Larping Plenary Power

Not a great look, but it has a long pedigree

I have been neglecting the ‘stack because I have an onerous teaching load this semester and I am also very lazy. But I am rousting myself from torpor because, having just finished up a module on the political thought of the great Thomas Hobbes, I opened up the Internets earlier this week to discover that a buzz around what lead Gollum of the Trump Brain Trust, Steven Miller, let slip during an interview with CNN. While discussing legal challenges that have been launched against the administration’s plan to send federalized national guard troops into supposedly lawless US cities, he noted: “Under title ten of the US code the president has plenary authority, ….” at which point he stopped abruptly, as if some kind of technical problem was interfering with the video feed.

People haven’t been buying that explanation though. Instead, the consensus is that Miller immediately realized he had said the quiet bit out loud – and so stopped talking in order to get a do-over. Amazingly, his imitation of a glitching Windows machine actually worked and CNN aired the interview minus the incriminatory and revelatory overstep. (You can see the original and edited clip here.)

The issue was that, by invoking the phrase “plenary authority” in conjunction with title 10, Miller was advancing the argument that the US president has complete, absolute, and non-reviewable power over the deployment of national guard troops. Another way of saying that is the US executive has the power to bring civil society under military control at any time without requiring any institutional authorisation, review, or oversight.

Now, the very fact that Miller’s comments were made with reference to recent rulings by US federal courts on the legality of federalizing the US national guard means his argument for plenary authority is absurd on its face – if that were, in fact, the case, the courts would have no standing to consider the question one way or another. But it is clear that this is what the US administration would like to have. That is, they seek not just the power to send troops marching into the streets of lawless, strife-torn hellholes like Portland Oregon, but the unchecked, unsupervised power to do so. Of late, they have been forcing the issue by larping precisely this kind of power, both through the strangely off-book deployment of immigration-enforcement goons, and, more recently, by deploying guardsman to gaze menacingly at patrons of the local Starbucks in blue US cities by way of cracking down against … checks notes – oh yes, anti-fascists. How’d we end up here again?

Actually, if we look more widely, we can find the reason. Gollum Miller and his ilk hold the view that the institutional upholding of the rule of law inside a constitutionally-ordered society has a clear leftist bias.

I feel safe in making this rather extraordinary claim because I am merely channelling Gollum Miller’s own words, which he declaimed more or less at the same time as he out-louded his plenary authority fever-dream. Last weekend, he noted that “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism, … shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general” is destroying America. The solution? “To use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

Put these two together, and you get the idea of the law (“judges, prosecutors and attorneys general”) recast as “leftwing terrorism,” against which a “legitimate state power” is required, where that power is the “plenary authority” to militarise civil society. No wonder Miller glitched when he spurted out on live television the plenary authority bit. Too soon!

That sentiment is bad for American democracy, but good for my classroom. In years past, I have found when teaching Hobbes that he can seem somewhat abstract and remote. He is interesting as the founding author of social contract theory, but his vision of power is so incompatible with our modern constitutionalism that it can be hard for students to relate to it as anything more than theory.

But no longer! The Trumpetistas are encapsulating a vision of power and sovereignty that underpins Hobbes’ entire political scheme. Hobbes believed more or less in untrammelled executive power to rule over people, because, having lived through the bloodbath of both the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, he knew firsthand a basic social truism: people can’t rule over themselves reliably. In the case of Hobbes, he identified self-interest and mistrust as insuperable problems that interfered with a well-ordered society. In the case of the current administration, it is the twin evils of empathy and tolerance that are undermining civil order. Either way, the remedy is the same: strong sovereign authority to remind people who is in charge for their own good.

For some, heavily armed troops in full battle gear walking down city streets is not a good look. But if your perspective is Hobbesian, it is a great look. This is because, ultimately, the role of sovereign power over the state is to impress upon people the cost of not complying with the basic terms of the social contract. Since, as Hobbes puts it, people “have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all,” what they therefore require to live peaceably with one another is precisely a “common Power to keep them all in awe.” By “awe,” Hobbes means fear. So, in other words, we need to have the shit scared out of us so we will behave properly. And jackbooted troops carrying large automatic weapons should have exactly that salutary effect.

Hobbesian thought was a reaction to the violent disorder of a Europe rent asunder by confessional and religious difference, destabilized by changing social dynamics, and menaced by complex geopolitics. The fact that seventeenth-century solutions to political chaos are now being used as a modern policy handbook, while great as a teaching moment in my classroom, is nonetheless rather concerning for the future of a democratic, constitutional rule of law. I suspect even Hobbes himself might have hoped we’d be a little more advanced in our political thinking after four hundred years of working on it. But apparently not.

Thanks for reading and remember you can always annoy others by sharing this post or make me feel slightly better about life by throwing me a like.