The Next Hero of the Soviet Union

On December 18, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump on the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress by votes of 230–197–1 and 229–198–1, respectively. The votes were partisan, with all Republicans voting against both articles of impeachment. Four Democrats dissented to varying degrees; Collin Peterson (MN) and Jeff Van Drew (NJ) voted against both charges, Jared Golden (ME) voted against the obstruction charge, and Tulsi Gabbard (HI) voted “present” on both. Independent Justin Amash (MI) supported both charges.[1,2] Three representatives who will soon retire abstained from voting.[3] The House majority alleges that Trump sought foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election by withholding foreign aid and a White House invitation to influence the Ukrainian government to investigate current Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, then obstructed the Congressional investigation of the aforementioned activities by ordering his subordinates not to cooperate.[4]

One way to view the impeachment of Trump is as the culmination of efforts to thwart his presidency that began before he took office. There were efforts to use faithless electors to alter the Electoral College result in favor of 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.[5] Once he was in office, there were allegations that Trump only won because of Russian collusion and interference.[6] Impeachment efforts began in 2017, led by House Democrats Brad Sherman (CA) and Al Green (TX).[7] The actual case against Trump is weak compared to the cases against Bill Clinton (who was ultimately acquitted) and Richard Nixon (who resigned before impeachment came to a vote, but almost certainly would have been convicted and removed had he not resigned).[8] Even the case against Andrew Johnson in 1868 had more substance, and it was based on his violation of a law that was later deemed unconstitutional in Myers v. United States (1926). The greater long-term concern is that the precedent established by impeaching Trump on such spurious grounds means that future presidents may be impeached simply because the House of Representatives is controlled by a different party.[9]

Hero of the Soviet Union

The allegations against Trump of collusion with Russia, along with the aforementioned concerns of lowering standards, bring to mind an element of the previous iteration of Russian statecraft. The Hero of the Soviet Union (Russian: Герой Советского Союза) was the highest honor that one could acquire, and was introduced in 1934 to be awarded to individuals or groups for “heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society.” Individuals who received the award were entitled to special privileges, including a pension, better housing, free bus travel, a first-class airline trip every year, entertainment, and medical benefits. A second award entitled a person to have a bronze bust with a commemorative inscription placed in one’s hometown. A third award entitled a person to have another bronze bust erected in Moscow near the Palace of the Soviets, but the Palace was never built and the busts were never erected.[10,11] The title was awarded to 12,862 people, though 72 people were stripped of the title and 13 awards were later annulled, leaving 12,777. 154 of these people received the award twice, three people thrice, and two people received four. The vast majority (11,572 single awards, 107 doubles, and 3 triples) were awarded for actions during World War II (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War). Twelve cities were declared Hero Cities during this time, and Brest was declared a Hero Fortress.

The Hero of the Soviet Union was supposed to be awarded a maximum of three times, but Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Chairman Leonid Brezhnev each received a fourth award. Zhukov’s fourth medal was awarded as a 60th birthday present on December 1, 1956 (his first three were given under proper circumstances in 1940, 1944, and 1945). This eroded the award’s prestige, as it was supposed to be awarded for immediate heroism rather than any sort of anniversary. But Brezhnev did far worse, as all four of his awards were self-granted birthday presents in 1966, 1976, 1978, and 1981. Especially toward the end of his rule, he developed a cult of personality, and granted many undeserved awards to himself.[12] Such practices were halted by a 1988 decision by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but the damage to the award had long been done.

Institutional Decay

Both the American impeachment process and the Hero of the Soviet Union award were designed to be used sparingly in response to great deeds of evil and good, respectively. In theory, an impeached American official should be reasonably suspected of having committed “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,”[13] while a Hero of the Soviet Union should have performed some great accomplishment that made one a model citizen of Russia. But like any institution of man, their original purposes have been lost over time, as successive generations reinterpreted them and later rulers repurposed them for their own ends. The decay of such high honors and condemnations as these denotes not the end of an age, but the beginning of the end. This occurs as a by-product of larger cultural and historical forces of civilizational decline, shaped in part by elite misleadership. The Hero of the Soviet Union had lost a significant amount of prestige by the 1970s, but the Soviet Union did not collapse until 1991. The impeachment process in the United States Constitution was devalued in 2019, but the Constitution, the republic, and the office of the Presidency will linger on a while longer.

A Prophecy

I offer little explicit prognostication in my writing, and this is by design. The mission of Zeroth Position is to explore a synthesis of libertarian and reactionary thought in order to better understand where we are as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a species; where we should go; and how to travel the path between. Prophesying future events in detail is beyond the strict scope of this mission. Whereas a broader view of this mission would allow for such predictions, there appears to be a clear pattern that may be of use in other situations, and an important test of a theory is its ability to make predictions, I shall make an exception in this case.

On the trajectory set by the partisan and relatively frivolous impeachment of Trump, the impeachment process will become the next Hero of the Soviet Union, a once-important stately affair later reduced to a political spectacle and object of well-deserved ridicule. Future Presidents of the United States are more likely to face impeachment as a political ploy rather than as an appropriate response to official misconduct. Whether this will apply equally to both major parties remains to be seen and is largely dependent upon whether Trump’s willingness to fight back against Democrats and the broader Cathedral apparatus is an aberration, the new normal for Republicans, or something in between.

Barring a currently unthinkable level of defection or the revelation of new evidence, Trump will not be removed from office. Neither this nor a shellacking at the polls in 2020 is likely to convince the most radical Democrats that impeaching Trump again is a bad idea, and he could be the first President to suffer multiple impeachments. This is likely to fail as well, but unless this makes Democrats too unpopular, the normal pattern in recent decades of the two major parties taking eight-year turns in the White House should continue. At some point, one of these nakedly partisan impeachments will succeed in removing a President for the first time. If the Electoral College is replaced by a national popular vote by that time, then it may be because the duopoly resists having a third-party president. Otherwise, it will be much like the Trump impeachment, but with significant intraparty opposition. This will only embolden Congress and strain the social fabric to the ripping point.

The United States of America is unique in world-historical terms for having the power and size of an empire coupled with a distinctly non-imperial governance structure. Regression to the mean would involve either a dissolution of the empire or the implementation of an imperial governance structure. While the Hero of the Soviet Union was a state honor that bore no more influence over governance than does the American Medal of Honor, the denigration of the impeachment process provides a plausible mechanism for how the Republic will end. The ultimate long-term prediction to make at this point is that should America survive intact over the next few decades, some President will eventually get convicted by the Senate under blatantly partisan conditions that may or may not have anything to do with “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” This man will actually be everything that the current leftist Resistance movement falsely believes Donald Trump to be. He will see an opportunity to seize imperial power and take it, appealing to the masses who supported him in the previous election, as well as the armed forces, to march on Washington and install him as emperor so that he may restore order. Then we have the American Caesar and the end of the republic as the result of a textbook Jouvenelian power play, with the high President-cum-Emperor and the low masses against the middle Congress. Helicopter rides may or may not ensue.

What will become of the impeachment process in this scenario is unclear, but the ultimate fate of the Roman Senate offers a possible clue. They continued to meet throughout the Roman Empire (and for more than a century after the fall of the Western part[14,15]), even after all true power was in the hands of the Emperor.[16] Impeachment may still exist in a future American Empire, and the Congress may still meet and hold some powers, but the Emperor would be above them unless and until a weak leader should come along and suffer a fate similar to that of King Charles I of England, which could take centuries. Until then, the Emperors, backed by the might of the U.S. military, would successfully denounce Congress with much the same words that Charles opened his unsuccessful defense before the Rump Parliament of the New Model Army in 1649:

“Having already made my protestations, not only against the illegality of this pretended Court, but also, that no earthly power can justly call me (who am your King) in question as a delinquent, I would not any more open my mouth upon this occasion…”

Alternatively, the procedure of impeachment may be abolished, for its continued practice would allow Congress to subvert the Emperor by removing his subordinates from their offices against his will. Either way, or perhaps another way, though the end of the United States as we know it is still a ways ahead, the beginning of the end is at hand.

References

  1. Fandos, Nicholas; Shear, Michael D. (2019, Dec. 18). “Trump Impeached for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress”. New York Times.
  2. Haberkorn, Jennifer; Wire, Sarah D.; Megerian, Chris; O’Toole, Molly (2019, Dec. 18). “U.S. House impeaches President Trump”. Los Angeles Times.
  3. Daly, Matthew (2019, Dec. 18). “3 Lawmakers Miss Historic Impeachment Votes”. Associated Press.
  4. U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (2019, Dec. 3). “Report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pursuant to H. Res. 660 in Consultation with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs” (PDF).
  5. Samuels, Robert (2016, Dec. 17). “In last-shot bid, thousands urge electoral college to block Trump at Monday vote”. Washington Post.
  6. Prokop, Andrew (2017, Dec. 1). “What the evidence shows about potential Trump-Russia collusion”. Vox.
  7. Singman, Brooke (2017, Jun. 7). “Reps. Green and Sherman announce plan to file articles of impeachment”. Fox News.
  8. Woodward, Bob; Bernstein, Carl (2005) [1976]. The Final Days (Paperback ed.). New York, New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 413–7.
  9. Wallison, Peter J. (2019, Oct. 30). “Factually Weak Impeachment Will Alter the Nature of Our Government”. RealClearPolitics.
  10. Prokhorov, Aleksandr Mikhaĭlovich (1982). Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. 6. New York: Macmillan. p. 594.
  11. “Resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union of May 5, 1934” (in Russian).
  12. Bacon, Edwin; Sandle, Mark (2002). Brezhnev Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 8–9.
  13. United States Constitution, Article II, Section 4.
  14. Levillain, Philippe (2002). The Papacy: Gaius-Proxies. Psychology Press. p. 1047.
  15. Richards, Jeffrey (1979). The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–752. Routledge. p. 246.
  16. Abbott, Frank Frost (1901). A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions. Elibron Classics. p. 385.

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