Deactivating the Legislature

If you have some radical ideas about how to remake the social order it’s a very helpful exercise to think through how those changes might be introduced with minimal, or, even, no overt transformations in existing social institutions or their founding narratives. (My argument, in Antropomorphics, for reading the US Constitution as written for a Chief Executive like George Washington, is an attempt to do this.) It’s easy to see that running headlong into massive, densely structured institutions staffed by well trained and committed people drawing upon decades or centuries of traditions of rule, as anyone familiar with the Jouvenal model knows, can only be successful with significant elite patronage—but in that case, is there any reason to think you’d be bringing about the changes you want? The left has, over the past century, operated overwhelmingly through infiltration, involving not only the insinuation of favorable personnel into major social institutions, from government to media to the universities, but the systematic revising and reinterpretation of founding documents and principles. This was much easier for the left than it would be for the right since those institutions were “pre-infiltrated,” being based on liberal principles conducive to High-Low vs. the Middle maneuvering. But the right has had its successes, in the realms of gun rights, abortion, and free market economics (which, yes, is not real, and is anyway currently out of favor with ascendant factions of the right, but think about whether you’d rather have corporations or communism), and these successes involved infiltrating law schools and economics departments, founding activist groups with donor networks and, I assume, something like NGOs. With a rigorous focus on law and order and equal treatment, there might be more victories in the coming years won through some canny appropriation of leftist-style strategies (this post was written prior to the inauguration of President Trump, and his initiation of what I suppose we could call a “Yarvinite” strategy of “regime change,” which might supersede the more cautious, gradual approach I explore here—but I think there will still be plenty of work to be done and some suggestions here as to how to do it).

But even while some important future officer class training and recruitment might be taking place through these battles, in the end they remain mere skirmishes. They can’t touch the basic fulcrum of desecrational politics, the oscillation between the central banks and central intelligence. And this oscillation works through the only thoroughly modern and completely unnecessary branch of government: the legislature. There never has been and there can be no governance without an occupant of the center, whether it be a monarch, chief executive or prime minister. Nor could there be without a judicial branch, or court system, which we also find in at least rudimentary forms in the most ancient forms of government. And we can see why—at the very least, from the standpoint of the center, the judiciary serves as a filter, framing, articulating and settling conflicts before they can snowball and become a threat to order or the regime. But the legislature develops out of late medieval struggles between the king and nobles over royal attempts to extract the necessary revenues, mostly for war. The idea that there can be a body of government that “writes laws”—and, for that matter, that “writing laws” was the basic source of laws, is a modern “discovery.” It probably developed out of the aforementioned requests for revenue by the king, which we can see “evolving” into the composing and passing of budgets in desacralized orders. If you’re responding “pre-emptively” to a request for revenue (implying the king has conceded that it is a “request”), then those providing the revenue must be allowed to determine the sources of revenue (not them, anymore) and its various destinations. (I assume late 17^th-18^th century England would be the place to study this transformation). And here we have most of modern law: grants of funds and authority to bureaucratic agencies (like through USAID). And since this is the money sluice, this is where all the attention of those outside of government who want something from government is directed, which is why a simple answer to any complaint about almost any feature of “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republics” (if you prefer) is: abolish the legislature. All law was originally royal decrees and common law developed through precedent based on judgments made in terms of the founding nomos (whose land is whose?). The “Code of Hammurabi” is just a collection of judicial decisions and most likely so are laws attributed to God in the Torah (which is still, clearly, a source of the idea that laws can be “written”—even if the assumption was that they can only be written this once).

Abolishing the legislature while (remembering the exercise proposed above) leaving it formally intact is a formidable task. Sticking to the US system (I suspect that parliamentary systems pose greater difficulties since the prime minister comes directly from the legislative body—still, most—all?—parliamentary systems have back-up reserves of power in either a monarch or president). In the US, the Congress has to pass a budget (which they haven’t actually done for quite a while, which mean we’re already either on the path outlined here or even further off it), but the process does begin with the President sending a proposed budget to Congress—so, the trick here would be to make congressional rubber-stamping of the presidential budget routine. We might want to model strategies on the Jouvenalian HLvM process, only in this case make it Executive and Judicial vs. the Legislative. It might be possible to use all kinds of legal measures, even drawing upon interpretations of laws passed by Congress, to place individual representatives in all kinds of potential legal jeopardy. This would be much easier for the House than the Senate, as in the House they’re almost all probably involved in borderline illegal activities on a regular basis. Understandings between the Department of Justice and the Federal Judiciary would work wonders here, even if I don’t know just yet how to spell out the details (leave that to the think tanks). Congressional representatives are privy to all kinds of classified information, which they can then transmit to well situated agents in the media, and there might be a lot to look into here as well. This presupposes the executive getting a handle on the intelligence agencies, which is very difficult in practice but at least easy in principle since those agencies have no constitutional authorization—the American political order could be what it is without the CIA and NSA in a way it couldn’t without Congress. Maybe another layer of strategy is necessary here: leveraging some parts of the intelligence agencies against others and leveraging the intelligence agencies against the administrative agencies.

There was a very fashionable movement, initiated in the US by Clinton and the “New Democrats” (with parallel developments in Blair’s “New Labour”), to privatize social services, on the publicly stated understanding that, given the post-Reagan and post-Communist faith in “markets,” this would lead to greater efficiencies and lower costs. I don’t think there’s anyone today calling these efforts a success, or pushing much to attempt it today, but a similar attempt has become routine in the “harder” areas of state power like intelligence and the military, where the use of contractors is indispensable—of course, private industry was always heavily involved in military production. The leveraging of private companies to route around and surround the legislature is much more promising in this area. If you listen to Trump speak about NATO and the US’s relation to its allies, you can see he sees the US as essentially contracting out its superior military power to the Europeans, and he is appalled that we should have been doing this for free and at a loss for all these years. If the government becomes more like a protection agency, intelligence service and, even more, an insurance company (which, strictly speaking, it has been since the 1930s), then the availability of resources outside of those raised by taxes and controlled by Congress presents itself.

All of the regulatory and social service funding and agencies empowered by Congress can be transferred to local levels, through the repair of the legal system so that it can handle lawsuits regarding damages attributed to products, working conditions, the environmental effects of production, and fraud, on the one hand, and decrees requiring localities, companies and families (kinship networks) to provide aid for, confine, or engage in “useful occupations” those who would otherwise become burdens on or dangers to the community. We remove all incentive to donate money to Congressional campaigns, and much of the incentive to go into politics as a profession—no more lobbying, no more rent seeking, no more use of regulation against competitors, etc. We do have to take into account two highly significant powers of Congress: the declaration of war, and impeachment. We could say that if congress has been brought into line with regard to rubberstamping budgets it will already be sufficiently tamed not to dare to defy the president in such matters. But let’s continue the exercise and assume these problems need to be confronted. First of all, what is war, and what would count as a declaration of war? War can be waged without declaring it, simply from the president’s power as commander-in-chief, and military action can be approved in verbal forms other than a “declaration of war” (“approval to take necessary actions…”). And have not the lines between war and not-war been blurred considerably, to the point where ordinary surveillance, information gathering, positioning and posturing, already approximate war? The need to neutralize congress will be an incentive to push these arguments further. Regarding impeachment, which is already a rare and risky recourse, never yet in American history leading to conviction and removal of a president (or hardly anyone else) from office, it can be made even riskier by the president availing himself of the same kinds of persuasive and coercive methods already adduced for bringing congress into budgetary compliance. I wonder whether RICO actions or the equivalent can be used to break up the political parties themselves, designating them as criminal organizations. Along the way there would be showdowns, with each one won by the president making victory in the next easier.

What, then, would be left for Congress to do? Well, there are still some Senate functions, such as approving Cabinet appointments and judges and ratifying treaties—maybe if these became more focused they could become useful, and since there are already end-arounds these dependencies, the Senate could be further marginalized in these areas as well. The Senate seems to be very dependent on the intelligence agencies, disciplines and secret and political police in these functions, and if those agencies are altered or eliminated as necessary, the Senate might become highly compliant here. There is one thing that both houses of congress do that they might very well be encouraged to do more of, and that they really seem to enjoy, and that is to hold hearings. House representative never seem happier than when they are humiliating (or trying to humiliate) some corporate or bureaucratic bogeyman or political enemy. All these hearings ever lead to is a referral to the DOJ for prosecution, which is to say, to the executive branch. Such hearings can be entertaining and informative and could be used to serve the president’s purposes. This might be glossed as returning the legislature to its original function of providing advice and counsel to the ruler, providing him with access to knowledge of the realm he might not have access to himself. And, finally, congressional representatives might find their true vocation as cheerleaders and publicists for their districts and states, representing their needs and accomplishments in a promising light, pointing out where federal agencies might be located or how the state might be staffed. This might make individual representatives very popular and very reliant upon their constituents, along with making representation less of a lifetime job and more a position people rotate in and out of—and the institution of congress itself, famously unpopular, might become admired liked again. And, some might say, isn’t that a truer democracy than what we have had so far?

The key here seems to be for some popular president to work systematically at coercing congress by targeting individual congresspeople in coordination with the DOJ and intelligence agencies—only a minority would need to be neutralized to significantly weaken the body as a whole. This assumes the possibility of coordinating with those notoriously “swampy” government agencies (or, given recent events, simply eliminating them—far better!), and the best way of approaching that is probably through the companies which those agencies contract out to, which can provide leverage in the form of necessary intelligence and capability and personnel. Regarding the DOJ, dependence on law schools, various legal communities and the disciplines more generally would be an issue—there are already bastions of conservative legal thought in those spaces but Federalist Society trained legal minds might be an obstacle insofar as they genuinely believe in a particular, originalist, understanding of the Constitution. Histories of legislative bodies, throughout the world and history but especially in the US, will need to be commissioned and written, in order to create space to speak about the legislature in terms other than the “body of government closest to the people,” etc. Marginalized traditions of American, Anglo and European political thought can be brought to bear on the effort. The legislative branch can be completely discredited as a serious vehicle of governance, and that should be the goal from the outset. One might not want it to be explicit from the beginning, but even if the project gets publicized early on, disgust with corruption and congress can be mobilized to counter charges of an attack on democracy, etc.