How to fix Iraq: meditations on the meaning of "party"

I did not intend on writing again so soon, but I've been seized with a burst of inspiration. I figure that, given the fact of my departure to New York tomorrow, it's best to leave a last will and testament for after I'm stricken down a third time by another undue speeding ticket. Speaking of which, the first trial is in five days. If I'm found guilty then we can at least be assured of a very turbulent 2022. History hasn't ended, folks. 

In any event, my attention has once again been pulled back to Iraq, after reading this rather short but clarifying piece. I am not one to hold any policy analyst from the American Enterprise Institute in great regard, but the thesis of Mr. Rubin's article was compelling in its recognition (perhaps unconscious) of the root of the Arab political dysfunction in the early 21st century. He warns of a return to the streets of the Iraqi public after the protest movement of late 2019 toppled Prime Minister Mahdi and the citizenry's disdain for the network of carefully balanced interests that constitute Iraq's ruling political clique today. He sees in Mustafa al-Kadhimi's present inability to rein in the proliferating venal offices of the civil service, his intimidation by the Popular Mobilization Force's state-paramilitary machinery, the Sadrist bloc's rise to power, and Iraq's dependence on its oil-sector as a toxic brew of conditions which, given a small spark, will combust into an anti-political explosion. In an earlier article, written just as the United States was prepared to dissolve its Provisional Authority, he points to the origins of Iraq's kleptocratic clique as rooted in the invading Coalition's failure to establish a truly representative electoral system. Foolishly, the PA chose to construct a new electoral system for Iraq based on party-slates and not single member constituencies. As such, key minority demographics, such as the Shiite Turkmen of Tal Afar and the party-skeptical Christians, were left to choose between no representation at all or voting with parties that had little regard for their interests (which is functionally the same thing anyway). Aspiring politicians were left to compete for the patronage of party functionaries who held control of the slates, the consequence of course being that, as Iraq descended further into a sectarian-tinged insurgency and political polarization, political candidates were forced to traffic in ever more inflammatory and identity-oriented language. This electoral system was reformed to a district-based electoral method after the 2019 protests, closer to what we have in the United States, but factional interests had entrenched themselves so deeply in the system that what we are still left with today is an Iraq whose unwieldy politics is suspended on a teetering seesaw. Large party blocs vie for power, struggle over the office of prime minister, sometimes attempt to kill each other in the streets (Kadhimi was nearly assassinated in a drone strike on November 7th, undoubtedly the work of the Fatah bloc), and all the while the state itself continues to expand its bureaucracy without a corresponding improvement in public services. 

All of this smacks very much not simply of dysfunction but also corruption, as well as that other d-word which sends chills down the spines of all those who fancy themselves enlightened and rational: "degeneracy". It is a political vocabulary not merely restricted to the dissident corners of the new right, but which is rooted in a long history of public discourse, thought and imagery. It is no coincidence that Mr. Rubin invokes Lebanon's long history of communal violence when discussing Iraq. The problem is fundamentally the same in both countries. The problem is one that has vexed man since the late 18th century - the problem of party. 

I have been accused in the past, when this issue has come up, of importing "western notions" into a region that is unsuitable for them. Particularly when suggesting that a transition to a partyless system, or the elevation of a trans-partisan "mono-party", would be adaptable to the particular circumstances of a country like Lebanon. To that I would simply point out that the very notion of a legitimate political opposition, and the norms that have allowed any political party anywhere in the world to flourish, first took root in the west. If anything, I am suggesting that a reversion back to what was once the standard for most of the Middle East's history would do much more to heal their strife than the current attempt to build a pluralist system out of fundamentally irreconcilable interests. The problem, of course, is that those interests are not interested in true representation at all. They have lost sight of their intended purpose and function, they have themselves created one of the starkest mass-elite divides in the world, with predictable results. 

The notion of a political party was just as alien to the Anglo-American world of the 18th century as the Middle East of the 18th century. It was not at all clear in the newly formed United States then, as it is not clear for the Middle East now, that any type of political opposition should be legitimated. George Washington, that emblem of freedom and democracy, is on record asserting that "meetings in opposition to the constituted authorities" are improper and dangerous. Political clubs, parties, and all organized extra-constitutional structures were deemed a threat to republicanism itself. The institutions provided for by the Union's constitution were considered sufficient to deal with social and political discord, without the need to find recourse in parties. This was an attitude inherited from the British experience, where the wars of religion in the 17th century, with their extreme violence, scheming, and frequent attempts at usurpation, had left bitter memories of factional politics for all involved. Parties, simply put, were no better than factions of enterprising men who did not have the public good at heart and sought only to benefit themselves. For anyone observing Iraq or Lebanon (or Israel, Turkey, Italy, perhaps the entire world), this cannot be an unfamiliar sentiment. 

Of course, the American revolutionaries perceived degeneracy of a much different sort infecting Britain's parliamentary system, whose membership remained largely unaligned even as the British electorate and suffrage expanded. Pocket boroughs, shifting factions, hereditary dominance, as well as purchase and arrangement in parliament all contributed to the widespread view at the time that the sun was declining on Britain and its system, that everything worthy of being learned from it had already crossed the Atlantic and would be preserved in the New World, away from the corrupting tendencies of the Old. It would escape the terminal decline that appeared to be sinking Britain by embracing a republican form of government which would imbue virtue through its representative constitutional framework. And it would do all of this without the fractious influence of party which had torn apart the Anglo world. 

The first-party system, when it did emerge, did not come into being as an established and settled norm. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans looked askance at each other and attempted to absorb the other into their respective coalitions - in the hopes that doing so would eliminate party politics once and for all. This did in fact succeed, after the War of 1812 appeared to confirm the triumph of American virtue over British degeneracy, and the Federalists promptly collapsed. The Era of Good Feelings, as it is now known, was a period of unchallenged dominance for the Democratic-Republican party. The last uncontested presidential election was won in 1820 by the, not coincidentally, last of the Virginian dynasty of presidents: James Monroe. After appearing to clear the field of all opposition and securing nonpartisan rule, he had this to say about the future of the American experiment:

"Surely our government may go on and prosper without the existence of parties. I have always considered their existence as the curse of the country, of which we had sufficient proof, more especially, in the late war...We have no distinct orders. No allurement has been offered to the federalists to calm them down into a state of tranquility. None of them have been appointed to high office, and very few to the lowest...Parties have now cooled down, or rather have disappeared from this great theatre, and we are about to make the experiment whether there is sufficient virtue in the people to support our free republican system of governance."  

Simply put: a free system of governance does not depend on the existence of political parties for its survival. Political opposition is not a necessary condition for the proper and judicious functioning of representative government. Instead, it is civic participation, oriented to the commonweal in opposition to private interest, that secures the foundation of liberty. 

So there you have it. Iraq is not an insuperable problem. Mr. Rubin is probably quite right in supposing that the Iraqi people will again attempt to put pressure on their politicians. The 2021 electoral success and composition of the Sadrist bloc is one indication of the shape of things to come. Much like the Five Star Movement's populist alliance with Lega Nord after the 2018 Italian elections, Sadr's movement has shown itself ideologically flexible enough to align itself with parties that would appear anathema to its value system under any traditional analysis. In 2018, the alliance of its religious populist-nationalism with the Iraqi Communist Party's Marxism proved successful. It has allied itself with smaller catch-all parties that utilize the technocratic language of "reform" and "progress". The people's attachment to interest group politics has weakened as the elite-mass divide has grown stronger. Growing numbers of Sunnis, for instance, no longer see the Iraqi Islamic Party as representing their interests. And why should they? Their lives have not changed. It has only gotten worse. If Muqtada al-Sadr has his way, it is inevitable that his party will transform into the kind of techno-populist party that is emerging across the world. A populist and independent Iraq with a single mono-party, free of foreign influence, ruled by the Shiite Islamist equivalent of Lord Bolingbroke's patriot-king, answerable to the people, committed to reining in all faction and slashing the perverse incentive structure of the bureaucracy, will go far in halting the country's degeneration into perpetual internecine bloodshed.

If all of this sounds ridiculous, I invite the reader to consider the past 18 years of Iraqi history and to consider whether that is an acceptable price to pay for an electoral instantiation of pluralism that is, if nothing else, the true western artifice.

Frisson and bloom

There are some lines that, after all this time, still ring in my head. Whenever I sit down to write one of these monologues, the thoughts I've amassed in my mind dissipate into nothing. Whatever cognitive artillery I was able to bring to the dialectic before has been spent on staving off a complete collapse in academic credibility, and now that it is over I am left with nothing but a hollow cavern in my head. I am merely typing now in the hope, however vain, that I can begin to reconstruct some semblance of a worldview not squelched by an obstreperous mind. 

In that vein, it would only be appropriate, given the season and approaching holidays, to relate the story of the Christmas reckoning as it is told in Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's an understated and beautiful novel, fictionalizing the short life of Friedrich von Hardenburg, or as the world now knows him, Novalis. A romantic philosopher-poet (that strange admixture which in all honesty should be mutually exclusionary, given the hegemonic influence that classical poetry and philosophy held over 18th-century Germany and the ancient disciplinary divides such a transmission ought to have transplanted) bewitched by a singular and passionate moment of ardor at the sight of twelve year old Sophie von Kühn. It is a love that appears to all interested parties to be intensely irrational and unsuitable. The Hardenburgs were a family that aspired to the noble pretenses common of the aristocracy, their patriarch a rigid man of faith who expected his son to follow him in managing the hereditary salt mines and who found his poetic mind deeply alienating. At their residence in the hometown of Weissenfels an old custom still holds sway, even in the midst of revolutionary upheaval in France and a loosening of old mores elsewhere. It is the Christmas reckoning - an annual penitentiary rite in which the children of the family confess their sins, omitted or otherwise. It is a deeply puritan ritual, a moral self-assessment which could only stem from a mind given to apocalyptic anxieties about the human character. It is 1794 and Christmas Eve when the Freiherr returns home and the children await his entry with anxious anticipation. Friedrich expects that he will be compelled to confess his budding courtship. But instead of consummating the ritual, as he is wont to do, the Freiherr slumps into his seat and makes a confession of his own: 

"You expect me to consider your conduct for the past year, both the progress you have made and your backsliding. You expect me to question you about anything that has been concealed from me. You expect - indeed it would be your duty - to answer me truthfully. You expect these things, but you are mistaken. On this Christmas Eve, the Christmas Eve of the year 1794, I shall want no confessions, I shall make no interrogations. What is the reason for this? Well, in reality, while at Artern I received a letter from a very old friend, the former Prediger of the Brethren at Neudietendorf. It was a Christmas letter, reminding me that I was fifty-six years of age and could not, in the nature of things, expect more than another few years on this Earth. The Prediger instructed me for once not to reprove, but to remember only that this is a day of unspeakable joy, on which all men and women should be no more, and no less, than children. And therefore...I myself have become, during this sacred time, wholly a child." 

This is a novel given itself over to the concerns of the Romanticist sensibility, indeed, attempts to make sense of its beguiling premise through a destruction of the boundaries that separate subject from object, waking from dreaming, wisdom and stupidity, life and death. The revolutionary sentiments of the period crop up frequently. One of the youngest Hardenburgs, known as The Bernhard, speaks flippantly of the seismic shifts occurring in world and thought, of republics without property and death as nothing more than a condition. There is a feverish expectation that runs through the eager Hardenburgs, Friedrich chief among them, that the events in Paris herald the return to a new "golden age". But these divisions and conflicts obscure deeper generational movements of the sort that they themselves begin to feel as they age. Late in the novel, as some members of the family reminisce at the break of dawn in an old family estate, one of the Hardenburg brothers confesses a deep desire: "I should prefer us all to be children...then we should have a kingdom of our own." It is telling that it is The Bernhard who punctures his lofty phantasms, "That has not been my experience," he says dourly. Just as it should come as no surprise that it is only The Bernhard's whose pleasure at the Freiherr's shaken disposition is made known to us and who breaks out into song at the sight: "He is born, let us love him." 

One fault-line not named but which runs an electric course through the book is that between the old and the young. It is the last, and perhaps hardest, boundary that the subjectivist or romanticist has left to break. Novalis is only dimly aware of this. Perhaps he sees it when wandering through a misty graveyard and notes a man standing before a headstone, a man he can see is very much alive but whom he also significantly understands as dead. Or perhaps he glimpses it when he sees Sophie for the first time and finds that "a quarter of an hour decided him". Or perhaps it never happens. Novalis died young, after all. He was not even thirty when tuberculosis smothered him. Sophie was half his age when she passed under the strain of chronic illness and multiple surgeries.

But surely there is something to be learned from the reckoning on Christmas Eve. Something quite anathema to those other thoughts I've had ringing in my head. At a dinner party I was made to attend only recently, where we discussed Fukuyama's End of History over champagne like repulsive elitists, a colleague expressed her gratitude that we were all there, learning to make the world "a less scary place". And the entire time she was speaking I could think only of how much a scarier place I would like to make of the world. The feverish apocalypse breaks in the Freiherr's mind, if only for a moment. It has yet to break from mine. And yet he has become what I wish to make of the world. Novalis quizzes those in his circle about the start of an unfinished story he has written about the eponymous blue flower, desperate to discern some meaning in his own symbolism and yet finds none. Perhaps it is a distant object of yearning like Gatsby's green light or fixed with meaning like the Little Prince's rose. Perhaps it is all of them, rose, flower, light. Novalis could hardly understand Sophie, could not "hear her question". That desire to reach something unreachable, to approach the infinite, propels him to elevate her into Wisdom and Philosophy. But what good is philosophy? Novalis's brother Erasmus reacts with surprise and dismay to discover the mature blossoming of a philosophical disposition in both himself and a worldly family friend, Karoline Just, and to discover that they are both twenty two years young. Time wasted is time that will hold us to account, in the end. 

These raise troubling questions, questions about what it really means to have "matured", about whether and when anyone really grows old and how such a thing might happen. Erasmus looks at Sophie and sees "a greedy infant", but Friedrich sees a gateway to another world. These are questions I cannot answer yet, but it would only be right, a kind of roundabout justice, if the ends I desire precipitate a reprieve from the repression I'd like to see imposed. But I would first hope that I can see the joy in this coming holiday. If the "golden age" is in fact a world without reprove, if to truly be a child again is to establish a kingdom without judgment and penance, then I should like to see that with my own eyes, to see it in myself most of all through the reflection of mirrors and persons and time. I have a sneaking sensation that, just as an early death snatched the blue flower from Friedrich von Hardenburg's tentative grasp, I will live only long enough to see that born again dream slip away.