Democracy Incorporated Part 18

CHAPTER SIX.

THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFORMATION.

1. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 160.

2. Edward S. Corwin's "The Const.i.tution and What It Means Today", rev. Harold W. Chase and Craig R. Ducat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 106.

3. See Niccol Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), bk. 2, chaps. 4, 19; The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Poc.o.c.k (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 32025.

4. The Greek and Roman political theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, were aware of the existence of contemporary empires, yet they ignored them in their cla.s.sification of types of political regimes.

5. New York Times, April 19, 2003, A-3.

6. For an engrossing account see Toobin, Too Close to Call.

7. According to Toobin, ibid., 19394, President Clinton wanted Gore to urge street demonstrations, but the latter chose not to.

8. Ironically, while the Republicans constantly attack the Democrats for their close a.s.sociation with Hollywood celebrities, it is the Republican presidents who emulate the action-heroes of the movies.

9. New York Times, June 9, 1991.

10. The resolution required that the president consult with Congress "in every possible instance" before committing forces; further, Congress, by a concurrent resolution, could direct the president to remove forces already engaged abroad if there had been no declaration of war by Congress or authorizing statute. I have borrowed from the account given in Edward S. Corwin's "The Const.i.tution and What It Means Today", 10810.

11. On the n.a.z.i a.s.sault on democracy and const.i.tutionalism see Bracher, The German Dictatorship, chaps. 35; Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, chaps. 45; Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, chaps. 45.

12. See Corwin, Total War and the Const.i.tution.

13. Ibid., 8.

14. At this writing American generals and civilian officials have stated that the occupation of Iraq may require that the United States remain in control for up to five years. The continuing Iraqi resistance and daily American casualties suggest that the second Gulf War, if only of a guerrilla type, will be a prolonged one.

15. During the preemptive war against Iraq, television and newspaper photographers were prohibited from taking pictures of the caskets of American soldiers at funeral ceremonies on military bases.

16. A consulting business (Frank N. Magid a.s.sociates) that advised the major news media about commercial prospects provided a survey for its clients showing that war protests registered last of all topics tested among 6,400 viewers nationwide. See Frank Rich, "Happy Talk News Covers a War," New York Times, July 18, 2004.

17. Secret tribunals outside the legal structure were an important fixture of n.a.z.i rule. See Bracher, The German Dictatorship, 210, 213, 263, 351, 352, 359, 364, 418.

18. One should not forget that n.a.z.i success in these elections was facilitated by violence against rival parties, especially against the Communists and Social Democrats. See ibid., 178 ff.

19. Jonathan Weisman, "Study: Bush Tax Cuts Add to Middle-Cla.s.s Burden," Washington Post, as reprinted in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 13, 2004, A-7. See also David Cay Johnson, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich-and Cheat Everybody Else (New York: Portfolio, 2004).

20. One notorious example was the secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and representatives of various energy corporations. Every effort to force the divulgence of the ident.i.ty of the partic.i.p.ants was rebuffed on the grounds of "executive privilege." Court decisions upheld the Cheney position.

21. See "GM Thrives in China with Small Thrifty Van," New York Times, August 9, 2005, A-1.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

THE DYNAMICS OF THE ARCHAIC.

1. Samuel Huntington, "Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite," The National Interest, November, 2002, 16.

2. Cited in Charles Marsh, "Wayward Christian Soldiers," New York Times, January 20, 2006, A-19.

3. Cited by Nicholas D. Kristof, "Believe It, or Not," New York Times, August 15, 2003, A-29. Kristof also notes that among non-Christians in the United States 47 percent also believe in the Virgin Birth.

4. Certainly not all, or even the vast majority, of evangelicals and fundamentalists are seriously involved in politics. Many scrupulously avoid political engagement and many are involved in social programs that benefit the poor. It is a matter of dispute as to whether their charitable activities are ever separated from proselytizing.

5. The quotation is the t.i.tle of a book by Falwell. Cited by Marsh, "Wayward Christian Soldiers," A-19.

6. For a study of the salvational and millenarian elements in n.a.z.i ideology and their influence in the Weimar period, see David Redles, Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

7. The line is from the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppenheimer had read in the original Sanskrit.

8. For details on the historical formation of fundamentalist notions of "inerrancy" and "the Last Days" in the United States, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 18701925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 4952, 54, 5657, 1078.

9. New York Times, September 11, 2003, A-1. It is worth recalling that fundamentalism in the United States is also distinguished by its lack of interest in social programs. This att.i.tude dates back to the first part of the twentieth century, when the forerunners of the current fundamentalists broke away in protest over attempts to develop a "social gospel" attuned to the problems of industrialism. In contrast, evangelical leaders are strong defenders of capitalism. One of the notable Washington collaborations is that between evangelicals and the radically antigovernment (and politically well connected) Norquist Americans for Tax Reform organization. See Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 90 ff.

10. Cited by Nicholas D. Kristof, "The G.o.d Gulf," New York Times, January 7, 2004, A-25.

11. The exceptions were Heidegger and Husserl. See Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See the essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy."

12. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), especially chaps. 2 and 7.

13. See my essay, "America's Civil Religion," democracy 2, no. 2 (April 1982); 717. For historical background, see Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Cla.s.sical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), chaps. 89.

14. For the background to the idea of republicanism, see J.G.A. Poc.o.c.k's cla.s.sic The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and the fine studies by Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984). See also Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 17761787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), especially chaps. 2, 3. and 11.

15. Still suggestive is Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, 2nd ed. (Boston: Da Capo, 2001).

16. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:454, 456.

17. I do not want to be understood as a.s.suming that in the distant or recent past the United States was in possession of a more or less ideal system and that it has suddenly been hijacked by right-wing fanatics. Our system has always been a work in progress and a contested terrain. We need only recall that "democracy" was not in favor among many of our Founding Fathers; that the original Const.i.tution explicitly accepted slavery and did not include a bill of rights.

18. Cited in Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: Norton, 2003), 21011.

19. The cla.s.sic statement of this view is Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber, 12956.

20. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. 2; J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper, 1956), especially 65 ff.

21. See Sheldon Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest (San Francisco: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

22. In the nineteenth century there were several proposals for subst.i.tuting science for religion as the basis of society, the most notable being that of Auguste Comte.

23. It is relevant in this connection that the iconic place of Leo Strauss in the formative thinking of the neocons means the adulation of a thinker notoriously hostile to modern science. Strauss's antiscience teaching is strongly evident in Alan Bloom's The Closing of the Modern Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987): Bloom's aim is exactly what the t.i.tle says, but the book, while ostensibly an attack on "modern" culture for being "closed," is actually a strategy for recommending the teachings of a closed mind, i.e., Strauss's.

24. Hobbes, Leviathan, 237.

25. For the contribution to democracy of evangelicals and Pentecostals generally, see Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 2069.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE POLITICS OF SUPERPOWER: MANAGED DEMOCRACY.

1. "I.R.S. Offers Amnesty to Companies That Admit Tax Indiscretions," New York Times, December 26, 2001, C-1.

2. See the thoughtful and engaging study by Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

3. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1973), 135, 14648.

4. Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 15, 20, 2627.

5. "Spy Agencies Told to Bolster 'The Growth of Democracy,' " New York Times, October 27, 2005, A-10.

6. One of the historical ironies of the current crusade for democracy is that during the 1940s and 1950s American officials, and especially Republican politicians, made a ritual of protesting the presence of agents and spies of communist Russia who were "interfering in the internal affairs" of our country. Today the American government subsidizes the efforts of NGOs to change the internal politics of former Soviet republics.

7. These comments are reported by then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. They occurred in November 2002 at a meeting to discuss a second round of tax cuts. See Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O. Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 291.

8. An example: a high-ranking lobbyist of the National a.s.sociation of Manufacturers, one of the most powerful business organizations, was nominated by President Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He was given a payment of $150,000 by the NAM after they learned of his nomination. The CPSC enforces consumer laws that cover many of the NAM's members. Stephen Laboton, "Bush Pick Gets Extra Payment from Old Job," New York Times, May 16, 2007, A-1. A week later, in response to public protests and Democratic criticisms, the nomination was withdrawn.

9. See Kurt Eichenwald, "Even If Heads Roll, Mistrust Will Live On," New York Times, October 6, 2002, sec. 3, p. 1, for an account of a series of crimes committed by business executives.

10. See "Military Bra.s.s and Military Contractors' Gold Mine," New York Times, June 29, 2004, C-1.

11. See P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

12. Job training was the motivating concern in President Bush's support for increasing government contributions to two-year community colleges.

13. Cited in Elizabeth b.u.miller, "Bush Rejects Idea of Boycotting Meeting in Russia," New York Times, March 30, 2006, A-10.

14. Cited by Floyd Norris, "Business Ethics and Other Oxymorons," New York Times, April 20 2003, sec. 7, p. 16.

15. See the important article, originally published in the Los Angeles Times, by Abigail Goodman and Nancy Cleeland, "Wal-Mart: Empire Built on Bargains." I have used the reprint in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, December 7, 2003, A-1.

16. See the example of Richard Perle, who combined corporate and government employment simultaneously (Scahill, Blackwater, 3067) and the "deft" travels of Edward C. Aldridge, Jr., between the Pentagon and private aircraft corporations. Leslie Wayne, "Pentagon Bra.s.s and Military Contractors' Gold," New York Times, June 29, 2004, C-1.

17. The New York Times (November 27, 2003, A-1) reported that after the American pharmaceutical industry had succeeded in blocking efforts to control the prices of prescription drugs in the United States, it turned its attention abroad. In trade talks with the Australian government U.S. officials were pressing for the weakening of price controls over prescription drugs. In the Medicare Reform Act of 2003 the administration succeeded in prohibiting the government from negotiating lower drug prices.

18. The Democratic majority elected to Congress in 2006 pa.s.sed a law requiring that the sponsors of earmarks be identified.

19. In preparation for the presidential election of 2004 the Bush campaign established a hierarchy of contributors. Those who succeeded in raising $100,000 in $2,000 individual contributions qualified as "Pioneers," while those who raised $200,000 qualified as "Rangers." The "bundling" of $2,000 contributions was a way of defeating the purpose of the law while observing the letter. It was also a means by which superiors exercised power over those who were called upon to contribute but received little recognition.

20. The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), No. 58, p. 396.

21. New York Times, November 23, 2004, A-1. Paul Wolfowitz, then a.s.sistant secretary of defense during the second Gulf War and reputed neoconservative, offered a revealing contrast between election possibilities. In Serbia, he noted, "communism collapsed with demonstrations on the street, which invested the population with a pride in embracing democracy." In contrast "Iraq has this advantage that we are there, with the coalition [forces], and with an enormous commitment to get it right." New York Times, May 22, 2003, A-16. Thus there is an "advantage" to having democracy imposed by foreign troops rather than being chosen by the "population."

22. Another nice example: in February 2004 the Bush administration decided to give in to pressure by Democrats and agreed to establish an independent inquiry into the "intelligence failures" regarding Saddam Hussein's "weapons of ma.s.s destruction. A day later, having been whitewashed by the Hutton Report absolving it of any attempt to "s.e.x up" intelligence reports to justify its partic.i.p.ation in the Iraqi invasion, the Blair government in Britain announced that it, too, would set up a bipartisan commission to inquire into possible intelligence lapses. But the cat was let out of the bag when the Liberal Democratic Party refused to partic.i.p.ate on the commission because the investigation would focus exclusively on intelligence failures and would not inquire into the government's uses of that intelligence. Both Blair and Bush thus followed the same strategy of ensuring that the focus of investigations be centered upon the CIA, etc., not on the White House. Both the planned independent commission and the commission investigating possible intelligence failures before 9/11 are under specific injunctions not to deliver their reports until after the November presidential election.

23. Noah Feldman, cited by Dilip Hiro, "One Iraqi, One Vote," New York Times, January 27, 2004, op-ed page.

24. Edward N. Luttwak, "Rewarding Terror in Spain," New York Times, March 16, 2004, op-ed page.

25. Trump was replaced by Martha Stewart, fresh from serving a jail term for perjury.

26. The landmarks are the Civil Service Reform Act of 1887 and the Hatch Act of 1934.

27. See Dorothy Samuels, "Golf Anyone? The Movable Feast Called 'Judicial Education,' " New York Times, April 24, 2004, A-24. Between 1992 and 1998 more than a quarter of the federal judiciary, some 230 federal judges, accepted free vacations, thanks to a loophole in the law.

28. See Paul Krugman, "Victors and Spoils," New York Times, November 19, 2002, A-31.

29. It is striking that recent public opinion polls repeatedly confirm that the citizenry's strongest desire is for improvements in health care and education, yet the response from their government is to devise programs, such as the 2004 Medicare reform, that benefit health care corporations rather than the public. Similarly the public has been emphatic in wanting the Social Security system to be preserved, yet the Bush administration responds by proposing privatization, while milking the Social Security Trust Fund in order to meet the deficits created by the administration's tax cuts and escalating military expenditures.

30. For details, see the study by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).