Bonapartheid

 

From Michael Meschke's production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Stockholm 1964.

I guess that should be counted as a kind of confession, with a plea for jury nullification: yes, when you come down to it, he kind of has tried to overthrow the US government, a couple or three times, and that's probably illegal in the normal way of things, but then the price of eggs is really high, so what choice did he have? You can't make a revolution omelette without breaking some constitutional eggshells, even if that's going to push the egg price even higher.

That is, Trump is really and truly making the claim that he has led a revolution against unbearable oppression, and at a time like this, the ordinary laws that we've been living with don't apply any more. Laws specifying procedures you have to follow if you want to fire a few hundred civil servants, or saying you have to spend the money Congress has allocated for a certain purpose on that purpose, or demanding that you treat immigrants as if they were human beings. You're busy saving your capital-C Country, for Christ's sake! Like the Founders, who were breaking the law too! 

Though Jefferson wrote his complex and sophisticated argument denying that they were doing that at all, putting all the blame on poor George III and claiming not that the revolutionary gang were the saviors of a Country which didn't in any case exist yet—just that they were breaking up with the abusive old country, and that they were acting in the service of self-evident truths, a higher kind of law that George was alleged to have relentlessly violated, including the unwritten British constitution, particularly in his refusal to grant them the traditional liberties of the British citizen with respect to representation in Parliament.

The quote itself is usually attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, as a presumptive defense for his role in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799, which overthrew the government of France under the five-man revolutionary Directoire, and established him as First Consul, though it wouldn't have made much sense for Bonaparte to say it either; he undoubtedly thought of himself as the savior of the nation, but preferred to have other people say that for him (unlike the irrepressible Donald Trump), and was anxious that the thing look backed by stringent legality): "The extraordinary decree of the Council of Ancients, in conformity with articles 102 and 103 of the Constitution, has put me in charge of the city [of Paris] and the army," he told the soldiers gathered at the Tuileries, after the Council finished its vote before high-tailing it out of town to Saint-Cloud; "I have accepted, in order to support the measures it will be taking, all on behalf of the people." 

The French emperor was certainly a murderous and narcissistic psychopath, but he wasn’t an idiotic meme like our American emperor. He had some sense of dignity, and some sense of what ordinary people are like and what they need to hear.

Imagine Vought or Miller writing Trump a speech offering a legal justification from the Constitution or statutes for firing 12 or 17 inspectors general (we still don't know exactly how many) or decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, or sending the military in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act to pacify the southern border area. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do it, any more than they are able to write up the administration’s executive orders and memoranda with the minimal professionalism required to keep judges from grinding their teeth in rage or laughing in the administration’s faces.

In fact Napoleon didn't say it, as I've been able to determine with my advanced Googling skills. The first appearance of the sentence "Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" is in 1838, 17 years after Napoléon's death on St. Helena, in a little collection of 525 unsourced sentences attributed to the emperor under the title Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, signed by a hatmaker called Jean-Louis Gaudy, but actually written by no less a figure than Honoré de Balzac, it turns out, who ghostwrote it on commission from Gaudy, making the quotes up mostly up out of his head (Gaudy was apparently hoping to earn a decoration from King Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king" crowned after the 1830 revolution, who encouraged the Napoléon cult to bolster his liberal bona fides—Balzac himself was a Legitimist supporter of a Bourbon restoration but also a great admirer of Napoléon and his contrast with the destestable bourgeois dominance of the age of Louis-Philippe, which shows how confused French political thinking was in the early 19th century). Balzac could never afford to turn down some easy money. He probably tossed it off in three days with 60 cups of coffee and then hurried back to whichever installment of La Comédie Humaine he was working on.

That makes the thing a neat little epitome of what this Trump administration is about. We can argue what he means by using the sa ying, we can debate where he got it from (the prevailing opinion on X and Threads seems to be that it's Stephen Miller, who loyally retweeted its appearances three times yesterday afternoon), but what stands out in the end is that it's fundamentally bogus, like everything else they do. 

We are being ruled by memes, meme stocks, meme coins, meme policies, meme slogans, meme philosophies of government, a meme emperor who thinks he's Napoléon when he's actually more like Père Ubu, and his Batman villain billionaire sidekick. And we do have to worry about what it portends for the administration as a whole in the awful future, because it's actually going to kill people, throw families into turmoil, halt important research, destroy international relationships, spread poverty, crash markets, encourage criminal corruption, weaken the military, harm the education system, and generally humiliate our country in the eyes of the world, but we can't let them continue to make us stupider. Refusing to become stupider is our only hope.

Permission to Be Your Worst Self

Over at the Xitter, Dinesh D'Souza is really on drugs now:

No, Dinesh, it's a 1787 document. See the "We the people" up at top?

Eleven years earlier, the authors had been members of a rebellion against a monarchy, and they could conceivably have been arrested for it, if the British army had been able to get close enough (I know for instance that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were expecting to be arrested in 1775 and fled Boston for Concord), but they weren't, and none of them was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, a felony. You can't become a convicted felon without having a trial first. That's how Trump did it, with a grand jury deciding to charge him and a regular jury deciding he was guilty.

That's just one of the differences between Donald Trump and James Madison. If you're looking for a Trump parallel in the story, you'd do better going with George III, another extremely wealthy but profoundly stupid grandchild of German immigrants who believed that God had put him above the law.

Think about it: 

State of Society

The other day in comments I was denouncing George Mason and the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1776 for the casuistry with which they declared that all men are equally free and endowed with rights except for those who happened to be enslaved: 

George Mason's Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia, drafted May 1776, where the original smushing took place a few weeks before Jefferson adopted it, began by declaring "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." 

That "enter into a state of society" clause was designed as an exemption for Virginians of African descent, who were deemed not "in a state of society". That was a diabolical piece of trickery (inherent for me but not for you, for reasons that are not intrinsic but historical), far worse than but very similar to the right to bear arms in the 1689 Bill, which was only for Protestants and not the Catholic allies of the ex-king.

Valued commenter Jeff Ryan took issue with that; surely I was overinterpreting what they meant by "state of society", and when I explained I'd gotten the interpretation from Wikipedia he wasn't too impressed with that either.

But the record of the deliberations makes it absolutely clear, as we learn from Self-evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War, by Richard D. Brown, 2017. Some delegates to the convention, led by Robert Nicholas, complained that the original language of Mason's proposed document, claiming natural freedom for all men without exception, was too radical for a society based on slavery: it could prompt the slaves to revolt, and delegate Edmund Pendleton came up with the hedge: 

It's Complicated

Liberty Tree, corner of Essex and Washington Streets, Boston, undated, via history.com.

I've been wanting to go back to the piece on historiography last week, and to correct something misleading I said, that led Redhand to comment

At this point in my life, I really am beginning to wonder what the hell the American Revolution was about, to begin with. "No taxation without representation," or as Yas suggests, no taxation at all, at least if you're part of the American meritocracy (or is it, actually, aristocracy?) Or, more darkly, (pun intended) was the revolution intended to enshrine under the banner of "freedom" the privileges of those "urban and urbane" white elites who were happy to see "the embattled farmers" do the real fighting at Lexington and Concord?

I didn't mean to try to substitute one categorical statement (the liberal postwar consensus view of the Revolution as a movement of pure idealistic principle) with another one (a strawman picture of the revolutionaries as purely selfish and self-interested actors). What I really wanted to praise in the older, cynical history of the early 20th century and by implication in the critical history of now is the possibility of not insisting on categorical judgments at all, of not requiring a decision on who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, of recognizing that it's complicated.

Lectiones: American Historiography

 

Stamp Act riots, Boston, 1765. Can't find a decent credit, but I think it's from Britain.

Reading a truly remarkable essay in The New Republic by William Hogeland, "Against the Consensus Approach to History" taking on the lofty historians after World War II who developed the myth of the revolutionary founding of the United States as a unified product of the Enlightenment and the belief in innate rights; in particular Edmund Morgan:

Throwing out elder historians’ prevailing focus on the founding generation’s self-interest (Clarence Alvord had said that George Washington became a patriot to defend speculations in Indian land) and on its class conflicts (Carl Becker had said that the Revolution was not only over British rule but also over the rule of elite Americans), Morgan sought to identify the grand principles that the revolutionary generation agreed on. “What the colonists had to say about Parliamentary power and about their own rights deserved to be taken seriously,” he explained later.

As the U.S. began to exercise new power around the world, Morgan set out to show that the protests in the 1760s and ’70s against the Stamp Act and other British policies offered slam-dunk evidence of a founding American consensus on principles of rights. Inherent to the American character, that consensus unified the colonists, he said, inspired the Revolution, and brought about the United States. In the larger context of his work, and the work of similarly minded colleagues, the lesson was that the founding American commitment to rights persisted in postwar U.S. commitments to modern liberal democracy.

I.e., something that sounds as if it had been designed by the CIA, in contrast to the more cynical and materialistic views, whether leftist or conservative, of the period from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (and views, I would add, that also recognize the diversity of the North American colonials, not quite the way we'd want to do it today with a focus on oppression and intersectional identity, but more compatible with that than the postwar picture).

Old Ancestor, He Just Keep Rollin' Along

Dr. Franklin flying a kite with his friend Amos observing from the genius's knee, by Robert Lawson, via. It was hard to find a good one, too, amid the truly crappy stills and storyboards from the Disney cartoon.

Screenshot from today's Brooks, "A Generation Emerging from the Wreckage", just in case some editor in the retreating rear guard stumbles across this lost detail and puts it out of its misery:

Brooks reports, speaking of the young people he encountered on his Voyage into the Heart of Millenniality,

They looked at me like I was from Mars. 

And no wonder. They've probably never met anybody from one of those cultures where the ancestors are invisible actors living among us, working their mysterious will. Propitiate them, with offerings of burnt animal fat and alcohol! They'll build that promised land yet!

Fundamental and astounding

Presidential nominee, 1860, via The History Place.

David Brooks has finally come up with an idea for that new national narrative he's been talking about, I think, and it's a doozy ("America: The Redeemer Nation"), custom made for Thanksgiving: just as he's suggested in the past that Jews ought to celebrate Shavuot on Passover instead of Passover, so on Thanksgiving he's celebrating Lincoln's Second Inaugural address.

The story of America, then, can be interpreted as a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts. Look at the mottos on our Great Seal: “A New Order for the Ages” and “Out of Many, One.” In the 18th century divisions between the colonists were partially healed. In the 19th century divisions between the free and enslaved were partially healed. In the 20th, America partially healed the divisions between democracy and totalitarianism. In the 21st, we have healing fresh starts still to come.

The great sermon of redemption and reconciliation is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

That's such a bizarre picture of the Revolution, in the first place, "divisions between the colonists", as if the British government had nothing to do with it. It's true that some 15%-20% of the Americans nominally supported the Crown, though they never came out to fight in anywhere near the numbers the British hoped they would.

Please don't throw me in that briar patch, Br'er Vox

British pro-slavery propaganda from the late 18th century, via HumaneMyth,

I was somehow personally offended to learn from blogfriend M. Bouffant, in comments to last Friday's post on how an 18th-century David Brooks might regard the American Revolution, that Dylan Matthews at Vox had already put up a post on Thursday arguing that the Revolution was a mistake from a more or less progressive, or at least Voxgressive, point of view, on the grounds that

I'm reasonably confident a world where the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: slavery would've been abolished earlier, American Indians would've faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse. 

Let the record show, by the way, that Matthews started his literary career as a 14-year-old blogger under the nym Minipundit ("I am little, it's the blogs that got elephantine"), and it wasn't very long ago. Like 2004, to be exact. Just saying.