Democracy Incorporated Part 15

In sum, Republicanism has given the nation, not an alternate but a genuine alternative: an inegalitarian social democracy and a bogus political democracy.

VIII.

A situation of Republican hegemony based on a generally conservative electorate and a consequent inability of Democrats to muster a coherent, effective majority requires a radical rethinking of democratic possibilities, a different perspective from the one that motivated earlier democratic movements. As we saw in the discussion of the three democratic moments, democratic energies had aimed at innovation, at replacing the "old order" by introducing political innovations that could claim little or no precedent. As the cliche had it, the democratic forces "broke with the past." That vision of democracy was perfectly represented in the idea of a "New Deal" and reflected in the t.i.tle of a volume by one of its eminent historians, The Crisis of the Old Order.26 That thinking is preserved by today's liberals when they refer to themselves as "progressive," with that term's connotation of moving past the present toward a better future.

If, instead of a.s.sociating democracy with progress toward something new, something more in synch with the ever-advancing tempos of our times, we were to list some obvious preliminary actions that redemocratization would require, then a different temporal perspective is suggested. Examples of "obvious measures": rolling back the empire; rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the inst.i.tutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving a representative system responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring government regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power.

I have labored unfashionable verbs-"roll back," "revive," and "restore"-in order to suggest the need for a reversal of temporal perspectives so that we might remember or relearn the reasons for believing that the nation could combine restraints on governmental power with social democratic programs. Democracy cannot coexist, much less flourish, under either the antisocial-democratic legacy of the Reagan era or the unconstrained president of the Bush era. The enemies of democracy are the radicals of our day, the futurists bent on substantially narrowing the social and const.i.tutional democracy of the recent past, and committed, in Vice President Cheney's phrase, to "an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy."27 Small "d" democrats need to rediscover and rethink rather than mindlessly embrace "the latest" and thereby become trapped in the regime's futurist dynamic. This does not mean adopting a democratic version of originalism, or fetishizing some revelatory moment or iconic forebears. It does mean relearning some hard-earned lessons.

Our reversal of perspective involves recognizing that in contrast to earlier centuries, when democracy represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become adapted to the status quo, which lends a certain sheen of legitimacy to a system of complicitous democracy. What complicates the problem and makes it unique is that today's status quo is dynamic. It is not about clinging to what is but about changing continuously in ways that undermine the conditions for a viable democratic politics. The amount of "leisure time," for example, has lessened, which means that time potentially available for politics has also diminished. And since the latter has become scarcer, political media wizards have found it easier to focus their resources upon simplifying politics. A politics dominated by slogans and sound bites is tailored to the voters' limited time and attention span. In combination they discourage public rationality. That situation captures precisely the neat conjunction of political irrationality induced among large segments of the citizenry and the systematic exploitation of popular irrationality by elites.

A society fixated on the future and caught in the frenzy of rapid change has difficulty knowing how to think about the consequences of loss, especially of things once widely shared. Many forms of change are inevitably destructive, displacing or replacing existing ways of life and belief. Obsolescence becomes the norm. Notions that were once common coin-"social justice," "objectivity," or "the common good"-now seem anachronisms, as do the commitments they implied. Unburdened by collective conscience, one feels no complicity in the killing fields of Iraq or in the actions and policies that have allowed the president-whom the Const.i.tution entrusts with responsibility for enforcement of the laws-to proceed as though he had received a mandate to relax const.i.tutional limitations. Rapid change not only blunts the collective conscience but dims the collective memory. So many "pasts" have flashed by and vanished that the temporal category itself seems obsolete. No collective memory means no collective guilt: surely My Lai is the name of a rock star.

Rapid change is not a neutral force, a natural phenomenon that exists independently of human will, or of considerations of power, comparative advantage, and ideological biases. It is a "reality" constructed from decisions arrived at within a certain framework-itself not accidental. We might call it "the political economy of change." That framework involves a wide range of factors: players with unequal resources, available capital, investment opportunities and decisions, market conditions, scientific discoveries, technological innovations, cultural dispositions, and the relative strength of contending political forces. Political corruption and lobbying are the princ.i.p.al expedients for conveying the concerns of the most powerful actors in the political economy of change.28 Democracy is not a player in that political economy; it is not even regarded as relevant except as a p.a.w.n.29 The political environment is so hostile to the norms that govern ordinary life, so destructive of commonality, that for many citizens it requires an act of uncommon courage to become engaged. The viciousness of "attack politics" and the degradation of civil dialogue further encourage citizens to distance themselves, declaring a plague on both houses, and abandoning politics to the organized zealots. A turned-off citizenry makes for a more efficiently managed and rationalized politics.

Clearly, recovering democracy presents a task that runs counter to the political dynamics of our times.

IX.

"Originalism" is the doctrine that exhorts politicians to be guided by the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, the Const.i.tution of 1789, and the Bible.30 "Going back" for democracy differs from originalism. It is not the quest for a privileged moment when a transcendent truth was revealed. Rather it is the attempt to remind ourselves what democracy is about by becoming acquainted with forms of democratic experience, their possibilities and limitations-not with imitating. In the historical "moments" discussed in the previous chapter democratization was a.s.sociated with a conscious effort to throw off the past and to challenge the present with a vision of a future for which there was no precedent. We saw how a newly self-conscious demos, thitherto excluded from politics, succeeded in forcing entry and gaining recognition. In the process it heralded something new: a more accessible politics, freer, more equal, attuned to popular needs and grievances and to the needs of the everyday lives of those whose personal powers were exhausted by the demands of survival. The possibility of a demotic politics meant that over time submissive subjects might evolve into active citizens, into a different kind of being. Demotic politics also meant a conversion of politics from a preserve of the privileged and powerful into a public domain.

The paucity of actual democracies historically suggests that democratic political inst.i.tutions are established only after a series of struggles against the "natural" tendency for political power to be monopolized by the Few, by those who possess the skills, resources, and focused time that enable them to impose their will on a society the vast majority of whose members are overburdened and distracted by the demands of day-to-day survival. Leisure signifies time that is at one's own discretion. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle noted that leisure was a necessary condition in the politics of a good society.31 Or, as an early twentieth-century populist rephrased it, "Raise less corn and more h.e.l.l."

That contrast between the leisured and the leisureless was literally written into the Const.i.tution. In 1787 many of the delegates to the Const.i.tutional Convention "had time" for politics because they owned slaves whose labor freed their masters for political activity. No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper helped to write the Const.i.tution.

The "fugitive democracy" referred to earlier can be seen as the form of political expression of the leisureless. That politics of protest appeared in prerevolutionary America, where the politically excluded irrupted periodically and took to the streets or relied upon improvised organizations to denounce political decisions in which their interests and views were unrepresented. There was no single ma.s.s, no one demos, only episodic actions. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a fragmented demos, frustrated by the political system devised by the Founders, retained the practice of fugitive democracy and irruptive politics. Jacksonian democrats succeeded in electing their man and gaining a foothold in the system of federal offices; abolitionist forces agitated for the elimination of slavery; women pressed for the right to partic.i.p.ate in political life; trade unions were established to protect workers against employers who were often backed by governmental power; gra.s.sroots populists mounted a flurry of protests attacking the power of railroad owners and pressuring legislators to control railroad rates; early twentieth-century Progressives campaigned successfully for government regulation of the economic power of large monopolies; in the 1950s and 1960s African Americans took to the streets and eventually succeeded in ending racial segregation, vigilante justice, and political exclusion; and throughout the 1960s spontaneous movements arose to protest the Vietnam War, racism, s.e.xism, environmental degradation, and corporate power, not least for the latter's influence over higher education.32

X.

Does a demos have a future in the age of globalization, instant communication networks, and fluid borders? Is the notion of "a" demos as a single, compact body with a "will" and an ident.i.ty that persists over time at all possible or even a coherent notion in the age of the political bloggers? Is there time for a more authentic politics, more reflective of the pluralistic character of reality?

Those fugitive moments when the demos acted, challenging the structure of power, even influencing it, were typically the initiatives of a fraction, not of a collective whole. Such holistic notions as "We, the People" are the remains of a day when the "people" implied the vast majority of persons and the reality of a common pariah status: they were all excluded from politics. As the barriers to partic.i.p.ation were gradually lowered and citizenship opened to all adults, what stood exposed, however, was not a compact body of citizens but the reality of a society fragmented-first, by economic interests, occupations, and social cla.s.ses, each of which could be almost endlessly subdivided; and, second, by cultural ident.i.ties that resisted absorption. There were small manufacturers and big ones; manufacturers who produced for a local market and those who relied on exports; and so on for virtually every industry. Comparable divisions existed among workers and farmers. Later cultural fault lines were articulated and organized for political purposes: race, ethnicity, gender, s.e.xual preference, and religious allegiance. One result was that notions and aspirations reflective of the simpler divisions of an earlier age-common good, general interest, the good of the whole-appeared as problematical as the ideal of demotic solidarity and as elusive as the values of commonality.

The numerous divisions and conflicting interests of contemporary society that make it difficult to muster a coherent majority appear a striking confirmation of the prescience of James Madison's argument in the tenth Federalist. Madison's essay is worth recalling, not only because conservative writers and politicians treat it as const.i.tutional gospel, and not only because Plato's antidemocratic argument resurfaces in it, but also because it reveals the conception of a const.i.tution designed to frustrate the politics of commonality.

Bearing in mind Plato's insistence that political power had to be kept out of the reaches of those most closely in contact with the grubby realities of everyday existence and most p.r.o.ne to irrationality, Madison claimed that a basic reason for the weakness of the central government under the Articles of Confederation, and a major argument for a new const.i.tution, was the domination of politics by "interests" and "factions." These he defined as either "a majority or minority" united by a "common impulse of pa.s.sion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."33 Madison's defense of the proposed const.i.tution was not a call for the extirpation of factions or for their regulation. Rather he argued that factions and interests were the inevitable consequence of a free society. The challenge was to devise a system that would make it difficult politically for a majority of interests to coalesce or, failing that, to control all branches of government.

But if, for the sake of argument, we claim that Madison's "factions" are potentially the stuff by which diverse "fugitives" form a momentary but authentic, rather than a tyrannical, majority, then the true target of his attempt to thwart majority rule was not the threat of a numerical majority but that of a heterogeneous movement aimed at redressing real political and economic inequalities. Accordingly, Madison traced the immediate origins of different interests of society to the "different and unequal" abilities in "acquiring property." From these differences in abilities there emerged diverse forms of property and "different degrees" of acc.u.mulation. These differences and inequalities shaped the views of their owners "concerning religion" and "government" and led to "different interests and parties" and "mutual animosities." "But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property." The eradication of these differences, Madison argued, would be impossible without destroying liberty; hence "the first object of Government" should be "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property."34 Thus he posed inequality as both reality and ideal against the authenticity of equality.

Madison's portrayal of democracy's politics as br.i.m.m.i.n.g with "pa.s.sions," "animosities," ideological and religious "zeal" and as essentially irrational was meant as a warning about the dangers of popular rule and as a preliminary to showing that the proposed new const.i.tutional system would simultaneously establish safeguards against it while protecting economic inequalities.35 But if we ask what kind of politics is being established and what kind is being discouraged, the conclusion might well be that Madison, who is usually regarded as the "father of the Const.i.tution," was bent on creating an artificial politics, the residue left after the authentic politics of popular grievance had been hamstrung by checks and balances. The greatest source of danger to a free government, he argued, was a majority faction's gaining control of governmental power; that was most likely to occur when the society was governed by a "democracy," a system based upon majority rule. Since the revolution of 1776 had depended upon popular partic.i.p.ation and as a result aroused democratic hopes, political expediency dictated that democratic impulses be controlled rather than suppressed. In short, how to manage democracy, or how to exploit division and thereby dilute commonality?

The solution required identifying the conditions for an antimajoritarian republic, for nullifying the single most important power element of democracy, not sheer numbers but differences that might discover their commonality. The solution required an expanded society where the geography of huge distances combined with "a greater number of citizens" and "a greater variety of parties and interests" would render it "less probable" that "an unjust and interested majority" or a single "religious sect" or "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project . . . [could] pervade the whole body of the Union."36 The political mobilization of "rage" or popular irrationality in pursuit of "improper or wicked project[s]" was thus what the new system was designed to prevent. What Madison described as "rage" would probably have been described by the enrage as protesting the actualities of economic hardship and political exclusion. The obvious instrument that, potentially, could express popular grievances was the legislature, the inst.i.tution that stood closer to the people and was hence the more dangerous.

If, as Madison claimed, the legislature "is every where extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex,"37 how could the legislature as well as other governmental bodies be prevented from committing acts of demotic willfulness? Madison's answer was to superimpose capitalism's principle of market behavior upon the political system, the principle that operated in "private as well as public affairs." Arrange the const.i.tution to imitate an economy so that the various offices "may be a check on the other; that the private interest of every individual may be a centinel over the public rights."38 Thus Madison's plan blocked popular irrationality and its misguided view of self-interest, and played off against each other the self-interest of the various government officials; the problem remained that the rationality essential to governing and policy making appeared to have been replaced by, or at least subordinated to, self-interest. Accepting explicitly that all men were driven to act by and for self-interest meant rejecting the ideal of disinterestedness a.s.sociated with Plato's guardian cla.s.s. The latter l.u.s.ted after knowledge, not political power, and, indeed, had to be dragged into fulfilling their public duties, and then only for a limited period.

Madison appeared to argue that the proposed const.i.tution would not depend upon a disinterested elite. Instead its elaborate checks and balances and the separation of powers would provide a systemic restraint, a mechanistic kind of reason, "a machine that would go of itself."39 "You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to controul itself."40 Hamilton went beyond Madison's negativism and sketched the outlines of an elite that would supply the skills needed for an active state. Writing in Federalist No. 35, he indicated from what quarters a guardian cla.s.s characterized by a certain higher kind of reason could be recruited: "land-holders, merchants, and men of the learned professions," whose very "situations" required them to acquire "extensive inquiry and information," even "a thorough knowledge of the principles of political economy." Hamilton concluded: "The man who understands those principles best will be least likely to resort to oppressive expedients, or to sacrifice any particular cla.s.s of citizens to the procurement of revenue."41 In the fifteenth Federalist Hamilton had introduced a specifically political element to the formulation when he referred to "knowledge of national circ.u.mstances and reasons of state which is essential to a right judgment."42 Thus elite reason was represented by those with a drive for acquisition, acc.u.mulation, and exploitation leading to wealth and power, the modern reality principles for a political society conceived as a political economy.

These qualities and cla.s.ses were incorporated into Hamilton's design for a powerful executive who was clearly intended to dominate a system designed to control populist politics and to promote economic development. That role was to be facilitated by the relative isolation of the president from the citizenry. As a single official the president would provide the "energy" and direction that a numerous and divided Congress could not. If Madisonian checks and balances and the system's political economy of conflicting interests were designed to prevent concerted action by a demos, the Hamiltonian executive was conceived for action. "Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterise the proceedings of one man," he explained, but not of a legislature. Moreover, the fact that the president was not directly elected by the citizenry afforded him independence. He would not have to bend "to every sudden breese [sic] of pa.s.sion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men" who "flatter their prejudices to betray their interests." When the people misunderstood their own true interests, it was "the duty" of their "guardians to withstand the temporary delusion."43 Thus in the new system the irrationality of the "mult.i.tude" was to be checked by the Madisonian devices that would, at the same time, allow sufficient leeway for rational governance by the new "guardians": an elite of planters and successful business and professional men who could be relied upon to withstand the gusts of demotic irrationality while developing and expanding the new system of power. Elite reason possessed the quality of being able to deal with power on an extended or national scale, and to devise the means of achieving expansive ends.

There was a further, darker side to the exploitative rationality of the republican elite, an "Alcibiades factor." This was the driving force of the quest for public recognition and distinction-in short, for the sort of fame a.s.sociated with the exercise of great power over the lives of those who had little or no power. It was suggested in a comment by Hamilton when he defended the const.i.tutional principle of no term limits on any of the branches of government. He imagines the frustrations of those who would be compelled to relinquish power and office.

An ambitious man . . . when he found himself seated on the summit of his country's honors, when he looked forward to the time at which he must descend from the exalted eminence forever; and reflected that no exertion of merit on his part could save him from the unwelcome reverse: Such a man, in such a situation would be much more violently tempted to embrace a favorable conjuncture for attempting the prolongation of his power, at every personal hazard, than if he had the probability of answering the same end by doing his duty.

Such men, Hamilton warned, might end by haunting the republic, "wandering among the people like discontented ghosts."44 Denied power, elite rationality threatens to turn into irrationality with a vengeance.

XI.

In order to suggest what is at stake in the gathering tendencies toward inverted totalitarianism, I want to recall a development that occurred broadly in sixteenth-century England and which historians refer to as the "enclosure movement." By custom some land was designated "commons" or "open fields" to indicate that it was not owned by particular individuals but could be tilled or otherwise used by the local populace. However, wealthy men and n.o.bles proceeded to erect hedges around parts of the common and, in effect, to appropriate it and exclude the general, and typically poorer, population.45 What had been common was now privatized.

Recall that for centuries politics, too, had been "enclosed," and that the demotic "moments" represented attempts to open it up, to make it, as it were, public land, devoted to common purposes. In recent decades, however, there has been a steady and relentless effort to reverse "common" gains, to privatize public functions, notably education, welfare programs, administration of prisons, military operations, postal services, even s.p.a.ce travel. In addition to the strong push toward privatizing Social Security, there are persistent efforts to privatize public lands or exploit their resources. Most instances of privatization reverse achievements that had originally been gained in the face of determined opposition from the very forces now operating or administering them. The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.

It is all too evident that political campaigns, elections, legislation, and even judgeships have become so dependent on private funds, especially from wealthy and corporate donors, that our politics, too, is being enclosed and the citizenry largely excluded. The tragedy is that social programs, government regulation of corporate excesses, environmental safeguards, and public education were commonalities won by dint of prolonged struggles against powerful resistance; the gains encouraged hope that democratic goals, reflecting the actualities of everyday life, were achievable.

In the United States the late twentieth-century elites shaped a politics and culture by which the stunting of popular rationality became an art form devised to solve the problem created by the admission of the demos into political life and the comparatively high levels of popular partic.i.p.ation in electoral politics around the turn of the last century. The aim was a new kind of electorate, a hybrid creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and popular fantasies of the miraculous. It was no leap of faith from the camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the twentieth to the politically savvy televangelist of the twenty-first century megachurch.

In a world where the incredible has become ba.n.a.l, public rationality is overmatched. In 2006, two years after the lie of Saddam's WMDs had been exposed, the percentage of Americans who continued to believe that there were such weapons in Iraq increased from 35 to 50, and a near majority believed in links between Saddam and al Qaeda, lack of evidence notwithstanding.

The credulousness that displaces public rationality tends to relax elite rationality so that elites are tempted by grandiose objectives and unscrupulous means. The mayhem depicted on screens certainly worked not to deter but to invite official forbearance, even approval, for torture, that is, for ignoring normal practice. The temptation of "shock and awe," of actually employing weapons of ma.s.s destruction, seems not to deter elites or to violate the sensibilities of citizens conditioned to the violence in most action movies; contemporary Baghdad seems just another cinematic episode in a long-run series.46 The sense of proportion needed by those with immense powers at their disposal is sadly lacking, as when a secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, demanded of then Chief of Staff General Powell: with all of those troops and arms at your disposal, why not use them?

How can elite calculation promote demotic irrationality that then feeds elite miscalculation? How are elites able to manipulate the demos, shape it into an irrational electorate, and then capitalize on it? The answer to both questions is this: by turning Madison's theory of interests on its head and constructing artificial majorities. Instead of discouraging "factions" from forming a majority, elites temporarily a.s.semble or rally diverse interests without integrating them. Instead of seeking ways to block the coalescence of diverse interests, they employ the strategy of "targeting" them with a "message." That message, without necessarily promising to bestow the specific benefits the group might want, appeals to some broad "value"-for instance, a blue-collar "Reagan Democrat" might be attracted by appeals to patriotism that are, at the same time, silent about promoting labor's right to organize.

Thus elites apply a certain type of instrumental or tactical rationality in devising means, including lies (Swift boat ads), to achieve a given end (electoral support). In the course of doing so, they nourish a public discourse of irrationality. Appeals to patriotism or religious faith are invoked because their status lends them the aura of the unarguable. The consequences of blinkered support are not limited to the more specific objectives that patriotism or religious fervor enables the leaders to pursue, but recoil on the decision-makers. When whipped up, as in the calculations after 9/11, patriotism and millenarianism can tempt leaders to undertake adventures that they might otherwise abandon for lack of popular enthusiasm. Thus what begins as rational calculation about voting behavior eventuates in both an irrational citizenry and the compilation by "the best and the brightest" of an alarming record of irrational decisions, a Vietnam, a Lebanon (1982), or an Iraq.47 A paradox: in matters of foreign and military policy the demos is said to lack the knowledge, experience, and a.n.a.lytic ability to make rational judgments, yet when they have their attention directed upon national and international problems or crises, they are encouraged to respond viscerally to appeals to patriotism, nationalism, and political evangelism. These forms of collective self-righteousness serve as blinders to the consequences, some horrendous and grossly immoral, of its support. The demos becomes at once complicit and irrational.

XII.

In the summer of 2007, as the military and political situation of Iraq steadily worsened, popular support of President Bush sank to its lowest levels. Unlike the cla.s.sical totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Mussolini-which were toppled by military defeat and, most crucially, vanished shortly thereafter, leaving few traces-inverted totalitarianism will likely survive military defeat and public scorn of its leader. The system is not dependent upon his particular persona. That the system will survive his retirement, would survive even if the Democrats were to become the majority party in control of both the presidency and Congress, something that has not occurred since the Carter administration. Consequently, the fixation upon Bush obscures the real problem. The political role of corporate power, the corruption of the political and representative processes by the lobbying industry, the expansion of executive power at the expense of const.i.tutional limitations, and the degradation of political dialogue promoted by the media are the basics of the system, not excrescences upon it. The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circ.u.mstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform. In the last a.n.a.lysis the much-lauded stability and conservatism of the American system owe nothing to lofty ideals, and everything to the irrefutable fact that it is shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors. When a minimum of a million dollars is required of House candidates and elected judges, and when patriotism is for the draft-free to extol and for the ordinary citizen to serve, in such times it is a simple act of bad faith to claim that politics-as-we-now-know-it can miraculously cure the evils which are essential to its very existence.

XIII.

The best hope for a democratic revival is to make use of the experience represented by the demos and by fugitive democracy, thereby identifying promising sites for a democratic revival. An essential preliminary is to distinguish popular from elite-managed democracy.

How are the two distinguished by the characteristic political disposition of each governing their approaches to the world of human and other natural beings, and to the natural world? We might put it as the difference between a commonality and an economic polity, between managing a society and its ecology in terms of the common good and subordinating the political system to economic criteria-for example, being driven by the possible effects of a political decision on the sensibilities of "financial markets."

The inst.i.tution that provides a model for the economic polity is, appropriately, the free market. It has as its motor principle individual self-interest and its variant, the national interest. Accordingly, no one excepting the deluded, and no nation excepting one led by starry-eyed idealists, is a.s.sumed to act disinterestedly to promote the interests of others. In contrast, democracy's idea is based on a culture that encourages members to join in common endeavors, not as a flagellating form of self-denial but as the means of taking care of a specific and concrete part of the world and of its life-forms. At stake are not only the natural environment but inst.i.tutional and especially democratic inst.i.tutions that, too, need tending.48 It is not solely a question of what kind of physical environment we leave to those who follow, but of what will be the condition of the political inst.i.tutions and the Const.i.tution that later generations inherit.

Commonality stands for the idea that the care and fate of the polity are of common concern; that we are all involved because we are all implicated in the actions and decisions which are justified in our name. What makes political power "political" is that it is made possible by the contributions and sacrifices of many. The perfect example of the difference between the politics of democratic commonality and corporate politics is represented by the contrast between the present Social Security system and the proposed alternative of a system based on private investment accounts. Under the current system one generation contributes to the support of another, so that the program becomes a shared endeavor resulting in a common good. Under the proposed replacement each would be on his or her own; commonality would be lost and inequality promoted. That contrast, between self-interest and commonality of concerns, involves contrasting mentalities, each with its own form of rationality; one is exploitative, the other protective.

To examine both the fugitive character of the modern demos and its form of rationality, consider how a citizenry materialized in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. That response was a political act on behalf of commonality. While the administration's vaunted "Homeland Security" agencies and highly disciplined White House floundered, there was a spontaneous outpouring of aid, financial and material, from ordinary citizens, civic and religious groups, and local governments from all parts of the nation. It was as though the United States could express democracy only by bypa.s.sing a national government preoccupied with distant fantasies of being democracy's agent to the world.49 In other words, the effectiveness of demotic action can go beyond the local when it can empathize. The fact that New Orleans and parts of Mississippi were in dire need of the necessities of life-food, shelter, clothing, medical a.s.sistance, and the like-was something that ordinary Americans elsewhere could spontaneously understand.

The survival and flourishing of democracy depends, in the first instance, upon the "people" 's changing themselves, sloughing off their political pa.s.sivity and, instead, acquiring some of the characteristics of a demos. That means creating themselves, coming-into-being by virtue of their own actions. While it cannot be emphasized too strongly that democracy requires supporting conditions-social, economic, and educational-the democratization of politics remains merely formal without the democratization of the self. Democratization is not about being "left alone," but about becoming a self that sees the values of common involvements and endeavors and finds in them a source of self-fulfillment. Transformation is not a rarity but happens all the time. Generic high school students can, before long, become principled lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, even MBAs who learn to behave, think, and speak according to ethical and demanding mores.

To become a democrat is to change one's self, to learn how to act collectively, as a demos. It requires that the individual go "public" and thereby help to const.i.tute a "public" and an "open" politics, in principle accessible for all to take part in it, and visible so that all might see or learn about the deliberations and decision making occurring in public agencies and inst.i.tutions.50 Demotic rationality is rooted in a provincialism where commonality is experienced as everyday reality and "civic spirit" is unapologetic. In that setting schools, businesses, law enforcement, the environment, the conduct of public officials, taxation all have an immediacy. That immediacy serves to chasten the actions of those entrusted with power, whether as council members, teachers, business-owners, police, or environmentalists. Inhibition does not preclude fierce controversies, strong grievances, prejudices, animosities, or nasty tactics, but usually they do not result in the victors' pursuing Rove-like fantasies of a "permanent" grip on power. And this because most decisions, rather than being abstract, visibly affect daily life, and hence their consequences can be evaluated by ordinary reasoning tempered by past experience.

Demotic political interventions are, at the national level, necessarily episodic or fugitive. Among other considerations, this means dependence on the political elite and its modes of engaging political matters. What is at stake is a fundamental difference between, on one hand, reason in the service of commonality and, on the other, elite rationality or reason in the service of the economic polity. It is revealing that the Bush administration's negative view of social programs and environmental regulations is that these fall outside the paradigm of profit; or that its favorite form of public spending is for the military, for sheer power; or that it should promote privatization of public functions that transforms a public service into a form of profit making.51 Elite irrationalism is encouraged by the ethos and ethic shared by political and corporate elites. Their mentality is expansionist, opportunistic, and, above all, exploitative; it exhausts resources-natural, human, public. It is not just the earth's atmosphere that is being destroyed or human beings who are "burned out" at fifty. Public inst.i.tutions are being savaged. A legislature, a court, a system of law, a civil service are the equivalent of a public ecology and, like the natural world, an inheritance to be cared for and pa.s.sed on. They can easily be "used up" by, for example, corruption, partisanship in the wrong places, denigration of public servants, dismissal of scientific evidence and the reports of whistle-blowers, systematic lying to the public, and the stretching of legal authority to the point where it sanctions torture.

XIV.

The demos will never dominate politically. In an age where ident.i.ties are potentially plural and changing, a unified demos is no longer possible, or even desirable: instead of a demos, democratic citizenries. Democratic political consciousness, while it may emerge anywhere at any time, is most likely to be nurtured in local, small-scale settings, where both the negative consequences of political powerlessness and the positive possibilities of political involvement seem most evident. Further, a vital local democracy can help to bridge the inevitable distance between representative government and its const.i.tuencies. There is a genuinely valuable contribution which democracy can make to national politics, but it is dependent upon a politics that is rooted locally, experienced daily, and practiced regularly, not just mobilized spasmodically.

Democratic experience begins at the local level, but a democratic citizenry should not accept city limits as its political horizon. A princ.i.p.al reason is that the modern citizenry has needs which exceed local resources (e.g., enforcement of environmental standards) and can be addressed only by means of state power.

While the project of reinvigorating democracy may strike the reader as utopian, it requires an accompanying, even more utopian project: to encourage and nurture a counterelite of democratic public servants. The ideal is not of neutral, "above politics" technocrats who would service any master. Ideally a public servant of democracy would combine knowledge and skill with a commitment to promoting and defending democratic values, lessening the inequities in our society, and protecting the environment. For decades that ideal has been the target of corporate-inspired attacks on "government bureaucrats" aimed at preventing a revival of effective regulation of corporate power and of social democracy.

A democratic counterelite would not consist solely of government workers. In fact such a corps already exists among the numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to environmental conservation, famine relief, human rights, AIDS prevention, and other likeminded endeavors. A crucial element in these efforts is that solutions are typically aimed at the local level and at encouraging the local populations to take responsibility for their own well-being.

As I have argued earlier, the local character of democracy can provide a crucial reality check on the conduct of national politics and governance, perhaps even inhibit the elite's temptation to foreign adventures. But that will require serious changes in the quality of public discussion, which, in turn, would depend upon the reclamation of public ownership of the airwaves and encouragement of noncommercial broadcasting. This contemporary version of the old struggle between "enclosure" and the "commons," between exploitation and commonality, pretty much sums up the stakes: not what new powers we can bring into the world, but what hard-won practices we can prevent from disappearing.

Notes.

PREFACE.

1. There are numerous instances, such as in the practice of torture or of elevating political or ideological considerations to limit or override scientific findings (e.g., in the areas of birth control, stem cell research, and environmental pollution), wherein the Bush administration approximates totalitarian practice. Throughout this volume I try to avoid the mistake of claiming that in a particular matter inverted totalitarianism "subst.i.tutes" one of its policies for a particular policy of the n.a.z.is-for example, racism. That would be to presuppose that inverted totalitarianism and cla.s.sical totalitarianism have the same structures. My point is that they do not. For a discussion of these problems, see Anson Rabinbach, "Moments of Totalitarianism," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 72100.

2. Consider the Internet. It is touted as a revolutionary development for promoting popular political partic.i.p.ation and providing for "democratic input." But, as recent disclosures demonstrate, it also allows for expanded governmental surveillance of the opinions and actions (e.g., financial transactions) of citizens.

PREVIEW.

1. Cited in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 19331939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 183.

2. National Security Strategy of the United States,, sec. 1, pp. 34. Hereafter NSS. I have used the text from nytimes.com of Sept. 20, 2002. This doc.u.ment was drawn up by the National Security Council for transmission to Congress as "a declaration of the Administration's policy" and released in September 2002.

3. Quoted in Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

CHAPTER ONE.

MYTH IN THE MAKING.

1. New York Times, September 12, 2003, A-19.

2. Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 2.

3. According to the 9/11 commission's report, the White House was originally on the list but was later omitted for reasons that are not clear.

4. According to one survey 74 percent of the TV coverage of 9/11 was "all" or "mostly pro-U.S.," while 7 percent dissented "all" or "mostly." Cited in Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 143.

5. After Giuliani completed his term, he became an entrepreneur whose business advised governments and corporations on the arts of leadership under conditions of extreme stress. In 2007 he announced his presidential candidacy and indicated that his actions in the aftermath of 9/11 would be his major qualification.

6. A notable fact about the contemporary political climate and its widespread fear is that when some striking event occurs, such as the power failure of August 14, 2003, when several of the northeastern states and parts of Canada were blacked out, the first response of authorities was to rea.s.sure the public that it was not the result of a terrorist attack. Yet a few weeks later, and a few weeks before the anniversary of 9/11, officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the body that had administered the World Trade Center) released new audiotapes of the voices of victims trapped in the Twin Towers, thus ensuring that the events would remain fresh in the public memory.

7. New York Times, September 10, 2003, A-11.

8. The phrase "holy politics" was used by an English divine, Richard Baxter, during the seventeenth-century civil wars.

9. Subsequently the families of the victims were awarded sums equivalent to their expected earnings had they survived. Even death has a salary scale. Meanwhile, the police and firefighters whose heroism was praised to the skies at the time were later unable to gain the wage increase they had bargained for prior to 9/11.

10. At the memorial service commemorating the second anniversary of those killed at the Pentagon, the director of the FBI read this from Ephesians 6:1218: "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." Quoted in New York Times, September 12, 2003, A-19.

11. A cla.s.sic example is the New York Times 's "public editor," the self-described "readers' representative." He characterizes himself as "a registered Democrat but notably to the right of my fellow Democrats on Manhattan's Upper West Side." He declares he can be located between the "left" of the Times 's editorial page and the "right" of William Safire's "right." "But," he declares audaciously, "on some issues I veer from the noncommittal middle" to become "an absolutist on free trade and free speech and a supporter of gay rights and abortion rights." He thinks it "unbecoming" for the rich to "whine about high taxes" and "inconsistent for advocates of human rights to oppose all American military action." He prefers "exterminating rats" to reading a book by "either Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore."

12. New York Times, December 28, 1993, A-4.

13. Quoted in David Sanger, "U.S. Goal Seems Clear and the Team Complete," New York Times, February 13, 2002, A-14.