The last election.
Book One of Aristotle’s Politics opens with an affirmation of the directedness and surpassing nature of the state. Benjamin Jowett’s translation puts it thus:
Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.
Harris Rackham’s twentieth-century translation, which is the one reprinted in the Loeb edition, opts for a somewhat different translation of the term κοινωνίαν in the original text:
Every state is as we see a sort of partnership, and every partnership is formed with a view to some good (since all the actions of all mankind are done with a view to what they think to be good). It is therefore evident that, while all partnerships aim at some good the partnership that is the most supreme of all and includes all the others does so most of all, and aims at the most supreme of all goods; and this is the partnership entitled the state, the political association.
Interestingly, κοινωνίαν — which will be immediately familiar, etymologically, to those who have grappled with New-Testament κοινὴ — is derived from a root signifying common, or the commons, which yields some direction in Aristotelian rhetorical intention.
Rackham strikes me as having the better of it — not in his grasp of Aristotle’s Greek, on which I have no informed comment, but in the connotations of his English. A community is willed or unwilled, according to circumstance: we are each in many communities which had no inception in choice or volition. (I have no choice, for example, but to be in the putative community of Hispanics, which raises interesting possibilities for gatekeepers to which progressivism has been alert.) A partnership is different, implying will and deliberation, and therefore necessarily a discernment of the good to which it — and the resultant state — is directed.
Ask an American which translation most accurately describes their polity and they’ll almost universally opt for Rackham’s partnership. This is not to say the word “community” isn’t used in American civics, because of course it is all the time, constantly, without cessation or relief. But the meaning here of volitional versus imposed association is important to Americans steeped in the mythos of the propositional nation. An American has the right to break free, to define himself politically, to cast aside the loyalties, duties, and allegiances of old and strike toward the new, with the righteousness of the intent being the metric of its permissibility. Furthermore, the American in his polity supersedes the Aristotelian directedness toward a common good, “the most supreme of all goods” being the atomization of the good: this is freedom, not liberty, as liberty asserts ordered ends and the uncoerced alignment with them. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what this is all about?
Now this sort of political advertisement (in this case from the ongoing theatrics, mimicking the culmination of a deliberative process that never happened, of the Democratic National Convention) is utterly ordinary in the American context: swap out the candidates and a mere handful of the images and it could be of either major party. The point here is twofold. First, that this is one of the few points of universally held ideology in the United States remaining; and second, that it is empirically wrong.
That error also comes in two counts, both in the total impossibility of discarding the supreme good, which will exist whether wanted or not, and in the conceit of a nation of Rackham’s partnership. The United States may have begun — at least in the minds of the Founders — as a voluntary association of political communities, but it has not been that for well over a century and a half now. The American Civil War ended the Jeffersonian idea (eventually, in a minor irony of history, endorsed by the waning Federalists) that withdrawal of consent was possible. The United States is now the only nation in the Anglosphere in which it is assumed that any such attempt will be suppressed by armed force from the center: meanwhile Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom all allow secession referenda. Though it is inarguable that those three nations broadly allow less individual liberty than does the United States, this is one element in which the liberal defense of monarchy has proven correct, with republicanism as a more iron guarantor of the state versus the people.
Furthermore, the past century of progressivism, powerfully aided by the pitiless mechanisms of commoditized popular culture, has labored to eradicate those political communities anyway, with considerable success. In the United States, the constitutive states are with rare exceptions mostly just administrative units; and in Great Britain, as we’ve seen, communal allegiance to the founding nations gets you jailed. America is not far behind its British cousins in this respect. When Michelle Obama asserts (again at the DNC) that “no one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” it is received as a feel-good line in the light of the aforementioned ideological principle: there are plenty of conservatives of the less-effectual variety who would applaud and agree. She likely doesn’t intend it as anything more than a platitude, but the idea has consequences. Again it asserts that there is no “most supreme of all goods” for the orientation and purpose of the state, and it violates Rackham’s partnership by denying the Americans the right to define themselves. We are instead in Jowett’s community, stripped of that which gives it meaning.
It is important here to grasp what the elimination of both the supreme good and the volitional partnership, in the Aristotelian framework, signify. It removes the Americans from nationhood entirely, and from politics entirely, throwing the entire people into a pre-political state. This is a dissolution of the nation, obscured because it is necessarily accompanied by a massive strengthening of the state, which the unwary observer takes as the nation. The state must be strengthened because a pre-political people must be ruled. Aristotle recognized it, as did Euripides and Xenophon, as did the American Founders who never imagined it would characterize the Americans.
This — propositionalism leading ineluctably to dissolution — is the majoritarian ideology among American elites, and admission to their ranks is nearly impossible without it. Its power, as an item of civic faith possessing the force of religion, commands nearly the whole of the left and much of the right. This is why those elements are fundamentally opposed to the Trump candidacy, as he nearly alone reintroduced the Aristotelian grounding into American civics: the propositions that Americans are a Rackham’s partnership, and that their state ought to be for something, most desirably its own nation. This is also why those elements regard the elevation of Vance with especial animus, as the most-explicit expositor of these ideas now. More than anything, this is the central question of the national contest of 2024: is America a nation, or not? If it is, what is its proper end? If it is not, then by and for whom are we ruled? There will be other votes, but one of these outcomes makes this the last election.
Let the reader understand.