September 13, 2007
Bonapartism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Alexander Burns posts that if General Petraeus takes the advice of the New York Sun, “to tell Congress that he needed its full support for the Iraq war, and that if he didn’t receive it he would resign and run for President,” he would be taking “an essentially Bonapartist course of action.” I don’t think General Petraeus would have been well-advised to take the Sun’s advice, but in the extremely remote possibility that he had, he would not, in my opinion, have been acting in a Bonapartist fashion. The historical Bonaparte eventually seized power with (and held it by reliance on) armed force, and his nephew, who won a national presidential election, subsequently mounted a successful coup d’état, later relying on plebiscites rather than contesting elections (although there was a very late phase of “liberal empire,” with an elected legislature having some power). Outside of the stricter Marxian rhetorical traditions, I think Bonapartist mostly means generals seizing power, and holding it, by means of bayonets; inside the Marxian traditions, there are some important additional implications, but the use of bayonets rather than ballots alone is still part of the idea. The Sun, as far as I can tell, while abrasively and stupidly suggesting that Congress stop criticizing the administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq, is not suggesting the use of violence to overturn the Constitution. Nor am I sure that demanding that Congress support the war or see Petraeus resign and run for President would be fairly comparable to MacArthur’s behavior in 1951. MacArthur was insubordinate to his commander-in-chief; Petraeus has not been, and if he made such a remark to Congress, giving his professional advice and mentioning the right he shares with many of his fellow citizens (to run for the Presidency), he would not necessarily be committing the military offense of insubordination; for one thing, I can imagine his Commander in Chief approving his remarks. Mr. Burns also quotes Niall Ferguson saying that 1951 was “perhaps the only moment in its history that the American Republic came close to meeting the fate of the Roman Republic.” I do not know the context, but Niall Ferguson seems to be making a bombastic and ridiculous remark. If 1951 was in fact our closest approach to a century of civil war culminating in centuries of despotism, and I have no reason to think otherwise, we have no great cause for alarm. At the time, people who were closer to the horrors of the last century thought they saw something more genuinely dangerous in MacArthur’s ambitions than most of us do when looking back more than 50 years later, in the same way that Huey Long looked more like Hitler if you were an excitable contemporary living in the Bronx than he does to us now. Then again, “close” may mean something to the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University that it does not mean to other speakers of English. As for extremely irritating remarks made by American generals, ones that comport very ill with democratic government, I’d pick the general who announced that President Clinton would not be physically safe if he ventured onto that general’s army base. At the time, I wanted Clinton to send the Secret Service to interrogate this general, who was apparently harboring traitors in his command. I probably overreacted—but not as much as Professor Ferguson seems to have done, with the benefit of a lot more hindsight.
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