If an angry spouse chose to serve divorce papers to their soon-to-be ex at their child's youth sports event in front of a large crowd, you could be forgiven for thinking that there's more than a simple legal action taking place. Indeed, in some respect the legal action itself is actually rather marginal to the point being made, which is a signal of disdain for their partner and a desire to humiliate them.
Something like that would seem to apply to Friday's shameful events in the Oval Office. In so far as it has become clear that, tragically, there is no way for Ukraine to defeat the unjust invasion launched by Russia's totalitarian despot, and in so far as President Trump and Vice President Vance are simply trying to bring Ukraine president Volodmyr Zelenskyy to the bargaining table, one can have little objection to that. It is, after all, virtually impossible for Ukraine to win by most accounts and so it would behoove their leader to attempt to negotiate an end to the war. It would also behoove Putin to do the same given that his absurd war has led to the deaths of countless young Russian men, men who would otherwise have possibly been getting married and having children by now, perhaps helping to address Russia's looming demographic crisis, which has only been made far worse by Putin's reckless actions.
But, of course, if that was all Trump and Vance were after, then this could have been handled behind closed doors, as is virtually all high-stakes international diplomacy, and the story here would have been little more than a return to foreign policy realism as the era of globalization unwinds and America's focus takes an increasingly domestic turn. It would remain tragic for the people of Ukraine, who do not deserve the evils that have been visited on them. But it would also recognizably remain an issue of foreign policy, I think.
That it was not done behind closed doors but rather was filmed as a spectacle (with one particular audience member in mind, one suspects) is significant. And without intending any offense to the victims of Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, it is likely that the most important part of Friday's events has relatively little to do with the ending of that tragic war. The greatest significance of Friday's events, it seems to me, is that it represents the loudest and most undeniable statement yet of Trump's fondness for the totalitarian.
I am currently reading David Ciepley's Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Ciepley makes the argument that the primary problem of western political life in the early 21st century is that our liberalism has defined itself against the threat of "totalitarianism" in the years since World War II. Because of this, both left and right varieties of liberalism were generally quite skittish about offering any kind of more robust or demanding vision of liberal citizenship, for fear of sliding into totalitarianism themselves. So the left tended to embrace social libertarianism because taking sides on social issues felt totalitarian to them. By a similar token, the right did the same with economic issues, shrinking back from the economic policies that have at times been embraced by the American right in favor of a relatively hands off approach which tended to regard the government as a problem which infringed on the liberty of markets rather than as a necessary actor in insuring that markets would exist for the nation and not the nation for its markets.
The outcome of this era—and here I am potentially getting ahead of Ciepley because I have not yet finished the book and he may steer the argument elsewhere—is that we ended up with a very emaciated and procedurally focused vision of liberalism. It veered into a moralizing HR-style progressivism on the left and a fairly helpless, one-dimensional vision of government on the right. Amidst that decline it is perhaps not surprising that some, myself included for a time, thought the problem was "liberalism" itself. But, of course, there is no single entity that all sides recognize as such to which we have given the name "liberalism." There is, rather, a wide range of ideas and values and policies fitted under that term and applied differently by different thinkers and nations.
Even so, as this procedurally focused liberalism spun its wheels, the society it regulated moved into decadence, which refers to a kind of life without liveliness or direction, a torpor in which the material systems of society continue to function but the spiritual heart has died, as it were. Anticipating this in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. described it this way,
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that suggestive phrase of Thoreau: 'Improved means to an unimproved end.' This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem, confronting modern man. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the external of man's nature subjugates the internal, dark storm clouds begin to form.
You could say that the liberalism of the post-war years was a liberalism of the external world shorn of any concern with the internal: The responsibilities, duties, and virtues of democratic citizenship were deemphasized, replaced by the external mechanisms and rules that defined the west's liberalism contra the east's totalitarianism.
One way of answering this spiritual loss, of course, is the path that now seems increasingly attractive to many of our neighbors and which our current president seems quite drawn to himself. Identify the Great Man (or Christian Prince) who will give your people a sense of destiny and purpose. Follow him no matter what. Do not bother yourself with the problems of judgment and deliberation and prudence. Simply watch what Dear Leader does and then follow him unwaveringly, defending whatever he does after the fact on the basis that he was the one who did it.
Such leaders can offer a pale copy of collective identity and purpose for a time, but because such leaders are virtually always concerned chiefly with themselves and themselves alone, they will virtually never uphold their end of the trade they have demanded of their subjects. And it will be their subjects left to suffer the consequences of their narcissism.
Another option is on offer, however. We could attempt a return to democratic virtues, to a democracy that asks something real and challenging and elevating of its citizens.
Consider: In the rotunda of our nation's capital each of our 50 states is given two memorials, two large statues depicting two of that state's greatest citizens. My home state of Nebraska honors the great novelist Willa Cather with one statute and the great Ponca chief Standing Bear with the other. Standing Bear was arrested for committing the crime of attempting to return his son's body for burial to his people's ancestral soil in Nebraska from which they had been forcibly removed. For this offense he was hauled before a judge and asked to answer for his crimes. In response to the judge he spoke these beautiful words:
That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.
And so today outside the chamber where the House of Representatives is assembled members must walk past a statue of Standing Bear. The man whose ancestral land was once taken from him by the actions of the nation represented in that capital now stands in the capital himself.
Standing Bear's statute, indeed Standing Bear himself, is a reminder of what liberal democratic citizenship is at its best: a call to recognize the dignity of each person, regardless of wealth or ethnicity or status, a call to see oneself as having authentic responsibility for the shape of one's nation, and a call toward mercy in our nation's public life.
When we recognize this more robust vision of liberalism, a liberalism with teeth, a liberalism that asks something of us, we find something that can (partially) address those internal longings common to us all. But it does not answer them with a call to mindless submission to a national leader. It answers, rather, with a call toward patient endurance with our neighbors, to answer bad speech with more and better speech, to afford every person the benefit of the rule of law, for if all the laws are cut down how then shall we stand in that great wind?
What concerns me about Friday's shameful display in the Oval Office, what concerns me about the choice to pardon insurrectionists and hirers of hit men, what concerns me about a cozying up toward totalitarians is not that I think America will soon collapse into totalitarianism of the sort that exists in Russia. It is that the spirit of our nation, enervated by decades of bureaucracy-as-democracy, would be further drawn away from the virtues and duties that both democratic life and ordinary love of neighbor demand of us.
One answer to the ways in which liberalism became truncated due to fear of the totalitarian is to return to a better and deeper liberalism. Another answer is to simply adopt the totalitarian style ourselves, even if (for the time) our legal norms make actual totalitarianism unlikely. We would do well to choose the first option rather than the second.