Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy by Tom Nichols

    

Should have received more publicity on publication

                                                            

The end of democracy will come not with mobs burning the Capitol, or food riots, or juntas of national salvation, or demagogues leading the peasants to burn the castles of the rich. It will end, instead, with highly educated, technically proficient, otherwise decent men and women with families and children and mortgages and car payments who will decide that uninformed, spoiled, irascible voters simply can’t produce coherent demands other than “just get it for us,” and they will act accordingly.


This will not happen after a revolution, or a disaster, or a landmark court case—or even after a pandemic. It will happen as part of a million small decisions made every day without the input of the common citizen, as the fulfillment of an unspoken agreement between technocratic elites and the working and middle classes. Rights and participation and transparency will be shelved—as they too often were during the Cold War in the name of national security—as luxuries simply too expensive to indulge. The population will not be impoverished proles, but reasonably educated, comfortable people who have decided that “democracy” means a certain standard of living.

Nichols, Thomas M., Our Own Worst Enemy (pp. 214-215). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

As we Americans attempt to deal with the crisis of our democracy, we are blessed to have many capable individuals addressing our plight. In no particular order: Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Thomas Edsall, Francis Fukuyama, Yousha Mounk, Max Boot, Tim Miller (and others in The Bulwark crowd), Steve McIntosh, George Packer, and others whose names escape me for the moment. Suffice it to say that there are many continuing efforts to better understand our plight. 

And, oh, yes, there’s Tom Nichols. Like Applebaum and Frum, Nichols also writes for The Atlantic. And like Frum and Applebaum and several of the others, Nichols published a book about this topic in 2017, The Death of Expertise. I haven’t read that book, but I became familiar with Nichols around that time and have followed his work since then. This includes frequent contributions to The Atlantic and podcast interviews with Charlie Sykes on the Bulwark podcast. And, to my surprise, I learned that Nichols had published a book in August 2021, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (OUP).  In fact, there’s a bit of an embarrassing story about how I discovered this book, which I detail at the end here.* Suffice it to say that while a year late to the party, I’m glad that I finally arrived. In fact, it may prove to be the best “party” that I’ve attended about this topic. 

Nichols's argument is straightforward: the greatest problems facing the U.S. and other established democracies come from within, not from abroad. The electorate in the U.S. (and I’ll focus on the U.S., as Nichols does) has been chronically unhappy with elites and the course of the nation. Why is this so? Our situation (at least our material situation) is really pretty good, notwithstanding the challenging events of the first fifth of the twenty-first century: the 9/11 attacks and related events of radical Islamic terrorism; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the crash of 2008; mounting domestic terrorism; the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic crash—all these events were indeed traumatic and cost precious lives and huge amounts of treasure. But for most Americans living in August 2022, life is nevertheless quite good. Again, not to minimize the pain and death associated with the events listed (and others), but Nichols (and I) agree with former Presidents Obama’s statement that there’s never been a better time to be alive. One must acknowledge that our material well-being, as measured by the amount of stuff we have and the quality of life that we can enjoy, is beyond the dreams of even the wealthiest who lived as recently as less than a century ago.

So, what's eating at us? Nichols summarizes his answer in three words: “narcissism, anger, and resentment.”

In pursuing this line of thought, Nichols distinguishes himself from others who’ve attempted to diagnose our malaise, including popular opinion. Nichols acknowledges that elites have indeed made mistakes, but then they always do, and the magnitude of those mistakes doesn’t justify the magnitude of the malaise claimed by so many.

To arrive at his diagnosis, Nichols, instead of using a searchlight, uses a mirror. 

Among the unholy triumvirate of narcissism, anger, and resentment, the anger (and resulting grievance) aspect has received the most attention from many commentators. This line of thought goes a long way in explaining the reactions of those who've suffered direct hits to their well-being by way of job losses and declining communities. Many of these losses are rightly attributable to jobs going overseas and to automation (the latter, I think, being the more significant problem regarding jobs). But the number of Trumpists and sympathizers who have suffered these severe losses is rather small. A full explanation of the approximately 40% of the U.S. electorate who vote for Trumpists requires a deeper, more sweeping explanation. 

Of course, anyone who knows much about American politics knows that most citizens, including most voters, are shockingly ill-informed about candidates, policies, and how our political institutions function. It’s a fool’s errand to place an articulated, rational set of reasons for the outcome of any election. It’s most often like trying to draw a detailed picture using just black and white (Yes or No? Candidate A or B?) and beginning the picture from a Rorschach ink blob. Nichols illustrates the problems with a couple of tales from my native Iowa: 

The Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce, for example, spoke to a woman who caucused for Sanders in 2016 and then voted for Trump. In 2020, she initially settled on Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as her choice. If Buttigieg didn’t win the nomination, however, she would move from the young, progressive, gay, once-married Buttigieg back to the elderly, right-wing, serially adulterous, thrice-married bigot Trump—a kaleidoscopic change in preferences that only makes sense as a search for a tailored set of narrow promises that would meet her personal satisfaction, rather than the selection of a candidate who must govern across a range of issues. Location 1306)

. . . . 

Another Iowan told the media that she had voted both for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump, “just to shake up Washington, to be honest.” (This is sometimes called the “OOT” voter, the person who voted Obama-Obama-Trump in 2008, 2012, and 2016, respectively.) Had Trump not been available in 2016, she said, she might have gone for—of course—Bernie Sanders. “We’ve just been in a rut so long,” she sighed. (Location 1311)

Even as a native and resident of Iowa most of my life (and as a long-time observer of its politics), this makes my head spin. I migrated from Booker to Buttigieg to Biden (I do like those Bs, I guess), but jump to Trump? How can any mind make that leap? But then it wasn’t the mind so much as the emotions that motivated these voters. 

Narcissism and resentment (and its manifestation on steroids, ressentiment—thank you, Nietzsche) both reach beyond the surface rationalizations and reasons to reveal the motivating emotional core. I suspect that social scientists tend to shy away from such broad and amorphous concepts that can’t be easily quantified, but happily, Nichols (a Ph.D. in political science and retired college professor) doesn’t shy away from these depths. 

In his discussion of narcissism, Nichols draws on the work of American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. Lasch was active roughly from the 1960s until his death in 1994, and he’s perhaps most remembered for his 1970 work, The Culture of Narcissism. Nichols cites this work and others in his review of contemporary manifestations of narcissism. One wonders what Lasch would make of our situation today. (N.B. Nichols, like me and others, believes Lasch went too far in his criticisms near the end of his career.) Related to narcissism, Nichols draws on the work of political scientist Edward Banfield to note that when the chips are down, individuals often hunker down into the confines of family rather than seeking out and pursuing the common good. Banfield saw this phenomenon demonstrated in a poor Italian village in the 1950s; Nichols sees this increasingly in contemporary America. Nichols quotes Hannah Arendt to capture the implications of the two different potentials exhibited here: 

The idiot is one who lives only in his own household and is concerned only with his own life and its necessities. The truly free state, then—one that not only respects certain liberties but is genuinely free—is a state in which no one is, in this sense, an idiot: that is, a state in which everyone takes part in one way or another in what is common. (Location 974)

But while there’s plenty of evidence in support of the anger-grievance and narcissism aspect of our current malaise, it’s the resentment aspect that may manifest the most potent motivating and explanatory power to our current malaise. Let me introduce this topic with an extended quote from Nichols: 

Resentment in politics is the externalization of envy. If there is one thing authoritarian governments do especially well, it is the way in which they mobilize resentment as a weapon. Democracy, on principle, is based on the public’s acceptance of regular cycles in which winners and losers exchange places, sometimes unexpectedly. Authoritarians, by contrast, promise stability and equality. They offer placidity by promising, without favor or exception, to make losers of everyone outside of the ruling group. By reducing all citizens to the same miserable condition, they build a constituency among those who are willing to endure oppression as long as the people they hate have to endure it as well. Resentment is about leveling rather than leadership, about vengeance rather than virtue.

(Location 1733)

. . . . 

Resentment, like narcissism, undermines the civic virtues of tolerance, cooperation, and equal justice, because it fuels demands for rewards and punishments based on jealousy and unhappiness rather than reason or impartial justice.

(Location 1739)

And if you thought that mere garden variety resentment seems quite enough to invade and perhaps destroy the garden of democracy, then there’s resentment on steroids: ressentiment.

Again, Nichols provides an informative overview:

There is a more evocative word, ressentiment (imported from French by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), that captures this vague but powerful envy of others. Mere “envy” or “resentment” isn’t enough to express the lasting toxicity of ressentiment. As the writer Joseph Epstein has explained, ordinary resentment is a “quick, stabbing thing, set off by an act of ingratitude or injustice, but that can, fairly quickly, melt away.” But ressentiment is of greater endurance, has a way of insinuating itself into personality, becoming a permanent part of one’s character. Ressentiment, then, is a state of mind, one that leaves those it possesses with a general feeling of grudgingness toward life. . . . So much so that those suffering ressentiment come almost to enjoy the occasions for criticism that their outlook allows them.

(Location 1741)

. . . . 

...philosopher Ian Buchanan describes ressentiment as a “vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have.”

(Location 1754)

. . . . 

...in the words of the German philosopher Max Scheler, it is existential envy “directed against the other person’s very nature,” and thus unresolvable: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.”

(Location 1758)

And if the citations to Nietzsche, Epstein, Buchanan, and Scheler seem too highbrow, here Nichols provides the comment of an American voter as an exemplar: 

[A]more prosaic example of this kind of resentment in modern America is the voter in Florida who was furloughed from her public sector job during a 2019 budget impasse between the White House and Congress. Initially a supporter of President Trump, she turned on her candidate in helpless anger. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting” (emphasis added).

(Location 1801)

After addressing the issue of resentment, Nichols touches on nostalgia, the tendency to idealize and attempt to recover an imagined past. The answer to malaise becomes time-travel; escape to the past when things were “better.” But time travel isn’t an option, time’s arrow flies only in one direction. And even if some aspects of the past were in some measure “better,” they can only be re-created, not re-captured. 

Nichols also notes that democracy and liberalism often prove boring. There’s no Le Mis celebrating the endless wrangling of a congress, legislature, or city council. The flag waving and drama of January 6 proved dramatic, even cinematic, but was not democracy, not the rule of law, and not a future that any sane person would want. Again, reason takes a backseat to the emotional engines that prompt some form of salvation through mindless acts expressing inarticulate dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Fascism, anyone?)

This work of Nichols is the most convincing, comprehensive assessment of our current democratic dis-ease that I’ve read to date (although there are many works out there on this topic that I haven’t yet gotten to). Nichols has the analytical mind of a political scientist that he combines with a keen, appreciative eye for the contemporary American scene. He reports coming from a modest background, and while he’s critical of his fellow Americans, he’s not dismissive or despairing of them. He wants us, our nation, to succeed, but he realizes the realities of our (largely) self-imposed self-destructive traits. Nichols has no magic wand, no simple answers; I imagine he hopes, like an experienced physician, that the first step forward in alleviating the malady is to properly identify it. 

There are many aspects of the book that I haven’t addressed here, and there are some avenues that I would like to have seen Nichols explore (for instance, the work of Rene Girard, whose insights about rivalry, memetic desire, envy, jealousy, resentment, and scapegoating, seem to me to be likely quite applicable who what Nichols is exploring. (But in fairness, I’ve only dipped into Girard to date, although I’m planning a deep dive. But we can’t know everything all at once.) Perhaps it’s best to close with a couple of more brief quotes from Nichols: 

Can we regain this Athenian sense of honor, civic pride, love of community, self-sacrifice, and deep confidence in our way of life? Or are these virtues now to be lost in a dark sea of grievance, resentment, and envy? (Location 3414)
. . . .  

“It cannot come from abroad,” Lincoln warned. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” (Location 3425)

 

*And now for my big faux pas: Nichols posted a thread on resentment in contemporary American politics. I "liked" the threat and suggested that he write up his perspective in an Atlantic article. His reply:  "(said much more in a book)" My humble pie response to that revelation was "My bad! I've now obtained a copy of OUR OWN WORST ENEMY & will seek to rectify my ignorance. Appreciate very much your commentary & analysis." I hope that this review has in some manner rectified my having missed the boat earlier!

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 30 December 2020

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the facts about man as man is that his vitalities may be elaborated in indeterminate variety. That is the fruit of his freedom. Not all of these elaborations are equally wholesome and creative. But it is very difficult to derive “in a necessary fashion” the final rules of his individual and social existence. It is this indeterminateness and variety which makes analogies between the “laws of nature” in the exact sense of the words and laws of human nature, so great a source of confusion. It is man's nature to transcend nature and to elaborate his own historical existence in indeterminate degree.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by implication.

The Science Is Clear. The Economy Is an Organism - Evonomics

evonomics.com

Can a story really be so powerful that it overrides experience, scientific evidence, logic, and common sense? Of course it can, as Eric Hoffer showed us long ago in his book The True Believer.--David Sloan Wilson.

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

Today [2020], the most important politician in the developed world lives by facts supplied via political chat shows on his favoured propaganda network, tweets from unknown origins and his own rampaging id.--Nicholas Gruen, Australian economist.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Comparing these two time scales, [Brian] Arthur estimates that technology evolves at roughly “10 million times the speed of natural evolution.”

Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad" with comments, Pt. 8

Twins: hatred of liberalism, desire for war, leaders of totalitarian regimes, slayers of millions. It seems likely that Collingwood thought of both as he wrote "Man Goes Mad"

In the preceding post, Collingwood addressed the attack on liberalism
emanating from the right, in this post, we'll start his assessment of the attack on liberalism from the left.

The other attack on liberalism, from the left, complains in effect that liberalism, as it has actually existed, is not genuinely liberal at all, but hypocritically preaches what it does not practice. Behind a façade of liberal principles, the reality of political life has been a predatory system by which capitalists have plundered wage-earners. What is proudly described as the free contract of labour is a forced sale in which the vendor accepts a starvation wage; what is called the free expression of political opinion is a squabble between various sections of the exploiter class, which conspire to silence the exploited. Within the existing political system, therefore, the exploited class can hope for no redress. Its only remedy is to make open war on its oppressors, take political power into its own hands, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat as an emergency measure, and so bring about the existence of a classless society. 

            In one sense this programme is not an attack on liberalism but a vindication of it. The principles on which it is based are those of liberalism itself; and in so far as its analysis of historical fact is correct, it must carry conviction to anyone who is genuinely liberal in principle and not merely a partisan of the outward forms in which past liberalism has expressessed itself. The correctness of this analysis has been demonstrated by the sequel. The attack on liberalism from the right has actually been the reaction of privileged classes to this challenge from the left. 

. . . . 

But the socialist programme as I have stated it, though liberal in principle, is anti-liberal in method. Its method is that of the class-war and the dictatorship. Class-war is war, and the time is past when war could be waged as a predatory measure, in order to seize property or power held by another. That is the old conception of war, which, as we saw [earlier in this essay], no longer applies to the conditions of the modern world. Therefore, war means not the transference of property from the vanquished to the victor, but its destruction; not the seizure of political power, but the disintegrations of the social structure on whose soundness the very existence of political power depends.

[Collingwood next returns to his discussion of the inevitability of political conflict (contra Marx’s vision of political life after the revolution)]

Healthy political life, like all life, is conflict: but this conflict is political so long as it is dialectical, that is, carried on by the parties which desire to find an agreement beyond or behind their differences. War is non-dialectical: a belligerent desires not to agree with his enemy but to silence him. A class-conflict within the limits of a liberal political system is dialectical: one carried on in the shape of class-war is non-dialectical. The ordinary socialist conception of class-war is equivocal, slipping unawares from one of these meanings to the other.  

In this selection of quotes, Collingwood identifies the common bond in between the extreme Right and extreme Left in their critique of liberalism: their desire for war. For the Right, at least in Collingwood's time, a race war was the paramount rationale, although nationalism and religion could also be called into play. (Religion, perhaps even more than race, now seems to be the rallying cry for the extreme Right.*) The Left prefers to pursue class warfare, although, in its extreme contemporary manifestations, I'm not sure how groups ("classes") would line-up since a Marxian industrial proletariat no longer exists in the West, and the extreme Right in the U.S. has captured the allegiance of many wage-earners and the economically marginalized

A repeating theme of Collingwood's and one that I heartily endorse: war, whether cheered-on by the Right or by the Left, is the enemy of liberalism. As it's been said, free speech is always the first casualty of war. And it's not only speech that suffers the consequence.

The mutual admiration--indeed, demand--for war is a shared characteristic of the extreme Right and extreme Left. This demonstrates the limits of attempting to parse the array of political perspectives on a binary Left-Right choice.

Collingwood identifies why the Left (socialists and Marxists) have shared some affinities. They are marked by a desire to bring a wider, more inclusive set of groups, values, and individuals into society and political life. The chief difference becomes one of timing and cost. For the extreme Left, change must come now even at the price of war (socially destructive civil war). Mainstream liberals--those who value constitutional government, the rule of law, and peace--won't pay the price of war and do not have to look beyond the last century to see the millions and millions of lives sacrificed needlessly for an ideal that was never close to attainment. By the way, compare Collingwood's appraisal of liberalism and its critics on both the left and right, with that offered by Adam Gopnik in his recent book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019). I find their respective perceptions and conclusions reach across the decades.

Also, by "mainstream liberals" I include traditional Republicans in the U.S., although they are now eclipsed by the non-liberal Trumpists.** This is the same for Conservatives in Great Britain and most continental conservatives. The great divide in liberalism is between those who emphasize laissez-faire economics and want to limit government--with markets as the preferred mode of decision-making--and liberals who use government as a tool and prefer political decision-making over market-based decisions.

Revised & updated 11.14.19. 

*I'm not very confident about my statement here. In the U.S., in any event, race and religion so seem to be quite mixed when one looks at White Supremacists, but this group, while prominent, isn't dominant in the Trumpist movement. Catholic traditionalists, for instance, your William Barr, your Patrick Deneen, your Rob Dreher, I don't believe make racist appeals, at least overtly, or perhaps not intentionally. Also, there are those vexing voters who voted once and even twice for Obama and then turned aound and voted once or even twice for Trump. The uniting factor among Trump loyalists is a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. Trump voters come in many different guises. Trump himself, we've learned, has no ideology beyond his own ego, bank account, and family. He is an empty vessel into which the many different flavors of dissatisfaction can be poured. 

**Since I originally wrote this, the eclipse of traditional Republicans--those committed to liberal democracy as the pursuit of a pro-business, pro-market, small-government set of policies--is now more or less complete. After the 6 January insurrection, big business made noise about withdrawing their financial support from Republicans, but the unspoken deal between the plutocratic wing of the party for tax cuts and other financial advantages and business-friendly judges, and the Trumpist wing, seems as though it will survive. Yesterday all but five Republican senators voted to attempt to avoid a second impeachment trial of Trump on "constitutional grounds" (that he's no longer in office). And 147 Republicans in the House and about seven in the Senate voted in favor of the attempt not to certify election results. 

Revised & updated 01.27.21

Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad" with commentary, Pt. 6

Collingwood in the 1930s

 Note that I reference my observations by the bracketed number. For instance, I expound on the first sentence of Collingwood's quote in my comment "1," etc.

The plainest political fact of our times is the widespread collapse of what I shall call, using the word in its Continental sense, liberalism. [1] The essence of this conception is, or was, the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity. How this is the to be effected, is a secondary matter. [2] 

. . . . 

The one essential of liberalism is the dialectical solution of all political problems: that is their solution through the statement of opposing views and their free discussion until, beneath this opposition, their supporters have discovered some common ground on which to act. [3]  The outward characteristic of all liberalism is the fact that it permits the free expression of opinion, no matter what the opinion may be, on all political questions. This attitude is not toleration; it is not the acquiescence in an evil whose suppression would be a greater evil; it is not a mere permission but an active fostering of free speech, as the basis of all healthy political life. 

. . . . 

            There are certain conditions under which alone liberalism can flourish. It is not the best method of government for a people at war or in a state of emergency: for then silence and discipline are demanded of the subject, bold and resolute command of the ruler. It is not the best method for a people internally rotten with crime and violence: there, a strong executive is the first thing needed; force must be met by force. Therese restrictions, however, do not amount to criticisms of liberalism on its own ground. It professes to be a political method, that is, a method by which a community desiring a solution for its own political problems can find one. War is not a part of politics, but the negation of politics, a parasitic growth upon political life. [4] 

. . . . 

Liberalism, then, requires for its success only one condition: namely that the civilization which adopts it shall as a whole and on the whole be resolved to live in peace and not at war, by honest labour and not by crime. [For, when it invites the free expression of all political views, it assumes that those who accept the invitation will use it as an opportunity for expressing political views, not as an opportunity for acts of violence.] [5]It might seem, therefore, that liberalism is a mere utopianism, based on a blindly optimistic view of human nature. But this is not the case. A liberal government is still a government, and like every government must enforce law and suppress crime. Because it set out to hear every political opinion, it is not committed to the dogma that every human being under its rule has such opinions. [318-320]

1. This "continental" liberalism may also be called "classical liberalism." It is the liberalism that American political scientist Louis Hartz (The Liberal Tradition in America) believed underlay the entire American political landscape. Until recently, the Republican and Democrat parties were essentially two different branches of this one stream. Both were committed to the essential institutions of liberal democracy. Of course, with the take-over (how hostile and unwanted I'm not so sure) of the Republican Party by Trumpism, this no longer true. We now have a fundamentally anti-liberal party in power, although it can be very liberal with the plutocratic interests that fund its congressional wing. 
2. Note the use of the term "community" here. One of the great conundrums of the Founders addressed in The Federalist Papers, and by Madison, in particular, is the extent to which a diverse, far-flung nation can foster a sufficient community to make a republic work for the new nation. To what extent can we as a nation, when "bowling alone," maintain the necessary coherence of perspectives, interests, and aspirations to keep a functional political community. I'd argue (I think Collingwood might follow me here) is that without a sense of community, we cannot maintain a democracy. By the very nature of the growth of our nation: in geography, population, economics, size of government, and so on, we lose some measure of community. But even with all of these centrifugal forces, Americans have still found periods of an intense political community, even at the national level. (Community is more easily visible at the local level, as we see with any trauma to a community.) 
3. This implies that "common ground" can always be found, but this is not always so. Yet even in cases of disagreement, a losing party may still share common ground by recognizing the legitimacy of the procedures and abiding by the decision; i.e., by "playing by the rules." When a party refuses to play by the rules and accept legitimate decisions, democracy will fail. And this is what's been happening at the Congressional level. Congressional and legislative Republicans have moved the goalposts by gerrymandering, refusing the act on presidential appointments, and even by ending the filibuster.  (Ending the filibuster isn't always a bad thing in my book, but it's a change in the rule motivated by temporary partisan advantage, not an aim to make the process more democratic.)
4. The flip side of this observation might be included in the dictator's handbook about how to end democracy. As Madison observed long ago, and as I've been preaching for a long time now, war and democracy don't mix. War strangles democracy. The concluding sentence of this paragraph (in italics) foreshadows the arguments of Collingwood's younger contemporary, Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that the essence of politics is speech (Collingwood's "discussion," I'd suggest). And that contra Mao, political power doesn't emanate from the barrel of a gun; only force comes emanates from a gun. War, then, is the antithesis of democracy. Instead, political power comes from the use of speech to persuade citizens to pursue a common course of action: 

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is "in power" we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. 

Arendt, On Violence (1970, p. 44), quoted in Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power, Social Research (1977).

5.  This bracketed sentence: "For, when it invites the free expression of all political views, it assumes that those who accept the invitation will use it as an opportunity for expressing political views, not as an opportunity for acts of violence" was deleted from Collingwood's manuscript, and the editors don't know why. But I include it because I agree with what he says in that sentence, and in light of the events in Charlottesville and elsewhere, we need to consider what limits upon free speech and expression--if any--we should impose. I'm of the classical liberal bent such that I'd let go anything short of violence, even though I find a sentiment abhorrent. But I'm not sure that this is the best course, and we'd all better consider what alternatives we want to pursue.

Updated 11.11.19

Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad" with commentary, Pt. 1

'Man Goes Mad' is included in this collection

The following quotes are taken from an essay written by R. G. Collingwood in 1936 entitled “Man Goes Mad.” This manuscript was not published during Collingwood’s lifetime and only came to light by the good offices of the editors and Collingwood’s daughter some decades later (as with other selections in the book). Collingwood’s thoughts, as always, are cogent and insightful. It’s a pity that they remained hidden so long, but a joy that they have come to light. The pithy political analysis contained in “Man Goes Mad” shows a profound understanding of the increasingly perilous political and cultural situation at the time Collingwood wrote, a time that our own time in some ways mirrors. I recommend the essay as a whole, of course, but to my knowledge, it’s only available in this book and perhaps one other (i.e., it's not available online). This entry will be the first of several blog posts that will share parts of Collingwood’s essay with some commentary by me.

            Since then [a generation ago] we have lived through a revolution in human thought: a revolution not so much caused, as precipitated and symbolized, by the war of 1914-1918. To the generation that has passed through that experience, those old forecasts of man’s future, and the whole system of ideas on which they rested, seem strangely perverse. For they all assumed that the road which nineteenth-century man was treading led uphill to infinity: whereas we now have seen that it led to the brink of a precipice. Over that brink millions of highly civilized men marched, in the course of a few years, to destruction; and now the whole civilized world trembles upon its edge, doubtful whether to continue the mass-suicide, to retrace its steps, or to find means of staying where it is. [305]

I include this quote because I don’t believe that we can appreciate any social and political critique from Collingwood’s era without appreciating the scars left by the Great War (WWI). But of course, it was not only a matter of looking back upon that catastrophic event (the centenary of which we are now in the midst of) but also a matter of looking at the world around him. Hitler and Mussolini were both ensconced in power, as was Stalin, who was already well into his course of genocide and personal paranoia. Japan had already initiated its wars of expansion into China. America had returned to isolationism as it dealt with the Great Depression, while Britain and France were not prepared to enter into a fight against hostile powers. Fascism and Communism, not Liberal Democracy, were ascendant in the eyes of many, if not most.  But in addition to this political analysis, we have a cultural shift that continued to reflect a growing unease, a sea-change that began before the Great War, going back even to the late nineteenth-century, and that the War accelerated. Collingwood was not alone in perceiving this as a most unhappy time.

1.       Marks of Madness 

If a man of great intelligence, great bodily strength, and great mental energy, were found working out elaborate schemes for the betterment of his own condition, and throwing all his powers into their realization; and if it were seen, even by himself, that these schemes when realized involved his own impoverishment, misery, and ultimate destruction, and yet he was unable to stop inventing them and carrying them out, psychological medicine would call him the prey of a neurosis, and ordinary people would call him mad. 

That is the condition of civilized man today.

 From this point, Collingwood begins to specify his indictment. He begins with war and how war has changed over the course of time into its (then) current state of totality and destruction. (Of course, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the nearly continual state of war in which the U.S. places itself, imagine what Collingwood would say today.) Collingwood notes that war was once primarily a matter of greed: conquer and take. But now it’s changed:

The modern nation is in the condition of a man who spends every penny that his safe containes in making it burglar-prooof. Modern war is the mutual attempt to burgle these formidable but empty safes. And so obvious has their emptiness become, that a new motive for war has to be invented and fostered by the modern national spirit: no longer greed but fear. In a modern war, no one stands to gain; but every combatant loses, and the defeated nation loses most: it loses the very thing that makes it a nation, namely its power to make war; and therefore any nation, to avoid this ultimate impoverishment, has the right to attack any other of which it is afraid, before it is itself attacked at a time favourable to its enemy. [307]

For instance, in the U.S., Garry Wills demonstrated in his book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010) how atomic weapons, theirs and ours, have warped many of our government institutions and our political discourse. In other words, what Collingwood identifies has not abated, but increased. And what would be more futile and self-destructive than nuclear war? Consider this as the U.S. (at least in the guise of its president) and North Korea continue to rattle nuclear sabers at one another. 

To be continued . . . .