Why the Right will Not Revolt
An Introduction to Belly-Politics
“I am not much in the habit of giving your advice concerning university work, but if any of you wanted to study Bacon, I don’t think that you would be wasting your time.” — Michel Foucault1
Good morning everyone.
He may be a neoliberal, but Michel Foucault is right almost all the time. As part of his discussion of raison d’État in the lecture cited above, he brings up Francis Bacon’s brief piece On Seditions and Troubles (1625). And what could be more timely than a discussion on this topic? I want to focus on a particular argument here, as a way of contending that a widespread revolt on the part of the American right/MAGA is just not in the cards.2 This isn’t cause for celebration, of course, since we should expect acts of r/w terror, especially as the clampdown on Trump’s criminality proceeds. But if we are concerned about a comprehensive, bottom-up, popular revolt against the state, then Bacon can help allay those fears. (I bring this up as well because this seems to lurk behind Trump’s weird threats against the FBI and even Garland more directly: he has repeatedly said that conditions are too tense, too “overheated” for the state to act against him.)
Bacon begins with this highly relevant, relatable point: “when discords, and quarrels, and factions are carried openly and audaciously, it is a sign the reverence of government is lost.”3 This briefly touches on a point made over at John Ganz’s Unpopular Front, namely the liberal fear of “going too far,” trepidation around the optics of “looking political” that has become associated with Barack Obama on Russia and Comey on “her emails.” If we follow Bacon’s logic here, then the liberal tolerance for these kinds of abuses carries its own dangers, not only of demoralization (when we witness powerful people committing the worst kinds of crimes openly, especially in contrast with the Reality Winners of the world), but of a loss of respect or “reverence of government.” There’s no question that we live in the kind of world that Bacon describes: various forms of revolt are at least discussed openly, and until recently with very little fear of reprisal at least on the MAGA right. And yet, conditions are not ripe for widespread revolt, for the material reasons that Bacon discusses next:
Concerning the materials of seditions. It is a thing well to be considered; for the surest way to prevent seditions (if the times do bear it) is to take away the matter of them. For if there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell, whence the spark shall come, that shall set it on fire. The matter of seditions is of two kinds: much poverty, and much discontentment.4
No question: the current conjuncture positively requires Baconian “discontentment,” and as I have argued elsewhere, the widespread, systemic sense of disillusionment with the neoliberal experiment happened first on the “nationalist” MAGA right. But what Bacon says next clinches the point I want to make now:
(I)f this poverty and broken estate in the better sort, be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great. For the rebellions of the belly are the worst.5
Translated into contemporary language, Bacon here is making the (Machiavellian) point that if leaders of state are concerned with sedition and revolt, they need to watch out for interclass alliances between those “in the better sort” and those whose lives are ruined by scarcity and precarity, the truly marginal and damned. In the end, in other words, we always come back to the politics of thumos, belly-politics, the visceral, gut-level reaction to material deprivation as a primal “danger” to sovereign control over territory and order.6 Bacon’s point that “(r)ebellions of the belly are the worst” is a warning to those in power, but it should also remind us that the MAGA phenomenon remains one of relatively comfortable, white, middle-class men and women. MAGA is an ideology which breaks from neoliberal globalism, in order to prioritize the values of a heartland petit bourgeoisie. As I read somewhere recently — I think it was a piece by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times — it’s a revolt managed by middle-managers, overseen and animated by the owners of used-car lots and construction companies, former military and cops, “small business owners” fed up with both cultural and economic elites. Like the Tea Party, it’s mostly an astroturfing phenomenon. It’s not an expression of thumos.7
So, should we feel relief? Yes and no.
Yes, the MAGA obsession with culture war is mostly a sign of weakness rather than strength. But it’s not like the Democratic party is meeting or addressing the needs of “belly-politics” in any competent way either: in fact, at least in its Biden/Harris/Pete iteration, the Democrats fail to meet the moment on both cultural and material terms. That is, they manage somehow to be both uninspiring and irrelevant. This is an opportunity for a Left that truly could speak from the gut of material conditions, but it would require a vanguard organization. To many of us raised on Cold War liberalism that sounds ominous and somehow Leninist, but it’s simply an observation about the necessity for political leaders who would fully represent (and engage in combat on behalf of) the wretched of the earth. Once that happens, once a real interclass alliance happens, the sovereigns of the world should in fact tremble.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 15 March 1978 Lecture, pg. 267.
Jeet Heer made this argument as well, and I addressed it briefly in this essay.
Bacon, “On Seditions and Troubles,” in Essays, pg. 44.
Ibid., 45, my emphasis.
Ibid.
Thumos here is a transliteration from the Greek, which in Archaic texts meant something like the spirit or breath that animates the human body, and which by Plato’s time meant something like the belly or gut. Plato identifies it with the warrior class and the “spirited” part of the soul in his Republic. My point here is in creating a conceptual correspondence between material deprivation (at least to a point: we don’t have time to address Primo Levi and Agamben’s discussion of the Müselmann) on the one hand, and collective revolt on the other. This is the “social question” at the heart of modern politics, and it has become even more relevant and even pressing because of the disparity caused by neoliberal policies.
I am aware of Harvey Mansfield’s use of the term thumos, but since I still refuse to read anything by Strauss or his disciples, I remain ignorant of its meaning. I assume it has something to do with American “masculinity.”