Donald Trump: A Tyrant, but Whose Kind of Tyrant?

One reasonable criterion for the worth of nonfiction is longevity. How long is a book worth continuing to read? This has rarely been truer than at the end of a year in which so many political events have been declared "unprecedented." If recent events are truly unique in history, then surely books published prior to those events can have little to tell us about our current predicament, yes?

But, in fact, the opposite seems true, and both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency have created cottage industries searching for theorists and philosophers who speak to contemporary problems. Of this year's attempts to prove the prescience of older texts, few are more brilliant than Andrew Sullivan's argument that Plato accounts nicely for the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to take on a less ambitious task and hearken back only to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, On Revolution.

In particular, I want to point to one of the many careful distinctions she makes in characterising the modes of power that emerged from the American Revolution. Arendt argues that the American Revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolution) bequeathed to us a definition of tyranny that is less precise than the one that preceded it. Prior to the American Revolution, Arendt claims, "tyranny" referred not to all types of one-person rule, but to one-person rule in which the ruler chose, of his own accord, not to rule in the public interest: "Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed." (Arendt 121).

Thus, for pre-Revolutionary philosophers and politicians, it was not kings per se who were tyrants; it was only bad kings who were tyrants: "Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolutions came to understand it, was a form of government in which the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the realm, had monopolised for himself the rights of action" (Arendt 121).

As Arendt argues here, from the experience of republican government emerged the idea that any form of non-democratic government was ipso facto tyrannical. The individual in power might make good decisions or bad; either way, her failure to gain sanction from the people she governs constitutes a form of tyranny. It is in this sense that a certain kind of conservative can see President Obama's use of drones as tyrannical even while, when push comes to shove, supporting the specific decisions he has made. It is Obama's failure to consult Congress or the people directly, not the rectitude of his actions per se, that constitutes tyranny.

The pre-Revolutionary distinction between forms of one-person rule is, I want to suggest, being revived before our eyes in the phenomenon of Trumpism.

In the eyes of Trump's critics, his selection of certain companies for scorn, his decision to "save" a Carrier plant in one place while ignoring workers in another--that is to say, his decision to rule almost without policy and only by caprice--constitutes tyranny as such. We might concede that, yes, the nation or the world is better off with those few jobs saved and that Carrier plant open; but we still object to the way in which Trump "monopolise[s] for himself the rights of action." If jobs are to be kept in the United States, we insist, this ought to be done through a rational policy debated in the legislative and executive branches.

Trump's fans, however, adhere to an older, pre-Revolutionary definition of tyranny. Under this sense of tyranny, these acts are not tyrannical because, though they may stem from one-man rule, they uphold the public interest. Under this definition of tyranny, Trump may be capricious and may rule outside the bounds of republican norms. However, he only becomes a tyrant insofar as his actions advance his own interests to the exclusion of the nation's. If he saved 700 manufacturing jobs, who cares how he did it?

Trump's critics, then, have their work cut out for them. Marshalling evidence that Trump acts without the consent of Congress or without public consultation will convince few for whom such acts are not the problem. Unlike during the Nixon era, in which the question was only whether evidence of the crime could be found, in the Trump era it is a question of how to define the crime itself.

Antarctic Notes 2: Exploration, Imperialism, and Tanks

"They were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France." 

--Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Why do we dislike imperialism? The obvious answer is its victims; in expanding their empires from (primarily) European bases, imperial nations subjugate other people, sometimes with genocidal consequences. Understandably enough, the effects of imperialism on these colonised people have received the lion's share of attention in postcolonial criticism.

The European (and, in one case, Japanese) exploration of Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers an interesting case study in this context. If it is indeed the effects on subjugated peoples that makes us object to imperialism, then attempts to "conquer" the South Pole should register differently; there being no Antarctic people to subjugate, there should be little to object to.

And, indeed, this is the case. Tales of Antarctic adventure certainly strike us as less problematic than parallel imperial tales from the "scramble for Africa" and the "settling" of the North American  plain written in roughly the same period.

That said, reading the narratives these explorers left behind suggests that there is something internal to the act of conquest itself that troubles us. Beneath the heroism, legitimate scientific curiosity, and awe at the beauty of nature in these stories there lies a sense that these men's self-assurance and fixity of purpose is itself problematic, that the lack of introspection here is, even absent concrete and immediate victims, still destined to end poorly.

This nagging sense of something wrong with the Antarctic imperial project bursts through to the narrative surface very occasionally. The most striking example of this is in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. The Terra Nova expedition, of which he was a part, had brought with it early versions of snow mobiles which they hoped would allow them to move supplies from their camp on the Antarctic coast to supply depots further inland. In assessing their utility after the fact, Cherry-Garrad makes this striking statement:

"Did they succeed or fail? They certainly did not help us much, the motor which travelled farthest drawing a heavy load to just beyond Corner Camp. But even so fifty statute miles is fifty miles, and that they did it at all was an enormous advance.... The general design seemed to be right, all that was now wanted was experience. As an experiment they were successful in the South, but Scott never knew their true possibilities; for they were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France" (Cherry-Garrard 332).

This last sentence is shocking. Writing in England in 1922, with the consequences of World War I (including the battlefield deaths of many of survivors of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition) all around him, Cherry-Garrad draws a direct connection between his own project and the horrors of the war.

Cherry-Garrard's memoir is otherwise notable in its lack of psychological insight; to Cherry-Garrad, every member of the Scott expedition was brave, stoic, patriotic, and good-natured to the end. That flatness of psychological insight makes this one sentence that much more striking. Here Cherry-Garrad breaks through, seemingly accidentally, to a remarkable piece of cultural insight: that British exploration, even in its most victimless and scientific mode, leads not incidentally but directly to the technology of warfare and the wreckage of the Great War.

Thus, to an Edwardian explorer maybe even more clearly than to us, the problem of imperialism is not just the victims external to its function, but the mindset and methods internal to it.

Antarctic Notes 1: Edwardian Form

One way to organise literary forms is on a spectrum from those which allow the fewest possible voices to speak to those which allow the most to speak. Thus we might see the possible range of literature running from the most monological, closed, didactic forms (propaganda of one form or another--Upton Sinclair at his worst, for example) to the most polyphonous, dialogic, and open-to-interpretation forms (the more sprawling realist novels, certain forms of experimental poetry, postmodern collage, and so forth).

It is fairly widely accepted that one end of this spectrum is less ethical, progressive, democratic, etc., than the other. That is to say, it is fairly common place to see the didacticism of Sinclair or later proletarian fiction as authoritarian and bad, and to see the openness and polyvocality of, say, Djuna Barnes or Thomas Pynchon as democratic, open-to-debate, and, therefore, good. The multiple voices in the works of these more esteemed writers encourage diversity of perspectives thereby undermining the authoritarian politics embodied in the forms at the other end of the spectrum. Or so the usual reading goes.

Reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World suggests a politics of form absent from the typical reading described above. Cherry-Garrard's memoir describes Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated attempt to discover the South Pole, and Charry-Gerrard's own role in it. In many ways, despite the hyper-masculine, perfectly Edwardian subject matter of exploration conquest, and the extremes of human endurance, the book's form appears more typical of later postmodern writers' collage and multiple voices. That is to say, the book's form is remarkably "democratic." Throughout the book, Charry-Gerrard includes other writers' work in the form of scientific papers, diaries, letters home, and later recollections that allow him to elaborate on topics in which he is not expert and events for which he was not present, as well as to give other people's perspectives on events he has already described first-hand. Indeed, at times these quotations almost overwhelm the writer's own voice, taking up pages at a time. His deference, in particular, to Scott's diary tends to render Cherry-Garrard's own voice almost secondary within his own text.

These citations and quotations, however, serve almost the opposite purpose to those usually lauded in polyvocal, dialogic literature. Rather than showing a great diversity of voices contesting each other or illuminating multiple perspectives, the polyphony here serves only to highlight the remarkable unanimity of the voyage's personnel. Every voice agrees as to the purpose and value of the voyage, the nature of the obstacles faced, and the heroism of the men in facing them. The controlling metaphor here is not the multicultural fabric or bustling agora, but one taken from the polar journey itself: multiple men yoked to a sledge, working together to pull in the same direction.

Thus Cherry-Garrard's book suggests a different possibility for multi-voiced literary forms: a distinctively Edwardian vision of many people all speaking to the same purpose, working toward the same goal. There is no postmodern diversity or parallax here; only solidarity and unanimity. Thus emerges from Cherry-Garrard's form something like the Edwardian postmodern or, perhaps, the Edwardian anti-postmodern. Or, perhaps, the last glimpse of a total unity of purpose before World War I would make any such thing inconceivable.