No Such Thing As Intelligence

Power and Permission

'If the aim of history is to describe the movement of humanity and nations, the first question that needs an answer for anything else to become intelligible is this: what kind of force is it that moves nations?'

Katherine Cross recently published this piece at Liberal Currents, describing what she calls the 'vision of emancipatory irresponsibility' which Trump provides for his base. As Cross defines it, this is one part vicarity, in which Trump's fans take pleasure in Trump himself being unrepentantly, unaccountably awful, and one part anaesthetic – an anaesthetic for any guilt or shame they feel, or are made to feel by those around them, for indulging in crudely violent self-expression.

What Trump offers, says Cross, 'is liberation from responsibility. From even having to pretend, from even paying lip-service to the idea that you have a duty to anyone you didn't choose.'

As an analysis of Trump's ability to mobilise his base, this feels basically correct to me. It explains why neither career politicians like Ted Cruz in 2016 nor technocrats like Stephen Miller in the second term can channel the same energy. When he embarked on the campaign that first got him to the Oval Office, Trump was best-known for hosting a game show where he insulted contestants constantly and his catchphrase was arbitrarily wielding the authority of the petty small-business tyrant. He was both systematically bankrupt and absurdly rich.

He had, in short, built his entire brand on power without restrictions or shame; no creature of any preexisting political institution could channel the same energy, because they would never be able to shed the impression of being beholden to that institution. There's a silver lining in this: it is unlikely that anyone can replace Trump if and when he becomes unable to lead his base. None of the people currently scheming behind his throne have the carny bona-fides, and none of the grotesque influencer-outsiders who do can call upon the long-standing bonds of bourgeois solidarity that constitute Trump's bankruptcy-proof wealth.

In the second epilogue of War and Peace, Tolstoy makes a similar argument to Cross's about the French Revolution and Napoleon:

'For various reasons known and unknown, the French set about butchering and destroying one another. And with the event comes a corresponding justification in the expressed will of certain men who believe it to be necessary for the good of France, or in the interests of freedom or equality. The butchery stops, and along comes a corresponding justification of this event in terms of the need to centralize power, resist Europe and so on. Men march from west to east, murdering their fellow creatures, and this event is accompanied by fine words about the glory of France, the vileness of England, and so on. History shows that these forms of justification are no less nonsensical and contradictory than, for instance, murdering somebody as a declaration of his human rights, or murdering millions in Russia in order to take England down a peg or two.
'But these justifications are very necessary at the time, shifting moral responsibility away from the men who produce the events.'

Tolstoy, agonized by the question of why half a million Frenchmen would march a thousand miles to murder perhaps as many as a million Russians, and furious with the 'great man' theory of history that dominated the 19th century, which proclaimed that the answer lay in Napoleon's strategic genius, argues that the main sociopolitical function of Napoleon was to provide psychological and moral cover for the otherwise unthinkable violence of C19th warmaking.

(Tolstoy's argument is worth reading in full. He describes the historians of his day as 'like a deaf man answering questions no-one has asked', and there's a darkly funny passage where he demonstrates that the French victory at Borodino cannot be credited to Napoleon because not a single one of his documented orders during the battle could possibly have been carried out).

The style and institutions of Napoleon's power are of course very different from Trump's, but they share this underlying structure. What Cross finds in Trump is not a historical novelty, though it is rare; I think in this context of how much the Nazis were stymied in their early efforts to exterminate German Jews by the inability of the original death squads to completely bury their own consciences. Hitler's power surely functioned in this same way as Napoleon's and Trump's, but even this most extreme form has limits.

What interests me, though, and my reason for making these historical connections, are the less extreme forms of 'emancipatory irresponsibility'. What Trump offers to the contemporary far right is unusual in its intensity and scope, but I believe this idea also provides a useful lens to understand political behaviour across the political spectrum. If we understand emancipatory irresponsibility as the opportunity to act upon others without having to care about or feel their objections, it starts to show up in some widespread and prominent patterns.

I know it best and most bitterly from the anti-trans crusade of the last ten years or so. JK Rowling, Graham Linehan, Kathleen Stock and many more of the people who have spiralled into vicious bigotry in that time share a trajectory. They imagined themselves to be 'good', 'progressive' people 'on the right side of history' – that is, they claimed, in virtue of their relationships to particular institutions, identities or ideologies, a kind of moral cover for their actions, whatever those actions might be. They were called to account for some of those actions by groups that they believed should have deferred to their assumed moral authority. And they were so offended by this assault on their assumed impunity that they sought any justification at all for rejecting it, eventually reaching for the fellowship of hatred with other bigots.

More broadly, this is the emotional character of much of the 'cancel culture' moral panic. A generation of public figures (really at least two generations, if we reach back to the 'political correctness' moral panic of the 80s and 90s) encountered attempts to get them to care about subgroups of 'the masses' that they had dismissed or publicly denigrated. Offended by what felt to them a violation of their emancipatory irresponsibility – the entitlement of their imagined moral and intellectual high ground – they punched down, hard and repeatedly.

(the '#MeToo has gone too far' backlash and the closing of elite ranks around Epstein should not go unmentioned here, though I don't want to dwell on them too long. In these cases emancipatory irresponsibility is revealed to be a foundational component of prevailing forms of both masculinity and wealth)

Understanding the psychology of bigots and fascists – especially those who slide into it from positions of self-identified 'progressiveness' – is useful, if we are ever to have an actively deradicalising response to such people that can stop them before force is required, but it is superstructure, not structure. It does not tell us how this power works. In fact, it produces a paradox that Tolstoy grapples with but never quite resolves: Napoleon's power is constituted by the permission given to the French to march into Russia, but the French march into Russia because they are given permission by Napoleon's power. This, obviously, is circular.

It is also a classic existentialist problem, tackled by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling and Sartre in his much-maligned Existentialism is a Humanism (sometimes known as Existentialism and Humanism) through the pentateuchal story of the binding of Isaac, when God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, only to then send an angel at the last moment to withdraw the instruction and provide a ram to sacrifice in Isaac's place.

I should acknowledge, here, that this story is originally a Jewish myth, attended by thousands of years of Jewish theology. Like Sartre and Kierkegaard, I grew up in a (tenuously post-)Christian context and am not well-versed in Jewish scholarship on the story; the existentialists' interpretations are largely shaped by Christian attitudes and assumptions, and my interpretation is entirely built on theirs.

From opposite sides, religious and secular respectively, Kierkegaard and Sartre are troubled by the question of authority, how it is granted and whether it can ever be known. It is Sartre, with the benefit of an extra century of intellectual history over Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, who puts his finger on the heart of the problem:

"But anyone in such a case would wonder, first, whether it was indeed an angel and second, whether I am really Abraham. Where are the proofs? … I shall never find any proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince me of it. If a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that of an angel."

Each Frenchman, then, must decide for himself whether that is Napoleon, and whether he is himself French (and many decided that the answer to one or other of these questions was 'no', and defied or ignored the Napoleonic regime). Each Trumpist must decide to be a Trumpist, and there is a whole online sport of watching such people writhe on the hook of deciding which parts of Trump are really Trump, and which parts of themselves are really Trumpist. Inverting the formula but keeping the logic, each academic, politician, washed-up comedian or children's author must decide whether the protesting voice in their mentions is a legitimate speaker on a genuine wrong or a cultish troll to be derided or ignored.

It is ironic, then, that Sartre finds in this crux not emancipatory irresponsibility but the 'anguish, abandonment and despair' of inescapable responsibility. One's comfort in the permission offered by an institution ultimately depends on one's own decision to defer one's judgement to that institution. I think this explains the fragility of people who invest heavily in this move, which Sartre calls 'bad faith'. It doesn't take much to strip away the illusion that the justification for one's actions lies outside one's own choices.

In the most extreme cases, even the momentary appearance of a challenge to the authority in which a person has placed their bad faith can provoke lashing out. So it seems to have been, as Cross points out, with the murder of Renée Good: an ICE agent opening fire because Good's driving did not exactly match the contradictory instructions he and his colleagues yelled at her. So it is also with many police murders of black Americans who take too long to get out of the car, or move slightly wrong in doing so, or don't sound deferential enough when answering questions (in fact, in a nation still so heavily defined by a colour line, even just the appearance of a black person on a certain street or in a certain shop can shatter the frail authority to which white supremacists cling – authority that they will kill to protect).

In the material world, the world of physical agency, we do not do most of the things we could do. In particular, we do not do many of the things we want to do. At any point, any of us physically could express ourselves into the world through violence; as a student told me in a seminar last week, "I could come over there right now and punch you." It is our own acceptance of the behavioural norms of society, for the most part, that restrains us, whether out of moral agreement or fear of judicial reprisal – and ultimately, emancipatory irresponsibility is constituted by the suspension of that acceptance.

This is not to say that we have a natural tendency to violence which we may choose to follow or not (if anything, human natural tendencies, such as they are, are strongly prosocial). Violence is not a default that we actively resist. I could just as well go outside right now and begin placing in the street all my worldly goods for others to take away; a complex system of norms including all of capitalism pressures me not to, and I decide instead to prioritise my own longer-term survival.

There are many reasons for which I could be choosing not to immediately, now, at half past midnight, start giving away all my stuff. It could be a prudential judgement that it would be difficult at this moment to do so in a way that would benefit anyone very much. It could be selfishness, the desire to keep owning my stuff, or liberal conviction that while I ought to engage in some altruism, I am nevertheless entitled to my personal comforts. It could even be a long-termist commitment to 'effective altruism', one of the clearest-cut cases of a social institution entirely constituted by the desire of its members to pass off responsibility for their vices – in this case, avarice – to an authority they imagine to be independent of themselves.

The point is not that my reasons are meaningless or arbitrary. My reasons are my reasons, and they are the reasons I choose, and the choices I make about my reasons are both expressive and constitutive of the values I hold. My reasons might be faith in an all-powerful god, conviction that we live in a moral reality, utilitarian calculation about what will minimise overall suffering, or any of countless more nuanced (or confused) positions, but I can never truly escape the terrifying moral precipice that my choice of reasons is my own.

So stark is this obligation that, according to Sartre, it is functionally impossible to avoid some degree of bad faith. It is human to project our choices onto other entities, in a sort of grand, cosmic 'just following orders' defence for the soul. Practicing the awareness that we project in this way helps, as does reflection on the authorities we do and do not recognise, but there is no perfect, abstract solution to the question of which authorities are legitimate; only our own choices.

This is, emphatically, not moral relativism. The conduct of Trumpists, Nazis and soldiers of the Grande Armée is not acceptable. It is not acceptable to me and I believe it should not be acceptable to you either. If you disagree (at least, if you do so in good faith and an appropriate forum), I will try to convince you, and there are several values I will advance in order to do so. But whatever rhetoric I use to advance these values, I will never escape that it is I who has chosen to assert them.

Illusions of external authority can become structural to the psyche, particularly for people raised in communities strongly committed to one particular illusion. Religious congregations probably come to mind first, but I was raised in a secular community just like this and am very fortunate that when its support for my selfhood began to crumble, I had no platform on which to externalise the resulting crashout. Trumpists and establishment Democrats alike rely on their alignments in the institutions of US government for this support. JK Rowling turned to the anti-Corbyn wing of the Labour Party, Graham Linehan to the close-knit community of the British entertainment industry, and Kathleen Stock to the nimbus of progressiveness that still clings to academia.

When these supports are undone, the tensions they restrain are released with immense internal violence, externalised through the material realities of platform and influence. Chuck Shumer's refusal to endorse Zohran Mamdani and your bigoted uncle's party-ruining rant at the dinner table are the same psychology at work with different means at hand. The only difference between these actions and Jonathan Ross shooting Renée Good is that, when Ross began to feel (perhaps even merely to imagine) that his emancipatory irresponsibility, the authority he had projected onto Trump, was challenged, he was holding a gun.