On the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The End of Democracy

After watching the Clinton-Trump election on television, I felt a compulsion to do something, anything, that might dull the emotional pain caused by the Trumpian irrationality and mendacity. I found succour of a sort, if little solace, in Simone Weil's 1943 essay, On the Abolition of Political Parties. On the one hand, the piece is prescient as a prediction of the party-political phenomenon of Trump and its causes. On the other, unfortunately, it offers no real alternative to party organisation in a democracy. But perhaps the warning it provides, coupled with the confirmation of her hypothesis in almost every action of Trump and his supporters, may prevent a future descent into irrecoverable chaos.

Weil takes her inspiration not from the usual ancient Classical Greek and Roman cultures but from the unlikeliest of sources for someone who is ultimately critical of mob rule, namely the French Revolution. For her,

"The true spirit of 1789 consists in thinking not that a thing is just because such is the people’s will, but that in certain conditions, the will of the people is more likely than any other will to conform to justice."

What impedes this spirit is the attempt to corrupt the free will and reasoning ability of individuals.

The signal of such corruption is ‘passion’, that is emotional stimulus which stops reason and eliminates free will. For Weil, political parties are vehicles of collective passion whose function is to instil conformity through social pressure. The goal of political parties, that is of their members as well as their leaders, is growth in their own power without limit. Political parties kill conscience and promote mendacity, thus destroying the most fundamental connection with reality: Truth.

“The truth which we desire but have no prior knowledge of... is a perfection which no mind can conceive of – God, truth, justice – [words] silently evoked with desire, have the power to lift up the soul and flood it with light. It is when we desire truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content that we receive the light."

Political parties blind us to this light.

One is tempted to discount Weil’s desperately negative view until one remembers that Nazism, McCarthyism, and now Trumpism are all products of party-political democracies. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can Happen Here can and does happen here. Weil has an educational message for those in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly Britain and the United States. She notes that the continental European political system not only demonises rival parties but as a matter of course threatens party rivals with prison and even extinction.

Anglo-Saxon politics, Weil notes, hadn’t yet reached this level, preserving a fundamental civility that was real but, as she saw it, temporary. Because of factional dissatisfaction and frustration which are necessary consequences of democratic politics, the natural trajectory of democracy is toward the continental model. Donald Trump’s threat to prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton is a fulfilment of Weil’s prediction. As is the stubborn refusal of Trump’s Republican supporters - particularly religious evangelicals - to even recognise the possibility of immorality on the part of their chosen leader. Their consciences appear frozen and inoperable.

Weil in fact implicitly anticipates this last point as well. She traces the origin of such obstinate mendacity to the Catholic Church’s attempt over many centuries to control the spread of sects and threatening (to it) divisions which followed the French Revolution. Parties act like mini versions of a secular Church. Unity is maintained through the generation of collective passion, a drug which should be banned like other harmful substances.

Which provokes a thought that seems to be incipient in much of the wonder at Trump’s ability to attract and maintain such a stalwart following. Trump has in fact created a secular Church, with himself as self-designated pope. “There is no us without you” is the prayer of his congregation. Let us hope that like all such religions, Trumpism fragments into its own sectarian bits before it does any more harm to democracy.

View all my reviews