In a recent review of Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, I argued that the film belongs at the center of an LPE cinema canon. The film opens during the Tokugawa Shogunate with a poor rōnin (a samurai without a feudal lord) entering the lush estate of the Lyi clan. This clan is presented as the epitome of economic success and marital prestige. The rōnin, Tsugumo Hanshirō, asks to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) within the clan’s courtyard. The clan’s senior advisor, Saitō Kageyu, tries to deter Tsugumo by telling him the story of another rōnin, Chijiiwa Motome, who the clan forced to commit seppuku with a dull bamboo blade because they suspected him of seeking charity dishonorably.
During this period, poor rōnin had been allegedly appearing at wealthy houses, requesting permission to perform suicide, and then accepting a pay-off to leave. When Chijiiwa arrives and makes such a request, the clan discovers that he had previously pawned his two steel blades. Rather than provide Chijiiwa with assistance, or allow him to withdraw his request, the clan decides to make an example of him. The act of visualized cruelty is meant to send a message: that rising poverty amongst disenfranchised samurai becomes dishonorable as soon as a samurai makes an economic claim on the prosperous daimyos.
Of course, this opening is all setting the stage for one of cinema’s great reveals. That other rōnin, Chijiiwa, was really Tsugumo’s son-in-law. Here, the film takes on the aesthetics of a courtroom procedural, as the truth is slowly exposed. Chijiiwa did come to the clan seeking charity. But he had been pushed to the brink by economic devastation and a sickness that left his infant son at death’s door. Despite Saitō’s callous disregard for Chijiiwa, we come to learn that the rōnin only sought enough money to save the life of his infant son. We also learn that Tsugumo has come not to seek charity, but revenge. Before arriving, he had defeated the clan’s three best swordsmen in one-on-one combat, making a mockery of the clan’s claims to marital prowess. After the reveal, Tsugumo proceeds to cut a swath through the clan, before finally being shot down.
Throughout the film, a ceremonial suit of armor looms over the clan, initially representing the clan’s martial prowess and honor. Over time, however, the armor becomes a symbol of an exploitative political economy premised on lies about honor and masculine virtues. Eventually, after fighting through much of the clan, Tsugumo tears the armor from its pedestal before being killed. After his death, however, the clan survives by restoring its symbols, including the ceremonial suit of armor, and erasing any record of the challenge to its authority.
Kobayashi understood better than most that symbols and spectacles are tools that the powerful use to sustain exploitative modes of domination. He also understood that exposing hierarchy’s baseless mythology does not, by itself, defeat the institutions sustaining domination. This is an important lesson for the LPE movement to internalize. While LPE scholars have shown how law constructs and naturalizes economic domination, we need to take a similarly critical stance toward the symbols and practices that make hierarchy appear legitimate. Real reconstruction will require tearing down these cultural forms, as well as constructing a new visual language focused on a horizontal political morality. We need to build public forms of collective power that enable people to see themselves as participants in democratic life.
The Importance of Spectacle
In a series of posts, I have argued for a constitutional politics centered on legislative supremacy, rebuilding state authority, and democratic reconstruction. To succeed, however, these institutional commitments will require more than mere implementation—they must also obtain a public life, a tangible presence through sights and sounds that make them real and legible. A horizontal political morality must become something that people can recognize and practice. Otherwise, the left risks rebuilding state capacity while leaving the symbols of hierarchical domination in place.
To understand the importance of such symbols, Thurman Arnold’s The Symbols of Government, published in 1935, offers a starting point. Arnold understood that exposing a legitimating belief’s irrationality did little to diminish its power. The authority of courts, for instance, rested primarily on their symbolic association with impersonal justice, which could not be dislodged merely by exposing their flawed reasoning. Similarly, institutions are not legitimated based on their “rationality”: new administrative institutions could perform useful work and still struggle to obtain comparable public standing to courts. Vindicating the New Deal, for instance, depended on obtaining symbols of authority that Americans had constructed habits of faith around (e.g., quasi-judicial administrators that could play on Americans’ regard for common-law judging).
As Mark Fenster explains, Arnold wanted to understand and use the symbols that a conventional realist critique might simply debunk. Arnold intuited something that leftists would later rediscover as “spectacle.” (My sense of spectacle here is influenced by Hannah Arendt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Edward Green, and the voluminous literature on racialized spectacle.) That word can connote something superficial. But in law, a spectacle can organize physical acts, symbols, and institutions in a way that gives them a public, political meaning.
Consider, for instance, the most vexing issue facing the American state: the symbol of a unitary president. The unitary executive theory carries a powerful political image in its chain of authority running upward through the state to a President who supposedly embodies the volk. The Roberts Court’s conservative bloc is obsessed with this vision. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court treated the tribune-like presidency as the Constitution’s pathway to democratic accountability.
Similarly, it is no accident that we are living through a purge of Black officials from the military and civilian administrative state. Removing Black public servants is a spectacle of domination that ritualistically reinforces the imperial presidency. Pairing these spectacles with narratives equating Black public service with corruption, incompetence, and illegality is itself meant to paint the purge as restoration. The President becomes the leader of a newly restored natural order. The state unifies around him.
None of this is new. Woodrow Wilson revived the tradition of delivering the State of the Union to Congress—it had been discontinued for more than a century at that point—because he wanted to create a spectacle of the state enraptured by the President’s words. This ceremony puts the President at the center of national political life. The point is not that a single ceremony led to the unitary executive theory. Repeated performances can, however, legitimate power (or at least normalize it) long before a court vindicates it. They cultivate expectations about who acts and who responds. A left that dreams of its own commanding President must confront the visuals of domination baked into presidential administration.
In considering this possibility, I find Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind extremely helpful. Rana argues that Americans’ democratic imaginations have been confined by a constitutional order rooted in the preservation of hierarchy. That order is, in part, built on spectacles and symbols. And constitutional devotion, a devotion to those same spectacles and symbols, becomes a trap, as the document further constrains our ability to imagine alternatives.
Symbols of Democracy
But Rana’s argument also points us towards tools. He calls for movements to reclaim constitutional politics from judges and legal elites, connecting institutional transformation to the material concerns organizing people’s lives. Unions and other intermediate institutions matter because they build the power to make alternatives possible. A different constitutional future requires constituencies capable of bringing it about. Constitutional rupture would be disastrous until we build social formations that let Americans imagine better alternatives as plausible.
That work requires spectacle. The No Kings rallies connect opposition to Trump with a pedigreed rejection of royal domination. The word “King” and the visual grammar of the rallies allows for an elaborate historical metaphor that conjures themes of democracy and illegitimate hierarchy. More to the point, the visuals connect the entire enterprise to an American history that is powerful so long as we remain steeped in what Rana calls “creedal constitutionalism.” But the rejection of kingly domination leaves unanswered how We the People ought to govern together. We need new symbols and spectacles that communicate a horizontal morality over presidentialism and juristocracy. We need a new constitutional politics—an explicit political struggle over who may govern and on what terms—so that American can imagine democratic constitutional alternatives.
This is one reason I favor legislative supremacy, despite the fact, as M. Sandhu points out, that Congress has many democratic shortfalls. At present, Congress is the only real option on the table at the federal level that avoids the symbolic trappings of hierarchy—the priests of the sacred text or the tribune-like representative of the American volk. Even in the high tide of “unorthodox legislating,” Congress is controlled by actual coalitional political demands. Congress offers an institutional setting defined by a horizontal morality.
Moreover, legislative politics is shot through with opportunities for democratic spectacles. Imagine a congressional hearing in which workers confront an employer’s power. Their testimony shapes legislation. Their organizations help secure its passage and acquire a continuing role in its implementation. The public victory is understood as something those workers accomplished together. A familiar congressional spectacle makes concrete a transfer in power, a reversal in the dynamics of economic domination.
Agencies offer similar opportunities. Holding an agency hearing that allows citizens to make claims on the state has its own symbolic meaning. Agencies can create the stage for affected communities to make claims on public decision-making. Law can force officials to explain their work to affected communities. And if the state is defined by its depth, then these commitments can survive a change in administrations. What I have called “administrative depth” matters because it disperses public authority across the state, creating institutional homes that can defy hierarchical political domination. Administrative depth is horizontal morality in action.
Of course, Sabeel Rahman is right that reconstruction requires using what we today call “executive” tools, and he offers resources for that reconstruction. My concern is what those resources might cost us. If reconstruction’s spectacles look like the familiar spectacles of hierarchy, as the gifts of a benevolent tribune or the juristocrats, then we reinforce the habits of political and economic domination that were cemented across the twentieth century. If and when the left finds a charismatic leader of its own, that leader risks becoming another symbol of hierarchy unless they commit to constructing durable institutions for self-government.
In light of the election results from last week, we should be thinking seriously about how to replace spectacles of hierarchy with spectacles of democracy. There are scores of examples. For instance, as I have alluded to above, we should compel Democrats to abandon the State of the Union address. But let me leave you with one example of paramount importance.
Congress used to enforce its powers through inherent contempt. Unlike today, lawmakers did not depend on executive officers to enforce their subpoenas. They sent the Sergeant at Arms to arrest those who resisted congressional authority. After the election, the new Democratic majorities will be stymied unless they rediscover a centuries’ old inherent contempt power. We should be calling on Democrats to flex their muscles and arrest private individuals and executive branch officials who would obstruct Congress. If MAGA spectacles replicate the grammar of hierarchical domination, our new counter-spectacles ought to help the public visualize the state’s subordination to We the People and our elected representatives. We need only find the courage to rediscover the art of spectacle.
An Arnoldian turn could advance LPE’s aim to construct a more egalitarian and democratic society. We already ask how apparently neutral rules construct economic domination. We should also ask how public forms of governing make domination seem natural, responsible, or even emancipatory. Asking that question is how we tear down Kobayashi’s suit of armor. A reconstructed political economy needs institutions capable of sustaining it, and those institutions need practices and symbols that let people see themselves as participants in public power. The task is to build a political order with sights and sounds that help people discover their own collective agency in the pursuit of democracy.
