The Eighteenth Brumaire of Barak Obama: what didn’t happen.

United States’ political situation is bordering a constitutional crisis. The decrease of world power is deepened by a political system that has stopped functioning and makes way for sedition. Unlike other empires, such as the British, which knew how to handle its decay, North American decadence is clumsy and fitful.[[The 18th brumaire of the year VIII refers to a date in the French republican calendar, coinciding with 9th November 1799. That day, Napoleon Bonaparte conducted a coup d’etat that put an end to the Directory, the French Revolution’s last form of government, and started the period known as the Consulate. For a long time, this date (18th brumaire) has been linked to the concept of Coup d’Etat. In 1851, Luis Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s nephew, conducted another coup, putting an end to the Second Republic and replacing it with the Second Empire.]]

In his famous book on the French political situation from 1848 to 1851, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx stated, in line with Hegel’s thinking: ¨history repeats itself, but with one exception: the first time is a tragedy, the second a farce.¨ I don’t think Karl Marx would have imagined a third, which is what happened in Washington in October 2013. We might then add to his statement: ¨the third time is a circus.¨

Before Luis Bonaparte’s eighteenth Brumaire, the French National Assembly was divided into factions that couldn’t agree on any initiative, including the most significant ones for national development. The legislature was paralyzed and the diverse political currents could only exercise reciprocal vetoing. The government was swamped and the president (elected by the national majority’s vote) Luis Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew) had his hands tied. In a different paper from the same time, this is how Marx described France’s political situation and its repercussion on public administration:

¨[It is] impossible to make the State’s administration become dependent on the interests of national production without reestablishing the budget’s equilibrium, the balance between the State’s expenses and incomes, and how to reestablish that balance without cutting back on public expenditure, meaning, without hurting interests which were so many other pillars of the dominating system and without submitting the tax redistribution to a new regulation, meaning, without transferring an important share of public burdens onto the haute bourgeoisie’s shoulders? The public debt’s increase directly interested the bourgeois fraction that governed and ruled through the Chambers. The State’s deficit was precisely the true aim of their speculations and their wealth’s main source. (…) Every new borrowing gave the financial aristocracy a new opportunity to scam a State that was artificially kept on the edge of bankruptcy; the latter had no choice but to sign with the bankers under the most unfavorable of conditions.
Every new borrowing was a new opportunity to ransack the public that allocates its capitals in State bonds, through Stock transactions (…). And if the State’s deficit answered to the dominating bourgeois fraction’s direct interest, it is clear why extraordinary expenses were incurred (…).
The enormous amounts that this way went through the State’s hands of gave way to, in addition, the opportunity to hire supplies, which were so many other cons, for briberies, embezzlements and all sorts of malicious actions. The large-scale con pulled on the State, just like it used to be performed through the borrowings, was repeated on a smaller scale with public work. And what happened between the Chamber and the government was reproduced ad infinitum in the relationships between the Administration’s multiple organisms and the different businessmen. ¨

In short, politics was about a redistributive struggle between opposing interests that translated into a political tie between fractions in favor or against public debt and social expenditure. On the one hand were the interests of the ‘financial sector’, on the other, those of a government that was potentially more willing than the financiers to uphold social expenditure with a greater tax burden upon privileged sectors, and in addition there were other fractions that wanted nothing to do with taxes, public indebtedness, nor high finances and willing to trigger the collapse of the entire shelf. As the reader of this article can appreciate, there is nothing new under the sun.

Facing this situation, President Bonaparte decided to have a clean break: he first gauged public opinion –unfavorable to the political shenanigans that ruled Paris-, then he ensured the National Guard troops’ loyalty, and then he launched a ‘self-coup’: he suspended the Constitution, shut down congress (the National Assembly), and proclaimed himself absolute ruler, exercising from that point on the government by decree and adopting the title of Emperor, following his prestigious uncle’s steps. He proclaimed himself Napoleon III, and thus exercised power until his defeat by the hands of the Prussian army in Sedan, in 1871. His authoritarian regime (precursor of the XX century dictatorships) lasted exactly 20 years.

What did Marx make out of this process? He claimed that when parliamentary representation through political parties is divided into irreconcilable and stubborn factions, ruling becomes extremely hard. The entire representative system of the bourgeois democracy falls into a crisis, to such extent that what Marx used to call ‘parliamentary cretinism’ gets out of hand.

In response to this vice, the central state apparatus and its executive branch sometimes distance themselves from the representative regime and erect themselves as supreme arbiters above all parties. A temporary dictatorship emerges, an authoritarian State that makes autonomous decisions in favor of the whole system, according to what the German theorist Carl Schmitt would name, much later, the exercise of sovereignty through the state of exception.

In line with this train of thought, in our own days, the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben has claimed that all constitutions contain clauses that foresee their own suspension. The most common examples of such state of emergency are international war or internal sedition. Sovereignty is exercised by whoever turns the steering wheel in light of the storm that’s coming.

Sometimes the turn is made within the rules of succession foreseen in the Constitution. Thus for instance, in 1890’s financial crisis in Argentina, President Juárez Celman’s resignation gave way in power to a more capable and determined successor -Carlos Pellegrini- who fairly gained the nickname of ‘storm pilot’. Other times, the successor accesses the State’s command through a coup of destitution (the true coup d’etat), which pulls away from the Constitution. Such was the case of Napoleon III.

In the recent United States’ legislative disputes there are both similarities and differences in comparison with the scenario I’ve just described. On one hand we observe the Congress’ division into irreconcilable factions, and particularly within the House of Representatives, but also more mildly within the Senate.
We must however note the following difference: in the US it isn’t about, as it is customary in Europe, a tie between the left and the right, but a dispute between an extreme right-wing faction and a moderate center, both conservative and liberal-progressive. In the past 30 years, the entire American spectrum has moved to the right, to such extent that we can summarize the situation like this: a shy center, a quite anemic traditional conservative group, and a right wing that is more extremist and vociferous with each passing day. It is a paradoxical geometry: the case of a spectrum with only one extreme pole.

I’ll mark another difference. Unlike the European countries, which favor a parliamentary regime, the American system is presidential (a constitutional model adopted by most Latin American countries). In theory, a strong presidential system allows the Executive to take measures of ‘necessity and urgency’ within and not outside of the constitutional framework, when exceptional circumstances –foreseen by the Constitution itself- demand so.

The founding fathers of the American Republic established a system of checks and balances (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, and within the Legislative another division into two chambers) that would allow to rule with compromises and temporary consensus, without falling either into the excesses of a republic of judges, or of a state of permanent assembly, or of an authoritarian presidency.

Perhaps they didn’t foresee the case of a congress contradicting itself: on the one hand it passes laws but on the other it prevents their implementation (the case of the Affordable Care Act), with the aggravating factor of a President who refuses to cut the Gordian knot and rule for a while under the state of exception, provoked by the abdication of power before a seditious group at its core.

Under such circumstances of indecision from the legislative power as well as from the executive power, the entire political system keeps spiraling down from one crisis to another and only exits each one once the situation becomes dangerous for the entire country’s economy and safety of the State (e.g. the risk of insolvency, and a serious distraction away from urgent international relationships). Those “exits” are partial and dilatory, and soon the system falls back into the same vicious circle.

Every crisis –and the sum of a whole series of them- gets in the way of sustaining coherent State policies, establishing priorities, and facing serious challenges on the domestic front (education, infrastructure, wealth distribution, and productive integration of marginalized sectors and the immigration flow), and in the international order (transference of the geopolitical axis from west to east, and risks of simultaneous wars in different regions around the globe).

The entire country is distracted by a power display that deep down no one wants, and that’s pernicious and deplorable. It’s a self-inflicted crisis that weighs upon the whole community just like the plague burdened cities in Greek tragedies. Sophocles named it: miasma. Today we can qualify the situation of the first power as political miasma.

The long arm of history

De acuerdo con el historiador y comentarista Gary Wills, la situación en el Congreso norteamericano tiene antecedentes graves en la historia del país, en particular en el secesionismo virtual de los estados sureños antes de lanzarse al secesionismo real que provocó la cruenta Guerra Civil (1861-65).

According to historian and commentator Gary Wills, the situation in the American Congress has a disturbing precedent in the country’s history, namely in the Southern States’ virtual secessionism before they actually embarked upon the real secession that caused the American Civil War (1861-65).

Today several States’ legislatures (among them the many of the Southern states) impose restrictions on the free and universal vote under the pretext of an alleged ‘fraud control’ on electoral lists, measures that in fact seek to exclude the black population from the electoral process. It is a masked form of racism (with the only difference that under President Lincoln, the Republican Party was anti-slavery), like spreading rumors that President Obama is a Muslim and a socialist.

The barely disguised racism and outrageous distortion of government policies by an extremist minority wing of the current Republican Party have managed to intimidate that party’s leadership in congress, afraid of losing its positions in the party’s disputes in homogeneous districts which have achieved a disproportionate representation in the chambers, directly opposing the American population’s majority, which is authentically heterogeneous and which has voted for President Obama twice in universal and open elections.

Through the subterfuge of manipulated electoral districts, the restriction of voting, and a disinformation campaign in public opinion, the extremists of the so called Tea Party have become the tail that wags the dog of the Republican Party, and the latter, in turn, has paralyzed the Obama administration.

The President has proven to be notoriously reluctant to use the executive power in a state of emergency in order to face the republican virtual secession with as much strength as the Constitution itself would allow him.

Facing the republicans’ threat of suspending the government’s finances and the debt payments, in exchange for concessions on the public health program, the President could have declared a state of siege and ordered directly and regardless of the will of the Congress that the Treasury issue money to pay for the government’s obligations and that the Central Bank issue the necessary bonds to refinance the public debt. .

This would definitely cause an attempt to impeach the President in the House of Representatives (erected by the Constitution as the prosecutor) and a posterior absolution on behalf of the Senate (which is erected as a judge by the Constitution). This would have ended once and for all the unacceptable threat by the republican extremist wing of destroying the country’s good credit and solvency in an attempt to extract revisions of laws that have already been sanctioned but that are not of their liking.

As the legendary investor Warren Buffet has pointed out, the strategy of this extremist wing is equivalent to the threat to use atomic weapons in a border dispute or in a commercial dispute between two countries. The Executive’s firm action would have at the same time enabled the elimination of the self-imposed limit on the national debt, as has been stated over and over again by American and foreign economists. As my friends say, the Grand Old Party (the Republican Party’s old nickname) has become the Grand Obstructionist Party.

We are witnessing conditions that resemble the virtual secessionism preceding the Civil War, which are: a party being held hostage by an extremist faction and the disproportionate representation of that faction in that party, which in turn holds the entire country hostage to obstructionist tactics.

Let’s bear in mind that in most states the vote favored Obama in 2012’s presidential elections, but the majority of positions in the House of Representatives was assigned to the Republicans –not because the voters split their ballots in the voting booths, but because the Republican governors from several states distributed electoral districts in favor of their party, in a trick known as gerrymandering.

Such spirit of secession (or if the reader prefers it, of sedition), was reinforced with attempts to restrict the vote and to sabotage any legislation within the Senate that wasn’t of the Republican Party’s reactionary liking, through vote postponements- a maneuver called ‘filibuster’. We may well say that the deputies and senators abusing this maneuver are acting as filibusters (another name for piracy).

Under such circumstances, the President’s responsibility is undeniable: if he does not exercise all the powers needed in a state of emergency, he will only manage to finish his mandate from one obstruction to another, one crisis to another, with only partial exits that ensure for his political enemies the victory they are seeking, which is no other than preventing him from governing by using any excuse, no matter how absurd it might be.

Obama’s second administration will therefore have a mediocre and sad end: both in international affairs and in domestic politics he has let others take initiative, and if he has survived so far it is not due to his firmness or skill, but due to the larger clumsiness of his rivals. Neither Napoleon the Third nor Abraham Lincoln nor Carlos Pellegrini: today he appears as a distant, doubtful and dour Hamlet in Washington. Stormy times are coming and –so far- there we have not seen a true storm pilot holding the steering wheel of the state.

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