The American Culture of Despair : The Sacred, Secularity, and the Test of Time [1 ed.] 9781527510333, 9781527503090

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The American Culture of Despair

The American Culture of Despair: The Sacred, Secularity, and the Test of Time By

Richard K. Fenn

The American Culture of Despair: The Sacred, Secularity, and the Test of Time By Richard K. Fenn This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Richard K. Fenn All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0309-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0309-0

For Juliana, Love incarnate

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Imagining the Sacred Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 The Culture of American Despair Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 Critical Moments and the Call for Authoritarian Leadership Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 23 In Modern America, is Sacred Memory a Thing of the Past? Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 41 American Despair and the Longing for Sovereignty Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 57 Cultural Despair and the Loss of the Future Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 77 The American Dilemma: Monarchy in the Whitehouse Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 87 The American Dilemma Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 103 Sanctifying the Critical Moment Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 111 Secularization and Finality Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 133 What Now?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been too long in the making for me to remember and acknowledge the many friends and colleagues who have made me question what at the time I thought I knew. Among them is an editor of other works of mine, Cynthia Read, who always made me see what was strange about the obvious and encouraged me to start over again. I also want to thank Tim Jenkins for showing me how ordinary moments are saturated with time. I believe that his work, unlike most of the works cited here, will indeed be read many years from now. And I thank Juliana, my wife, for love beyond words.

FOREWORD IMAGINING THE SACRED

1. Critical moments As a modern and largely secular society, America is not as disenchanted as many sociologists have assumed. It is not the sacred that is absent; its presence is manifested or experienced as an absence: as something missing, a lost promise, a critical moment not fully seized, an obligatory or inspiring but now irretrievable vision from the past. It is not that time has left the sacred behind in some antiquarian preserve but that the sacred is known more often by a sense of missed possibility and thus by the apprehension of being continually too late: more under the form of absence than in a real, immediate, and potent presence. Without the sanctification of time, it is very difficult to construe critical moments—ruptures in time—as elements of a story with continuity and development, a beginning and an end. That is why, in a radically secularized society, critical moments represent a sharp break between the past and what could have been the future. They are ends without the possibility of being transformed into new beginnings—more like the Cuban Missile Crisis than the winter solstice. In traditional societies that sanctify the long passage of time itself it is possible to believe that the time will come when a society can finally fulfill its promises, pay off old debts, and overcome erosion and decay. It will never be too late for a medieval Caliphate or an evangelical and Christian nation Thus Hitler saw his Kompf as part of a centuries-long battle. However, when time itself is not sanctified, there is no certain prospect either of continuity or of further development. The critical moment, even when it is held in sacred memory, leaves a legacy of continually felt absence, of ongoing, perhaps endless struggle without the prospect of ultimate consummation. Thus, a new American dictator may well find glory only in struggle itself from one critical moment to the next: perpetual crisis and self-inflicted wounds rather than sacrifice within the framework of sacred history.

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I argue that a radically secularized society sanctifies time in critical moments rather than throughout a sacred history. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the end of Lincoln’s life could still be transformed into a new beginning: a new birth and extension of the nation’s sovereignty. Public portraiture depicted President Washington extending his arms to the fallen Lincoln from his apotheosis in heaven, depicted in the fresco above the rotunda in the nation’s Capitol. Time was still infused with eternity. Was there a sanctified sense of an ongoing history in which ends could be transformed into beginnings and current sacrifices be redeemed in the end? In the more secularized society of the 1960s, I argue, the present time could be regarded as critical, even fateful for the future of the nation. There was little sense that ends could be transformed into beginnings, that in time all sacrifices would be redeemed, and that the original vision of the nation’s mission in history could still be consummated by a nation inspired and guided by the spirit of those present at the beginning of the Republic. The sacred torch of liberty might be passed to a new generation, to be sure, and a new frontier was opening up. The time had come for the president to say “Let us begin,” but the journey that would take much longer to complete than the lifetimes of those present. Thus, by the 1960s, American society had become more secularized: more clearly subject to the passage of time without the prospect of redemption. Without recourse to the guarantees of a sacred history, President Kennedy endowed his administration with the sanctity of the critical moment. In the first days of his new administration, President Kennedy assured the nation that in “this hour” Americans faced unparalleled opportunity but also peril. In his State of the Union address, Kennedy proclaimed: “Our problems are critical. The tide is unfavorable. The news will be worse before it is better. And while hoping and working for the best, we should prepare ourselves now for the worst.” The collective and the existential, politics and life merged in this very hour. The critical moment itself had all the earmarks of the sacred, but the passage of time was not sacred and offered no antidotes to cultural despair. Furthermore, the death of Kennedy brought the nation even closer to the recognition its vulnerability to time and to chance, and what had been the nation’s future would remain, for many, a permanently missed possibility. Observances of Kennedy’s memory became signs more of his absence than of his continuing presence in the imagination or ideology of the American people. The critical moment of Kennedy’s assassination has remained embedded in the event itself: perennially superseded but not

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transformed by the passage of time. What is to prevent the increase of cultural despair? Critical moments give the collective state of the nation existential impact and significance. That is why they attain the seriousness of the sacred. Not only the continuity but also the survival of the social system is at stake. To grasp this we need Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of a “state of exception,” the world of serious “indistinction” between life and politics; “When life and politics . . . begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.” 1 I will use the term to apply to any critical moment in a social system where the relation between ends and means is being created by the ad hoc actions of the chief executive. For instance, Arthur Schlesinger called the Cuban Missile Crisis “the most dangerous moment in human history.”2 Indeed, the nation’s fate, and perhaps that of the planet, was indeed terrifyingly contingent on chance, circumstance, and on the often-flawed judgment of its leaders. Although the crisis had lasted for thirteen days, Schlesinger called it a night, just as Kennedy had spoken of the times as “this hour.” Indeed, it was not only the political elite that knew that the moment was critical for the nation. The American people—and the peoples of other nations—knew that any military engagement could subject them to what had come to be called a nuclear winter; thus, the politics of the Cold War had become existential. The Cuban Missile Crisis was like the winter solstice, the longest night of the year: a time when the survival of the planet was hanging in the balance of the moment. Thus, the exercise of sovereignty made and signified a difference that transcended all other differences: those between the personal and the societal, the collective and the existential, as well as those between the past, present, and the future. No wonder that such a critical moment – and with it the unfettered exercise of sovereignty itself - became sanctified. Without the sanctification of time, however, JFK’s assassination led many Americans to believe that the nation had experienced an irreversible rupture in its history: a point of no return. There was a fatal flaw in the nation: destructive forces that were erupting on the streets or on the nation’s campuses. Despair increased as body bags kept returning from Vietnam. The times were confused, out of joint, deeply troubled, and on occasion close to the brink of chaos. The public came to realize that the truth was being withheld from the American people, and that their leaders knew neither how to resolve the war nor how to solve the nation’s

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complex social and economic problems. There was an increasing demand for an authority that could act decisively and significantly, transform means into ends and ends into new beginnings. Nixon promised that he had “a plan” to end the war in Vietnam, just as Trump said he would “fix it….Trust me.” The radical secularization of the process of time leaves a nation with a heightened sense of both personal and collective mortality; it becomes increasingly vulnerable to cultural despair. A regressive cycle begins. However, being forced to live with a chronic sense of contingency and chance, of absence and decline intensifies the need for the sacred at the very political and cultural centers of modern societies. Thus, the regressive cycle inevitably leads back to a longing for a Caesar. Because secular societies have no way to transcend the passage of time, they sanctify the critical moment itself: Kennedy’s “this hour” and Schlesinger’s reduction of the thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis to that “night.” Such a critical moment blurs the distinctions between the existential and the political, between the personal and the collective, and between matters of life and matters of death. However, without the myth of a sacred history, or the capacity to sense the eternal within the times, a radically secular society is left only with a sense of its existence as subject to the passage of time. Thus, when confronted by the finality of a sudden loss, like the death of Kennedy, a radically secular society can only sanctify the critical moment as separating what used to be the past from what used to be the future. Time is no longer sufficiently sacred to be redemptive. The way forward leads back to the critical moment marked by the transformative and salvific exercise of sovereignty itself, when means became ends in themselves and ends became new beginnings.

2. The sanctification of the critical moment In a society where the living remain in some sort of conversation with the dead, sanctifying the passage of time prevents the critical moment of departure and loss from becoming irredeemable; it postpones the finality of death. Consider this ancient Greek monument erected by a father to his dead son, described by the historian of ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant: “A stela at Athens that crowns the tomb of a young man recommends that the passerby weep that so beautiful a boy had died, ‘hos kalos on ethane.’”3 We are struck immediately by the way this message confronts us with the contrast between what had been before—the boy and his beauty—and what had come after he had died. There is no other

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solvent here for the loss of the dead boy than the tears of the living over the course of time. Indeed, it takes time for the psyche to sanctify the critical moment with devotion and weeping; otherwise, it becomes too late to prevent immediate presence from becoming chronic absence and irreparable loss. The passage of time, sanctified by memory and anticipation, perpetuates the tension between absence and presence, death and life, fascination and terror. Thus, the standing stones of a Neolithic community point precisely toward the place where the sun disappeared on the night of the winter solstice; an ancient Greek stela – a grave monument - calls on passers-by to commemorate with their tears a dead boy, his beauty, and his untimely death. Sacred monuments allow losses to be redeemed by the passage of time; they give space to the time when the perennially absent will return. However, even sacred times and places, people and objects, slowly lose their sanctity. The passage of time erodes every sacred connection with the sources of life itself. It is this process that I will be calling “the cultural fatigue of the sacred.” I argue that the fatigue of the sacred, combined with the radical secularization of social life, leads to cultural despair: the awareness that a time is coming when it may well be too late for a society to redeem its promises or to forestall disaster. Not even the burning of sacred torches on the longest night of the year may be enough to bring the dawn. Despair feeds the longing for a sovereign who can seize the critical moment, whose word is final, whose means are ends in themselves, and whose office thus has no term-limits. Does cultural despair always perpetuate the regressive cycle leading back to authoritarian forms of sovereignty? To approach this question we need to understand how a particular society constructs, interprets, manages, and distributes the flow of time. Emile Durkheim saw social systems as being interruptions of the flow of time, like boulders in the middle of a stream. Thus, in archaic and traditional societies we will be focusing on caves, stone circles, standing stones, temples, rites, masks, and monuments. In modern societies, we may focus on strategies for finding or revising precedents, updating old promises and renegotiating old debts. We might also explore the ways in which a complex, modern society turns prophecies into predictions, and predictions into a wide range of more or less implausible scenarios as a basis for risk management. We also need to see how societies give at least the illusion of continuity to critical moments of apparently irreversible finality. How does any society lend ancient precedent to historical novelty? How, on the eve

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of a civil war or in the aftermath of the assassination of a president, does a particular society transform a sharp break in time into a continuing story or irreparable loss into the possibility of redemption? Thus, to understand social life we need to examine the various strategies, some of them self-confident and innovative, pragmatic and flexible, others of them more desperate, by which a particular society has tried to prevent itself from being washed away by the passage of time. How did Americans, after a civil war that had turned into a revolution, become the first new nation, a novum ordo saeculorum, even with a Constitution giving its president powers on par with those of the King of England? After the death of President Lincoln, did American society believe that its very being-in-time had been transformed by the civil war or by the assassination of its President? By the sanctification of collective memory, has American society been able to become coeval with—and thus honor—the dead and to redeem the sacrifices of its patriots and martyrs.

3. The sanctification of time Without the sanctification of time, a secular society is unable to prevent the loss of the departed friend or child, citizen or martyr, sovereign or scion from producing a finality that is irreversible and irredeemable. However, even an intimate link between the living and the dead, the past and the present, time will wash away the remains of the departed and will slowly erode. Thus the fatigue of the sacred eventually undermines even the more enduring bastions erected by the social order against the flow of time. Under these conditions, a society doubts its capacity to revitalize itself in the name of its original virtues or to mobilize its citizens for further sacrifice. Cultural despair indeed prevents a society from inspiring the living to finish the work of past generations. Were it not for the secularization of time and the fatigue of the sacred, the assassination of JFK may not have fed a national culture of despair. Indeed, the many decennial commemorations of JFK’s assassination may have prolonged a poignant sense of Kennedy’s absence and of the future that with his assassination had been aborted. That is why, I will argue, there is a profound American longing for a charismatic sovereign who is more than a match for the nation’s enemies and who embodies as well as announces the nation’s future.

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Such a sovereign would be what Vernant calls the colossus: a double who can enable a people to achieve a sense of its own continuity throughout time and its own grounding in a world far beyond their knowledge and control. “By embedding the stone in the ground, one attempts to fix, immobilize, localize in definite spot of the earth the elusive psuche, which is at once everywhere and nowhere.”5 Thus, the sacred prevents the critical moment from becoming a point of no return. As the psychoanalyst Irvine Schiffer puts it, “fate becomes transformed into an old prototypical object—the benevolent parent internalized in childhood and projected outwardly in time of crisis.”6 Thus, a charismatic leader who promises to “Fix it” becomes an autocrat whose word is law, whose means are ends in themselves, and who acknowledges no limits on his sovereignty: a colossus. Vernant is quick to point out, however, that the colossos, whether in the form of a stela or any other double, eventually loses its power to hold together in one time and place the opposites of life and death, presence and absence, mobility and fixity, symbol and actuality. Indeed, Vernant says, “It was not long before the Greeks forgot the funerary stone’s relationship with the dead, remaining conscious only of its visible form.” 7 Even the colossus is subject to the tendency of the sacred to become fatigued in its struggle to transcend with the passage of time. As Busby writes, “What makes the materialization of divine power particularly interesting . . . is the perception that after a certain time this power begins to run out, that it needs to be regularly renewed.”8 As it becomes fatigued, the sacred intensifies and prolongs the experience of separation and loss as well as the dread of a future point of no return. As cultural fatigue weakens the sacred’s capacity to protract presence in the face of absence, the sacred is progressively less able to project possibility in the face of finality. Speaking of the ancient Greek use of statues as doubles for the departed, Jean-Pierre Vernant notes that the double is a peculiar and ambiguous presence that is also the sign of an absence.” 9However, “The sole effect of all these doubles,” he writes, is to make “absence all the more poignant and unbearable.”10 Thus, the ancient Greek stela created a palpable sense of a difference that should transcend and outlive all other differences: not only those separating the living from the dead and the present from the absent but the differences between the past, the present, and the future. No wonder the passerby was enjoined to weep. By sanctifying the memory of the boy and by intensifying the passer’s-by own sense of his loss, the sacred somehow

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extends the time span of the critical moment of the boy’s departure and, in doing so, endows the boy’s absence with the aura of his presence. “It is on the monument that this youthful beauty, preserved by death before it could fade, could continue to be seen throughout the succession of the ages.”11 Thus, the task of the sacred is to perpetuate the critical moment, to create an in-between time in which it is still possible to postpone the finality of absence and loss, and to immunize a people against cultural despair. However, by protracting and re-presenting the critical moment between life and death, the sacred not only resists the finality of death with the recognition of a soul’s enduring presence but also intensifies the anguish of absence. Thus, on the one hand, through sacred memory, what the Greeks called anamnesis, there is some semblance of continuity between the past and the present. On the other hand, however, the enormity of such a boy’s death continues over time to evoke tears of sorrow. The sacred is no antidote to—and may thus be conducive to— despair. By sustaining a sense of the past as present, the sacred also heightens the experience of absence and loss. Consider an engraving, published in 1802 shortly after the death of George Washington, which portrayed the president being attended at the moment of final departure by his physicians. On the one hand, the engraving’s depiction of Washington’s apotheosis into the heavens converts the end of his life and of his presence on earth into a new beginning among the immortals. Indeed, the past and the present continue to be intertwined with each other, and the critical moment itself is caught up in some sort of eternity. On the other hand, however, sacred memory also bears the scars of the passage of time. An inscription at the base of the engraving reads: “Americans, behold & shed a grateful tear/for a man who has gained yor freedom most dear/And now is departing unto the realms above/Where he may ever rest in lasting peace & love.” Like the beautiful dead boy commemorated on the Greek stela, the engraving of George Washington’s death and departure thus intends to evoke tears of saddened memory, tears that not only rekindle a sense of the presence of the departed but also perpetuate the recognition of his absence. In 1802, there was still time for the sacred to transcend the differences created by the passage of time: notably those between time and eternity, the living and the dead, the before and the after, the end and the beginning. However, the engraving sanctifies the memory of one who not only continued to be present but who also remained profoundly missed. Early in the nineteenth century the engraving of George Washington’s apotheosis

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at the moment of his death could still point to “the realms above,” where the occasions of life know no particular season.12 Similarly revered was Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington. Indeed, “As Washington was apotheosized in the minds and hearts of his countrymen, so was the Athenaeum portrait. During his three-year tour of the United States in 1811, a decade after Washington’s death, the Russian diplomat Pavel Petrovich Svinin penned words that underscore the link between the veneration of the man and the posthumous cult status of Stuart’s Athenaeum: “The country is glutted with bust portraits of Washington from the brush of this master [Stuart]. It is noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.”13 Whether it is in withstanding the passage of time, meeting the test of time, expunging the taint of time, or surviving the shock of finality—of sudden and irreversible absence—the sacred itself is vulnerable to the passage of time and may become less an embodiment of the eternal than a mere copy. Indeed, the sacred may lose its ability to annul or obscure the difference between life and death, the natural and the supernatural; presence and absence may lose their mystery and become relatively matters of fact. In time, the possibility of real presence yields to the awareness of chronic and unredeemable loss and absence. As the fatigue of the sacred becomes manifest, and as cultural despair inhibits sacrifice, the longing intensifies for a Caesar who may mix life with politics and transcend not only the difference between words and deeds, ends and means, but also between human and divine law.

4. The death of Kennedy You might well disagree. You might think that it is not the absence of a leader like Kennedy but lingering apprehensions of his presence that feed the longing for a new Caesar. You might well believe that American society, however secularized it may be, is not a wholly disenchanted universe but is still haunted by a sense of its own greatness. You might even sense that time itself has not been wholly secularized but rather that critical moments, partially sanctified, have a life of their own and come back with renewed force in times of crisis. Thus, Americans may well long for a leader like the Kennedy who saw us through the Cuban Missile Crisis, whose spirit still evokes a destiny of national greatness, and who asks us to sacrifice even our lives for the liberty of the nations of the world.

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You might even imagine that there is an inherent poetry in the American soul, despite its apparent popular addiction to information processing and technology. Speaking of Greek tragedy, Rene Girard points out that “The god bestows his presence on the poet only, it seems, to withdraw it. A thin thread of remembrance links these alternating visitations and absences, a thread just long enough to assure the individual’s sense of continuity and to sustain those visions of the past that heighten the intoxication of possession but render even more painful the anguish of loss.”14 Is there, then, a “thin thread of remembrance” linking current losses and despair to the nation’s mood at the moment of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Under these conditions the sacred points beyond itself to something or someone – or somewhere - else, or to someone who once was loved and who remains only as one profoundly missed. American society remains in a sort of purgatorial limbo: unsure of what has been lost forever in the death of John F. Kennedy and in a state of continuing self-appraisal and self-judgment not only about the causes of his assassination but about the soul of the nation itself. Certainly I do not intend to underestimate the psyche’s need to believe that nothing of the past is lost and gone forever or beyond the reach of the psyche’s effort to recover its own vital presence by incorporating the past into the present or projecting it into the future. I take seriously the capacity of the psyche to transform itself by creating objects or symbols that anchor and ground the psyche in external reality and bring both the past and the future to bear upon the present. To put it another way, the psyche itself has a way of overcoming the dread of nonbeing and the trauma of separation and loss by transforming the present into a critical moment. Thus, sanctified, the critical moment gives the psyche time for that transcendence by opposing possibility to finality, hope to terror, life to death, and presence to absence. On the other hand, you might be sure that neither the nation’s annual but increasingly moribund Memorial Day rites, nor the repeated representations and commemorations of the death of Kennedy through the nation’s media over the subsequent fifty years, have been able to restore what was left of the capacity of the nation to embody and exemplify the sacred at its political and cultural center. On the contrary, you might argue that, in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, the vacuum of sanctity at the political and cultural center left the sacred free to seek sanctuary in the domestic, the mundane, and the private. After all, have not migrant

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workers on the West Coast sanctified their opposition to their employers by invoking the Virgin of Guadalupe? Has not the sacred taken on more domestic but also more local, private, and transitory forms: private visions and revelations? Certainly, the Supreme Court of the United States has relegated the definition of pornography to local option and sanctified the conscientious objection even of individuals who lack membership in a traditionally religious community. Some even argue that nothing matters now more than the sanctity of the fetus or of the conscience of the truly Christian believer. Under these latter conditions, longings for control and recognition, for healing and affection, for certainty and security come into conflict with the prevailing distribution of advantage and satisfaction. Eventually, pundits will exhaust their repertoire of clichés for naming the American malaise as nativism, xenophobia, ressentiment or moral outrage, authoritarianism, and chauvinism. It becomes increasingly evident that the nation is in a new situation that is yet to be adequately defined. At the same time, the fatigue of the sacred becomes more palpable as inspired memory no longer re-presents or reenacts the past but offers only a recollection or recounting of what has gone before. Recollection in turn yields to mere repetition, especially in the form of rites that have to be repeated if their benefits are not to erode with the passage of time. Under these conditions, the cultural fatigue of the sacred may turn into a more widespread and debilitating form of cultural despair, and it is under these conditions, I suggest, that a people demands a sovereign capable of initiating a Final Solution. At such a stage, unresolved moral issues and popular distrust of any official or leader calling for further sacrifice will intensify cultural despair and may eventuate in demands for a final solution, even for an apocalyptic showdown. On that day, old promises have to be kept, old debts paid, former obligations fulfilled, ancient grievances assuaged.

5. The ancient in the modern The sacred, I will suggest, enacts and enables the individual to transcend the critical moment by signifying the crucial passage from one state into another. Thus, cairns and water-tombs situated on hilltops between valleys or along waterways where the passage becomes narrower and thus more critical are cases in point, as I have suggested. So also is the possibility that rites seek to enable individuals to transcend the mundane

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awareness of difference and thus to reach a state of mind transcending all difference. The sacred therefore seeks to become the difference that supersedes all other differences. To do so, of course, it must help the devotee and practitioner to escape from the mundane by transcending the differences between space and time, the natural and the supernatural, or between life and death. To this end, Neolithic peoples may have made use of substances that induced altered states of consciousness. “It is possible to extend this argument even further and relate it to suggestions that these sites were involved in practices to do with altered states of consciousness and trance. There is evidence to suggest that certain types of chambered tombs may have been suitable venues for these kinds of activities, and this interpretation has some heritage in Neolithic studies. . . . In many cases, rites of passage are accompanied by trance, disorientation, and bewildering episodes. Furthermore, if people were in trance-like states, perhaps induced by dancing, music, fasting, or hallucinogens, stone may actually have taken on fluid properties.”15 Such monuments as cairns and tombs, like the rites altering states of consciousness, both mark and soften the impact of the critical moment in which presence becomes absence, life becomes death, and whatever came before is superseded by what is coming afterward. The sacred indeed marks such a critical moment in societies separated by centuries of social change. Thus anthropologists have long been interested in the moments that obscure the differences between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, and the temporal from the eternal. Malinowski, for instance, focused on the uncertainty of a widow as to whether her husband was still alive, still present; for that crucial moment in time, the widow was torn between attraction to his presence and abhorrence at his absence. The life that was there is gone and will not return except during the exact, proper, and skillful performance of a rite. For another instance, the anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith has focused on the critical moment in which the hunter waits to discover whether his quarry is truly dead or still alive enough to be dangerous. Is the moment in which the arrow of time is shot part of time that is moving irreversibly in one direction? Is its passage never to be rescinded?17 Note, however, that in such a critical moment it is not clear whether the slain animal is dead or alive, present or absent; the hunters pause in some apprehension before standing on their prey and uttering shouts of triumph. It takes a moment to experience the shock of the rupture between before and after, presence and

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absence, the relentless and irreversible aspects of time itself. Thus sacred rites and practices, beliefs and symbols that capture, re--present, and enable people to cope with such moments over longer periods of time. We need not be surprised by the affinities among the archaic, the primitive, the traditional and antique, and the modern. As Dorothy Ross puts it, “in the federal [period] the antique was familiar.”18 Thus, the same Mercury who appears in early depictions of George Washington ascending into heaven can also be found on the ruined floors of Celtic chapels in Britain.19 Thus, in modern societies as well as in the archaic or traditional, the sacred transforms an end into a new beginning, an absence into an enduring presence, mortality into life, and the temporal into the everlasting. However, the sacred has never been a wholly reliable ally in the struggle against the passage of time. Both in ancient as well as in modern societies, the sacred may lose its ability to obscure the difference between life and death, the natural and the supernatural, presence and absence. Even in Neolithic societies or in archaic Greece, on its battlefields or in the Athenian Temple, secularity infects and corrupts the sacred. A few months after the sun survives the winter solstice it begins its long decline. The standing stone signifies the absence as well as the once and future presence of the one who put it there or in whose memory it was erected. The solidity of rocks and of calcified bones is always in tension with the power of water to erode rocks and to wash human remains into the sea.20 The sacrifice offered to the gods may be accepted, but it may also be ignored or declined. The statue of the deity in the Acropolis is a certified copy of the real thing. Constantly engaged in a struggle to meet the test of time, therefore, the sacred becomes subject to chronic fatigue. I will therefore be asking the reader to suspend for the time being any firm convictions about the differences between modernity and antiquity. Among artists, of course, the confluence of the archaic and the modern has long been familiar. For instance, Picasso once told a reporter for The Guardian about his experience searching for African art at an ethnological museum in Paris. “A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately. . . . But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an

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aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.” 21 Painting, like the mask, functions as a double, a standing stone shielding us from terror and grounding us in the universe. Indeed, the power of art and of the sacred is not only liberating but also terrifying. According to the curator of a Parisian exhibit of Picasso in 2006, “Picasso created something so ugly that it startled people, frightened them. . . . He got that from African art—it was a different way of looking at the power of art, and that set his art free.” 22 Thus, like the sacred, these masks transcended such usual differences as those separating the interior of the self from the exterior, revelation from concealment, and vitality from mortality. To view them was to question the difference between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the demonic or subhuman. No wonder, then, that Picasso felt that he had discovered the masks’ “sacred, magical purpose,” the capacity to express both presence and absence, and thus both to vivify as well as to mortify or even terrorize the soul. Picasso knew that, as the psychoanalyst Schiffer puts it, the psyche exercises a “representational intelligence [allowing] the psychic apparatus to internally represent an absent event or object, to recall the past, to depict the present, and to anticipate the future in one swift, organized mental act.”23 It is this capacity to restore the presence of the absent and to represent the past that enables the hunter to place the dead animal’s horns upon an altar for the sake of recompense, sacrifice, and further petition. However, we also need to remember that sacred representations, like Picasso’s masks, reveal the terror underlying the psyche’s primitive magic: the threat of nonbeing. Thus, in attempting to recover the sources of its own being, the psyche finds it necessary to renew and repeat its most unpleasant, even terrifying experiences..

6. Despair and the chronic failure of the sacred What indeed are the causes of the sacred’s chronic and recurrent fatigue? Why is it that sacred beliefs and practices, symbols and objects offer at best only temporary relief from ontological anxiety, the terror of time, and the threat of nonbeing? Is it simply because the secularization of time itself in the long run exposes the sacred to the dangers of institutionalization, obsolescence, irrelevance, and inefficacy? Alternatively, is there something within the sacred itself that tends to run out of time?

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Speaking of nature in general and particularly of water, Ricoeur points out that “the sacred power of nature is first attested to by the fact that it is threatened and uncertain. The sacred universe, after all, is a universe that emerges out of chaos and that may at any instant return to it. . . . Through this power of water, as well as that of shadows, demons, and infernal regions, as well as in a multitude of other ways, nature speaks of the depth from which its order has emerged and toward which chaos it may always regress.”24 Is it because sacred practices are irrevocably connected to the cosmos that they may come to undermine the individual’s self-confident possession of—or access to—a being that is vital, lasting, and essential? To be sure, the light returns, with the possibility of enlightenment, but only for the time being, and its days are always numbered. Some scholars would not agree that in the world of the Neolithic, the sacred was unreliable, intermittent, and subject to fatigue. Certainly, the archaic world was at some pains to avoid a point of no return, especially in the relationships between the living and the dead. For instance, the passage from Colin Richards’s studies of the Neolithic, quoted above, suggests that no one in that world was lost forever; even the dead had a permanent place in the cosmos. There was no absence that could not be turned at least into a temporary presence: no form of death that could not at times be transformed into life by the sacred. Through the sacred, nonbeing could be transformed into being, and time itself, otherwise a source of erosion, decay, and eventual loss, could be turned into a stream of renewed consciousness. Thus, Richards credits archaic peoples with what we have come to think of as agency and a sense of connectedness: a form of protection against existential helplessness. Other anthropologists have also imagined the Neolithic world as relatively immunized or even inured to the passage of time. The archaeologists Fowler and Cummings note, “In particular, the experiences generated at megalithic sites may have referred to prior experiences of rivers, the sea, the shore, and their associated cultural qualities. . . . Those depositing quartz at a stone monument may have been ‘making it wet,’ marking it out as appropriate for acts of transformation. The products of the sea may have been interpreted as the manifestation of spiritual qualities associated not only with the sea and rivers, but with the dead. . . . Perhaps creatures living in the sea bore a close affinity with the dead (and also therefore the living); perhaps they were even manifestations of the spirits of the dead.”25 Thus, Fowler and Cummings suggest that the bones of deep-sea fish embodied remnants of ancestral flesh washed out to sea, a

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conjecture made more probable by evidence that these fish were not part of the Neolithic diet. If Neolithic peoples lived, moved, and had their being in a sacred cosmos or an “enchanted universe,” they would have had some defense against ontological anxiety and despair. After all, time would have conveyed eternity, and the living would have had access to the dead, at least at the winter solstice when the rays of the sun might penetrate the innermost reaches of an ancestral tomb: once on the way down and again on the way back. Presumably, if I had returned to the Buddhist cave east of Bombay on the 22nd of December, I would have had the same temporary reassurance of the Buddha’s presence. Nonetheless, I was there long enough to experience the return of the Buddha into darkness. His presence was soon superseded by his absence, his being by apparent nonbeing. The moment itself was fundamentally critical because it was intended to be. Thanks to the continuing influence of the work of Mircea Eliade, some scholars continue to assume that there was a Neolithic cosmology that promised the return of everything over time. Ends would inevitably turn into beginnings, the departed would always and forever return, and even apparent absences would suggest enduring presences. However, it is not entirely clear that there was such an endemic cosmology; rather, Neolithic communities may have shared a family of similar practices and symbols but lacked beliefs that would integrate their separate communities into an overarching cultural framework. Precisely because these ancient sites and practices incarnated the critical moment of passage between states of being or between being and nonbeing, Neolithic communities may have lacked cosmological immunization to despair and may have faced the perennial possibility of irrevocable darkness. So it is with the solstices. The practice of sanctifying the power of the sun perpetuates the possibilities not only of return and renewal but also of decline and loss. Any time of illumination, whether in a cave, a stone circle, or a shrine proves to be fleeting. That is why the sacred is vulnerable to the passage of time, carries within itself its own tendency to secularity, and is therefore prone to cultural fatigue. That is also why even in antiquity we may speak of a regressive cycle linking critical moments of apotheosis with a slow process of decline that leads to despair. Eventually, the most intense of appeals needs to be made to the highest cosmic power or authority. One solstice or pivotal moment prefigures a second, equally critical moment. To be sure, the regressive cycle in American society links Anglo-American authoritarianism to a

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culture of despair, but it has a generic link to the regressive cycles of antiquity: links that at times also appear to have been genetic. For instance, as Jean Pierre Vernant has noted, through such dramatic and forceful techniques of re-presentation and reenactment as the anamnesis of the ancient Greek bard, the sacred does restore the presence of the absent by evoking and reincarnating the past within the present. Nonetheless, the spectre of loss even attends the remains of old attachments. As Vernant, in his magisterial studies of ancient Greek culture has noted, the Greek stela or grave monument and the standing stone along the wayside not only call for remembrance and perhaps also tears but also evoke a presence uncannily experienced as an absence. Even the statue of Athena in the Parthenon testifies to an eternal absence, the real Athena being firmly embedded in and reserved for the heavens. Thus, the psyche may become self-alienated by its desperate attempt to preserve and recover attachments to unreliable persons or objects: to a parent, perhaps, or a partner. Even the objects and people in whom the psyche finds reassurance of its own being also tend to rekindle its existential anxieties, its doubts as to how essential and significant, vital or vulnerable it may be.

7. The fatigue of the sacred In the early years of the American republic, collective memory sanctified the nation’s present by linking it both with ancient history and with the eternal. The “sacred fire of liberty” had been entrusted to this new nation; the historical fate of freedom and equality would henceforth depend on the capacity of the new republic to bring history closer to its end. As I have noted in connection with the many reproductions of an engraving of Washington’s apotheosis, Washington was believed already to be enjoying the company of the immortals, and, as we shall later see, if John Adams was right, he had become the Americans’ god. This is not to say that the sanctified memory of Washington was impervious to the passage of time or immutable. On the contrary, Barry Schwartz has described the ways in which, following the Civil War, interest in the image of George Washington increasingly reflected the progressively egalitarian and populist interests of the American people. Washington’s image took on the details and hues of these later portraits in the public imagination, even as some earlier images continued to shape the way in which respects and devotion were paid to Washington’s symbolic but no less real presence in American life. For Schwartz, the past is

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“neither totally precarious nor immutable, but a stable image upon which new elements are intermittently superimposed.”26 I would simply add that even sanctified memory is shaped by the passage of time, much as the centuries of water streaming over massive boulders shaped the rocks that covered Neolithic tombs; even sacred emblems of the eternal may suffer erosion in and through the passage of time. There is ample historical reason to doubt my argument that the sacred has a tendency to wear out over time. For example, Anthony Grafton has shown that Albrecht Durer created self-portraits that claimed an affinity with – or even an origin from – the image of Christ embedded in the “sweat cloth on which an image of the divine features was imprinted without the work of human hands.”27 As Grafton puts it, “Durer took care to show viewers that he himself had made an image of a traditional kind, the value of which supposedly depended on the fact that no one had made it.” 28 I would suggest simply that Durer was manufacturing the sacred, in the sense that he was combining a sense of his own presence with a reminiscence of the possibility of mortality and absence. He was also creating novelty: an unprecedented form of artistry as well as of selfportraiture, that was a manifestation – a re-presentation - of the past in the present, like the relics from the catacombs now resident among the congregations of Catholics in Europe. That is, Durer was creating a form of the sacred that was intermeshed with the secular: a portrait of eternity subject to the passage of time. He was abolishing the difference between the ancient and the modern; as Grafton puts it, “he underlined the modernity and the contingency of an icon.”29 Like the African masks that appalled and fascinated Picasso, these images may not only have once shielded the psyche from the terror of loss and abandonment but over time have become reminders of what has been lost and now confront the nonbeing. I will therefore be demonstrating that, despite the anxious and chronic inventiveness of the psyche, the sacred wears out, loses its vitality, reminds its devotees that something is missing, and even rekindles the primitive fear of abandonment. The regressive cycle that eventually links despair to a longing for a Caesar thus gains momentum from the fatigue of the sacred. As that fatigue becomes more evident and widespread, existential differences reassert themselves: those between presence and absence, the past and the present, the dead and the living. As that despair becomes more acute, it exacerbates fears that it is becoming too late for the nation to overcome its divisions, to realize its historical mission, and to assert its rightful sovereignty among the nations. The more intense become social and

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existential differences, the more urgent become both cultural despair and the longing for a new leader who embodies the nation’s original virtues and vitality. Now, in addition to the contributions of sacred fatigue to the regressive and authoritarian cycle, consider the effects of the secularization of time itself. As the temporal becomes more separate from the eternal, and as the living become far less conversant with the dead, the fleeting moment becomes, well, more fleeting; thus, in a secular society the past and the future are constantly being revised and novelty becomes routine. However, with all this temporizing, the past is never fully present or fully completed; neither does the future ever really begin. Thus, the critical moment of JFK’s administration and particularly of his death has not yet been placed within any larger time perspective other than what is offered by decennial commemoration by the mass media. There has been no sanctified commemoration and no apotheosis but only the frequent and poignant representations by the media, of Kennedy’s death. There has been no way for future sacrifice to redeem the president’s death or for that death to be underwritten by eternity. It would be as if, in the Middle Ages, when relics from the catacombs were being exhumed and placed in churches, they were merely reminders or curiosities rather than models of devotion for the living to emulate and embody. I will therefore be arguing that the effect of the cultural fatigue of the sacred is amplified by the process of secularization. Thus the assassination of John F. Kennedy has become, in retrospect, a point of no return: a focal point of cultural despair rather than an end that could have been transformed into a new beginning or a loss that could be transformed by a renewed sense of Kennedy’s presidential presence. Many despair over America’s loss of a future that could have been realized had John F. Kennedy not been slain. Furthermore, the media presentations of the Kennedy years and of his assassination may well have reminded Americans that their society is subject to chance and violence even at the highest level. Fifty years of media-based commemoration have intensified an awareness of contingency; anything could happen anywhere at any time. It is entirely possible that American society is now dominated by a sense that the nation’s power over death is increasingly obscure and uncertain. In addition, the sacred may fail to come when it is called and thus prove itself to be a cause rather than a cure for intense ontological anxiety. Thus, cultural despair takes refuge in longing for a Caesar or Führer whose power over death will offer a lasting defense against

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ontological anxiety. Such a Caesar would also transcend national divisions and restore lost virtues, vitality, and even sanctity to the nation’s center. As I have noted, we will be examining the notion of a “state of exception” in which the sovereign’s will has power over life and death without offending either divine or human law. As Agamben himself notes of the “state of exception,” politics and life become intimately intertwined; all of life becomes serious, that is, sacred. However, a new Caesar will never provide the longed-for grounding of the human being in relentless, indefatigable, indeed absolute sovereignty. We need to be reminded that the sacred “originally expresses both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment” [emphasis added].31 As religion loses its control over the way a modern society maintains its moral or territorial boundaries, the sacred finds sanctuary in the interstices and margins of the social system. There the sacred makes its appearances in the informal, more familiar, local, personal, and peripheral aspects of a secular social order, where it has increased immediacy and personal relevance. Indeed, the more that the sacred thrives in the interstices and margins of the social system, the less susceptible is the sacred to fatigue. Consider these highly local and intimate manifestations of the sacred: a yellow ribbon on the front porch of the family of a hostage; a Confederate flag in a parlor window, in a local park, or in a sports stadium; the uncommunicative but nonetheless sanctified body of a patient in a coma or of a fetus in the womb; or the practice of a highly personal spiritual discipline. Thus, it becomes incumbent on the aspiring Caesar to amalgamate and subsume these more vital but decentralized forms of the sacred into his or her own emblematic presence and ultimate authority; otherwise the dispersed and intimate, informal aspects of the sacred will make it all the more difficult to recruit committed and even sacrificial citizens. In the end, the cure for more extreme forms of secularization in the life of a nation may well be a Final Solution that requires the evocation of the sacred at the political and cultural center that sanctifies all of life.

8. Summary In sacralizing the critical moment, a society exercises its capacity to ground its being in time itself. That is why Neolithic societies sanctified the critical moments presented by each solstice as well as the very places

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where one valley or waterway opened up and yielded to another. Those were the times and places of uncertainty and contingency, and they required the auspices of the sacred. However, the extremes of secularization and the cultural fatigue of the sacred are conducive to a societal sense of chronic crisis. They subject a nation to radical contingency and the passage of time. It is not only that critical moments cause a social order to invoke and ground the sacred in auspicious places. It is also that social orders, in order to affirm and be sure of their being, require critical moments: places in time that test their capacity to withstand and transcend the passage of time. Had they not already existed, these moments would have had to be invented; otherwise how would any society, short of cataclysm, know, in the face of catastrophe, that it would still continue to be in time? Subject as they are to a constantly revised sense of the past and of the future, and thus very vulnerable to uncertainty contingency, radically secularized societies therefore create and invoke critical moments in order to affirm their confidence in their capacity to weather and transcend the passage of time. However, because of the tendency of the sacred to aggravate as well as alleviate ontological anxieties and the threat of abandonment, collective sanctifications of memory require frequent repetition to compensate for their increasingly limited and transient effects. Thus, radical secularity, when aggravated by the fatigue of the sacred, makes it not only more difficult but also more necessary for the nation to redeem its losses and to revivify its original vision. Longings intensify for one who can seize the moment and act with finality: a moment, as in Agamben’s “state of exception,” when means become ends and the sovereign’s words are tantamount to deeds; that is, “the emergency…has become the rule.”32 I am speaking of an increasingly intense demand for an authoritarian leader, a new Caesar, whose will augments, supersedes, and consummates the lesser forms of sacred authority and attachment that become dispersed in highly secularized social systems. Because the sovereignty of this new Caesar is expressed in a series of critical moments, each superseding the other, the Final Solution may require increasingly more desperate demonstrations of the chief executive’s authority. To put it in familiar terms, the struggle for control and authority sanctifies the life of the nation as the once and future critical moment. Because the critical moment calls both the past and the future

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into question while injecting the moment with transcendental significance, I will be using the concept of Kairos throughout this study, the quintessentially sanctified critical moment: the eternal in the fleeting. Like Hitler’s Kompf and the ancient Greek agon, the nation’s Kairos becomes unending: an end in itself. Thus, a truly critical moment, a Kairos, may combine both the unprecedented and the momentary with the everlasting. It represents “the final solution” to the problem of temporal existence: the “eternal in the fleeting.”33 Hence it heralds a demand for an Alexander or a Caesar. However, the extremes of secularization and the fatigue of the sacred ensure that the final solution is always only at best a temporary expedient. Like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, its commemorations will have to be repeated over and over again. The extremes of secularization leave the political and cultural center so marked with the stigma of time that it must sanctify itself through frequent and repeated commemoration, anamnesis, or representation and reenactment of its critical moments, its Kairos. However, cultural fatigue reduces the sacred to mere recollection and reminiscence, and the future becomes the object of mere anticipation, prognosis, prediction, and the succession of one scenario after another. Indeed, the frequent commemorations of John F. Kennedy’s assassination may have undermined American society’s sense of its capacity to stand the test of time.

Notes 1

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1198; p. 148. 2 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Remarks on Receiving the John F. Kennedy Medal,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 9, 2007; p.1. 3 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006:p. 348. 5 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Ancient Greeks, translated by Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2006; p. 330. 6 Irvine Schiffer, The Trauma of Time, A Psychoanalytic Investigation, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1978: p. 136. 7 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Ancient Greeks, translated by Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2006; p. 331 8 Busby 2006:88. 9 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Ancient Greeks, translated by Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2006; p. 323.

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Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Ancient Greeks, translated by Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2006; p. 326. 11 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Ancient Greeks, translated by Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2006; p. 348. 12 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p. 116; jstor 1180583. 13 Adam Greenhalgh, “’Not a Man but a God’. The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 269-304; p. 287. 14 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; p. 156. 15 Chris Fowler and Vicki Cummings, “Places of Transformation: Building Monuments from Water and Stone in the Neolithic of the Irish Sea,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 1-20; pp. 15-16. 17 Walter Burkert, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 18 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399. 19 Roger Leech, Martin Henig, Frank Jenkins, Margaret Guido, Dorothy Charlesworth, E. M. Besly, S. A. Butcher, R. H. Leech, R. F. Everton, “The Excavation of a Romano-Celtic Temple and a Later Cemetery on Lamyatt Beacon, Somerset. Britannia, Vol. 17 (1986), pp. 259-328. 20 Tim Phillips, “Seascapes and Landscapes in Orkney and Northern Scotland,” World Archaeology, Vol. 35, No. 3, Seascapes (Dec., 2003), pp. 371-384. 21 Andrew Meldrum, “G2: Culture: Stealing beauty: How Much Did Picasso's Paintings Borrow from African Art?” The Guardian; Mar 15, 2006; p. 1. 22 Andrew Meldrum, “G2: Culture: Stealing beauty: How Much Did Picasso's Paintings Borrow from African Art?” The Guardian; Mar 15, 2006; p. 1. 23 Irvine Schiffer, The Trauma of Time, A Psychoanalytic Investigation, New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1978: p. 26. 24 Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, Translated by David Pellauer, Edited by Mark I. Wallace, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995; p. 52. 25 Chris Fowler and Vicki Cummings , “Places of Transformation: Building Monuments from Water and Stone in the Neolithic of the Irish Sea,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 1-20; p.14. 26 Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory. The Democratization of George Washington,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 1991), pp. 221-236; p 234. 27 Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead. The Past as Revelation, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001; p. 69. 28 Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead. The Past as Revelation, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001; p. 69.

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Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead. The Past as Revelation, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001; p. 69. 31 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:83. 32 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:12. 33 A.F. Stewart. Lysippan Studies. 1. “The Only Creator of Beauty.” The American Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 87. No. 2 (Spring 1978), pp. 163-171;’ p.171.

CHAPTER ONE THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN DESPAIR

In less secular societies, a critical moment provides the occasion for looking back in sacred memory at times and places where the community or nation struggled against threats to its existence. Such a community may remember these moments as times when it was guided by a hallowed vision of its mission in history. Aeneas leaves a ruined Troy carrying his father on his back and guided by his father’s vision of a once and future kingdom. Approaching the shores of the American continent, Governor Winthrop remembers ancient Israel as a city set upon a hill and exhorts his followers to become just such a light for the nations of the world. Having warned the nation of the threats to its survival as a democracy, President Kennedy evoked the mission of the American people to carry the sacred torch of liberty to all oppressed peoples. Passing that torch to a new generation, he proclaimed the nation ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of its historic mission. Critical moments, I will argue, provide occasions for a society to achieve its highest levels of commitment and sacrifice. Thus, they are essential to the creation and maintenance of any social system. However, they also provide glimpses of the often self-defeating aspects of social order, both in modern nations and in the communities of antiquity, and we will attend to them as well. One such moment is the embodiment of the social order in a Caesar whose struggle, like Hitler’s Kampf, becomes their own.

The secularization of critical moments In the long run, secular societies find it necessary to transcend critical moments by reconstituting themselves around an ancient vision of their origin and destiny. In the meantime, however, a secular society will find it difficult to draw inspiration from authoritative accounts of critical moments both in the past and in the imagined future. That is because the process of secularization allows societies to temporize with both the past

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and the future. Not only are the novelties and threats of the present given new precedents, they also foreshadow a wider range of possible outcomes for the future. Indeed, the future is no longer what it used to be. Temporizing thus undermines the capacity of a society not only to sanctify the past and the future but also to call for sacrifice in the present. In its struggles against death and nonbeing, as a secular society forfeits the reassurances of a sanctified past and future, it becomes more vulnerable to cultural despair. Thus, Dorothy Ross suggests that “Lincoln feared that historical circumstances now made maintenance of the American republic more difficult for the heirs than founding had been for the fathers.”1 The continuity between the ancestral past and the living present, or to put it slightly differently, the living presence of the ancestors, had been giving American society time to live up to its ideals, but on the eve of the Civil War, President Lincoln could no longer believe that the nation still had time on its side. The slow but relentless passage of time had been interrupted by time whose passage is sudden, eventful, and even fateful for the social order. The conjunction of these two kinds of times creates what ancient Greeks used to call Kairos: a god who is the apotheosis of time itself. A Caesar can express, embody, or create such a critical moment in the life of any social order. A Kairos requires and evokes fresh supplies of sacrifice, without which any social order will doubt its capacity to transcend critical moments and disintegrate into chaos and violence. As Ross reminds us, this was just what Lincoln feared: “He saw around him increasing ‘disregard for law’ and mob violence; in time, he feared, violence would make the people lose faith in their political institutions and succumb to a tyrant.”2 The process of secularization has deprived the nation of authoritative models of critical moments in the past that could reassure the nation of its capacity to meet foreign threats and overcome domestic conflicts in the present. The promise to “Make America great again” relies on the President’s arbitrary selection of critical moments in a continuously reinvented past. Thus, it is neither novel nor surprising that in recent years, and especially during the electoral conflicts of 2016, the United States has experienced an aggravated sense that time is running out. Moreover, sacred memory and beliefs, sacred objects, times, and places tend to lose their sanctity over time. They wear out, become less relevant or reliable, and need to be replenished with fresh devotion and commitment. Therefore, the fatigue of the sacred itself allows the President to mobilize evangelical Christian support in return for policies that disregard scientific

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arguments for both evolution and climate change and cater to the residues of racial hatred embedded in many conservative Christian communities. The effect of these policies is to exacerbate domestic conflicts while requiring the nation to confront foreign competition and threats from a positon of increasing isolation and weakness in the international community: the very conditions that Lincoln feared would intensify longings for a tyrant. No wonder that there are Caesars-in-waiting who promise to bring America back from the abyss while making America great again. Nostalgia for a past that many have forgotten lends an addictive quality to a sense of chronic crisis. It is not that the nation becomes inured to critical moments; it seeks to create a national struggle or kampf in order to be assured of the vitality and grounding of its own being. Otherwise, it may succumb to the “culture of despair” that Fritz Stern identified in Germany during the decades preceding the rise of Nazism. That is why it is not enough for pundits to round up the usual suspects of authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia, nationalism, chauvinism, jingoism, racism, and anti-intellectualism at what appeared to be debased versions of American nationalism. America is not now either as secular or as modern as many believe this country now to be. That is why it is especially vulnerable to the “cultural despair” that Fritz Stern found in Germany in the years preceding the advent of fascism, it is also vulnerable to longings for a strong leader capable not only of rescuing the nation from enemies domestic and foreign but also of restoring it to its original vision and virtues. To put it bluntly, I expect the nation to seek resolution and rescue in an absolute authority capable of fulfilling the vision of the nation’s founders and of restoring the people’s sense of their own sovereignty: a volkisch führer. All it takes is the capacity to fuse the authority of the ancient with the modern and of the secular with the sacred: to arouse the core of American fascism. To root the modern within the ancient and to sanctify the apparently secular institutions of the nation requires a return to the roots of the Republic. However, the process of secularization has weakened the nation’s grasp on past sources of national self-confidence and has left the nation facing an open-ended future without any promise of triumph or consummation. Moreover, not only American secularity but also the fatigue of the sacred make it difficult for American society to re-present the past in the present as though the living could still evoke the presence and support of the dead. All the nation has is an intensified sense of crisis

4

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for an indefinitely extended time-being. Left to its own devices to reimagine the past and to simulate or predict the future, the nation has a severely diminished capacity to excite devotion or elicit sacrifice. Like Kennedy, the new Caesar may seek to transform chronic crisis into a national Kairos: a decisive test of the nation’s will to shape and to transcend the passage of time. Because the critical moment has become an indefinitely extended time-being, ends dissolve into means; to threaten becomes an end in itself. The prospect of disruption with no end in sight affects not only the streets but also safe havens like stadiums and campuses. Processes as essential to the smooth running of the social order as the distribution of energy, money, and information become subject to crisis-without-end. Thus, longings intensify for a new king or Caesar acquire increasing salience, relevance, and intensity: one who would promote the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty. Longings for absolute authority surfaced with the threat of civil war in the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. In the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, the nation’s founders chose to model the offices of the new American chief executive on the British constitution; the new American president obtained powers comparable to those of the sacred monarchy of Charles the First. Present from the beginning of the Republic, the longing for an American Caesar intensified during the Cuban Missile Crisis and after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in the Great Depression, on the eve of the Civil War and after the assassination of Lincoln. Residues of American absolutism have appeared in an ideology of sacrifice during critical moments in which the past and the future were hanging in the balance of the present. I will be exploring the ways in which leaders such as Jefferson and Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and, within more recent memory, John F. Kennedy have defined the nation during such critical moments. In a state of siege from potential acts of terrorism, Americans now live in a situation in which politics is inseparable from both life and death; only the sovereign knows, can ignore, and make the difference between them. In its responses to terrorism, and not only in the latest utterances of political candidates on the right, American society may be moving into Agamben’s “ state of exception”: a notion derived from the conservative political theory of Carl Schmidt in the pre-Nazi Germany of the 1920s. Americans must now take seriously policies that would have been unthinkable before the most recent terrorist attacks on civilized centers in

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the West. In “the state of exception,” an American president could order detentions of legal as well as illegal immigrants, authorize arrests without trial or due process, require surveillance without the approval of lawyers, execute alleged terrorists and other enemies of the state at home as well as overseas, and mobilize armed forces without a War Powers Act or any other Congressional mandate.

American fascism Cultural despair over the future of the nation finds expression in visions of national greatness glossed with religious overtones and romantic references, but it is still despair. Fritz Stern, writing of Germany despair in the years preceding Nazism, remembers Fichte’s pronouncement that “You are of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depth of its miseries.”3 The same overtones of cultural despair can be found during the Depression of the 1930s, when critical opinion was divided as to whether the United States must necessarily follow the fascist models of Italy and Germany. Writing of America during the depression years, Katznelson cites the prophecy of Reinhold Niebuhr that “The liberal culture of modernity is quite unable to give guidance and direction to a confused generation which faces the disintegration of a social system and the task of building a new one.”4 Many would have agreed with William Ernest Hocking at Harvard that some way must be found “to reassert the reality of the total interest of society” and to create “a more unified society, capable of using its voice and its muscles, with a sterner internal discipline and a new emotional basis.”5 That is why, of course, in the depths of the Depression Congress invoked the spirit of George Washington reigning from the heavens and mandated literally millions of local commemorations through the year of 1932. Like the far more totalitarian dictatorships and one-party governments of Europe and Latin America, Congress’s goal was to close the gap between the collective and the personal: to represent the people to itself in the form of a coherent and obligatory social order. Thus, Katznelson quotes historian Richard Overy, who described the fascist regimes “as the absence of political division and the true representation of popular interests, the creation of a united mass public into a singular people

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capable of acting to solve society’s most pressing problems.”6 Thus, the sanctification of the nation-state creates a sovereign who is, like the sacred itself, the difference that transcends and subsumes all other differences. European dictatorships have cast themselves as superior, non-liberal democracies because they claimed to embody a sanctified representation of the people to themselves. Europe’s dictators claimed the sole capacity for the transformation of life itself in all its material and spiritual dimensions. Katznelson quotes Mussolini as announcing that “the Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value . . . Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of the people. No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, and social classes) exist outside the state.”7 As Giorgio Agamben notes, the effect is to fuse life with politics and to subsume all differences within the state itself.8 Note the paradoxical emergence of a sacralized nation-state within a highly secularized society. The more secular a society becomes, the less confidence there can be either in its capacity to pay off old debts or to be the “hope of the whole human race.” 9 It is therefore no longer possible to deploy the sacred to mobilize commitment and require sacrifice for the sake of rescuing humankind “from the depth of its miseries.” The connection is broken “between the nation’s present and the past” in which it once promised to perfect humanity; the future lacks the consolation of ancient vision and promise. Indeed, the future may remain so problematical and fluid as to suggest either a narrative of continuing eclipse and decline or a wasteland of meaninglessness and apprehension. In either event, a secularized society lacks the capacity to counter, delay, or transcend the passage of time. Secularization therefore undermines a society’s capacity to mobilize commitment and sacrifice and increases its tendency to cultural despair. As critical moments become more suggestive of points of no return, only the radical transformation of an entire people into a sacred political community will restore the illusion of a sovereign people who are humanity’s last, best hope for redemption. Thus, in the years preceding the rise of fascism, it was German Protestants who longed to make Germany great again. It was time indeed for the German people to put back together what the modern world was tearing apart: to wed the personal with the collective

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and the individual with the collective will. Only then would the natural capacities of youth be more profoundly social than ever before. Thus, as Stern explains, “the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith. They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.” 10 No one can miss the obvious parallels with an American society whose leader currently dismisses international obligations and accepts no limits on the use of force to express and exert national sovereignty. No wonder that the revitalization of a secularized nation would require the services of a sanctified nation-state. Indeed, German Protestants of the nineteenth century had “fused Christianity and German idealism so as to forge a Kulturreligion, which hid beneath pious allusions to Goethe, Schiller, and the Bible a most thoroughgoing secularization. The religious tone remained, even after the religious faith and the religious canons had disappeared.”11 In these comments on a religious faith that had lost its hold on the sacred and on “pious allusions,” you also find a suggestion that the sacred itself was wearing out over time. Cultural despair thus hides within a shell of national piety and devotion a chronic sense of national decline and the fatigue of the sacred. It can indeed happen here. In the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there was some despair over the loss of what had been the American future and a longing for a leader strong enough to unite the nation against a newly aggressive and competent empire. Even fifty years after Kennedy’s assassination, many still debate as to whether the future had been forfeited or initiated. For many, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was indeed a critical moment, a point of departure from what until then had been the American past; indeed, in the past fifty years it has become ever more obviously a point of no return to what, until then, had been the American future. Even at the time, there were signs that the event would have lasting effects. Chaos and violence became ordinary, not only on American streets, but also on the nation’s campuses. At the time of his assassination, large numbers of citizens indicated, when invited to do so, that they felt that they had experienced grief at JFK’s death as sharply as if he had been a close friend. Years later, many still felt that the nation had forfeited the future it would have had if John F. Kennedy had lived. Some expressed their sentiments as unalloyed regret, whereas others acknowledged doubts,

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skepticism, and even a sense of betrayal about Kennedy’s qualities both as a man and as a president. The tens of thousands of books written about the conspiracies alleged to have been behind Kennedy’s assassination, not to mention the thousands of more respectable volumes on his presidency, suggest that for millions of Americans Kennedy’s death has yet to be accounted for and those responsible for his assignation have yet to be held accountable. Critical moments in the life of a society are decisive for its survival, but they also prompt continuous and agonizing reappraisals of the leaders and institutions that define the nation. For some, Kennedy’s assassination had become Judgment Day, sufficient in itself to be a cause of cultural despair. Soon after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, attributed the president’s death to divine judgment on the Kennedy administration’s policy of targeting the leaders of foreign governments. A leading journalist, days after Kennedy’s death, said simply that what goes around comes around. A mortal debt had indeed been paid. One of the earliest voices of American despair had long been an apostle of hope. Shortly before he himself was assassinated, Martin Luther King attributed Kennedy’s murder to the violence in American society that for years had undermined the sanctity of the individual. If it is no longer individuals who are to be held sacred, then, but lives, then something fundamental has changed in the relation of the citizens to their own nation. Life itself has become the arena in which sovereignty is to be exercised or limited. Politics has become about life and death, as if the natural and the social had become coterminous with the legal and the political: precisely Agamben’s point about the state of exception. Who but an absolute sovereign can determine where the line is drawn between lives that are expendable and those that are sacrosanct? In the last fifty years, the media has frequently returned to what has become in retrospect a point of no return: a moment in which what had until then been the American future became either eclipsed or entirely lost. Consider this early warning sign that something fundamental had changed in Americans’ sense of their nation as a political community. In polls taken during the 1950s, a bipartisan plurality of citizens had consistently agreed that the people in Washington had little regard for the interests of ordinary people, but in the presidential election of 1964, a year after JFK’s assassination, there was an unprecedented polarization of public opinion regarding the nation’s government. The majority of those disenchanted with government in Washington had become disproportionately Republican. The society was being polarized along lines of cynicism and despair.

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In the meantime, it is not clear whether JFK’s presence has been lost or whether it remains as a shadowy presence to be evoked in commemorations of his assassination; in either event, his assassination reinforces longings for a charismatic and pragmatic president expanding the limits of American power.

Summary I have been calling attention to the convergence of several trends. On the one hand, there is a sense that the political has become a matter of life and death: a time-being imbued with a sense of personal and national crisis. On the other is cultural despair: a chronic feeling that the nation is not what it used be and may never become what it might have been had it not lost faith in its original vision and mandate, in its political center, and in many of its sacred institutions. The fatigue of the sacred and the secularization of the social order create an anxious sort of secularity: an immersion in time without confidence that time and history are on the nation’s side. To infuse the secular with the sacred and modernity with ancient virtues thus becomes a cultural imperative. Critical moments in the life of a society are decisive for its survival, but they also prompt continuous and agonizing reappraisals of the leaders and institutions that define the nation. Indeed, the sense that time may be running out intensifies the significance of critical moments and heightens a demand for the swift and fateful exercise of national sovereignty. The extraordinary powers given the office of the chief executive by the Constitution, legitimated by an ideology that requires sacrifice for a messianic and redemptive political community, have been intensified by presidential warnings that the nation is in mortal danger from unprecedented domestic and foreign threat. These are the foundations of American authoritarianism that calls for a sovereign with the authority to define what is worth living and dying for. These authoritarian remedies for cultural despair, however, may turn out to be only futile exercises of political will in a nation lacking national consensus on its identity and mission. In the latter case, we may look forward to an American version of European fascism in which it will be more than ever incumbent on the one who would be Caesar to decide whose life is sacred and whose is expendable. Such a Caesar will take the law, justice, violence, and life itself into his or her own hands.

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Notes 1

Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 2 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 3 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Open Court Publishing, 1922, 268; quoted in Fritz R. Stern The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989: 279). 4 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.114. 5 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.115. 6 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.108; quoting Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York: W.W.Norton, 2004) pp. 294-295. 7 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.112; quoting Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, New York, Howard Fertig, 1935, pp. 93-4. 8 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:11. 9 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Open Court Publishing, 1922, 268; quoted in Fritz R. Stern The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989: 279). 10 Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989: xx. 11 Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989: xxv.

CHAPTER TWO CRITICAL MOMENTS AND THE CALL FOR AUTHORITARIAN LEADERSHIP

In times of crisis, any society will face demands for authoritative, decisive, and effective leadership. It was at just such a critical moment that Seneca said to his friend Lucillus, “All mankind are stretching their hands to you on every side. Lives that have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you they look for hope and assistance . . . Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. Even if you had a large part of your life remaining before you, you would have to organize it very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary; as things are, aren’t the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!” (Letter XLVIII 7, 12).1 When time is running out, immediacy is essential. Such a leader must mobilize commitment and a call for sacrifice yet must also respond to cries for help from the very people who are suffering most from conditions beyond their understanding and control. There is no time for temporizing or for exploratory and provisional actions: no time to disguise hesitation as deliberation: no time for circumlocutions covering uncertainty not only about what must be said but about what must be done. By avoiding polite language and circumlocutions, the leader of the hour must get to the point with brutal directness and telling effect. Words do not matter; in the words of the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2016, they are “just words.” To act is an end itself.

Ur-fascism in America The tendency of the sacred to bear the stigmata of time makes it all the more difficult for a secularized society to prevent, overcome, and transcend the passage of time. The more secularized a society becomes, the more characterized by flux, the more necessary it is for the sacred to offset the temporal with intimations of the eternal and to transform ends into what at

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least appear to be new beginnings. This combination of secularity with sanctity is what Umberto Eco calls Ur-fascism: a more or less unified core overlaid by specific variations in particular times and places and containing a mixture of opposites. Ur, or primitive, fascism is at once traditionalist and modernizing, antireligious and yet in search of support from religious institutions, skeptical of reason and yet wedded to technological and industrial advancement. The syncretism of primitive fascism underlies its capacity to combine means with ends, the recovery of original virtues and power with the Final Solution. On the one hand, Eco notes, “fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” 2 On the other hand, fascism claims to be the quintessential source of the kampf, the agon, the contest for itself: “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus, pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. However, such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.”3 Few American leaders have been more forthright or effective than John F. Kennedy in evoking the struggle against time and nonbeing. In his first State of the Union address, President Kennedy spoke of “the harsh enormity of the trials through which we must pass in the next four years. Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that—in each of the principal areas of crisis—the tide of events has been running out and time has not been our friend.”4 Caesarism is thus a last-ditch defense against the passage of time; as Seneca put it, time is “desperately short.” In an address on July 4, 1962, Kennedy reminded the nation that it was threatened with extinction: “I speak today in an hour of national peril and national opportunity. Before my term has ended we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain. The answers are by no means clear. All of us together—this Administration, this Congress, this nation—must forge those answers.” Politics becomes fused with life: means with ends; words

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with deeds. Differences disappear within the difference supplied by the sanctified nation-state itself. Longings for autocracy in America—and calls for sacrifice—have been discerned in such critical moments as the eve of the American Revolution or the Civil War, the death of George Washington and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We note that in the depths of the Depression, Americans were exhorted to submit to a national discipline and to fulfill their obligations to the larger society whatever the cost to themselves, even in the face of despair. In his superb analysis of Western democracies during the Depression of the 1930s, Ira Katznelson recalls that the United States was entirely subject to the panic that was affecting Western Europe and in particular Germany and Italy: “The panoply of anxiety was too extensive, the sense of disappointment too profound, the criticisms of liberal democracy too relentless, the defenders of democracy too plagued by doubt, and the problems of depth, difficulty, and urgency too insistent.”5 It was clear that none of the necessary changes would take place until and unless the interests, the values and commitments, the existential hopes and fears of the individual were to be wedded far more closely to the future—to the fate—of the nation. Only a central authority who could call for the sacrifice and commitment of its individual citizens would be able to counteract the despair that was turning into panic. Enter Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his invocation of the national sacred: “We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife” (emphasis added).6 This spiritual and moral duty of the citizen to the larger society would therefore solemnize the ways in which Americans would raise their children, train workers, educate their citizens, punish wrong doers, make decisions, and respond to calls for sacrifice. Indeed, Congress mandated that the villages, towns, and cities of this nation should hold commemorations of the life and example of George Washington in order to draw wisdom and courage from his example. The nation complied with about 16,000 of such observances every day—over 4.7 million before the year was done. In a society as secular as America, critical moments reveal what is formative and constitutive of the nation itself. As Eric Nelson puts it in his study of the royalist enthusiasm of American patriots during the American

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Revolution, “Political crises change how people look at the world.”7 They do indeed—how else could the nation have endowed the office of the president with powers that eclipsed those of any English monarch since Charles the First? How else could the nation ever have imagined George Washington as having been exalted into the same heavens that had in the past received Roman emperors? This was indeed “an extraordinary revision of the patriot historical imagination.”8 Thus, sacrifice and autocracy became the ideological core of the social order during the formation of the nation in the Constitutional Convention of the 1780s. There is no doubt that the American Revolution had been a radical shift in the alliances, allegiances, and historical viewpoint of many American patriots; indeed the shift became apparent to the British when rebel troops, composed of yeomen and fishermen, faced the troops of the British Parliament arrayed in the Boston Common and declared themselves to be the soldiers of the King. Thus, from the outset, American society relied directly on the patriarchal vision of an ancestor and founding father or that the president wanted Americans “to submit our lives and property” to the discipline of the good of the society as a whole. That is, the nation was born in what Giorgio Agamben calls a “state of exception,” in which the sovereign need not distinguish between divine and human law. In the “state of exception,” all life, human and otherwise, can be sacrificed and is therefore sanctified by the exercise of sovereignty itself. To put it more strongly, sacred trusts, compacts, obligations, and the call to sacrifice are no less typical of a modern and quite secular society such as the United States than they are of traditional societies with their presumably firmer purchase on the sacred. From the outset, American society relied directly on the patriarchal vision of an ancestor and founding father or that the president wanted Americans “to submit our lives and property” to the discipline of the good of the society as a whole. American society brings the past and the future into present critical moments by calling for sacrifice in the face of despair. George Washington entrusted the torch that held what he had called “the sacred fire of liberty” to the new nation. Having evoked a new frontier for freedom in John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arabella, John F. Kennedy passed the sacred fire to a new generation, his own. Thus, to understand both American despair and its resources for overcoming that despair, we therefore need to find the national ideology of self-sacrifice in the stories American society tells about itself in critical moments: narratives about the nation’s origins and destiny, its heroes and its villains, its travails and its victories.

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It may seem strange for the highly educated, the best and the brightest, to fall back on story, myth, and ideology in complex national crises. However, rationality is the more easily displaced in a complicated situation, where it competes with normally latent fears, passions, beliefs, and presumptions. There we find the more or less ignorant, disorganized, and paranoid attempts of its leaders to define a looming threat by discerning its risks and by assessing the intentions of others. In his brilliant study of how Western nations stumbled into the first World War, Christopher Clark says as much when he refers to the “dissent and polemics” that confused decision makers “with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia.”9 During such a critical moment, when the imaginations of those at the highest levels of power may be fraught with ignorance, mistrust, and even delusion, it is essential to discern the latent beliefs and commitments that constitute a nation’s identity and may well precipitate destructive— and self-destructive—actions. To discern these normally hidden beliefs and fears, however, we need to focus on critical moments. There we will find a complex of visions and beliefs, ideals and assumptions inherited from the past that cloud the present and shape the future. That is why it is important to take seriously Christopher Clark’s observation that, in the years leading up to World War I, many of the Western states had developed a “sacrificial ideology” that permeated their societies, influenced the youth to adopt a military posture, and set public opinion in favor both of militarization and of the virtues of war itself.10 We will return to that point later in this discussion. I mention it here to highlight the possibility that a latent ideology, one determined to call for and elicit sacrifice, may add to the fog of rationality.

The covert sanctity of the secular nation-state It may be that some critical moments have had little effect on American society’s self-understanding and identity, its sense of continuity, and its vision of itself in the future. As a critical moment in the life of the nation, for instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis has engendered an ongoing critique over many years from a variety of professional and academic sources. In retrospect, the Kennedy administration is usually credited with having adopted a pragmatic approach, one that was continuously revised according to the available data regarding Soviet capacities intentions, and motives. Even the threat of a nuclear war and the resulting blight on life on this planet did not inspire vigils, fires burning through the dark night of the

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winter solstice, or sacrifices of the newborn. Sanctity, I will argue, was embodied in the secular nation-state, where it could mix life with politics, turns means into ends, and call for the sacrifice of human life without appearing to offend either divine or human law. That was a state of exception: no less embedded in a secular state than in the sacred monarchy to whom American rebels first called for help, and whose prerogatives the new and secular nation installed in the office of the chief executive. Ordinarily, however, complex, modern, and apparently secular societies like America are ignorant of their own Caesarism precisely because they are immersed in the passage of time; they temporize as a way of life, make themselves up as they go along, and thrive routinely on novelty; thus, little is done once and for all, and the future is always being revised with every fresh prediction. Indeed, in fascist societies the ultimate sacrifice becomes penultimate and, in time, routine. Remember Daniel Bell’s proclamation in the 1960s of The End of Ideology. It was relatively easy at that time for the sociological imagination to perceive America as having indeed been rationalized. Personal considerations had been isolated from the world of work and politics, science and education. The world had its own logic, and there were rules in each part of the larger society for gathering and tor less systematically. Even in primary schools, children could be encouraged to make observations so that they could develop and test their hypotheses. Thus, American society, even in a situation as fateful as the Cuban missile crisis, would have needed neither to evoke sacred memory while calling for sacrifice nor to invoke the ideologies of Marxism or fascism. Indeed, sociologists could have assumed that, as an increasingly secular society, America was by then “disenchanted,” that it lacked a sense of mystery, of unseen presences, and of invisible forces at work in everyday life. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, both Prime Minister Khrushchev and President Kennedy could risk the possibility of a nuclear winter that imperiled the survival not only of their own nations but also of biological life on the planet because they embodied the sanctity of the secular nationstate. The authoritative exercise of a secularized nation-state, even while risking a nuclear holocaust, operates through what Max Weber called “formal” rationality. Formal rationality lacks substance, a strong and clear sense of the truly existential and ontological issues that are at stake in a critical moment. That is why Christopher Clark entitles his book on the origins of World War I The Sleepwalkers. The question, Clark notes, is

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how to allow latent “questions and objections” which “might have been suppressed in a more disciplined policy environment, to come to the surface.”11 Thus, a secularized American society encountered this critical moment by gathering all the available and relevant data, projecting scenarios for a wide range of possible motives, interests, goals, devising strategies under a variety of conditions, assessing probable costs and outcomes for a range of possible initiatives and responses, and avoiding responses based on ideology, fear, of nonrational forms of discernment. Similarly, there is some evidence that Prime Minister Khrushchev’s intentions and motives were merely tactical, strategic, or political. In his 1972 book, The Diffusion of Power, Medland, quoting Walt Rostow, concludes that “Khrushchev was looking for a quick success which would enhance his political prestige and power in Soviet politics; enhance his authority in the international communist movement . . . redress the military balance cheaply in terms of resources . . . and provide leverage for the resolution of the Berlin problem he had sought without success since 1958.” Thus, formal rationality and short-term strategizing provide for the quasi-magical and formulaic exercise of sacred power over life and death, being and nonbeing, existence and annihilation. By doing the right thing in the right way, in the right place at the right time, for the right reason and in the right manner, a secular nation-state may nevertheless initiate a long nuclear winter in which bacteria have the best chance of survival. Indeed, they have a better chance of doing so than did Neolithic priests on the long night of the winter solstice. On this point Clark notes that, “while Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy were reluctant to wage war, and the State Department was largely opposed to intervention, the smaller and more nimble National Security Council, which strongly favored war and operated beyond congressional oversight, narrowed down the Presidents’ options on Vietnam until war was virtually unavoidable.”12 This narrowing of options, Weber’s “formal rationality,” with its terrible oversimplification, seems uniquely fitting and relevant. One wonders why there is widespread paranoia about the intentions of leaders with questionable authority and yet the power to destroy nations. One answer to that question is that the secularity of decision-making permits authoritarianism in a democratic society to remain covert. Thus, the Cuban Missile Crisis, although among the more terrifying moments in the history of the world, soon allowed ordinary life to return. Public

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opinion polls taken shortly afterward indicate that most Americans soon went back to their normal ways of living and working. “Overall, while the Cuban missile crisis was on most people’s minds, the public was not overwhelmed by worries and did not dwell on concerns about death and nuclear survival. Nor were there notable declines in psychological well-being. Instead, psychological reactions were rather mixed and muted. Positive affect was down, general happiness was up, and negative affect changed little. Likewise, measures of stress and anxiety showed little alteration and clearly presented no evidence that people were traumatized or debilitated by worries over the crisis. People did, however, report slight gains in some problematic activities and a larger increase in drinking. In sum, the public did not panic, was not overcome by nuclear anxiety, and remained psychologically intact during the crisis.”13 In the normal course of quite ordinary events, an ideological predisposition toward authoritarian government may remain embedded and concealed in the ways in which power is conceived and justified, exercised and distributed, retained and disguised. It is only in critical moments - when a secular society calls for sacrifices - that it cannot risk withdrawal, cynicism, or despair or allow its members to withdraw their allegiance to smaller and more personal sanctuaries. For the time being, it may well be possible for a secular society to draw upon its more dramatic forms of rhetoric and the exercise of power not only to prevent potentially crucial issues from becoming matters of public concern and debate but also to alleviate the kind of cultural despair that preceded the rise of Nazi Germany. However, in critical moments, a secular society may call for a Caesar who enacts retribution and restoration; settles old scores; pays off of old debts; demands the sacrifices of a faithful, obedient, and sacrificial people; and promises messianic or even apocalyptic triumphs. Under a Caesar, therefore, all of life becomes political. No sacrifice is beyond the sovereign’s will, and the partial authority of local governments, like the traditional authority vested in the family or in communal groups, is augmented and completed in the sovereign’s own person and by the sovereign’s will. The sovereign’s words are tantamount to deeds. I am arguing that we must allow for the covert authoritarianism that has legitimated America from its start. It is an authoritarianism that feeds on announcements that the future of American democracy itself is being threatened, and that the identity, continuity, and even the survival of a social order are at stake. At this moment of writing, the media are

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heralding a turn toward fascism in American politics. It is a turn accompanied by many signs of cultural despair: xenophobia, concern over the sort of downward mobility that used to be called proletarianization, ethnocentrism, nationalism, authoritarian leanings, and calls for a restoration of national greatness. Once again, it is worth noting how difficult it is to discern whether the social order is reinforcing its sense of solidarity and control in the face of such critical moments or is using the appearance and announcements of such moments to reinforce its own sense of solidarity and control. I would also add that a social order as secular as the United States finds it difficult to relieve the time being of chronic crisis, by appealing either to the auspices of eternity or to the reassurances offered by a sacred history. It is not that such appeals are entirely absent. In the 2016 presidential campaign, one candidate for that office invoked eternity as the reason for being—and for being a candidate; evangelicals harbor aspirations for America to fulfill its promise as a Christian nation. However, until these invocations of the sacred become central to the ideology of the winning candidate, it is premature to suggest that sacred hope and memory have recovered from their cultural fatigue. Cultural despair makes the sense of chronic crisis addictive. Thus, as if he were running a casino, Trump provoked repeated, virtually daily crises; raised impossibly high expectations; and rejected all accountability for the losses that ensured to his followers. I would immediately call this constant turmoil the Ur-fascist commitment to life for the sake of struggle, Trump’s kampf, but it is still too soon. However, in the conclusion of this book, I will argue that secularity so inures a social order to temporizing that the fascist cycle will take much longer to complete itself. It is probably too soon for the return of a real Caesar. It is clear, however, that the chief executive himself is poorly informed and under the influence of a circle of advisers with their own ideology and special interests in intervention. Under these conditions, an ideology of crisis may make even a potential nuclear holocaust seem part of a takenfor-granted universe of meaning and expectation. When the president adopts a paranoid view of domestic and foreign relationships without taking responsibility for making risky and destructive decisions from an unnecessarily limited set of options, we have a scenario like the one described by Christopher Clark on the eve of the First World War and, to a lesser extent, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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In critical moments it is possible for the entire nation to take selfdestructive risks—and to risk the survival of other peoples and nations— even when the reasons for undertaking such risks are poorly understood, known only to a relatively few insiders, and subject to those who have influence or even control over public opinion. I am thinking, of course, of the information possessed by John F. Kennedy when he gave his first State of the Union Address concerning the perils and tests facing America. The nuclear-armed Soviet empire could change the nation’s being into nothingness. .

Cultural despair increases as devotion slackens, as sacred memory fails, and as the ancestors move on or become unresponsive and indifferent. Despair deprives a social order of any lasting sense of presence; promises and possibilities remain too long unfulfilled to be still credible; observances fall into disuse; the dawning of a new and longedfor age is replaced by the sense of living in an age that is forever passing away. Sacrifices no longer contribute to the nation’s continuity or development and remain unredeemed in the end. Without a beginning and an end to the national story, the sense of time loses its intensity; the time being goes on indefinitely; novelties and the unprecedented become commonplace; change becomes routine; possibilities become scenarios. Cultural despair requires the sovereign to represent what is missing or lost among the crucial figures of the past, to consummate the social order in singular and decisive acts, and to call for sacrifice. Otherwise, things will come to an end. The nation will decline or be altogether destroyed. There will be no time when the nation will finally fulfill its ancient promises, pay off its ancient debts, and become immune to erosion and decay. There is only unfinished business, continuing possibility, and the threat of impending loss or defeat without hope for ultimate vindication, restoration, consummation, or victory. When the anxiety of death is unassuaged by the possibility of a final triumph or redemption, a sense of crisis becomes endemic and perennial and a secular society becomes especially vulnerable to despair and terror. The ancestors will not respond to the petitions of the living. Death will replace life. Only then will the future bring a crisis to end all crises: an end to the nation’s kampf, a Final Solution to the agon, the struggle, between being and nonbeing.

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Notes 1

Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Epistolae Morales ad Lucilium, Selected and Translated with an Introduction by Robin Campbell, London: Penguin Books, 1969:98,100. 2 Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, The London Review of Books June 22, 1995 Issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism. 3 Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, The London Review of Books June 22, 1995 Issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism. 4 John F. Kennedy, State of the Union Address, January 29, 1961;section IV, p.5. 5 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.114. 6 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2013; p.121. 7 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 22. 8 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 22. 9 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: HarperCollins, 2013; p. 240. 10 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: HarperCollins, 2013; p. 240. 11 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: HarperCollins, 2013; p. 240-1. 12 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: HarperCollins, 2013; p. 240. 13 Tom W. Smith, “Trends: The Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. Public Opinion,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 265-293; p.74.

CHAPTER THREE IN MODERN AMERICA, IS SACRED MEMORY A THING OF THE PAST?

Umberto Eco locates fascism in the struggle against the passage of time. In order to achieve symbolic transcendence over time itself, societies link the antique with the modern and combine the sacred with the secular. The agon, the struggle, between life and death, time and eternity, presence and absence, goes on endlessly without a final resolution. As Jean-Pierre Vernant, the historian of ancient Greece, puts it, in times of crisis, one is often caught up “in the thrall of the present moment and all its attendant pleasure and pain,” but one also feels “swept along in a moving, everchanging, irreversible flux.”1 That is one reason why the kampf that pits the social order against the passage of time is addictive. The battle with time is impossible to win once and for all. Time is notably unfavorable to the Ur-fascist attempt to wed the ancient to the modern and the secular to sacred. That is in part because sacred rites and the sanctification of collective memory themselves have difficulty in embodying and effecting transcendence over time when coping with “irreversible flux.” Lacking a way to inspire hope for the fulfillment of ancient promises and of long-standing aspirations, a society finds its collective horizon forever receding, and there is no way to transform death into a new beginning. The dead will have made their sacrifices in vain. Especially in critical moments, when it becomes necessary for a society to replenish the public’s reserves of patriotism and sacrificial commitment, doubt over the efficacy of rituals will incite longings for autocratic, even dictatorial leadership in order to restore the nation to what it believes to have been its original virtues, vitality, and mission.

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The civil war as Lincoln’s kampf This collective struggle has long been a matter of anxious import to Americans. Both John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln saw the nation caught up in this struggle with the passage of time; both presidents believed that the years of their administration would determine whether or not America would be able to survive as a democracy. For Lincoln, the nation was engaged in the classical agon, the struggle between being and nonbeing. Only by sanctifying the nation itself, the Union, could he transform the approach of finality into possibility; the coming end must become a new beginning. As Lincoln put it, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”2 Indeed, Lincoln believed that the nation lived in a present-time that promised the fulfillment of ancient promise and possibility. According to Ross, “Using the language of exceptionalism, he described America’s republican institutions as more conducive to liberty ‘than any of which the history of former times tells us.’ The duty of his generation was to bequeath the nation ‘undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.’” 3 What arrests our attention here, of course, is Lincoln’s kampf, his agon, his contest with the passage of time. Not only did he believe that the nation was at the eleventh hour if it ever were to implement its universalistic ideals regarding the equality and freedom of all human beings. Its very attempt to meet those ideals would imperil the current generation, which might become the last that fate would permit the world to know. Later, it was the generation of survivors on whom would depend the vision and legacy of those who had died as they carried the sacred fire of liberty on the killing fields. Only if the sacrifices at Gettysburg were sanctified in collective memory would the original vision be bequeathed “undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation.” 4This is what Eco had in mind; for Ur-fascism, life is lived for struggle, and it is a struggle against the passage of time itself. We find this form of Ur-fascism, with its mixture of the ancient and the modern, the secular and the sacred, early in the life of the new American Republic. If the Civil War were indeed the beginning time of American society, it is not only because Washington was welcoming Lincoln into the apotheosis of all Caesars and human divinities. It was also because, at the moment of his death, George Washington had first been depicted as

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ascending immediately into heaven. In an 1802 engraving of George Washington, an Irish émigré artist, John James Barralet, commemorated the death of Washington by depicting the late president being raised from his tomb and assisted into heaven by Immortality and by Father Time, depicted as the ancient Greek divinity Kairos: the god in whom meet timeas-relentless-flux and time-as-the-critical moment. In this engraving, “Washington is participating in an apotheosis, a resurrection, and an assumption.”5 This depiction finds antecedents in the ancient Near East, in the deification of Greek Kings, and, in Rome, during the period between Caesar Augustus and Nero and, in brief later revivals, with the apotheoses of Roman emperors.6 Indeed, the sacralization of George Washington links him not only with Roman Caesars but also with the royal Stuarts, James I, and, as Phoebe Lloyd Jacob tells, with Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin.7 Note the conjunction of the primitive with the transcendental, the antique with the modern, the old order with the new age. In Barralet’s 1802 engraving of Washington’s apotheosis, we find in attendance not only Kairos, the god of time, but also Faith, Hope, and Charity; an American Indian; an eagle; and two rattlesnakes. The North American is at home in the classical scene. Thus, Phoebe Lloyd Jacobs concludes, “What Barralet had constructed was reenactment of the antique rite of deification upon a Christian scaffolding. . . . Over several centuries apotheosis had evolved as a form to celebrate important secular leaders almost as though they were holy figures.”8 As Umberto Eco has argued, Ur-fascism displays precisely this combination of the secular with the religious, the ancient and the modern. The critical moment of President Washington’s death and departure had thus provided an Ur-fascist core to the nation’s struggles against the passage of time. The living could become contemporaries of the deceased and yet risen president, because the nation itself had become coeval with Greek and Roman heroes and emperors who had long dwelled among the gods on Mount Olympus.9 The abundance not only of Biblical, Greek, and Roman but also of North American references thus linked the classical past to the new frontier. As Phoebe Lloyd Jacobs put it, “antique precedent and contemporary incident were as one.”10 Consider the highly ritualized collective responses to the death of Lincoln at the close of the Civil War. When Abraham Lincoln was shot, there were not only ceremonies in honor of the martyred president as his cortege passed through communities from Washington D.C.¸ but also calls

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for his apotheosis. Lincoln was to be given a place in the Capitol comparable to that of George Washington’s ascent into heaven. In the many portraits gracing American parlors, George Washington was looking down from his heavenly apotheosis in the rotunda of the nations’ Capitol. Indeed, George Washington was often depicted as welcoming the newly martyred Lincoln into heaven. “Here, a statue or bust of Washington looked down upon Lincoln’s coffin; there, a life-size portrait of Washington stood beside it; elsewhere, a slogan linked the two names. Never mind that many were faulting Lincoln for having been at best a weak president not only in the conduct of the war but also in his failure to prosecute the leaders of the Confederacy for their treason. Shortly after Lincoln's entombment, people were buying mourning portraits of Washington welcoming Lincoln to glory.” Washington, as John Adams put it, had become like a god to American society. By associating the death of Lincoln with the apotheosis of George Washington, sacred memory could bring the past into the present and assure that, although the critical moment in the present might have been an abrupt departure, it would never become a point of return. Indeed, the American historian Catherine Albanese referred to the Civil War as the Beginning Time. Much in the same vein, Schwartz goes on to note that “The Civil War.. introduced a New Heroic Age. The massive scale of the war made the Revolutionary War, and its soldiers, including Washington, seem less significant.” 11 Their saving of the Union was equivalent to the act of creating it—hence the frequent pairing of the images of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. However, that Beginning could not have occurred unless sacred memory had enabled Americans to turn an end into a new beginning. At the core of the American political community, we therefore find the sanctification of a sacrificial president who called the nation into being in its struggle against the passage of time. Thus, in 1932 Congress mandated what became over four million local celebrations invoking Washington’s presence, inspiration, and authority. Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait of Washington was reproduced and displayed widely in the United States during the depths of the depression. As historian Adam Greenhalgh puts it, “the image was displayed in a ritualized manner that dislocated it from the realm of secular portraiture altogether and consecrated it as a cult image.”12 The portrait thus provided “a show of national unity built around Washington’s symbolic presence, just as 150 years earlier Americans had rallied under his leadership.”13

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By the end of the Civil War, when the apotheosis of George Washington had been depicted in the fresco above the Capitol rotunda, it would appear that American society had found a way of symbolizing, embodying, conveying, transcending, or overcoming the passage of time by fusing the ancient with the modern, the secular with the sacred, the temporal with the eternal. It had overcome the prospect of inevitable decline and had temporarily immunized its people from cultural despair. Perhaps that was a time in American society when, as the sociologist William Lloyd Warner later put it, speaking of the survival of the Memorial Day services that had been initiated at the close of the Civil War, “Men [sic] can . . . love and hate themselves as gods and be loved and hated by the deities they have created. The faith of the group in supernatural symbols, the sense of ‘integration,’ of ‘oneness,’ and the sacrifice of self for the survival of these sacred symbols now become meaningful. Whenever an individual can identify sacred symbols in which he believes with the integrated socio-species symbols of his ordinary life, he (sic) can have enough faith to believe in their supernatural efficacy and power.”14 This very capacity, i.e. to fuse the antique with the modern and the secular with the sacred lies at the heart of Umberto Eco’s notion of Urfascism. Indeed, because the people’s very being-in-time is contingent on the survival of the sanctified collectivity, the sovereign is entitled to call upon the people for unlimited sacrifice. They have no alternative, since their existence and their being have no other life than that conferred upon them by the state and the social whole. Under these conditions, however, cataclysmic natural disasters and critical moments such as the assassination of a chief of state evoke and intensify doubts, conflicts, and criticisms of a society’s leaders and institutions. After the shooting of Lincoln, while many thousands were imagining Washington as welcoming him with open arms into the heavens, thousands more were expounding on Lincoln’s failings, his mismanagement of the war, and his lenience toward Confederate traitors after hundreds of thousands of lives had been sacrificed in the war against the Confederacy. At the same time, many politicians, journalists, and clergymen debated whether the secessionist leaders should be hanged or engaged in the rebuilding of the nation. Certainly the assassination of President Lincoln could have been a point of no return for the social order. How, then, could it have been a “Beginning Time:” the birth of a people, to quote Lincoln, “undecayed by

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the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation?” 15 How can a social order undo, pay for, redeem, and consummate the past in the present while at the same time initiating the future? In a Neolithic society, the solstice does fuse the natural with the supernatural and time with eternity. In post Civil War America, however, there was indeed a gap between the heavens and the earth: Washington’s arms reaching out to Lincoln but not raising him to a place in the heavens. “The lapse of time” between the Revolution and the Civil War had eroded the nation’s confidence in the link between time and eternity. The sacred, unfortunately, is often (I would prefer to say ‘always’) disappointing. Indeed, the sacred shows its capacity to transcend the passage of time only by bearing the marks of time itself. The gods and the ancestors have always been notoriously unreliable. Even the massive stones dragged from watery places for miles to cover Neolithic tombs show evidence of having been eroded by the passage of water over hundreds of years. Thus, the standing stone by the Greek wayside not only kept a point of departure from becoming a point of no return, but it also connoted the wayfarer’s enduring absence. As for the statue of Athena on the Parthenon, it was only a copy of the eternal. Similarly, by 1932 the devotional rites in Washington’s honor had merely encouraged the living to model themselves after Washington’s character and virtues: to become, like Athena, a mere replica. The distance between time and eternity, like the gulf separating the past from the present, had increased since Lincoln’s death, when portraits in American homes had depicted Washington as reaching down from his apotheosis to assist the slain Lincoln in his heavenly ascent.

The atrophy of sacred memory There is some evidence that sacred beliefs and practices can no longer preserve the tension and balance between the past and the future that inhere in a truly critical moment. Although the sacred may give to the merely temporal an elevated seriousness. It can no longer redeem America’s losses and failures, sacrifices and defeats. American society, through sacred commemoration, can no longer transform even singular and compelling loss into a sense of continuing presence. Rather, awareness of that presence conveys a sense of indelible absence. Time has taken its toll on the sacred. In America at least, there is reason for cultural despair. One of the earliest heralds of that despair was Catherine Albanese, who, early in the 1970s, noted how moribund had become American observances of Memorial Day. Originating at the end of the Civil War, which Albanese

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called the Beginning Time, Memorial Day rites had slowly gained their vitality and authority only to lose it gradually owing to “the inability of later generations who had not lived through the experience to reproduce it and then by a new movement in history, the Vietnam war, which seemed to end forever the agreement of the American civil community on the transcendent meaning of war.”16 In the immediate aftermath of the violence of the 1960s and as a result of political assassinations, the murder of protesters, and the steady supply of body bags from Vietnam, Catherine Albanese argued that Americans were no longer united by religious beliefs and rituals that transcended time itself. She was speaking of “the effects of the passage of time and the pressure of events on religious structures.”17 There is no realm of ambiguity here; the temporal had simply superseded whatever was left of the eternal in the nation’s rites honoring those who had died in its service in the Civil War and in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Time had eroded the sacred. Others did not agree. In an earlier assessment of what he called the Memorial Day cult, William Lloyd Warner had come to the conclusion that these local celebrations of a national rite could indeed give the passage of time the tincture of the eternal. In its Memorial Day rites, the nation sanctified not only the deaths of soldiers in war but also the lives of ordinary citizens who had lived, moved and had their being within the sanctuary provided by the nation itself against the terror of death. Culminating in the local cemetery, the Memorial Day rites placed the lives of fallen soldiers and of individual citizens on the altar of the nation, and the nation itself offered its own guarantees against the passage of time. Time and death were the enemy, but they were redeemed by sacred rites honoring the self-sacrifice of the citizen and soldier. However, Warner’s argument had first appeared in his book, American Life. Dream and Reality, in the same year in which an editorialist for the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph was deploring the atrophy of the Memorial Day rites. Over the next twenty years, as Albanese later reported, editors across the country continued to lament “the limp quality of Memorial Day ceremonies” and their “record of non-participation..”18 The nation’s claim on the citizens’ devotion had become weakened. That is why, speaking of the war in Vietnam, Albanese later determined that “The rites of Memorial Day could not unify “[the American civil community] because there was no agreement on the meaning of the war and therefore on the sacrificial quality of the death of American soldiers.”19 The passage of time itself had vitiated what was left of the sacred in these rites.

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Albanese clearly understood that Warner’s view had become thoroughly outdated, given the effects of war in Indochina on the public’s reserves of patriotism and sacrificial commitment. President Kennedy’s exhortation to the people - to ask what they could do for their country had been followed a few years later by chants of “Hell no, we won’t go.” No wonder Albanese concluded that the pressure of time and of critical events had taken their toll on any living memory of sacrifice in the Civil War. Sacred memory could no longer legitimate the call for devotion and further sacrifice on the part of the average citizen. Memorial Day rites no longer supplied faith in the American past as a source of authority and inspiration for the future. Albanese’s reference to “the pressure of time” raises the historical question of how long Memorial Day rites had been moribund. After all, William Lloyd Warner was writing only a few years before Albanese reached her conclusions about Memorial Day rites. Before the assassinations of the 1960s and the slaughters of the war in Vietnam, he could still come to the conclusion that what he called the Memorial Day cult could yet sanctify not only the deaths of American soldiers in various wars but also the lives of ordinary citizens who had served the nation in their everyday lives. Culminating in the local cemetery, the Memorial Day rites seemed still to place the lives of fallen soldiers and of individual citizens on the altar of the nation. Thus America could still redeem time and death by honoring the self-sacrifice of the citizen and soldier. In retrospect, however, it is clear that Warner may well have overlooked the weakness of these Memorial Day rites even at the time of his writing. In the late 1950s, an editorialist for the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph was also deploring the state of these rites. Sacred memory was already losing its more immediate connections to the lives of living citizens. However, it took the Viet Nam War for Albanese to conclude that Warner may well have overlooked the weakness of these Memorial Day rites even at the time of his writing. In the late 1950s, an editorialist for the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph was also deploring the state of these rites. Sacred memory had already begun to lose its more immediate connections with the lives of living citizens. The Beginning Time had become an inaccessible past. However, it took the Viet Nam War for Albanese to conclude that “The rites of Memorial Day could not unify [the American civil community] because there was no agreement on the meaning of the war and therefore on the sacrificial quality of the death of American soldiers.”23 Furthermore, by the 1970s in America, the World War II generation was aging. As the ranks of that generation would begin to thin out, so would their memory of, and their reverence for, the sacrifices of the Second World War.

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With Albanese, then, we may trace the advent of cultural despair to the time when sacred memory was no longer able to provide a sense of the continuing presence of the past and of the departed without also intensifying an enduring sense of loss and of something missing at the heart and in the center of the social order. Albanese writes, and I agree, that “some form of collective expression of human anxiety over death must be present in a society...The question is, if the cult of Memorial Day is declining, then where is the collective expression of death going?” Her answer was quite simple: “the American symbol system is in crisis.”24 Where, then is one to find the “collective expression of death?... “So the answer of crisis is really the answer of ‘nowhere’ to the question of where the collective expression of death is going. That is precisely why there is a crisis.”25 America could no longer evoke commitment and sacrifice by claiming in some way to transcend the passage of time and death itself. Albanese was pointing to what I have been calling the fatigue of the sacred: a loss of confidence in the nation’s struggle against time and chance, uncertainty and death itself. Sacred memory is a notoriously weak bulwark against the passage of time; it suffers from cultural fatigue. Ancestors, like the gods, are not always responsive, and when they do respond they may be ambiguous and disappointing. Monuments, even those as enduring as the massive water stones covering Neolithic tombs, reveal the erosion caused over hundreds of years by the flow of water. Why bother, then, with the sacred when a Caesar can redeem the times, heal the nation’s divisions, allay its fears, thwart its enemies, dispense with outmoded or even sacred precedent, substitute his will for that of the people’s hapless and deceptive representatives, initiate the future by turning ends into means, and defy death with threats of nuclear annihilation?

Turning social history into autobiography By seeking to transcend time, whether in the form of shrines and priesthoods or beliefs and practices, the sacred inevitably exposes itself to the possibility either of being relegated to the past or of becoming deferred to an end time. As the anthropologist Webb Keane puts it of the Anakalangese, “The language of temporal precedence is equivocal . . . for it can go along with the notion of temporal epochs. It locates the spirits in a segregated past. In this perception of history, the presence of the spirits is acknowledged in the very act of displacing them. The displacement evokes a theme of loss.”26

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Even sanctified ancestors themselves become notoriously unreliable as protectors of the individual or group from the abyss of extinction. According to Webb Keane, the Anakangalese’s houses, certain tombs, and even their valuable possessions of ancestors had once embodied “traces” that seemed to be “shadows” of the ancestors, representing “the lost body of the ancestor.”27 In time, however, the present comes to be seen as “a depleted version of the past.”28 This sense of depletion, says Keane, can take many forms. For some of the Anakangalese, their sacred rites “were no longer alive and complete but partially lost”; the rituals themselves had lost their ability to recover ancestral presence and power.29 As their rites and ancestral houses lost the ability to represent the spirits of the dead, the Anakangalese found their connection with the ancestral sacred becoming very tenuous indeed. The fatigue of the sacred thus intensifies makes it more difficult for communities and the larger society to find a place for death anxiety to go. Citing work on fundamentalists, Keane observes that changes in speech and deportment helped to create “an overarching sense of history built on sharp oppositions between past and present, and between present decisions and the millennial future.”30 Thus, the Protestant Reformation deprived the living of an opportunity to affect the well-being or prospects of the souls of the dead through prayers, alms, or fasting; the dead became transformed from spirits in communion with the living into the embodiments of the past on the other side of an uncrossable boundary between the enlightened present and the unenlightened past. They became mere examples of moral and spiritual endeavor or virtuosity rather than patrons to whom one can turn for assistance in time of need. The spirits of the dead thus belonged to a previous era or epoch that was no longer coeval with the present. It is difficult for a society to believe that its rites are moribund, just as it is difficult for a people to believe that their social order is running out of time. Cultural despair gains momentum whenever there is no way for a nation to sanctify the memory of the dead, to revitalize ancient virtues, or to foster the emergence of new hope and vitality. Collective memory becomes mere recollection. Without a past that can be brought to life in the present through sacred memory, the nation will lack what Clark called a “sacrificial ideology” capable of inspiring its citizens to give their lives for their nation. Therefore, the capacity of sacred memory to transform death into life, absence into presence, and departure into return needs “to be regularly renewed.”31 Thus, counter-reformations inevitably seek to return to an earlier and more authoritative set of rites.

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At the same time, charismatic leaders may seek to separate the present from a more recent and moribund past in order to give themselves room to re-present an earlier version of ancestral authority. This regressive cycle becomes more authoritarian as aspirants to higher authority claim that they embody an ancestor. However, as Keane puts it, “In order to be recognized as an ancestor-like founder . . . the person who claims to be one must appear to be realizing a capacity for ancestral status that is already latent in the nature of ritual practices.”32 Over time, however, as those practices have been losing their capacity for representation, charismatic leaders will have to produce their own effects, whether these be, as Weber puts it, booty, victory, or some other form of salvation. Even these forms of charisma, however, have only a short span of time in which to deliver the goods and so meet the test of time: perhaps only the first few months in presidential office. By shortening the time available for rites to work and for the gods to redeem the times, the process of secularization thus accentuates the tendency of sacred beliefs and practices like Memorial Day observances to become irrelevant or moribund. In modern societies secularity makes it all the more likely that the slain soldier will be forgotten, rites will be neglected, oaths will be violated, graves desecrated, and shrines ruined. The lost connection will never be restored, and what comes after will have erased all traces of the past. Secularization ensures that flux, the sheer flow of time, will have made it difficult, if not impossible, for the nation’s rites and de novo leaders to maintain continuity with country’s past and to guarantee its transcendence over the passage of time. Until and unless it can be reanimated and revitalized at critical moments, sacred memory offers little chance for collective redemption. Thus, secular societies become prone to the cultural despair that Fritz Stern identified in Germany in the years preceding the emergence of fascism as an antidote to decline and insignificance. Until and unless it can be reanimated and revitalized at critical moments in the life of a social order, sacred memory offers little chance for collective redemption. If such moments do not present themselves as occasions for national revitalization, the society will have to create them. That is why, I am arguing, it has been necessary for some modern societies to find a leader who will call the nation to sacrifice at a critical time of testing: a sanctified sovereign who can sanctify the political community with his or her own body and soul and, if necessary, blood through a pledge of sacred honor and of life itself.

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There have been critical moments that have tested – and found wanting - the capacity of sacred memory to elicit devotion and sacrifice on the part of the average citizen: setbacks in the nation’s continuing agon against the passage of time that have undermined faith in the American past as a source of authority and of inspiration for the future. Indeed, I am arguing that the 1960s themselves represented a critical period in the life of the nation, and that the death of Kennedy has remained a point of no return to the sanctified memory of the nation’s past sacrifices. Remember that the god Kairos, if not properly seized by the forelock, leaves the supplicant with nothing to grasp. Thus, as I have already noted, for Agamben the sacred “originally expresses both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment.”33 Any subjection to a power over death offers not only the possibility of trumping finality but brings with it the threat of being abandoned by that very power. That abandonment can take many forms: a flat “no” from a god, an offering that is rejected, a prayer that remains unheard or ignored, a disease that remains uncured or becomes fatal, a voyage that ends in disaster, a homecoming that brings tragedy instead of welcome, a commemoration of a slain President whose absence thus becomes all the more apparent and irredeemable. Although it promises transcendence over the passage of time, even sacred memory itself loses energy over time. Under these conditions, sacred memory fails to relieve existential anxiety or to offset finality with further possibility. Rituals that seek to put the living in touch with the dead, to invoke the presence of the absent or the departed, to rekindle ancient passions or to precipitate the advent of longed-for future satisfactions may, over time, may therefore fail to infuse any society with energy or with extraordinary power. The dead may no longer be coeval with one another. The temporal and the eternal may fail to coalesce. The departed and the newborn may not come together either in the womb or in the fires of sacrifice. Ends may not be transformed into beginnings. Points of departure may eventually be seen as points of no return. Even charismatic leaders, then, unable to draw on the reservoir of sacred memory through rites that still work, must demonstrate their power not through words but through deeds. They have no time. Even in ancient societies, monuments that embodied a sense of power over death could also evoke a sense of exposure and abandonment. Consider the standing stones that became the focus of Neolithic devotions during the solstices; they could also be found along the ancient Greek

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wayside where they stood for the presence of the departed traveler. Similarly, the ancient Greek stela prevented the departure of the dead from becoming a point of no return by eliciting anamnesis, the kind of memory that links the living with the dead in a vital, spiritual community. So long as it remains both vital and effective, sacred memory may prevent points of departure from becoming points of no return. They hold at bay the prospect of exposure and abandonment. Properly sanctified by the Neolithic standing stone, the sun, like the wayfarer and the ancestor, has the capacity to come back: but will it? Thus, any attempt to overcome existential anxiety in a cave, a stone circle, or in a shrine might also discover that the time of illumination is fleeting, and that, like the light, the darkness returns. Even the Neolithic grasp on the sacred remained vulnerable to the possibility of inevitable decline and loss. When a catastrophe produces a sharp break in a society’s sense of its own continuity from one generation to the next, the society’s command of the succession between the light and the darkness is called into question. That is precisely what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis as fears of the long nuclear winter became uniquely realistic. Similarly, the killing of JFK radically may well have weakened popular confidence in the nation’s capacity to prevent the forces of nonbeing, of violence and chaos, from determining its future. Indeed, I am arguing that the assassination of President Kennedy may have triggered the same sort of profoundly existential anxieties that haunted a Neolithic solstice. I also am arguing that it was a turning point backward toward the Ur-fascism at the origins of American society. Societal despair thus takes the form of hope for a new Caesar who will fill the emptiness at the society’s center, call for devotion and sacrifice, and initiate the future. To accomplish such a miracle, the sanctified authority at the political and cultural center must suspend and transcend all difference and thus remove every possible exception to their rule. Agamben notes that Augustus, recognized by the Roman Senate on January 16, 27 BCE, was defined by his auctoritas: the capacity to compete and correct, to augment and authorize every other—and inevitably lesser—form of authority. Thus, “It is the auctoritas that he embodies, and not the magistracies with which he has been invested, that makes it impossible to isolate in him something like a private life and domus.”34 The Caesar is a collective person, and as his words become deeds, the past and the future emerge from the present. Time is then no longer fraught with existential anxiety but becomes a flow in the midst of which individuals and whole societies live and move and have their being.

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However, it is also filled with time-as-event: words becoming deeds, ends becoming means, the dark becoming light. On this note, it is worth rereading President Trump’s Inaugural Address. The night is far passed. The long awaited day is at hand. Promises, mere words when spoken, are soon to become deeds. Caesarism conquers time by embodying the temporal and thus putting an end to temporizing. As words become deeds, the fascist dream of a social order whose parts exist only because they derive from and depend on the whole becomes political fact. Indeed, the hallmark of the Caesar is the capacity to embody and bring about a new order that will stand the test of time. By incarnating Promise, the Caesar consummates all possibility and puts an end to every alternative affection or aspiration. The Caesar determines and incarnates what to expect, how long to wait, and what sacrifices will have to be made. America has become a truly secular society; the saeculum, the present age or the time being, is all there is. A sense of crisis has become endemic and chronic; American society continuously makes itself up as it goes along. Novelty has become commonplace. Because temporariness has become permanent, one might imagine that American society no longer needs even to transcend the passage of time. Sacred memory no longer offers active communication with the dead, and American rituals, even in critical moments, are little more than tactical maneuvers to arouse public interest, commitment, and alarm. The death of John F. Kennedy, like the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, has created a long-standing vacancy at the national center where sacred memory once stood. However, American society still needs to imagine itself as transcending the passage of time. Indeed, the cycle from authoritarian origins toward partial and secularized democracy is making another regressive. There is a widespread and deeply held desire for old virtues to be renewed and restored, although some have in mind the original sanctities of the American South. Many seek the advent of a new Caesar, especially if the current incumbent turns out to have disappointed those who had thought that he was the one who was to come. I am arguing simply that the process of secularization obscures but does not eliminate Umberto Eco’s Ur-fascism. The linking of the natural with the supernatural, the ancient with the modern, the secular with the sacred: these may be effaced but not eradicated over the passage of time. Americans still will seek an authoritarian leader to lend a sense of the

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extraordinary to the mundane and lend to the merely temporal an elevated seriousness. Indeed, the longing for such a leader has also been intensified by the process of secularization. Secularity makes the passage of time relentless, full of anxiety and uncertainty, devoid of the comforts of the past in the present, and lacking a future that fulfills ancient promise. Thus, the flow of time may have left Americans, as Albanese suggested, at the mercy of their own anxieties about death, but in time, in a critical moment, the cycle—and it is a regressive cycle—of anxiety, conflict, and the appeal to a sanctified and authoritarian political center will return. Indeed, the latent presence of the sacred in American society, and thus its underlying Ur-fascism, make such a demand for Caesar inevitable. It is only a matter of time. We need therefore to know more about American society’s grasp on time, or time’s grasp on American society, in ways that allow us to see what is peculiarly or particularly American, rather than what is simply a variation on a more universal tendency. We also need to assess how Americans have come to view the place of their nation in time. In particular, we need to know more about the ways in which Americans experience, talk about, and conceptualize critical moments: moments that in themselves are quintessentially time-bound and yet have effects that can only be assessed over the passage of time.

Notes 1

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006:131. Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 388. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 3 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 4 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 5 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p.125; jstor 2

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1180583. 6 Larry Kreitzer, “Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor,” The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 53, No. 4, (Dec. 1990), pp. 210-217; p. 211. 7 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p. 126,128; jstor 1180583. 8 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p. 126; jstor 1180583. 9 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p.123; jstor 1180583. 10 Phoebe Lloyd Jacob, “John James Barralet and the Apotheosis of George Washington. Winterthur Portfolio Vol.112 (1977), pp. 115-137; p. 116; jstor 1180583. 11 American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 221-236; p.225. Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095781 12 Adam Greenhalgh, “’Not a Man but a God’, The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of George Washington,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 269-304; p. 272. 13 Adam Greenhalgh, “’Not a Man but a God’, The Apotheosis of Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of George Washington,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 269-304; p. 272. 14 W. Lloyd Warner, American Life. Dream and Reality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1953; 1962. 15 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 16 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 392. 17 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398. 18 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 388. 19 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 391. 23 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 391. 24 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 397. 25 Catherine Albanese, “Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 386-398; 397.

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Keane 2007:161. Keane 2007:159. 28 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns. Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007; 160. 29 Keane 2007:156-7. 30 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns. Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley; University of California Press, 2007; p. 129. 31 Busby 2006:88. 32 Keane 2007:157. 33 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:83. 34 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998: pp. 82-3. 27

CHAPTER FOUR AMERICAN DESPAIR AND THE LONGING FOR SOVEREIGNTY

In the previous chapter, we discussed the notion that there is a modern tendency toward fascism. Continuing exposure to the flux of time, by exposing the difference between the past and the present, and between the present and the future, causes a continuing sense of loss, change, and uncertainty. Modernity lives at the crossroads between two kinds of time, irreversible flux and critical event: the former being a continuing and open-ended time-being somewhere between no longer and not yet. The prospect of living up to a nation’s original promise and of redeeming the sacrifices of previous generations keeps receding into the ever-increasing distance. This kind of time is conducive to its own sort of chronic and cultural despair. Thus, Ur-fascism becomes the answer to the question, posed by Catherine Albanese, about how, given the decay of rituals such as Memorial Day commemorations, Americans can cope with their anxieties over death. By transcending the differences between the ancient world and the modern, between the secular and the sacred, and between the natural and the supernatural, the sacred will return to the political and cultural center of modern societies in time to redeem ancient sacrifices and to call for new ones. Indeed, the modern world calls for, elicits, and legitimizes the kind of absolute sovereignty that—as Agamben puts it— can sacrifice the living without violating either human or divine law. The latter kind of time, the eventful, creates a time-being somewhere between the irrevocable and the inexorable. Characterized by sharp breaks between the past and the present, it also consists of sharp breaks between the present and what used to be the future. The experience of finality and of foregone possibility in turn create their own more acute kind of cultural despair. Indeed, I argue that the assassinations not only of John F. Kennedy, of his brother Robert, the attorney general, and of Martin Luther King, confronted America with finality head on. Being a secular society with a relatively weak grasp on the sacred, the nation experienced enough

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chance, fate, and uncertainty to raise doubts as to what is true, lasting, vital, and authentic at the American center. Indeed, a vacancy opened up in the political and cultural center of American society: a vacancy easily filled with cultural despair. In their empirical study of various popular attitudes toward the Kennedy-myth nearly thirty years after JFK’s death, Felkins and Goodman argue that “Kennedy’s assassination is the tragic context in which archetypal images of life and death, the Promise and the loss of the Promise, dramatically collide. Reston . . . described most poignantly the archetypal Promise of hope and renewal that became the essential mythic image of the Kennedy years: ‘What was killed in Dallas was not only the President, but the promise. The death of youth and the hope of youth, of the beauty and grace and the touch of magic’”1. The antidote to such despair is a sovereign who can indeed overcome finality by turning ends into new beginnings. Each loss becomes a victory. Hope forfeited for one future becomes the advent of a hitherto undreamedof future. As original virtue triumphs over latter-day decadence and weakness, and as newly realized possibility triumphs over the finality of old loss, the modern world becomes newly sanctified by the ancient: the sacred revealing itself as having been immanent within the secular. Once restored to the political and cultural center of the nation, the sacred subsumes and transcends all other differences: Umberto Eco’s Ur-fascism. Back in the nineteen-sixties, as a new graduate-student in sociology, I believed that as a modern, secular society, America would endure the flow of time without acute, existential anxiety. I believed that Americans could even accept radical secularization in ways that make it unnecessary to embody the passage of time—and transcendence over time—in an authoritarian leader. The sacred would indeed thrive in more diminished sanctuaries and contexts, dispersed throughout the social order, far from the political and cultural centers, in ways that could resist institutionalization. The social order could actually be entrusted to unprincipled and opportunistic leaders without any collective form of sacred memory and vision. All they needed would have been the political skills and acumen sufficient for obtaining and remaining in office. Collectively, the nation would immerse itself in the passage of time, temporizing with novelty and even crisis, without seeking in critical moments the return of a once-andfuture Caesar. John F. Kennedy could die without any form of sanctification: no arms of Washington reaching down from heaven to initiate JFK’s apotheosis.

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Now it is clear that there may still be a national longing for a more absolute form of sovereignty, even if the political community is never again sanctified by memory and hope. The new Caesar may convince the nation of the necessity to introduce new forms of surveillance and detention, to suspend civil liberties. At the eleventh hour, the time will have come for guaranteeing the society’s existence and continuity and for turning ends into beginnings. Indeed, “the time remaining” becomes the primordially critical moment for sacrifice, for transformation, and for the final fulfillment of all obligation and promise. After all, both those who celebrate and those who grieve the results of the last American presidential election believe in conspiracy theories, for albeit different reasons, just as they both feel deeply that something essential has been lost at the political and cultural center of American society. There is no sacred history in which Americans can place their trust that old sacrifices will be redeemed and old promises will be fulfilled. Neither is there any reason to believe that secular time is on the nation’s side. I am arguing that the intensity of cultural despair, along with a regressive cycle turning back toward the absolutist origins of American society, is due to the intersection of two kinds of time: the one an irresistible and relentless flux carrying the nation ever further away from its origins and eroding its basic, democratic institutions; the other an eventful and disruptive kind of time that inserts sharps breaks between the present and what once had been considered the past or imagined to have been the nation’s future. To develop this argument, I am drawing on Hoyt Alverson’s remarkable cross-cultural study of how time is experienced and expressed in four different cultures: Western, Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, and Sesotho. We find that there are quite different ways of expressing time as a medium (“flowing, moving, passing, coming, waiting, fleeting, bearing events with it, conducting events in it”) and time as causal, known in its effects: “destroying, wearing revealing, healing, befalling, happening, making happen.”2 Some cultures abstract these ordinary expressions, long practiced in everyday life and carried forward through generations in folk stories, and incorporate them into more or less coherent philosophies of the place of the individual and everyday life in the cosmos.

Two kinds of time Alverson’s first type of time depicts time as a medium. In it, and through it, things change. Life goes on. Fortunes come and go. That is why

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secularity specializes in temporizing, in scenarios for the future based on revisions of the past, in promises that require projection “going forward” and on averting mortal threats for the time being. A secular society chronically seeks ways to resolve its conflicts and to overcome its anxiety, to free itself from uncertainty and to construe, to interpret, to manage the passage of time. However, if you look at time through the lenses of Alverson’s second type, time produces more sudden and disruptive change, loss, desolation, transformation, and consummation. Finalities come to be seen as markers of irretrievably lost possibility: points of no return, breaks with the past, and the loss of what had been, until that moment, the future. When a secular society no longer is confident that it can stand the test of time, no longer sure that it will endure despite all the changes and the chances that come with life and death itself, it will become vulnerable to acute despair. Cultural despair reflects a sense that time is not on the side of the nation, nor is the nation sufficiently sanctified to call for the commitment and sacrifice without which it will never stand the test of time. Inevitably, demand increases for a day of judgment, initiated and consummated in the selection of a sovereign that embodies, augments, fulfills, and supersedes the sovereignty of the people themselves. The notion of such a final sorting out and accounting has long been a staple of social critique, political polemic, and of fundamentalist prophesying. Certainly polemicists like Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell have announced a time of judgment on civil libertarians, gays and lesbians, feminists, and their sympathizers in the liberal media that shame their audiences for feeling anything but the prescribed tolerance or even affirmation of these groups’ agendas. A secular rapture brings a settling of old scores, a reversal in the fortunes of the poor and the rich, and a judgment on the proud, self-satisfied, and corrupt elites. Thus, when the nation’s past and future are hanging in the balance of the Judgement Day, the sense of time as flux is intersecting with the sense of time as causal. The nation is being condemned for having forgotten or abandoned the authoritative, even messianic vision that originally gave it legitimacy. Memorial Day devotions and rites have become dispensable. The nation is running out of time, and only a critical event like the Day of Judgment will turn the nation back to the promise and calling of its origins. By bringing a trial of the nation’s innermost identity, a secular rapture would reveal what long had been hidden away. As I have noted more than once, just such a demand for such a Day of Judgment arises

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from the cultural despair that Fritz Stern identified in the years preceding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany.3 One solstice in the regressive cycle leading at first away from - and then back toward - the nation’s absolutist origins of return can be found as Thomas Jefferson was summoning the colonists to a day of prayer and humiliation. Jefferson’s occasion was an appeal to the King of England to take action to avert what would become a civil war if Parliament persisted in its plans to close the Port of Boston. Another solstice can be found when Lincoln decided that time was running out on the possibility that the nation would ever fulfill its commitment to the ideals of human freedoms and civil rights. The day had come for a judgment on the blood drawn by the slave-owner’s lash. Still another solstice occurred when John F. announced that the new American republic was facing a mortal test of its survival and of its commitment to bear any burden and to make any sacrifice in carrying liberty’s “sacred fire” to the rest of the world. He was indeed echoing President Washington in the First Inaugural Address: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” 4 Washington is speaking of what ancient Greeks used to call Kairos. The moment is filled with the possibility that, without immediate and decisive action, it will soon be forever too late to fulfill the Republican dream and preserve the sacred fire of liberty. Kairos, I have noted, is the same god depicted by Barralet in 1802 as lifting Washington to his apotheosis among the gods and emperors. He is the God of the Critical Moment, who combines time as a medium, a river bearing away all in its path, with time as a prime cause, both creative and destructive. Kairos bears Washington away, but the moment of his departure is critical for the American people. In a time of Kairos, the existential differences between time and eternity, the living and the dead, and between divine and human law are suspended. So also are the usual differences between classes and political positions; policies and ideologies no longer matter. The unprecedented and fateful nature of the situation requires decisions that appear not only to be unethical or unprincipled but what Kierkegaard called the “transcendental suspension of the ethical.” That is because the critical moment confronts an entire people with the test of time. Kairos is the hour when despair and the longing for sovereignty require a sharp break with the past and the beginning of a future that no one can

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wholly envisage. Such an hour requires decisive action both in order to realize its fleeting possibilities and to ward off its dangers. Opposition and criticism only confirm the leader’s imagined destiny and his followers’ loyalty. Anyone reading this description will understandably remember that in 2016 a relatively free and largely democratic people elected as president a man who claimed that his electoral victories were unprecedented, that his achievements in the first months of his administration were “historic,” and that his administration would suspend the usual ethical criteria for judging conflicts of interest. Such readers will also have noted that President Trump appears to be addicted to the critical moment if only in order to justify taking unprecedented and unprincipled actions. These acts, in turn, allow him to live for the kampf, the struggle against all his enemies and those who are enemies of the people. With Trump in office, furthermore, it appears that the enemies of the people are also enemies of the state and, therefore, foes of President Trump himself. The personal is wedded to the collective, the ends to the means; the end of the carnage of the American working class becomes a new beginning for the nation as a whole. That is what happens when the flux of time, the sheer passage of time itself, with its unending openness to change and to revisions of both the past and the future, becomes fused with the passage of time as causal and fateful. The success of a relatively unprepared and unprincipled presidential candidate in 2016 was just a harbinger, I am arguing, of more messianic leaders to come. Within a few more years, social conflicts over the effect of global trade on social and economic inequality, the rights of minorities and immigrants, and white supremacy may well intensify and become more violent. The mobilization of portions of the electorate that previously have remained passively alienated will threaten political stability, and appeals for national unity will become particularly divisive. Similarly, external threats from global trade or from stagnant economic growth, from terrorism or from aggressive and nuclear-armed nations may become clear and present dangers. Under these conditions, the nation may well opt for a markedly charismatic, authoritarian, perhaps even a totalitarian form of leadership. Such an outcome is especially likely if it becomes increasingly difficult for the nation to distinguish existential from political issues. Thus, when a secular society faces relatively extreme threats both to its order and to its survival, it may seek more authoritarian and charismatic leaders who are able to sanctify national sovereignty, to forge a national will, to advocate the unfettered assertion of national power, and to embody

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some form of the sacred that subsumes and supersedes all other forms of difference. That is why, as James Barber puts it of Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, “a political leader may come to believe that he has a magic strategy, a way of acting that is not subject to the ordinary rules of political evaluation, one that is bound to work if rightly performed.”5 Much has been made of Donald Trump’s tendency to emulate Andrew Jackson, but he has a much better prototype in Andrew Johnson, who complained of being unfairly treated by rivals and by the media. Indeed, Barber reminds us that “Johnson went on and on, reiterating for an hour and ten minutes the old themes of his personal life history, the false accusations against him, and his similarity to Christ. Johnson asked: Are those who want to destroy our institutions not satisfied with one martyr?” 6 Johnson indeed presented himself as the one who could transform sovereignty through sacrifice. “If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union . . . let an altar of the Union be erected, and then if necessary lay me upon it, and the blood that now animates my frame shall be poured out in a last libation as a tribute to the Union; and let the opponents of this government remember that when it is poured out the blood of the martyr will be the seed of the church.”7 The transformation of sacrifice into sovereignty appeals to people who, like those mobilized by Donald Trump, believe they have been forgotten. Thus, speaking of Andrew Johnson’s run for presidential office in 1865, Barber notes that in Nashville on October 24 Johnson faced “a large crowd of Negroes…a mass of human beings, so closely compacted together that they seemed to compose one vast body, no part of which could move without moving the whole,” over which “torches and transparencies . . . cast a ruddy glow.” When Johnson promised that, once in office, he would guarantee the sanctity of marriage among Negroes whose women were not safe from white exploitation, he was hailed as a savior. According to Barber, the crowd was ecstatic: “‘Thank God, Thank God’ came from the lips of a thousand women.” At which point someone shouted, “‘You are our Moses,’ a cry echoed again and again by the crowd.” 8 No doubt Johnson was deeply moved by this rallying cry. The sacrificial sovereign can not only reverse the flow of time but also turn it into a redemptive force. Remember that Hitler proclaimed in Mein Kampf that the long-awaited time had come to turn the finality of Christ’s death into a final kampf against evil itself. “My feeling as a Christian . . . points me to my Lord and Savior as fighter. It points me to the man who

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once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter . . . In that I defend myself against Judaism, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”9 The tide of time would be turned against death itself.

The flow of time and the culture of despair When the flow of time merges with an indefinitely extended critical moment, there is no time for a national day of prayer and humiliation, no appeal to a distant monarch either on earth or in heaven, no way to go outside the system to rectify its ills or to save its soul. That is because the nation lives without the blessing of a sacred history or the promise of future redemption. Under these conditions, a secular society lives in a chronic “state of exception,” with no constitutional precedent immune to ad hoc reinterpretation and revision; any law may be fulfilled by suspending it. Even the election of a demagogue who claimed to have as little respect for the law as he had for most people would then seem to be entirely consistent with the self-creation and chronic innovation of a secular society. At the intersection of the two kinds of time, the flowing and the eventful, rituals may fail to reanimate sacred memory, suspend disbelief, evoke commitment, redeem losses, and legitimate pleas for further sacrifice. Their failure to sanctify and renew the nation as a political community feeds cultural despair by underscoring the fear that the nation will fulfill Fichte’s pronouncement on Germany that I quoted earlier: “If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depth of its miseries.”10 If the nation loses faith in its capacity for revitalization and self-renewal, the alienation of its citizens will become more pervasive and profound. Under these conditions, when collective vision and rituals no longer elicit commitment and sacrifice or provide a second line of national defense against cultural despair, the time has come for Judgment. Judgement Day takes the place of rites and symbols that might have enshrined the death of John F. Kennedy in sacred memory and thus might also have defended the nation against the capacity of time to destroy the irreplaceable. Indeed, decades after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when Americans viewed Oliver Stone’s film JFK, many showed far less faith in their own democratic social order and the legitimacy or effectiveness of voting. Furthermore, the lack of rites of collective transformation also

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leaves the nation dependent on the mass media for recollecting, understanding, and learning from critical moments that have threatened not only the survival but its very continuity as a democratic social order: moments as destructive as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and as momentous as the Watergate crisis. The American press has contributed to the myth of Kennedy as a leader who could enable the nation to stand the test of time. In the commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it became clear that the American press still harbors a bias toward strong executive authority. In June 2013, Peniel E. Joseph, writing for The New York Times, recalled President Kennedy’s civil rights speech to the nation in June of 1963, the day when Medgar Evers was assassinated. JFK was calling on the nation to take part both in the search of personal conscience and in the revolutionary movements creating profound social change throughout the country. There would be no security and freedom for a democratic nation like the United States until the world was free of the aggressive tyranny of the Communist empire. Note Joseph’s appreciative conclusion: “Thus, Kennedy’s death made him a martyr for many causes, and in a cruel twist, it provided a huge boost to the civil rights bill, which his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed on July 2, 1964. But without the moral forcefulness of the June 11 speech, the bill might never have gone anywhere.”11 As in the days of national prayer and fasting called for by Jefferson on the eve of the American Revolution, the conscience of the nation, its integrity, and even its survival were at stake. Now, however, in the absence of such rites of national transformation, it is the media’s task to sanctify the memory of Presidential sacrifice. Thus, another writer for The New York Times, Alan Brinkley, employed the media to give Kennedy’s death a measure of sanctity by asserting that it was Kennedy’s martyrdom that had led to the legislation that, not long after his death, became his monument. Indeed, Brinkley argued that “Kennedy, during his short presidency, proposed many important steps forward. In an address at American University in 1963, he spoke kindly of the Soviet Union, thereby easing the Cold War. The following day, after almost two years of mostly avoiding the issue of civil rights, he delivered a speech of exceptional elegance, and launched a drive for a civil rights bill that he hoped would end racial segregation. He also proposed a voting rights bill and federal programs to provide health care to the elderly and the poor. Few of these proposals became law in his lifetime—a great disappointment to Kennedy, who was never very successful with

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Congress. But most of these bills became law after his death—in part because of his successor’s political skill, but also because they seemed like a monument to a martyred president” (emphasis added).12 Thus, by attributing Kennedy’s posthumous legislative achievements to his death as a martyr, the media referenced—if it did not actually invoke—the sacred as a means of understanding the lasting effect of Kennedy’s assassination on the nation’s continuing commitments and high aspirations. As further evidence of Kennedy’s incipient sanctification, Brinkley noted that “Visitors from all over the world have signed their names in the memory books, and many have written tributes: ‘Our greatest President.’ ‘Oh how we miss him!’ ‘The greatest man since Jesus Christ.’ . . . 50 years after his death, Kennedy is far from ‘just a flicker.’ He remains a powerful symbol of a lost moment, of a soaring idealism and hopefulness that subsequent generations still try to recover. . . . His legacy has only grown in the 50 years since his death. That he still embodies a rare moment of public activism explains much of his continuing appeal: He reminds many Americans of an age when it was possible to believe that politics could speak to society’s moral yearnings and be harnessed to its highest aspirations. More than anything, perhaps, Kennedy reminds us of a time when the nation’s capacities looked limitless, when its future seemed unbounded, when Americans believed that they could solve hard problems and accomplish bold deeds.”13

Note the familiar elements of what Eco called Ur-fascism in the sacralization of the otherwise secular presidency of John F. Kennedy and in the attribution of ancient virtues to this wholly modern president. Note also that Kennedy is here portrayed as standing the test of time; he is not one whose memory and inspiration will be swept away by the flow of time itself. Kennedy also is being remembered as standing tall in the face of crisis and potential disaster by easing the Cold War and by providing the template for an American society far less prone to interracial conflict and violence. I would argue that the devotional tributes to John F. Kennedy are more secularized but no less quintessentially American Urfascism than those paid originally to George Washington. Remember that in 1812 John Adams called attention to “the idolatrous worship paid to the name of General Washington by all classes” and “the application of names and epithets to him which are ascribed in Scripture only to God and to Jesus Christ.”14

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Indeed, the media has long fostered a longing for a president who can forge a national will and turn the vital affections and loyalties of the American people into policies, programs, and laws. Consider this excerpt from a seminar attended by Tom Wicker and other equally highly ranked columnists and commentators shortly after Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s pardon of the disgraced president. Jeffrey Pressman opined that “‘I certainly think that the demise or weakening of the executive shouldn’t be too widely heralded before it happens. By the way, it’s interesting to note that, soon after the Nixon resignation, the press was once again calling for executive leadership in foreign affairs and also in economic affairs to do something about inflation. The press was right there, calling for strong action. . . . That all indicates to me a continuing feeling that there are world events which somehow cry out for executive leadership. And the press, for all of its good work on Watergate, has not exactly been at the back of the line of those calling very loudly for executive leadership.’” Tom Wicker responded, saying, “‘I agree with that profoundly. The tendency of the press in this country is, has been most of the time, and will be again to play on the team. The tendency of the press in this country is not to attack presidents and I think the Watergate case has proven that rather than refuted it. Most of us were dragged kicking and screaming into Watergate. And ultimately, it may well be, the press did play a substantial role, although I think that role is exaggerated considerably. Your point is beautifully taken about immediate reaction to Ford. The New York Times was out there within a week of Ford’s accession calling for vast exertions of presidential power again by this new guy. I think that it is something that this panel might well deliberate and I don’t quite understand it myself . . . that yearning on our part for a great leader.’”15 There is something fundamentally, originally, and quintessentially American about these longings for a sovereign capable of decisive and effective action, whose words are tantamount to deeds, and who can wed means to ends in an enduring rebuke to the passage of time. Just as Kennedy evoked the mandate and vision of George Washington, others seeking authority may yet claim to represent the crucial figures of the past and to consummate the social order in singular and decisive acts. John F. Kennedy pledged his own “sacred honour” in the course of calling upon the nation to carry the sacred fire of liberty to every people and nation. Indeed, Kennedy invoked the rhetoric of George Washington, who in popular devotion is honored for having given his life for the nation and who, in battle after battle, indeed risked his life for the sovereignty of the people.

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Judgment Day We may well expect, as James Baldwin warned us some years ago, “the fire next time.”16 Americans may yet select a president who promises to settle old scores once and for all, to restore the nation to the purity of its original vision, and who calls for and requires sacrifice. Next time a leader may challenge the nation to carry the sacred fire of liberty to the oppressed peoples of the world. The fire would bring purification as a militant nation tramples out the global vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored. Note the signs of the last judgment: guilt and innocence may be established by popular fiat rather by the conventional processes. It may be the people, not the political or legal institutions, whose judgment will be final. Even at the most local level, schools and streets may become scenes where the people will exorcise the demons of ethnicity and race. To identify these longings for a purified people, sovereign in their own communities as well as in their own land, commentators typically fall back on a plethora of terms like xenophobia, nativism, populism, authoritarianism, Know-Nothingism, paranoia, resentment, status anxiety, nationalism, and reaction. Indeed, the longing for sovereignty may be expressed from both the left and the right in calls for revolution. That longing, as I have been arguing, has been with Americans from their colonial origins and will become increasingly potent the longer it remains unsatisfied. It feeds on despair. Like the eschaton, the last judgment, the 2016 presidential election revealed what had long been hidden. Consider that the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has found among the angry and alienated, displaced and unemployed, superseded and politically disenfranchised white working class a longing for something very much like a secular rapture. She observes, “Although life expectancy for nearly every other age group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like ‘end times.’”17 It is not simply that less educated white Americans were incensed by the threat to their livelihoods and social status posed by the minorities and immigrants who were being given preferential access to jobs, schools, and government programs. It was not only injury but also being judged by the liberal elite for their resentment that inflamed their resentment. Many in the media had made the struggling and downwardly mobile whites of the lower-middle and working class feel as if they were not only responsible for the fates of minorities or for the victims of illness

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and poverty but also morally deficient if they did not care.18 It had been their feelings, or their lack of feeling, that had been under perennial judgment; they were not entitled to feel sorry for themselves and were unworthy if they put their own problems ahead of those who were the beneficiaries of public policy. No wonder they needed a day of judgment, a turning of the tables, a settling of old scores, a final vindication, and a new purchase on the future. Of course they gravitated toward a leader who voiced their hatred against a system “rigged against them.” American despair reflects a loss of faith in the nation’s capacity to stand the test of time. The ritual of the presidential election is not capable, however, of reassuring the country that it can stand the test of time. It is not just that promises may not be kept or that new threats may present themselves. Neither is it simply that the winners in one year may be removed from office in when their terms expire. What had been revealed in the agonies of the 2016 electoral season was a profoundly American despair and a longing for the sovereignty of a people who had long felt demeaned and ignored: a people who knew themselves to be expendable; they did not matter. Furthermore, rather than feeling that the nation was in the process of being redeemed by their victory at the polls, over two-thirds of Republican voters, shortly after the election, felt that the nation was profoundly divided.19 Vindication meant a continuing division of the nation itself: a sentiment shared with Republicans by over three-quarters of independent and Democratic voters.20 Indeed, the extent of these divisions was unprecedented. That is what Judgment Day accomplishes: a separation of the sheep from the goats. For many, the election of 2016 was the eleventh hour: the time to act once and for all, now or never. Polls indicated that many voters, knowing that the Republican candidate was unfit by preparation, character, or judgment to fulfill the duties of the president still felt that the time had come for a radical break with the past if they ever were to put the sovereignty of the people into collective effect. However, long before the last vote was cast and the final tally taken, there was widespread agreement that the election itself would not resolve the conflicts that it had exposed and intensified. These conflicts would continue, and the one elected to the office of chief executive would inevitably face implacable opposition from the other side.

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Notes 1

Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449, quoting James Reston, “What Was Killed Was Not Only the President but the Promise,” New York Times Magazine, November 15, 1965: p. 127. 2 Hoyt Alverson, Semantics and Experience, Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University press, 1994; 129. 3 Fritz R. Stern The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989 4 https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html 5 James D. Barber, “Adult Identity and Presidential Style: The Rhetorical Emphasis,” Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (Summer, 1968), pp. 938-968; p.950. Published by The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023846. 6 James D. Barber, “Adult Identity and Presidential Style: The Rhetorical Emphasis,” Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (Summer, 1968), pp. 938-968; p.948. Published by The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023846. 7 James D. Barber, “Adult Identity and Presidential Style: The Rhetorical Emphasis,” Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (Summer, 1968), pp. 938-968; p.948. Published by The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023846. 8 James D. Barber, “Adult Identity and Presidential Style: The Rhetorical Emphasis,” Daedalus, Vol. 97, No. 3, Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (Summer, 1968), pp. 938-968; p.944. Published by The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20023846. 9 Charles Marsh, Strange Glory. A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014: pp. 269. 10 Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Open Court Publishing, 1922, 268; quoted in Fritz R. Stern The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1989: 279). 11 Peniel E. Joseph, “Kennedy’s Finest Moment,” The New York Times, June 10, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-rightstriumph.html#h[]. 12 Alan Brinkley, “The Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” The New York Times, Sep 18 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-legacy-of-john-fkennedy/309499/. 13 Alan Brinkley, “The Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” The New York Times, Sep 18

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2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-legacy-of-john-fkennedy/309499/. 14 Adams, John. [1812] 1966. “Letter to Benjamin Rush, 1812.” p. 229 in The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (2001), Liberty Fund. 15 Demetrios Caraley, Charles V. Hamilton, Alpheus T. Mason, Robert A. McCaughey, Nelson W. Polsby, Jeffrey L. Pressman, Arthur M., Jr., George L. Sherry and Tom Wicker, “American Political Institutions after Watergate--A Discussion,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter, 1974-1975), pp. 713-749; p. 720. 16 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Penguin. Random House; 1963. 17 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York, London: The New Press, 2016; pp. 125-126. 18 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York, London: The New Press, 2016; pp. 128. 19 http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/21/gallup-finds-record-divisionstrumps-america. 20 http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/21/gallup-finds-record-divisionstrumps-america.

CHAPTER FIVE CULTURAL DESPAIR AND THE LOSS OF THE FUTURE

As we investigate the residues of the 1960s, and particularly the lingering effects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we revisit longstanding sources of American despair over the legitimacy and authority of the political center. To be sure, the assassination of John F. Kennedy devastated the public’s sense that the vote of the people could direct the fate of the nation. These events also revealed the incapacity of the nation to protect itself from unprecedented and irreversible loss and to withstand the passage of time itself. Now the American electoral system is once again under siege. The electoral system itself has been undermined not only by political strategies for voter-suppression and by foreign intervention but also by the slightly veiled political threats of assassination against the Democratic candidate. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther certainly undermined the national will. Nearly twenty years after that crisis, Oliver Stone produced the film JFK, evoking the horror of the moment but also the unresolved questions about the secrecy that surrounded the post-mortem investigation and that had long fed conspiracies theories about unknown or undisclosed plots against the president’s life. Psychologists who interviewed individuals who attended showings of that film found that its effect was to intensify despair about the American electoral system itself. That the will of the people could be overturned by one gunman undermined the viewers’ willingness to make political contributions and to vote.1 The incapacity of the nation to forge a lasting national will through the electoral system over the last fifty years has fed into the American culture of despair. These events thus revealed that it had become too late for the nation to be what it could have been had King and the Kennedy brothers lived. The nation could neither protect itself from unprecedented and irreversible loss nor withstand the passage of time itself. As it was in the

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1960 so it is now, that, to paraphrase the old fascist mantra, the time had passed for “hard words”; it was time then, too, for “hard deeds.” However, the sources of national despair run deeper than the domestic and foreign subversion of the electoral system, the absence of a national will, or the shock of catastrophic loss. The 2016 election shared with the 1960’s an inability to appeal to a transcendent source of legitimacy and authority. Both the recent elections and those of the 1960’s revealed not only the precariousness of a nation-state too complex and too vulnerable to temporize or to withstand the shock of sudden change. It is also the inability of a secular society to sanctify the passage of time that fosters the recurrence of Ur-fascist longings to close the gap both between the secular and the sacred and between the ancient and the modern worlds. It becomes only a matter of time and the advent of a true Kairos or Day of Judgment before the nation will seek its sanctified embodiment in a Caesar: an absolute ruler to whom there is no exception, an authority who constitutes and subsumes all other authorities, and who anchors and guarantees the nation’s soul in its struggle for being against nonbeing.

The sanctification of the present by the past Umberto Eco’s concept of Ur-fascism reminds us that communities may sanctify time in many ways other than under the auspices of religious institutions. As the fleeting moment comes to be imbued with the eternal, the secular, raw passage of time does indeed become sacred. As the living grieve for the dead they have never known, and as they mourn the passing of those who died before they were born, the living may even experience the crisis of a prior generation as though it happened to themselves personally. The prior fate of the community or society comes to have a profoundly personal and existential significance in the present. Once again, we are seeing the origins of Eco’s Ur-fascism as secular time becomes sacred and the modern becomes infused with the ancient. Consider Maurice Bloch’s account of the ways in which the people of Madagascar recalled a rebellion against the French in 1947. Many of the individuals who took part in that rebellion were still alive at the time when Bloch was engaged in his study. Indeed, he stresses the wide range of accounts, the multiplicity of the narratives, and the richness of personal recall, especially when individuals took him to the places where they had taken part in the revolt. Bloch notes that many of the people who gathered at these places of collective story-telling were children who had not taken part in the revolt or even been alive at the time. Nonetheless they included

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themselves in the stories as though they had been participants, as part of a collective “we” that even included Bloch himself as part of a moral community that was discovering in these accounts its own continuity with the past. Bloch concludes that the revolt was “for them a lived experience. Their memory of the period of hiding was therefore not of a fundamentally different kind to that of those who had lived then.”2 Bloch has thus captured a way in which the social order co-opts the Ur-fascist consciousness by making the past and the collective intensely personal. He has argued that, in listening to collective accounts of the past, individuals will “construct a coherent mental model which enables one to imagine what is happening as though one was witnessing it; it is this imagined event and not the text that is remembered . . . In this way the difference in the nature, if not the content, of historical and autobiographical memory for narratives of events of great importance for those concerned disappears completely.”3 That is just the point: the hallmark of the sacred is indeed the collapse of the difference between the past and the present, the collective and the personal, the living and the dead. Like many sociologists influenced by Emile Durkheim, Bloch understands ordinary people—even the unwary sociologist—as homo duplex: two beings, as it were, residing simultaneously within the same psychic space. Bloch thus notes that “It therefore seems likely that for ordinary people—and not only for professional historians, who might be expected to guard themselves against such things—episodes of the distant past are ‘remembered’ in ways which are strikingly similar to those which people have experienced within their lifetime.”4 We must therefore ask whether an anthropologist like Maurice Bloch would find Americans, like his community in Madagascar, capable of remembering and imagining the assassination of John F. Kennedy in ways that make it seem to be a personal experience encountered within their own lifetime. The question is not only about the people who were alive at the time of JFK’s assassination but those whose only acquaintance with it is through the reminiscence and reanimation of the critical event provided over many years and on many anniversaries by the mass media. Have the many representations of JFK’s assassination led many to remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy as if it had been for them a personal experience, even if they were not then alive or old enough at the time to have remembered the event? From a sociological viewpoint, even in a highly secularized society like the United States, individuals are hybrids of the societal and the

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personal, the collective and the existential. They carry, as if they were their own, perspectives that have been derived from the larger society. This is what one would expect of “ordinary” people, as Bloch points out. It is not what we would expect of professionals who, as Bloch puts it, try to “guard” themselves from being open to—and subject to—perspectives, accounts, and experiences that they themselves have not put to the test of empirical investigation, plausible hypothesis, conflicting accounts, and the careful sifting of available evidence. Professionals would not define a world collectively regardless of whether that world is precisely what it is said and thought to be by those who seek to persuade others of its moral and spiritual priority. However, it is not at all clear that professionals are different from “ordinary people” in the capacity to infuse their present experience with the past. The Cambridge sociologist Tim Jenkins, in his examination of the religious group made familiar to many sociologists by Leon Festinger in The Prophecy That Failed, finds that adherents to the Adventist faith, presumably very “ordinary” people, were very much like the professionals who study them. Like those in that community of faith who speak of their spiritual experiences and listen carefully to the accounts of others, so, too, professional observers “are acting as prophets in response to an altered social condition; they ‘channel’ science, creating new possibilities of life which claim to express a truth that is universal and transcends all particulars.”5 More generally, Jenkins finds among both scientists and evangelicals, Adventists and Spiritualists, a secular concern with the progressive development of a self that resists taken-for-granted, conventional, and unexamined convictions and that is open to a social and moral universe of expanding possibilities. Indeed, Jenkins notes, “Spiritualism asks people to take nothing on trust but to become investigators, to observe demonstrations of the truth of the matters at issue, under test conditions in the séance room.”6 The sacred finds itself entirely at home within the secular. Let us take another example from Madagascar: a group that differs quite markedly from the community studied by Maurice Bloch, which was steeped in a past that had become part of their own autobiographical experience, even if they had not been alive at the time. I am referring to a group of Seventh Day Adventists in Madagascar studied by the anthropologist Eva Keller, who notes that they have a highly secular consciousness: “In paradise, absolutely everything, even God, will be accessible to the human senses. There won’t be anything mysterious any longer. Nothing will escape human capabilities, and there will be nothing

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that humans do not or cannot understand. There won’t be anything ‘transcendental’ or ‘supernatural,’ but everything will be perfectly clear. And herein lies the beauty of the picture the Adventists are in the process of making appear. The anticipated clarity—which is foreshadowed by knowledge of the truth, but which manifests itself completely only in paradise—thus dissolves the distinction between this and another worldly existence.”7 That is just the point: an otherworldly consciousness has become a mere extension of the knowledge and inquiry that animate a secular society. As time stretches on toward ever-increasing enlightenment, it is always and already infused with the eternal. It is as if, under the impact of Adventist eschatology, the next world becomes a mundane extension of this. The secular and the sacred are easily combined even under the auspices of a pragmatic and empirical approach to everyday life. Thus, even in the wake of thousands of conspiracy theories, the impact of certain moments, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, may be felt for generations as affecting the future both of the individual and of the larger society. To be sure, at the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the vast majority of Americans, for days at a time, were indeed enthralled by the news of the event and by the ceremonies unfolding in Washington, by the riderless horse and the jets roaring overhead, and by the horror of finality. The continuing impact of that event was not diminished because the majority of Americans were not persuaded by the Warren Report that there had been only one assailant in the assassination of JFK. The past continued to be experienced in the present as individuals and groups were beginning to conduct their own autopsies and trials, to demand inquiries and investigations, and to create a popular literature of conspiracy that now numbers tens of thousands of volumes. Like professionals, ordinary people want to know the truth even as they relive the past as if they had been present or project the evident into the mysterious or the time-being into the everlasting. Thus, as I have already noted, even when those following Lincoln’s cortege were caught up in the sanctity and the glory of the moment and were picturing Washington as reaching down from heaven toward the slain president, they too were listening to many highly critical accounts of Lincoln’s presidency. In a radically secularized society, there is little in the way of sacred history to redeem moments or times of sudden and serious disruption or loss. Finality remains an end without being transformed into a new beginning. However, the present may remain open to the past, just as a critical event in the past may be felt as an event in the life of those who were not present or even alive at the time. A moment as critical as that of

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John F. Kennedy’s assassination may become sanctified in collective memory even if the nation lacks the redemptive possibilities offered by a sacred history. Let me put it more strongly. If American society is so secularized that it fails retroactively to sanctify either the critical moment of JFK’s assassination or the period of his presidency, then it lacks any defense against radical change, loss, death. If the critical moment itself is beyond redemption, either through retroactive sanctification or by mythologizing the future, we see, mythologically speaking, only the back of Kairos’s head. However, a secular society has the capacity to infuse the critical moment with sacred meaning. We remember what Schiffer called the “secret of the self:” its uncanny ability to make the absent present and to infuse the present with both the past and the future.

The trauma of presidential death Certainly the assassination of John F. Kennedy was experienced as a devastating rupture between what had come before and what, after JFK’s death, was to become its future: a finality for which the nation was wholly unprepared. On the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, mundane routines were suspended. The average American adult spent eight hours watching news of the event; on the next day, Saturday, the average was ten hours, and on Monday and Tuesday the average adult was still watching television coverage of Kennedy’s death and of the funeral for eight hours.8 This does not count the additional hours spent talking with others about the tragedy or the time spent in solitude, and indeed many Americans reported that they did want to be alone during this time.9 More clearly, a sign of shock and grief was that the majority of those surveyed reported that they had been “nervous and tense,” felt “dazed and numb” and had cried during the days after the assassination.10 Researchers noted “the cessation of ordinary activities, the almost complete preoccupation with the event, and the actual physical symptoms we have here described . . . The assassination generally evoked feelings similar to those felt at the death of a close friend or relative, along with ‘sympathy, sorrow, anger, and shame for the country.’”11 John F. Kennedy was the object of personal affection, interest, attachment and loyalty even among those who were not among his political supporters. Indeed, “The majority of the population could not

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think of any other time in their lives when they had the same sort of feelings as when they heard of President Kennedy’s assassination,” and those who could think of a comparable event were referring to the death of someone very important to them.12 Overall, 80% of the respondents “felt deeply the loss of someone very close and dear”; an even higher proportion expressed “deep feelings of shame that such a thing could happen in our country.”13 The trauma was therefore deeply personal as well as collective. This event was clearly an unprecedented break of the nation’s experience of itself and the individual’s experience of the nation. The social psychologists Bradburn and Feldman observed that “the death of the President, whether from natural causes or murder, has always provoked large-scale emotional responses in the population. . . . We suspect that the large extent of the grief is caused by the simultaneous loss of a loved person by all the citizens. This collective confrontation of the death of the national leader is as rare as it is disturbing, and appears to trigger off very profound emotional reactions in almost all men (sic), no matter what their status in society.”14 Thus, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, intense feelings of loss and grief, shock and sorrow were indeed widespread in the population, but the mass media could not have conveyed the news of the president’s death with anything approaching the immediacy of the news that JFK had been assassinated. Similarly, although the media were no more advanced than the wireless telegram and daily newspaper, the American people grieved deeply when McKinley had been assassinated and at the death of Garfield. Contrast the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when virtually everyone in the United States knew of it within hours of the event, and the vast majority within minutes. Certainly, they reacted to the assassination of JFK in terms of a deeply personal loss, as though Kennedy had been “a close friend or relative.” Most suspended daily activities and went through the physical and emotional process of intense grieving. The event of JFK’s assassination was thus extremely disruptive. It had the capacity similarly to affect people of radically different ethnicities and social classes in what they attended to from day to day, in what they cared and worried about, and in their fears and aspirations. There could have been few better conditions for the onset or the intensification of an already latent cultural despair. Given the simultaneity, the universality, and the depth of this shock to the American electorate, it is no wonder that it has endured as a critical moment not only in collective memory but also in the lives of those who

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were not present or even alive at the time. The American people discovered that they were powerless to forge and execute a national will; their sovereignty had been nullified by one gunman at the right place and at the right time. Indeed, the media brought John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the American people with an unprecedented intensity and immediacy and elicited reactions of grief and sorrow from the vast majority of Americans, regardless of their social status or prior interest in national politics. That the assassination of JFK is an enduring Kairos for the nation as a whole and for later generations is attested to by the fact that the relatively well educated and politically engaged were no more likely to have been affected by JFK’s assassination than were those less engaged in the public sphere. Americans were deeply affected by the assassination, regardless of their socioeconomic status, education, and engagement in national affairs. Certain political scientists asked whether responses to JFK’s assassination would differ between those who were more rather than less socially advantaged, and more or less interested in or concerned about national issues. They found that the relatively privileged were no more likely to be affected by the assassination than were those whose daily lives had been circumscribed by their minority status or lack of education. In their study of the effects of JFK’s assassination, political scientists Bradburn and Feldman also found that “there is little evidence that those who might be less concerned with events beyond their personal worlds responded less to the assassination than those who presumably were more involved in the world around them.”15 More than a shocking and disruptive event, and more than a personal loss to Americans regardless of their individual political loyalties, the loss of JFK meant the destruction of one who had protected the nation from utter devastation. Writing for The New York Times on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s death, James Wolcott noted: “Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in 1941, and the destruction of the Twin Towers, in 2001, JFK’s assassination was one of those unifying, defining moments when everyone alive remembers where they were when the news struck, shattering the glass wall separating before and after. I was in the sixth grade, a member of the safety patrol, with a white sash and officiallooking badge: I remember the light at the end of the school hallway reflecting off the floor as word went round and the weight in the air the days after. For kids my age, it was like losing a father, a father who had all of our motley fates in his hands. (During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962,

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a lot of us grade-schoolers thought we might be goners, our Twilight Zone atomic nightmares about to come true.)” 16 Critical moments in the life of a society prompt continuous and agonizing reappraisals of the leaders and institutions that define the nation. Have the promises and obligations of the past been forfeited or fulfilled? As I noted in the first chapter, soon after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, attributed the president’s death to divine judgment on the Kennedy administration’s policy of targeting the leaders of foreign governments. Indeed, Robert F. Kennedy wrote in his journal that his brother may have been killed because of the administration’s policy on assassination. That reflection may have been initiated by a conversation that a friend of Robert Kennedy had with Lyndon Johnson shortly after the latter’s inauguration. As the historian Max Holland has pointed out, “The LBJ–RFK relationship deteriorated further in 1964 after Johnson criticized JFK’s complicity in the coup that led to the 1963 murder of President Diem of South Vietnam. Johnson suggested, in a conversation with RFK’s friend Pierre Salinger, that the Kennedy shooting was “divine retribution” for the killing of Diem. He surely knew and perhaps intended that his words would be repeated to RFK—which made the gulf between them ‘ultimately impassable.’”17 The death of Kennedy had precipitated a post-mortem period for the assessment of responsibility and guilt, for developing contrition and penitence, while awaiting final sentencing. To begin with, purgatorial apprehensions and judgments came not only from those in or near to the White House but also from the American South. I. F. Stone argued that Kennedy’s death occurred in the middle of an impasse between white supremacists in the Congress and the forces supporting civil rights: “there were hundreds of thousands in the south who had murder in their hearts for the Kennedys”. 18 In a secular American purgatory, it is not clear whether a soul had been lost or whether it remains as a shadowy presence to be reviled, avoided, placated, or evoked. We will keep this devastation of all other forms of the sacred in mind as we discuss the Kennedy years and JFK’s assassination. No doubt that his administration was transformative for American society, but all the more definitive was JFK’s assassination. As historian Sheldon Stern puts it, “Lyndon Baines Johnson’s succession to the presidency on November 22, 1963, was the most traumatic in American history—more so than earlier presidential assassinations (1865, 1881, and 1901) because television permitted the American people and the world to become virtual

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participants in the event.”19 Other researchers agree with this assessment. According to Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “the impact of assassinations on America and the world is incalculable and . . . by a wide margin, Americans cite the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as the crime that had the greatest impact on American society in the last hundred years.”20 Indeed, these researchers have found that societies like the United States, with regularized methods for ensuring uneventful political succession at the highest levels of government, have more than average amounts of such disturbances when compared with nations that lack such means of succession.21 For the United States government to undergo a crisis in legitimacy was inevitable in view of the assassination; indeed, the nation was suffering a succession crisis. The bloodshed in Dallas had contaminated Johnson’s entrance into the White House and made it exceedingly difficult for him to act as if his succession were completely legitimate. As Sheldon Stern puts it: “LBJ was never able to put behind him the terrible circumstances of his accession to the presidency.”22 Antipathy to LBJ from the family and supporters of the Kennedy administration did not help, despite his attempts to avoid conflict with Robert F. Kennedy and his offer of an ambassadorship to Caroline Kennedy. During LBJ’s administration, it became apparent that the FBI had failed to notify the CIA of Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence in Dallas, and conspiracy theories, some of them implicating LBJ and his supporters in the assassination itself, added to the difficulty of Americans in suspending their disbelief in the legitimacy of the postsuccession American government. As a defining and critical moment, an American Kairos, the death of Kennedy marks a sharp break between the present and what was then both the past and what might otherwise have been the future. On the other hand, if only because of fifty years of media-sponsored re-enactment and the continuing appeal of conspiracy theories about his death, JFK’s assassination has affected the lives of later generations as if it were part of their own autobiography: a point of no return. Looking back on John F. Kennedy, Americans may doubt that this country will ever see the likes of him again. Some might revere Kennedy in retrospect, and some, as we have seen, may even call him a martyr, but with the passage of time - of fifty years, in fact - the assassination of JFK remains a continuing source of cultural despair and of longing for the return of president who can once again alert the nation to its dangers while opening up new possibilities, new frontiers, and new horizons: a leader strong enough to make America great again.

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Granted that the Kennedy years were a Kairos—a critical moment in which the nation’s past and future were hanging in the balance of the critical moment. For a nation to be immersed in that terror transforms national consciousness. However, the eventfulness, even the fatefulness of the Kennedy years, JFK’s successful confrontation with the Soviet Union, his incipient leadership in the civil rights struggle, the traumatic but relatively smooth succession to the LBJ administration: all the kairoi have flowed into the stream of time-as-medium. In the decades following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Kairos-time of his administration and assassination has become immersed in continuous revisions of the past, a sense of chronic crisis in the present, dread of the future. Jill Abramson, then the editor of The New York Times, suggests that “his martyrdom—for a generation of Americans still the most traumatic public event of their lives, 9/11 notwithstanding—has obscured much about the man and his accomplishments.”23 The reverse, I would argue, is also true. The years of discussion and analysis of JFK’s real and imagined virtues and accomplishments have obscured much about the trauma of the nation’s kairos during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the civil rights marches on the one hand and at the time of JFK’s assassination on the other. As Abramson herself puts it, “As the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears, John F. Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down.”24 Thus as a secular society the nation is indefinitely consigned to a world of scenarios and predictions, of updated precedents and revised histories, of expedients for the time being and shifting definitions of the immediate public or private situation. All these constitute, on the one hand, a surfeit of possibility; they are indeed hard to “pin down.” Indeed, they offer little protection against renewed threats to the survival of the nation. The process of secularization combines both destructive and transformative time with time as flux - slowly eroding and wasting the nation’s original strengths and virtues - the nation requires a leader able to transform a critical moment—a Kairos—from the threat of irredeemable loss into possibility and promise. The significance of that Kairos in the life of the nation itself remains unresolved fifty years later. The reason for this lack of resolution, I am arguing, concerns the convergence of one kind of time with another: the flowing together of time-as-eventful into time-as-medium and sheer passage. Kennedy’s invocation of America’s unique identity and mission has been subjected not only to conflicts over his character and presidency but to the death of a

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thousand qualifications concerning his merits and legacy. His legacy remains flawed, obscure, and contested, and his continuing presence, conjured up by politicians attempting to define themselves, carries a sense of his continuing absence. Attempts to offset popular idealization of his presidency by demythologizing the Kennedy years have made it difficult for the nation to sanctify his memory. Several generations of high school students have been raised on textbooks that are highly critical of JFK’s presidency, of the gaps between his rhetoric and his accomplishments, and of his contributions to the Cold War. Popular fascination with JFK’s style and charisma has yielded to public distrust of the official manipulation of political imagery; relief at the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis has become distrust of JFK as the Cold War politician; respect for JFK as an idealist who could mobilize the nation in pursuit of its highest ideals has been supplanted by a growing awareness that at best his legislative achievements were incomplete and his commitment to civil rights belated. Longing for a leader who could forge a national purpose and strengthen national will have to combat chronic suspicion of hidden influences on the nation’s government. This death by a thousand subsequent qualifications is what one would expect; secular societies make themselves up as they go along. I have mentioned the relentlessly provisional and temporary aspect of every part of the social order, from policies and political promises to traditional liturgies, employer–employee contracts, marriage covenants, and claims to personal identity. The provisional aspect of every social policy and arrangement, like the contingent relations of means to ends or of actions to outcomes, leaves policy makers, employers and employees, husbands and wives, parents and children awash in a sea of possibility without any means of securing ends. As for the past, the relevant precedents keep changing. How long can secular societies continue to live in a perennial time being, with finality being managed as a series of incipient crises that can be prevented by timely actions and policies, before coming to climactic and irreversible moments of grief in catastrophic and unredeemable loss: loss unredeemable by any form of the sacred itself? As the journalist James Wolcott points out, the odds were not in favor of the assassin’s bullet. Never mind the retrospective attempt to find significance in prophecy, in providence, or in a curse in various deaths in the Kennedy family; never mind the president’s ominous sense of his vulnerability or those who hated Kennedy and his policies. James Wolcott knows contingency when he sees it, and he dismisses a sense of fatedness as a

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belated attempt to find significance where there was only paradox, irretrievable loss, and terror. The question comes down to this: How long can secular societies ward off cultural despair? Wolcott is dismissing any notion of the sacred, any attempt to sanctify the memory of JFK: “Pop immortality comes at a price, and the price for JFK is having his presidency and posthumous reputation become muddled with the martyred pathos of Marilyn Monroe, whose drug overdose in 1962 was ruled a suicide, a determination that undaunts those who believe that dark forces wanted her conveniently dead.”25 The afterlife is illumined only by the “stage lights” of pop culture and the mass media. Wolcott prefers to take his terror straight: “The scary thing lurking behind all of these assassination-haunted books is the awareness that we have immensely more gun nuts running around today than we did in 1963, and they are toting a lot more firepower.”26 That is reason enough for despair. In Wolcott’s world, the increase of possibility enhances the likelihood that terror, whether in the form of a bullet or a lethal virus will trump possibility. The proliferation of possibility is conducive to terror. “Each ramp-up of rabid animus raises the odds of another Dallas, and there’s a lot more of that frothing around, too.”27 Wolcott knows about immortality and sanctification, but he uses these terms to show the way in which various media hype the significance of celebrities. Sufficiently secularized, that is, manipulated by those with the means to shape public opinion, the Kairos, the critical moment to end all other critical moments, becomes simply a matter of time. Yet another legacy of the assassination of JFK’s assassination is the nation’s awareness that its sovereignty is undermined by the reign of sheer chance: the premature and irreversible foreclosure on the future. In the aftermath of JFK’s assassination came the awareness that the future is dependent on the unlikely success of a sharpshooter, the sometimes random and often violent expression of resentment and pure chance. America’s cultural despair incorporates the quite realistic dread of what the future may well bring. In place of the national will, it is fate that determines the possibility that a very unlikely long shot will hit its target. As in the 1960s so it is now that that American intelligence services are revealed to be not only flawed and secretive but willing to withhold evidence from other branches of government and from the people themselves. Current investigations into Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 election offer as ripe a field for current conspiracy theories as the

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investigations of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Once again cultural despair feeds on the knowledge that sovereignty and the national will are subject not only to chance and fate but to the flaws and secrecy of the very agencies on which the nation relies for its own security and survival. We need a better understanding of cultural despair if we are to illuminate the increasing alienation of a wide range of citizens from the nation’s political center over the last fifty years. There are many reasons, not all of them demagogic, why in 2016 the Republican nominee for president emphasized law and order, advocated the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, and traded on fears of domestic violence and terrorism at home. We are not far from the chaos and political violence of the 1960s. Indeed, Martin Luther King believed that JFK had suffered from the same violence that long had afflicted the black population, a widespread sense in the populace at large that the nation was possessed by its own endemic tendencies toward violence, and the opinion that the nation had justly been punished for its own fatal designs against foreign leaders over many years. It is precisely this sense of being at a critical moment with both the past and the future hanging in the balance of the present that links the current crisis to the despair of the 1960s. The assassination of JFK wounded both the people’s sense of their sovereignty, as embodied in the presidency, and their confidence in the nation’s capacity to create and sustain a national will that would be proof against chance, fate, and the passage of time. It would be hard to imagine a more potent source of cultural despair. The nation’s self-judgment fed despair over the loss of its ancestral virtues and over the inability of the nation to muster a will adequate to the challenges of an increasingly hostile environment. Cultural despair takes hold when possibility can no longer be sure of a victory over both the finality of death and the raw secularity of time as flux. The future offers no possibility of final triumph over the nation’s enemies. Not only will the agon, the kampf, continue indefinitely but the nation will also have to struggle against the passage of time and the ongoing loss of national virtue and vitality. The death of Kennedy continues to be a critical moment, a Kairos that defines the nation’s loss of its grasp on the passage of time itself. Without a reassertion of its Urfascist potential, the sacred no longer offers both collective and deeply personal reassurances that every end is either the fulfillment of what has gone before or the harbinger of a new beginning.

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The more intractable the despair, the more millennial must be the promised triumph over the passage of time. After the forces of Alexander had swept through the territory of Persia, laying waste to its shrines, the Sibylline Oracles, hiding in their grottoes, prophesied the ruin of Greek cities. On the Iraqi-Syrian periphery, jihadists once again proclaim and impose a form of the sacred that annihilates all other forms of the sacred, whether Christian, Buddhist, or Sunni-Islamic. Millennialism ends the long waiting period for the Day of the Lord or the twelve Imam, when all prior forms of the sacred will have been annulled, all ancient obligations and promises fulfilled, and old scores finally settled. With millennialism fails the demand for a Caesar becomes inevitable and, for some, irresistible. As Charles Marsh explains: “By 1938, lip service to the idea of the churches as ‘the last hope of protecting Christianity from godless Bolshevism’ had outlived its political usefulness. Nazism had never truly believed that Germany needed faith in anything more than the fascist state’s ‘unified principle that could explain everything.’ Ultimately, Nazism’s all-consuming perspective could not coexist with any other form of religion; even the German Christians were at last regarded as competitors to be eliminated. Hitler, in fact, would reject not only the doctrines of the church but also the neo-pagan volkisch religiosity his movement had engendered and fed off . . . to him the essence of faith would be the willingness to fight. ‘In a manly time of struggle,’ proclaimed one German Christian pastor at a Frankfurt rally in homage to the Führer, ‘one cannot get by with effeminate and sweet talk of peace.’”28 Enshrined within a sacred history that keeps the end in sight—or at least in mind, a nation may wait for the promised return of the sanctified leader or city or kingdom. In the mean-time, the struggle against nonbeing becomes mere prelude and preparation for the final battle. Once the sacred begins to take absolute form in a Caesar, however, there can be no greater duty than to follow the one who fulfills the ancient promise of sole and complete triumph over all difference and non-being. Only one form of the sacred can triumph; all others are slated for extinction. That is why the German churches swore their allegiance to Hitler, to the Reich, and to the German people. They enlisted in the ultimate agon against all difference, under the illusion that such solidarity would spare them the fate of the Jews who were finally to be eliminated. However, the kind of time that brings only destruction and transformation and requires relentless struggle can very quickly leave nothing for anyone

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to hold on. It will soon be too late for everyone except the god of time himself. Thus, Marsh goes on to note that “Hitler’s regime no longer cared that the churches had taken the oath to the Führer, affirmed the Aryan laws, excommunicated the Jewish Christians, thrown out the Old Testament, fashioned a Teutonic Christ, and done everything else imaginable to accommodate the regime.” Hitler criminalized “all activities associated with the churches” themselves.29 Kairos can so monopolize attributions of the sacred that it destroys all others but its own.

The loss of sacred memory I have been arguing that, to understand American despair, we must also consider the effects of secularization on America’s Ur-fascist potential. When Lincoln was assassinated, popular devotion imagined him being lifted up into the arms of Washington, who presided over the nation from his apotheosis in the rotunda above the nation’s Capitol, surrounded by icons of time-transcending sovereignty. However, the assassination of John F. Kennedy lacked these assurances of time’s connection to eternity and of the past’s vital presence in the present. JFK’s assassination revealed the incapacity of the nation to deploy the sacred at its center, to place crisis in the context of a sacred history, to invoke past virtue in the present, and to guarantee the nation’s future transformation. I have also been arguing that we need to understand the interaction of two kinds of time: time experienced as an eventful, even fateful Kairos, and time experienced as a flowing medium. Only if the critical moment of JFK’s assassination had been adequately sanctified could the nation have experienced the sudden, immediate, pervasive, intense, disruptive, and personal as well as collective loss of the president as an end that could be transformed into a new beginning. To accomplish this transformation of the event itself, however, would have required the service of sacred rites that would have assured the nation of its continuing capacity to meet threats, to seize opportunities, to bring the past fully into the service of the present, and, through sacrifice, to shape the future. Without rites that sanctify collective memory, redeem personal sacrifice, and initiate a redemptive future, the nation can only engage in conspiracy theories and media-based commemorations of his assassination, post-mortem analyses of the Kennedy years and of his death, and anguished reflections about the nation’s capacity to stand the test of time. All of these perpetuate the Kairos of his administration and death as though it were part of the experience of current generations as

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well as of those present at the time of the crisis itself. Without rites of sacred commemoration, the nation is unable to sanctify the political community, call for further sacrifice, and consecrate the future. As you will remember, we have discussed the atrophy of Memorial Day rites as one indication that the nation is no longer able either to assuage the death anxiety of its people or to provide access to the nation’s primordial virtues and vitality. It is not only rites that are missing, but also the necessary myths. Indeed, Felkins and Goodman have noted, “As we begin to witness an ever-increasing crisis in our national political identity, with professional mythmaking and self-appointed shamans, we search for authentic myths but find shallow manufactured copies. Moreover, when genuine links between the natural and the social realm grow weaker, we lose our sense of coordination and mystery.”30 As the nation becomes more secularized, it lacks the capacity to endow itself with the mysteries of sacred power. As rites such as those observed on Memorial Day fall into disuse or merely casual observance, the nation can no longer place the living in communion with the heroic dead. What remains is a sense of absence and loss irredeemable by the passage of time. In the rapidly secularizing America of the 1960s, there was no sacred history within which to place the president’s death: no providential order that would redeem JFK’s promise of a New Age. Although many had imagined Washington holding his arms out to Lincoln, no one has welcomed Kennedy into the heavenly company of past sovereigns. Like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy committed the nation to sacrifice itself for the liberty of others. Unlike Lincoln’s assassination, Kennedy’s murder could not give birth to a new generation of national heroes. Without sacred memory, not even fifty years of media-sponsored commemoration of JFK’s assassination has been able to sanctify his memory or to renew the vision that he shared with Washington of the American people’s redemptive mission in history to liberate all peoples. Thus JFK’s assassination has not yet been incorporated into a history of the nation’s trials; neither has it been sanctified by a ritual evoking either ancient vision, divine promise, or the call for new generations of sacrifice. Rather than opening possibilities for national transformation, the killing of John Kennedy has left Americans without the future they would have had should he have lived. There is only the time being and the temporary deal, the fabricated consensus, the charisma of the TV showman or the contrived political persona, fake news and false promises, official lies and the obvious absence of a national will.

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The American stage is now set for what Agamben has called the “state of exception,” in which even a democratically elected tyrant may exact sacrifice with impunity and without offending either divine or human law. Indeed, in his seminal The Time Remaining, Agamben argues that autocracy thrives when there is no rule from which exceptions cannot be made. Law is fulfilled in the act of being suspended. The vacuum in the center has been filled by someone who will define and redefine the national will from one day to the next. There is no future over which to despair; rather, the future is always unfolding in the exercise of the will of the “Decider.” We may even be told that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Notes 1

Lisa D. Butler, Cheryl Koopman, Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Psychological Impact of Viewing the Film ‘JFK’: Emotions, Beliefs, and Political Behavioral Intentions,” Political Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 237-257. 2 Maurice E.F. Bloch, How We Think They Think.Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder CO., and Oxford, U.K.: Westview Press, 1998, p.121. 3 Maurice E.F. Bloch, How We Think They Think.Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder CO., and Oxford, U.K.: Westview Press, 1998, pp. 123-5. 4 Maurice E.F. Bloch, How We Think They Think.Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder CO., and Oxford, U.K.: Westview Press, 1998, pp. 123-5. 5 Timothy Jenkins, Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists. A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013; p.74. 6 Timothy Jenkins, Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists. A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013; p.75. 7 Eva Keller, “Scripture Study as Normal Science,” in Fenella Cannell, editor, The Anthropology of Christianity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2006; pp. 273-294; pp.290-1. 8 Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1964), pp. 189-215; 197-8. 9 Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 1964: pp. 189-215; 194. 10 Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 1964: pp. 189-215; 199. 11 Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 1964: pp. 189-215; 2067. 12 Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 1964: pp. 189-215; 194.

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Paul B. Sheatsley, Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 1964: pp. 189-215; 195. 14 Norman M. Bradburn and Jacob J. Feldman, “Public Apathy and Public Grief,” in Bradley S. Greenburg, and Edwin B. Parker, eds., The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1965; 273-288; p.286. 15 Norman M. Bradburn and Jacob J. Feldman, “Public Apathy and Public Grief,” in Bradley S. Greenburg, and Edwin B. Parker, eds., The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1965; 273-288; p.282. 16 James Wolcott, “Chronicle of a Death Retold,” Vanity Fair, November 2013 17 Sheldon M. Stern, “ Presidential Tapes and Historical Interpretation,” Review of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath by Max Holland, in Reviews in American History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 580-590; p. 582; quotation from Holland, pp. 238-9. 18 I.F. Stone, I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly, Vol. XI, No. 24, December 9, 1963; p. 9. 19 Sheldon M. Stern, “Presidential Tapes and Historical Interpretation,” Review of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath by Max Holland: Reviews in American History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 580-590; p. 580. 20 Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “The Political Consequences of Assassination,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jun., 2008), pp. 385-400, quoting Appleton, Sheldon. 2000. Trends: Assassinations. Public Opinion Quarterly 64 (Winter): 495-522; p. 495. 21 Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “The Political Consequences of Assassination,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jun., 2008), pp. 385-400. 22 Sheldon M. Stern, “Presidential Tapes and Historical Interpretation,” Review of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath by Max Holland, in Reviews in American History, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 580-590; p. 581. 23 Jill Abramson, “Kennedy-The Elusive President”, The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2013 24 Jill Abramson, “Kennedy-The Elusive President”, The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2013. 25 James Wolcott, “Chronicle of a Death Retold”, Vanity Fair, November 2013 26 James Wolcott, “Chronicle of a Death Retold”, Vanity Fair, November 2013 27 James Wolcott, “Chronicle of a Death Retold”, Vanity Fair, November 2013 28 Charles Marsh, Strange Glory. A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014: pp. 261-2. 29 Charles Marsh, Strange Glory. A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014: pp. 292.

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Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 461.

CHAPTER SIX THE AMERICAN DILEMMA: MONARCHY IN THE WHITEHOUSE

It is no more a modern—or particularly American—tendency than an ancient one for ritualized attempts to guarantee authoritative presence and power to lose their efficacy, intensity, and credibility. For instance, a sacrifice and its potential success may expose the worshippers to a universe of possibility. The rite may therefore evoke excited anticipation and aspiration but, if it fails, the ritual will yield a sense of something missing or even irretrievably lost. To borrow an insight from Penelope Deutscher’s discussion of Derrida, “In relation to the opposition between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ difference is neither present, nor absent. Instead, it is a kind of absence that generates the effect of presence.”1 It is therefore very difficult to find a permanent place for the sacred, either in ancient or in modern societies, without discovering reminders of the tendency of the sacred to evoke a sense of absence and of something missing. Once institutionalized, even charismatic leadership becomes reduced to the procedures of a formal organization, sometimes referred to dismissively as “sacred cows” or to revered but optional conventions. Thus, in time, sacred authority becomes fatigued or irrelevant, and cultural despair takes the form of longing for what once seemed to have been an original virtue or for the advent of a long-promised future. That is a civilizational dilemma, but it has particularly disturbing and American manifestations. Time as medium, flux, and flow inevitably weakens the ability of the sacred to embody a sense of vital and effective presence and time as cause or event. The sheer complexity of modern societies makes it necessary to live in a present without reliably authoritative or even sacred precedents. Politics, for instance, as well as business, science, and education continuously revise their own priorities and standards, their own ways of recruiting followings or disciplining the deviant. Credit-worthiness depends on fluctuating and often faulty ratings. Student debts and the

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insolvency of banks and insurance companies require years, often lifetimes, of payments without forgiveness, often at terrible cost to the taxpayers as well as the debtors, unless the debtor commands a legion of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists. Responsibility for disasters, faulty products and their damages to individuals, the failure of education, the distortion of public discourse, the misrepresentation of public opinion, deceptions by policy-makers, and the destruction of habitats become so diffused that it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to hold particular individuals accountable. The fatigue of the sacred deprives it of a chance to be either a reservoir of possibility for the larger society or a prophylactic against unredeemed losses. At the extremes of that fatigue, popular longings intensify for a form of the sacred that could set limits on domestic chaos or disintegration while encouraging national resistance to threats from external powers. In its Ur-fascist form, the sacred becomes absolute: an end in itself transcending and transforming the passage of time. The apotheosis of George Washington, along with his later commemorations at the close of the Civil War and during the Great Depression, underlies a perennial longing for a modern Caesar who, like Kairos, embodies the flow as well as the eventfulness of time. In the 1960s and 70s, as religion was losing its relevance to the nation’s political and cultural center, the sacred was taking root in the periphery of the social order, among the disenfranchised or the marginal, as well as among those who wore the mantle of collective aspiration. Discrete, if not entirely separate, ways of enacting and embodying the sacred supersede the conventional, repetitive, or patterned expressions and performances of the sacred. The act of sacrifice itself was becoming personal, local, discrete, and specific to particular contexts and situations. Thus, limited, temporary, and local efforts observances were taking place in candlelight vigils on college campuses and in local neighborhoods; efforts to name American dead and to protest against the meaninglessness of human sacrifice in the Vietnam war, while the Berrigan brothers, both of them Catholic priests, poured blood over the files of local draft boards. Consider also how eventful time, time as cause, threatens nations as they, in seeking to enhance their own security, threaten and endanger their neighbors and so increase the likelihood of armed conflict. The threat of mutually assured destruction becomes the only way to keep open the possibility of avoiding a nuclear holocaust. Thus, the secular world itself has become not only complex but also mysterious, not merely rational and

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temporary but also more uncertain and dangerous. As modern societies experience the effect of time-as-flow on all that has been held to be sacred, they also experience time-as-cause, or Kairos. As Dan Edelstein puts it, secular myths can “embellish a process, one which is worthwhile in itself, independently from any end result. We can never know what the future world will resemble, but we must believe in our power to transform the present.”2 Thus, even as the death of god was being announced, new ages were imagined to be dawning: a secular age, the Novum Ordo Saeculorum first announced at the birth of the nation; the Age of Anxiety; or even the Age of Aquarius. The point is that the times were difficult to define, and their definition was being contested from a wide range of social vantage points. The question is why in the punditry and scholarship of the period there were no commemorations of the apotheosis of George Washington: no new call for thousands of local celebrations of Washington’s virtue and wisdom like the ones that had graced the Depression in 1932. Instead, the dispersal and diffusion of the sacred afforded the nation only sporadic, partial, and inconclusive symbolic protection from terror, like the yellow ribbons later to be tied around poles in honor of the hostages taken from the US Embassy in Teheran. We must therefore take care to identify the residues and shards of traditionally sacred authority hiding within the pronouncements of the new president. In The Royalist Revolution, Eric Nelson cites John Adams’s argument that “the people are the fountain and original of the power of kings and lords, governors and senates, as well as the house of commons, or assembly of representatives; and if the people are sufficiently enlightened to see all the dangers that surround them, they will always be represented by a distinct personage to manage the whole executive power.”3 The American people could best represent themselves not merely in two legislative houses but in a single person, the president, whose powers derived from those of the British monarch in the years before the civil war in England. There is little doubt that Washington has functioned in American mythology as the sanctified sovereign, embodying both the nation and the people, the human and the divine. These are, as we have been noting, the hallmarks of what Agamben finds typical of the authoritarian ruler in the “state of exception.” Thus, America is neither as modern or as secular as it might seem, and its Ur-fascist tendencies in the electorate may be mere harbingers of a more thoroughgoing fascism yet to come.

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The president, as John Adams noted, does exercise constitutionally protected powers equivalent to those accorded sacred monarchy under the British Constitution: powers typified by the fascist “state of exception,” in which the ruler is able to sacrifice human life without offending either divine or human law. It is therefore unclear how the Constitution might prevent a presumptive autocrat from assuming the right to authorize torture, to deport millions, forge an alliance with a government that massacres citizens, initiate a nuclear arms race, or to order a preemptive nuclear strike against a nation like North Korea. Thus, President Kennedy was acting within his Constitutional authority when he risked a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. No wonder, then, that the royalists in the American Revolution advocated a king who could better represent the people and ensure their unity than any assembly such as the British House of Common, comprised of popular differences, factions, and divisions. It was through their influence that the new American Constitution concentrated extraordinary powers in the hands of a president with an executive authority on a par with that of King Charles I. Therefore federalists could all agree, notes Nelson, that one person, whether a chief magistrate or a constable, can represent the people, although they affirm this notion for different reasons. The Adams party believed that consent could be derived from the tacit willingness of people to accept authorizations derived from the past. The more Whiggish party believed that through election the one could be chosen to represent the many. Indeed, Charles I had considered himself the “patriot King” and was retrospectively referred to as “martyr of the people” in his attempt to defend them from a tyrannous Parliament that had usurped royal prerogative and stood between the people and their royal defender. Thus, a colonist as patriotic as Benjamin Rush could revere the sanctity of the Throne itself.4 Thus, Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, and their followers understood that the people’s representatives do not need to be a microcosm of the people as a whole. To be sure, there were some who argued that any representative assembly must comprise “a full and equal representation . . . which possesses the same interests, feelings, opinions, and views the people themselves would were they all assembled.”5 However, only a president could prevent the people from legislating against themselves and from exacerbating their differences. Truly, to be represented, the people needed an embodiment in one who articulated their deepest aspirations and transcended their divisions. As Nelson puts it, speaking of Adams and the royalists, “They denied that being a good

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‘representation,’ or image, of the people was either necessary or sufficient to establish the legitimacy of a representative, whether a single person or an assembly (or some combination of the two).”6 For Adams, the authority of the chief executive did not require the act of voting; indeed, there was no need for representatives to be governed by the momentary currents of public opinion: hence the precedence conferred by the British constitution and sacred monarchy.

Incorporating the ancient within the modern Americans understand the possible dangers posed by the concentration of legitimate authority in the office of the chief executive of the United States of America. It is therefore worth remembering that, as John Adams described the office of the president emerging under the new American Constitution, “the duration of our president is neither perpetual nor for life; it is only for four years; but his power during those four years is much greater than that of an avoyer, a consul, a podesta, a doge, a stadtholder; nay, than a king of Poland; nay, than a king of Sparta . . . I know of no magistrate in any republican government, excepting England and Neuchatel, who possess a constitutional dignity, authority, and power comparable to his . . . These rights and duties, these prerogatives and dignities, are so transcendent that they must naturally and necessarily excite in the nation all the jealousy, envy, fears, apprehensions, and opposition, that are constantly observed in England against the crown.”7

Shortly after Washington’s death, many regarded him as immortal and even godlike. Thus in his absence, Washington was experienced as a presence vital to the life of the nation. Referring to the literary evidence for the early sanctification of George Washington, historian and sociologist Barry Schwarz notes, “Although these writings were produced within society’s privileged sector, they reflected the universal sanctity of Washington’s memory during the first 65 years of the nineteenth century.” He quotes de Beaumont as saying that “To Washington alone are there busts, inscriptions, columns; this is because Washington, in America, is not a man but a God,” and he cites Walt Whitman as declaring that “the name of Washington is constantly on our lips. . . . His portrait hangs on every wall and he is almost canonized in the affections of our people.”8 Does the apotheosis of George Washington in the nations’ Capitol still transcend the differences between time and eternity, the living and the dead, the present and the absent, the end and the beginning? At the highest

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symbolic level, does it still annul the difference between sacred monarchy and the American presidency? Does the fresco in the rotunda above the nations’ Capitol still represent the past or does it represent the passed? To put the question another way, are traditional forms of the sacred still coeval with contemporary forms of apparently secular authority, or are they actually the past, in the sensed of being over-and-done-with? So long as it was still functioning as the sacred, the apotheosis of Washington could perform as a difference that negated and transcended all other forms of difference. That is how the American people could remake the image of Washington in accordance with their ideal self-images and their own presumed virtues. First revered as a frontiersman, a courageous patriot, and a disciplined, virtually austere statesman, Washington came to acquire the democratic virtues of love for children, romantic enthusiasm, and the enjoyment of the company and pleasures of ordinary folk.9 Well into the nineteenth century, it would have been impossible not to revere, let alone to forget, the nation’s first president. Washington was not only depicted in the portraits that adorned American homes but also, by 1864, looked down on the Capitol from his apotheosis in heaven. Certainly, as Schwartz notes, citing the Chicago Tribune, “when Abraham Lincoln’s assassin jumped to the stage of Ford’s Theatre and looked up to the presidential box to shout out justification for his act, his eyes came to rest on a festooned portrait of George Washington. In the millions of mourning portraits produced in commemoration of Lincoln’s death, it is George Washington who welcomes Lincoln into Heaven.”10 Indeed, the Chicago Tribune’s metaphor, that the sanctified Washington was “stretching out a hand to Lincoln,” is reminiscent of the way in which the Creator reaches a hand out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Even in the twentieth century, George Washington’s apotheosis into heaven, depicted in the ceiling of the rotunda over the nations’ Capitol, allowed Congress to mandate over four million observances across the nation as recently as 1932.

Summary I have argued that the sacred emerges in critical moments: at a winter or summer solstice; the eve of a civil war; the assassination of a president; the depth of a Depression; on the verge of a nuclear war; indeed whenever both life and death hang in the balance of the moment. The ordinary flow of time is threatening enough, even when it is not punctuated by such critical moments. In a secular society absorbed in the time being and

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burdened with complexity, overlapping political, economic, and social practices add to the experience of chronic uncertainty and contingency. Sacrifices may be called for and the sacred evoked, but there is no way of knowing whether the right thing is being done in the right way at the right time, or which particular causes will lead to specific effects, not to mention which means will lead to the desired ends. Conversely, there is no way to turn ends into beings, or to reassure the people that, in the long run of a sacred history, their sacrifices will be redeemed and vindicated. Tired of waiting for the satisfaction of old desires and the fulfillment of old promises, exhausted by chronic crisis, sick of hope deferred, and frightened of impending chaos, the people may seek an incarnation of their entitlements and a dispenser of long-delayed justice: one whose word is not only law and whose utterances have immediate effect. Worn out by the passage of time and despairing of future transformation, a people may invoke the Day of Judgement: a Kairos to end all kairoi. That is, time-as-event so interrupts and consummates the flux of time that the passage of time itself is transformed. Gone is the time when the gods may or may not have been present, or when they may or may not have been watching or caring, and when they might or might not respond favorably to sacrificial offerings. No longer does the society have to wonder whether the critical moment has been fully and properly seized. The long awaited – or, for some, dreaded – Day has arrived. To put it another way, by making the sacred less immediately accessible, religious institutions protect individuals from some of the vagaries of gods and ancestors. Religious institutions enable individuals to sacrifice immediacy, and the charismatic endowments that confer such immediacy, in return for the increase of time provided by sacred history. Thus, religious institutions also allow individuals to feel less vulnerable to the anxiety and terror caused by the flow or pressure of time itself. As for the flow, everything has a season. As for the pressure of time-as-cause, only the coming of the end will disclose what actually has been conferred or lost. Religion places the time being within a sacred history. The present is always poised between the time of origins and the time of final consummation. By embedding every fleeting but critical moment in a story with a beginning and an End that will redeem all the intervening losses and sacrifices, religion deprives individuals of their own agency. It takes authorized sacrifices, elections or an oath, not authenticity and personal effectiveness, to enact or embody the sacred. Rather than

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authorize personal agency and guarantee immediacy in any form, religion confines the sacred to repetitive and institutionalized practices legitimated by authorized belief. There is a vastly diminished possibility, then, of disruptive moments; there is no place outside of authorized rites to act in a way that embeds the end in the means or unites a cause with its effect. Thus, Keane notes that this strategy “vastly expands the scale of time in order to assist in the displacement of agency from those immediately concerned.” 11 If acts of consecration are to be made, they must occur within a framework of institutionalized validity. This is, after all, how religious ideology works; individuals and the social order sacrifice their own agency to an institution that protects them from the helplessness they feel in the face of radical contingency and uncertainty. When the longed-for or dreaded Day of Judgement does arrive, however, victories must now be won, riches bestowed, and sacrifices rewarded— and all of these sooner rather than later. There is no time to waste before taxes on the wealthy are reduced, the nation’s enemies are punished, naysayers and detractors are humiliated, and alternative sources of authority altogether eliminated. Otherwise the agency embodied in a new Caesar claiming unfettered sovereignty will turn out to have been one more temporary and expendable sacrifice offered to an unreliable and inattentive god, and time will resume its less slow, uneventful, disappointing, and in the end destructive flow. (As of this writing, the critics of the President complain both about his autocratic methods and also about the length of time it is taking for him to enable his Congressional party to pass significant legislation). Left to their own devices and resources, charismatic leaders cannot always fulfill their promises and shortly and inevitably lose their followers. That is because episodic, personal charisma has difficulty standing the test of time. To become effective, more personal, charismatic forms of the sacred are required to become collective if the episodic nature of its authority is ever to become perpetuated or even institutionalized. However, shrines become as empty as religious rhetoric. Beliefs and practices lack relevance to everyday life and to the personal experiences, affections, and loyalties of people who are routinely mistaken as ordinary. Thus, attempts to institutionalize the sacred and to give it collective embodiments and expression tend to fail over time. Thus, in the next chapter I will describe in more detail the regressive and authoritarian cycle in which social conflicts give rise to charismatic

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leaders who, if successful, add to the sanctity of the political center of the social order but whose presence further arouses and intensifies the differences and divisions of the people themselves. In American society, the office of the chief executive, imported from the British Constitution as a derivative of sacred monarchy, has performed the function of monarchical authority. It is the Constitution that allows politicians who become chief executives to lend whatever charismatic endowments they possess to a presidency sanctified by over two centuries of official or institutionalized charisma. Indeed, Americans are now witnessing what F. H. Buckley calls “a return to the Crown government of 250 years ago, with the difference that we now have George Mason’s ‘elective monarchy’, with voters choosing the executive and clothing him with powers not unlike those of George III.”12 It is that same office whose powers enhance, excite, and create our social and political divisions.

Notes 1

Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida, 2005:29. Dan Edelstein, “The Birth of Ideology from the Spirit of Myth: Georges Sorel Among the Ideologues,” Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, editors, The ReEnchantment of the World. Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009: pp. 201-224; p.221. 3 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 67-68. 4 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; pp. 12, n37-38. 5 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 209. 6 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 69. 7 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 208. 8 Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington, American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 221-236. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095781. 9 Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington, American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1991); p.227. 10 Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization 2

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of George Washington, American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 221-236http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095781. 11 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns. Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley; University of California Press, 2007; p. 121. 12 F.H. Buckley, The Once and Future King, New York: Encounter Books, 2014; p, 163.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE AMERICAN DILEMMA

As an essential element of sovereignty, the sacred constitutes the center of things. For the Greeks, as Jean-Pierre Vernant points out, the sacred provided “a common law” that “keeps each power within the limits of its own domain...”;1 it provides a power or force to transcend and neutralize all other forms of power and force. Like the “public hearth” at the center of the Greek city, its function is precisely to represent every lesser form of the sacred without dignifying or circumscribing any particular one more than any others: an early form, I would suggest, of the Establishment clause in the American Constitution. 2 The function of the central hearth thus belongs to the king or the president who represents but also sustains and creates the unity of the nation by transcending and limiting the aspirations and aggressions of its many parts. As the sanctified center of the polity, the central hearth, the sacred is intended to be the difference that transcends all other differences: the endpoint for the otherwise endless succession of differences. Indeed, one of the earlier assumptions of the Durkheimian school of sociological theory was that any office, shrine, totem or object that typifies the unity of the social order over and above its many and often contending parts is de facto sacred. Like the hearth of the ancient Greek polis, the office of the president is intended to keep any single faction of the nation from claiming priority or precedence over the other. Under the impact of the assassination of JFK, however, all the nation’s lesser hearths have been claiming an unprecedented and tenuous centrality, each of their very own. However, I am arguing that the assassination of John Kennedy has delayed the return of the monarchical past in the present. To put it another way, American society has yet to transform the end of the Kennedy administration at the time of his assassination into a sense of a new beginning. American longing for a strong, even sanctified leader at the nation’s political center is not due simply to the tendency of the sacred to be as often known as an absence as it is a presence; neither is it simply because the sacred, like the ancient gods, seems to come and go of its own accord,

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although its presence can never be ruled out. Neither can this longing be entirely explained by the increasingly secularized nature of American society. American longing for a strong, even sanctified leader at the nation’s political center is not due simply to the tendency of the sacred to be as often known as an absence as it is a presence; neither is it simply because the sacred, like the ancient gods, seems to come and go of its own accord, but its presence can never be ruled out. Neither can this longing be entirely explained by the increasingly secularized nature of American society. The longing for a Caesar has been embedded in American society since the eve of the Revolution and has haunted every later Kairos. I have noted that the new Republic derived from the British Constitution a chief executive modeled on sacred monarchy. The presence of sacred authority at the constitutional center of American society was to provide the Difference that would supersede all other differences. Indeed, at the beginning of the revolution, American rebels appealed to the English monarch to help them avert civil war and to preserve what Washington called the “sacred fire of liberty.”3 From the outset, when the American people have taken up the cause of liberty, they have turned to a patriot king, a sacred monarch, to vanquish the enemies of the people and to create cohesion among disparate and often conflicting interests. After the revolution, the presence of absolutist power was constitutionally vested in the new American executive: a not very well disguised replacement for sacred monarchy. From its very beginning American society has relied on sacred days and festivals, sacrifices and tributes to mobilize the electorate in ways that have precipitated crisis. For instance, in the months preceding the onset of the American Revolution, there were indeed calls for a last-minute appeal to the king to find a way to avert Parliamentary action which, if undertaken, would almost certainly lead to armed conflict. A bill was about to be introduced in Parliament closing the Port of Boston. Thomas Jefferson, although later opposed to using the government to foster religious observances, was entirely supportive of declaring June 1, 1774, as a day of fasting and humiliation. Jefferson’s motives, however, were not entirely clear. On one hand, he sought to alert the colonists to the dangers facing their fellows in Massachusetts. On the other hand, he wanted to avoid civil war. Thus, the resolution for such a day of prayer, called for on June 1, 1774, by Jefferson and others in the Virginia House of Burgesses, was seen by the loyalists as a not-so-innocent way to precipitate rather

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than to avert the civil war. As historian James Spalding concludes, “Whatever may have been intended by Jefferson and the other burgesses in their fast day resolution of May 24, 1774, its immediate practical effect had been the dissolving of the House of Burgesses by the loyalist governor and the setting up of a revolutionary government in Virginia. This presents a close parallel to England in 1642 after Charles I fled London.”4 Thus, in 1774, just as Parliament was threatening to close the Port of Boston, there was a dearth of potent and viable rites evoking sacred memory and calling for peace through sacrifice. Spalding notes that the rites called for by Jefferson and others to be held at the Virginia House of Burgesses were to have been modeled after a similar day during 1755, when, after the defeat of General Braddock, the colonists had drawn upon Puritan rites in the revolutionary Parliament of 1648: “Puritan precedence was in the mind of the patriot Thomas Jefferson much earlier, according to his reminiscences of the month of May in 1774 when, ‘We were under the conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen as to passing events; and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention. No example of such a solemnity had existed since the days of our distresses in the war of 1755 . . . [caused by] General Braddock’s defeat, since which a new generation had grown up. With the help therefore of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for the revolutionary precedents and from the Puritan of that day, preserved by him, we cooked up a resolution, somewhat modernizing their phrases, for appointing the 1st day of June, on which the Port bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer, to implore heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and parliament to moderation with justice.’”5

Even on the eve of the American Revolution, sacred rites were moribund and had to be doctored or contrived. For instance, Callahan, in his study of sacred days in American society, points out that no single observance would be sufficient to overcome what he calls “the contingency of national identity”; sacred observances must be repeated under new conditions that threaten national identity. In February of 1775, the Virginia “Commons House of Assembly . . . and the Members of the Provincial Congress at the request of the House on Febry 17th 1775,” observed “a day of fasting & humiliation, on account of the unhappy differences between Great Britain & her Colonies.”6 A resolution relative to this day of humiliation is recorded in the Journal of the Provincial Congress for the last day of its first session, January 17,1775: “RESOLVED, That it be

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recommended to the inhabitants of this colony to set apart Friday the 17th day February next, as a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer, before Almighty God, devoutly to petition him to inspire the King with true wisdom, to defend the people of North-America in their just title to freedom, and to avert from them the impending calamities of civil war.”7 The aspirations for a central authority who could ensure that peace and order would accompany freedom are still embedded in the Constitution’s provisions for the office of the president. However, the king or president who represents, sustains, and creates the unity of society may also generate rather than resolve intense animosities, jealousies, and rivalries. The sanctified cure, in other words, is worse than the disease. Thus the writers of the Constitution had due regard for the failings of the possible incumbents and recognized that that office may intensify the very divisions and conflicts that it is meant to assuage and transcend. Inevitably, therefore, some were appalled by the powers about to be conferred on the office of the president under the new constitution; they protested what they saw as the rebirth of monarchy. Against these opponents, according to Eric Nelson, no voice was more compelling than Alexander Hamilton’s, who took pains to “reaffirm his own radical conception of the proper role of the British sovereign (as opposed to the one actually played by George III and his Hanoverian predecessors). The result was perhaps the most stridently Royalist account of the English constitution to appear in the eighteenth century.”8 Referring to the opponents of the new presidential powers, Hamilton went on: “Calculating upon the aversion of the people to monarchy, they have endeavored to enlist all their jealousies and apprehensions in opposition to the intended president of the United States, not merely as the embryo, but as the full grown progeny, of the detested parent. Hamilton was clearly recalling Randolph’s charge that the president would be a ‘foetus of monarchy.’” 9 To institutionalize personal charisma in the office of a president modeled on the British version of sacred monarchy not only threatens the nation with autocracy but also intensifies the very divisions it is intended to overcome. Thus, Hamilton distinguished the new president from the King of England by considering the person of the latter as “sacred and inviolable,” whereas the new American president could readily be impeached.10 On the surface, the notion that the new president could be impeached or that he would serve only for a limited time, depending on the will of the electorate, appeared to minimize the threat posed to

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democracy by sanctified authority at the political center. As Nelson argues, however, Hamilton’s effort to distinguish the new American president from the English King was “disingenuous in the extreme.”11 Hamilton had earlier made it clear that the Stuart monarchy was for him, and not only for Adams, the model to be followed. Although the chief executive could be more or less differentiated from, interdependent with, or under the control of Parliament, that office was indeed sacred. From the American beginning, personal charisma, combined with the sacred authority of the office of the chief executive, has been expected to be the difference that transcends and negates all other forms of difference. However, the autocratic effect of placing a charismatic leader in the office of the chief executive intensifies the very social and economic differences that divide the nation and threaten its social order. Inevitably, the intensification of social conflict in the face of authoritarian leadership in the political center will increase the need for that authority to be legitimated, even sanctified, at a higher level: a regressive and circular process that reignites the presence of America’s monarchical past. On the one hand, as John Adams noted, the people are best represented by a monarch who transcends more than he represents the differences of the people themselves. On the other hand, as Adams also observed, such higher levels of authority further arouse popular jealousies and rivalries. Even, or especially, sacred monarchy itself will excite their jealousies and exacerbate their divisions. It is precisely this mutually reinforcing tension between social division and presidential power that creates a cycle of intensified conflict leading to renewed calls for the return of past monarchical authority in the present. Take, for example, sociologist Barry Schwartz’s elegant account of Lincoln’s funeral procession. There we will find that even the nation’s more virulent and intractable social tensions can be subsumed by the sanctification not only of the slain president but also of national sovereignty itself. As I have noted, the key figure in this process of sanctification is the presence of President George Washington, newly ensconced in his apotheosis above the rotunda of the national Capitol, where he is both god and immortal sovereign. However, in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, there was no national consensus on the direction that the nation should take; no agreement on the moral basis for war; no agreement on what makes human sacrifice necessary, sufficient, or even legitimate. Public despair over the future of the nation has continued to be fed by popular skepticism concerning not

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only the effectiveness but also the legitimacy and authority of such institutions as the Congress, the courts, the press, the universities, and the legislatures. As it was in the American beginning, these are nearly ideal conditions for intensified demands for a real and effective, utterly personal presence in the White House. However, as I have been arguing, that very presence further excites the nation’s divisions. As we explore Schwarz’s account of the rites attending Lincoln’s cortege, we will find good a very good description of the regressive circle that, at a critical moment, reintroduces a monarchical past into the present. We will see how tensions and the threat of social chaos heighten the demand for the unity and transcendence offered by a sanctified political center. We will also find that even the prospect of such a sacred and authoritative central hearth intensifies the seriousness of existing differences and stimulates the formation of new divisions and conflicts. These in turn strengthen the demand for a sanctified political center with the capacity to transcend and subsume the differences and conflicts that might otherwise tear apart the social order. Here is how Schwartz puts it: “The power of the national government had not been apparent for very long. Its dominance over the provincial regimes to the South was problematic until the recent conclusion of the war, and Lincoln’s funeral was the very first occasion for the ritual display of its newly won power. Nowhere was this display more vivid than in the climactic procession in Springfield, Illinois.”12 Schwartz astutely recognizes that whatever Lincoln’s place might later become in a putative civil religion, what we have in these local celebrations is far less of a religious celebration than a rite sanctifying the state and the imposition of order. Even in the midst of the eulogies for President Lincoln, there were criticisms of his character; of his indecisive conduct of the war; and of his leniency toward a brutal, unrepentant, and traitorous enemy. The martyred and, for many, saintly president had been weak, flawed, and profligate in the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of lives in an unnecessary or poorly prosecuted war. Nonetheless, and therefore, the new order would transform these deaths into new life for the nation. That is why, as Schwartz points out, “Every newspaper account of the funeral observance, regardless of the city in which it took place, tried to characterize the collective spirit it evoked. Everywhere, the funeral train's arrival was novel and unique, an unprecedented visitation never to be recaptured. Lincoln's funeral passage was ‘the most solemn, the most sacred and the most sublime spectacle ever witnessed by the people of

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Harrisburg’…The progression through Indiana was ‘a glorious record’ for the state ‘to treasure up in her heart of hearts’…A Chicago correspondent contemplated ‘the rich treasures we have inherited through the assassination’….”13 Schwartz makes it clear that the American center was, for the time being, united with the periphery, just as the individual was fused momentarily with the collective. The nation was finding its embodiment in the state, just as the state was becoming grounded in the affections and commitments of the nation. Schwartz describes how President Lincoln’s funeral train carried his body to city after city, from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. The hundreds of thousands who attended were divided over their admiration, disappointment, or scorn for Lincoln, but they were united in their celebration of the nation’s unity, won at the point of the sword, and in the power of the state to assert its sovereignty throughout the land. Soon, the people awed by the funeral cortege turned to enthusiastic welcomes for the returning generals. The enthusiasm of the crowds lining the tracks from Washington to the Midwest was temporary: the mood changing from the awed, to the dutiful, and eventually to the excited and celebratory as returning generals attracted far more enthusiasm from the crowds than the presidential cortege. There was also something transitional in these days of mourning; the charisma of Washington, of the nations’ Capitol, and the charisma of office was being carried to the Midwest, but unlike the coronation processions of English monarchs like Elizabeth I, the processions did not return that sanctity to the center. To be discussing these rites without realizing the presence of George Washington, however, would be like performing Hamlet without the Prince. The rites following the Lincoln cortege were unique: as different from anything that had occurred before as they would be from any subsequent commemorations. However, the spirit of George Washington enabled the nation not only to express but also to subsume and, for the time being, even to transcend all its other differences. The sacred, newly enshrined in the apotheosis of George Washington in the nations’ capitol, was replicated in thousands of busts and portraits that graced American homes long after Lincoln’s funeral cortege had passed through the city and the countryside. To be sure, popular awareness of the sacred was occasioned and intensified by the collective enthusiasm of these visitations, but the nation’s sanctified sovereignty, like the apotheosis of George Washington, already presided over the death of Lincoln, gave it meaning, and succeeded in ushering Lincoln himself into the company of the immortals. In the case of Lincoln, we have manifestations of the sacred, each more or

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less unique, serendipitous, unrepeatable, transient, local, or transitional, but all of which contributed to the sanctification of American sovereignty embodied in—and initiated by—George Washington. I am reminded of Huston Smith’s observation that “institutionalized religion isn’t all of religion, and the fact that the sacred is withdrawing from certain spheres doesn’t mean it isn’t moving into others.”14 If the national dissent about Lincoln’s character and presidency had devolved into myths about his legendary and heroic character, and if the relevant rites had been—and would continue to be—performed under the authoritative auspices of a priesthood, we might want to say that the solemnities across the country in honor of Abraham Lincoln constituted evidence for a civil religion. However, in this case the rites varied from one locale to another. They were intensely focused not only on Lincoln but also on returning generals. Certainly they have not been repeated, nor were they performed, under the auspices of a singular institution or priesthood. Even in a secularizing society, the sacred is expressed and formed in a single, unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable episode: a fleeting moment with lasting, and for some, eternal effects; and the celebration of a person’s presence in the midst of the most obvious signs of his absence. The influence of Emile Durkheim can be seen in Barry Schwartz’s description of the public rites that accompanied the passage of Lincoln’s funeral cortege from Washington to the Midwest: “Out of these ceremonies and these states of moral arousal comes the idea that there is a sacred world apart from the profane world of everyday life, and it is in this sacred world that ordinary people are transformed into extraordinary beings. The public response to Lincoln’s assassination in the northern states is a case in point.”15 Thus, Schwartz notes that, in the rites attending the funeral cortege of Lincoln, the sacred elided the difference between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the exalted and the mundane. For the moment, and it is a critical moment, the exaltation of sentiment and the fusion of individual with collective voices may have so overwhelmed the participants with their own significance that their influence would have seemed to them to have been coming from a transcendent, external, constraining, and superior source. Remember our discussion of American Memorial Day rites, of which William Lloyd Warner gave a similar description only to have it effectively countered by the far more skeptical arguments of Catherine Albanese to the effect that the rites themselves were moribund and were leaving the American people with no reprieve from death anxiety.

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Unlike Warner, Schwartz is no Durkheimian. His skepticism comes out in his account of the many voices critical of Lincoln that were raised on these solemn occasions. Lincoln’s rites, grand and compelling as they were, had also been accompanied by widespread public comments that as a man and as a president, Lincoln qualified only for moderate admiration. Schwartz notes that “From the Lincoln rites comes the impression of an extraordinary man, a flawless man beloved by all. From the substance of things said about him comes the impression of a less than flawless man, greater as an object of sympathy than of reverence. There is significant inconsistency between the rites that commemorate Lincoln and the beliefs that reveal him. This relationship between belief and ritual is not the kind that Durkheim …knew and wrote about.”16 Schwartz is quick to note the limits of any Durkheimian model when dealing with the sacred itself. Schwartz reconciles the contrast between public skepticism about Lincoln as a man and president and the grandeur of the rites attending his funeral cortege: “Lincoln could be universally mourned without being universally admired because the celebration of America's moral unity and cohesion was the ultimate object of his funeral. The state was the entity through which the nation’s moral unity and cohesiveness were affirmed. In every city through which the funeral procession passed, memorable displays of national symbolism amplified this realization.”17 Thus, the local was identified with the nation, the individual with the collective, and the occasional with the everlasting. The sacred is the difference that negates, subsumes, and transcends all other differences. As a sociologist, Schwartz helps us lay the groundwork for a theory of secularization that considers the sacred as differentiated from any putative connection to religion. In so doing he allows the discussion to focus on what is characteristic of anomalous and unprecedented occasions that are recognizably and indisputably sacred: the transformation of finality into a new beginning, the sense of Lincoln’s continuing presence at the critical moment of his departure, the dissonance of beliefs and opinions in the midst of solemnities, the episodic and transitory nature both of the rites themselves and of the awe they aroused, the unprecedented nature of the moment relieved by the proliferation of images of George Washington welcoming Lincoln into heaven, the outburst of popular enthusiasm over the returning generals, and the celebration of popular sovereignty along with the longing for a strong leader to replace the flawed and departed president.

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In Schwartz’s description, as I have noted, we see the process of regression from transcendent and sanctified authority at the political center into division and conflict that, in critical moments, calls for and leads to the return of the monarchical past into the present. The sacred is host to regret, uncertainty, disbelief, fluidity, contingency, and divergences of anticipation while performing the transformation of absence into presence and of death into life. Thus, the evocation of a sanctified and sovereign nation-state enabled many of those pronouncing on the virtues and faults of the slain president to see in his death not a day of judgment but of exaltation: an opportunity for the nation to find a strong leader. Judgment would come, but it took the form of expectations that Andrew Johnson would prosecute, try, and execute the leaders of the defeated enemy rather than forgive them. The judgment that came from Johnson was not what had been expected. To be sure, Johnson placed the Union at the top of his priorities, far ahead of any of the imagined benefits of Emancipation. He vetoed the Freedman’s Act and postponed during the life of the former slave owners the transfer of their property to the freedmen. More devastating to the radical Republicans was Johnson’s willingness to restore the former rebels to the vast majority of official positions in state and local government. The institutions of the South, except for slavery, could remain unchanged, and those who fought to preserve a moderate form of slavery remained in control. More important for my point here, however, is the way Johnson in effect superseded Congress with his own decisions. What Agamben calls the state of exception, in which the law is essentially what the sovereign declares it to be, was quite apparent in Johnson’s refusal to try the former Confederate leaders for treason or to have them hanged, again a decision he made without the advice or consent of the Congress. As Michael Les Benedict, the historian of Johnson’s impeachment, puts it, “Like Lincoln, he assumed complete authority over the question himself, and denied Congress’s power to participate even more firmly than his predecessor.”18 That is what I mean by the return of the monarchical past in the present. It is his exercise of sovereignty that underlies another, quite singular act of Andrew Johnson: to call for a National Day of Prayer, Humiliation, and Thanksgiving. To do so was in the English tradition, and both Charles I, the martyred Patriot King, and King William, whose advent from Holland finished, if it did not resolve, the conflicts of the civil war, both were honored in England with annual days of national tribute. When on

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special occasions the nation was called to such acts of surrender and devotion, it was to prepare the people for submission and sacrifice: momentary states of exception, as it were, when the nation was imagined to hang in the balance between the past and the future, or between life and death.19 Prior to Andrew Johnson, President John Adams had been the last president to have called for a national day of collective repentance and thanksgiving, actions in keeping with what we have come to know of Adams’s own preference for the British Constitution and sacred monarchy. The struggle once more was between a chief executive claiming to represent the whole people, Johnson’s notion of “the Union,” and Congress’s assertion of its right to represent the differences among the populace. The end of the Civil War and the death of Lincoln himself are transformed into a new beginning for a nation so sanctified by sacrifice that it can stand the test of time. Because of the changes associated with the process of secularization, the regressive and circular pattern linking conflict to the sacralization of the political center never returns to quite the same starting point. The circular pattern becomes more like a spiral over time. Take, for example, two changes associated with the Ur-fascist core. The first is an attenuation of the relation between the secular and the sacred. This, of course, can take many forms: the increasing distance of the sanctified past from the present; the unreliability of ancestral presences; and the increasing gap between the temporal and the eternal. That gap, as we have seen in the case of Washington’s arms extending from his heavenly apotheosis to the slain Lincoln, was only just beginning to widen in the aftermath of the civil war. The second change is like the first: an increasing sense of the difference and the distance between the modern and the antique. The familiarity of the American home with the insignia of antiquity that we noted during the years shortly after Washington’s death may have been far less widespread in the wake of the Civil War. By combining the charisma of a popular or even populist politician with the charisma institutionalized in the office of the chief executive, American constitutional democracy allows a president to enact Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception.” In the state of exception, the sovereign has the right, even the duty, to make decisions that, by transcending the difference between divine and human law, institutionalize autocracy and even risk nuclear annihilation. Not only had JFK announced his new administration as a national Kairos and had evoked Washington’s injunction to the new nation to carry the sacred torch of liberty throughout the world. He also had passed that torch to a new generation whom he

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called upon to make any sacrifice that the nation’s redemptive mission might require. With Kennedy’s assassination, however, the nation’s Kairos became its Day of Judgement. Thus, Martin Luther King himself wrote what could well have become his own epitaph: “We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We had tolerated hate; we had tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of all aspects of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views.”20 It is as if someone had tossed paint on a portrait of Washington reaching out to the slain President Lincoln to lift him into the company of the immortals. Instead of exaltation or apotheosis, there was only a day of judgment. Although assassination of John F. Kennedy was indeed a Judgment Day, the judgments proliferated and dispersed as social divisions, postmortems, dissenting voices, and partisan reflection whittled away at the Kairos until it became subject the slow erosion of the passage of time-asflux. It was a delay marked by the battles for civil rights and civil liberties, or the long evangelical and conservative reaction against liberal successes in those same struggles, and the proletarianization of the lower middle class under the auspices of their representatives in Congress. Perceived as a day of judgment, President John Kennedy’s assassination has led to a series of developments, the most telling of which are a sense of absence in the political center, the dispersion of the sacred from center to more peripheral social units like the local community, the family, or the ethnic group; and, finally, a seeming endless series of post-mortems on the demerits of the Kennedy presidency. Thus, John F. Kennedy’s name has been given to more schools and institutions, roads and parks, monuments and arenas or playgrounds than that of any other president, both in this country and abroad. His assassination and the process of secularization have created a vacuum at the center of the social order. There is no apotheosis for John F. Kennedy: no sign that he has been welcomed into the presence of other immortal leaders or sovereigns. Indeed, there is only a longing to fill the vacuum at the national center where the sacred used to be. It is a vacuum that had been filled by JFK in various ways: by his rhetorical invocations of the sacred, by his preservation of the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, by his charismatic evocations of the critical moment in which the nation would indeed find its true self, by his visionary apprehensions of a new age or frontier, by his passing of the

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sacred torch of liberty to a new generation, by his pledging of the nation’s sacred honor to the nation’s redemptive mission, and by the fusion of his personal charisma with that institutionalized in the presidency. The nation is missing far more than JFK’s own evocations of the sacred, his personal charisma, and his summons of the American people to higher levels of commitment and sacrifice for the cause of freedom around the world. There is a palpable fatigue in the sacred that inheres in the nation’s highest office, the one office intended to stand above the nation’s factions and special interests and to offer to the people an actual embodiment of the people’s own deepest values and commitments, their aspirations and their apprehensions. This protracted secularization of the Kairos marked by Kennedy’s assassination has allowed the cycle to extend itself before initiating the turn toward the monarchical past. It is a delay that will end in a critical moment where the past and the future of the nation seem to be at stake. At such a moment, a fascist aspiring to the Oval Office could appeal to sacred moments in American history while urging the nation to fulfill what we used to call its Judeo-Christian mission among the nations of the world. Evoking principles of human liberty grounded on the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights, he (or she), like Abraham Lincoln, could affirm that the time had come for these permanent truths, “applicable to all men and all times,” to be put into action lest they be forfeited forever and even summon the nation to “trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored.” To summarize: Perceived as a day of judgment, President John Kennedy’s assassination has led to a series of developments, the most telling of which are a sense of absence in the political center, the dispersion of the sacred from center to more peripheral social units like the local community, the family, or the ethnic group; and, finally, a seemingly endless series of post-mortems on the demerits of the Kennedy presidency. True, John F. Kennedy’s name has been given to more schools and institutions, roads and parks, monuments and arenas or playgrounds than that of any other president, both in this country and abroad. His assassination and the process of secularization have created a vacuum at the center of the social order. There is no apotheosis for John F. Kennedy: no sign that he has been welcomed into the presence of other immortal leaders or sovereigns. Indeed, there is only a longing to fill the vacuum at the national center where the sacred used to be.

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The nation is missing far more than JFK’s own evocations of the sacred, his personal charisma, and his summons of the American people to higher levels of commitment and sacrifice for the cause of freedom around the world. There is a palpable fatigue in the sacred that inheres in the nation’s highest office, the one office intended to stand above the nation’s factions and special interests and to offer to the people an actual embodiment of the people’s own deepest values and commitments, their aspirations and also their apprehensions. Thus, as we seek to detect in critical moments the ongoing spiral of this regressive circle, we must make allowances for a change in the starting point. What indeed was the relation of America to antiquity, or the relation of the ancestral past to the present, in the 1960s? It cannot have been quite the same, at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and at the beginning of a new generation on its way to a new frontier, as it had been in 1865. Consider this journalistic description of a ceremony honoring John F. Kennedy on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. “Standing wordlessly before a flickering flame, their faces etched in the sunlight slanting through a canopy of thinning trees, two Democratic presidents came together Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the memory of a third. . . . President Obama and former President Bill Clinton walked up a hillside to the grave of John F. Kennedy, where, joined by Michelle Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, they laid a wreath to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death by an assassin’s bullet. A military bugler called out taps, the mournful notes resounding on a crisp, clear autumn day that seemed a softer echo of the stark grandeur of the state funeral on Nov. 25, 1963. It was the emotional highlight of a day laden with symbolism, uniting Democratic presidents past, present and possibly future, to pay tribute to a beloved predecessor, a leader whose legacy and family played a formative role in the lives of Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton.”21 Note the reference to the “stark grandeur of the state funeral on Nov. 25, 1963.”

I have been arguing that the sacred undergoes cultural fatigue; even relics lose much of their potency. Further, the sacred ancestors often do not come even when called upon in times of crisis. However, we must not confuse apparent absence with a lack of presence. The question becomes an inquiry into the vitality of American rituals. Are they as moribund still as Albanese and others have found them in the aftermath of the 1960s? After fifty years of commemoration, there has been little to observe of the monarchical past returning with force and significance into the present. Where are the arms of President Washington, reaching down from his heavenly apotheosis in the heavens?

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Notes 1

Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 231. Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 233. 3 http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/why-is-america-exceptional. 4 James C. Spalding, “Loyalist as Royalist, Patriot as Puritan: The American Revolution as a Repetition of the English Civil Wars,” Church History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 329-340; p. 330. 5 James C. Spalding, “Loyalist as Royalist, Patriot as Puritan: The American Revolution as a Repetition of the English Civil Wars,” Church History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 329-340; p. 329. 6 Robert Smith and C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “A Declaration of Dependence: Robert Smith's 1775 Humiliation Sermon,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 100, No. 3, Religion in South Carolina (Jul., 1999), pp. 221-240; p. 223. 77 Robert Smith and C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “A Declaration of Dependence: Robert Smith’s 1775 Humiliation Sermon,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 100, No. 3, Religion in South Carolina (Jul., 1999), pp. 221-240; p. 223. 8 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 218. 9 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 218. 10 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 219. 11 Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution. Monarchy and the American Founding. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; p. 218. 12 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343364; p. 355. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 13 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343364; p. 356. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 14 Martin Marty, “The American Situation in 1969,” 1969:25-43; 32. 15 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343364; p. 357. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 15 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343364; p. 346. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 15 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 3432

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364; p. 356-7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 16 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343364; p. 353. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 17 Barry Schwartz, “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: DurkheVol 39, No. 4, im and the Lincoln Assassination,” Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 343-364; p. 355. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580243. 18 “Michael Les Benedict, “A New Look at the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Sep., 1973), pp. 349-367; p. 350. The Academy of Political Science. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2148988. 19 Charles Ellis Dickson,“Jeremiads in the New American Republic: The Case of National Fasts in the John Adams Administration,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 187-207; pp187-88. The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/365605. 20 edy,” Transition, No. 75/76, The Anniversary Issue: Selections from Transition, 1961-1976 (1997), pp. 24-39; pp. 26-29; 29. 21 Mark Landler, The New York Times, “The Obamas, Clintons and Kennedys Went Wednesday to Arlington National Cemetery to Reflect on a Nation’s Sad Chapter. Published: November 20, 2013.

CHAPTER EIGHT SANCTIFYING THE CRITICAL MOMENT

The Ur-fascist course, we remember, elides the difference between the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the secular. It is therefore not surprising that the first new nation, the American republic, should have sought to sanctify its political center very much as the ancient Greek polis sought to sanctify its own. Take, for example, Jean-Pierre Vernant’s description of the Greeks’ “common law” that “keeps each power within the limits of its own domain”;1 That law was like the “public hearth” at the center of the Greek city, whose “function was precisely to represent every hearth without being identified with any particular one.”2 The regressive cycle in which sanctified authority from the past is reintroduced into the present was working then as well: the authority of the chief’s own hearth being renewed in the heart of the polis in the form of the “common law,” a law both sacred and secular. However, the common law, the central hearth, the chief priest, or the king, instead of providing the difference that transcends all other sources of difference and division, also intensifies the aspirations and aggressions of a society’s several parts. To be sure, the historian of ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant, calls the sacred an “instrument in the struggle against human time revealed as pure flux . . . Against this human time [memory] sets the conquest, through anamnesis, of a knowledge capable of transforming human existence by connecting it to the cosmic order and to divine immutability.”3 However, the reliance on sacred precedent, the appeal to an authority that transcends the passage of time, indeed, every effort to avert a crisis by sanctifying the critical moment may make the passage of time even more critical than it otherwise would be. From its very beginning American society has relied on sacred days and festivals, sacrifices and tributes to mobilize the electorate to unify public allegiance to their self-appointed leaders or to the sanctified authority of the king. However, even these rites have precipitated and intensified crisis. Intended to prevent a civil war they may have initiated the Revolution.

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Thus, a priest in South Carolina appealing to the distant king for leadership and “Liberty” that could avert the civil war that became the American Revolution. He referred to the American colonies as a “new Israel:” a problematic reference in view of the fact that time and again Israel had been sundered by a civil war fomented by the rivalry between two brothers, each of whom thought of himself as a chief priest. Not only was the Israelite center subject to fratricidal tensions, but the central sanctuary in Jerusalem was often pitted against rival shrines or charismatic leaders in the countryside. This form of the regressive cycle of disintegration and the reassertion of sanctified authority at the political center has particularly disturbing American manifestations. Therefore it is not unusual to argue that the sanctification of the powers of the chief executive intensifies social and political conflicts and excites new ones. As F. H. Buckley has noted, the expansion of the franchise and the process of immigration create a more diverse and conflictual body politic, whose differences and divisions, increasingly represented in Congress, produce the stalemates and chronic crises that legitimate the expansive use of executive power. Indeed, F. H. Buckley believes that the rise of Crown government itself is the consequence of advanced complexity that in turn requires the increasing use of advanced technologies of communication and more highly controlled and complex bureaucratic structures of governance. None of these factors is conducive to democratization. That is why an authoritarian leader may be elected President who promises to simplify administrative structures through simple and direct communications. However, as Buckley suggests, there is something dialectical about this development. 4 It is not just that chronic crises call for the expansive use of executive power through a tightly disciplined bureaucratic apparatus. It is that executive power itself creates and feeds upon crises that allow the executive to legitimate, demonstrate, and expand its powers: “We have more supposed ‘emergencies’ today than ever in the past, but this is a consequence, not a cause, of the rise of Crown government.”5 Times of crisis generate demands for a sacred authority, a chief priest or a king, a chief executive or constitutional monarch that can enable a society to rise to an occasion, overcome a crisis, and thus keep a social order from running out of time. Such a sanctified sacred authority may so intensify the meaning of a critical moment that its opportunities and dangers become not merely critical but fateful for the entire social system. Thus, the American dilemma: the expansion of democracy and the increasing

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complexity of the governance lead over time to the sacralization of the office of the chief executive and of the sovereignty of nation-state itself. Conversely, the sanctification of the office of the chief executive fuses life with politics, as Agamben has noted. That makes everyday life serious (and thus, in Durkheim’s view sacred) and makes differences and divisions fateful or even mortal in their intensity and significance. Furthermore, as Buckley and others have suggested, the tightly-coupled workings of complex organizations make it inevitable that a difficulty in one part of the system will cause conflicts elsewhere. Thus, the complexity based on the technological and professionalized organization of work and politics make it inevitable that chronic crisis will become acute. Further centralization ensures that conflicts will further disrupt those who profess solidarity to a common constitution, who share a political or policy-based mission, and who subscribe to the virtues of responsible interdependence. It is worth pausing a moment to note how time-as-event threatens the smooth and protracted workings of formal organizations and governmental bureaucracies. Sudden and fateful interruptions of that smooth and secular passage create points of no return, ends for which a secular society finds great difficulty in its attempts to transform them into new beginnings. As I have noted, in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, the nation became all the more easily fractured into multiple representations not only of special interests but also of ethnic, regional, or local loyalties sanctified by convention, time, and tradition. Religion became a vehicle for resentment, for intergroup conflict, and for communal competition and defense; many understandably felt that there was something missing at the American center. Note how ancient is this apparently modern dilemma. Even in ancient societies, sacrifice has never been routinely effective and often had unintended consequences. In his magisterial treatment of sacrifice in ancient and classical Greece, Professor Naiden cites Plutarch’s assertion that a joyous festival connotes “the good hope and impression that the divine is present and kindly and will receive the ceremonies favorably.” However, Naiden also notes that gods are, after all, gods. Thus, neither a Biblical deity nor ancient Greek gods can be counted upon always to be either present or pleased. As Professor Naiden reminds us concerning ancient Greek deities, “Gods not only rejected sacrifices, but used rejection to split communities that sacrifice would supposedly unify.” Indeed, it was not only that flaws in a sacrificial animal might fail to please or be attractive to a god; it was that “Flawed entrails betokened an

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unfavorable god.” 6 Even in traditional societies the ancestors and the gods may at times have been be unreliable, unpredictable, disappointing, and disruptive. Rituals are supposed to go smoothly. They are also intended to make things go more smoothly. As they intensify the critical moment, however, and especially if they do not go smoothly, rites can intensify the meaning and solidify the consequences of a critical moment. As Callahan points out in his study of sacred days in American society, no single observance would be sufficient to overcome what he calls “the contingency of national identity”; sacred observances must be repeated under new conditions that threaten national identity. Moreover, in such critical moments as the onset of the American Revolution, more is therefore required than a patchedtogether revision of earlier liturgies, like those that served in a comparably critical moment over a century earlier on the eve of the civil war in England. Thus, it is risky to rely on any single rite while seeking to enable an entire society to face a critical moment. Indeed, until the time of Andrew Johnson, President Adams was the last to call for a national day of fasting.7 National days of surrender and devotion sanctify states of exception, when the nation is imagined to be hanging in the balance between the past and the future, or between life and death. Life is then fused with politics, and the secular becomes indistinguishable from the sacred. The Ur-fascist core, when it comes to the surface, offers no quarter. That was precisely the problem facing a South Carolina preacher named Robert Smith on the eve of the American Revolution. A day of fasting and humiliation had been called by the Provincial Assembly, and the most prominent minister in South Carolina, an apparent loyalist named Robert Smith, had been called upon to give the sermon to that body. In his audience also were the most powerful members of Southern society: plantation owners and the leading members of the provincial government itself. Dissenters and Presbyterians sat alongside outright loyalists: the sources of the very divisions that had long torn British society apart and had laid the foundation for the English civil war a century earlier. Indeed, given his own aristocratic background and his ties to the Bishop of London, the Reverend Mr. Smith was acutely aware of the contingency of American national identity. Both in earlier and later drafts of his February 1775 sermon he referred to “communities” and “peoples” as the basis for collective solidarity, but it was only in 1775 that he could bring himself to refer to Americans as a nation, like Israel, wholly dependent on the

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providence of God for its very existence. Only in 1780, when he was on military duty as the British laid siege to the Port of Charleston, did he refer to “Citizens of America.” Nonetheless, in his 1775 appeals to the authority of the Bible, to the sacred history of Israel, and to the providential and almighty God of the universe, he reminded his fellow colonists that “Instead of that cordial affection which as Christians should unite us with the closest bands, how often are the smallest differences in sentiment made the weak foundations for a confirmed aversion to each other.” 8Smith was indeed invoking the difference that transcended and subsumed all the other differences among Americans otherwise divided not only in their regional loyalties and class interests but also in their religious allegiances. Thus, in his sermon on February 17, 1775, Robert Smith also reminded his audience, many of whom would become the leaders of the newly independent colonies, that their fate as individuals—and of the new nation itself—would either excite the joy and admiration of the angels forever or else become a dark and unending torment. The difference in these two fates would depend on the obedience they rendered to God and the righteousness with which they lived their individual lives. “Then may we hope with confidence, that our Israel may be safe under the protection of the most high; & that it will be well with us and our children forever.” 9 Fully aware of how social conflicts could easily overwhelm any collective form of sacrifice and devotion, on a subsequent day of national humiliation fasting and prayer, July 20, 1775, Smith delivered another sermon that indeed confirmed the leaders of the Revolution in their determination to seek sovereignty in their own land. It was a day that, in the eyes of some historians, was truly the beginning of the American Revolution.10 We therefore need to understand more fully how attempts to sanctify a critical moment may intensify its meaning and make more intractable its consequences. Take, for example, the archaic Greeks described in their sometimes futile sacrifices by Professor Naiden: “All eyes are on the god, or the place of contact with this being. Joy, hope, fear, awe, more feelings than there are worshippers crowd the line of sight between him and them. . . . That is how they see themselves.”11 To sanctify a Day of Prayer, Humiliation, and Thanksgiving only raises the stakes of the crisis by holding the fleeting moment in perennial tension with the eternal. However, the sacrifice and its potential epiphany expose the worshippers to a universe of possibility that evokes not only excited anticipation or

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aspiration but also dread. The Kairos, the moment in which a people stands the test of time and becomes assured of its grounding in the universe, also becomes the time when the very existence of an entire people is most threatened. Thus, the revolutionary sermon preached by Robert Smith on the eve of the American Revolution has had very powerful echoes in recent and still living memory. In an address to the governors of the states on July 4, 1962, President Kennedy cited Thomas Jefferson’s affirmation that the American Declaration foreshadowed the liberty of all peoples and went on to assert, “On this fourth day of July, 1962, we who are gathered at this same hall, entrusted with the fate and future of our States and Nation, declare now our vow to do our part to lift the weights from the shoulders of all, to join other men and nations in preserving both peace and freedom, and to regard any threat to the peace or freedom of one as a threat to the peace and freedom of all. ‘And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’”12 The commonwealth of liberty would include henceforth not only a transAtlantic partnership linking the United States with a united Europe but a commitment by this country to support any nation seeking its own independence. There is no doubt that Kennedy felt that to keep its identity the nation might have to risk its own survival. On July 4, 1962, the context for Kennedy’s call to sacrifice was a time of national trial full of possibility for the salvation of freedom throughout the world but fraught also with the threat of extinction: “I speak today in an hour of national peril and national opportunity. Before my term has ended we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain. The answers are by no means clear. All of us together—this Administration, this Congress, this nation—must forge those answers.”13 The world was approaching its Kairos. It might soon be too late for America to realize its own aspirations for freedom: aspirations dependent in a complex world on the fate of freedom abroad. By evoking the sacred, JFK enabled the nation needed to invoke the sacred to meet the threat of extinction at the hands of a militant and expanding totalitarian and imperial Soviet Communism armed with missiles bearing nuclear warheads. He may have intensified the threat by declaring that moment on July 4 to be critical for the life, the identity, the very being of the nation itself. The fact that Kennedy chose the Fourth of July not only links him

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with Robert Smith’s manifesto sermon to the American people but also reflects the regressive and dangerous aspects of monarchical return. In the end, time-as-event, charisma, and the assertion of sanctified central authority, although intended to represent an enduring presence, inevitably also signify an enduring absence. Like ashes, relics, or a cross, each emblem, however sanctified by residues of presence, reflects and signifies that something essential is missing: Consider the names carved into the memorial wall at Ground Zero in New York City where once the World Trade Center stood or the names inscribed at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. By committing the nation to undertake any sacrifice that might be necessary to carry the sacred torch to the peoples of the world, Kennedy made a promise that not only lived with him but also may indeed have died with him. Thus, if sacred beliefs and practices fail to transcend but instead only intensify social conflicts; if they fail to anchor the fleeting moment, with all its opportunities and losses, in the everlasting but rather merely increase a society’s sense of its vulnerability to the passage of time; if they convey a sense of enduring absence where they were intended to represent real and effective presence even in the face of death; if they no longer represent, and in that sense embody, the society in and for which they stand, then sacred beliefs and practices, institutions and emblems will intensify the cultural despair for which they are intended to be the one most effective and enduring antidote.

Notes 1

Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 231. Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 233. 3 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006:136. 4 F.H. Buckley, The Once and Future King, New York: Encounter Books, 2014; pp. 164, 168. 5 F.H. Buckley, The Once and Future King, New York: Encounter Books, 2014; p. 160. 6 F.S. Naiden, Smoke Signals for the Gods, Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through the Roman Periods, New York and Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 21-2. 7 Charles Ellis Dickson, “Jeremiads in the New American Republic: The Case of National Fasts in the John Adams Administration,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 187-207; pp187-88. The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/365605. 8 Robert Smith and C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “A Declaration of Dependence: 2

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Robert Smith's 1775 Humiliation Sermon,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 100, No. 3, Religion in South Carolina (Jul., 1999), pp. 221-240. South Carolina Historical Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27570386; p.232 9 Robert Smith and C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “A Declaration of Dependence: Robert Smith's 1775 Humiliation Sermon,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 100, No. 3, Religion in South Carolina (Jul., 1999), pp. 221-240. South Carolina Historical Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27570386; p. 236. 10 Robert Smith and C. P. Seabrook Wilkinson, “A Declaration of Dependence: Robert Smith's 1775 Humiliation Sermon,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 100, No. 3, Religion in South Carolina (Jul., 1999), pp. 221-240. South Carolina Historical Society. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27570386. 11 F.S. Naiden, Smoke Signals for the Gods, Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through the Roman Periods, New York and Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 23-4. 12 http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/PhiladelphiaPA_19620704.aspx. 13 http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/PhiladelphiaPA_19620704.aspx.

CHAPTER NINE SECULARIZATION AND FINALITY

Now, if we are to imagine American society, we need to ask what has happened to the American Ur-fascist core. Does the nation still engage in a conversation with the dead, with the past, with antiquity, and with the gods? Does the apotheosis of George Washington, mandated by Congress during the Civil War, still preside over the nation? It has been over eighty years since Congress mandated millions of local celebrations of the life and character of George Washington in order to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression. It has been fifty years since John F. Kennedy, echoing Washington’s mandate to America, summoned the nation to bear the torch carrying “the sacred fire of liberty” to all the oppressed peoples of the world, but there has been no Congressional mandate to commemorate JFK’s leadership or martyrdom, just as there is little national enthusiasm for carrying freedom’s “sacred fire” to the peoples being slaughtered by their own governments or co-religionists. Has the nation forgotten or just become indifferent to its founding vision? As an increasingly secular society, America has been constantly revising its notions not only of the past and of what constitutes relevant precedent but also of what can be usefully anticipated of the future. It has become increasingly difficult to know whether it is time to lay the racial past to rest or to fulfill certain long-overdue promises. Is it time for the long-delayed future to begin or to temporize a little while longer? Has the nation reached a point of no return to its racist and absolutist past, or is the nation still poised precariously between the past and the future? Prophets used to specialize in such questions. In secular societies, however, prophecy is no longer a divine message whose truth is certified by the critical moment; rather it is a questionable assertion whose accuracy requires the development of a wide range of relevant scenarios for variable probabilities. That is one reason why the regressive cycle linking loss and conflict to monarchical return has become more attenuated. The cycle takes more time than it did for President Lincoln, for President Washington, for Thomas Jefferson and Robert Smith, or for Charles I.

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To be sure, transcendence over time can never be fully maintained or taken for granted. Even sacred mountains may lose their sanctity and their shrines; monks may not come to them any longer nor tourists replace the missing pilgrims. Graveyards become abandoned and fall into decay or are paved over to make way for buildings or for bombers. Ancestral relics lose their power to heal or to save their devotees from danger; the ancestors move on and have other things on their minds than the management of their descendants’ affairs. That is one reason why Memorial Day services have become sparsely attended and presidential calls for further sacrifice acquire a tinny ring. Sacred rites increasingly fail to sustain the contest between being and nothingness, and it becomes more doubtful whether being will prevail over nonbeing. Cultural despair erodes any confidence in American exceptionalism, the belief that America would be the nation where the promises and possibilities of the past were finally to be fulfilled—the belief, therefore, that America would be the sacred difference that will transcend and eliminate all other differences. Despair makes it far easier to place trust in the hard assets of traditional marriage, in the family, and in the local community than in the nation’s political center. Secular and religious fundamentalisms that rely on literal interpretations of the Constitution and of the Bible take the place of more abstract democratic values such as equality of opportunity and aspiration and of the more universal norms of human rights. Longing intensifies for the purity of the nation’s earliest years. For the time being, the secularization of America prolongs the time being while postponing an apocalyptic showdown. There is no priest or prophet like Robert Smith of South Carolina, who called, as we have seen, for sacrifice that an as-yet-to-be-revealed new nation might fulfill its role in a providential and sacred history. A secular society allows the sovereign to mix the complexity and uncertainty, the divisions and the provisional judgments of an open-ended time being while delaying the more definitive, even decisive time markers associated with the sacred. A wholly secular society, I have been suggesting, temporizes not only with both the past but also with the imagined requirements, threats, and possibilities of the future. Being subject to continuing revision and reimagination, however, the future itself offers few enduring sources of vision and vitality, and equally few guarantees of survival or triumph. The future becomes reduced to what is now seen as “trending,” if only for the time being.

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I have been arguing that cultural despair thrives in a society in which sacred authority is essential but contested, or in which the social order is both sanctified and therefore also a source of chronic and at times acute division. Where institutions fail to monopolize, own, or even merely to control the manifestations and embodiments of sanctity, the sacred may not only become dispersed throughout the society but so diffuse in its appearances and representations that the social order may fear that it is losing its grasp on the sacred. The nation may no longer be, as Fichte put it of Germany, the “seed of perfection” on whose flourishing and maturity depends the future of humanity itself. What has happened to the Ur-fascist core that grounded the office of the president in the sanctity of the English monarchy and that was epitomized in the apotheosis of George Washington in the rotunda of the nation’s Capitol? As William Callahan has put it of Anglo-American days of national fasting and humiliation, going back to the seventeenth century, such observances “combined the spiritual and the temporal to assert the nation as the sacred political community.”1 Such days of national consecration, argues Callahan, generated “a new kind of sovereignty for the nation-state that joined sacred and secular in a productive tension.”2 Thus, Anglo-American sovereignty merges the popular with the political, the existential with the political, the natural with the social, the temporal with the eternal, the secular and the sacred. Without the presence of Washington’s apotheosis, it is very difficult to explain how the balance between time and eternity, end and beginning, absence and presence could have been held in such creative tension given the conflict between the devotions and tributes accompanying Lincoln’s rites and the simultaneous, freely skeptical or even derogatory speech that also characterized them. To understand the Ur-fascist core in America we need to consider the views of that historian of ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant, on the ancient Greek kolossos: a double for the departed king. Those who created the kolossos sought to maintain the temporal presence, for instance, of a dead king, to give time for mourning. Long after the king’s own remains had been dispersed or buried, and until the period of mourning had passed, the colossus stood in for the king, just as the fresco of Washington’s apotheosis stood for his colossus. Indeed, Washington’s presence as a double for the life of the nation itself may have prevented Lincoln’s death from creating an irreparable break between the nation’s past and its future. The presence of Washington’s colossus may have allowed the rites attending Lincoln’s

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funeral cortege to hold the unity of the society in tension with its conflicts and to transform his assassination from an end into a new beginning for the nation itself. Even more than conventional sacred monuments and emblems, the kolossos maintains several links that are critically important for the regressive cycle: the link between the fleeting moment and the everlasting, between the dead and the living, between presence and absence, between a society’s sense of unity and various differences and divisions, between the past and the present, between the novel and real or imaginary precedent, between a sense of an ending and the sense of a new beginning, between the irreversible and the redeemable. The transcendent presence of the President as kolossos helps to explain an observation made in 1965 by political scientist Sidney Verba. In the course of reflecting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Verba wisely notes that, “the self-conscious secularization of political life may obscure the extent to which political commitment in the United States contains a prime component of primordial religious commitment.”3 Verba goes on to mention “the close meshing of the sacred and the secular in the top institutions of a political system” and the way in which, “In a secular society where formal religious commitment is weak, the activities of the state may be the nearest one comes to activities of ultimate importance, activities that fundamentally determine matters of death and life and the quality of life.” 4 Without the kolossos, personified in the President and routinized in the activities of the secular state, there is no way for a society as secular as the United States to hold finality in perennial tension with possibility, the regressive cycle becomes indefinitely attenuated. The kolossos preserves the possibility of monarchical return despite the erosion of sacred memory, despite the atrophy of rites of commemoration, despite the various revisions of the past that transform sanctified memory into critical reflection, and despite the temporizing with scenarios that creates a constantly revised and receding future. Without a kolossos, a society as secular as America opens itself to despair over promises that will never be fulfilled, old obligations that will never be discharged, and ideals that will never be met. It was after the death of Kennedy, during the slaughter of the war in Viet Nam, and during the decadence of the office of the American Presidency under Nixon that early in the 1970s Catherine Albanese began to argue that the American symbol system was in a perennial state of crisis. The nation had lost its collective sense of mastery over the anxiety

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caused by death itself. As I have noted, Albanese was speaking of the dwindling and moribund condition of national Memorial Day rites. We know that she felt that the decline of these observances had left the nation without the sanctified order that would keep the living in some sort of communion or community with the dead. The longings for significance or permanence in the face of death would have to counter despair that they would never be assuaged. There was no kolossos whose words could become deeds, whose means could become ends in themselves, whose promises could be kept in the making of them, and whose politics could be essential to life itself. The current, unsanctified sovereign was offending both human and divine law. Thus, after noting the sacralization of secular governmental practices, Verba also went on to observe what he called an “absence of ritual in American politics, the absence of an aristocratic or monarchical tradition.”5 Clearly, then, Verba saw American society as highly secularized in its rituals even while being profoundly attuned to the sacred at the nation’s political center. He has not been alone in noting signs of cultural fatigue in sacred symbols and monuments, beliefs and practices, indications that the sacred itself has been suffering from the effects of the passage of time: wearing out; losing energy; becoming irrelevant or moribund; and offering little chance for redeeming old losses, fulfilling old promises, paying off old debts, and initiating a transformative future. Over time, the slain soldier may be forgotten, memorial rites may be neglected, oaths may be violated, graves desecrated, and shrines ruined. I also have been noting the dominance of time as sheer flux: the raw experience of time making disenchantment seem irreversible and despair as uniquely realistic as the cultural despair identified by Fritz Stern in Germany during the years preceding the emergence of fascism. Over time, many rites, practices, and devotions may lose their capacity to transform despair into hope, finality into possibility, the unforeseen into the fulfillment of past prophecy, mere chance into signs of the advent of a long anticipated future, and the absence of a sanctified center into intimations of its real presence. In critical moments, the fatigue of sacred rites will then intensify longings for a sanctified, monarchical form of sovereignty: for the return of the kolossos. Only the sanctified sovereign can make time eventful and transformative, destructive and redemptive. American society has long had the benefits of the once and future kolossos. Washington, and later Lincoln, soon became kolossoi. There was no such transformation for John F. Kennedy. The question is why? Was it

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because of the process of secularization or the belief that modernity has little to do with antiquity? Is it because of the cultural fatigue even of the sanctity of sovereignty and of the office of the chief executive? Is it because of the atrophy of sacred memory? I believe that we need to attribute this lack of transformation to more than persistent secularity if we are to account for Verba’s neglect of the monarchical tradition. It is a neglect that is especially surprising in view of his interest not only in “the particular role of the presidency in symbolizing the ultimate nature of state power” but also in “the awe inspired in modern secular societies by the ultimate power of the state.”6 Many social scientists have studied the political myths surrounding John F. Kennedy, which were reflected in the widespread and enduring attitudes of the American public toward JFK in the years after his assassination. Some of them seek to attribute to JFK the powers and authority of a kolossos. “It is in his death that Kennedy is assured a place in the American mythos, not as much the man himself, but what he represented to many people—a rebirth of hope, a promise of youthful possibilities, and of individual commitment to create a better world.”7 JFK also represented a near-messianic figure whose authority and presence stood between the nation and a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis: a presence with the power both to avert and to initiate the end of the nation itself. Such a figure belongs to a past that is no longer accessible but remains part of an imaginable future. Some social scientists the process of secularization can attenuate the regressive cycle appear to give Kennedy the same stature as a kolossos that they have awarded Lincoln. For instance, Felkins and Goldman argue that “Kennedy invoked the power and identification with ‘good’ myths, especially those associated with the political, spiritual, and artistic development of the United States. He also used strategic rhetorical references to presidents who have taken on mythic proportions: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt.”8 Thus, JFK was evoking crucial important ancestral, iconic, authoritative and vital presences that in the past had embodied and ensured the life of the nation in the face of acute uncertainty and danger. Felkins and Goodman go on to assert that “John Kennedy’s speeches and public statements also contain links to mythic archetypes. For example, Kennedy heralds the ‘New Frontier’ with visions of the ‘last frontier,’ the Old West, and calls for new ‘pioneers’ . . . [an] archetypal image of the Frontier as a major American myth with the ‘healing power’

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of the New Land, symbolizing the rebirth of humanity beyond the evil and injustice of the Old World. Often dramatic contexts and rhetorical exigencies inspire mythical discourse as the most fitting response to a particular situation.”9 What, then, is the issue? Writers like Felkins and Goodman no doubt have grasped the Ur-fascist core in American politics. They do sense the presence of the ancient in the modern, just as they note the coalescence of the sacred with the secular. It is possible to read their analysis as if they thought that the mythologizing of Kennedy’s life and death had already allowed for the eventual return of the monarchical tradition. However, in the following passage they seem to be suggesting that something remains incomplete in the regressive cycle: “While Camelot and the New Frontier inspire substantial discourse, the most demanding [situation] . . . of the Kennedy years is the context of John Kennedy’s death. There was and continues to be an insatiable, emotional need for information, explanation, and eulogies. In his martyred death Kennedy himself inspires the most authentic mythic discourse.”10 Why, if Kennedy has inspired such authentic mythologizing does there continue to be an insatiable demand for more postmortems? It is worth reminding ourselves of what the regressive cycle of monarchical return looks like when it is relatively swift and intact. American society has long departed from what William Callahan, referring to the peace declared in 1648 between Parliament and King Charles I, calls the “continual invocation of the nation as the sacred political community.” More than a hundred years before Jefferson sought to petition the king to preserve the colonists from civil war, King Charles I saw peace as the sole alternative to a civil war of national self-destruction. Even when constituting itself as a “political community” sanctified by the devotions of those loyal to the sovereign, however, the British Constitution allowed or required ultimate authority to be contested between king and Parliament, with their separate adherents aligning themselves quite differently from one context to another. Thus, as Callahan has noted, the Anglo-American tradition has “produced a new kind of sovereignty for the nation-state,” allowing the sacred to remain in tension with the secular.11 We have also discussed Thomas Jefferson and the clergyman, Robert Smith, in their appeals to monarchical authority and the will of God on the eve of the American Revolution. Let us return to President Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, when he could no longer believe that Americans could keep faith with their ancestral values and preserve intact their

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universalistic principles while postponing the full realization of equal rights for the indefinite future. At that critical moment, President Lincoln could no longer believe that the nation still had time on its side. As Dorothy Ross has suggested, Lincoln felt that the nation could no longer define itself by its ideals so long as the social facts of division, conflict, violence, and victimization revealed those ideals to be palpable fictions. Ross reminds us that Lincoln had seen Americans as the “inheritors” of a “hardy, brave, and patriotic . . . race of ancestors.”12 The continuity between the ancestral past and the living present, or to put it slightly differently, the living presence of the ancestors, had given American society time to live up to its ideals. For Lincoln, the contradictions of the polity, the coexistence of dual republics, one of them slave-holding, could no longer be legitimated even by the Constitution that permits them. The nation itself was running out of time. Let me quote more fully here the passage from Ross mentioned in the first chapter: “The task of his own generation was a problem for him because he had absorbed the fear of the republic’s fragility that shadowed the exceptionalist narrative. In classical republican discourse, time is the enemy of the life of the republic, the bearer of decay and usurpation. Lincoln feared that historical circumstances now made maintenance of the American republic more difficult for the heirs than founding had been for the fathers. He saw around him increasing ‘disregard for law’ and mob violence; in time, he feared, violence would make the people lose faith in their political institutions and succumb to a tyrant. Notably, the examples of violence he chose to mention were caused by abolitionist agitation or by slavery.”13

Only Lincoln as a kolossos could call for human sacrifice on an unprecedented scale without offending divine as well as human law. The arms of George Washington would still welcome him into eternity. Not so with Kennedy. There is no introduction to the world of presidential kolossoi. The loss of what would have been the future had he lived seems far less redeemable; there has been no prophecy that the unrealized ambitions and aspirations of the Kennedy years may still transform this nation: no commitment to turning the sudden end of Kennedy’s life and work into a new beginning for the country. Something has been holding in abeyance the monarchical return. Is it only the process of secularization or the fatigue of the sacred, or has there been something more potent at work disturbing the Ur-fascist core of American society?

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In the past fifty years, JFK’s death has taken on the meaning and force of a break in time, a sharp separation between what had come before and what has since followed. The nation’s sense of its own future has been irreversibly altered. Twenty years after President Kennedy’s death, nearly two out of every three Americans believed that “the United States would have been much different if Kennedy had not been killed. If only he had lived, went the argument, the storm would not have come. Vietnam would not have become an American trap, there would not have been fires in the streets, and the presidency would have remained untarnished by scandal and bitterness.”14 Since his death, what Kennedy made possible has never been considered a possibility remaining to be realized. His promises, and the Kennedy Promise, will not be kept. Thus, JFK’s absence has become far more palpable than his implicit presence, and only an eternal flame in his memory holds the fleeting moment of his presidency in precarious balance with the everlasting. What, then, could have changed in the century between Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s assassinations to delay the regressive cycle’s return toward a sanctified political center? Both the process of secularization and the fatigue of sacred may help to explain why the regressive cycle linking loss and conflict to the return of the monarchical tradition has been far less evident following the death of Kennedy than it was following the deaths of Presidents Washington and Lincoln. Both processes, I have been arguing, help to account for the persistent growth of cultural despair in American society, but we have yet to understand why it is that demands have not fully crystallized for monarchical return. At first glance it might appear that the rites surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy were very much indeed like those that accompanied the progress of Lincoln’s cortege from city to city across the country: the same sense of an enduring presence and an acutely felt absence, the aura of the sacred in the midst of mundane conflicts about the president’s character and conduct of office. However, President Kennedy’s death was experienced not in a moment of collective enthusiasm as the cortege arrived in town, an enthusiasm easily transferred to the procession of generals down the main street. Rather, it endured day after day as it was being witnessed in the vast majority of American living rooms. Indeed, not only the vast majority of Americans but also millions of Russians turned to their TV sets to witness the funeral. Certainly, as Verba points out, “The assassination crisis increases our understanding of various institutions of American politics because it

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allows us to see them operating in a time of strain.”15 However, as Verba also points out, we also would need to know “what the impact of such a crisis would be in another setting.”16 That is why we have been comparing some accounts of the ceremonies and discussions at the time of Lincoln’s assassination with those in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death. Certainly there were no heavenly arms reaching down to Kennedy from Washington’s apotheosis in the Capitol rotunda. In the place of the generals leading the funeral parade, there was a horse with an empty saddle, jets flying over the Capitol, and generals leading a vastly unpopular and wasteful military adventure in Vietnam with no end in sight. The shock of Kennedy’s death, its finality, was not offset by a rhetoric of new beginnings but by a sense of the loss of the promise of his administration and by the prospect of endless fatality in Vietnamese jungles. As we have seen, Sidney Verba refers to the absence of ritual in American politics. To be sure, there was clearly something lacking or moribund in American rituals such as those accompanying Memorial Day. More importantly, Verba also refers to the role of the media as well as of the churches and other religious institutions in making the assassination of President Kennedy and its aftermath immediately, widely, and vividly available to the American people. Some Americans had felt especially drawn to President Kennedy and through him felt personally engaged with both politics and the nation.17 Even those who did not know or vote for Kennedy felt the loss of a personal friend. Equally surely, individuals felt and understood that Kennedy’s assassination left an open and potentially mortal wound in the body politic. In the critical moment that was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, American rites, not only conducted in religious institutions, but conveyed through the media, made his loss real, and as intensely personal as it was collective. The king was truly dead. No kolossos could keep the king alive. Not only was the King dead, but no one could hear the shout of “Long live the king.” That is the point: it was the media that brought Kennedy’s death and the funeral itself into the homes and lives of individual Americans. To be sure, the loss of Kennedy was felt to be deeply personal. At that level, the injury to the nation would be like a sacrilegious attack on a sacred, national shrine: a wound to the Ur-fascist core of the nation as a whole, and a violation of the ancient with the modern. Thus, Patricia Felkins and Irvin Goldman report that “Joseph Campbell . . . recalls John Kennedy’s funeral procession in a classic mythic context: ‘the symbolism

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of the gun carriage bearing the flag-draped coffin, drawn by seven clattering gray steeds with blackened hoofs, another horse prancing slowly at their side, bearing an empty saddle with stirrups reversed. . . I saw before me, it seemed, the seven ghostly steeds of the gray Lord Death, here come to conduct the fallen hero youth on his last celestial journey.’ Manchester . . . also associates the assassination of John Kennedy with a common mythical theme-the ritualistic murder of the folk hero as a messenger to the gods.”18 The assassination of President Kennedy left many Americans with the sense that something essential to nation’s cultural and political center had been irretrievably destroyed. Some were struggling with feelings of loss and betrayal in the Kennedy myth and were confronting a “crisis of representation.” Others who had been somewhat skeptical of the Kennedy myth nonetheless felt that America had lost the promise that Kennedy had articulated and embodied: “their old methods of defining and ordering the world are no longer credible. They once believed in the Felkins and Goldman mythology of the Promise, but much has changed and the halos are gone.”19 Let us return to the point that, regardless of individual feelings and political attitudes, the wound to the nation was both deeply individual and personal and yet also collective. 20 As researchers J. Hurm and Mark Messer put the question: “Did persons grieve because the collectivity had lost its leader or because they had lost a man with whom they personally identified?”21 It was something of a rhetorical question, because there was every reason to believe that the answer to this question was “both.” Drawing from various studies conducted during 1963 by the National Opinion Research Council both before and after the assassination, several scholars had confirmed a strong relationship between high involvement in politics, indicating a tendency to take personal responsibility for the welfare the society, a sense not only of personal loss but of personal responsibility for the death of Kennedy, and a tendency to become rededicated to public affairs after his assassination. What makes these findings all the more significant is that there was no conscious appeal to a sacred history that would in time redeem the nation’s loss; there was no time coming when Kennedy’s sacrifice itself would prove to have been redemptive for the nation. On the contrary, it was a loss to the nation felt deeply at the level of individuals who, in their turn, were taking responsibility for redeeming that loss. However, they were doing so in the wake of an extreme loss to the nation at its political and

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cultural center. There was no kolossos at the center whose presence could evoke and redeem the devotion of the citizenry. For some, the assassination of Kennedy simply revealed an absence of integrity, authority, and legitimacy at the nation’s political center. Felkins and Goldman found that some who mourned the death of Kennedy had never been enchanted by Kennedy’s charisma and had not sacralized his role at that critical moment in the life of the nation still. Indeed, they had felt that his promise had been manufactured by the media in collusion with the Kennedy family itself. “The Unenchanted Skeptic . . . conveys an aura of cynicism and is perhaps exemplary of the moral and spiritual crisis that envelops all of our institutions. In some sense the factor has truth-value in portraying the loss of virtue in contemporary culture.”22 While rejecting romantic hero myths, these skeptics might still hold the myths of science, progress, and rationality as possessing valid truth claims. It was of American society and its future that these skeptics despaired. If we are to understand the impact of Kennedy’s assassination, then, we need to investigate it as a wound to the nation’s Ur-fascist core: to the place where secular commitments conceal sacred devotions, and where apparently modern practices harbor, conceal, and perpetuate elements of sanctified authority that have their roots in antiquity. JFK’s assassination was a form of sacrilege. Precisely because of the clear evocations and echoes of the sacred in Kennedy’s presidency and in his funeral rites, his assassination becomes a sacrilegious act, underscoring the secularity of the presidency, and sundering its claim to represent ancient virtue in a modern institution. The gap is widening between eternity and time. With the death of Kennedy, the fate of the nation became more visibly contingent on chance and fatality. The assassination of Kennedy underscored the vulnerability of the sacred both to time-as-destructive-and-causative and to time-as-medium: the sheer, raw passage of time itself. The “sacred compact” that had united the rebels of the Massachusetts colony with the king no longer united the people of America with their president. What had been regarded as sacred prior to the assassination of JFK was now sanctified in the form of an absence; only residues were left both of the charismatic authority of the president’s office and of Kennedy’s rhetoric: his promise of new beginnings, his invocation of ancestral authorities, and his calls for the nation to bear any sacrifice to carry the sacred fire of liberty to other peoples around the world. However, these residues were not embodied in any kolossos.

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Therefore, in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, it was doubtful that America would ever be the same again. Indeed, the Kennedy era itself came to be understood as a point of no return. That is why it would also foster a perennial sense of loss and absence, both popular despair over the future of the country, and longing for an authoritarian, even an absolute ruler. Indeed, despair over the capacity of the people to exercise their sovereignty through the vote, combined with a sense of illegitimacy at the political center, may have contributed significantly to a withdrawal from the political system. It is a delay that could attenuate the regressive cycle linking chaos and conflict to renewed demand for the return of monarchical authority. It became increasingly apparent that America was subject to the effects of impersonal forces like force and chance. The nation itself was threatened from the outside by nuclear or biological weapons and from within by terror: well over a hundred cities in flames after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and almost as many campuses being seized by students. Domestically, the people found themselves burdened by political elites only marginally representative of their needs and values, an elite running in its own interest an economic and financial system too complex and ambiguous for popular understanding. Kennedy’s announcements of a new frontier and of the passing of the sacred torch of liberty to a new generation lacked the staying power of a standing stone or of Washington’s apotheosis in the Capitol rotunda. His pledge of sacred honor and his calls for sacrifice in the cause of liberty throughout the world have not had the transformative capacity of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Kennedy assured the American people that the future he was evoking would take far longer than his lifetime to achieve, but his summons, “Let us begin,” has not led to the reconsecration of a nation to the vision he held sacred. Over time, sacred rites and beliefs gradually lose their capacity to hold life, presence, and possibility in a tense balance with death, absence, and finality and to transform an end into a new beginning. Thus, even the media’s repeated commemorations of JFK’s assassination have underscored the irredeemable and irreversible nature of that loss; the future that would have been, had he lived, has created a vacuum at the center of the social order. Instead of his continuing presence in American life, his presence is experienced more as a constant absence. It is not only that time-as-medium has merged with the event-ridden time of Kennedy’s administration and assassination. It is that there has been a vast erosion of

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the rites of sacred commemoration. The re-presentation of the past becomes mere representation; the many anniversaries of the assassination of John F. Kennedy reduce what had once been living memory to a review of dubious assertions, personal recollections, and conspiracy theories that have been filling the gaps left by the deception of the legislative branch by the intelligence services. In the twenty years following his assassination, the public’s doubts and misgivings about Kennedy’s assassination produced what was then a voluminous literature, one that is still growing, on various conspiracies that may have produced Kennedy’s assassination, on the flaws in the subsequent Warren Report, on the evidence that the CIA had withheld important data from the Warren Commission, and on the limitations of the report produced by the Church Commission some years later. Oliver Stone’s film JFK, released twenty years after the assassination, drew upon this literature. As three Stanford University researchers have reported, the film reinforced doubts about the importance of voting for any president: “…JFK induced an array of psychological sequelae in an educated, politically diverse audience seeing the film under natural circumstances. . . Viewing JFK was associated with a significant decrease in viewers’ reported intentions to vote or make political contributions. A general helplessness effect is proposed to account for the increase in feelings of anger and hopelessness and the decrease in intentions to vote or make political contributions.” 23 Congress has not called for a year of nationwide, local commemorations of JFK’s person and character, of his leadership and his presidency, of the sort mandated by Congress for George Washington in the Great Depression. Certainly there has been no monument as compelling as the Vietnam War memorial or the monument to Abraham Lincoln: no sacred object or image embodying the vital presence of the absent or of the dead president. Despite the fact that John F. Kennedy’s name has been given to more schools and institutions, roads and parks, monuments and arenas or playgrounds than that of any other president, both in this country and abroad, there is to be no apotheosis for John F. Kennedy: no welcome into the presence of immortal sovereigns. Indeed, there is only a longing to fill the vacuum at the national center where the sacred used to be. Despite the attempt of some presidents and vice-presidents to associate themselves with John F. Kennedy, there have been no plausible representations of JFK’s own evocations of the sacred to emulate his

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personal charisma, or to renew his summons of the American people to higher levels of commitment and sacrifice for the cause of freedom around the world. We have discussed the secularity of American society: its exposure and vulnerability to the vagaries of chance and to its inability to keep the passage of time in continued tension with the eternal. If there has been one institution in the increasingly secular United States that has remained sacred, it would be the Office of the Chief Executive, and yet the electoral decision of the American people had been nullified by a chance shot that in retrospect had been an implicitly sacrilegious act: the assassination of President Kennedy.24 Especially after the assassinations of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, chance, probability, and uncertainty accentuated the extent to which American society was vulnerable both to the often destructive, causative type of time, and to time as the ever-flowing stream that bears all its sons and daughters away. I conclude, then, that the long-term impact of the assassination of John F. Kennedy can only be understood if we see it as sacrilege. This conclusion need not be surprising. Modern societies are not entirely clear about the difference between presence and absence, life and death, time and eternity. For instance, Agamben speaks of the very modern world as being characterized by the confusion of such traditional dualities as nature and culture, mind and body; “sovereignty borders …on the sphere of life and becomes indistinguishable from it.” 25 Thus, a more viable description of modernity, freed from the constraints and assumptions of differentiation theory, comes from Victor Turner, who chose the notion of the liminoid to describe the ways in which the formal and the informal, the personal and the societal, the fluid and the structural aspects of modern societies come together in everyday life. He concluded that people in modern secular societies no longer live in a world where social structure is opposed to and set apart from the liminal and indeterminate; rather, moderns live in a world with strong affinities with the archaic. If the sacred may be manifest at any place and at any time, the uncertainty principle becomes a way of life. It is difficult to know what is really critical, unprecedented, and final, let alone sacred. In liminal societies, Turner thought, one could go on pilgrimage from one’s village to the temple by passing through a liminal, in-between state. Only when beholding the final prospect, the temple itself, would one become exalted. The regressive cycle began in the village, extended though the wayside along the pilgrimage routes, and culminated with the vision of the Temple,

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where all differences would be subsumed and transcended by the ultimate authority. Whether in the liminoid worlds of the modern or of the archaic, the faithful do not need to be granted access at specific times and places to another more mysterious and supernatural world by those ordained to do so. Along the wayside, the sacred becomes more dispersed to unauthorized people and places, occasions and practices. The sacred also becomes more diffuse, until the attempt is made to contain it within a shrine and its institutionalized practices. The ambiguities of liminoid and secular society make it necessary to rethink such terms as religion and the secular and to use them independently. Thus, Rasmussen calls for a thorough reanalysis of the relation of religion to the sacred: “There remains much unfinished business in theorizing sacred, secular, and related concepts. How do poststructural anthropologists, wary of binaries and reifications, know whether to ascribe the terms ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ to particular concepts, ideologies, and settings? . . . The secular is not merely a space remaining from, or neatly opposed to, the sacred and/or religion. Yet the reverse also holds true, for what is sacred, or something approximating it, is not merely a space left over from or neatly opposed to the secular. Nor are these concepts static or sequential. The secular does not always emerge in linear fashion during social change, as more “modern” than the sacred. The sacred is not necessarily more or less “traditional” than and does not always precede other domains;”26 That is one reason why it is time to heed Susan Rasmussen’s demand that we understand that the sacred is not more suited to traditional than to modern societies; neither is it more likely to be found in religious contexts than in the secular. Its possibilities are very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to fix within the customary mental worlds of social scientists who focus on the differences or even oppositions between the sacred and the secular or profane, or who imagine the modern world to be in most respects radically different from the ancient. To be sure, in Neolithic antiquity, the sacred was perhaps able to “incarnate the invisible, the beyond” and “the divine.”29 According to Jean-Pierre Vernant, in classical Greece, at the turn from the fifth to the fourth centuries, idols had been more than images; they were “primitive and strange.” 30 It is primitive, in the sense that it embodies and reveals primitive a real presence; it is strange, because, even when the idol is disclosed to the view of the initiated, it remains at some vital remove from

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direct apprehension. Thought to “contain an aspect of the divine . . . a supernatural quality,” they were thus far more than a mere image, imitation, or representation of that quality.31 They remained not only untouchable but also mysterious and hard to grasp. To quote once more Jill Abramson, then the editor of The New York Times: JFK’s “martyrdom—for a generation of Americans still the most traumatic public event of their lives, 9/11 notwithstanding—has obscured much about the man and his accomplishments.”32 Thus, “As the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears, John F. Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down.”33 He was America’s kolossos, and he has been destroyed. It is easy to assume that modern, secular societies are clearer about the differences between heaven and earth, life and death, the natural and the supernatural, or between time and eternity than were “primitive” people or traditional societies who spent their time erecting standing stones to ensure the return not only of their ancestors but of the sun and the cosmos. However, traditional or what used to be regarded as “primitive” societies may have been as secularized as many modern societies. Indeed, some ancient societies imagined the heavens so far to exceed the human imagination as to be immune to manipulation through sacrifice; the world thus became secular as the god of ancient Israel, for instance, acquired over time a magnificent transcendence over time itself. The heavens were so far above the earth that the distance between them could not be traversed by virtue, sacrifice, or by flights of the imagination. Thus, some traditional societies may have been relatively secular and time-bound, whereas in others the temporal may have been infused with the eternal, the human with the divine, the natural with the supernatural. That is one reason why we need to be very cautious in our use of such terms as traditional, archaic, modern, or secular to describe kinds of societies. There may well have been more differences among various societies now called “traditional,” for instance, than there are between traditional and socalled modern societies.

Assassination as sacrilege The sacrilegious effect of Presidential assassination intensified by the process of secularization, which constantly revises the past and the future, decreases spiritual and emotional access to the dead, foreshortens time perspectives, routinizes innovation, sustains a chronic sense of crisis, and indefinitely extends the cycle of monarchical return. For the time being, a social order as secular as the American does find it difficult to keep up the illusion of continuity and development over time. What used to be the

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future soon becomes a thing of the past, and time is no longer on the nation’s side. A culture of despair begins to permeate not only the marginalized and downwardly mobile but even elites who no longer feel confident that they know the answers to their society’s enduring and complex problems. As this book is being finished, the American people are faced with a series of prophecies, all of which may be self-fulfilling: prognoses of a lost American future; right-wing Christian apocalyptic prophecies that America must undergo a battle with its domestic as well as foreign enemies; summonses for America to recover its original vitality and virtues; apprehensions that the nation will be unable to meet not only its current challenges but also to stand the test of time; and the entrepreneurial, reality-show based manipulations of an unprincipled president who invokes the sacred whenever it is in his interests to do so, but for whom, by some accounts, nothing otherwise is sacred.34 The heightening of cultural despair leads me to expect American society to witness a return of the regressive cycle linking conflict and destruction to a demand for sanctified, even monarchical authority. Like any other society, the United States needs to be able to keep its identity through time; it needs continuity. Otherwise, there will be no way for the society to claim that it will keep its promises or fulfill its vision for the future. Anyone reading this who is conversant with the vagaries of the American presidential campaigns of 2016 and with the first few months of the Trump administration will know what I mean: more on this subject in the next chapter. Here it is enough to note that in his campaign for the office of the chief executive and in the White House, Donald Trump has been aided by a right-wing impresario, Steve Bannon, who truly believed that “America is hurtling toward a crisis on par with the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression.”35 Bannon, in turn, had been persuaded about the coming of a catastrophic crisis by an amateur world tract called The Fourth Turning. As Jeremy Peters puts it, writing for The New York Times, “the grim future that the book foresees helps explain the underpinnings of the president’s conservative, nationalist ‘America First’ agenda, one that Mr. Bannon has played a large role in shaping.”36 The regressive cycle is closing fast and will be accompanied by the reassertion of sanctified, indeed monarchical authority in American society. It may not be long before the new Caesar gives the command for sacrifice. That is why Jeremy Peters of The New York Times notes that

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“many will find reason for alarm in [The Fourth Turning’s] conclusion that the coming crisis will demand loyalty and conformity from citizens.” Bannon’s source book argues that collective crises are cyclical, and that previous exemplary crises are to be found in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. Indeed, by Steve Bannon’s own account, “In the ‘Fourth Turning’ theory you’ve got a country that believes it’s off course. . . . Two-thirds of Americans now think we’re on the wrong track. That’s an extraordinary number.” That is why “Everything President Trump is doing — all of it — is to get ahead of or stop any potential crisis.”37

Notes 1

William A. Callahan, “War, Shame, and Time: Pastoral Governance and National Identity in England and America,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 395-419; p. 397. 2 William A. Callahan, “War, Shame, and Time: Pastoral Governance and National Identity in England and America,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 395-419; p. 397. 3 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 348-360; p. 354. 4 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 348-360; p. 354. 5 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 348-360; p. 352. 6 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis,Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965:pp. 348-360; p. 352. 7 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449. 8 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F.Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449. 9 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449.

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Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449. 11 William A. Callahan, “War, Shame, and Time: Pastoral Governance and National Identity in England and America,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 395-419; 12 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298. 13 Dorothy Ross, “Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 96, No. 2, Abraham Lincoln at 200: History and Historiography (Sep., 2009), pp. 379-399; p. 387. Published on behalf of Oxford University Press Organization of American Historians. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622298 14 Herbert S. Parmet, “The Kennedy Myth and American Politics,” The History Teacher, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Nov., 1990), pp. 31-39; 33 15 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 348-360; p. 351. 16 Sidney Verba, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis, Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 348-360; p. 350. 17 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; 455. 18 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449. 19 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 449. 19 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F. Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 461. 20 J. Hurn and Mark Messer, “”Grief and Rededication,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis,Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1965:336-347; p. 347. 21 J. Hurn and Mark Messer, “”Grief and Rededication,” in The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, Social Communication in Crisis,Bradley S. Greenberg and Edward Parker, editors, Stanford California: Stanford University

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Press, 1965:336-347; p. 347. 22 Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, “Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and Understandings of John F.Kennedy,” Political Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 447-467; p. 461. 23 Lisa D. Butler, Cheryl Koopman, Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Psychological Impact of Viewing the Film ‘JFK’: Emotions, Beliefs, and Political Behavioral Intentions,” Political Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 237-257. 24 Had there been a civil religion in America during the 1960s, fifty subsequent years of commemoration might have been enough time for JFK’s memory to have been sanctified or his absence on earth to be transformed into a heavenly presence. However, I agree with Schwartz that the solemnities across the country in honor of Abraham Lincoln do not constitute evidence for a civil religion. Moreover, despite the intermittent advocacy of Robert Bellah in the 1960s and 70s for the notion of a civil religion, I agree with John Wilson’s arguments that the presence of a religion depends on evidence of a developed system of beliefs and practices, a cadre of experts entrusted with the performance of rites interpreted through myths, and a set of prescriptions for an appropriate way of life to be adopted by devotees. Neither the events surrounding the death of Lincoln or the evidence developed in the 1960s by Robert Bellah meet those conditions. 25 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:11. 26 Rasmussen, Susan. (2007). “Re-Formations of the Sacred, the Secular, and Modernity: Nuances of Religious Experience among the Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq).” Ethnology 46 (3) (Summer): 185–203; p. 185. 29 Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 349. 30 Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 337. 31 Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 2006; p. 337. 32 Jill Abramson, “Kennedy-The Elusive President”, The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2013 33 Jill Abramson, “Kennedy-The Elusive President”, The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, October 22, 2013. 34 Peter Baker, The New York Times, 35 Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can Be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming’,” The New York Times, April 8, 2017. 36 Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can Be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming’,” The New York Times, April 8, 2017. 37 Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can Be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming’,” The New York Times, April 8, 2017.

CHAPTER TEN WHAT NOW?

“The absence of evidence is in no way evidence for the absence of a phenomenon.”1

If we are to understand the sacrilegious impact of JFK’s assassination on the American people, we need to remember that in his Inaugural Address of January 20, 1961, he gave Americans a similarly elevated picture of their own nature and destiny: “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge--and more…All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” 2

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In this speech President Kennedy merges the sacred with the profane, the transient with the everlasting, as if they are embedded within each other and relatively indistinguishable: “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Pilgrimage becomes never-ending; whereas it used to have a starting place and an end in view, the journey has become a way of life: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” Despite the long view that Kennedy takes of the passage of time, he is also announcing that the nation is in the midst of what may be its ultimate Kairos: “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” That Kairos may also be ultimate in the sense of final: “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” As typified in the myth of the god Kairos, the critical moment confronts the social order with the full consequences of the passage of time itself. Sanctified in the form of the god Kairos, the passage of time holds the past and the future in the balance of the critical moment itself. Only decisive action will allow the individual—or the social order—to seize possibilities inherited from the past, unprecedented in the present, and ominous of the future. While the face of the god Kairos is covered with a forelock that must be grasped at the critical moment, the rear of his head is bald and, impossible to grasp, which represents the point of no return until or unless one comes who, through decisive action, can rescue a people from the onslaught of time and cultural despair. Thus, in calling on the nation “to face all problems frankly and to meet all dangers free from panic or fear” and in evoking the nation’s “sacred Honour,” Kennedy was authorizing whatever sacrifice might become necessary to restore national greatness. Kennedy is therefore speaking with the sense of sovereignty that I have been describing as being the core of American Ur-fascism. Indeed, he evokes the original virtue and mission of the American Revolution: “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.” Furthermore, the words of the Chief Executive have a force of their own; in that sense they are accomplished in the very act of Presidential utterance: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike…”

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To keep possibility open in the face of finality, the sacred first transforms the struggle between being and nonbeing into an ongoing battle with time. However, in giving time for this struggle, the sacred cannot forever postpone a confrontation with the end, with finality itself. In the ancient Greeks’ agon, the contest could take place in the arena, on the battlefield, or in the agora or on stage, but it always faced a critical point where life and death were hanging in the same momentary balance. On the battlefield, of course, the warrior could seize the critical moment by delivering a swift and fatal blow. In the agora and on stage the end often came in the form of a rhetorical or dramatic stroke. That critical point or moment is Kairos, that Hellenic divinity with a long forelock who must be seized before he passes lest he become the point of no return. As Rene Girard puts it of the cycle of violence between rivals, each seeking the critical moment to make the fatal strike: “And each blow is delivered in the hope that it will bring the duel or dialogue to an end, constitute the coup de grace or final word.”3 Kairos is also emblematic of both Stoic and Epicurean sensibilities in an Hellenic age particularly aware of the precariousness of life itself and of the vulnerability of individuals and societies to happenstance and change.4 To put it crudely, the sacred buys time by holding in creative tension the opposites of possibility and finality, but it does so by prolonging the agony. As Girard points out regarding the ancient agon between life and death, “Victory—or rather, the act of violence that permits no response thus oscillates between the combatants, without either managing to lay final claim to it.”5 So long as victory remains only a temporary possession, there is still time for an Eschaton, a millennium at the end of history, which will fulfill generations of sacrificial endeavor. Otherwise a sense of despair may create a widespread and intense demand for a final solution: a telling move or blow against either the nation’s foreign adversaries or against the alien, dissident, disloyal, or lawless elements within. Such a decisive blow requires a transfigured and transforming sovereign: a timeless will triumphing over the passage of time. In the wake of sacrilege at the nation’s political center, political authority depends on the government’s effectiveness in satisfying pressing needs while adhering to a national consensus on the procedures and rules for making changes. In a secular society, however, the rules and procedures that underwrite legitimate governance constantly change without their legitimacy being guaranteed either by past precedent or by future benefit. Improvisation over time is more effective in providing

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currency than legitimacy. Thus, if boundaries between the human and the divine or between the living and the dead are to be transgressed, it will take a new Caesar to violate these boundaries with impunity: a dictator prepared to defend the nation against terrorism or a nation with leaders as convinced of their own immortality as they are of their ability to survive a nuclear war with America. I have been arguing that American society whose political center suffers from a vacuum left by has been suffering from a vacuum left by sacrilege and assassination. It is a vacuum left also by the decay of what was left of the sanctity of the Constitution. Richard Kreitner of The Nation asked three writers “to consider the precise nature of the threat Trump poses to the Constitution, democracy, and the freedom of the press, and to address that question that’s always asked when a system’s internal contradictions are brought into sharp relief: What is to be done?”6 One of them, Louis Michael Seidman, responded: “Would the election of Donald Trump threaten the sanctity of the United States Constitution? We should be so lucky. As it functions in the 21st century, American constitutionalism is authoritarian, obfuscatory, and reactionary. It is also arbitrary, providing a ready excuse for some people to exercise power over other people without having to offer good arguments for the outcomes they favor.”7 I have been discussing the conditions that are conducive to demands for authoritarian leadership and rule. Time is not only eventful and causative but also a powerful medium and a relentless flow. When it is experienced as a medium for scenarios and contingency planning, time rapidly becomes critical. Citizens die of lead poisoning from contaminated pipes while bureaucrats delay. North Korea comes far closer to a nuclear missile callable of reaching the United States in less time than had been predicted. The new president’s first one hundred days become a liability precisely because they were not sufficiently causative and eventful. Legislation affecting the health of millions is prepared in short order and in secret, with stringent limits being set on debate and amendment. Immediacy is requisite and fateful. Immediacy also becomes a demand for direct, unmediated access to the office of the chief executive, whose incumbent presumably represents and presides over the nation as a whole. On the one hand, President Trump issues executive orders to export immigrants, punish the lawless, keep order, and enforce traditional ways of conceiving and bearing the young. Tweets, utterances of 140 characters or less through social media, permit the president to denounce enemies or erstwhile friends, change political

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fortunes, deny and make accusations, change opinions, or create false news and new crises. These are the marks of charismatic authority. Political speech becomes eventful and disruptive; it makes things happen and changes outcomes. Charisma sanctifies time-as-cause at the expense of time-as-medium. However, because it is episodic or even fitful, its authority wanes with each disappointment or failure. His words become moot when uttered. The advent of Donald Trump into the American White House has spawned more than enough punditry on the subject of authoritarianism in the West. What may be lost in the commentary is the simple argument that I have been making here: that the Ur-fascist core, as Eco put it, does make it difficult to distinguish the sacred from the secular and the ancient from the modern. That is the “indistinction” to which Agamben refers in describing the “state of exception:” the authoritarian synthesis of life and politics, law and executive degree, the exceptional with the routine. It is a state in which the usual moral calculus that asses the relationship of ends to means is unnecessary and outmoded: ends being means, and means being ends in themselves. This Ur-fascist core, as I have been arguing, underlies a tendency toward cultural despair as America strays ever further from its original virtues and identity. Conversely, the tendency of sacred authority to run out of steam or to require resuscitation causes cultural despair and intensifies demands to revive the secular with the sacred and to incorporate the ancient within the modern. To understand Trump’s rhetoric we need to see it as a secular form of myth-making. Who can transform the present into a long-awaited time of transformation other than one endowed with the most powerful sort of charisma? Furthermore, the charismatic quality of Trump’s rhetoric cannot be reduced to the swagger of a media mogul addicted to public attention and political power. There is something genuinely mythological about the notion that the present can fulfill the promises of the past and inaugurate the future. The charisma of the office of the chief executive makes it reasonable to believe that the new president could introduce a radical break in time between the past and the present and inaugurate the future, a moment unprecedented in American history: the inauguration of a messianic period in which the first are now last and the last are now first. Indeed, within minutes of taking the oath of the Office, the newly inaugurated president proclaimed, “We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and

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technologies of tomorrow.”8 It was as if a long-heralded future had just begun. Trump’s very accession to the office of chief executive marked the beginning of a new age. Thus, to understand the dynamics of the 2016 election, we need to take into account the power of secular myths to galvanize consent or instill silence among the skeptical. As Dan Edelstein notes in his discussion of Georges Sorel, “we require motivation to be propelled into action. Visionary politics and rhetorical skills require the assistance of emotional and imaginary involvement for political choices to appear more enticing. More importantly, ‘vision,’ like Sorel’s myths, may be less about where we arrive than about how to arrive there, that is, about the process of arriving.” 9 Thus, Trump also announced not only the inauguration of an entirely new period in the nation’s history but a radical break with the past: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world. That is the past. Now we are looking only to the future. We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it's going to be America First.”10 As Dan Edelstein notes in his study of Sorel’s contribution to the revolutionary mythology of the general strike, Georges Sorel was “. . . prone to glorifying violence. A violent strike had a ‘sublime’ quality to it, he claimed, at least to the extent that it was ‘cataclysmic’; quoting Emile Durkheim, Sorel even compared this violent beauty to the ‘sacred.’” 11 Therefore, Trump’s secular mythology not only creates a present that is unprecedented, sui generis, revelatory, transformative, but it is graced by violence: “We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones—and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” There will be no jihadists left standing anywhere in the wake of the devastation about to be wreaked upon them. As Paul Krugman of The New York Times puts it, “What we see here is the most powerful man in the world blatantly telegraphing his intention to use national misfortune to grab even more power. And the question becomes, who will stop him?”12 The time has come for radical steps and a thorough transformation of the way the nation forges its national will and initiates the future. There is no legitimacy or transformation to be found in continuity with the last thirty years or what the president said last week. That is why we have witnessed a chiliastic emphasis on the suspension of all customary

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inhibitions and conventions, a fascination with violence and with short, explosive utterances on social media, each with a very short expiration date: a constant “state of exception.” However, there is far more at work in Trump’s political rhetoric and glorified self-understanding than a form of secular enchantment with agency and power, violence and vindication. Not only did Trump announce that a day of unprecedented abundance would arrive under his presidency and that he would expel the foreign influences undermining traditional ways of life in America. He himself claimed to be possessed of such extraordinary knowledge that he had no need for the ordinary sources of information and advice. Least of all did he need the support or consent of those leaders who had hitherto enjoyed the respect and commanded the allegiance or obedience of the people. All former attachments, including those with foreign communities and nations, would be subject to termination at any time. A secular apotheosis had arrived with Trump’s ascension to the American presidency. Indeed, President Trump announced that he was swept into office “by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before” and that “We stand at the birth of a new millennium.” This temporal form of sanctification likens the new president to the god Kairos, whose advent is indeed fateful for humankind, and whose presence must be seized upon lest humanity itself be left with nothing in its grasp. There was ample warning of this high view of presidential authority not only in Trump’s many pronouncements during the campaign of 2016. Note Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and for the independence of the courts and of the press, not to mention a willingness to excommunicate ethnic and religious minorities from the body politic. Indeed, many Americans clearly found something captivating or enchanting in his promises of authoritarian efficacy and in his crude appeals to prejudice, thwarted ambition, and hatred. Certainly, his promises appeal to the immediate self-interest of the undereducated and underemployed, allayed their fears, and aroused their longings for vindication and revenge. The newly inaugurated President Trump quickly drew on the charisma of the office of the president to cast a spell of swift and decisive action in a transformative present. Thus, in his Inaugural Address, Trump announced a radical break with the more recent past and the beginning of a new future: “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have

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not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes—starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.” Cultural despair thrives on the proletarianization of the middle class, widespread fear of social chaos, and the collective awareness that the nation’s virtues and vitality are in steady decline; these are also the ideal conditions for charismatic, authoritarian leadership. It is therefore far too easy to see his presidency as a mere extension of the myth-making of a campaign in which allegations created social facts regardless of their verifiability. To fill the vacuum of the sacred at the American center, President Trump has sought additional sources of charisma by banning immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries, a far remove from the traditionally charismatic authority of the values sanctified by the Statue of Liberty and enshrined in Washington’s commission to the new nation to carry the torch of liberty to oppressed peoples throughout the world. In a pale and secular echo of John Winthrop’s exhortation to the pilgrims aboard the Arabella to remember that they are a city set upon a hill, Trump asserted of his ban on Muslim immigrants, that “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.” Thus, many of the more conservative as well as evangelical Christians have endorsed President Trump’s support for Christians who refuse admission or service to gays and lesbians, and they welcome his intention to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from penalizing religious groups that openly endorse political figures. In these various initiatives, they see in President Trump someone who is unabashed in identifying the nation with Christianity. Not only did President Trump use the name of Jesus Christ in his inaugural address but he also has explicitly offered refugee status to Christians from nations listed under his first ill-fated ban on admitting refugees from seven largely Islamic countries. Trump’s attempt to curry charisma form the evangelical and right wings of the Christian community has already intensified the jealousies and rivalries that presidential power inevitably excites between rival sections of the elite and of the American people. “Staff at Hebrew Union College, a Jewish seminary in Cincinnati, reported last Tuesday that a sign near the main entrance had been vandalized with a swastika. Staff members removed the swastika and police are investigating the incident. . . .

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Last Wednesday, a Muslim man in Inkster, Mich., discovered his car had been vandalized with swastikas and racial slurs and his tires slashed.”13 President Trump has already moved in the direction not only of a clash of civilizations but of a war between America as a Christian nation and the Islamic enemy. “Apocalyptic visions are always in fashion, of course; it’s just a question of where the end is seen to be coming from. The bellicose statements directed at other countries by our current president and some of his advisers have renewed fears (or, in some quarters, hopes) that we’ll bring it about ourselves through all-out war.”14 It is entirely likely that he will move in the direction of mobilizing Christian sentiment for a war on Islam. It is no wonder, therefore, that President Trump’s ban on immigrants and refugees from seven largely Muslim nations exempted the Christian and other minorities who suffered persecution in those countries from radical Islamic groups. It was a clear signal that America as a Christian nation would no longer stand by while Christians were being persecuted in Islamic countries. It is therefore necessary for an aspiring autocrat to acquire a higher level of sanctity than comes with that office in a more secularized America. Thus, President Trump has found it necessary to borrow charisma from evangelical religious communities. He has drafted an order permitting right-wing evangelical churches to exercise their religious freedom by engaging in politics and by discriminating against gays and lesbians, a bold move to mobilize a religious constituency that, given access to the power of the state, might seek further to limit governmental control over those religious groups seeking to intimidate, demean, and suppress other minorities like the transgender communities. Thus Masha Gessen, writing in The New Yorker, observed that “In the nostalgic campaign that got him elected, Trump promised to take his voters back to an imaginary past in which they felt better, more secure, and generally greater than they do in the present. Nothing communicates Trump’s commitment to the past as effectively as reversals of L.G.B.T. civil-rights progress—arguably the most rapid social change in American history… ‘So many of them support what I do. They support me from the evangelical-Christian standpoint,’ the President said in an interview last weekend with Mike Huckabee.”15 Or as Ross Douthat put it, writing for The New York Times, “The Trump reaction was more Erdoganian or Putinesque, promising to protect a once-dominant majority, to restore its privileges and reverse its sense of cultural decline.” 16

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Thus, in his Inaugural address and in his first State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress, Trump made it clear that he was ending a long period of elitist governance into a new era—or at least a new chapter—in American history: a period in which the forgotten people of this country would be in the forefront of policy making, their interests and values enshrined in the political center. He declared a new day for religious freedom in which the people’s religious convictions would find expression in their work and in their schools, in their politics and in government. From the White House, new directives would issue signifying the end of elitist indifference to the needs of ordinary people. God would once again bless America, the nation would welcome Christian refugees from Islamic terrorism, and the president could once again wish the American people “Merry Christmas.” If time is on the side of the nation, or at least on the side of Trump’s followers, it would not be because of a divine providence or a sacred history but because the time of restoration and fulfillment had already arrived with his electoral victory and his presence in the Oval Office. Past greatness was becoming present, and what had been absent was now once again fully present: a sovereign chief executive representing a sovereign people and directing the course of a sovereign nation, a return to what Ross Douthat calls “our own imperial—er, presidential politics.” 17 Thus, we have seen announcements of the passing of a defeating and humiliating period in American history marked by the advent of a new and more glorious future. Popular sovereignty, exercised through freedom of religion and the sacred electoral process, is at last enshrined at the nation’s political center in presidential word and deed. Thus, in his address to the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump announced that “Freedom of religion is a sacred right, but it is also a right under threat all around us, and the world is under serious, serious threat in so many different ways. And I’ve never seen it so much and so openly as since I took the position of President. The world is in trouble, but we’re going to straighten it out. Okay? That’s what I do. I fix things. We’re going to straighten it out. . . . Believe me.”18 There is clearly an attempt by the Trump administration to restore the authority of the Christian right in American politics, but that same policy, translated into the politics of the Near East, reinforces an alliance with autocratic regimes. Thus, Trump finds common cause with the military dictatorship in Egypt, which might protect Coptic Christians from murderous attacks by the Muslim Brotherhood, and with Assad, whose

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regime offers partial protections of Christian Orthodox minority communities. It is far too easy and always too soon to define the policy of a sovereign whose own words are tantamount to deeds, whose decisions simultaneously ignore past precedent and define new precedent. That is because a Caesar’s words are also deeds, ends as well as means. In uniting cause with effect and means with ends, the Caesar personifies temporal agency that invokes the test of time. Trump was quickly becoming the apotheosis of tough-minded and unprincipled power-politics without regard either for democratic or human rights. He announced that he had ordered missiles strikes in Syria in response to President Assad’s renewed use of chemical weapons: “‘We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world,’ Mr. Trump said solemnly. ‘We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who passed. And we hope as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will in the end prevail.’”19 It is therefore a mistake to assume that Trump is relying only on charisma, sense of the moment as being critical and presidential action as being definitive for the nation as a whole. He is also restoring past virtue and giving new life to traditional authority. Indeed the authoritarian longing to resuscitate - and to gain legitimacy from - the past has become more characteristic of Republicans than of Democrats. “In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values—a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time . . . the Republican Party shifted electoral strategies to try to win disaffected Southern Democrats, in part by speaking to fears of changing social norms—for example, the racial hierarchies upset by civil rights. The GOP also embraced a ‘law and order’ platform with a heavily racial appeal to white voters who were concerned about race riots.”20 Thus, in his inaugural address, Trump promised that the longed-for day of a government that truly represented the needs and will of the people would coincide with the first day of his administration, and yet Americans’ differences and conflicts have seldom been more intense. What pundits chastised as the recrudescence of ethnic, racial, nativist, and sectarian loyalties in the 2016 presidential campaign was precisely what we might expect when various candidates forthrightly appealed to

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white evangelicals, who not only distrusted or despised the black incumbent of the Oval Office but also saw no legitimacy in the concentration of power in the nations’ capitol. One promised to conduct a revolution, fueled by prayer, that would bring the nation back from the edge of what he called the “abyss”: a term with clearly apocalyptic notions for those who, like the Christian right, had been steeping themselves in apocalyptic literature and its mundane prophecies of national disaster ever since the 1960s. Similarly, Nixon had deployed “the Southern strategy” to attract those alienated by the attempt to accord to African Americans the civil and political liberties hitherto monopolized by whites. The notion of the true Christian became reserved for those in the evangelical churches and polemically dissociated from the more liberal population associated with the mainline churches, with the coastal elites, and in the African American minority, embodied in President Obama. We therefore need to abandon the assumption that modern societies are disenchanted and thus vastly different from what used to be called primitive communities or traditional social orders. Everyday life can become very serious, and, as Durkheim reminded us, the sacred lives and moves and has its being in “la vie serieuse.” It is still possible in a society as secular as the United States to transform the present and the past from what Vernant calls the flux of “human time” into a common age: a single universe of shared and unrealized, threatening or life-giving possibility. It is still possible, as Anthony Grafton puts it, “to erase the distance in time between the pure religion of the earliest believers and the sadder but wiser religions of the moderns; to see, perhaps, the possibility of living an ancient life.” The sacred thrives in the zone of indistinction between the past and the present, the living and the dead. That is how Caesar, like Kairos, can claim that on his presence or absence will hang the fate of a nation. Trump is not only appealing to the test of time but believes that, because America “stands for justice,” it foreshadows “the end.” It is not as if for Trump himself there were any battles more significant than those of the moment and of the day. The agon, the kampf, continues from day to day, with the balance between good and evil, life and death, being and non-being, shifting according to who has delivered the most recent blow. That is why Trump’s newly appointed director of the C.I.A. is known to have accused Congressional investigations of the C.I.A.’s use of torture as “‘quintessentially at odds with duty to country.’”21

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Moreover, for his evangelical supporters, he is no other than the anointed one, endowed with authority over the nation by no less than God himself. The evangelical leader, Paula White, who is reputed to be Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, believes that “He’s been raised up by God, because God says he raises up and places all people in places of authority. It is God that raises up a king, it is God that sets one down, so when you fight against the plan of God, you’re fighting against the hand of God…” 22 Given a vacuum of the sacred at the nation’s political center; given that even the Constitution is simply a text open to arbitrary interpretation by special interests with access to justices on the Supreme Court; given the claim that the vacuum has been filled by a divinely chosen President; given that many of the churches have underwritten and submitted to the authority of the new Caesar, and given the apocalyptic quality of the President’s own threats, it is entirely possible that Trump may use a terrorist strike within the territorial United States as an excuse for declaring martial law and, if the timing is right, postponing the next presidential election. Certainly the vast majority of Republican voters would not object were he to postpone that election. Secular demands for an apocalypse may come at any time. “Apocalyptic visions are always in fashion, of course; it’s just a question of where the end is seen to be coming from. The bellicose statements directed at other countries by our current president and some of his advisers have renewed fears (or, in some quarters, hopes) that we’ll bring it about ourselves through all-out war.”23 No wonder that Donald Trump’s exercise of presidential power has aroused talk not only of eventual impeachment but also of a military coup. Indeed, Eliot Weinberger, commenting for The London Review of Books, has suggested that “A military coup is no longer unimaginable in the USA: Trump calling for a preemptive nuclear strike against Pyongyang and the spooks and brass rising against him.”24 One can only hope.

Notes 1

Hoyt Alverson, Semantics and Experience, Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University press, 1994; 113. 2 https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BqXIEM9F4024ntFl7SVAjA.aspx 3 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, Baltimore,

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Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; p. 151. 4 Lucia Prauscello, Sculpted Meanings, Talking Statues: Some Observations on Posidippus 142.12 A-B (= XIX G-P), The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 127, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 511-523. 5 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; p. 151. 6 “Is Donald Trump Actually a Threat to Democracy?,” The Nation, June 23, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/is-donald-trump-actually-a-threat-todemocracy/. 7 Louis Michael Seidman, “Is Donald Trump Actually a Threat to Democracy?,” The Nation, June 23, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/is-donald-trumpactually-a-threat-to-democracy/. 8 President Trump’s Inaugural Address. The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/20/us/politics/donald-trumpinauguration-speech-transcript.html 9 Dan Edelstein, “The Birth of Ideology from the Spirit of Myth: Georges Sorel Among the Ideologues,” Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, editors, The ReEnchantment of the World. Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009: pp. 201-224; p.223. 10 President Trump’s Inaugural Address. The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/20/us/politics/donald-trumpinauguration-speech-transcript.html 11 Dan Edelstein, “The Birth of Ideology from the Spirit of Myth: Georges Sorel Among the Ideologues,” Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, editors, The ReEnchantment of the World. Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009: pp. 201-224; p.222. 12 Paul Krugman, “When the Fire Comes,” The New York Times, February 10, 2017; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/when-the-fire-comes.html. 13 The Editorial Board, “This Week in Hate,” The New York Times, January 11. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/opinion/anti-semitic-note-promisesmayhem.html. 14 Mike Hale, “Review: ’The Dark Side of the Sun’ and, By the Way, We’re Doomed,” The New York Times, February 10, 2017. 15 Masha Gessen, “How Trump Uses ‘Religious Liberty’ to Attack L.G.B.T. Rights,” The New Yorker, October 11, 2017. 16 Ross Douthat, “In Search of a Good Emperor,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017. 17 Ross Douthat, “In Search of a Good Emperor,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017. 18 Remarks by President Trump at National Prayer Breakfast, February 2, 2017.. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/02/remarks-presidenttrump-national-prayer-breakfast#content-start. 19 Michael R. Gordon, Helene Cooper and Michael D. Shear, “Dozens of U.S. Missiles Hit Air Base in Syria,” The New York Times, April 6, 2017. 20 Amanda Taub, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism, Vox, March 1, 2016.

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http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism. 21 David Bromwich, “Act One, Scene One,” London Review of Books, 16 February, 2017, pp. 3-7. 22 Conor Gaffey, “Who is Paul White, Donald Trump’s Favorite Pastor,” Newsweek, August 25, 2017. 23 Mike Hale, “Review: ‘The Dark Side of the Sun’ and, By the Way, We’re Doomed,” The New York Times, February 10, 2017. 24 Eliot Weinberger, “Trump: The First Ten Days,” London Review of Books, January 30, 2017. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog.