Democracy Incorporated Part 7

A half century ago the work of scientists was idealized. Typically science was depicted almost monastically, as pursued within a "community of scientists" that constrained their behavior in accordance with an unwritten code of conduct for protecting scientific objectivity and integrity.20 Scientists operated outside the marketplace; their autonomy, which was considered to be the necessary condition for scientific honesty, was subsidized by government and universities. Now, however, scientists, have become "incorporated," either as entrepreneurs or as employees in research divisions of corporations and government bureaucracies.21 The integration of science into the culture and practices of corporate and governmental bureaucracies has destroyed the iconic status it enjoyed for more than three centuries, leaving scientists and their findings more vulnerable to political and corporate manipulation and attacks by religious and economic archaists. Once scientists were universally revered as exemplars of independent truth seeking, of knowledge for its own sake, but in recent years they have been accused of fraud, misrepresenting their findings, and other forms of cheating reflective of a highly compet.i.tive, market-oriented culture. More significant, on virtually every major policy issue, from global warming to genetic engineering, apparently reputable scientists can be found appealing to scientific evidence and theories while defending diametrically opposed positions. While some may welcome these revelations for eliminating the last holdout against postmodern subjectivism, there can be little question that they, along with the corporatization of science, further weaken public confidence in the possibility of disinterested policies and public trust in authorities.

Paradoxically, the demystification of science and its incorporation into the power complex have worked to the advantage of religious fundamentalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing throughout much of the twentieth, science was widely regarded as the most powerful alternative system of beliefs that challenged organized religion for hegemony.22 Although the echoes of those controversies can occasionally be heard today in the curriculum battles between "creationists" and "Darwinians," what tends to be obscured is the reversal in influence and popularity of the antagonists since the Scopes trial. Today it is religion, not science, that is in ascendancy, that holds the loyalties of those who "believe."23 The new vogue of "intelligent design" can be interpreted as a modest theology that hopes to capitalize on the vulnerability of contemporary science.

The demotion of science has had severe public consequences. It means that the ideal of a disinterested arbiter, of a forum where partisan claims might be tested "objectively," is as much a relic of the past as is the ideal of an independent judiciary. In its place we have "virtual reality," imaginary weapons of ma.s.s destruction, democracy as a cover for market forces, an ideological rendering of terrorism that transforms its reality into a theological problem admitting of no solution.

VI.

The end of worship amongst men is power. . . .

But G.o.d has no ends.

-Thomas Hobbes.

How is it possible for corporate power, worldly, cynical, materialistic, not only to coexist alongside evangelical Christianity but to subsist, to be symbiotic with it? How have Christ and Mammon come to cooperate? Several explanations are plausible. One might emphasize the manipulative genius of Republican Party operatives in attracting the loyalty and contributions of both while keeping each compartmentalized from the other. Or, alternatively, one might argue that, far from being p.a.w.ns of the party, religionists are as adept as corporate operatives in exploiting the party for their own ends. Or, again, one might point to examples of how corporations-in the belief that piety helps in producing more loyal, honest, hardworking, and nonunion employees-have become increasingly receptive to religious groups who bring their message to the workplace. Or one might conclude that religious fundamentalists, who tend to believe that all are by nature sinners, can take in stride corporate scandals and political corruption as confirmation of mankind's original nature rather than as an outrage. Similarly one might expect fundamentalists to tolerate capitalism's treatment of workers and resistance to welfare programs, to raising the minimum wage, or to guaranteeing pensions and health care as in keeping with the historical decision of fundamentalists to eschew teaching a social gospel out of concern that it might distract people from focusing on salvation. There is a tuneless harmony between, on the one hand, the evangelical belief that this life is destined to pa.s.s away and, on the other, industrial practices that threaten to exhaust finite resources while polluting the earth and atmosphere.

While these and other tactical explanations are suggestive, and even true to some extent, they do not do justice to the contradictions between corporate power and evangelical beliefs, to the tension between the materialistic and worldly and the faith-driven, otherworldly. I want to suggest that the alliance between power and faith results because each needs the other, desperately.

To the ancient philosopher who exclaimed, "Whirl is King," all is flux and change, another, Herac.l.i.tus, responded, "Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one." If we think of the world as being continuously redefined by contemporary science, technology, corporate capitalism, and its media, it would not be misleading to describe it as a "whirl." Everything seems in flux, from definitions of "family" to specifications of job skills, from the modes of human reproduction to the prospect of s.p.a.ce travel, from the near extinction of manners, propriety, and civil discourse to the endless affronts displayed on TV and the cinema screen, from the frequency with which people change jobs to the frequency with which they change partners. When life is defined by "style" and style by the latest mode of provocativeness, then meaninglessness aptly describes much of contemporary life. Or, if that characterization seems overwrought, try "absurd" or "the permanence of a changing contemporaneity."

Whatever the term, the point is the universally uncertain character of contemporary life. The promise of stability, not simply stability itself, but the promise and a.s.surance of certainty, give the archaic its appeal and make it complementary to the politics of fear and ant.i.terrorism. Yet the fact remains that there is no natural affinity, as distinct from tactical advantage, between the relentless drive for change represented by science, technology, and corporate capitalism, on the one hand, and the reverence for changelessness among those defenders of the Logos, the const.i.tutional and religious fundamentalists. The alliance between the dynamists and the fundamentalists is tactical or expedient rather than a matter of fused ident.i.ties. Corporate ent.i.ties couldn't care less if all evangelicals and fundamentalists were to suffer a crisis of faith and to disappear tomorrow; and an even greater indifference would be found among scientists and technologists. Among the dynamists there is a greater affinity with const.i.tutional than with religious fundamentalists. Corporate power has utterly transformed the const.i.tutional system of the Founders without acknowledging the transformation. If the fundamentalists wish to believe that the corporate donors who subsidize conservative legal foundations are as fervent as they are about an original Const.i.tution, then corporate types are more than ready to indulge the make-believe. Corporate power is more than eager to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of const.i.tutional fundamentalists; it needs a stable legal framework, and for most of two centuries corporate operatives have successfully cultivated accommodating judges and eager lawyers. As long as the courts are prepared to step in when the federal government tries to flex its regulatory powers, corporations will continue to underwrite the Federalist Society.

One practical consideration that causes the corporationists to play along with religious zealots and political doctrinaires is that archaism helps to neutralize the power of the Many. The religious fundamentalists remind the needy that instead of throwing their energies into gaining the transient goods of this world, they should heed Jesus' teaching and concentrate upon the salvation of their souls and the "pearls beyond price" awaiting them in the Kingdom of G.o.d. The const.i.tutional fundamentalists teach the same lesson of quietism but with a different logic. The Const.i.tution, they allege, is one of limited powers, and those powers become especially limited whenever the government "interferes" with property rights in an effort to remedy gross inequities, or threatens the rights of that peculiar species of persons called corporations, a status not mentioned in the "original Const.i.tution."

VII.

There is a complementarity among the republican doctrine of elitism, evangelical notions of an elect, Republican Party elitism, and (as we shall see later) neocon elitism. The elect and the elite, the elected and the elect. The combination is as old as the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans believed in both an elect destined by G.o.d for salvation and an elite destined to govern. When modern-day Republicans invoke the imagery of "a city upon a hill," they may think that they are quoting Ronald Reagan, but historically the author was the first governor of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who a.s.sumed himself to belong to the elect and the elite.

Sadly, the archaists do not temper the dynamists but collude with them. Once upon a time, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Great Awakenings helped to further believers' democratic impulses and to urge them into the forefront of the fight to abolish slavery. Once upon a time, too, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelicals preached a "social gospel" and sided with the poor and the working cla.s.s. Their fate seems intertwined with that of democracy itself.25

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Politics of Superpower:

Managed Democracy.

I.

Tax shelters, many of them illegal, saved big companies

at least $14.7 billion in federal income taxes last year, a

senior Internal Revenue Service official said. . . . Now all

companies are being offered an amnesty in return for confessing

their illegal tax avoidance.

The 95 companies that have already confessed their tax

avoidance strategies . . . shorted the government an

amount equal to a dollar a week for every man, woman

and child in America.

-David Cay Johnson1

Superpower is the union of state and corporation in an age of waning democracy and political illiteracy. This chapter inquires into some of the political changes that are making Superpower and inverted totalitarianism possible and demoting democracy from a formative principle to a largely rhetorical function within an increasingly corrupt political system. The crux of these changes is that corporate power and its culture are no longer external forces that occasionally influence policies and legislation. As these have become integral, so the citizenry has become marginal and democracy more manageable. What follows is an account of these developments.

II.

Superpower has its own "const.i.tution," its own "more perfect union." Unlike the nation's written Const.i.tution, with its emphasis upon checks and balances, limitations upon governmental authority, federalism, and the Bill of Rights, Superpower's unwritten const.i.tution is about powers whose scope and influence derive from available resources, opportunities, and ambitions, rather than legal limits. Its composition is meant for "increase," not constraint.

Superpower's const.i.tution depends upon a symbiotic relation between two elements, one political, the other economic. The first is empire and consists in large measure of military might, of bases scattered throughout the globe, of arms sales, of alliances and treaties with comparatively weak client states. Unlike the Roman Empire, and its extended citizenship, Superpower has only customers and clients, dominated markets instead of incorporated provinces. The second element is the globalizing corporation. It brings to foreign countries economic goods and services as well as the softening power of cultural influences and products.2 As these elements take hold and develop, the "homeland" is transformed, from a self-governing, predominantly inwardlooking political society into a "home base" for international economic and military strategies.

The "dynamic powers" of science, technology, and capital discussed earlier are clearly vital to the imperial reach and the globalizing drive of corporations. They are the basis of the new system of power, replacing the old one and its ideal of a sovereign citizenry. The new const.i.tution conceives politics and governance as a strategy based upon the powers that technology and science (including psychology and the social sciences) have made possible. Exploitation of those powers enables their owners to redefine the citizenry as respondents rather than actors, as objects of manipulation rather than as autonomous.

A distinctive and common feature of organized science, technology, and capital, and of imperial power and the globalizing corporation, is their distance from the experience of ordinary beings. Military and corporate structures are hierarchical, complex, and arcane. Both science and technology employ an esoteric language familiar mainly to the initiates, while military-speak is a language unto itself. Democracy, whose culture extols the common and shared, is alien to all of these practices and their modes of communication.

The politics both of empire and of the globalizing corporation have a special status. In the rhetoric of governmental officials, military spokesmen, corporate executives, and think tank intellectuals imperial and global politics occupy a special plane, that of foreign policy, where, insulated from the pressures and instabilities of domestic politics, problems can be addressed in the language and a.s.sumptions common to experts and elites. Throughout American history political leaders, opinion-makers, and academics have maintained that foreign policy should be out-of-bounds politically, not only to safeguard secrets but to insulate decision-makers from the whims of a democratic citizenry and the distractions of populist politics. Prestigious academics have warned that if foreign policy decisions were made sensitive to public opinion, the result would likely be either indecision or constant "shifting" in response to a whimsical populace.3 A public sage of an earlier era, Walter Lippmann, predicted flatly that if foreign policy were to follow public opinion, the outcome would be "a morbid derangement of the true functions of power" as well as policies "deadly to the very survival of the state and a free society."4 In the Bush administration the doctrine of "reason of state" was not only alive and flourishing but extended to domestic politics. Take the incident in which the vice president secretly invited several executives from the energy industry to formulate the government's energy policy while excluding environmental and public-interest representatives. The vice president then refused to disclose the ident.i.ties of the representatives or the content of their policy proposals. As the elaborate system of wiretapping, secret surveillance, and extreme interrogation techniques suggests, the apparent aim of the administration is to extend the privileged secrecy of foreign policy (arcanae imperii) to domestic affairs. This is consistent with its phobia about leaks to the press and its zeal for stamping doc.u.ments from the distant past as "cla.s.sified," and thus shaping future interpretations of the past. The totalizing implications in the extension of the doctrine of arcanae imperii to include domestic politics are underscored by the government's surveillance of Internet communications; authorities at first claimed that this eavesdopping was restricted to communications directed abroad, but then later admitted that domestic messages were also being monitored.

The insulated status ascribed to imperial affairs, the secrecy and inhibitions beginning to envelop domestic politics and the operations of globalizing corporations have the net result of excluding the public from a deliberative role in each and all of the major preserves of modern power. The demos is free to enjoy the results of its exclusion, but, as in the political process in general, it has no claim to a significant, let alone a controlling, influence. At the same time, the powers that exclude democracy from their counsels are eagerly exporting it. Thus democracy, like empire and globalization, gains a universal status, but what it universalizes is not the practice of self-governing democracy but American power.

Recently the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, announced that a new strategy had been adopted by the Bush administration "to bolster the growth of democracy"; henceforth that goal would rank among the three top missions for American intelligence agencies-just below the war against terrorism and weapons proliferation. The director specified that the agencies' "operators" would "forge relationships with new and incipient democracies" in order to help "strengthen the rule of law and ward off threats to representative government."5 Undercover democracy: one could imagine a day when a grateful democratic movement would express thanks by erecting a monument to the 100,000 spies that the agency claims to employ.6 III.

Haven't we already given money to rich people?

Why are we going to do it again?

-President George W. Bush

Stick to principle, stick to principle.

-Karl Rove, responding

Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the midterm

elections, this is our due.

-Vice President Cheney. also responding7

State power not only relies upon corporate power for the conversion of scientific advances into technological achievements but depends heavily on corporate personnel for policy advice and managerial skills. Consider this postmodern potpourri. Politicians resign in order to accept lucrative corporate positions; corporate executives take leave (typically with "delayed compensation") to run government departments and set policies;8 and high-ranking military officers are hired by corporations, become TV commentators, join faculties, and run for presidential nominations. One consequence is that the political has been managerialized. Politics and elections as well as the operation of governmental departments and agencies now are routinely considered a managerial rather than a political skill. Management is not a neutral notion, however. Its roots are in the business culture, its values shaped by the pressures of a compet.i.tive economy that persistently push the limits of legality and ethical norms. The arrogance that leads corporate executives to violate the law finds its parallel in the arrogance with which Superpower flouts or disregards international norms.9 The consequences are registered in the decline of a public ethic. Disinterestedness has virtually ceased to be celebrated, much less practiced, as a public virtue. Instead it has become a casualty of the process of relentless rationalization and integration. One of the preconditions of disinterestedness, a certain protected isolation, was thought to encourage independence. Ideals such as academic freedom, isolation of the scientist from the marketplace and from politics, the impartial jurist, and the public intellectual (a Walter Lippmann) were valued as especially necessary to the pursuit of truths in matters where interests and pa.s.sions ran strong in society at large. Another casualty: the ideal of a civil service, disinterestedly devoted to the public good and a n.o.ble calling for college graduates. Its place is now occupied either by the "manager" who is equally at home at the Department of Defense, Halliburton, and the Republican National Committee, or by the party apparatchik who is rewarded for loyal service that he is expected to continue to perform, albeit as a public servant. Not coincidentally, generals who later join corporations and corporate executives who take a turn in government have, along with party officials, regularly been charged with corrupt practices.10

IV.

Corporate power depends on the state in innumerable ways: for contracts, subsidies, protection; for promoting opportunities at home and abroad. Beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the relationship between corporate power and state power began to develop beyond one of reciprocal favors or of a revolving door between corporate headquarters and military headquarters. An important fact of contemporary politics is that, while the scope of government regulatory authority has receded, corporate power has increasingly a.s.sumed governmental functions and services, many of which had previously been deemed the special preserve of state power. Corporate expansion extends to military functions, a province once jealously guarded as a state prerogative.11 To the extent that corporation and state are now indissolubly connected, "privatization" becomes normal and state action in defiance of corporate wishes the aberration.

Privatization supplies a major component of managed democracy. By ceding substantive functions once celebrated as populist victories, it diminishes the political and its democratic content. The strategy followed by privatization's advocates is, first, to discredit welfare functions as "socialism" and then either to sell those functions to a private bidder or to privatize a particular program. A traditional governmental function, such as education, is in process of being redefined, from a promise to make education accessible to all to an investment opportunity for venture capital.12 It might seem perverse to warn of the "totalitarian temptation" at a time when the Republican Party-and to a lesser extent, the Democratic-have championed the cause of "smaller government," of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the size of the "bloated bureaucracy" and sharply weakening its regulatory powers. To scoff at the warning would be to miss a main object of managed democracy: the expansion of private (i.e., mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry. These trends are not driven by a desire to reduce control over the populace. Rather they indicate a realization that governance-in the sense of control over the general population and the performance of traditional governmental functions, such as defense, public health measures, a.s.suring the means of communication and transportation, and education-can be accomplished through "private" mechanisms largely divorced from popular accountability and rarely scrutinized for their coerciveness.

The so-called free market is not simply about buyers and sellers, or producers and owners, but about power relationships that are fundamental to the management of democracy. Financial markets are not just about securities but about useful insecurities. These const.i.tute methods of discipline, of reinforcing certain behaviors and discouraging others, of accustoming people to submitting to hierarchies of power, of exploiting the tentative nature of employment-the uncertainty of rewards, pension systems, and health benefits. The union of corporate and state power means that, instead of the illusion of a leaner system of governance, we have the reality of a more extensive, more invasive system than ever before, one removed from democratic influences and hence better able to manage democracy.

V.

We support the election process, we support democracy,