Gift is the German word for poison and there are times I am reminded of this fact.
Context matters. Without it we cannot understand each other or what is happening around us. Illocutionary is a word that means the thing a speaker does in saying something, not just the words themselves or their after-effects, but the act performed by saying the thing is the ordering, promising, warning, requesting, or threatening that is implied by context.
Conservatism cannot exist without context. Neither can appeals to liberal norms. Conservatism is, by definition, the philosophy of preserving what works based on historical experience, and you cannot conserve what you do not remember or understand. Liberal norms depend on shared constitutional principles built over centuries. Remove the context, meaning the history, the precedents, and the reasons why certain procedures and traditions matter, and you end up in a situation where critical political principles need defending more than ever, but the would-be defenders are disarmed because they too lack the context to understand why the principles matter. The defenders sound like scolds, and many Americans don’t think these scolds care about them anyway. So why should anyone care?
This is why the loss of context matters so desperately for both true conservatives and Democrats. They are making arguments in a country where context has collapsed, and against the policies of individuals who do not care about context—only about power and getting more for themselves. They do not care about the future or the past, except to erase it so that no one will remember what a proper functioning government looks like and how it worked.
Every civilization is built by stages. One plank, one level at a time. This evolution is sometimes natural and subtle and other times is deliberate and jolting. The American Revolution is an example of the jolting shock to the system that was deliberated openly until the Founding Fathers concluded they no longer had a place in the British Empire. An alternative example is the evolution of sentimentalism giving rise to more frequent love-matches, that is, marriages where a woman could expect better treatment from her husband because he actually loved her; that was a more subtle evolution in America having a lot to do with the openness to social advancement and less class rigidity caused by colonizing land not already controlled by the old nobility. Both had massive impacts on how American civilization developed and became more attractive to Europeans than their home countries.
But these developments, even when slow and subtle, had causes and reasons: context. Americans have lost the context on so many issues they do not recognize why something is wrong and is a risk to themselves and their freedoms. People genuinely do not know why particular traditions, behaviors, procedures and processes matter. Part of the problem is education, part of the problem is immigration, and part of the problem is comfort. It matters that people have lost their collective or tribal memory and that others have not been taught the stories of their new country.
Money is Power. The English learned this painful lesson over centuries, and America is a direct, and consequential offshoot of England. The Founders knew their English history. In the late 17th century England began to shift away from the continental Europeans regarding the relationship between freedom and military power. In England, if the king went to war, he needed to raise taxes which required the approval of Parliament. This relationship was so clear and bound together in how Englishmen understood themselves that the more the king went to war the more powerful Parliament became because it controlled the money needed to fight the war and could ask for more privileges from the king. Rights and privileges came from the monarch, even Parliament was a creation of the Crown, but once privileges were granted they could not be unilaterally revoked. It was a constant negotiation, and it worked well.
But without the context, Americans will not understand that a president who receives gifts and donations to do the business of government is subverting the power of the people over the government. The dependence on taxpayer money equals citizens’ control over the government. Here is how deep the context collapse has gone. I saw a post by a former state legislator who could not understand why people were upset by the East Wing demolition and the claim that it would be paid for by donations from corporations, “why can’t you accept a gift” he said. He honestly did not understand the difference between a president destroying government property - the People’s property - without the permission of Congress, paying for it with private funds, and a president doing so with taxpayer money requisitioned by the people’s representatives in Congress. The context of power, money and permission was lost on him.
As readers know I like to deal with things directly. The claim is that people should not complain about the demolition because the proposed ballroom will be “free” and other renovations were paid for by the taxpayer, and being paid for by the taxpayer is worse because you have to pay for it.
That is the ethic proposed by the MAGA demolition team: if it is free and the people are not paying for it the people should not care. And that is all wrong. Why?
Government is not business. Government does not exist to make a profit, it exists to provide law, order, and protection, and to steward community resources toward community ends, and this requires that the community be in charge. No taxation without representation is the tool to keep government under control because if the government cannot spend money or take money without permission then the ones you get permission from —the People— are in control. Anything that gets around that deliberately is stealing power from the people. Governments have tried this before, and they called it benevolence 400 years before George Orwell could call it doublespeak.
A benevolence tax was a sum of money that English kings, from Edward IV to James I, extorted from their subjects without the consent of Parliament. It was disguised as a gift. Now the idea before was that the gifts were — forced — loans and so the king would promise to “repay” the money. Not really though, and most ended up just holding a promise which of course they could not collect against the king. The way it worked was the king would come up with a “need” then he either sent a letter of request to the richest men in the kingdom or sent government officials to different localities with marketing tools, I mean arguments, to justify the loan. The kingdom is in danger, please do this instead of being called up to serve in the war, etc, etc.
Then Edward IV stopped pretending there was going to be any repayment, and the word benevolence was first used in 1473 to describe an extorted gift. After all, cannot the king accept a gift? You do not payback a gift. But the goal was to get around asking Parliament’s permission for new taxes. Why would people agree to gift extortion? This gets to the nature of unchecked power and what the late philosopher John Searle called indirect speech acts.1 Something like “nice shop you have there, shame if something happened to it.” The words do not mention any threat, but you know it is a threat because of the context and probably the tone. That is the illocutionary effect.
First, people paid benevolence taxes to English kings because the monarchy had great power, and people felt they had to do what the king asked to avoid getting in trouble. Rich nobles and wealthy people also felt pressure to show loyalty to the king, worried that if they refused to pay, they might lose the king’s support or their important position in society. Additionally, people were afraid of what might happen if they did not pay, especially if they were the sort of rich people who were used to not abiding by the rules, meaning if the king decided to take a closer look at their affairs he might find justifications to punish them with fines, throw them in jail, or take revenge in other ways. Finally, some people paid because they hoped the king would reward them later. They saw it as an investment, thinking that if they showed loyalty now, the king might give them special treatment or favors in the future.
Eventually the practice of extorted benevolence gifts went away in the 1620s due to resistance from Parliament and the people. The People understood if it could be done to the wealthy, it could be done to them, and Parliament realized that they had to draw a line or become irrelevant. But without this context, it is hard to understand why a gift might really be poison for a republic. Conservatives and Democrats need to work together to reclaim the context.
In fact, the construction of a new east wing is not "free" to the American taxpayers because the donations are tax deductible to those making the donations. The cost to the taxpayers is the difference between what the donors would have paid in taxes vs. what the donors actually paid in taxes after taking their "east wing gift donation". And, since the US is continually running a deficit, the deficit goes up by the amount of taxes not paid by the donors. To add insult to injury, the taxpayers are on the hook for paying interest probably in perpetuity on that increase to the federal debt. The insult here is not only did the taxpayers (through Congress and advisory boards) have no inputs on the project, they are still on the hook for paying for a portion of it regardless of what the politicians say.