The politics of performance vs. the performance of politics
[by Lynn C. Rees]
A favorite rule of thumb of mine is that politics is the division of power. The three most important questions I ask about politics tend to be:
- What is the division of power?
- What is the division of power?
- What is the division of power?
This can oversimplify, perhaps going for blacker black when grayer grey will do. The notion that politics is the division of power originates in a more cynical school of politics than Civics 101. It will come off more as darker dark than whiter white. Considered in isolation, it can come off as naive materialism, stubbornly and single-mindedly clinging to the assumption that the life of man is tragic, nihilistic, and trite, a farce of grunting conditioned responses driven solely by thirst for power and its fruits.
From a more clinical distance, politics as division of power is merely instrumental. By itself, it is neither black nor white, good nor evil. It merely is. As war is instrument, effector, and expression of politics all in one, juiced up an admixture of physical violence as persuasive spice, politics is an instrument, effector, and expression of culture. Without culture, politics lacks meaning. Without politics, culture is dead. Culture needs power to be more than dead letters. Politics needs culture to be more than twisting machinations, soap operas without end.
To consider politics without culture may be useful for analytic or presentation needs. But to divorce culture from politics and leave a wide gulf that exists more in imagination than substance is as dangerous and seductive as divorcing war from politics. In reality, all are merely expressions of the same human strivings, artificially shorn from one other for more comprehensible storytelling.
The particular rhythms of politics and culture, even though tightly interwoven, hit their own distinctive notes. The warp and weave of culture may hit higher, clearer tones. The twists and contortions of politics may strike a deeper, muddier pitch. Yet both are needed for a well-orchestrated score that marries a healthy bass with soaring melody.
The Constitution of the United States has a peculiar office from a contemporary institutional perspective. Due to the fateful meeting of the peculiar cultural inheritance of English-speaking North America and the curious political conditions of the 1780s, the United States government is led by an elected monarch. Republican themed governments established in the immediate wake of the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, most prominently in the newly independent nations that carved themselves from the corpse of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, adopted the same principle of an elected monarch, usually with indifferent to disastrous results. The office of president usually ended up being indistinguishable from the office of king or emperor, though the branding was different and the optics more current.
Outside of the Americas, today’s most common form of government arose from the perhaps even more highly contingent cultural and political circumstances of the fall of the Second Empire of the Buonapartes, the original for Marx’s historical tragedy repeated as farce. The precipitous fall of the Idiot Nephew left a vacuum. Republicans, some smelling of Jacobinism and Terror, clambered over antediluvian Bourbon and Orleanist pretenders in a race to where even fools feared to tread. Though retro-monarchists who thought Richelieu or Mazarin too modern and too moderate were probably in the majority during the following decade, the times conspired to deny them another go at absolutism under a sacred monarch.
The result was a system where the executive ended up divided between an elected figurehead with little constitutional or customary power and a legislative leader selected by a working majority who held most of the real power, one rooted in their ability to get laws through through the legislature. The French Third Republic ended up with a president who was head of state and a premier who was head of government. This created a partial separation of state and government. The government is dead, but, since the state endured, long live the government.
This separation was further accentuated by the remarkable frequency with which premiers and governments rose and fell under the Third Republic. It was possible for a more assertive president like Raymond Poincare to exercise more power than perhaps the ideal of the Third Republic would like. Remarkably, the whole thing endured the travail of World War I which saw the French Republic survive the rare pairing of assertive premier (Georges Clemenceau) with assertive president (Poincare) until the Third Republic was destroyed by that unfortunate sizable hole they left in the middle of their defenses. The Second Empire fell at Sedan so it’s odd the Third Republic let itself fall at…Sedan.
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