The sticky glue and invisible threads of democracy
US democracy depends not only on laws but on age-old unwritten customs and agreements. Those are being shredded by the increasingly authoritarian Trump
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In the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, hangs an obscure painting that speaks volumes about the modern dilemmas of government and the natural tension between the sticky glue and invisible threads that bind together the members of democratic societies. The masterfully rendered work, dating from approximately 1899 by the Dutch painter Otto Eerelman, shows hundreds of soldiers costumed in the dress blues of a military parade in Amsterdam, and mounted on brawny stallions. Leading the procession are erect, square-shouldered officers in their fine, medal-adorned coats and feathery chapeaux-de-bras, with a palace looming in the background. Banners, pennants, and coats of arms are flapping in the breeze, and members of the public are standing at attention. The military swarm has surrounded an elegant, cream-colored carriage of royal pedigree, with the soldiers sitting atop their steeds, clutching long swords pointed skyward, at vertical attention (see a photo of the cropped painting above, and the full painting below).
What is curious about the painting is that inside the carriage are the only two females apparent in the entire male militaryscape: a young woman of eighteen, named Wilhelmina, who is about to be crowned queen of the Netherlands, and her mother, Emma, who as Queen Regent has been holding the post until her daughter came of age. The sea of soldiers and their long knives are darkly rendered, but the painter’s skill has bathed the two women and their delicate carriage in a glazed light, as if the hope and aspirations of a nation are ensconced in their halo at the heart of the painting.
As I stood staring at this image, what initially struck me was the frailty of these two women anchoring this muscular display. Any one of these soldiers could simply canter close to the royal barouche, say, “Good day, Your Majesty,” and with a couple swings of his sword run them both through. The two women, one young and the other old, would be powerless to defend themselves.
Yet the soldiers don’t do that, quite the contrary. Instead, they all hold the line, at attention while the carriage rolls past, as if all the soldiers are hypnotized by some kind of spell. Only a couple of the horses appear to buck against whatever rule is binding them to an unspoken consensus: that this vulnerable young woman shall rule over these brave hard men, indeed over an entire nation. I felt transported by the artist’s skill, as if I were standing there in the Frederiksplein as the procession rolled past. The sheer incongruity of it all, of a delicate young woman more powerful than all these armed men, is what entranced me.
I knew I was witnessing, from my distant perch, the social and political agreements that had bound them all to their national fate…the invisible threads of connectedness that wrap countless personal lives into a web of officialdom. Every generation, as well as every nation and political order, makes its agreements, its social contracts, bonded by the “sticky glue” and “invisible threads” that hold it all together and that keeps the human heart of darkness from ripping us apart. While seeming second nature to those living under them, the rules of agreement are rooted in the past, in culture and local color, looking both backward and forward at the same time. And once you step outside the picture and observe the rules from another place or distant time, you can see that often they made sense only to those who lived under the dome of their social and political contract.
Queen Wilhelmina went on to become a popular monarch who reigned for fifty years, a symbol of national unity that inspired the Dutch people with her staunch resolve during the Second World War. But at the time of this painting, who could have known what the future held for the young queen or her nation?
It makes me wonder about the unwritten agreements, compromises, and social contracts we live by today. Every national paradigm, every political economy, has its rules and agreements that establish the manners and modes for the inhabitants of that time and place to live by. These rules are incorporated into certain fulcrum institutions that work as an integrated whole, which, when taken together, form a distinctive American Way, or a European Way, or a Chinese Way, or a Mexican or Canadian or Russian Way.
The great historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, “Countries have characters that are as distinctive as those of human beings,” and each fulcrum institution is a component part of a greater whole that contributes to the formation of a “national character.”
The American national character today
Since January 20, Americans have awoken to a strange new “national character,” in which the sticky glue and invisible threads are less binding than previously. We are suddenly living in a time and place in which the president of the United States has jettisoned over the side of the ship USS America many of the norms, traditions and expected behaviors from the occupant of the Oval Office. The sticky glue and invisible threads that in the past had made America America feel like they are shredding and unraveling right before our eyes.
President Donald Trump has finally erupted, like that volcano in the middle of a Mexican farmer’s cornfield that grew from a small mound to an exploding mountain, as a grave danger to the US Constitution and our nation’s imperfect political system of representative democracy, that has evolved slowly, painstakingly, haltingly, from the time of the Founders and Framers.
As the New York Times wrote recently, President Trump’s “expansive views of his power have been evident in his words and deeds.”
“He has liberally dispensed executive orders that have gone beyond what is considered to be legally permissible. He has fired officials, run roughshod over federal agencies in ways that go beyond his authority and frozen funds that Congress had already appropriated. And just last week, the president made clear that he believed he had broad leeway to reshape the government in any way he saw fit.”
Trump has signed numerous executive orders, and fired numerous officials and dismantled government agencies, by overstepping the limits of presidential power, and frozen spending authorized by Congress without clear authority. Many of his executive orders have been frozen temporarily by the courts.
With Trump, it can be hard to tell whether he is serious in many of his boasts and insults, or entertaining himself and his supporters by stirring up controversy and acting as an agent of chaos. But even as he starts posturing more and more like an authoritarian ruler with his dozens of executive orders, his rhetoric appears to be nominating himself as the first American autocrat. Recently he wrote on social media:
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
This is a quote that is often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general who effectively declared himself emperor in 1804. That was followed by a post on his social media platform Truth Social, identifying himself as a king as he celebrated his administration’s move to kill New York City’s congestion pricing program:
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The White House reinforced the King Donald message by recirculating Trump’s post on Instagram and X with an illustration of Trump wearing a crown and a shit-eating, Joker-like grin.
But increasingly this is no joke. Trump’s first month in the White House has been full of invocations of nearly monarchical powers. He positioned himself divinely, as close to God as Elon Musk is to him, when in his Inaugural Address he said God had saved him from an assassination attempt in order “to make America great again,” implying that this is evidence that he has divine backing to enforce his every will and impulse.
Trump has backed up his rhetoric with action, bringing a far more aggressive posture toward his use of power in his second term than he did in his first. The powers of the presidency were tragically bolstered by last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the president is presumptively immune from prosecution for any crimes he may commit in the course of his official duties.
The Authoritarian Reflex that is rattling America
American political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart, winner of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (which is like the Nobel Prize for political science), has written that “People’s values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the decades following World War II, he wrote, something unprecedented occurred in economically advanced countries: much of the postwar generation grew up taking survival for granted.
But then came increasing levels of globalization, outsourcing of jobs and technological replacement of workers. The rising tide did not necessarily float all boats. Wrote Inglehart:
“High levels of existential security are conducive to a more tolerant, open outlook – but conversely, declining existential security triggers an Authoritarian Reflex that brings support for strong leadership, strong in-group solidarity, rigid conformity to group norms and rejection of outsiders. This reflex is currently bringing growing support for xenophobic populist authoritarian movements in many countries.”
Including in the US with the rise of Donald Trump. Increasingly, creepily, it does feel like the United States is sleepwalking into an “authoritarian reflex” phase. Most recently Trump has based many of his policy moves on a dubious legal theory known as the unitary executive theory of presidential power, which is as ominous as it sounds. Breaking with all previous presidential traditions, Trump recently signed a sweeping executive order mandating that the president has sole authority over the executive branch, including all independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. This fringe theory, which is being challenged in court, is believed by most legal scholars to be illegal, given that Congress set the agencies up specifically to act independently from the president. If Trump succeeds, it will greatly expand the executive power of the presidency to — yes — kingly proportions.
What happened to “virtue”?
I am a comparativist and an institutionalist, so I naturally gravitate to examining other nations and/or historical epochs in trying to assess the gravity of the moment.
The human being has long demonstrated that we are creatures marked by a dual nature of contradictory instincts and goals: inner versus outer, us versus them, winner versus loser, peace versus war. This naturally polarizing temperament was front and center in the formative years of the young American nation, as it groped its way towards early representative democracy. The writings of constitutional founders James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, as well as John Adams, showed that they saw deeply into humans’ dual nature, both the dark and the light, and endeavored to design a democratic government that could restrain humanity’s worst impulses. Madison famously once said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Madisonian framework of separation of powers and checks and balances can be understood as a late 18th-century injection of this powerful realization.
In recognition of this dual nature, many of the Founders prized a human quality that is rarely discussed anymore: virtue. Pulitzer prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood, an expert on the American colonial period, examined this deportment in his insightful book Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Writes Wood, “By classical standards, virtue meant the willingness of people to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the public.”
Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, writes Wood, “were classically educated enough to know that republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay.” The governing principles of a republic, said Adams, “are as easily destroyed as human Nature is corrupted.” Jefferson agreed, anticipating “a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origins, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people.”
Both Adams and Jefferson knew that republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects, wrote Wood. In republics, where authority came from the people themselves, each citizen must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his or her personal desires for the sake of the public good. “Without virtue and self-sacrifice, republics would fall apart,” wrote Wood, explaining Adams’s philosophy.
Did Americans have this “positive Passion for the public Good,” this kind of virtue? That was the question that Adams agonized over as he designed the first plans of government for Massachusetts and other states. Adams wrote in 1776 that he had seen “such Selfishness and Littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that altho We are engaged in the best Cause that ever employed the Human Heart, yet the Prospect of success is doubtfull, not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.”
Adams’s inquiry still reverberates with powerful relevance today. We are about to find out what stuff Americans are made of, and whether the animal spirits of representative democracy are still vibrant and roaming free. And we are about to find out to what extent our hallowed political institutions, in too many ways still rooted in their antiquated 18th century “winner take all” origins, are adequate for restraining an authoritarian plutocrat the likes of which these United States of America has never seen.
Or are we creeping closer to some American version of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933? I am aware that some believe this is an overreaction and a misreading of this historical moment. I sincerely hope they are right. It is still early in this second Trump administration. This period of American history is gearing up to be, once again, “a time that tries our souls.”
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 @stevenhill1776.bsky.social
This is good. Thank you for writing it.
Unfortunately, I believe that the spirit of free enterprise, of capitalism, the inherent right to become as affluent as one can master, that has been the national character of the U.S. far more than the spirit of democracy.
We were always a sick nation. Whether it was slavery, or 1929, or 2008, the robber barons are the constant in the equation. Money is more powerful than democracy in the U.S. Now with T****, we can see that money is more powerful than even the rule of law.
It's surprising how low we can go, but there it is.
Bernie is correct.