Reading, Watching 06.30.24
Peering over the Edge
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. I hope you enjoy!
Greetings from the edge of the abyss. Today I have for you:
Thoughts on the debate debacle as a kind of constitutional crisis.
The French election.
The most Balzacian Balzac novel I’ve read.
But first—in case you missed it—I have some very exciting news: When the Clock Broke made the New York Times Bestseller list! Never did I dare dream that this idiosyncratic and even slightly odd little book would be met with such a reception. You’ll also permit me to gloat a little bit: It’s funny to reflect now that every single publisher we sent the proposal to at first passed on the book. So, a special thanks must go to Alex Star, my editor at FSG, who got the idea immediately. He’s clearly a publishing visionary! Also, thank you to everyone who’s bought the book and most especially thank you if you’ve recommended it to a friend or family member—the reviews help, but seems sales are really being carried by word of mouth.
I’d also like to draw your attention to a couple recent reviews that I think really deepen the understanding of the book. The first is by the historian Kim Phillips-Fein in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And the second is by economist
over at his Substack, Grasping Reality.Here’s one thought that occurred to me observing the drama that has followed Biden’s deeply concerning debate performance: were are something like a constitutional crisis. Often we use that term for a situation where the text of a written constitution is unclear, ambiguous, and cannot fully resolve a dispute over the exercise and transfer of power or application of the law. What we are facing, so far, does not concern the Constitution of the United States as a document. But there is something else that we might call a constitution, something that’s more like the constitution of Britain or ancient Rome; an unwritten set of conventions, traditions, and rules that permit the political system to function. In the Roman republic, there was ius, the general conception of right, which included both the written lex and the customary mos maiorum, the “way of the ancestors.” In the United States, we have the capital-C Constitution and then we have “the norms,” ancillary institutions for the appropriate use and delegation of power that have evolved over time through the practice of politics. One of the most important of these is the mass political party, which developed in the middle of the 19th century. Martin Van Buren, the father of the modern political party, conceived of parties as the institutional means way permit the widest remit of democratic rule. The political party, with its ability to forge consensus and discipline out of the clash of interests, was even understood a kind of model of democratic rule itself. The parties were republican and democratic in the sense that they were not to be mere instruments of their leaders, but bodies made up of their members—leadership would arise out of the organization. As Richard Hofstadter writes in The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840:
The parties ought to be democratic associations run by and for their active members, and not for a proprietary leader. There was to be a chain of command, but its orders would issue from the members in conclave, and not from a leading notable and his clique. Parties were not to be personal factions…The personal faction would only serve the interests of its aristocratic leader. But the popular party would underwrite a series of careers open to talents: it would create opportunities for nominations, patronage, careers, in return for the loyalty it demanded of its members. Its leaders were not the owners of the organization but its agents, who earned their way upward in its ranks through faithful service.
Although they were conceived as vehicles for democracy, the selection of candidates was not particularly democratic until the 1970s when primaries replaced national conventions as the way to pick presidential nominees. Constitutional systems balance elitist and democratic methods of government. Sometimes undoing that balance has paradoxical results.
Let’s look at the situation we are in now: through phis domination of the primary process, Trump personally rules the G.O.P; he did not have to rise slowly through the party apparatus, he has ridden roughshod of the party elite and they must submit to him. The result of this democratization of the party is now functionally antidemocratic: he leads, to this point, a minority faction that has capitalized on the anti-majoritarian parts of the constitution to get into power and when that fails, he has attempted to call a mob into the streets to make up for a lack of democratic legitimacy. He does not observe any parts of the informal constitution when they don’t serve him personally. He is not disciplined by loyalty to either party or nation.