What is decadence? In popular usage, it is synonymous with “excess,” especially of a sensual or appetitive nature. I am not sure what it means that we encounter the word most often these days in connection highly caloric chocolate confections. Perhaps such linguistic degradation, in which serious things are reformulated in an atmosphere of ironic depreciation, is one sign we live in a decadent age. In any case, at its core I believe that decadence has less to do with excessive consumption or sensuality than with ontological attenuation.
What does that pretentious mouthful mean? It means that decadence is essentially about the hollowing out of vital institutions, not their surrender to gluttony, lust and profligacy. In The Present Age, Kierkegaard talks about a decadent age that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” Once upon a time in America, the prospect of impeachment was an awesome talisman — half threat, half admonition — that everyone took seriously.
Richard Nixon was almost impeached over Watergate but resigned in order to avoid what surely would have been his conviction and removal from office.
At some point between the Nixon administration and Donald Trump’s first administration, impeachment went to drama school. When the president of the United States can be impeached for making a phone call to a foreign leader, it is no longer a political expedient but a theatrical one. And when he can be impeached again after leaving office, we have entered the theater of the absurd.
What, then, should we make of the effort by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro “I-love-open-borders” Mayorkas? In my view he deserves to be impeached — if not, indeed, keelhauled — but what is happening in the House now is just performance art. The expedient of impeachment was weaponized by the Democrats, who regard every tort, if performed by a Republican as a capital offense. But with Mayorkas, Republicans are just going through the motions. Mayorkas, a man who is as malevolent as he is incompetent, deserves to be removed from office.
But the latest move by Republicans is more likely to underscore their general fecklessness than harm or impede Mayorkas. Even if the vote in the House to impeach Mayorkas succeeds, it has zero chance in the Senate, where the case will be tried. At the end of the day, the whole “let’s-pretend-to-impeach-Mayorkas” charade will serve chiefly to peel another layer of legitimacy off our central political institutions. There will still be a Congress whose members will meet and preen and pretend to govern. But their activities will be like an egg that is quietly emptied of its meat, leaving only its hollow shell behind. The whole fiasco will be yet another reminder that our society has been listing dangerously towards decadence. Just as we have only the mere semblance, merely the verbal trappings, of freedom today, so too we have but the semblance of democratic politics. A joke about the Soviet Union was “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” For Congress, it’s “The people pretend to support us, and we pretend to govern.”
Like all decadent phenomena, it’s unsustainable. But it’s anyone’s guess when it will finally collapse or what will replace it.
