Democratic Government Depends On Civil Norms And "Gentlemen's Agreements" More Than Law

Alan: What becomes clear over the course of the following interview with Amherst scholar Lawrence Douglas is that functioning democracies ALWAYS depend -- existentially -- on a set of suppositions that politicians "will behave in a fundamentally fair way." 

The presumption of "fairness and civility" embodies the necessary pre-legal understanding that people will compromise -- even their "inviolable" principles -- in order to share power in an alternating way.

Once healthy, tolerant, open societies put an end to this acculturative process of "power sharing," the door is flung wide to autocracy and suddenly "the enemy is inside the gates." 

Douglas, the interviewee-author of "Will He Go? Trump And The Looming Election Meltdown Of 2020" frequently refers to the non-codified, unwritten fundaments of "functioning government" as "the norms." 

Open society democracies function only as long as the deep culture of a society perpetuates civil discourse and civil participation as central features of government.

Tragically (and perhaps terminally) the collapse of civility in these "United" States, deprives the body politic of civil discourse and civil participation based on the necessary compromises of democratic power-sharing. (Decades ago, I framed houses for a conservative general contractor who said: "Republicans remain in power until power corrupts them. Then, people vote for Democratic representatives who undertake needed housecleaning until power corrupts them. This cycle repeats itself.")

It will be easier to understand the underlying "normative components" of Douglas' view if you keep in mind the phrase "gentlemen's agreements" whenever Douglas refers to "the norms" that serve as the indispensable "lubricant" of democratic governance. (It furthers understanding to mention that the "lubricant" of pork barrel horse-trading was essential to the proper functioning of American politics.)

Without the lubricant-grease of civility -- which is to say without "gentlemen's agreements" -- the bedrock of government crumbles, and in the resulting quicksand-chaos, we discover that the most egocentric, self-seeking politicians are the functionaries most ready, willing and able to fill the sucking void of dysfunctional democracy with autocratic policies and procedures. 

Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan "Summarizes The Republican Philosophy"

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/01/republican-presidential-candidate-pat.html

Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong" 

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Right-Went-Wrong-Neoconservatives/dp/0312341156/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381295072&sr=8-1&keywords=where+the+right+went+wrong 

"Where love rules, there is no will to power, 
and where power predominates, love is lacking. 
The one is the shadow of the other." 
Carl Jung

What made The Tea Party so successful at "getting its way" (simultaneously beating a path to Trump's autocracy) is that Newt Gingrich and his fundamentally destructive cadres chose to be relentlessly uncivil, so that ALL "gentlemen's agreements" (all norms) were nullified.

This nullification may even have taken place without Tea Party "actors" realizing what they were doing. After all, stupidity and ignorance are hallmarks of incivility. (It was Steve Bannon's evil genius which "clearly realized what he was doing" as he - and by extension Trump - went about the business of deliberately "de-constructing" the administrative state.)

An Aside: The energy released by de-construction, destruction-fission is such a "rush" that destroyers feel uplifted, even "glorified" by the very act of destruction just as soldiers in battle often experience a kind of psychotomimetic "enlightenment" arising from the unprecedented sacrifice-of-battle and consequent transcendence of baseline egocentrism.

On the surface, America's right-wing believed they were still "playing by the rules" and that "Tea Party conservatism" had won "fairly and squarely." 

While it is true that "Tea Party conservatives" continued to play by certain "formal rules," their autocratic impulses "won the political contest" by trashing the uncodified norms of civility (aka "gentlemen's agreements") which have always subtended democratic process --- that root-level set of norms and "gentlemen's agreements" that are fundamentally responsible for the proper functioning of democratic government.