Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom? –Pascal
It has often struck me how little regard the mainstream Republican has for the rule of law–Nixon and Watergate; Reagan and Iran Contra; Trump and . . . where to begin? Has there been anything on the Democratic side since WWII that has been so blatantly and systematically defiant of the rule of law?
And yet Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed.
We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the people because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't care less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus.
And Trump supporters are Jacksonians in the sense that they are heirs of a Jacksonian sense of American identity. This is the kind of American that someone like Sarah Palin insists is the only "real American". This primitive underside of the American psyche was always there, but with Jackson it became normative. Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the 1828 election was a watershed that is not talked about a lot, but it was revolutionary.
"Liberals", then as now, are shocked by "Jacksonian" disrespect for the rule of law because they don't understand that Jacksonians respect only the laws that reflect their customary mores. Liberals have a hard time understanding how Jacksonians can justify their thuggishness because they don't understand that Jacksonians believe that they are defending a moral order that has nothing to do with the consent of the governed, unless the governed are people who submit to the mores of their customary culture.
These are people whose ancestors argued in all seriousness that slavery was biblically legitimated, and that makes sense only if you understand that their hierarchical social imaginary is a reflection of a cosmic imaginary grounded in premodern hierarchical models of the cosmos and society. These are people who are simply incapable of accepting the assumptions that govern life in the modern world. Indeed they reject those assumptions tout court. That's why white evangelicals support Trump. His personal behavior is irrelevant so long as he is an ally in supporting their premodern imagination of the social order.
Nineteenth century Jacksonians sincerely believed that the slave society of the South was a reflection of the divine hierarchical order, and that the abolitionists were morally bankrupt in their project to undermine that order. For Jacksonians, the consent of the governed means nothing if the governed defy cutomary mores, even if those mores embrace slavery, lynchings, wife beatings, disregard for Indian treaties, etc. All that is justified by custom, and custom is all that counts. Anything that threatens to undermine that order doesn't count, and so deserves only to be resisted, and if not destroyed, beaten to within and inch of its life.
So for the average Jacksonian, then as now, nothing counts as truly unlawful unless it breaches customary mores that give shape to his traditional social imaginary; and the reverse–nothing counts as truly lawful unless it's somehow consonant with those mores. For "Whiggish" Liberals, the rule of law and the social contract are everything; the legal order is a human construct legitimated by the consent of the governed. It has no pretense that it is grounded in divine law. That doesn't mean the Liberals are irreligious, only that they see the political sphere as one that is designed to solve mundane, practical problems. You don't need divine sanction to justify a tariff law or whether to finance a canal.
For Liberals this moving beyond custom is a great and wonderful thing, a liberating thing. And for Liberals customary culture and mores are perceived mostly as an impediment to good order because of the way it motivates resistance to innovations that Liberals see as progress precisely because they undermine repressive traditional mores and customs, customs that justified slavery, racism, white beating, and until more recently, gay bashing.
Liberals get their shorts all in a twist when Jacksonian conservatives break "their" laws, and nothing delights this kind of conservative more than to upset Liberals in this way. But, of course, this defies the whole idea about how a republic is supposed to work, and it's not at all what the founders had in mind. And the founders who lived into the 1820s saw their hopes for the republic going up in smoke with the rise of the thuggish Jacksonian democratic impulse.
So for the Jacksonian any man-made law that is not grounded in the sense of order has no legitimacy, and there is no moral taint associated with breaking such laws. A Jacksonian like Ollie North, for instance, saw the Boland Amendment as having the same level of legitimacy as the moonshiner saw the law forbidding him his God-given right to make and sell his own hooch. The government revenuers were the villains, the freedom-loving Americans who defied them were the heroes. Jacksonian culture admires the defiance of Liberal laws as gallantry in the name of good sense. It has only contempt for the rule makers as soulless bureaucrats who haven't a gallant bone in their body.
And so this kind of Jacksonian traditionalist has a fantasy of the Constitution as a sacred document, but he is very selective about which parts of it he approves. So, for instance, he approves of the second amendment, or his bizarre interpretation of it, because it resonates with his customary mores. But the emoluments clause? Only liberals care about something technical like that. Clearly Trump never heard of it, and could care less about it in the same way that Jackson and his Democratic mob didn't care about treaties or agreements or supreme court rulings regarding the Indians. Such things defy common sense, when common sense is shaped by a customary social imaginary.
So Trump's supporters see his political enemies as making hay with these technicalities because that's the way politics is played. For them, Trump's political enemies have no moral ground because their politics is by definition a repudiation of the moral order they seek to defend. So politics is warfare, and any tactic–lying, cheating, breaking the law–that is in the service of defending the old order is justified. Jacksonians don't care about the law as some sacrosanct thing; the law has value only as a weapon used to preserve their traditionalist understanding of the social order.
You use it to go after a moral degenerate like Clinton, but you disregard it when it's being used against anybody on your team. Clinton's abhorrent behavior wasn't the issue; his being a Liberal was. This isn't hypocrisy; it's tactics. Liberals believe that the law should be impartial; Jacksonians see the law as a weapon. And so for them Trump, unlike his liberal adversaries, is not doing anything that breaches their imagination of that order; indeed, he is an exemplar, as Andrew Jackson was. His racism is exemplary in this Jacksonian mold, and it is deeply consonant with the white traditionalist social imaginary, and this is why Southerners see this Yankee billionaire as as one of their own.
These are the people now in the South and the mountain west whose ancestors thought of Indians and Mexicans as vermin that should be exterminated. This language used by Trump now resonates because it's in the collective unconscious of his supporters. And they are the white people in the rural areas of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the midwest who find it easy to believe that Obama was a Muslim who forged his birth certificate and had no legitimate claim to the presidency. This is incomprehensible to any American who was not shaped in part by the Jacksonian legacy, but it's perfectly understandable and acceptable if you were shaped by it. And who was foremost among the birthers but Trump.
If you asked them they'd insist they weren't racist. And they're not racist, at least in a self-conscious, calculating way, but they grew up in a world where white supremacy was just assumed in the same way that English was assumed as their native tongue. And so they are very comfortable in a red-state ethos that derives from what used to be normative in the Jacksonian Democratic Party until the Democrat Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights laws in the mid sixties, and in doing so triggered the realignment that transformed the party of Lincoln the party of Jackson.
So theirs isn't blatant racism, but it rhymes with it, and it's understandable that these people would have such attitudes given the white supremacist ethos they inherited from their Jacksonian ancestors. The legislators who pushed through Civil Rights laws were liberals who think they can legislate stupid laws like the Boland Amendment, no matter how egregiously it conflicts with the Jacksonian social order into which they were acculturated.
And so Civil Rights for African Americans or for Gays and Lesbians take their place alongside all the other not-to-be-taken seriously laws that contradict their customary mores. If they were more than customary Christians, they would have a deeper, firmer place to stand to make their moral judgments. But they're not, and they don't. Pascal;s quote in the epigraph above is right about the average human being who is nothing more than the product of his or her acculturation, but not right about the human being as Christianity imagines him or her fully awakened. Such a human being is a production of custom/culture, but also a being capable of transcending its limitations.
Thoughtful, self-reflective, religious conservatives don't think this way. But most of them are Never Trumpers. The Never Trumpers see Trump for who he is, and the reason that the Trump base does not see him for what he is derives mostly from their own moral confusion, a condition I call Ontological Dizziness. Ontological Dizziness affects especially those who are dependent on some outside authority and stable traditional cultural framework to provide for them a coherent meaning framework.
And so ontological dizziness is prominent in those areas of the country where customary culture has been continuously eroded by the disruptions caused by decades of free-market capitalism, which is no respecter of traditions and customs. It manifests primarily in an anomie, the kind that we see in urban underclass societies, but now increasingly in white rust-belt areas, where the same anomic underclass dysfunctional behaviors have become widespread. People who are suffering from Ontological Dizziness are desperate to find some authority figure to provide a meaning framework. Some join religious cults. Some become political zealots, and some just join the kind of resentment-fueled mob shaped by the programming at Fox News and conservative talk radio.
So the point here is that law and order for the rank-and-file Trump supporter is not about the obeying or disobeying the technical laws that derive from legislatures. These are people who are desperate for a meaning framework to replace a deeply eroded customary mores framework that has no future because it cannot be sustained in a complex globalizing world. Anything that contradicts what seems to give their lives meaning doesn't count, and right now the Trump Personality Cult is what gives their lives meaning.
Arguing with a Trump supporter is like trying to convince a smitten teenager that the cad she has a crush on is lying to her, is just using her for his own selfish purposes, and will throw her off as soon as he's tired of her. Some things you can only learn the hard way. So you can't argue with Trump supporters about the reasons for their supporting him because they don't understand how their Jacksonian cultural programming unconsciously shapes their politics. Most have no idea who Jackson was, and if they are aware of him at all it's because his face is on the twenty dollar bill. All they know is how they feel, and Trump just feels right to them. Everything else is ex post facto justification.
Trump is for them an American hero, a celebrity, a successful businessman, but more importantly a spokesman for their resentments against the forces they believe have destroyed their customary meaning framework. His transgressions don't count. What counts is that he gives them a sense of meaning and purpose, mostly by being a channel for their fear and resentment.
That he is a con man who is playing them is a truth too deeply threatening to countenance. Beyond Trump there is only the void. The void is the opposite of order and stability they crave. So Trump, whatever his shortcomings, is their last hope before falling into the void. It's a false hope, of course, but there it is.
I believe that many Trump supporters, once the bubble is burst, will find a deeper truer source for their hope and a more worthy object for their faith and trust. Now they are like alcholics who have to bottom out. Theirs is a sickness that has to run its course. And it will. Hopefully they won't destroy the framework that works for the rest of us in the meanwhile.
Leave a Reply