Trust me--I'm the President

Monday’s New York Times had an interesting editorial about what it called ‘The Trust Gap’ between President Bush and the American public. Predictably, the Times casts the dangers of a presidency based on trust as undermining the ‘checks and balances’ that exist to limit the power of the executive. Previous posts on this blog have argued that fetishizing ‘checks and balances’ – typically the left’s first line of defense against Bush initiatives – substitutes legalistic wrangling for political debate.

But there is also another element to this politics of fear. In demanding that the public trust him on a directly personal basis, Bush is trying to solicit a more immediate type of political legitimacy – a legitimacy based on a intimate, emotive relationship with the individual, instead of a relationship mediated by public institutions, that intercede between citizens and their elected representatives. While we may wish to question the extent to which we subordinate the political process to non-political ‘checks and balances’, the idea that political life can take place without collective public institutions is profoundly un-democratic.

As society is not a single organism, nor a beehive, but is organized around individuals, collective deliberation can only take place in the form of public institutions. To try and jump over the institutions of public debate, and hook leaders up directly to individuals, is to eliminate the substance of the political process itself. While this phenomenon has deep roots in twentieth century American political history, Bush’s limitless appetite for ‘trust’ indicates that presidential authoritarianism is being taken to deeper and darker depths. This reflects the degraded state of America’s political life. For Bush is no Caesar, decisively undermining the proud institutions of the Republic – these were already rotten through. In place of public reflection and debate, we have a sickly sweet, therapeutic authoritarianism whose preferred medium is television and passivity rather than mass rallies.