I wrote this before the 2024 US election. I hoped for another result, but did not hide from the alternative. I think it’s still relevant to the world in which we find ourselves now.

Dear Friends, Unitary Executive

The theory of sovereignty which takes as its example the special case in which dictatorial powers are unfolded, positively demands the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant.

Walter Benjamin

Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.

Simone Weil

The “theory” of the unitary executive has been floating around in extreme reactionary circles – including such highly respected cough-cough ones as the Heritage Foundation – at least since Reagan. Suddenly, now, though, its proponents actually seem to think that they have a shot at making it fly in practice, and all the rest of us should be very, very afraid. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is the latest iteration of its Mandate for Leadership, first unleashed in 1981 to offer paternal guidance to the neophytes of the Reagan regime. Let no one say that the Heritage Foundation shies away from grandiosity, the original Mandate comprised twenty volumes.

In the US, the broad idea of a unitary executive goes back at least to the Constitutional Convention, and it comes from more distant sources. However, its adoption by the Republican Party in the 1980s is for the permanent establishment of reactionary government. Let’s be fair: Reagan’s handlers still had fairly modest goals, at least paying lip service to the separation of powers. Today, as laid forth in Project 2025, control by the president of the executive branch in its entirety means executive power over government as a whole: judiciary and legislature become creatures of the executive. And the Project is clear that executive power is not the power of the executive branch, it is the personal power of the chief executive, the president.

But aren’t these just the abstract ruminations of a think tank? If you think that just listen to what the many times impeached and indicted former president, running for re-election, says about what he’s going to do, starting day one, once he’s back. How much of this can he actually do, under the law? We really don’t want to find out. Trump has no ideas, thoughts, arguments, even opinions about anything, he is vacuity personified. This does not in any way mean that he is not dangerous, and one of the dangers he brings into being is the possible realization of the Heritage Foundation’s … what can we call them? … fantasies of a triumphant superego, maybe? So …

What the f***, as the news outlets say … we’re doing this in 2023? How is this possible? Well, I’m not even going to try to answer that one … but … maybe it’s a good idea to think of where all this stuff comes from in the first place: and the simple answer is that it comes from Les six livres de la République (1576, The Six Books of the Republic) by Jean Bodin, the number one theorist of absolute monarchy. And Bodin’s number one word is sovereignty. The monarch must be sovereign, and sovereignty must be absolute, perpetual, undivided. 

Absoluteness covers not only the scope of sovereignty but also its origin. The scope would seem to be, well, absolute, and a fundamental principle is that “the king’s will is law” (from which a necessary corollary emerges, It’s good to be king). But it’s not that simple, and Bodin does wrestle with his own concept. Origin is simple: God. The sovereign rules under God, in accordance with His laws, that are the laws of Nature. BUT, in contrast to earlier medieval thought, he, the sovereign, alone, determines what God has on His mind – presumably through regular briefings.

Sovereignty in monarchy is perpetual, because, in principle, there is never a moment without a sovereign – the king is dead, long live the king. Jumping ahead to the appropriation of the concept of sovereignty by aspiring democracies (following Rousseau) the people are continuously sovereign.

Sovereignty must be undivided because only one single will  can unify the entire, heterogenous, force of the republic in any engagement. As with absoluteness – and in conjunction with it – Bodin has trouble with undividedness. But he makes it fundamental, and in accordance with earlier thought and practice. He admired above all the ancient Roman Republic, and the role of the Dictator shines light not only on his own decisions, but also on the future of his thought [see What is a Dictator].

Bodin does not merely define sovereignty, he shows how it must be in order to realize itself. He’s complicated, as is any significant theorist, but monarchy is the central theme; his accounts of other forms of government, aristocracy, democracy, etc. are secondary. So, Bodin identifies three forms of monarchy, two legitimate, one illegitimate: royal monarchy, despotism, tyranny.

In royal monarchy, subjects are secure in their persons and property; in despotic monarchy, the prince “governs his subjects as absolutely as the head of a household governs his slaves … [He] is master of both [their] possessions and [their] persons”. In tyranny, anything goes.

Nice, clearcut distinctions. Yes, both royal and despotic monarchy are legitimate, but the former is appropriate for Europe today (1576). And, well, haven’t we left tyranny behind? Well, yes and no. We still have a problem and that is sovereignty, absolute, perpetual, undivided, itself. For how can there be any limit to the monarch’s will if he (almost always) is the sole participant in the regular briefings with God? Walter Benjamin, in his great work on baroque Trauerspiel, answers the question: “the theory of sovereignty which takes as its

example the special case in which dictatorial powers are unfolded, positively demands the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant.” The “special case” refers to the definition of sovereignty given by the reactionary legal theorist Carl Schmitt: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” His definition is at once a vindication of Bodin – who lauded the exceptional power of the Roman Dictator – and an imaginative leap carrying the 16th century into the 20th, and now, into the 21st.

Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty is integral to his overall

political theory, according to which the fundamental political distinction is that between friend and enemy, initially, between states. But the distinction must also go within, to the domestic enemy, on which the state as sovereign will also decide: and it holds “the verdict of life and death, the jus vitae ac necis” over its own subjects, just as against the external enemy in actual war. Yes, but that’s all Schmitt, what about Bodin?

Bodin identifies his own contradiction when he says that the (legitimate) despotic monarch “governs his subjects as absolutely as the head of a household governs his slaves … [He] is master of both [their] possessions and [their] persons”. The despotic monarch rules his subjects as the head of a household, the patriarch, rules his slaves – that is, any head of household, patriarch, in any form of government. Isn’t a royal monarch likely to be a bit jealous of the patriarch’s power?

Well, yes, and even more so, because it’s not just a matter of slaves. For Bodin (and he’s not alone) the most terrible threat to Europe and its future is the loss of the ancient Roman law

according to which the father, the head of the household, the dominus, held “the verdict of life and death, the jus vitae ac necis”, over all members of his household (domus), not just slaves, but his wife and children as well. So not even the despotic monarch has the power over his subjects that the dominus has over his family: maybe only the tyrant can truly say It’s good to be king.

Why should the despotes, dominus, patriarch get such a good deal? Because the family is the model for the state, and not vice versa. God stands to the monarch as the monarch stands to his subjects, and the head of the household stands to its members: that is, each stands as father. Therefore, among all earthly rulers – the prince, the magistrate, the captain, the master, etc. – only the father “has a natural right to command … the father, who is the image of Almighty God, the Father of all things”. The family is model for the nation, the father for the sovereign.

The patriarch over his family is the image of God over all Creation. God clearly has the verdict of life and death over all things – not only men [sic], but nettles, roses, emus, Thompson’s gazelles, everything – because they are all His. So the patriarch has the same verdict over wife, children, slaves, all that is his own. But the patriarch has this verdict, this right, a natural right, from God, not from any monarchy, whether royal, despotic, or even tyrannical. His is a right for all time, all governments, a right of nature – even if modern Europe has so fecklessly thrown it away.

 And this, the patriarch’s right is, properly speaking, not despotic, but tyrannical: so, insofar as he donates his image to the sovereign, he does indeed effect “the completion of the image of the sovereign, as tyrant”.

How nice it would have been if Bodin’s theory of sovereignty with all its ramifications had died with absolute monarchy itself. Unfortunately:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau retrieved sovereignty from absolutism and applied it to democracy: sovereignty is the will of the people, or, more specifically, the general will. Hannah Arendt, although she is fond of Rousseau, says that this retrieval was an absolute and continuing disaster. I think she’s right. Sovereignty’s bad news, always, it always returns to the monarch, it must entail absolutism; and it must do all this because its origin is in the patriarchal family, in which the patriarch has the right of life and death over all members of the household.

Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu against sovereignty is fundamental, but you’ll have to look it up yourselves, starting with On Revolution. In the meantime, and with extreme irony, the democratic recognition of sovereignty gives the reactionaries cover for their retrieval of absolutism.

So, take a deep breath … maybe we should get back to the present: does any of this once upon a time stuff help us right now? Yes, it does!

Project 2025 calls for reduction of all federal agencies – including the Department of Justice, and so the FBI, etc. – to direct presidential control: they will be under the personal command of the president. So who is fit to serve in all the positions, top to bottom, of all these agencies? Those, and those alone, who show complete loyalty to the executive authority, that is, to the president – the king’s … oops, no, the president’s will is law…

In case you’re wondering if the folks at Heritage are in sync with the many times indicted (who can keep count) former president, he has announced that he will enact legislation (he has only a hazy notion of presidential powers, but that is not a reason to be complacent) permitting him to fire and hire civil servants at will; and he intends to purge all government departments of anyone who might have, or may dispute his will.

Just another little thing: Trump (with Project 2025) aims to revive the power of impoundment by which the president may refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, thereby nullifying the purpose envisaged by the appropriation. This power was revoked by Congress in 1974 in response to abuses by the Nixon Administration. Reviving it would require congressional action, but Project 2025 aims for control of the White House and the two others, so, no problem!

And, of course, the criminal defendant former president has announced, trumpeted from the housetops, even, that he will prosecute and imprison his opponents (and as many Republicans as Democrats), possibly even execute some of them. He has also announced his intention to permit only the media who favor him, and to prosecute the others …

Ok, lots more to say about how Project 2025, along with absolutely clear statements by the 91 times charged (am I getting the number right?) orange one (so unfair to the color and to the fruit and all things orange) can be traced back to Bodin. But then there is one thing more:

The patriarch’s right of life and death over all members of his household.

For Bodin and his followers the loss of this right is a potentially mortal blow to European civilization in its entirety.

Where does the idea of such a right come from? – Ok, ok, from where does the idea of such a right come? – Well, presumably, worldwide from many sources. For Bodin, two are primary, Rome, and the Old Testament – that is, the two most important strictly patriarchal traditions in the Western heritage. And as so often with Renaissance thinkers, the Biblical engulfs the Roman, the New Testament engulfs the Old. Bodin understands the father’s right to come from God even before the divine right of the monarch.

Nothing in the original unitary executive theory, for instance in 1787, is necessarily Christian, it is a reiteration of standard political doctrine going back, indeed, to Bodin, that an undivided executive is the strongest. But it has become a secular and political theory; it is not concerned with the organization of the family; and it does not trace out the logic of sovereignty all the way from father to God.

However, if you go back to Bodin and accept his argument as a whole, then you are in a different world. I have no idea whether any of the authors of those interminable volumes of the original Mandate for Leadership and all its interminable sequels have even heard of Bodin, and I’m certainly not going to waste time trying to find out. Whether they know it or not, they are his descendants. And I think that the most dangerous of all the modern unitary executive theorists’ views comes from the blind allegiance, that they have in common with Bodin, to the patriarch as absolute and unquestionable power, as the one who holds life and death in his hands.

The unitary executive project moves in tandem with many other reactionary movements, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the reactionary movement overall has many different currents, but is all one. The “parents’ rights” movement is one of the currents. According to any normal, reasonable understanding of parents and parenting in modern times, the “parents’ rights” movement’s views contradict their movement’s name. BUT the participants in the parents’ rights movement do have only a rather tenuous connection to modernity: if they had the good fortune to run into Jean Bodin at the local, they’d have a high old time.

Seriously, though, the “parental rights” movement does deserve its name under one specific claim for parental rights, and this is why its members will have such a good time with Bodin at the local. Over and over again in their strange battle against a non-existent enemy, parents’ rightists, and their political allies, assert the absolute authority and power of parents over their children … and of course, the enemy is not imaginary: it is the terrible danger that children, from birth, will be themselves, and will remain themselves.

Love. Christianity is the religion of love. Christians love everyone, all God’s creatures. They hate the sin but not the sinner. But this supreme love is so hard. We all of us, every single human being since Adam and Eve, are born with original sin. We can never overcome it entirely, so deeply is it burnt into our nature, so love is so hard both because my sinful nature darkens me, and because I am so repulsed by the sin I see in you. But as we grow in rationality and strength, we are able to fight against sin – some well, others not so well. And, then, as adults, we are responsible for our sinfulness, and will be judged accordingly, here, and hereafter.

Children are in an entirely different position. They are born absolutely helpless and defenseless, without reason, without morality, without God, but with original sin. And yet, above all, we, Christians love children, all children, ours and all others. But this boundless love for children is the supreme achievement, harder than any other, why? because children are little demons, original sin incarnate. God, and reason, and morality will only come to them through their parents’ instruction – so it is all too possible that a child may grow up without reason, without morality, without God. Therefore the success of this instruction is beyond life and death, the child’s salvation depends on it. It must be carried out by any means necessary … any means.

For true, believing fundamentalist Christian parents, their child must always be on trial before God, the parents’ love for their child cannot in any way mitigate this. Or: God, not the child, comes first – I’ve never understood how the story of Abraham and Isaac could conceivably be imagined as the depiction of a benign God, a good father.

I don’t know to what extent today’s commitment by radical evangelical parents to these principles of “parenting” is new, or simply a continuation of tradition. But just as extremist Islamic groups are not returning to “traditional” Islam, so Christian Nationalist White Supremacy is not traditional Christianity. The same forces have shaped both – capitalism, imperialism, neo-liberalism – and if from opposite directions, leading to rather similar results. 

Yes, but are we really at the power of life and death stage? Well, consider a couple of things.

The reactionary talk-squawk-squawk people (maybe Bentham was right about the tyranny of sounds) have discovered the basic cause of the decline and rapidly approaching fall (complete and absolute) of American civilization (ahem) in its entirety: the destruction of men – real men, that is. Who is destroying them? The usual suspects, liberals (now known, mysteriously, as hard left), environmentalists, the LGBTQ+ community and all its supporters, anti-2nd amendment fanatics, anyone even slightly pro-choice, anyone who thinks that maybe, just maybe the US still has a problem with racism, so, of course, anyone who kneels or does not stand during the national anthem, so, getting down to specifics, Collin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, Brittney Griner, and, by extension, just because they are strong, vibrant young women, Taylor Swift and Greta Thunberg, so going general again, who above all? WOMEN, obviously, and, above all, young, unmarried women. This is not a joke … look it up.

Men are being destroyed, that is, their ability to be manly, to do manly things, is being destroyed. So what are all those manly things? Well, obviously, being in charge, explaining everything that needs to be explained and what does not, doing all the difficult and dangerous things – not to mention the difficult but not so dangerous, clearing out the gutters, pushing the car when it breaks down, etc. – protecting the weak and helpless, especially woman and children … … … Now this one is interesting, because there are not a few women, including members of Congress, who in the rare intervals when they are not waving guns around and yelling at people, tell us that woman are the weaker sex, and need men to protect them. How do they know this? God told them.   

This may be, genuinely, a new development – a result of the enormously complicated impact of feminism. Someone really needs to figure it out. But, for now, what it shows all too clearly is regression to patriarchy.

The air-raid sirens signaling the destruction of men and the mortal danger it poses to society as a whole are a direct descendant of Bodin’s siren call warning of the terrible danger Europe faces now that the patriarch no longer has the right of life and death over all in his household.

The assertion of the primacy of the husband/father/man, even by a weak and needing protection pistol-packing wife/mother/woman is the assertion, or re-assertion, of Patriarchy. And Patriarchy is male power, yes, indeed, to do things and protect things, but also to command and dominate things and people: Patriarchy demands that each patriarch strive to be the best, the strongest, the toughest because against whom must the weak ones, children, women (pistol-packing or not), be defended above all? Other patriarchs.

Patriarchal power, still today, is violence, whether potential or actual: the patriarch “defending” his own against another patriarch, that is to say, adult male, or anyone else, so the patriarch defending his own against a non-existent threat has the right to shoot someone through a locked front door. Yes, external threats. But the patriarch, the man, all men are threatened as much from within as from without. What if a daughter, but above all, a son (males take priority, duh!) should come out as gay? Or, worse still, a son comes out as trans? Schmitt’s rule applies in the family as in the state, the internal enemy may even be worse than the external

AND

… haven’t I explained this to you already, American society is facing an existential threat, the destruction of manhood! The scope of male violence must necessarily be expanded to combat this terrible threat (for example a well-known reactionary squawk-host has told fathers to beat up their children’s teachers). So more and more the target of violence approaches the family itself: the teacher now is the enemy, but what if the child likes the teacher? Now patriarchy announces the law: if the child sides with the enemy, then it (he, she or they) becomes the enemy.

Some instances: A Republican Oklahoma state representative, Jim Olsen, argued against a bill introduced by another Republican, John Talley, that would prohibit corporal punishment in schools for children with disabilities – not all corporal punishment in schools, just against children with disabilities. Quoting the standard “spare the rod spoil the child” biblical passages, he continued: “God's word is higher than all the so-called experts.” Olsen was supported by another state representative, Randy Randleman (also a Republican), who argued against too much nurturing: “If you nurture too much, that child's going to have control. He’s going to take charge.” The horror! Anyway, the bill failed, so Oklahoman parents of disabled children can rest easy: their kids will not be overly nurtured in school.

Olsen’s view is pretty standard and generic. It belongs to a sort of common ground. Much can be built on that ground: A Montana Republican State Representative, Kerri Seekins-Crowe, sponsored a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. In arguing for it she said that she would rather that her own daughter should commit suicide, than that she should transition. The reports have been confusing, but it seems that she does have a daughter who was suicidal, but she regarded her daughter’s suicidal tendencies as “emotional manipulation”. That is, as Oklahoma Rep. Randleman says: “If you nurture too much, that child's going to have control.” The suicide of your child is better than that she should “have control”.

Your children belong to God before they belong to you, you must follow God’s will … BUT, you alone, parents, are the judges over your children before God, you declare His will.

Punish the children. You must, because they are full of sin: they must all be punished. Beat the sin out of them. And what if, after all that, a daughter becomes suicidal because you refuse to accept her desire to transition? Let her kill herself, she will be better off that way.  

I cannot understand, I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine the thoughts, the feelings, the actions that lead parents to these things. But they are far from the worst.

So we must go on, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we are going down to the depths.

The family, especially the traditional family is, by definition, a sexual being: husband and wife, male and female, join – that is, they have sex – to become father and mother. Children grow up to be prospective husbands and wives, male and female, that is, they grow up to have sex with other males or females. The family, especially the traditional family, lives out its sexual existence from the beginning … and really, you don’t have to be a guy like I, much too attached to Herr Doktor Professor Sigmund, to see this: the simple sensuous intimacy of mother and infant; the young child’s gradual awareness of sexual difference leading to the son’s courtship of his mother, the daughter nursing her doll for her father.

So how do the family’s necessarily sexual relations – relations among husband and wife, father, mother and children, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers – develop? A stunningly boring answer: that depends largely on how husband and wife see their relations with each other, and with their prospective, then actual children. How they see this will, obviously, be shaped by the norms of their society…zzzz…snore…

Ok, but note that I have been emphasizing the traditional family, and the true model for the traditional family is the patriarchal family, and here results of the most superficial observation are, unfortunately, anything but boring.

In a properly patriarchal society, the father, the patriarch, rules: and even if the law does not grant him the power of life and death, within his family his rule is absolute at least by custom. The family is, by definition, a sexual being. The patriarch’s rule is sexual, the rule of the male. Putting slaves aside, he rules his wife, his daughters, and his sons. Let’s get the poor sons out of the way first: until such time as they are able to go out into the world on their own, hoping to become patriarchs themselves, they are kept from wife and daughters by fear of castration.

So here’s the patriarch, his wife (or, often, wives, but let’s keep things simple), and his daughters. He dominates them by right, he’s the dominus after all; his rightful, sovereign power over them, as despotes, is despotic. The patriarch’s first power is over wife and daughters, over “his” women. Everything else follows from this – including his rule over his sons.

How do you think this is going to go? Well, the family is, by definition, a sexual being. The patriarch rules because he is father, he is male. His power, in itself is sexual; his power over wife, daughters, sons, is sexual. And his is the sole acknowledged power within the family sphere.

If the patriarch’s rule is ordained by God, then his power reaches toward the absolute.

The rule of patriarchy is the rule of the father, the rule of the phallus.—Yes, this is not a pure male over female rule, since the sons also lack the phallus, but that’s for another time.—Above all, the father rules his women – wife, daughters, servants. Whatever the law now, his rule descends from time immemorial, and in the true, immemorial, order, the patriarch owns his women. Before anything, a male who owns a female owns her body.

This is the necessary logic of patriarchy. And of course it is not logic alone, patriarchy is one of the oldest forms of oppression of women, and its sexual oppression is necessarily expressed in sexual violence. And again, such violence is not simply an unfortunate episode of the past, it is with us today.

I repeat: the logic of patriarchy establishes the power of the patriarch over his women’s bodies, his women – wives, daughters, servants. The power of a man over a woman’s body is, immemorially, sexual. Whatever may happen in any particular patriarchal household, this immemorial logic is always present. And it is present today in so-called “traditional” households … yes, it is, and we know this all too well from the news. Is every traditional household a place of sexual abuse? No. But the logic is always there, and the stronger the tie to “traditional” values, the stronger the logic’s iron embrace.

The first law of the “traditional”, so, patriarchal family is obedience, and the more God is brought in on the act, the more onerous is the yoke of obedience. But, though all must be obedient, to whom must they be? Well, children and servants must be obedient to father and master, mother and mistress. Wife-mother-mistress must be obedient to husband-father-master – the head of the household, the patriarch. To whom must he be obedient? to God. But his sessions with God, whether therapeutic, instructional, or judicial, are absolutely classified, no other can ever know of them, of what the patriarch said to God, what God said to him. The patriarch is absolute in his sole knowledge of God’s will, so also in his knowledge of God’s commands for punishment of the disobedient.

Obedience is the measure of punishment, but the punishment lies with God, and only the patriarch knows God’s rules. So, back to the treatment of children in today’s God-fearing family. Punishment must be implacable, the parents know the truth, the child does not, at least, does not until he or she surrenders entirely to the parent’s (God’s) knowledge: and this must be a surrender because the child knows nothing of the truth, it knows only sin. A recalcitrant child is in danger of eternal damnation. The parents’ power over the child must be absolute because the stakes are damnation or salvation. The child must be nothing more than an object for the parents, an object on which any extreme of punishment, corporal or mental, is justifiable. This is force as Simone Weil defines it: “To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” To become an accepted member of a properly God-fearing, traditional Christian household a child must first become a thing. Acceptance of God’s truth by the child can only be achieved by force.

The “parents’ rights” movement aims to enshrine one right: the parents’ right to own the child, for the child to be their property, a thing. This is a right given by God.

Liberal and conservative writers love to quote Acton’s famous dictum, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, somehow thinking that it only applies to their enemies – leftists, adherents of “positive” freedom, etc. – but wouldn’t the most obvious target be the only One who actually claims omnipotence, their own God (insofar as they are Christian)? And God lends to the patriarch just a bit of His own absolute power.

If Acton is right patriarchy is absolutely corrupt. But it is corrupt in a quite specific way: it is sexually corrupt. The patriarch has absolute power over his wife and his daughters, the male owns the female. The patriarch owns the bodies of “his” women, and “his” children.

Haven’t we wandered a long way from the unitary executive, a nice, clean “theory” of government – fundamentally anti-democratic but, hey! nobody’s perfect – into the darkest realms of the human psyche? … well, yes we have, but it was kind of a wandering not of the lost. The “theory” of the unitary executive is founded on Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, and his theory of the divine sovereignty of the monarch follows from the patriarch, in the family, as the image of God. And the Christian nationalist movement is quite clear about this: family and state are one, joined by the church: the separation of church and state is a liberal lie, the church rules family and state together.

The new Speaker of the House of Representatives – he probably won’t last very long, poor guy, so I won’t bother with his name – says that if you want to understand his entire world view, and all his positions on policy, just pick up the Bible. This means, as far as anyone can tell – his statements on the subject have not exactly been clear and distinct – that the Bible precedes, and trumps the Constitution. And speaking of trumps, the much indicted former president, now laying out the programs for his triumphant return to power, says that he will institute laws requiring the teaching of “traditional gender roles” in schools.

“Traditional gender roles” require the subordination of mothers and daughters to father and son. This subordination must be guaranteed by force and punishment, it must be guaranteed by the infliction of pain and suffering. It must be guaranteed by “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”. Mothers and daughters must be things, objects for the father, and, eventually, for the sons.

To make another a thing does not necessarily require inflicting pain and suffering – not necessarily, though I’m not coming up with an example. But violence inflicting pain and death is integral not only to the structures and instruments of the unitary executive/patriarchal vision, it is also its deepest motivation and desire. Force is the ultimate, necessary, agent in the necessary mastery of the patriarch over his women.

The family (domus) is the origin of domination. If domination requires force and violence within the single household, it requires it even more among households under the rule of exogamy. We can’t go into the whole history of the exchange of women here – but if you want to get into it, start with Gayle Rubin’s great essay “The Traffic in Women”, and, for the inner Marxist-feminist in all of us, Luce Irigaray’s sequence “Women on the Market” and “Commodities among Themselves”.

Now, just stop for a moment, and recall all of the pronouncements, the appeals to God, the incitements, the actual acts of violence … and of violence that inflicts pain, suffering, misery, and death. Have you heard or seen or read of such pronouncements, appeals, incitements? If you have, what would you say, on a scale from 1 to 10, would be the likelihood of actual acts of violence resulting from them?

This is the core of violence, the domus subject to the rule of the dominus. In truly patriarchal societies such violence is taken for granted whether or not it is enshrined in law. But wherever it is possible for communities to assert their religious right to the order of the patriarchal family, violence – violence against women and children – will continue. Unfortunately, the news, day after day, attests to this.

This is the core of violence. Violence must push beyond its core. I myself, going along with Freud and his feminist critical but sympathetic readers, think that some form of the ownership of women is fundamental. But even if we make the argument historical – properly patriarchal societies did emerge – violence in the patriarchal family becomes violence in the patriarchal state. The primordial violence of men against women underlies the violence of men against each other.

Statistically speaking, violence is likely to be a significant feature of patriarchal families. What about a community in which the patriarchal family is the norm, or ideal?

And then, what about a community in which the patriarchal family is the ideal, and in which gun ownership is normal?

→→→→→→→→→→ a terrible fact →→→ suicides by all other methods have about a 5% “success” rate; suicides by gunshot have about a 90% “success” rate. The higher the rate of gun ownership, the higher the rate of “successful” suicides. Suicides account for the majority of deaths by gun violence.

Finally, what about a community in which the patriarchal family is the ideal, gun ownership is normal, and anti-democratic ideas are strong? This is more and more the community of the white, Christian nationalist movement, more and more drawn into the MAGA movement, and its conspiracy theories. The combination of these elements leads to a rhetoric of increasing, and murderous violence. Yes, it’s all wildly contradictory, but the threat of deadly violence is real. Domestic terrorism arising from Christian nationalism associated with the MAGA movement, and with already established neo-Nazi organizations, etc., is a far more serious threat than external terrorist movements.

These domestic movements have developed new strategies using new technologies. One of the most important is what social scientists now term stochastic terrorism. Extremists use social media, and even traditional media, to incite violence against marginal groups. These incitements lead to acts of actual violence that are “statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable, with plausible deniability for those creating media messaging.” (Quoting Wikipedia)

Deniability is so important here: they know exactly what they are doing, they are inciting violence, if actual violence does not follow then they have failed. But oh no, we didn’t have anything to do with this, this person was deranged, it’s a mental health problem, nothing to do with guns.

Most of the rise in political violence in the US today is due to the words of Trump and of his lackeys, low and high (he does have some very high class lackeys in the bunch, Senators, Ambassadors, former luminaries – the noble name Newt Gingrich shines forth with especial brightness). No one is more craven than Trump in denial, denial that is entirely implausible. But on he goes, and how is it possible that we have all become so inured to it all? How can such a craven nonentity have such a following?

Ok, we’re not going to answer these questions here. But at least two things emerge from our tedious journey back to Jean Bodin. First, the unitary executive “theory” does not only assert the power of the executive over the other branches of government, but over society as a whole. But, second, unitary executive power itself is grounded in the unitary power of the patriarch over his own. Today, as for Bodin in 1576, the power of the unitary executive, that is, the power of the president, derives from the power of the father.

The power of the father manifests itself in violence, as does the power of the executive. Violence doesn’t just happen, it is motivated. Murderous violence requires a murderous motive. Bodin’s world, dedicated to patriarch and absolute monarch, was one of necessary cruelty all the way from the patriarch’s hearth to the monarch’s court. Violence gives form to cruelty.

Why, today, has cruelty become the norm for one of the two main parties in the US, unleashing violence? Today’s reactionary cruelty springs from the same source as that of Bodin’s time, even though it is so monstrously against the aspirations of modernity. Today, cruelty has become a gratuitous feature of an order – the patriarchal order – that no longer has any real grounding in the existing social order.

Cruelty comes from the family, the cruelty of the parent against the child, the necessary cruelty ordained by God, because it is better that the child should die – having lived in misery and pain – than that it should be godless. Schmitt’s order is reversed: the internal, and the most intimate, enemy, shows us the way to the necessary mercilessness against the external enemy. If we can kill our own children, how formidable will we be against any foreign foe.

The cruelty, sometimes mortal, is indeed and necessarily directed against the other, the outsider. But it is also directed, and with equal necessity, against those amongst us who prove themselves to be other. And it is here that children must continuously be observed, interrogated, judged, lest any otherness however small should emerge in them. The relation of parent to child must be one of suspicion and at least latent hostility.    

The child who becomes other is treated with a cruelty and violence that, to anyone other than the family, the god-fearing family, must seem inhuman: and so it is, the word comes from God. True Christian parents – according to fundamentalist doctrine – must never be seduced into the sensuous and sentimental relations with their children that seem so compelling at the moment, they must steel themselves against them. They must never trust their feelings for their children, because the devil is the master of feeling. They must never act according to what they feel, but only to what God wills – and of course, He knows that their feelings are not what he wills.

Ok, are you your children’s parents, or is someone else? You must decide this. If you are not, if God is their parent, then, yes, the only legitimate government is theocracy. Do you want that? Hint: what if the cracy that takes over does not happen to worship your theo?

I am reducing the term “Christian” to “fundamentalist Christian”. Of course, other Christian denominations are not so extreme; just as so many non-Christian faiths are so varied. But I want to emphasize the need to be clear, to reject, if necessary, many of those with whom we are aligned by name. So, let me put it this way: I remain a socialist, and, because the terms have become so mixed up, I must say also a communist (actually, with my daughter Marina, I prefer it), and I am always a Marxist in that I think Marx understands our world better than almost anyone else. I condemn without reservation the atrocities – as great as any of our terrible century, the 20th, ours being those whose lives showed them a brief and glorious modern world, before hurling them into the horror of modern war; who sought above all things to make such war impossible; who were forced to fight that supposedly impossible war; who, in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, dreamed again of peace, a peace of liberation; a peace to redress imperialist atrocity, sexual domination; yes, there’s more – but, for myself, in face of all this, I condemn the atrocities committed in the name of communism as much as I condemn those committed by the reactionaries, the fascists, the Nazis.

I expect anyone who is a Christian to have a similar recognition of all the atrocities, small and large, done in Christ’s name. And especially the largely invisible atrocity, the always potentially murderous stance of good Christian parents to their children. Of course, any number of Christian parents have loved and nurtured their children as well as anyone else. But I ask all Christians to think, first, of the real ramifications even of quite moderate doctrines; second, of the ties, the underlying ramifications through which moderate doctrines remain bound to the views of hardline evangelicals. I have to do something like this every day, I think you all should do it too.

Cruelty in the patriarchal family, cruelty against the child, is the focus of all the cruelty, the necessary cruelty, the love of cruelty of reactionary movements. Project 2025 realizes the whole, from family to state, most intimate to most public, radiating from the focus, the totality of misery pain and death that is the bequest of reaction. Perhaps the reactionaries realize the horror of what they intend, perhaps not. Unfortunately, whether they do or not is irrelevant.

But just in case you were wondering about the reality of all this:

“… former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches …”

… a rather mild excerpt from the unanimous Federal Appeals Court ruling, 6 February 2024 (emphasis added), on presidential immunity, made by the three judge panel, J. Michelle Childs, Florence Pan, Karen LeCraft Henderson.

In a recent article for American Conservative, a blog partnered with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Peter Tonguette argues, in the name of “basic fair play”, for Trump’s right, having secured the presidency in 2024, to run again in 2028: “Don’t let questions of Trump’s age in four years fool you. Trump in 2028!” It’s not clear, at least it’s not clear to me, whether Tonguette aims to repeal the 22nd Amendment, or whether he’s saying that we should just ignore it. It’s even less clear that he can gain any traction (as we say now) for this idea. Still, let’s not underestimate how far these guys (and they are mostly guys, and white) are willing to go.

Love and solidarity,

Bobby

PS I wrote a lot of this a year ago, before the media, or anyone else was paying much attention to Project 2025, that’s all changed, and attacks on it have become very successful in the campaign against Trump, especially because, as usual, he denies all knowledge of it, which is demonstrably false. I think that what I’ve written is pretty much as useful now, and is slightly different from what other people are saying; and since a lot of it is about a book from 1576 I don’t think I need to update anything. But I am going to add one more thing, hot off the press, or at least warm:

Tucker Carlson, a tv personality or whatever, so nasty that even Fox – even Fox!!! – got rid of him, spoke at a rally for Trump in the closing week of the campaign, and uttered what, astonishingly, given the fierce competition, may be the vilest thing to come out of the entire Trump noise machine:

Trump Rally, Duluth, Georgia, October 23, 2024, Tucker Carlson speaks

“This is very familiar to anyone who has children, which is if you allow it, you will encourage more of it. If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous. If you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it. Those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for them. No, there has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, Dad comes home—and he’s pissed! Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children—disobedient as they may be—he loves them because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know. When dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.’”

I don’t think that you need me or even my pal Doktor Professor Sigmund to get the message. The one thing to emphasize is that this is a nightmare condensation of absolutism, of sovereign patriarch as sovereign monarch, the completion of the image of the sovereign as tyrant. And the tyrant, as patriarch, holds the jus vitae ac necis, the verdict of life and death. The crowd went wild.

November 5, 2024

Election Day

and remember

the other Guy