Me and My Shadow

On the emerging doctrine of the President's two bodies. Plus: Rushdie and Wiman (and Reed redux)

Last Thursday, I listened to a large part of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court over Donald Trump’s claim of total immunity from prosecution while I was running errands and commuting. I found it so fascinating and horrifying that I went back and subjected myself to the entire transcript (I can’t recommend reading it–the write-ups report the important stuff–but it’s a remarkable document). I had some thoughts on the political theology of the hearing, which were published by the Christian Century. Here’s the nut (but you should still click through to read the whole thing):

The office of the presidency has been escaping the bounds of law at least since the Manhattan Project vested it with impenetrable secrecy and world-altering power. That we had created a behemoth at the heart of our political order was, at best, a necessary embarrassment to legal and political thinkers. But the slender reed on which the legitimacy of this office rested was the person of the president himself: while vested with enormous power, he was merely a man, subject to the law. Inside the godlike machine was a mere citizen, who must emerge after a term in office and join the common run of humanity.

It seems that we are about to lose this last conceptual firewall between a republican presidency and an elected monarchy. The Court’s liberals vainly pointed out that the framers of the Constitution knew about immunity clauses and chose not to write one for the president. This does not matter to the Court’s supposedly “textualist” and “originalist” majority. Something they called the “structure” of our political order requires that presidents stand above and outside it. By the end of the argument, it would not have been more surprising if Justice Alito had warned that the rains might fail and the crops wither if a president were subjected to the laws of the republic.

I wasn’t the only person to notice medieval overtones here. John Ganz connected the twin spectacles of the Supreme Court argument and the Manhattan fraud trial to Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology:

Kantorowicz describes how lawyers and political philosophers in the middle ages and early modern period developed a conception of the monarchy where the king was understood to have two bodies, his literal, corporeal one and another, incorporeal one, co-extensive the state, or, as Kantorowicz argues, the origin of the myth of the state itself.

There is a great deal of danger in this line of thinking, as is obvious enough from the oral arguments or, alternatively, from thinking about it for five seconds. It was an unthinkable argument only a few years ago, when everyone arguing to acquit the former president in his second impeachment trial acknowledged that he could be charged and tried in a court of law. If his party had decisively severed him, if anyone else had been able to gain the levers of the party’s media apparatus and turn its middle ranks against him, and especially if he had failed in his quest for renomination, this legal claim would never have seen the light of day. But as we have learned over nearly ten years as political, legal, and media institutions have progressively corrupted themselves, what this particular individual wants becomes the official demand of one of our two major parties, and the demands of a major party apparently have de facto constitutional status. This is something to bear in mind if Trump is elected for a second term and starts planning and agitating, as he very probably would, to be ruled eligible for a third. Plain language didn’t preserve the force of the fourteenth amendment. There’s no grounds for certainty that it will preserve the twenty-second. If the demand is made, the argument will somehow arrive.

But beyond this, and beyond the scope of my piece, was the sheer humiliation of listening to this theory of executive inviolability be articulated at the highest levels of our legal system. We could, after all, have had a king if that’s what we had wanted. There was a whole war about it. My pride in America’s (never close to perfect but nevertheless) founding principle that we are a nation governed by fellow-citizens–that we have a “government of laws, not of men”–is apparently so deeply rooted that I don’t even think about it until our most powerful lawyers are casually batting around the idea of tossing it aside. It’s a servile idea, not befitting the discourse of a nation of free and equal human beings. One does not blame the Tudor-era jurists who made such far-reaching claims for the king’s “body politic.” It was the order they knew and their resources for knowing another were limited. We have no such excuse.

In Brief

I mostly manage to avoid media resentment at this stage of my life, but I felt a pang of envy that Ezra Klein got to interview Salman Rushdie for his podcast, and that Matt and Sam got to interview Christian Wiman for Know Your Enemy. Rushdie starts out by talking about Hans Christian Andersen’s¹ story “The Shadow,” in which the main character’s shadow detaches itself and goes around the world becoming interesting while the man stays behind. Rushdie superfans will remember that he borrowed this conceit for Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the first book he wrote after the fatwa and a delight. The idea of the shadow becoming more real for the world than the man is a theme of the interview, and a rather poignant one in light of Rushdie’s 2022 near-assassination. He mentions the liberal intelligentsia who agreed that he’d gravely insulted Islam (while saying, of course, that he should not be killed for it), which was an appalling concurrence with what amounted to fraud. Respect to Rushdie for going hard on the three book recommendations at the end—no dweeby nonfiction about apps or whatever, just the big guns.

The Wiman interview is a joy as well. I bought an e-book of My Bright Abyss when it was new and I think I was afraid of it, or perhaps put off by the vague intensity of the praise it received. It doesn’t make sense; I loved He Held Radical Light when I read that one. But anyway, the e-book long deleted or sequestered on a lost account, I bought a used copy a few months ago and while I won’t try to add to the vague intensity, I did love it and do recommend it. The new Zero at the Bone is surely excellent too. Matt read the first part of “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians,” a poem I’ve handed to seminarian interns and texted to friends and written about here. No real surprises in his response to that, but at least they asked exactly the question I’d have asked.

Civil War: The people who wanted more politics were, I think, missing the point. To make the war “about” something would have diluted its portrait of war being fundamentally about itself. If it were somehow instrumentally rational, it would have ruined the whole thing. It’s a movie about nihilism. Is it also a nihilistic movie? Maybe. It’s said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film, and I think the fact that even some of the main characters combine a high-minded rationale for their work with an adrenaline-junkie lust for a great shot drives that point home.

Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes: I love Lou Reed’s work and I’m eager to hear the behind-the-scenes on making the albums and the personal joys and disasters but I couldn’t read past this point in the preface:

What defines Reed’s best work—besides fearlessness, beauty, intelligence, and switchblade New York City wit—is what for me places it at the highest level of all art making: its empathy.

Even as a fan I found this undignified. The author took pains to update Reed’s inadequate articulation of his own and others’ sexual and gender identities as “self-caring” and I was prepared to overlook that special pleading (sometimes people are just jerks). But this kind of stanning suggests unsuitability for writing seriously about music. If you’re going to “define” someone’s work with one quality, you get one “besides,” not four. The King of New York’s two bodies were the one that produced great music and the one who produced garbage, and they coincided in the same very mortal, very limited man. No need, as the saying goes, to leave him “faint with damned praise.”

1. Buried a short distance from Søren Kierkegaard in Copenhagen’s Assistens Kirkegård. Andersen got a statue. Kierkegaard did not, but because his fans are freaks he has a fence (or at least he did in 2004).