Becoming the Adversary

In innumerable bad 'Nineties action flicks, there will appear a character who evinces superior wisdom by dropping gnomic quotations from East Asian textbooks of martial lore. As I understand it, there was a similar fad in business circles around this same time for applying the lessons of Sun Tzu and his ilk to the art of strategic confrontation in the marketplace (with this penchant for silly exoticism eventually reaching its zenith in a series of books devoted to the leadership lessons to be gleaned from the career of Attila the Hun). 

And as much as I can recognize that all of this is in bad taste, perhaps offensive, I am also not immune to its allure. I too have longed to be the kind of strategic mastermind who could dispense pearls from the Chinese Art of War or the Japanese Way of the Samurai at will, finding them unexpectedly apropos to a host of non-martial situations. Except, of course, that in my case, we would not be talking about either war or business, but would be applying the lessons contained in each to the no-less-conflict-laden worlds of politics and human rights advocacy. (After all, "human rights strategy" has in fact started to come into its own as an ostensible discipline, complete with course syllabi featuring Sun Tzu.) 

It was in this spirit that I turned to Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, a largely technical 17th-century manual of Japanese sword-fighting that is full of precisely the sort of pithy utterances that 'Nineties action movie heroes and business executives have been prone to apply in improbable contexts. I found the book to be surprisingly artless in style; its author, a practical man, offers his thoughts in a somewhat rambling and non-linear form. For at least the opening sections of the book, meanwhile, I feared the book's lessons would have little to say to a person of my peaceable nature. 

I am, after all, fundamentally conflict-averse, fearing and evading open confrontation with a kind of panicky intensity of purpose. Despite the fact, therefore, that my current job title has the word "strategist" in it (part of the impetus behind my deciding that I should acquaint myself with some of the classic texts in the field, however loose the connections may appear to my actual work), I found it hard to enter fully into the insights Musashi has to offer, which take as their starting assumption that one's goal is to overpower and kill one's opponent as quickly and directly as possible. ("It is essential to think of everything as an opportunity to kill," he writes (Thomas Cleary trans. throughout).)

In attempting to apply this wisdom to the world of politics and advocacy, therefore, I have to peer at it through at least two layers of abstraction. First of all, my goal is of course not actually to kill anyone. But one can easily see—as Elias Canetti and Clausewitz and so many others have pointed out—that politics is a kind of warfare without killing. As Canetti would phrase it, one has in the polling booth a confrontation of two armies that pull up alongside one another to measure their numbers and hence their strength; and when the votes are counted, the smaller army goes home, having realized it is the weaker. 

But even if we are ready to accept that "killing" here is metaphorical, there is still my inner hand-wringing liberal telling me that the "overwhelming" and total defeat of my opponent is still not really what I seek—even if it is occurring non-violently, even if it is only at the ballot box. This is so because liberal democracy (and human rights, as we understand them, are nothing other than a restatement of the liberal democratic framework) is not just about installing ideological liberals in positions of power. Hence, it is not just about "beating" non-liberals and anti-liberals. It is also, crucially, about protecting the underlying norms and laws of the liberal democratic order that make it possible to navigate political conflict nonviolently in the first place. 

Thus, Mushashi's emphasis on seizing any and every possible opening in order to best one's opponent requires some translation for liberals. After all, there may be some openings available to us that we should not take, since doing so would mean becoming something other than liberal democrats and thereby forfeiting what we were ostensibly fighting for. There might, that is to say, be ways in which we could defeat Trumpists and white nationalists and remove them from power that would amount to a hollow victory, because we would tear down established norms and laws in the process, installing some version of our own totalitarianism that is just as fatal to liberal democracy. 

By way of example: a few strategies that I do not think can be available to us in this political moment, tempting as they might appear: 1.) court-packing. I get why this option might strike us as desirable; and I understand that there is nothing in the Constitution that would explicitly forbid it. It is not technically-speaking illegal. But it would take us even further down the road of openly politicizing the judiciary and turning the nation's highest court into a quasi-legislative body, offering party-line votes on whether or not to uphold legislation and executive orders against which political adversaries would file ever-more flimsy and pretextual legal challenges; and I know that Republicans deserve much of the blame for having taken us so far down that road already, but "two wrongs," etc.

2.) Strained invocations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Back when it was first becoming clear that Senate Republicans were not going to do their Constitutional duty to hold Trump accountable for his lawless attempt to subvert a democratic election—or at least, that not enough of them were going to do so, in order to clear the super-majority threshold—I started to hear discussion on the National Security Law podcast and elsewhere of increasingly desperate Plans B. One of them: use a little-known and seldom-quoted section of the 14th Amendment to deny the opportunity to hold public office to those who engage in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, or who give "aid and comfort to the enemies thereof."

I don't dispute that Trump meets the definition of at least one of those categories. "Insurrection" is a big term, and I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to say Trump was guilty of this crime; though he certainly tried to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the procedure it lays out for selecting our leaders. But saying that he provided "aid and comfort" to the enemies of our Constitution and system of government is close to indisputable, in the ordinary-language senses of the words. 

But we are not always concerned solely with the senses of words when we administer justice. If we think about the underlying norms of our society, and if we read the words of our Constitution with an eye to historical context, we recognize that this section of the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to refer to the Civil War and the Confederacy alone. If we were to give it a more expansive interpretation now, broadening our definition of "enemies" and reading "aid and comfort" to mean literally any action that supported or provided peace-of-mind to people who oppose the U.S. system of government, we could open the door to barring from office any politician who had ever, say, traveled to Cuba, anyone who in their youth had ever belonged to a radical organization, anyone who expressed doubts as to U.S. foreign policy in the wrong venue, and so on. 

Of course, Trump himself might deserve the penalty under discussion (being barred from future office)— in fact I'm sure he richly does. But, as Caesar says in his speech in Sallust's The Conspiracy of Catiline—in discussing what justice should be meted out to another traitor against republican governance: "Every bad precedent arose from a good case." (Batstone trans.) We might find that Trump merits this particular penalty, but that does not mean it's a good idea to open the door to its use. We might eventually find that the weapon we used against him finds its way back to our own hearts.

These are some of the reasons why Musashi's doctrine of overwhelming force is one that liberals can only apply after it has been wrapped several times over in metaphor. We are, as liberals, tasked with upholding a certain order of procedural justice, not just exploiting and overturning the rules of that system in order to incapacitate our enemies. Our confrontations even with anti-liberals, therefore—even with people who, like Trump, despise liberal democracy and hold our Constitutional order in brazen contempt— have to be waged in a manner that simultaneously respects the rules of that system. 

However, there are still insights to be found in Musashi's text that speak unmistakably to our present moment. I have in mind, for one, his discussion of disintegration. Look to the moment, he bids us, when your opponent begins to disintegrate. That is the moment to strike. 

Another one is his principle of placing oneself in one's enemies' shoes. This is not, for Musashi, an exercise in empathic communion. It is, rather, an invitation to realize the relative powerlessness of one's opponent, and thus how one might exploit that fact to one's advantage. 

Musashi gives a striking example of what he has in mind. If there is a burglar hiding in one's house, he observes, one regards that man as dangerous. One is often afraid of him, and therefore regards the burglar as the more powerful and menacing of the two of you. But if, on the other hand, one looks at the situation from the point of view of the burglar—placing oneself in his shoes—one sees that he is the powerless one. He is the one who is forced to hide. "[T]he whole world is against him; he is holed up in a helpless situation." Therefore, rather than  retreating from a confrontation with him, one should realize one's own position of relative strength in the battle. 

All too often, when confronting Trump and the Republican leadership, we are in the position of the owner of the house. We regard these people with abject terror, just as the owner fears the burglar. We see all the ways in which they might be able to harm us in future. We think of how they might lunge at us out of the corners and the shadows. So much do we dread these phantom threats that Democrats every day manage to restrict their own legislative or policy ambitions without any help from their colleagues—shedding any mention of tying immigration protections to the COVID-19 package, settling for the indefinite continuance of such intolerable moral evils as the Trump-era Title 42 expulsions policy, and so on.

Yet, if we apply Musashi's principle of reversing perspective, we realize how different the situation and the analysis of strategic advantage must seem to the GOP. Their party is undoubtedly in a moment of disintegration. Their last president to hold office was a historically-unpopular one-termer who holds the record as the only chief executive in U.S. history to be impeached twice. They lost not only the presidential election that unseated him, but also—despite all odds—two Senate seats in what had hitherto been deep-red territory, forfeiting their majority in the upper chamber. 

The grassroots voter mobilization drives of Stacey Abrams and others underscored the significant advantage that Democrats enjoy under our system as the nation's majority party. Quite simply, we have more voters than they do. We own the house; they are the burglar.

And the Republican party, in the face of these defeats, seems to be in a moment of disintegration. As Musashi recognizes, this does not mean in itself that they will be overcome for all time. An adversary can recover from moments of disintegration and the loss of what the ronin author calls "rhythm." But that moment of profound disorientation offers an opening if we are willing to seize it. It is our moment to strike. 

We will, of course, have to "strike" in ways that uphold, rather than undermine, the liberal democratic order. But fortunately, the fact already mentioned—namely, that Democrats have more voters behind them, in terms of sheer numbers, in this country—points to exactly how this might be done. We don't need to turn to any norm-busting tactics of court-packing or coming up with "creative" interpretations of Constitutional passages which we can apply in wholly new contexts. We can simply try to bring our electoral system into closer alignment with the underlying moral basis of liberal democracy itself—the principle that every person should have an equal say in the governmental decisions that affect their lives. D.C. statehood is merely one example of the steps that Congress could take to make this happen. 

We are in a brief moment of opportunity that may not come again. The Republican party may not field such a disastrous candidate again; they may not be so riven by internal divisions and backbiting again; they may not be so confused as to their own identity and way forward again; they may not lose both chambers of Congress and the presidency again in a single election. Democrats may fear the Trumpists and the white nationalists and the MAGA people, but it is only as one fears a thief who has invaded the house of democracy—from their own point of view, they are in the weaker position. And if we do not use that fact to try to advance policies that prevent a minority of white nationalists from gaining power again, by making our system more genuinely democratic, we will live to regret it. 

Of course, for all the reasons stated above, the victory we must press in this moment of opportunity is not just the victory of "us"—not just the victory of one party or one set of leaders, who can prove to be just as corrupted by power as so many others have been. It has to be a victory for the total system—for liberal democracy as a whole. But legislative reforms that strengthen access to democratic institutions and broaden the franchise and increase representation in Congress for previously excluded parts of the country—all of these reforms would do just that. The fact that they also, in the near term, would advantage Democrats, is merely a bonus.