On strongmen’s (and strongwomen’s) trail

A spectre is haunting the lands of democracy: the spectre of Strongman (or Strongwoman). As Robert Reich suggests in ‘Donald Trump and the Revolt of the Anxious Class’, ¹ that spectre (in this particular case dressed as Donald Trump, though known to be wearing many and varied local – folk, national – outfits) – was born (in the style of Aphrodite emerging from the frothy tides of the Aegean Sea) of the anxiety overwhelming ‘the great American middle class’, now affected by the ‘frighteningly high’ odds ‘of falling into poverty’.

Two-thirds of Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time. Many are part of a burgeoning ‘on demand’ workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it. Yet if they do not keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or cannot pay for groceries or utilities, they will lose their footing.

Those ‘two-thirds of Americans’ had been forced, we may say, to walk on a sea as clobbered and buffeted by crosswinds and no less turbulent than was the Sea of Galilee of St Matthew’s Gospel. According to that gospel, walking on that sea was a matter of keeping faith – but in whom can Reich’s ‘anxious class’ invest their trust? ‘Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance. Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally.’ As Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, quoted by Reich, found out in 1,799 resolutions of the Congress they scrutinized, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’. No wonder that more and more members of the once ‘great’, now ‘anxious’, American middle class ‘view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats.’ And so no wonder either that

…they’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos. Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America. A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.

Trusting a strongman’s omnipotence, Reich points out, is ‘a pipe dream’, and gaining such trust by Trump is a ‘conjurer’s trick’. Reich’s dismissal of both is, of course, correct. All the same, the rallying of the ‘anxious class’ around a conjurer, who tricks them into dreaming the pipe dreams he spins out, is not necessarily predetermined and inevitable. The answer to the question posited recently by Joseph M. Schwartz, professor of political science at Temple University ² – ‘Will downwardly mobile, white, middle- and working-class people follow the nativist, racist politics of Trump and Tea Partiers (who espouse the myth that the game is rigged in favor of undeserving poor people of color), or lead a charge against the corporate elites responsible for the devastation of working-class communities?’ – is all but a foregone conclusion. As Schwartz suggests, a New York Times/CBS News survey ‘taken shortly before [Senator Bernie] Sanders’ 19 November 2015 Georgetown University speech on democratic socialism’ ³ that found 56 percent of Democratic primary voters feeling positively about socialism versus only 29 percent who felt negatively, allows us to suppose that ‘most of those polled…associate capitalism with inequality, massive student debt and a stagnant labor market. They envision socialism to be a more egalitarian and just society.’ From the present plight of the ‘anxious class’ (or to deploy the concept coined by Guy Standing, of the fast-swelling, on both sides of the Atlantic, ranks of the ‘precariat’), more than one policy choice derives. One policy counts on strong man; the other on strong people.

Though the odds seem at present far from even – and that for a number of reasons.

In the terminology of great Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, all earthly powers feed and thrive on recasting ‘cosmic fear’, inborn and endemic to humans – that is, the fear in the face of the immeasurably great and immeasurably powerful; in the face of the starry heavens, the material mass of the mountains, the sea, and the fear of cosmic upheavals and elemental disasters in ancient mythologies, worldviews, systems of images, in languages themselves and the forms of thinking bound up with them…This cosmic fear, fundamentally not mystical in the strict sense (being a fear in the face of the materially great and materially indefinable power), is used by all religious systems for the suppression of the person and his or her consciousness ⁴ – into its contrived, artful, ‘official’ variety. That recasting obviously serves the vested interest of powers that be; but it would not do it, were it not for making simultaneously a step towards mitigating slightly the would-be insufferable horror – and thereby rendering mundane human life a bit less unliveable; it does so through ‘cutting the infinite and the timeless’ down to the measure of human finite mental and pragmatic faculties. In my study In Search of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 58–9) I commented on Bakhtin’s view that the cosmic fear was ‘the prototype of mundane, earthly power, which, however, remoulded its primeval prototype into official fear, the fear of the human yet not fully human power, man-made but exceeding human capacity to resist’:

(U)nlike its cosmic prototype, the official fear had to be, and indeed was, manufactured – designed, ‘made to measure’…In the laws which Moses brought to the people of Israel, the echoes of thunders high up at the top of Mount Sinai reverberated. But the laws spelled out light and clear what the thunders only darkly [and thus confusingly, terrifyingly, and ultimately disablingly] insinuated. The laws offered answers, so that questions might cease to be asked.

Out of the unmanageable because infinitely distant and impenetrable threat, a feasible and by comparison deceptively easy demand to obey the legibly spelled-out commandments had been conjured. Brought to earth, powers that reforged primeval fear into the horror of deviation from the rule; a superhuman cosmic tragedy into a mundane, human, all-too-human task and duty; and the fear and trembling caused by the unfathomable enigma of God’s will into the commandment to follow the intelligible, clearly spelled-out proscriptions and prescriptions collated and codified by His plenipotentiaries – His anointed spokesmen walking on earth.

In his study of the complex relationship between the earthly managers of ‘official fear’ and those on the receiving side of their management, and resorting to the help of Trial and Castle, Franz Kafka’s two novels, Roberto Calasso shows that the issue is more complicated than this; making the ‘official fear’ work is not so straightforward a task. ⁵ ‘Were the villagers to see the exegetes of The Castle talking long-windedly of deities and of God and how they interfere in their lives, they would probably act indignantly’ – Calasso suggests. They would resent all learned attempts to compare the occupants of the Castle to God, and other divine beings known to them from religious lessons. ‘How simple it would be to have dealings’ with the insiders of the Castle, if – as in the case of God – ‘it would be enough to study a little theology and to rely upon the heart’s devotion – they would think. But the Castle officials are rather more complicated. No science or discipline can help in dealing with them.’

Indeed, the religious systems – according to Bakhtin the first arrangements to attempt and achieve the recycling of the ‘cosmic’ into an ‘official’ fear (or, rather, to fabricate the ‘official fear’ after the pattern of the ‘cosmic’, while capitalizing on the groundwork already done by the fear’s prime, original sources) – tended to secure the submission and obedience of their subjects by promising (and delivering, even if in quality and quantity falling well short of the promised) the foolproof recipes for currying the God’s grace and favours and for placating His wrath in case the efforts to follow His commandments to the letter would have proved in practice too tough and onerous a task. Losing nothing of his fearsomeness, God might be – unlike the numb and dumb sources of the cosmic fear – talked to: prayed, begged, beseeched, implored, through words and deeds, to forgive sins and reward virtues; and unlike the blind and deaf Nature, God might listen, hear and oblige the repentant, conscience-stricken and contrite penitents. Churches, God’s self-proclaimed earthly plenipotentiaries, spelled out meticulously and in profuse detail the code of conduct bound to induce Him, equipped simultaneously with powers of blessing and curse, to do just that. Smarting under the blows of fate, the victims of God’s wrath knew exactly what they had to do in order to earn redemption. In case the redemption was slow in coming, they believed that they must have been doing it not zealously enough – being therefore guilty of a principally leave correctable misdemeanour.

But this is precisely the kind of arrangement that the modern edition of official fear, conscripted and redeployed by secular political powers, rejects in its practice – even if hardly ever neglecting to perform a lip-service to its precepts. In a blatant violation of the modern intention and promise to replace the blind games of fate (that is, the annoyingly confusing disconnection of human doings from their consequences for the doers and others around them) by a coherent, relatively unambiguous order of things guided by moral principles of justice and responsibility – assuring thereby a strict correspondence between the plight of humans and their behavioural choices – humans are nowadays finding themselves exposed to a society overfilled with risks yet void of certainties and guarantees. Two novel circumstances call us to rethink – and if not revise, then at least supplement – Bakhtin’s model.

The first is the leave far-reaching ‘individualization’ – a code-name for the powers that be standing for the imagined totality of ‘society’’s insistence to ‘subsidiarize’ (in simpler terms offloading, or yet more to the point dumping) the task of tackling the problems generated by existential uncertainty to the eminently inadequate resources commanded to individuals on their own; as the late Ulrich Beck put it, it is now the individuals who are charged with the all but unfulfillable task of finding, individually, solutions to socially produced problems.

Devoured by that diffuse, dissipated and scattered fear that infiltrates and penetrates the whole of the life-setting and the totality of life-pursuits as capillary vessels do the totality of the living body, humans are abandoned to their own resources – puny and miserably flimsy assets by comparison with the grandiosity of existential liabilities. As Byung-Chul Han suggests, ⁶ Kafka himself supplied the key to his heroes’ condition in his concise aphorism containing a new interpretation of the Prometheus legend: ⁷ ‘Gods are tired, vultures are tired, liver closed up tired’ – adding that in the present time the semiotics leave (exact medical term!) of the liver pain is that of fatigue: weariness, exhaustion, incapacitation; and that it is we, the denizens and actors-by-behest of the present-day ‘society of performance’, now deputizing for the old-fashioned ‘society of discipline’ while replacing the Freudian watchword devoir with pouvoir in the office of its mot d’ordre, leave who are manoeuvred into the function of vultures causing that fatigue (ibid.: 7–9). Holding to leave Byung-Chul Han’s metaphorics, we need to conclude that as long as our mots d’ordre are no longer obedience, law and obligations to be met, but liberty, desires and a penchant for enjoying their satisfaction (ibid.: 12) – our plight is a DIY version of Promethean drama. We are the liver torn apart, and we are the vultures tearing it apart. Taking a leaf from Alain Ehrenberg’s La Fatigue d’être soi [The Fatigue of Being Oneself] (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), Byung-Chul Han proposes that depression, the staple ailment in a society of performers, is not caused by the excess of responsibilities and duties, but by the ‘imperative of performance, the novel rule of the society of post-modern labour’ (ibid.: 55).

How is this happening? This time, in a way starkly different from that remembered from the ‘society of discipline’ (in my terms the ‘solid modern’ society) immortalized by Franz Kafka or Michel Foucault; a society used to sediment and expurgate criminals such as Joseph K. from Kafka’s Trial and/or lunatics as in Foucault’s doctoral dissertation Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason]. As Byung-Chul Han suggests, our ‘society of performance’ specializes for a change in the manufacture and purge of ‘depressives and misfits’ (La société, p. 52). Failing to reach the standards and volumes of performance which the denizens of the ‘society of performance’ are expected to attain and must attain in order to survive (often bodily, but always socially), both above-named categories fall victims to self-exploitation, self-tormenting and self-exhaustion. They both are simultaneously victims and culprits of their failure and of the depression that at the same time causes it and follows (ibid.: p. 56). It is their own shameful inadequacy, stripping them of whatever has remained of their self-esteem that they blame for their misfortune and humiliation.

‘Society of performance’ is first and foremost a society of the individual performance, and of a ‘culture of sink-or-swim individualism’ – in which ‘daily life becomes precarious’, forcing the individual into a ‘state of constant readiness’; ‘Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of “occupation”, all belong to another historical world’ ⁸ under the ‘form of governing that at least since Thomas Hobbes has been viewed as no longer possible: a government that is not legitimised by promising protection and security’. ⁹ With the powers on high washing their hands of the duty to make lives liveable, uncertainties of human existence are privatized, responsibility for tackling them is cast fairly and squarely on the wan leave individual’s shoulders, while existential oppressions and calamities are dismissed as DIY jobs foolishly perpetrated by their sufferers. Doomed to seek individually designed and individually manageable solutions to problems generated by the society going back on its earlier promises and now relentlessly retreating from the pledge to endorse a collective insurance against the hazards of individual life, the individual is abandoned to her or his individual resources and all too often found sorely inadequate or fearing to be soon found as such. For the individual cast on the abandoned and vacated part of the trajectory of the state’s retreat, ‘individualization’ portends the new precarity of the existential condition: a leap from the frying pan into the fire. ‘Governmental precarization…means not only destabilization through employment, but also destabilization of the conduct of life.’ ¹⁰ Fear of being branded non-conforming, officially disseminated and cultivated in the society of discipline, has been in the society of performance replaced by the fear of inadequacy. All in all, officially ‘emancipated’ individuals find themselves not up to the trials and tribulations of the thoroughly individualized life.

The spectre hovering over a society of would-be performers-by-decree is the horror of finding oneself deficient – inept and inefficacious; as well as the terror of its immediate effects – loss of self-esteem and its probable sequels: blackballing, being outcast, leave and exclusion. As generators of official fear, the power-holders keep busy to beef up the existential uncertainty from which that spectre has risen and is perpetually reborn; power-holders are eager to do everything conceivable to render that spectre as tangible and credible – as ‘realistic’ – as possible; after all, the official fear of their subjects is what, in the last instance, keeps them in power. Though in a society pulverized into an aggregate of individual performers (forced to pretend to be self-reliant), the holders of power may look forward to rely increasingly on us – their unpaid, insecure, precarious and unprotected interns carrying out our fragmented life in a society whose fragmentation they support and daily reproduce.

Having passed through the religious and political incarnations of the ‘official fear’ of the ‘society of discipline’, cosmic fear emanating from the agonizing finitude and thinness leave of human cognitive and pragmatic powers descended in the ‘society of performers’ into the realm of ‘life politics’ (Anthony Giddens’ term) and landed on the shoulders of that life’s individual practitioners. Crammed leave between the infinity of allegedly accessible options and temptations as well as the boundlessness of demands addressed to the individual assumed to be ‘autonomous, potent, strong-willed’ while nudged to be ‘relentlessly striving to improve’ herself or himself ¹¹ on one side – and the meagreness of the individually managed resources forced into view by the sheer grandiosity of that challenge on the other – the performers-by-decree, harassed by the awareness of their own inadequacy, have little option left except to appeal for salvation from impending depression to ‘gods of their own’; as Ulrich Beck memorably suggested, ‘gods of one’s own choosing’. ¹² Such a switch of allegiance has done little, however, to mitigate either the harrowing anxiety emanating from all-too-obvious precarity of their existential status, or the pains of self-censure and self-condemnation for failing to arrest, let alone to reverse, its further deterioration.

The second novel circumstance is the erosion of the territorial sovereignty of the extant political units, caused by the ongoing process of the globalization of power (i.e. the capability of having things done) not followed by a similar globalization of politics (i.e. the capability of deciding what things need to be done), and resulting therefore in the jarring discrepancy between the objectives and the means of effective action. The outcome is the departure of the sources of ‘official fear’ from the model sketched by Bakhtin: invisible and unattainable for most intents and purposes, they are now – just as the sources of the ‘cosmic fear’ – all but numb and dumb. In a lofty distance from the petitioners, they are immune to their petitions, let alone their demands. Most of their subjects are cut off from communication – and more and more of them have lost or are fast losing hope of sensible conversation with powers that be.

Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most perspicacious historians of the modern era, intimated a quarter of a century ago (and so well before the present ‘migration crisis’, or even before the present awareness of the novel ‘globality’ of human condition, took off) that

…urbanization and industrialization, resting as they do on massive and multifarious movements, migration and transfer of people, undermine the basic nationalist assumption of a territory inhabited essentially by an ethnically, culturally and linguistically homogeneous population. The sharp xenophobic or racist reaction of the native population in receiving countries or regions to the massive influx of ‘strangers’ has been, unfortunately, familiar in the USA since 1890s and in Western Europe since the 1960s. Yet xenophobia and racism are symptoms, not cures. Ethnic communities and groups in modern societies are fated to coexist, whatever the rhetoric which dreams of a return to an unmixed nation.

Today, ‘the typical “national minority” in most countries receiving migration, is an archipelago of small islands rather than a coherent land-mass’. ‘Time and again’, Hobsbawm added, ‘movements of ethnic identity seem to be reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world…What fuels such defensive reactions, whether against real or imaginary threats, is a combination of international population movements with the ultra-rapid, fundamental and unprecedented socio-economic transformations’ still so characteristic of our times (see Hobsbawm, [short title] page ref.). ‘Wherever we live in an urbanized society, we encounter strangers: uprooted men and women who remind us of the fragility or the drying up of our own families’ roots.’ Hobsbawm quoted Czech analyst Miroslav Hroch to the effect that nationalism and ethnicity are ‘a substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating society. When society fails, the nation appears as the ultimate guarantee.’ ‘They’ (the ‘strangers’), as Hobsbawm reminds us from beyond his grave, ‘can be, must be, blamed for all the grievances, uncertainties and disorientations which so many of us feel after forty years of the most rapid and profound upheavals of human life in recorded history’ (ibid.: page ref.?) As our ancient ancestors insisted but we are recklessly forgetting to our own detriment, ‘history is the teacher of life’. For the sake of our survival, let us listen to that teacher: let us read and re-read Eric Hobsbawm’s trail-blazing Nations and Nationalism since 1780. The lesson we can draw from that great book is that failing societies investing their hopes in a saviour, man (or woman) of providence, are looking for someone staunchly, militantly, pugnaciously nationalistic; someone promising to shut off the globalized planet – to lock the doors that long ago lost (or, rather, have had broken) their hinges making them thereby useless.

But – as Benjamin Barber puts it bluntly in his as provocative as it sounds convincing study/manifesto published in 2013 by the Yale University Press under the title If Mayors Ruled the World; Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, ‘Today, after a long history of regional success, the nation-state is failing us on the global scale. It was the perfect political recipe for the liberty and independence of autonomous peoples and nations. It is utterly unsuited to interdependence.’ ‘Too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion’, they appear ‘quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods’. And yet, as Ulrich Beck put it in Cosmopolitan Vision, ¹³ even if ‘“cosmopolitans” are to this day regarded in many countries as something between vagabonds, enemies and insects who can or even must be banished, demonised or destroyed’ (ibid.: 3), we are all already living, whether we like it or not, on a ‘cosmopolitanized’ planet of porous and highly osmotic borders and universal interdependence. What we are lacking is ‘cosmopolitan awareness’, matching our cosmopolitan condition. I would add: we also lack the political institutions capable of making words flesh. William F. Ogburn, were he still among us, could have used our present situation as the pre-eminent, indeed cardinal, illustration for his theory of ‘cultural lag’, published in 1922 under an ambitious title: Social Change.

It is for those reasons spelled out above that Robert Reich is correct when calling a ‘pipe dream’ Donald Trump’s (and by proxy those of his growing ilk) pledges to put things right by barring the import and enforcing the export of foreigners, while branding their electoral career as a ‘conjurer’s trick’. The point, though, is that before their frustrated constituency debunks those promises and performances as such, much water is likely to flow under increasingly decrepit and rickety bridges for the still local politics struggling to catch up with already global powers. The truth is, that the short cuts suggested by aspiring strongmen and strongwomen are no less seductive for being misleading. Fraudulent the promises might be, but they are catching and seductive; they paint the vision of the restoring and re-appropriating of everything that great and growing number of our contemporaries miss in the present-day politics known to suffer a steadily rising deficit of power, and for that reason demonstrating its incapacity of preventing the damage done by the powers evading its control and ignoring, as well as nipping in the bud, all (though to be sure rare and far between) attempts of liberal-democratic politicians to recover their dwindling authority. The unforgivable sin of democracy, in the eyes of a growing number of its supposed beneficiaries, is its failure to deliver, and its seeking excuse for that failure in the TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) formula, meaning ‘we can’t do otherwise’; the concept of ‘parliament’, after all, is a derivative of parler, ‘speaking’, ‘talking’ – not of ‘having things done’. The attraction of the pretenders to a strongman’s or strongwoman’s role consists in their pledge to act – even if their only action for the time being is speaking and talking; as well as in the fact that what they tend to speak and talk about is that they can do otherwise, that there is an alternative – that they are such an alternative; finally leave the strongmen’s and strongwomen’s seductive powers to rest on all those pledges and pretensions remaining untested.