The politics of performance vs. the performance of politics

There are some hypothetically attractive features of a clean separation between state and government and their respective leaders. Joining the two as the U.S. Constitution does leads to a situation where you need a criminal conviction in order to fire an incompetent employee i.e. the President of the United States.

My cousin Thomas Riley Marshall, vice-president of the United States under Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may his bones be crushed), was encouraged to oust the head of the ticket after that evil critter was crippled by a debilitating stroke. Cousin Tom anguished over the decision before deciding against it out of fear he’d establish some toxic precedent for kicking the People’s Choice™ out of office. Cousin Tom may go down in history as a hero of feminism, if heroes of feminism are in fact a thing, for electing the nation’s first de facto woman president through inaction. He may have left the worst U.S. president of the 2oth century intact as a diseased pustule that could still periodically burst and infect the republic.

I don’t judge Cousin Tom too harshly: he’s family, after all. He was an amiable chap and he legitimately fretted about ejecting evil from the oval office for perfectly understandable reasons. Within the cultural distinctiveness of the United States government and the peculiar trajectory of its political perturbations, he probably made the right call. A future where Thomas Woodrow Wilson (bones, crushed) wasn’t tossed out onto the street may have been the best of all possible futures. However, other nations, drawing on the traditions of the Third Republic and even that sunless nation of shopkeepers, have systems that let them fire the help without criminal trials, constitutional crises, or even attacks of angst or hand-wringing.

However, nations aren’t made by clever institutional counter-weights or finely tuned parchment walls. They’re not even made by blood and iron. Robin Pearson, voice of the History of Byzantium podcast, pointed out that constant imposition of iron to beget blood is expensive. A state that had to rely on continuous active application of violence, though violence is the primal core of the dividing of power, would quickly enervate itself into bankruptcy. The wise statesmen, and, usually, even the mediocre statesmen, strive to create the legitimacy that will bind people to state through cultural ties of love, fear, and, strongest of all, habit. Drip, drip, like Chinese water torture, habit will bind men stronger than the sword or the pen, though a bit of both violence and influence is a component of building habit.

In charting the byzantine machinations of Byzantine religious controversy, Pearson echoes a point raised by his podcast predecessor Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast: offended gods are a national security threat. If the sacred chickens are tossed overboard because they fail to peck an omen in a timely fashion, the gods will take it personally and personally take it out on Rome’s fortunes with her enemies. When pagan Roman Empire became Christian Byzantium and indulged in seemingly pointless byzantine hair splitting over how many inches an image had to rise above the medium it was emblazoned upon before it became an idol, it was a continuation of sacralized poultry divination by other means. In the immortal question posed by Bart Simpson to the Flanders boys, “Angry God or Happy God?” The rational statesmen usually opts for Happy God and ensures his sacred chicken have all the leeway they need to peck out the future and double-checks that his icons are safely two-dimensional so they aren’t accidentally mistaken for Golden Calves.

God in His heavens is not actually moved by such petty propitiations: His ways are higher than fumbling human appeasement. He knows how to do His own work. Trying to get on His good side by striving to do His will is still a sensible policy. Even debauched former choir boy Josef Stalin allowed carefully metered appeals to the old God of Mother Russia during the darkest days of Barbarossa. The most useful god, even for a godless atheist like Uncle Joe, was a god of habit. The tyranny of the GULAG is a toddler’s temper tantrum next to the more pervasive tyranny of habit, however constituted.

Culture is the art of the unspoken assumption. Statesmen who strive against the grain of culture, especially as manifested in habit, culture’s most concentrated form, are petting the cat backwards. They’re not likely to get the purring they’re expecting. Separation of the office of head of state from head of government and, the second being like unto it, the separation of the state from government appeal to me on the happy clean idea level. However, the two roles are married in American political culture. Trying to divide them would only produce an enraged feline.

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page