An attendant courtier. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
After John Kerry stepped down from his role as Biden’s climate envoy, another Democratic stalwart was bound to take his place. Enter John Podesta, a consummate Washington insider and veteran of the last three Democratic presidencies. Already an overseer of the $370 billion in spending authorised by the Inflation Reduction Act, the strategist now finds himself at the very intersection of the administration’s foreign and domestic policies.
Yet for someone who’s held so much power for so long, it’s important to remember that Podesta has never been an elected official and has instead relied on his close proximity to the formal holders of authority to sustain his rank. Presidents have come and gone, but Podesta remains, always near the top, dispensing advice on both matters of policy and partisanship. He is, in other words, a modern-day courtier, and the courtier’s pursuit of power is an art that Podesta has all but perfected.
Podesta first emerged on the national scene in the Nineties, as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. He was instrumental in realising that administration’s “Third Way” project, the central tenet of which was the neoliberal faith in deregulated markets and trade integration with rising industrial powers like China, who took the lion’s share of subsequent world manufacturing growth. Today, he plays a comparable role in executing the President’s economically nationalist “Bidenomics” agenda — the dialectical opposite of neoliberalism. He is, in effect, reversing the liberalising thrust of the Clinton years and positioning the US to compete once again with strategic rivals (like, say, China). It is almost a tacit admission that Podesta helped to create a series of problems in one administration, and has returned to fix them in another.
This seemingly breathless inversion, on the part of Podesta and his party, raises several questions. Is it the result of ruthless political opportunism, or an agile and creative pragmatism — or both? And what does it all say about America’s liberal ruling class, in particular the privileged caste of courtiers within it? The answers, I suspect, may lie in philosopher John Ralston Saul’s notion of the “rational courtier”, which he employed, in his 1992 magnum opus Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, to examine the breed of political technocrats who arose in the post-war era and who have since come to enjoy total hegemony over most institutions.
Written at the dawn of the globalised era, Voltaire’s Bastards was a prophetic warning about the excesses not just of the neoliberal economic regime but of the underlying mode of disembodied, instrumental reason that its apparatchiks practised. The result of this marriage of cold reason and raw power was a new incarnation of an old archetype, one who fused the clandestine, self-serving intrigues of an aristocrat at Versailles with all the expertise of a Harvard MBA (or, in Podesta’s case, a Georgetown JD). As Saul wrote: “The modern technocrat and the royal courtier are virtually indistinguishable… Taken together, they form a group, a class, a type, linked by a particular sort of intelligence involving their central talents as systems men… who create and work principally within and through the system of which they are emanations.”
Throughout the past century, such rational courtiers were present in both parties: Saul cites Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker as examples. They were already far cry from Baldassare Castiglione’s Renaissance ideal, laid out in the Book of the Courtier: a versatile humanist statesman who drew on a broad range of virtues to provide wise counsel and point his prince toward justice. Instead, these figures submerged that ideal “beneath the growing need to prove everything by means of what were coming to be known as facts”, drawing exclusively on the “innate mechanical and logical talents which link our new men of power together”. This was the Book of the Courtier, but authored by Sir Humphrey Appleby.
In this view, loyalty to particular persons, causes or ideologies becomes anachronistic. The courtier can alter his professed allegiances as casually as he changes neckties since his energies are really dedicated to preserving systems and his place within it, a field of rational administration that exists aloof from the plane of politics. Understood this way, Podesta’s seamless shift from one paradigm to another makes sense. Just as the rational courtiers survived (and thrived) in the transition from post-war Keynesianism to neoliberalism, so too will they find niches for themselves in the move toward a new form of economic nationalism. As any rational courtier can say: political movements rise and fall; only power is constant — and reason is the currency of that power.
A big difference today is that, thanks to a process of polarisation along the lines of class and credentials, the Democrats have become the new home of this class. And in very many ways, Podesta and his party’s flexibility on political economy is a positive development. It shows that the courtiers are responsive to changing times and that they might even be as rational as they claim. But as Saul warned in Voltaire’s Bastards, the blind exercise of reason, used as both a means and an end, always carries externalities. Beneath the courtiers’ impressive veneer of technical excellence lies a callous indifference to the social and human dimensions of any great enterprise. Looking closely at Podesta’s trajectory from free trader to neomercantilist can confirm as much.
The trend of financialisation, by which Wall Street would be unshackled from Depression-era regulations, reached its climax with the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. A White House memo dated from 1995 showed Podesta to be one of the more eager proponents, writing: “The argument for reform is that the separation between banking and other financial services… is out of date in a world where banks, securities firms and insurance companies offer similar products and where firms outside the US do not face such restrictions.”
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