Brooks on Soul

What is a soul?

asks David F. Brooks ("Joe Biden and the Struggle For America's Soul"), with reference to President Biden's assertion, when he was announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential race, that we are still "in a battle for the soul of America," as we were in 2020, when that was Biden's campaign slogan.

Actually it's just a rhetorical question, because he knows the answer. In fact he knows more than one answer, and he also knows which answer Biden has in mind:

Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

And what the hell is that, when it's at home? A "moral essence"? (Makes me think of the Essence of Chicken that Tiger moms in Southeast Asia give their children to endow them with strength to study harder, or the French word essence meaning "gasoline".) 

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Whig politician who became a small-c conservative after the French Revolution frightened him half to death in 1789-90, from whom Brooks allegedly got some of his ideas when he was a student at the University of Chicago, speaks of "moral essence" as the non-physical thing of which nations are made:

Mere locality does not constitute a body politic. Had Cade and his gang got possession of London, they would not have been the lord mayor, aldermen, and common council. The body politic of France existed in the majesty of its throne, in the dignity of its nobility, in the honour of its gentry, in the sanctity of its clergy, in the reverence of its magistracy, in the weight and consideration due to its landed property in the several bailliages, in the respect due to its moveable substance represented by the corporations of the kingdom. All these particular moleculae united form the great mass of what is truly the body politic in all countries. They are so many deposits and receptacles of justice; because they can only exist by justice. Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator.

In fact, Burke goes on to say, France doesn't even exist any more in France (this is in 1796 or 1797), but "out of her bounds"; they no longer have the landed property in the several bailliages, but they are still owed the respect. "The regicides in France are not France. France is out of her bounds, but the kingdom is the same."

 I don't suppose that would apply to the individual soul, though. ("Death is when a gang beheads your moral essence and what's left of it runs away to Germany and Austria, so your body is left without a respectable government.")

But enough kidding. I did find a concept of "moral essence" that's relevant to our current issues, from no less a figure than good old George Lakoff, the OG semiographer of American politics, giving some thought to the phrase in his 1995 "Metaphor, Morality, and Politics": it's a metaphor. Within the system of the conservative metaphors for morality, governed by the metaphor of "moral strength" (good is being upright. bad is being low, doing evil is falling, evil is a force internal or external), the "moral essence" is a metaphor for the aspect of a person's character that tells how they will behave morally, well (if they have a "heart of gold") or ill (if they're "rotten to the core").

Which I think would not be the same thing as a "soul", and clearly wouldn't explain what Biden means by the "soul of a nation" (maybe it would for the tankies for whom everything done by the US is evil by definition and everything done opposing the US good, whether the perpetrator is a communist country like the USSR or a fanatically rightwing country like the Russian Federation—they might accept the idea that the US at least has a moral essence, in that it's essentially immoral).

But Lakoff does something different with nations with which the word "soul" has no obvious connection; as you'll probably remember (if you haven't remembered already), his metaphors for nations come from families: families with Stern Fathers for conservatives, families with Nurturing Parents (meaning both of them if two are available) for liberals. 

I think Biden's line about the struggle for the soul of America should be understood in those kind of terms: what kind of family is our country going to be? Is it going to be hierarchical and authoritarian, governed from the top down? Or are we all going to support each other in our various aspirations, in kindness and appreciation of differences, valuing fairness and happiness?

However that, of course, is not the choice Brooks wants us to be thinking about, because it's a way of saying Republicans are nasty, so he turns the subject to Trump instead:

It's pretty to think so. To me the unique thing about Trump is his personal incompetence and inability. He could never have achieved power on his own. He is the achievement of mainstream Republicans from Stone and Manafort and Giuliani to Graham and Christie and McCarthy.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2023

Those men--and Mercer and Uihlein and Thiel and so on the money side--chose him, fully aware of his ignorance and his personal viciousness. To manipulate him into accomplishing their private goals (on taxation and regulation, in opposition to the majority of Americans).

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2023

Or if you like to continue the restructuring of our society on an authoritarian, Stern Father model (Dad gets to hold back cash from the family pool, Dad doesn't have to listen to anybody's ideas about safety).

Republicans created Trump, like W before him and Reagan before that, for their own purposes. Theirs is the responsibility. They should stop dodging that.