We live in an age and society of the “mirror before the mirror,” to borrow a phrase from filmmaker Adam Simon. Everyday life and political life have been complicated and duplicated in dizzying ways by the maturation and multiplication of the mass and social media. Even when we can tell the difference between that which is a simulacrum, a screened artificiality, and that which is the natural or the real, we soon enough realize that images and media have interwoven themselves with, grafted themselves onto, the whole of our lives. The new media are imitations of life, but they are more and more the substance of our lives, saturating it and consuming it.

With good reason then does Simon describe his montage where clips from horror films are juxtaposed with contemporary images from the TV news. Such is the wilderness of mirrors in which we live. With even better reason Simon proceeds to reflect on the cinematic features of our modern political life, which are too extensive to be listed, but include such venial matters as political office having become a mere audition for a more lucrative role as a contributor to one of the cable news networks, and such ominous matters as the federal government and its intelligence services’ attempts to manipulate the flow and content of social media.

As Simon’s observations suggest, we may be tempted to conclude that the cinematic saturation of contemporary politics is wholly an aberration, wholly a feature of a horrific new age where Hollywood and Silicon Valley come to dominate our perceptions of the world and our interior lives. And indeed, ours may be such a horrible new age and this domination almost certainly has done great damage to our society and threatens to do more.

But Simon’s concern lies not so much with the danger of the present as aberration as it does with what the mirrored, media-saturated, quality of the present age reveals about political life in general. Politics is neither upstream nor downstream from culture, he observes, because culture is the stream, and politics, I would add, is simply a part of its form. We may justly claim that law shapes culture and also that culture shapes law because the two constitute dimensions, one narrower, one broader, of a single whole. Following from this, forms normally associated with the stuff of culture—rhetoric and drama, as Simon names them—also are part of and formative of our politics. Simon, therefore, speaks of the dramatic “core” of our political and social life.

The crucial turn in Simon’s argument is to offer us two alternative dramatic scripts. All political life is an agon, but we may choose by our wills whether it shall be a melodramatic or a tragic one. The melodrama of political life is a contest, a war of good against evil, where the establishment of justice requires the vanquishing of the wicked. Tragic politics entails the necessary choice between competing goods and the effort, in Simon’s telling, to defy fate by finding a modus vivendi that deliberates and compromises between those goods, rather than condemning one in the name of the other.

The fundamental claim about the dramatic character of politics sounds right to me, while his subdivision of that dramatic character into the melodramatic and the tragic seems significantly less so. Both my agreement and my dissent are rooted in two reflections Edmund Burke made in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which was, of course, for Burke the dawn of a new age, the modern age of ideological warfare, an age that summoned him to recall and defend the great insights of the classical and longstanding principles of politics. I want to reflect on Burke’s observations by way of endorsement and critique of Simon’s argument.

In the celebrated passages of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he recalls the noble elegance of the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, he is led to a reflection on the nature of politics properly understood. Political institutions must be “embodied” in persons. By this of course Burke means most literally the monarchy itself. But the embodiment principle extends beyond the personhood of the rulers. Embodiment refers to the forms of political life, the concrete, representative features of it that give our life together shape. Such forms “create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” Affections combine with manners in the service of the law. Burke concludes,

The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic [Horace], for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states. Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Political life, moral life, and life as a whole, we may extrapolate, is of necessity aesthetic. Politics at the least has an essential aesthetic dimension and it is even plausible to propose that politics is aesthetics. The activity of politics is the shaping and embodying of the country’s institutions so that they will take on a beautiful form, a form worthy of our love and obedience.

Burke is here giving expression to a classical understanding of political life and reality more generally. In that understanding, beauty is a property of being and so—along with unity, truth, and goodness—is one of the qualities by which being, the real per se, shares itself. But it is not just one among equals. Beauty as a property of being is that aspect of reality that first awakens us to the real and which also is the final justification of the real. We love the truth because the truth is wondrous in beauty; we want to achieve our good because it is beautifully noble to be good and to do good; we perceive reality primarily in terms of the form and splendor, the beauty of existent form, it radiates, however much that radiance may be attributed to truth and goodness as well. If this is so, then there is no escaping from aesthetics in any aspect of reality because reality itself is beautiful; it would be impossible for politics to lack its own aesthetic dimension.

Our age tends to assume the separation of the beauty of aesthetics from the beauty of truth, but Burke does his best to minimize or even overcome that separation. And rightly so. We should be envisioning our individual lives, as well as our lives in common, in terms of their form and splendor. Politics is the art of asking and answering such questions as, “What is the beautiful way in which we ought to live together?”, “What shape shall our polity take?”, and “What form and order should law and state confer on the people it governs?” All these questions suggest what Simon calls the rhetorical and dramaturgical structures of politics and may be comprehended overall under the idea of politics, along with everything else, as a kind of aesthetic activity. For Aristotle indeed the practice of ethics and politics was completed by the poetic. Only in the dramatic and poetic image of the life-form of a character and the plot-form of human action can we see and therefore test the integrity of characters and acts. The beauty of such forms is the final criterion for questions of practical activity, individual or social, whose end is the good.

Simon presents two possible dramatic forms for political society: the melodramatic and the tragic, as I noted above. Both are agonistic and presume the permanence of divisions; but, whereas the melodramatic conceives one side in political divisions as an evil to be destroyed, the tragic views political divisions as founded in competing goods that have to be managed by compromise.

Let us examine his starting premise, which is not so much considered as simply assumed. Simon writes that contemporary society tends to view things through the “melodramatic lens” and even ramp

the stakes of the conflict up to be about the existence and nature of the universe, the world, the nation, ourselves, our families, and our so-called “way of life.” As if, in an explicitly pluralistic society, there could possibly be one way of life.

This passage should give us pause. What is the basis for saying that American society is “explicitly pluralistic”? And, further, what is the meaning of pluralism?

The most ready answer to the first question would seem to be James Madison’s in Federalist 10. There we find that division, faction, and sect are existent realities to be suffered and to be contended with; they are not principles constitutive of the polity itself or principles specifically to be nurtured and protected by republican government. Madison along with most modern political thinkers going back to Mandeville, Locke, Hobbes, and even Machiavelli, start from the assumption that human beings are unsociable in nature and given to a diversity of private desires. The aim of politics is to play the contrary and competing forces off one another so that, in pursuing their private vices, a public virtue, order, and unity may be achieved. Pluralism is the tragedy to be overcome by good politics. The intended result is an artificial unity that political order tricks into being. In this sense, there is indeed one way of life at which we should all aim. The weakness of modern political thought is that it conceives of unity and order as something beautiful to be brought about by ugly means. It attempts to bypass the difficult work of forming good citizens as parts of a natural order, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

Ancient political theory is more insightful on pluralism and the aesthetics of politics. Aristotle most famously shows the naturalness of political life: by nature, the individual is born into the family; by nature, families congregate together; and by nature, when a sufficient number of families are gathered, the self-sufficient political society of the state comes into being. This is a natural process ordered to the good of all who enter into life together. The process of formation and the self-sufficient form created both have their proper beauty. A principle of pluralism that simply presumed different ways of life coexisting in a single place would per se exclude the kind of shared, good-oriented life that leads to and is the purpose of political society. It is because a people share one way of life that it can be called a people in the first place, and it is the end of sustaining and refining that way that the practice of politics, of its essence, serves.

Simon proposes a tragic approach to politics as an answer to the melodramatic one, which is dysfunctional. He observes, for instance,

Any attempt to limit abortion access is framed as a total assault on women, any attempt to protect such access is framed as a nearly demonic desire to kill innocents. Any attempt to limit access to military style weapons is framed as a prelude to the arrival of black helicopters and world government, and any argument which suggests that the founders may have had a good reason for not allowing the state a total monopoly on arms is framed as total capitulation to a conspiracy of the NRA and gun manufacturers.

Simon’s concern—rightly—is that the “melodramatic lens” through which many of us view politics is divisive, Manichean, and futile. He hopes this may be overcome by the embrace of a “tragic” vision that leads a pluralistic society to cooperate in a spirit of compromise. We have already seen that Simon’s aesthetic vision of politics has antecedents in Burke and Aristotle’s aesthetical politics and that these figures reject pluralism, in the sense Simon uses the word, as a good to be cultivated in political life.

Simon’s concern with the violent passions of the present age also finds an antecedent in Burke. In the same pages where Burke defends the ancient vision of political life as embodied in beautiful institutions, he laments that this vision is even now being overthrown by the French Jacobins whose “rationalistic” revolutionary program will tear down beauty and order at once. He writes,

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understanding, and which is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.

And just a few lines on, he continues,

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert antient institutions, has destroyed antient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it . . . which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are obey it.

The post-revolutionary age, prophecies Burke, will be an age without politics as the ancients understood it. It will not be the age of natural orders convening together with difficulty for the sake of the common good, the shared life that is every individual human being’s natural end and happiness. These things rather will be superseded by a new species of politics, founded not on a shared way of life, but exclusively on the power of the state to coerce people into a cowering kind of unity. The modern citizen will have nothing in common with his fellow besides his terror of civil power.

Burke claimed this had come to pass more than two hundred years ago. The French Revolutionaries inaugurated an age where war could be fought, power could be seized, in the name of overthrowing old ideas and contriving new ones. Politics ceased to be aesthetics—or tried to, at any rate—and became ideology.

In the age of ideology, what constitutes a human being, who counts as human, and what people are for, are all brought into active, radical, and continuous dispute. Nearly all Americans believe, for instance, that the individual life is ordered to some kind of transcendence but there the agreement ends. Some hold it is a transcendence of the reason’s ascent to the knowledge of truth found in God, others the triumph by reason and force of will over nature and its supposed givens, while still others hold it is the mere twitch of the nerves of desire that leads us beyond ourselves. Are we subjects of God, masters and possessors of nature, or expressive individualists living only to feel like our “authentic” selves? Are we ordered to the common life of knowledge, to a mere convenience of enlightened material self-interest, or to a casual association as we set off on the quest to remake ourselves after the image of often wild and capricious feelings?

These are fundamental questions. A mere switching of lenses from the melodramatic to the tragic will not eliminate them or resolve them.

Simon concludes his argument with a reflection on Frank Capra. He suggests that the great filmmaker was an “individualist” while his screenwriter, Robert Riskin, was a “liberal”; the brilliant vision of political society that appears in Capra’s films was a result of their compromise. This could well be, I grant, but it is not the impression I have gained from the biographies of Capra’s life and work.

As I have always heard the tale, Capra had a great patriotic vision of his country, but he also recognized that the country suffered from a Protestant individualism and “pluralism” that seemed impoverished in comparison with his own Italian Catholic heritage with its corporate and ecclesial spirit. In his films, we see Protestant America fulfilling itself and improving itself by discovering that to have a “way of life” entails also having a life in common. What Capra’s characters discover, in other words, is that Madisonian America needs to reform itself by discovering the political vision of Burke and Aristotle—and, moreover, of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Catholic Social Teaching. They move from a tragic vision of competing interests to a genuine community united in its love of the highest good held in common. Instead of tragic or melodramatic politics, we need a Capraesque politics of comedy. Restoring such a vision seems almost hopeless now, but without it, we have not politics. We have rather, as Burke saw, a war of all against all suspended only under the threat of the state’s terror.