Nemesis

The Great Balancing

Almost on a whim, the day before election day, I visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birthplace in Hyde Park. I didn’t consciously attach any symbolic meaning to the visit or connect it to the events in the country; it was almost an ironic side trip to a piece of hokey Americana. But in the end, I found it quite moving. It’s a national park, so they have portraits of the president and vice president, and it felt like a desecration to see those two mugs hanging on the wall: these were two people working to erase the legacy of the man honored here. Watching the films and walking through the exhibits, I couldn’t help but feel sad. This was the vision of the country I had, in a childlike sort of way, believed in: Imperfect, deeply flawed even, but always moving towards something better. I wondered if that country was forever lost; If we had just forgotten the spirit of FDR’s America and it was now just fading nostalgia. This melancholy frame of mind was certainly helped along by it being autumn. I stopped to look down the driveway that FDR, stricken with polio, forced himself to “walk” up and down with his heavy leg braces. It was bathed in almost otherworldly afternoon light as yellow leaves gently fell and settled. To say it was peaceful would not do it justice; it was suffused with a perfect serenity and calm that was difficult to walk away from. You could see easily how this environment would raise a man with “a first-class temperament,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, and perhaps more astutely than he meant, because FDR’s pacific demeanor so fully reflected the blessings of his aristocratic upbringing.

I thought of Isaiah Berlin’s recollection of what Roosevelt had meant to him in the darkness of the 1930s.:

…the only light in the darkness that was left was the administration of Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States. At a time of weakness and mounting despair in the democratic world, Mr. Roosevelt radiated confidence and strength. He was the leader of the demo­cratic world, and even to-day, upon him alone, of all the states­men of the thirties, no cloud rested neither on him nor on the New Deal, which to European eyes still looks a bright chapter in the history of mankind.

Melancholy airs will not do for a guest in the Roosevelt home. Lincoln was our great melancholic, the product of the century of romanticism and all its morbid preoccupations; FDR, for all his suffering and struggles, beamed. He was the spirit of modernity, not as alienation and existentialist angst, but as progress. (As an aside, it is interesting to think of Donald Trump as anti-FDR, the spoiled scion without class or taste, corrupt and greedy rather than filled with noblesse oblige, and Vance as anti-Lincoln, the man from modest roots filled with small envies and resentments rather than magnanimous wisdom. Men with the ambition of their historical parallels but without the virtue.) But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when I drove away from Hyde Park. I was very simply happy—carefree—and looking forward to visiting another great American institution just up the road: a diner.

Then the next day: the thunderclap. FDR’s America seems back from the dead. People are arguing already whether or not Americans really rejected the ugliness and hate of Trumpism or just the economic disappointment and disarray. I think they are inextricable to some degree, both products of the same disorder. Most Americans said they were voting against corruption, which has a literal, legal meaning but also a broader moral meaning that combines both economic unfairness and tyrannical abuse of power.

I always believed that an effective antidote to Trump would have to include both a case for democracy and a reconstruction of its promise for ordinary people. All the great successes of anti-fascist mass politics—from the New Deal to the Popular Front in France—combined a program of material improvement for working people with a defense of the democratic republic. The coalition to make that possible, that popular front, took a much longer time to cohere in the United States than I had hoped. Part of it was just fortune: it took time for the right combination of economic grievance and political outrage to come together, But again, much of what we are experiencing is the full fruit of Trumpian authoritarianism. Its economic failures are not separate from its political abuses: they are the consequences of it. Fascist politics always involves some volatile combination of the leader's personal vainglory and caprice, his followers' ideological fanaticisms, and his fellow travelers’ venal grasping. Hubris, fanaticism, and avarice for a moment seem to pull in one direction, giving the false impression of overwhelming power, but these cronies will always fall out sooner or later. The resulting disorder is not an unfortunate deviation from the original program as the “sensible” Trumpists now want to say: it is intrinsic to the regime. Fascism is inherently an incoherent response to genuine social problems. It can’t resolve the crises that bring it to power because its entire political imagination is organized around a systematic misapprehension of their causes; It can only project those contradictions onto imaginary enemies, and in the process deepen the discontents it promised to conquer.

The word that kept occurring to me yesterday was nemesis. Today, we use it to mean something like a personal arch-enemy, but the significance in ancient Greek is much deeper. Nemesis was the goddess that restored balance. Her name comes from the word nemein, to give what is due. Nemesis inflicts divine retribution on hubris, arrogance. Hubris often gives rise to its own nemesis: the belief in one’s own invincibility, the lack of recognition that one’s success is the product of good fortune, sows the seeds for one’s own downfall. One can see nemesis all over the Republican defeat. They confused a narrow electoral victory with an irrevocable popular mandate, their temporary and in many ways accidental possession of power with a permanent transformation of American society. In their overweening pride they sought to humiliate and punish their opponents. And in their arrogance, they forgot the source of their power: the people’s will, who had given it to them and could just as easily take it away. Their belief in their own omnipotence ultimately rendered them blind and then powerless.

But in Greek ethics, nemesis is also a disposition, a feeling of offended justice. It is what one feels when one sees the undeserved good fortune of others. Aristotle differentiated it from envy in that it is righteous indignation over the success of the unworthy rather than bitterness over the just success of the worthy. It’s an ethical emotion, a desire to see balance restore and the goddess Nemesis’s work done. There’s going to be a lot of discussion on how we are to handle the gross criminality of this regime. If they were guided by hubris, arrogant pleasure in domination for its own sake, let us be instead guided by nemesis: a desire to restore justice, balance, and order.