Ruere in Servitium

 Almost a year into the second Trump administration, the mad rush of the nation's rich and powerful to demonstrate craven submission, self-degrading fealty, and "anticipatory obedience" to Trump continues apace. If we hear less about it now than we used to, it's not because it has become less common—but rather, that it has become so common as to be unremarkable. 

Any given week, the news headlines will furnish you with fresh examples. This or that major university just cut a deal with Trump and agreed to install a regime of MAGA censorship to ensure that its curriculum will henceforth be compatible with this administration's white nationalist priorities. This or that major corporation has turned another humiliating moral somersault in order to please its masters on the Potomac. 

Maybe you heard a couple weeks ago about how the Washington Post editorial room ran an op-ed praising Trump's demolition of the East Wing of the White House, for instance. What stood out about the article was not only its servile flattery of the President, but also its startlingly fascist rhetoric—its praise of the coup de main, and of action for its own sake, like something a Futurist poet might write in an Italian journal on the eve of Mussolini's takeover. 

"Strong leaders reject calcification," the editorial declared, in one particularly chilling phrase. 

Oh, and one thing the editorial forgot to mention—at least when it was first published: Amazon, whose billionaire founder Jeff Bezos owns the Post—is a major financial contributor to the East Wing renovation project. 

But the Post's line on the East Wing project—ominous at it is—at least directly concerns only the fate of a building. More troubling still is the line that some of our newly MAGA-converted billionaires have taken on the fate of actual human beings. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, for instance, on the rush on the part of defense contractors to cash in on Trump's new bloodthirsty drug war in the Caribbean. 

Alex Karp—a former Biden donor and endorser of Kamala Harris as recently as a year ago—wins the prize for the most shameless flip-flop. He wouldn't say if his company Palantir is profiting directly from Trump's extrajudicial killings at sea, but he added (according to the Journal): "If we are involved, I am very proud [...] I believe that fentanyl is a scourge on the working class of America and that if this scourge was affecting non-working-class people we would use extreme violence and so I support what they’re doing."

Fentanyl, of course, is not trafficked along any of the sea routes that the Trump administration is targeting. To the contrary, most of the boats the administration is blowing up—along with their civilian crew and passengers—are believed (without evidence or charge or trial) to be moving cocaine. Which is not a particularly lethal scourge in this country—but to the extent it affects anyone, mostly impacts the "non-working-class people" Karp has in mind. 

Indeed, I suspect Karp, in his Silicon Valley elite tech bubble, knows personally a lot more cocaine users than fentanyl users. 

Regardless, this is the most pathetically fallacious argument for murder I've ever seen. It's not only a "Tu quoque"—the seldom-valid argument from hypocrisy that should impress no one; it's also a particularly unconvincing hypothetical Tu quoque. After all, maybe the Trump administration would be committing even grosser war crimes if there were an overdose epidemic primarily afflicting the financial elite. Guess what: I'd oppose that too. What else you got? 

Meanwhile, Washington is in some consternation this week over the moral and legal status of those killings that Karp praised—after the Post (in its news-reporting rather than editorial water-carrying function) claimed that Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. forces to make multiple passes over one vessel, for the express purpose of ensuring there would be no survivors of the attack. 

Even some Republicans yesterday were starting to question whether this incident, if it happened as described, might amount to a war crime. 

Hegseth seems rather bemused that this report has caused extra concern; and in fairness, he has a point. Why would circling back to kill the survivors be any more of a war crime than killing unarmed civilians in the first place? The whole point of these strikes, after all, has been to execute people who pose no threat of military force. These were always meant to be "lethal, kinetic strikes," as Hegseth put it.

No human rights monitors had to perform a deep dive to uncover evidence of these crimes. To the contrary, the administration has made a point of showcasing their handiwork each time. 

Pete Hegseth has himself lovingly displayed snuff films of these murders on social media, in which viewers are invited to see human figures moving around on the surface of the crafts—and then being engulfed in flames. In the government's own video footage, which Hegseth has so proudly showed off to the world, you can clearly see that these people were unarmed and posed no military threat at the time they were killed. 

I therefore have to agree with Hegseth on one thing: the "follow-up strike" to kill the survivors seems like hardly more of a war crime than the initial strike (even if it seems like an even more basic violation, if that's possible, of the elementary principles of fair play and human decency that undergird civilization). Both things are very certain and obvious violations of human rights and the law of war; and the administration—far from trying to obscure this fact—has essentially admitted that they know this and simply don't care. 

An administration that posts the graphic video evidence of its own murders to an audience of millions is past being shamed. As Hegseth's response seemed to indicate in so many words: the whole point of this exercise was to kill defenseless people all along; that was its open and avowed and unapologetic purpose—so why should the politicians act so surprised now? 

These are the murders, then, that Alex Karp praises. These are the war crimes that he says he would be "very proud" to profit from. 

God help us. 

The classical term for this kind of sniveling self-debasement before arbitrary power, which Karp and Bezos and so many others have displayed, is the ruere in servitium, or "rush into servitude," that "Tacitus has once and for all analyzed and rendered into classical prose," as the Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce once put it (Furst trans. throughout). 

Croce invoked the phrase, in his book on the History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, in the context of describing the craven flattery and anticipatory obedience that the rich and powerful engaged in, following Louis Napoleon's coup d'état on December 2, 1851 and the rise of the Second Empire in France. The shameless parade—this "rush into servitude"—that "follow[s] the termination of every liberal régime," as he puts it, Croce depicted in vivid colors: 

[A]cclamations, flattery, voluntary servitude, perjury, the rapid conversions of heated democrats—which would have been comic if they had not been humiliating—mental restrictions, compromises, and fears and terrors and desertion of friends and cowardly denunciations, insensibility to the violation of justice and to daily wrongs, the pretense of not seeing and not knowing, in order to silence the pangs of conscience, what everyone saw and knew perfectly well [...] supine applause for every statement or assertion coming from above [...] and, in the midst of the general timidity, the boldness of the bold in taking fortune by storm, the readiness to seize private advantages or to satisfy private hates under the semblance of political zeal, without anyone's daring to oppose or protest [...]"

Does that not perfectly describe what Karp is getting up to? The abject willingness to repeat the administration's demonstrably false and easily refutable lies; the faux-naïve posture that pretends it can't see what is in front of its nose; the deliberate hardening, by use of propagandistic phrases, of the moral sensibility that knows—somewhere deep down—that murder is after all still murder—and in the midst of it all, the willingness to cynically profit from the whole debasing spectacle. Karp, as he crawls before Trump and kisses the boot, plainly has his eye all the while on the main chance. 

Croce's description of this period is written with such passion—by the way—that it is impossible to avoid the impression that he had present circumstances in mind. This was a history of liberalism written, after all, under the boot-heel of a fascist regime that had seized power and overturned a liberal, parliamentary government with as much unlawful force—if not more—than Louis Napoleon ever deployed. (Croce's history first appeared in print in 1933, when Mussolini was well entrenched in power.)

And thus, Croce's description of the "ruere in servitium" in Second Empire France (which Émile Zola had also depicted so well in some of his novels) also seems to have an element of disguised self-accusation. In fascist Italy, Croce was known to oppose the regime, and even made some sacrifices for his stance (he was on the record as an anti-fascist as early as 1926.) He was, thus, a sort of internal exile in Mussolini's Italy. 

But—like all such internal exiles (as W.G. Sebald has demonstrated in his essay on the same phenomenon in Germany)—he could not remain entirely uncompromised. He never went to prison or into actual foreign exile for his views. (And so, in his plea for us not to be too hard on the French elite who debased themselves during the Second Empire, he is perhaps partly arguing his own case: "humanity," he writes, "in its average ranks, is so created that it must not be submitted to too difficult tests and asked for too hard sacrifices, such as the renunciation of a quiet life[.]")

It is odd indeed to see Croce writing a history of triumphant liberalism in 1933 that cuts off abruptly before mentioning the rise of Mussolini or Hitler. These men, and their overthrow of their countries' respective parliamentary governments, would seem to be a subject that any historian of liberalism in that period would have to confront. 

Yet, anyone with even a modest ability to read between the lines can see that Croce is implicitly criticizing the fascist dictators of his time—even if not by name; indeed, that he holds them in abhorrence. 

He warns, for instance, against the perils of modern nationalism, which he calls a grotesque perversion—on the order of a Satanic black mass—of the holy, humanitarian, and cosmopolitan version of the "national idea" that inspired liberal figures like Mazzini and Byron in the nineteenth century. He excoriates at length the doctrines of what he calls "activism"—clearly a shorthand for fascism and kindred ideologies—with its atavistic cult of power, strength, blood, and war for its own sake, and which he likewise sees as a dark mirror for the values of liberalism—the "fallen angel" within the "religion of liberty." 

The astonishing thing, however, is that even in the midst of a fascist country, witnessing the rise of dictatorships in the very nations whose liberalizing course in the preceding century he has just charted, Croce seems to retain his optimism. His history of the nineteenth century is still a tale of the ultimate triumph of liberty; unembittered by what came immediately after it. And he concludes his book with a prophetic vision of eventual European political unity—seeing past the violent national antagonisms that were raging at the time he wrote to the eventual reality of the EU that has come to fruition in our era. 

Perhaps we should take the same lesson to heart today. In much the same way that the nineteenth century appeared to people in the twentieth, after all—the twentieth now appears to us today. We look back on it as the liberal age; which has been subsequently eclipsed by rumbles of dictatorship and democratic backsliding. 

But for long stretches of the nineteenth century too (during the post-Napoleonic reaction, say; or the post-1848 reaction) it seemed that liberalism was the very last ideology that would ever triumph on the Earth. It seemed that it had been ignobly defeated for all time. Likewise too—in the first half of the twentieth century—it often appeared that liberalism was destined to be eclipsed by the new dictators and the trendy religion of blood and strength that Croce short-handed as "activism." 

By the end of the twentieth century, though, it was clear that Croce—with his old-fashioned liberalism, which so many denounced at the time as the religion of their grandfathers and utterly irrelevant to the modern world—was actually on the right side of history. 

So may it be with us. We live in a historical moment when liberalism once again seems to be on the ropes—just as it did in 1815, or in 1849, or in 1933. We live in an age when prominent makers of public opinion once again use the rhetoric of what Croce called "activism" — viz. that Post editorial with its language in praise of "strong leaders" who trample upon what it calls "calcification"—but which the rest of us simply call the law as enacted by democratic majorities. 

But each time that liberalism seemed equally threatened in the past, it proved in the end to be a mistake to count liberalism out prematurely. As Croce observes: "the facts show that for no other idea have so many fierce battles been faced and won, for no other idea has blood been shed more freely, or a fight been led with greater stubbornness," as for liberty. 

As Arthur Hugh Clough put it—amidst the seeming wreckage and defeat of liberal hopes after 1848—"say not the struggle nought availeth," for—after all—"if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars." 

And so—likewise—Croce concluded, the best we can do—in such times as these— is to "Work according to the line that is here laid down for you, with your whole self, every day, every hour, in your every act; and trust in divine Providence, which knows more than we individuals do [...] Words like these," he adds, "which we have often heard and uttered in our Christian education and life, have their place, like others from the same source, in the 'religion of liberty.'"

May we too, then, not be dismayed into absolute passivity and cynicism by the abject spectacle of the "ruere in servitium," which—as Croce puts it—always "follow[s] the termination of every liberal régime." 

Let us instead trust to the forces of history and posterity to give the Alex Karps of the world the only coda they have ever deserved. For, "in the perspectives that before me open," as Hugh MacDiarmid once put it, "I know the evil will be undone and vengeance wrought / With a completeness beyond human thought."