Democracy Incorporated Part 12

VIII.

In a general election, the candidate with the most hopeful

message is going to win it. Most people in the U.S. want

to be rich, they want to get ahead, and that's why an

opportunity-oriented message works.

-Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council.

What kind of politics is encouraged when the president is strong and Congress weak? A politics set by a decisive leader, a politics of action rather than the deliberative politics that is the forte of the legislative branch.

Ominously, the decline of congressional power and prestige in the United States is one of the most striking recent political developments. Historically, the legislative branch was supposed to be the power closest to the citizenry, the main reason being that lawmaking was held to be the highest, most solemn, and most important of all governmental powers, the symbol of rule by consent of the governed. A law was viewed as a command that all citizens had to obey because the people's representatives had approved it. Legislation made tangible the notion of equality: no one was above the law and everyone was protected by it.

Unlike the cla.s.sic totalitarian systems that tolerated only the unanimity of pseudolegislatures, our rulers have come to exploit a nearly evenly divided electorate and a consequent near parity of representation of both parties in the Senate and House. Majorities do exist, but either they are narrow or, when they are substantial, they tend to be limited to one chamber. However, the politics of near gridlock, as it works out in Washington, does not mean that all interests are equally and adversely affected by what appears to be a politics of inaction or stalemate. Executive orders can still be issued that roll back environmental gains or withhold funds from programs disliked by the administration, or that insert into trade negotiations items favored by campaign contributors.19 And regulatory agencies, now stacked against regulation, are not prevented from doing the bidding of the major party and corporate interests. Moreover, even a gridlocked Congress will likely support, even enthusiastically increase, military spending. Similarly, gridlock does not prevent tax breaks for the wealthiest cla.s.ses from being legislated.

The true significance of near gridlock is not that it paralyzes governmental action but that it prevents majority rule. Sharp and nearly equal divisions, the stuff of gridlock, are in the interest of some powerful groups who would be less influential, more threatened by majority rule.

What is made more difficult by the politics of stalemate is the capture of state power to advance the social interests of the Many. The politics of programmatic social democracy, which had defined politics throughout much of the last century-the politics of populism, Progressivism, the New and Fair Deals, and the Great Society-has all but vanished. Does this suggest that a broad consensus exists, that social conflicts have disappeared even as the society becomes more sharply divided in terms of income and of all the attendant values of education, cultural opportunities, health, and environmental safety? Why are those sharp differences not reflected politically?

Returning to the narrow margin between the major parties in the Congress: if one believes that they correspond to sharp and widespread ideological divisions in the society, one might conclude that social inequalities are in fact being registered, that what is being represented are really deep divisions in society and boiling cla.s.s conflicts, and that Marx's scenario of cla.s.s struggle has begun. In reality, the much publicized polarization of the electorate is less a sign of division than of a politics shaped to prevent the expression of substantive differences. Polls that provide the evidence for a sharply divided electorate typically collect responses to questions so broad as to be meaningless. What could follow substantively from questions such as "Do you think the president is doing a good job?" Electoral politics is integrally connected with polling so that elections tend to be contested over narrow differences in emphasis that do not disturb a pseudoconsensus. In the compet.i.tion for the votes of the center, for the so-called independents or undecided, the deepening social, educational, and economic inequalities remain submerged, unevoked in political rhetoric, immobile.

The resulting despair produces strange contortions of allegiance. Workers find themselves in an era of declining trade union power, yet many respond by opposing unions, voting Republican ("Reagan Democrats"), and hoping to improve their economic prospects by joining the military and going off to defend corporate America.20 Traditionally the meaning of the ideal of consensus was that the fundamental inst.i.tutions and practices of the political system, "the rules of its game," were accepted by all citizens and politicians; that a winning party would not proceed to stack the system against the losers and make it impossible for them to gain controlling power (e.g., gerrymandering); and that some political inst.i.tutions (e.g., the courts and independent regulatory agencies) should not be systematically and deeply partisan. In recent times, roughly since the Reagan counterrevolution of the 1980s, an ersatz consensus has evolved: from agreement about basic political inst.i.tutions and practices to one that accepts as permanent the inst.i.tutions and practices of corporate capitalism and the dismantlement of the welfare state; that equates taxation of the wealthy with "cla.s.s war"; and that anoints Protestantism as the civil religion of the nation.21 Traditional consensus stood for agreement upon political fundamentals and, as such, beyond ordinary partisan politics. Ersatz consensus exploits that notion in order to reduce the s.p.a.ce for acceptable contestation. Certain matters, such as tax increases, are declared to be "off the table." How influential the phony version can be was ill.u.s.trated when, during the 2004 elections, the Democratic presidential candidate testified plaintively, "I am not a redistributionist Democrat. Fear not." He identified himself as "an entrepreneurial Democrat."22 The nationalistic, patriotic, and "originalist" ideology being hawked by Republicans promotes a myth of national unity, consensus, that obscures real cleavages in order to subst.i.tute synthetic ones ("the culture wars," school vouchers, abortion) that leave power relationships unchallenged. Manufactured divisiveness complements the politics of gridlock; both contribute to induce apathy by suggesting that the citizenry's involvement in politics is essentially unneeded, futile. In the one case, of consensus, active involvement is superfluous because there is nothing to contest-who wants to dispute the wisdom of The Founders? In the other, gridlock, it appears that active engagement can accomplish nothing. Meanwhile divisiveness is a.s.signed to the make-believe politics played on talk shows or by pundits. Thus consensus, pseudodivisiveness, and gridlock establish the conditions of electoral politics. In elections the parties set out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote. Afterwards, post-election politics of lobbying, repaying donors, and promoting corporate interests-the real players-takes over. The effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their efficacy.

One striking example of the suppression of deep differences was the 2004 electoral campaign of John Kerry. There is wide agreement among observers that during the winter and spring presidential primaries the Democratic Party was galvanized by the deep antagonism toward the Iraqi war. Moreover, as a side effect, the growing antiwar sentiments threatened to activate segments of the population that had become resigned to the impotence of the Democratic Party. Yet the party organization and its centrists, abetted by a Dean-hostile media, succeeded in squelching the bid of the antiwar candidates and threw their resources behind Kerry. Kerry's nomination and subsequent meandering campaign furnished no focus for debate over the decision to go to war, the tactics of the administration in misleading the public about the threat posed by Saddam, the need to rethink the terms on which the "war on terrorism" was to be waged, and not least the terms by which "homeland security" had been cast into opposition with civil liberties.23 The threat that antiwar sentiments might embolden anticorporate elements to entertain hope of reversing the trends embodied in Superpower, combined with the determination of the Democrats to prevent that from happening, points to the crucial significance of the lack of third party alternatives. The historical role of third parties has been to force the major parties to cherry-pick third party proposals, typically those of a democratic or social democratic tendency. The 2004 presidential election marked the tragicomic playing out of the ineffectualness of third parties: the Democrats employed every dirty trick possible to discourage Ralph Nader from merely gaining a place on the presidential ballot for November 2004. At the same time the Republicans were deploying resources to enable Nader, their severest critic, to secure a place on the ballot. The episode, in its absurdity, shed a sharp light on how the two major parties connive to create as many obstacles as possible-in the form of requirements-for discouraging genuine alternatives to the established parties and their policies. While the Republican Party is ever-vigilant about the care and feeding of its zealots, the Democratic Party is equally concerned to discourage its democrats.

The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working cla.s.s, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and by a.s.suming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.24 Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans, with their combination of reactionary and innovative elements, are a cohesive, if not a coherent, opposition force.

The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and meaning. Formerly it was a.s.sociated with the Left and with the use of political power to lift the standard of living and life prospects of the lower cla.s.ses, of those who were disadvantaged under current distributive principles. Radicalism is now the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves "conservatives" and are called such by media commentators. In fact, pseudoconservatism is in charge of and owns the radicalizing powers that are dramatically changing, in some cases revolutionizing, the conditions of human life, of economy, politics, foreign policy, education, and the prospects of the planet. It is hard to imagine any power more radical in its determination to undo the social gains of the past century. The transformation of the Republican Party reflects the domestic requirements of an imperial Superpower and is an indicator of the future forms of party politics in this country.

Paradoxically, liberalism and its historical party, the Democrats, are conservative, not by choice but by virtue of the radical character of the Republicans. At the historical moment when the citizenry is strongly antipolitical and responds to immaterial "values," the Democrats, in order to preserve a semblance of a political ident.i.ty, are forced into a conservatism. Out of desperation rather than conviction, they struggle halfheartedly to preserve the remains of their past achievements of social welfare, public education, government regulation of the economy, racial equality, and the defense of trade unions and civil liberties.

The imbalance between, on the one hand, const.i.tutionally limited state power and, on the other, the relatively unconstrained power of science, technology, and corporate capitalism makes little difference to the Republican Party. It is content with an ancillary role of encouraging capitalism and allowing it to shape the directions of science and technology. By relying on corporate capital to provide major funding for the other two powers, the party can then even adopt a mildly disapproving stance toward public subsidies of some forms of scientific research (e.g., on stem cells) or of some technologies. The Democratic Party mirrors the problem more acutely. As the party with a history of both favoring state regulation of economic activity, especially of large corporations, and being well disposed toward subsidizing science and technological innovations, it would appear to be well positioned to use state authority to redirect the dynamic powers that are driving American imperialism. But in recent decades, as it has become dependent on contributions of corporations and wealthy donors, it has become less willing to mount an electoral challenge that would take on the Republicans at the level of the fundamental political question of whether democracy can cohabit with imperial Superpower.

At best, if state power were to fall into the hands of a reform-minded Democratic administration, that administration would, perforce, expend considerable "capital" (i.e., the patience of its corporate sponsors) playing catch-up. No area of policy better ill.u.s.trates the "game" of catch-up and how it can a.s.sume desperate proportions than that of environmental or ecological issues. Scientific evidence regarding global warming, air pollution, water and food shortages, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuel continues to acc.u.mulate; yet, in the face of what appears to be a looming global crisis, the political system, at best, can manage spasmodically to enact regulations in those areas-only to have them weakened or rolled back by a new (i.e., Republican) administration. The frustrations of environmental policy reveal a profound inability of the system to deal with long-range problems requiring consistency of purpose, allocation of public funds, taxes, and a determined commitment to controlling corporate behavior, qualities that a porous policy process lacks. At the same time, the economy, with its highly focused quest for profits, generates new products, new dangers to consumers and the environment, and new tactics for circ.u.mventing existing safeguards.

IX.

In their beginnings political inst.i.tutions and their practices typically incorporate a notion of proper scale. Their "sphere" of operations is defined by geography, socioeconomic circ.u.mstances, available technologies, and cultural values. Our system was originally conceived as a federal structure that recognized the presence of sovereign states but also envisaged an arrangement flexible enough to absorb the addition of new states. Virtually from the beginning of the republic it was a.s.sumed that the nation would expand westward. It was expected that the main national inst.i.tutions of president, Congress, and courts would be enlarged to accommodate additional representatives in the Senate, the House, and the Electoral College without altering the practices governing those inst.i.tutions. In other words, while a new scale would come into existence, the old inst.i.tutions would have to adjust only in a quant.i.tative sense (new states would mean additional senators, representatives, and electoral votes). Thus the operative norms would continue unchanged. It was a.s.sumed that the admission of new states to the Union could be orderly and need not disturb issues that the Const.i.tution had either suppressed or postponed, such as slavery, women's suffrage, and the status of native Americans.

The a.s.sumption that politics could comfortably accommodate an expanded scale was first put in doubt in the decades preceding the Civil War. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an attempt to settle the crucial issue of whether new states entering the Union would be free or slave. It admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state but prohibited slavery in the rest of the territory acquired under the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36-30 lat.i.tudinal line.25 The Compromise of 1850 allowed inhabitants of the New Mexico and Utah territories, acquired by the Mexican War, to decide the question of whether they wished to enter the Union with or without slavery. In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.

X.

Today this failed a.s.sumption, that free politics could be reconciled peaceably with an ever-increasing scale, has been demonstrated again by the imperial ambitions of Superpower and its distinctive nonterritorial conception of empire. It used to be said of the late British Empire that it was not the consequence of a premeditated plan but casually established in "a fit of absent-mindedness." There were, of course, "imperialists" who dreamed of empire, and some of them, such as Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill, who consciously fought for its realization. But there is a larger truth in the notion of an empire that begins without much forethought or conscious intention at work: empire building is likely to have contributing causes other than, or in addition to, the conscious intentions of imperialists. Those causes could include the actions of non- or even anti-imperialists. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, who set out consciously to establish one-party dictatorships and to extend their rule beyond their nation's original borders (Lebensraum, mare nostrum, world revolution), inverted totalitarianism comes into being, not by design, but by inattention to the consequences of actions or especially of inactions. Or, more precisely, inattention to their c.u.mulative consequences.

The lobbyist who seeks to influence a legislator by campaign contributions or other inducements does not set out to weaken the authority and prestige of representative inst.i.tutions and thereby contribute to inverted totalitarianism. The legislator who votes in favor of a resolution giving the president virtually unlimited discretion in deciding when to wage war does not intend to weaken the powers of the legislature to the point where it lacks the will to check the president in matters of war, peace making, and foreign policy. The federal regulator who, despite thousands of letters of protest, approves a regulation allowing large media conglomerates to extend further their control over local markets may not intend to eliminate the possibility of outlets that give a voice to dissenting political, economic, and ecological views. The employer who "busts" unions does not seek to weaken the structure of civil society and the power of its a.s.sociations and nongovernmental organizations to counter the state and corporate capital. The occasional citizen who, muttering about corrupt politicians, retreats into political hibernation and emerges blinkingly to cast a vote does not mean to make himself an easy object of manipulation or to confirm the elite's view of democracy as a useful illusion.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Inverted Totalitarianism: Antecedents and Precedents.

I.

In late November and early December 2004, a million citizens of Kiev and from other parts of Ukraine a.s.sembled in the public square of Kiev to protest the results of a national election, claiming that it had been deeply flawed by fraud and that the true winner was the candidate of the opposition party. Foreign observers largely agreed that the election had been marred by widespread irregularities. The protesters demanded a recount and held firm for several days until an agreement was reached that set a date for a new election. This in a society that had no strong tradition of democratic politics.

Following the American presidential election of November 2000, there were numerous claims that proceedings in the crucial state of Florida had been marred by irregularities of various kinds, including fraud, voter intimidation, and racism. The issue was eventually settled by a process that was as flawed and partisan as the election itself. Yet no crowds took to the streets; no one sat down before the Supreme Court in protest; no one mounted a ma.s.s march on Washington. This in a society that boasted of being the world's oldest-and presumably the most experienced-democracy.

II.

The crisis, it seems, is that there was no crisis. In its literal meaning a crisis is "a turning point." Adapting the formulation "a turning point but no crisis" to the condition I have designated "inverted totalitarianism," we might ask, why does the existence of that turning point go unrecognized? how are the facts of radical political change concealed when there is no evidence, say, of a coup or revolutionary overthrow? how can we recognize that the country is at the political turning point of inverted totalitarianism?

As a start, we might pause over the notion of "recognition." As commonly used, it implies a prior knowledge of an object: we recognize (i.e., identify) an old schoolmate. But if we bisect the word into "recognize," a somewhat different meaning is suggested: to rethink, to reconsider, in our case, to reconceive the possible forms that totalitarianism might a.s.sume and to question whether the political history of the United States really is the triumph of democracy in America. That double strategy might enable us to avoid the presumption that fascism or totalitarianism necessarily means a distinct break by which a political society is suddenly and radically transformed by a coup or a revolution, as were Lenin's Russia and Franco's Spain.

The second aspect of our strategy calls for collective self-examination: is the United States the model democracy or a highly equivocal one? If we were to list the essentials of a democracy, such as rule by the people, we would find that democracy in that sense is nonexistent-and that may be a substantial part of the crisis that is no crisis. That our system actually is democratic is more of an unquestioned a.s.sumption than a matter of public discussion, and so we ignore the extent to which antidemocratic elements have become systemic, integral, not aberrant. The evidence is there: in widening income disparities and cla.s.s distinctions, polarized educational systems (elite inst.i.tutions with billion-dollar endowments versus struggling public schools and universities), health care that is denied to millions, national political inst.i.tutions controlled by wealth and corporate power. While these contrasts are frequently bemoaned, they are rarely considered as c.u.mulative and, rarer still, as evidence of an antidemocratic regime.

To claim that antidemocracy is a regime means expanding the meaning of democracy so that it is not confined to political matters but applies as well to social, cultural, and economic relationships. If it is objected that this stretches the meaning of democracy beyond what it can reasonably bear, my response is this: not to do so implies that democracy can operate despite the inequalities of power and life circ.u.mstances embedded in all of those relationships.

An inverted totalitarian regime, precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary, as evolving out of a continuing and increasingly unequal struggle between an unrealized democracy and an antidemocracy that dare not speak its name. Consequently while we recognize familiar elements of the system-popular elections, free political parties, the three branches of government, a bill of rights-if we re-cognize, invert, we see its actual operations as different from its formal structure. Its elements have antecedents but no precedents, a confluence of tendencies and pragmatic choices made with scant concern for long-term consequences.

For example, the contemporary phenomenon of privatization by which governmental functions, such as public education, military operations, and intelligence gathering, are shared with or a.s.signed to private entrepreneurs represents more than a switch in suppliers. The privatization of public functions is an expression of the revolutionary dynamic of capitalism, of its aggrandizing bent. Capital brings its own culture of compet.i.tiveness, hierarchy, self-interest. Each instance of the private inroads into public functions extends the power of capital over society. Services such as public education that had previously been viewed as essential, not only to the literacy of the citizenry but to its empowerment, are now increasingly being ceded to private entrepreneurs. From a democratic perspective the effects of privatization are counterrevolutionary; but from a capitalist viewpoint they are revolutionary. Privatization of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations, perhaps to blend popular education and media culture so as to better manage democracy.

III.

As the example of privatization suggests, re-cognition enters as we discern connections between phenomena that, when naively noted, seem unrelated. Thus at first glance forms of popular culture such as newspapers, cinema, TV, or radio seem more or less unchanged except in technology. Occasionally we are told of changes that we cannot see, that "ownership is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands." Even less frequently are we told that ownership brings control of content, how that control is manifested, and what its political bearing might be. TV might present what we recognize as the familiar figure of a uniformed policeman at a political demonstration; but, again, if we have been reading about the new technologies (e.g., databases), tactics of crowd control, surveillance methods, and weapons (stun guns, pepper spray) being used by police, as well as the broader authority available to them by virtue of ant.i.terrorist laws, we may re-cognize the police as a force for controlling popular expression rather than simply as "the arm of the law" dedicated to the protection of life and property.1 Antecedents but not precedents: Police repression is far from being novel in American history; it has antecedents. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, not uncommonly, police and National Guardsmen were used to break strikes and to aid employers against unions; and throughout the twentieth century, from Selma to Watts to Berkeley and Chicago, the police have been employed to quell populist political protests; it was National Guardsmen who shot dead antiwar demonstrators at Kent State. Those actions are rarely, if ever, invoked as precedents that justify repression. They are viewed as singular, ad hoc interventions rather than a practice. There are few antecedent examples of repression of the rich, much less precedents.

But does terrorism, that war without end, that perpetual emergency, cause us to re-cognize repression or, instead, to normalize it? When do the police evolve from the obvious but occasional agent of employers into an element within an evolving system of control, intimidation, and repression; or when does the expanded domestic role of the military seem a natural response to terrorists-or to a natural disaster such as a hurricane? How does good old American pragmatism, supposedly the least ideological, most practical of public philosophies, become the unwitting agent of a regime with affinities to the most ideological systems?

A possible answer: The normalizing of deviations occurs when the main political inst.i.tutions, such as legislatures, courts, elected law enforcement officials (e.g., district attorneys), mayors, governors, and presidents are able to exploit a fearful public and promote the powers of an increasingly militarized police but not their accountability. The usual justification is one that draws the citizenry into complicity: the public, according to polls, favors harsh sentences, safer streets, the names of s.e.xual predators publicized and their residences listed, and no coddling of prisoners in those rehabilitation programs favored by liberals at taxpayers' expense. In these examples we see the ingredients whereby antecedents become precedents: an empowered police, an officialdom that sanctions expanded police powers and reduced legal and political safeguards, and public opinion that appears to favor methods which weaken legal safeguards and diminish the inst.i.tutions whose traditional role is to oversee, check, and alert the public to dangerous tendencies in the system. The remarkable thing about public opinion is that it is self-justifying, never accountable.

Thus the invasive Patriot Act, with its inroads into personal liberties and the reduced power of the courts to check overly zealous officials, is first accepted by the public as a practical response to terrorism, but then it is soon cemented as a permanent element in the system of law enforcement. What may have emerged without premeditation is quickly seized upon and exploited. The response to 9/11 is soon declared to be a "war on terrorism." Then, when that war appears to be flagging, it is redefined as the war against "radical Islamism" or an "Islamic caliphate." It then seems logical to coordinate all the relevant agencies-federal, state, and local, and all armed forces, from police and National Guard to the traditional armed services-and, voila!, we have a system. The n.a.z.is called it Gleichschaltung (coordination). We might call it "management" to indicate its place in an opportunity society.

But-returning to TV-we may be led to wonder whether the actual intimidation of populist protests by police and TV's highly selective and unfavorable depiction of them are connected. Invoking history, we may further re-cognize when a significant change occurs. Recall the media's relatively benign portrayal of the civil rights movement and antiwar rallies of the sixties, and recall, too, the media's steady focus on the "police riot" at the 1968 Democratic Convention; then contrast those with its perfunctory coverage of the opposition to the first Gulf War and to the invasion of Iraq (2003). The main continuity between the sixties and the Reagan and George III administrations is the close scrutiny of antiwar and antiracist protests by increasingly militarized police forces, a cooperative media, and an ever more intrusive and high-tech national intelligence network.2 What is at stake here is the control of public s.p.a.ce and the power to depict, to discourage and intimidate, and ultimately to filter what is happening and being expressed at a time when technology makes filtering relatively easy. Consider the attempts on the part of protest groups during the summer of 2004 to enter the public s.p.a.ce of streets in the environs of the conventions of the two national parties. As the police herded the protesters into the equivalent of cattle pens, the media presented the groups as bizarre and ignored the serious arguments they were attempting to offer. In effect the media transformed a political action, intended for the civic education of a public, into a spectacle framed for ma.s.s entertainment. Earlier, during the election campaigns of 2004, the media enforced the one-and-a-half-party system and a stunted version of an electorate. When they did not caricature, they virtually erased the attempts of third parties to present the electorate with alternative policies and candidates; even Howard Dean, a conventional candidate though an unwelcome one to the party establishment, was pilloried as an extremist and ridiculed as "out of control."3 The perfect ill.u.s.tration of a rigidly controlled system at which both parties connive was the so-called presidential debates of 2004. In a fog of vacuous answers to insipid questions the public was treated as props, pa.s.sive guests rather than citizen-partic.i.p.ants. One might reasonably wonder what educational character those debates might have had if, say, Ralph Nader had been allowed to press Bush on issues of corporate power, or Dennis Kucinich had confronted Bush on the likely consequences of his proposals for reforming the Social Security system, or Howard Dean had been present to pursue the issue of a calamitous war and the justification for killing thousands of Iraqis while reducing large parts of their society to rubble.

IV.

Police control over demonstrators, combined with the media's censorship of popular protests and of third party activities, produces for inverted totalitarianism what Fascist thugs and censorship accomplished for the cla.s.sic version.4 It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism. Recall that an element common to most twentieth-century totalitarianisms, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility toward the Left-in the United States the Left is a.s.sumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of "the left wing of the Democrat Party," never of democrats. Indeed, a crucial feature of all totalitarian systems is that they were preceded by a p.r.o.nounced shift in political dynamics from left to right.5 In the politics of Spain, Italy, and Germany after 1918 and before the Fascist triumphs, liberals, socialists, and communists had been major players, on occasion controlling government and influencing the general political culture.6 Accordingly, the elimination of the Left became a key objective of Fascist strategies. That strategy was complemented by campaigns to stoke, then reinforce, ma.s.s emotions of nationalism and patriotism, and to accuse the Left of being "soft" and "unpatriotic."

In the United States the rise of an extreme and highly ideological Right was driven by an unrelenting a.s.sault on liberals, portraying them as both "hating America" and hostile to business, and thus suggesting that the two occupy the same plane, even though a substantial proportion of Americans are reported as being distrustful of corporations.7 Paradoxically, and unlike cla.s.sic totalitarians, the Bush administration simultaneously attacked liberalism while professing a determination to establish democracy and free markets abroad. A clue to its real tendencies is that in defending its domestic policies, the Bush administration rarely claimed to be promoting democracy.8 That right-wing ideologues, with their staunch defense of elitism and disdain for the demos, should attack liberalism and belatedly discover democracy, smacks of bad faith.9 Liberal intellectuals, like their conservative counterparts, have traditionally defended a meritocratic elitism-and hence are at one with many conservatives-while democratic theorists have rejected it as incompatible with the principle of equality. Although neocon ideologues manage to muster one cheer for capitalism,10 most liberals manage at least two, and some leaders of Christian political groups three. Thus liberalism would seem to share important common ground with conservatives, and that, in turn, suggests a certain skepticism about broad distinctions between red and blue politics. Color coding obscures the likelihood that a significant number of liberals hold serious reservations about democracy: what is the color of centrist Democrats?

Thus a muddle: conservative elitists should hate democrats and ally with elitist liberals. Instead they profess to love the former and hate the latter. Is deference to democracy popular among politicos of all shades because its dynamic is spent and its force is mainly rhetorical? If such is the situation, then a rhetorical democracy may hide the contradictory elements that, in the case of conservatives, are joined tactically to produce a dynamic but, in the case of liberals, produce uncertainty.

A short historical detour may shed some light on the changing dynamics of political ident.i.ties and alliances.

V.

d'ynamis (Gr.): power, potentiality.

Historically, the ideology of liberalism came to represent an uneasy combination of elements: elected representative government, limited government, equal rights, property rights, and an economy that, when freed from governmental interference and rid of privilege, nevertheless produced inequalities as striking as any in the traditional regimes.

In early modern Britain capitalism and liberalism had been allies in their revolutionary struggles against the "old regimes" of inherited privilege and power. They represented "forces" of change that promised greater freedom, economic opportunity, and an end to privilege and arbitrary government.11 In contrast, early modern conservatism had no dynamic, only a reaction in defense of a dying order. In Edmund Burke's cla.s.sic version conservatism responded to the French Revolution by preaching quietism, appealing to tradition (represented by the landed gentry and established church), and defending a politics of deference to superiors. Thus conservatism stood as a holding action against radical change from "below," a defense of customary ways and inst.i.tutions, a skeptical view of marketplace values and types, and an abhorrence of demotic equality.12 The liberal apostles of change were the great political economists-Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo. In varying degrees they advocated a politics centered on the middle cla.s.s and excluding the working cla.s.s and poor. None were egalitarians-with the possible exception of Bentham. They pitted intellectual elitism against the inherited privileges of an aristocracy, the free market against mercantilist notions of state control of the economy, and they sided with modern science against religious obscurantism. They were only moderately enthusiastic for political partic.i.p.ation, favoring, instead, a larger role for disinterested public servants. Except for Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the English version of liberalism was formulated roughly a quarter century after the American Revolution; hence it was not their liberalism that initially took hold in America.13 When the American colonists protested the taxes and import duties that the mother country had imposed, their arguments were primarily based on political principles concerning representation, not on economic theories. Moreover, in the years after the revolution, many among the emerging political elites believed that the most pressing need was to establish a strong government and especially one that would play a major role in overseeing economic affairs and promoting economic growth-the opposite of the teachings of many nineteenth-century English liberals. That viewpoint was embodied in the American Const.i.tution, in provisions for political inst.i.tutions and individual rights and for checking majoritarian democracy. In a.s.signing to Congress broad legislative powers to regulate commerce, the framers aimed at preventing the states from interfering in business transactions or with the flow of commerce. Other clauses provided for a central government with authority to promote as well as protect the new nation's economy. In other words, a strong element of neomercantilism was perpetuated.When Alexander Hamilton became secretary of the treasury in the Washington administration, neomercantilism became policy, thus establishing precedent for a long tradition of government favors and subsidies to business.

The neomercantilist concordat between liberalism and capital, which continued throughout most of the nineteenth century, was an expression of the dynamic comprising the centralized state emerging from the Civil War, an expanding economy, and ideologies of nationalism and compet.i.tive individualism ("social Darwinism"). It began shaping the habits, outlook, and material circ.u.mstances of the population, extending the reach of the state, and encouraging the corporate revolution of the last half of the nineteenth century. As Karl Marx, no less, repeatedly emphasized, capitalism is by nature a revolutionary force. When, toward the end of the century, that dynamic was opposed by a different dynamic-the challenge of populist forces demanding that the state intervene to regulate railroad rates, promote paper money, and prohibit monopolies-the alliance between state and corporation, while strained, held against the threat of neomercantilism in the service of populism. When ant.i.trust legislation was introduced, it was inconsistently enforced. The great Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century, while sharply critical of corporate concentration and growing political influence, were not anticapitalist.

America's entry into the First World War was an intimation of what was to come: a Democratic, reformist administration that redirected its energies into making a world safe for democracy. Following victory the party went into decline, along with reformism.

The first sustained parting of the ways between liberals and capitalism came with the New Deal, when liberalism displayed a degree of independence that, if not anticapitalist, appeared highly critical.14 Serious governmental regulation of the economy and legislation favorable to trade unions and social democracy were introduced, suggesting that liberalism was about to redefine its alliance with capital. What made that moment possible was the Great Depression and the consequent weakened condition of capitalism, plus the heightened political consciousness of workers, small farmers and businessmen, teachers, artists of all kinds. Throughout the Western world at the time there were wide-ranging discussions of alternatives, especially of governmental planning as the means of reorganizing economic life to serve the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of citizens. From today's vantage point it is difficult to recognize a time when politicians, public intellectuals, even some businessmen were convinced that capitalism was in mortal danger and in need of serious reform, possibly by some type of "collectivism."

The aftermath of World War II should have witnessed the high tide of liberalism; instead it was as though liberalism became frozen in time, its dynamic spent. It might promise more New Dealtype social legislation, but not more regulation of the economy. One of the last important pieces of New Dealtype legislation was the GI Bill of Rights with its educational subsidies for veterans; significantly, no regulation of capital was involved. Ideologically, it seemed as though there was nothing more to reform-very few party leaders were concerned about civil rights, much less racial equality.15 After the years of wartime controls over the economy accompanied by rationing and shortages, the public seemed to have little desire for the expansion of government but a huge appet.i.te for the material comforts denied during wartime. The substantial governmental apparatus a.s.sembled during the war was adapted to the new mode of Cold War and containment and produced near disastrous hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. Neoliberalism emerged as the New Deal's residuary legatee and found its icon in JFK. Its proponents were willing to sacrifice some elements of social democracy in order to promote a "strong state" for opposing Soviet communism abroad.16 Many liberals shared with conservatives a distaste for the partic.i.p.atory politics of the sixties. About civil rights neoliberals tended to be either indifferent or lukewarm, as witness the JFK and Carter presidencies, or rhetorically friendly only after the fact (Clinton). In short, liberalism had lost the robust dynamic that had enabled it to intervene to control the "excesses" of capital and to respond, at least minimally, to the new challenge of broadening political along with social democracy. The contrary tugs of liberalism-toward a defense of the "free world" against communist aggression, and toward social and racial equality at home-were played out in the Johnson administration. It floundered helplessly in an unwinnable "hot" war abroad, while at home its reformist energies were pretty much exhausted by efforts to secure equal voting rights. The climactic moment symbolic of its exhaustion was Lyndon Johnson's decision to withdraw from the race for his party's presidential nomination in 1968. By its own actions and inactions, not through any conservative strategies, liberalism had failed in Korea and Vietnam, and proved unable to come to terms with the partic.i.p.atory energy of the sixties.

VI.

Meanwhile American business underwent its own revolution. During the 1950s and 1960s publicists announced that American capitalism was in the throes of "the managerial revolution."17 A new cult figure emerged: the executive trained and certified in the dynamics and intricacies of organizing, administering, and exploiting power. Thanks to the role of business and law schools, a new component of a ruling cla.s.s, educated in the ways of power and of innovation in its uses, was introduced, not only in businesses but throughout society, in university administration, philanthropic foundations, cultural inst.i.tutions (museums, symphonies), and the communications industry. The managerial revolution made possible the modernization of the Republican Party.

Managerialism, by definition, was not only elitist in principle but, in an age dominated by large-scale forms of "organization," a claim to rule. That claim was distinctive, for it concerned ruling in a context of intense compet.i.tion, high risk, and big stakes. Accountability figured mainly as profitability. In that sense organizational power, with its emphasis upon expansion, dynamic leadership, and risk taking, contrasted with const.i.tutional authority, with its emphasis upon restraint, settled ways, checks and balances. The differences between organization and const.i.tution would loom large when the corporate manager, the risk-taker, succeeded the governmental bureaucrat, and when the president trained at the Harvard Business School succeeded the Rhodes Scholar president.

The managerial character of capital a.s.sumes particular significance in light of the fact that no distinct, self-conscious conservative ideology existed in the United States before the mid-twentieth century. The major exception was the Civil War era's Southern apologists for slavery. Modern conservatism was a postWorld War II invention. And when capitalism and conservatism merged in the latter part of the twentieth century, conservative intellectuals, while occasionally paying homage to "absolute values," rejected the conservative temptation to look backwards and instead joined their cause to the dynamic of an expanding, globalizing capitalism and its managers.

Conservative intellectuals date the beginnings of "the modern Republican Party" from the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. That happens to have been when conservative intellectuals first played an influential political role. By the time that the party returned to power in 1980, it had become increasingly radicalized and its reactionary elements converted into a political dynamic symbolized by managerialists such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. The revelatory moment came when the neocons joined with the managerialists to proclaim the "New American Century" and lay plans for the expansion of American power.

A case might be made, however, that the origins of the party's transformation and the source of its dynamic are earlier than either the Goldwater campaign or the Reagan presidency or the managerial revolution. They can be traced to the Cold War with the Soviet Union that began in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The distinctive element in that transformation was the party's success in blending foreign threats and domestic suspicions to lay the basis of a totalizing dynamic. America, scarcely finished with a global war in 1945, had to be mobilized again, aroused to confront the "challenge" of a new and peculiarly insidious enemy. Thus began the first efforts at constructing an enemy who, while not mythical, was given mythical proportions.

Republicans and their supporters claimed that Soviet communism had launched a "conspiracy," a "plot" for "world domination" whose operations were secret and hidden, dependent upon spies and traitors. That allegation led to a crucial decision, to reflect the "crusade against Communism" inwards, into domestic politics. That move led to a campaign to expose Communist Party members and sympathizers. Its beginnings were in the McCarthy "crusade" (as its supporters called it) to ferret out "disloyal" citizens and "Communist sympathizers."

In effect the party first invented, then launched a culture war. What was striking about many of those accused as "subversives" or "un-American" was the large number of academics, writers, actors, and Hollywood directors and executives. Thus the targets were the makers of popular and "highbrow" culture. The ideology for that counterdynamic was quickly formulated by a new breed of highbrow conservative intellectuals. Decades before neoconservatism became a buzzword, there were true intellectual revolutionaries bent on overthrowing and replacing the liberal establishment that, in their view, had dominated the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Their a.s.sault gained more standing when, as the liberal intelligentsia hesitated, conservative intellectuals united in discrediting the populist and democratic politics of the sixties. The new ideology can be fairly described as totalizing and unapologetic for its absolutism. Its targets were not confined to Democratic politicians but included a wide range of matters: education, morality, religion, and popular culture. The great evil was "relativism," the favorite remedy "discipline." They charged that liberal relativism, permissiveness (= moral laxity), affirmative action, and secularism were softening the national will, mocking ideals of loyalty and patriotism, and in the process undermining national unity in the global struggle with Soviet communism.

To describe Republicanism as a dynamic party is to say that the party succeeded in organizing and focusing powers that challenge limits, be they limits regarding church and state, presidential powers, environmental protections, the distinctions between public and private, the protections for civil liberties, the observance of treaties, or respect for local markets. The party united otherwise disparate powers, producing the momentum for change as well as dictating its direction. And that direction has been self-consciously antiliberal and not infrequently reactionary. While packaging democracy for export, at home it hacked away at the social supports for democracy.

Doubtless there are several factors underlying the party's success, but there is one in particular that may explain the party's distinctive combination of forward-looking (science, technology, venture capital) and retrogressive elements (fundamentalists, creationists, originalists, moral absolutists, and cla.s.sroom disciplinarians). An age of rapid, relentless, and uncertain changes leaves many, perhaps most, people yearning for stability, for relationships, beliefs, and inst.i.tutions that abide. The retrogressive elements seek rea.s.surance that there are religious, moral, and political verities, unchanging truths. Thus the party is able to have it both ways, encouraging and subsidizing the powers that undermine the status quo while publicizing prayer in the Oval Office and making abstinence in the third world a condition of foreign aid.

VII.

At present the national government is embarked upon a war in which our leaders first deceived the public about the threat to the nation and then followed a course of action that consistently evaded and violated const.i.tutional limitations. Nonetheless its actions and official justifications are in certain important respects compatible with some of the broad aims of some of the Founders of our const.i.tution. The point is not whether the Founders had a totalitarian vision, but rather what forms of power they were bent on encouraging and what forms they were determined to check. What did they hope for and what did they fear?

The main hope of the framers of the Const.i.tution was to establish a strong central government, not one hobbled at every turn by an intrusive citizenry or challenged by the several "sovereign" states. They professed to be choosing a republic, but it is closer to the truth to say that they were focused upon establishing a system of national power to replace what they considered the hopelessly ineffectual system of decentralized powers under the Articles of Confederation.

The new system, with its emphasis upon a strong executive, an indirectly elected Senate composed (it was hoped) of the educated and wealthy, and an appointed Supreme Court also represented the fears of the Founders. Theirs was a counterrevolution against not only the system of politics that had led the revolution against Britain but against the democratic tendencies and populist outbreaks that had persisted from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth.

Why should one oppose democracy, that is, a government that advanced the interests of the vast majority, of the less powerful? During the eighteenth century there were many attempts at answering that awkward question. The people, it was said, were not competent to rule (i.e., they were uneducated and/or inexperienced); hence they would be unable to govern according to their (true) interests. Or allegedly the people were subject to wild mood swings. Or it was claimed that, at best, democracy was possible in a society of small scale; an extended society made it impracticable for the people to a.s.semble-as though democracy depended upon a.s.sembling the entire nation. In the course of its arguments for the ratification of the Const.i.tution, The Federalist made much of a contrast between "reason" and "pa.s.sion," the one a.s.sociated with the Few, the latter with the Many. Pa.s.sions were attributed to uncontrolled self-interest: they were "immediate," "private," "selfish," "strong," "irregular." Because "the people" symbolized the threat of irrational politics, the task of elites was to hold popular forces at bay by establishing and defending a "reasonable" politics.18 According to The Federalist the main purpose of the Const.i.tution was to control "interests," explicitly the interests of a majority. Interests were depicted as selfish, irrational, and potentially destructive.

In fact in the early years of the republic ordinary people had concrete interests, such as small businesses (a tanner, a butcher), manufacturing, trade, and agriculture. Interests, although not the same ones, were what most Americans had in common; the system of exchange (the butcher bought from the farmer) was an important bond in a relatively large country without an extensive system of communication. Ordinary Americans welcomed democracy as the only political system that encouraged them to use power to promote and defend their interests. As early as the 1760s groups of New York artisans declared: "Every Man who honestly supports a Family by useful Employment is honourable enough for any office in the State, that his abilities are equal to. And in the great essential Interests of a Nation, which are so plain that every one may understand them,-as every individual is interested, all have an equal Right to declare their Interests, and to have them regarded."19 In short, democracy and the interests of individuals were complementary.

For The Federalist interests were legitimate so long as they satisfied two conditions: they were nonideological and not organized politically into a national majority.20 For The Federalist, and for Hamilton in particular, the consolidation of national power and its extension required the promotion of certain interests, such as banking, finance, and commerce. These were "national interests," even a "common interest" of which "the state" would be "guardian."21 In other words, some interests were expansive, the const.i.tuents of national power, while the interests of the butcher were parochial and unrelated to state power. That understanding continues today.

The history of the revolution that most Americans are taught emphasizes the role of selfless generals, patrician leaders-in short, an elite.22 However, thanks to the efforts of some historians, we now are able to learn about the extraordinary political activities of working-cla.s.s members, small farmers, women, slaves, and Indians during the period from roughly 1690 throughout most of the following century. It took several forms: street protests and demonstrations, attacks on official residences, pet.i.tions, ma.s.s meetings, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. Virtually without exception the motive animating these actions was to protect or advance interests that the existing system ignored or exploited unfairly. And, since most lacked the economic resources necessary to qualify for the suffrage, protest was also directed against the exclusion of the lower cla.s.ses from the political decision-making inst.i.tutions. Democracy, in this early meaning, stood for a politics of redress, for common action to alleviate the sharp inequalities of wealth and power that enabled the more affluent and educated to monopolize governance.23 It was, of necessity, a fugitive democracy, given to moments of frustration, rage, and violence that inspired the dominant cla.s.ses to describe the people as "tumultuous." That "turbulence" was, in effect, the demotic form of political dynamics. It drew its strength from sheer numbers, but also from the indispensable role of artisans, laborers, small farmers and merchants not only in the economy but as common soldiers and sailors in the military. Except for periods of unemployment, those who protested, marched, organized, or propagandized had neither leisure time nor the resources to sustain their own dynamic.

The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were a.s.sured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered.

VIII.

The contortions that the Founders underwent in order to contain demotic power produced a lasting fault line: on the one side a national establishment and preserve for an elite politics concerned with the grand issues of war, defense, diplomacy, regulation of commerce, national credit, and public finance, and whose operations were to be "regular," "efficient and well administered";24 on the other a collection of decentralized societies whose politics and culture displayed-as virtually every foreign observer attested-democratic and egalitarian tendencies, rowdiness ("irregular"),25 local loyalties, a parochial suspicion toward a remote power claiming sovereignty over local life, and a destabilizing politics often "turbulent" and "tumultuous."26 Thus two countertendencies housed within the same framework: national power could not, even with the best of intentions, be wielded democratically; local powers could not easily submit except by suspending democratic instincts and suspicions and surrendering to the seductive pa.s.sions of nationalism and patriotism.

The result was a two-tiered system that, at the national level, might be called one of "dissociated democracy." There the people reigned but did not rule. At the state and local level, alongside "great families" whose wealth and status enabled them to play a considerable role in politics, were elements of a widespread and robust democracy, often inspired, sometimes crude, and where the bias of numbers occasionally prevailed.

The framers of the Const.i.tution understood clearly that majority rule was the first principle of democratic government and the essential means of expressing a popular will. It was the method by which "the people" a.s.serted itself politically and acquired self-consciousness. But the Founders, almost without exception, believed that democratic majority rule posed the gravest threat to a republican system. It stood for collective irrationality or, as Madison put it, the "wishes of an unjust and interested majority."27 The dilemma of many of the Founders was that, while they feared "the people," they recognized that the political culture of the largely self-governing communities that preceded the Const.i.tution made it unrealistic to attempt a political system without the consent of the power they distrusted most, the people. So they fashioned a variety of devices intended to "filter" expressions of a popular will, hoping to rationalize the irrational. They limited direct popular elections to one branch, the House of Representatives, and designed an elaborate system of separation of powers and checks and balances to make it as difficult as possible for a majority to control simultaneously all branches of the government. The president and Senate were to be indirectly elected; the federal judges were to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, while personnel of the executive branch were to be appointed by the president and some required approval of the Senate. Neither the original Const.i.tution nor the Bill of Rights contained any provision guaranteeing the right to vote for national offices.

The "great experiment" was aimed not at inventing self-government or individual freedom-these were already the prized achievements of the several states-but at managing democracy. As Hamilton wrote, "When occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of their interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection."28 Thus the people, like wayward minors, needed "guardians"-not executors of their will but interpreters of their true interests. Accordingly, the great purpose of the system of indirectly elected politicians and officials was to legitimate a guardian cla.s.s, an elite with sufficient leisure to devote itself to governing and schooled in what Hamilton called the "science of politics."29

IX.

We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for.

What we plan for is that we're a superpower. We are the