I haven’t spent a tremendous amount of time in Washington D.C.’s Eastern Market. What I found the last time I was there, however, spoke volumes about political leadership, and what it means to us as people. I had arranged to meet someone there on a Saturday morning, and as I walked, I noticed a street vendor selling what I can only characterize as religious artwork devoted to progressive icons. Amidst the shopkeeper’s other wares one could find portrayals of Elizabeth Warren, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and other dashboard saints of the American left depicted in a style unmistakably reminiscent of Christian iconography. And this is not an isolated occurrence. One not need spend too long online to find people selling votive candles to Nancy Pelosi and Robert Mueller.
Much of this political folk religion, of course, is just tongue in cheek. Scarcely anyone is making offerings to Senator Warren. No serious person petitions for the aid of the late Justice Ginsburg, perhaps in the hope that she might dissent from whatever ails them. But how we choose to depict people signals both the regard in which we hold them, and the role that might wish them to play. Putting ones self in the shoes of a Very Online liberal of the Trump years, one can easily imagine feeling powerless, in some way. Hillary Clinton tried her best, and yet, the evil wizard triumphed. What is one mere person to do in the face of such trials? Most people, after all, are fairly powerless when confronted with the machinery of the presidency, its adjunct offices, and the power of the state. In such circumstances, we turn to those who we think actually can interpose between us what we fear. Thus, we turn to Robert Mueller or Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the hope that one of them, perhaps, has the power to help us. When we cannot affect the world around us, we appeal to our saints so that they might do it for us.
See, also, the rhetoric and descriptions of President Biden just prior to his inauguration. One late night talk show host characterized the inauguration as America getting a “brand new dad,” and another commentator compared lights around the reflecting pool the night before as “an extension of Joe Biden’s arms embracing the country.” Nobody, of course, actually believes either statement is literally true. But both go some way in explaining what political leadership has become, and in a sense, always has been. People expect presidents to embody nations like charismatic kings of old, combining the roles of war leader, father of the nation, and ultimate judge. When Congress musters the audacity not to enact a presidents agenda, we get treated to public tantrums about a “do nothing Congress,” as though a president’s desire to do something meant Congress were in any sense required to follow through. As the figurehead of the nation, the president represents its will, and to defy the president is to defy its will. When a disaster strikes somewhere, we expect presidents to travel to the disaster site, taking the body politic of the nation with them in the carapace of their body natural.
This is, I think, what people really mean when they say that someone is “not my president.” It is an attempt to denigrate the current officeholder’s legitimacy, to be sure, but it carries with it an implication deeper than that. There is no point in fulminating about somebody carrying out the office of president if they are actually carrying out the office. You may not like it, but whoever is doing the job is doing the job. To claim a current president is “not my president,” as many Democrats did under Trump and many Republicans do now, asserts that the individual carrying out the office does not represent the true American nation. Trump, whomever you happened to believe, represented not America, but some racist, sub-American fringe of it, the Russians, or someone else. He may have represented someone, but the Real America as understood by whoever made the claim.
Likewise, claiming Joe Biden is “not my president,” when he is like or not carrying out the office, stems from the belief that whomever he represents is not truly American, whether it be the Chinese, the media, Antifa, or millions of fabricated votes. Whomever he represents, it is not the Real America, a concept that represents to the speaker whatever values they hold important. To a certain type of person, Joe Biden serving as president is as horrifying as a Huguenot King of France would have been to a particular type of Catholic Frenchman, or that rule by James II’s Catholic descendants would have meant to some of England’s protestants. Whichever place or whatever people this ruler embodies, it is not us.
All of this happens because when we say we want political leadership that represents us, our definition of “representation” is more akin to that meant by a 2010s Tumblr blogger complaining about the lack of LGBT representation in Lord of the Rings. Most people do not care all that much about the capital gains rate, the carried interest loophole, or the specific details of non-permanent resident visa statuses. What they do care about is someone who can stand in for them in some kind of abstract, metaphysical way. They want someone who plays a character in public they can empathize with and support.
It is not that what they actually do in office does not matter, but it matters a great deal more that the occupant of the Oval Office be someone who values the things that they value, and participates in rituals that are important to them. Thus, when one party is out of power, its partisans proceed to sacralize one of its champions, whether a Supreme Court justice or a former president. Antonin Scalia and Ronald Reagan, for example, occupied a very important place in the conservative consciousness during the early Obama years, though not with quite the same creepy reverence that Ginsburg receives. Again, people who feel powerless will find someone to interpose for them when they think the world has turned against them.
Despite our republican constitution, we continue to view presidents as kings in the sense that we want them to embody us a as a nation. It is not rational, but we are the way we are. It is especially poignant now because the United States lacks leadership with widely acknowledged moral and cultural credibility. Increasingly, when Red America’s candidate loses an election, they view the result not as a bitter result of a race well run. They view it as rule by the king of Blue America, a monarch of a different nation. Blue America has much the same reaction to presidents from Red America. In such times, Americans will look to the revered, and even to the dead in search of answers and stability.
This is but one of many ways in which America is not all that exceptional. In Portugal, the Habsburg succession prompted a growth in Sebastianism, the belief that King Sebastian had actually never died and that the rule of Philip of Spain was illegitimate. In Russia, aggrieved serfs rallied to the banner of Yemelyan Pugachev, who adopted the persona of Tsar Peter III, the deceased former ruler deposed by his wife, who was returning to bring justice to his people. In the Greek east, it was rumored after the Turkish conquest that the last Roman Emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI, would one day return, and similar stories proliferated in Germany about Frederick Barbarossa. Christianity teaches that what we really want is for our king to return and wipe the tears from our eyes, but we so often look in the wrong places.
Divided as we are, what America needs now is political leadership that both desires and is capable of unifying the nation. That also requires a public that wishes to unify instead of divide, for a nation that wants to divide will eventually do so. Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said that he found the crown of France in a gutter, and picked it up. Having gone through the tumult of the Revolution and the Terror, the French were willing to entrust their revolutionary state into the hands of a competent leader who could command respect, remolding the monarchy they had cast off. Somewhere in America there is a crown lying in a gutter, waiting to be picked up. Whoever does, whichever person can be elected to actually unify the country, their character and motivations will matter greatly. Leaders set the tone for their people by showing them what to emulate, and a wise people will elevate to leadership those with values worth emulating. As Americans, we are a people enormously lucky that the first person to pick up that crown was George Washington. We may not always be so lucky.