If you have not watched or listened to Oprah Winfrey’s Golden Globes Cecil B DeMille Award acceptance speech, I urge you to do so now. Its the best ten minutes you will spend this week and perhaps this month.
That said, Ms Winfrey’s speech (and the radio chatter generated by the hint that she might make a run for the presidency) left me wondering: what kind of world is it that we live in when celebrities who lack policy making or legislating experience capture our imaginations as potential candidates for the highest office in the land?
I am not unfamiliar with the attraction fame, fortune, and power hold, particularly for individuals who have none: witness the tabloid culture and its audience. For better or worse, the attraction these hold goes as far back, historically, as the eye can see: witness the non-contest between David and Saul; Saul the wise and thoughtful servant, David the flashy, self-made violent, yet talented librettist (he wrote many of our Psalms) and warrior. So I am not saying that our attraction to Ms Winfrey is something new.
And, yet, when I consider the dull and boring legislators and policy makers we have produced over the years — many of them quite brilliant precisely as legislators and policy makers — I have to wonder whether the shift we are witnessing is not something new.
Was it FDR’s fireside chats? Was it JFK’s handsome mug (specially when viewed side-by-side with Nixon’s pale, sweaty face)? Or was it Reagan’s folksy TV-personality that inured us to the notion that legislating and policy making is a function of celebrity?
In fact, however, I believe that our attraction runs much deeper. Our attraction, I believe, touches upon “the sublime.” The sublime is frequently confused with the beautiful. But they are fundamentally different. The sublime holds interest for us in a way fundamentally different from the beautiful. As the 18th century German thinker Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) once noted: “The beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, for esteeming it even against our interest” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgment §29). But why might we esteem any thing even though — or perhaps because? — it is against our interest? Why might we prefer Dionysus to Apollo?
It is Kant, again, who may offer insight in this matter. In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, he offers the following analysis:
Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrate all the virtues of peace — gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person — precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. Hence, no matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general. Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. A prolonged peace, on the other hand, tends to make prevalent a mere[ly] commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of that people (I Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment §28).
Here Kant indicates that the sublime, unlike the beautiful, holds out for us the possibility of radical, qualitative, unanticipated transformation. The beautiful is what it is and nothing more. A states person crafts a piece of legislation — the epitome of a boring document, packed with sections and subsections and subsections of subsections. She crafts it in collaboration with women and men who differ with her and who are therefore eager to leave their own imprint on the final document. And when it is complete, each of these sections and subsections fit neatly, rationally, lawfully, not only with one another, but also with the corpus of existing law. Borrrring!
Or take the business person whose dealings are memorialized in contract and subject to existing laws and regulations. No surprises. Again: Borrring!
Now consider the general — or any individual who seems capable of violating, destroying and then creating, law through their very speech and activity. They are, in this limited sense, gods. These magical beings, because they are not subject to the laws that govern most of us, can perform acts the rest of us cannot. They can make America “great” not because they are legislative geniuses, not because they even know the law; nor because they are financial wizards. All of these acts really do require competence and skill. No. These sublime women and men accomplish deeds that defy law and rationality. Even when their leading accomplishments have included violence and destruction on an awful scale, we hold them in esteem even against our interest because they have proved themselves able to break through the bonds that hold and constrain us; they have violated both natural and human law; they are sublime.
And, yet, through it all they have kept their heads: Their minds “cannot be subdued by danger.” Or, rather, their minds are impervious to the violence and destruction of war?
Today, of course, celebrities and warriors are often confused. Warriors are celebrities. Celebrities regularly play warriors. Both defy the rules. But celebrities have something that most warriors do not: glamour, wealth, publicity. But their wealth is not in their person; it is in their personality — their quality of being a person. And so, unlike the soldier, who must actually risk something, the celebrity’s wealth and power and fame is, by definition, ineffable. It is beyond understanding; beyond rationality; beyond law — it is credited to them by us.
And isn’t that what we need in a President; someone not subject to the normal laws of nature, of physics, of rationality, or institutional inertia? Not simply a Washington outsider; but an individual, subject to no constraints whatsoever.
Celebrity attracts us because it appears unaccountable, completely inexplicable. It is that je ne sais quoi — that quality which, unlike legal training or negotiating skills or apprenticeship in a trade, arises from a place not subject to normal laws and processes. Which is why a “merely human” celebrity is an oxymoron.
(Parenthetically, having made acquaintance with many genuine actors, I know how much work and study goes into the trade of acting. Most of these actors are not also celebrities, but some are; and it is the least appealing dimension of their trade, that they must sell themselves as something they are not.)
But this means that the reason that many voters lunged for Trump is not, as Michael Moore famously claimed, that the election of Trump (or Bush, or Reagan) was “the biggest f*ck you ever recorded in history.”
Moore gets it wrong here. Trump is not the middle finger we held up in disgust. Rather was he the middle finger we held up because we believe that holding up middle fingers, or waving magic wands, or storming the Bastille, or [choose your favorite act or symbol of violence and destruction] holds the capacity to bring about fundamental emancipatory change. Like Kant, we prefer the soldier over the statesman; because we actually believe that “even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights.” And, even more, we believe that “war . . . makes the way of thinking of a people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground.” Alongside Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, we too believe in the cleansing, redeeming, restorative power of the sublime.
But then we need to ask ourselves why we believe this. Why do we not believe in the cleansing, redeeming, restorative power of — for example — science, scholarship, statesmanship and legislative competence?
Surely part, but only part, of the answer to this question lies in the skill and competence of legislators who have mastered the largest transfer of wealth from working families to the top .09 % in human history. If policy makers and legislators are responsible for our relative poverty, then it stands to reason that their competencies are suspect; never mind that transferring wealth back down the income hierarchy to where it was produced will require extraordinary legislative and policy making skill. In other words, we will not get to where we want to be without the very competencies we are rejecting because of their cynical misuse.
But there is another, far more disturbing, reason we doubt the cleansing, redeeming, restorative power of statesmanship and legislative competence. Deep down, we want a miracle. We want the laws of physics to be suspended. We want good to arise irrespective of legislation, of laws, and of institutions; and irrespective of the arduous, often thankless, work of political organizing and lobbying. We want a miracle. And on a deep level, this reason is far more disturbing to me because it is so completely fantastic and because so many people I love believe that it is so.
It is possible of course that Ms Winfrey is a legislative and policy making genius. In which case, she should show us what she can do in a state house, a state senate or in a Federal seat. This is where two of my heroes — Kamala Harris and Barbara Lee — began their journeys; and what legislative and policy making geniuses they have proven to be! Amazing! I would eagerly support either of them for the highest office.
So, no. My reservations are neither about race nor gender. Although die-hard HRC supporters still argue that she lost because she is a woman and not because she is a neoliberal hawk, I gladly voted for her in the main election. That is not the point. Ms Clinton remains a superb legislator and policy maker — just not for policies or laws about which I am specially fond. In any case, celebrity was not why we supported Ms Clinton. Not. At. All.
So why are many so ready to entertain a run by Ms Winfrey? Is it magic? Or is it magical thinking?