Photo, US Department of Agriculture, Wikimedia Commons
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error…Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
— Talking Heads, “Once In a Lifetime”
We’re on the eleventh ballot, with no end in sight. It’s been three days of comic repetition. Nominations are made, and Congressman Kevin McCarthy once again presents himself as the heir apparent to the position of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Each time, there are speeches, and there is a vote, and Clerk of the House Cheryl L. Johnson announces, again, “We have no Speaker.”
Growing up in the seventies, I was among the first generation to become acquainted with the running gag of Charlie Brown and the football, with Lucy snatching it away, time and time again—even after promising, time and again, that this would be the time she would finally let Charlie Brown have a chance to kick it.
Again, and again, and again.
Only now it’s not a joke, no matter how much the House of Representatives has come to resemble a cartoon show. It is an arm of our government that has been trapped in an endless circle of the drain, unable apparently to pull itself out of the current that brings us back to the same sweep of the dial, time and again. Round and around and around she goes.
In his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observed that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse reverses the order, pointing out that Fascist movements like Nazism present themselves first as farce, then as tragedy. What remains unexplored, in both Marx and Marcuse, is what we are to make to the unending satire now unfolding before us. It is no longer a matter of figuring out the proper order of two points in time. Rather, we are caught in an endless loop. History, simply repeating, and repeating, without end.
One might pause to ask why.
As I think about it, it seems more and more like Kevin McCarthy, and those who support him, have become unable to even imagine a future in which he does not assume the role of Speaker of the House. We know this because earlier this week, McCarthy occupied the office of the Speaker prior to the first vote even having been held. We know this as well because of the overwhelming evidence of the endless loop we seem to be stuck in: McCarthy presents himself, is refused, and presents himself again.
Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking a good deal about the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt. At the top of this piece, I quoted from her The Origins of Totalitarianism, which might be her best-known work: The concern of mass leaders is to make their predictions come true.
I find this observation of Arendt’s dovetails well with similar observations made in two of her other works, On Violence, and The Human Condition. Across these three works, Arendt makes the case that there are two major realms of human organization in our present age. Let’s call them the economic and the political.
The economic realm (for Arendt) is the realm of predictive outcomes. For example, a factory that takes in X amount of raw materials and labor does so in the expectation that it will produce Y number of widgets. The profits of the factory depend upon the accuracy and repeatability of that predictive arrangement. The more assured the prediction, the better the profit over time, QED.
Against this predictive regime of the economic, Arendt offers a contrasting example of the political. In this realm, Arendt claims, human life is not organized to predictive ends, but rather to unpredictable ones. Human beings are not machines producing widgets, but rather are complex beings with conflicting desires and needs. Historically, politics has been the sphere in which these needs and desires have been put into a discourse that yields compromise and consensus. What the final agreements will look like cannot be predicted or even mapped at the outset of the undertaking.
It is the great tragedy of our present age, Arendt argues, that the economic realm has become a totality, with politics no longer seen as an equal sphere of engagement, but rather as the handmaiden of the economic. This is to say, we no longer believe in the possibility of the unpredictable. The only future worth imagining is the one that has already happened, where the number of widgets coming out of the factory has already been set. To quote that old comedian, Ian Shoales, around here, “everything is work.”
I suggest to you that Hannah Arendt might just be the physician who can diagnose the present malaise we see at work in our body politic: namely that it is no longer a body politic at all, but rather a body economic. The men and women (but let’s be honest, men) we elect to Congress are not going there to engage in compromise or consensus. They're not interested at all in unpredictable outcomes. These guys are in the widget business—and up to this point, business has been good.
I think this explains McCarthy, better than anything else I’ve seen. He and the GOP keep coming back to the same impasse, repeating the same dead-handed motions, unable to escape the loop. They can’t, because doing so would mean letting go of the need they have to make their predictions come true.
The only possible way to move forward is to take a step toward an unknown future, a future not manufactured like a widget. Unfortunately, given all the evidence we have seen these past three days, there may be no one left in Washington who is willing to take that step.