In refusing to admit he lost the election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump weakens the legitimacy of the US Presidency. To fully grasp the significance of Trump’s ‘I CONCEDE NOTHING’ requires understanding the structure of a constitutional republic. In late 1786, Samuel Lyman, who was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, wrote a letter to a fellow federalist, Samuel Breck.
His words are instructive of the problem that a constitution for the United States was expected to solve. “[N]ot only this Commonwealth but the union at large are in the most confused and confounded condition; we do not yet feel that sameness or unity of interest which is the only cement of any nation...” The federalist solution to perceived disunity in the nation is to establish a strong central authority that embodies The American People.
This solution is captured in the first line of the preamble to the constitution of a United States created one year later: “We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union...” A century earlier, in 1655, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan offered the first theoretical support for constituted political orders. In the conventional version of that argument, the people, naturally desirous of power, are led to struggle against each other, which exposes them all to “the continual fear and danger of violent death”.
To avoid this “war of all men against all men”, the people bind themselves by mutual covenant to confer upon an “artificial man”, the task of peacemaker. For Hobbes, this Leviathan—whom he also called the ‘Common-Wealth or the State’—is a colossus so large as to loom over a mountain range, at the near edge of which is a city. Only a strong state can compel peace, without which the people will remain in a state of civil war.
In his slim book Stasis (which is Greek for civil war), Giorgio Agamben presents an astonishingly unconventional reading of the frontispiece of Leviathan (in picture). As befits a philosopher of the highest rank, he plumbs the depths of Hobbes by staying on the surface. Why, in the frontispiece, does Leviathan not occupy the city but hover outside it? Why is the city empty of people? Why do armed guards and beaked figures depicting doctors of the plague appear in the city? There is much more in Agamben’s dense reading of the frontispiece.
But his answers to these three questions is perhaps sufficient to illuminate the fuller meaning of Trump’s refusal to concede. Against convention, Agamben shows that Hobbes was fully aware of the spectral nature of ‘The People’. Hobbes distinguishes ‘The People’ from ‘the multitude’. The People is the substance of the ‘body politic’ and is represented by the state. In contrast, the multitude are the natural bodies, the citizens—you and me.
The multitude exist in two conditions: either as ‘disunited multitude’ referring to citizens in the condition of strife, or as ‘dissolved multitude’ referring to citizens in a pacified state. The constitution of the state/Leviathan marks the passage from the disunited to the dissolved multitude. Leviathan is formed of tiny bodies because the state cannot be distinguished from The People. It is precisely this transmogrification of the many into the One that is meant by the motto on the Great Seal of the US—E Pluribus Unum. After the state is constituted, this one People decompose back into a pacified multitude.
For Hobbes then,
The People is not the citizens but a sort of optical illusion conjured up to justify sovereign power. This is why Leviathan/The People does not inhabit the city but oversees it from afar. In contrast, the citizens/multitude inhabit the city as subjects of the state. The presence of armed guards and doctors of the plague in the city depict how citizens are governed. According to Hobbes, the supreme business of the state is the safety of the multitude. The police and the physician appear as the favoured deputies of the state because safety is understood as both the preservation of life and the management of health.
The import of Trump’s refusal to concede now comes into fuller view. The office of the President is understood to uniquely represent The American People. The President is the legal head of state which, by definition, embodies the nation to its citizens and to the rest of the world. Trump never pretended to represent all Americans. From his early support of the mendacious ‘birther movement’ to his more recent incitement of the insignificant Proud Boys to ‘stand by’, Trump has been a partisan through and through. By his unprecedented refusal to concede, ostensibly on behalf of some 70 million supporters, Trump has fully exposed The American People as a phantom.
In contrast, Biden resurrects The People in order to save the Republic. Biden says he does not recognise blue states and red states but only the United States. Moreover, to control the pandemic and to heal the ruptures among warring factions, Biden brings back the two guardians of the Hobbesian State: the physician and the policeman. Trump’s corrosive factionalism and Biden’s illusory inclusiveness are as horns of a dilemma. Perhaps one way to avoid being gored by the one or the other is to figure out the difference between self-governing citizens and a multitude managed by The People.
Sajay Samuel (Email: sxs26@psu.edu)
Professor at State College, Pennsylvania