include plenty of desk jockeys, not just yeoman farmers or blue-collar trade unionists. Anton and Deneen offer little but contemptuous dismissal for educated professionals, at times suggesting, in ways jarringly similar to Marxist denunciations of the bourgeoisie, that they are a parasite class. But do they (we) really deserve to be sent off to the gulags? Why not have a little sympathy for people trying to make our modern institutions (even the Bigs!) operate well, with all the frustrations of limited agency that modern corporate and bureaucratic forms create? Effective self-government in America, if it is to come, cannot simply cast these people out for supposed ideological and political sins.

 

There is a second, more prosaic way in which the authors’ apologias for undemocratic politics disserve them: If readers are persuaded that a full “regime change” is needed for government to serve normal Americans again, they will be discouraged from seeking to vindicate their interests in normal politics, instead ceding the field to the worst tendencies of “the oligarchy.” In other words, as they dream of exiting our system for a just new order, they will neglect to make their voices heard in normal politics. This would be a real shame, because many of the policy issues that motivate Anton and Deneen seem entirely amenable to normal politics. Both parties offer legislation meant to help families, but Deneen pooh-poohs these proposals and instead pines for a “family czar” who would look to Hungary for inspiration. For his part, Anton calls for striking more Trumpist blows against free trade and immigration, and for industrial policy. Whatever one thinks of the merits of these views, American politics is clearly ready to include them, even in a Joe Biden administration.

 

More fundamentally, Anton’s and Deneen’s vanguardism is profoundly at odds with the American political tradition, and thus (much to the credit of that tradition) is likely to be self-defeating in an American context. Previous generations of Americans were preoccupied with Julius Caesar, but he was a purely negative example. His enemies, Brutus and Cato the Younger, were held up as symbols of republican virtue to be emulated. Anathematizing the tyrannies of Caesar, Cromwell, George III, and both Napoleons was standard congressional fare from the time of the Founders through most of the 19th century. In the 20th century, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler supplanted these earlier figures as embodiments of tyranny, ever to be avoided.

 

Some on the new right have suggested that this preoccupation with unjust rulers has distorted Americans’ political imagination. Certainly Deneen, who wants to say that Anglo-American political thought took a wrong turn somewhere in the 18th century, might be expected to do so. Adrian Vermeule and Eric Posner dismiss this whole aspect of our political tradition as hysterical “tyrannophobia” that has made Americans far too suspicious of executive power sensibly deployed.

 

But if Anton and Deneen want to be bringers of a new regime, it really is strange for them to rely so heavily on foreign materials. No matter how alienated from the current governing class they are, American patriots are not going to start flying “Tread on me” flags. (Anton’s sneering contempt for what once upon a time were known as the rights of Englishmen reaches epic proportions; he says that “what roadkill is to flies, appeals to ‘freedom’ are to conservatives.”) They are likely to want their populism straight rather than “aristo”-inflected, and while desire for a strongman may be rising, it is still a distinctly minority preference. Americans want a president who will fight for their interests, but suggesting that they go out and get an emperor is a good way to ensure political irrelevance even if it delights some very-online types.

 

Developing far afield of all this big talk, the more pressing question is whether our “democratic” and “republican” parties are still committed to representative government, with all of the compromise and mutual forbearance it requires. Beyond their normal attempts to win elections, both parties have formulated scripts in recent years about why their opposition is illegitimate. Neither Donald Trump nor Stacey Abrams questions the American people’s supremacy as expressed in elections. But both have been willing to claim that elections, as they are actually administered, are designed to distort rather than reveal the people’s will.

 

Those of us who still believe in self-government — yes, even with this American people — need to be keenly aware of this acid and keep it from corroding our constitutional institutions. We need to get people practicing politics, attending to the many problems that ail us in all their mundane details. If we do, we may find that regular people’s common sense has not deserted them so completely, and that Americans can still be trusted to do the right thing, eventually. By comparison, the New Right’s fantasies are indeed “the stuff of cheap political thrillers.”