Part 4 (2/2)

-Barry Goldwater.

Weakness is provocative.

-Donald Rumsfeld, ”Rules of Life”

In Western thought the idea of a New World was typically used to support a myth of a fresh beginning, a place of promise, a new birth. As the ”first new nation,” the United States was widely regarded as fulfilling that promise, even though there were several old nations already occupying the land. But today the myth of a ”new world” is not superimposed on an uncharted land, a tabula rasa, or blank tablet, awaiting inscription. Rather the idea is necessarily superimposed on an existing world. To the extent that it envisions a radically changed system, a new world represents a willful act of power, a determination to supersede not an old order-for in postmodernity maturity and old age are unacceptable-but a current one.

The most recent example of this mode of thinking-although it seems long ago-was the celebration of the arrival of a new millennium in 2000. At the time it was widely prophesied that advanced societies were poised at the threshold of a new age of dazzling technological marvels.4 A year later, following September 11, 2001, many public officials and commentators were quick to declare that a different kind of ”new world” had come into being, a world of fears where ”barbarians” were turning sophisticated technologies against the advanced civilization that had invented them. Citizens were told that the destruction of the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon meant as well the destruction of the comforting a.s.sumption of invulnerability that had implicitly underlain American foreign policies and military strategies as well as their own daily lives.5 The most complete statement of the ideology of will-to-power was The National Security Strategy of the United States issued in 2002. In that doc.u.ment the administration declared its intention to reshape the current world and define the new one. ”In the new world we have entered,” it declared grandly, ”the only path to safety is the path of action.”6 Clearly neither politicians nor the news media could truly know that a new world had been born that instant and that an old world had been superseded. Declaring a new world is a positive act canceling an old one and discarding along with it the old restraints and inhibitions upon power. ”If they [Iraq and North Korea] do acquire WMD [weapons of ma.s.s destruction] their weapons will be unusable,” Condoleezza Rice warned, ”because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration”7-the wrath, if not of an angry G.o.d, then of a divinely appointed agent. The United States, the president announced, is the ”greatest force for good on the earth,” and in fighting terrorism the nation is responding to ”a calling from beyond the stars.”8 Terrorism is both a response to empire and the provocation that allows for empire to cease to be ashamed of its ident.i.ty. Under empire the claims of power can be relocated in a context different from the one defined by the traditions and constraints of const.i.tutional government and of democratic politics. Among the first actions of the administration, with the acquiescence of Congress and strong public support, were the creation of a Homeland Security Department, Superpower's super-agency, and pa.s.sage of the Patriot Act, introducing super-citizens to their diminished bill of rights.

These and other actions were responses to 9/11. But they were simultaneously attempts to reshape the existing political system, most notably by enlarging the powers of the executive branch of government, including the military and police functions, while reducing the legal protections of citizens. In the shaping of a fearful new world much would depend on the administration's definition of the enemy, the evidence supporting that definition, and the definition's problematic nature. Definition, evidence, and consequences, however, were to be preceded by the invention of a context consistent with the new world. Following 9/11 and virtually every day thereafter, government announcements and news bulletins sounded a drumbeat, cautioning citizens that a furtive network of fanatical enemies was tirelessly plotting death and destruction-especially for occasions when citizens congregated-and only awaited the opportunity when a free society relaxed its guard.

Accompanying the invention of a new world was the concerted effort to fix in the public mind a certain shapeless character and ident.i.ty to terrorism. The National Security Strategy-more of its doctrine later-declared that terrorism was ”[a] shadowy network of individuals [that] can bring great chaos and suffering to our sh.o.r.es for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technology against us.”9 Thus the diffuse character attributed to terrorism is reproduced in an enveloping atmosphere whose effect is to arouse a primal fear about the precariousness of every moment in daily life, to surround the most taken-for-granted routines with uncertainty. As many commentators have been quick to point out, terrorists do not present the single, determinate threat of an enemy nation-state. Potentially they are everywhere-and nowhere. The amorphous character a.s.signed to the new world of terrorism then justifies enlarging the power of the avenging state both at home and overseas. ”The best way to protect America,” the president claimed, ”is to go on the offensive, and stay on the offensive.”10 Power becomes not only spatially but also temporally limitless.

At the same time, the character of absolute evil a.s.signed to terrorism-of a murderous act without reasonable or just provocation-works toward the same end by allowing the state to cloak its power in innocence.11 In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Americans asked, ”What have we done to deserve this?” The official silence that met the question made plain the obvious answer: Nothing. When a few voices suggested that acts of terrorism had been committed in retaliation for U.S. government actions abroad, the media quickly dismissed the notion as implausible and vaguely unpatriotic. (It was an object lesson in how the system can enforce censors.h.i.+p and stifle opposition without appearing to do so.) Terrorism was made to appear as irrational violence, without apparent cause or reasonable justification. It became stylized as ”threatening,” its intentions unknown until too late. Action in response to it could thereby appear as ”pure,” without ulterior or mixed motives, provoked. An innocence that under normal circ.u.mstances might raise suspicions about motives served to justify extensions of power at home and abroad. In the ponderous summary of one commentator, ”The most carefree and confident empire in history now grimly confronts the question of whether it can escape Rome's ultimate fate.”12 The moment that marked the turning point from the old to the new was not the immediate, horrified response of the citizenry but the astonis.h.i.+ng speed with which the entire nation was to be defined in a single, all-encompa.s.sing purpose. By declaring a war on terrorism, America had, in the pastoral language of its president, found ”its mission and its moment.” In his message urging the expansion of the government's powers under the intrusive Patriot Act, the president turned from his New Testament friendly G.o.d to a.s.sume the role of the Old Testament G.o.d of vengeance and wrath, vowing, ”We will never forget the servants of evil who plotted the attacks and we will never forget those who rejoiced at our grief.”13 ”The struggle against global terrorism,” according to the administration's National Security Strategy (NSS), ”is different from any other war in our history. It will be fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time.” The characteristics of the hastily constructed new world were like terrorism, vague and indeterminate. ”The war against terrorists of global reach,” according to NSS, ”is a global enterprise of uncertain duration.”14 A world where warfare has no boundaries, spatial or temporal, and hence no limits was not the simple product of terrorism but that of its exploitation. ”Progress,” according to NSS, ” will come through the persistent acc.u.mulation of successes-some seen, some unseen.”15 The dark vision of a radically new condition produced a wish, an opportunity, and a justification for converting an event into a permanent crisis. Terrorism, power without boundaries, becomes the template for Superpower; the measureless, the illegitimate, becomes the measure of its counterpart.

To be sure, before September 11 government had, on more than one occasion, manufactured and manipulated fear. This time, however, because of the indefinite spatial and temporal character of terrorism, fear became pervasive and invasive, the rule and no longer the exception, the mockery of FDR's counsel, ”We have nothing to fear except fear itself.” The focus on terrorism elevated fear into a public presence, creating a new atmospherics that could be appealed to and exploited.16 Miraculously, out of the rubble and phoenixlike emerged a stronger state, a ”superpower” or ”empire.”17 Superpower was commonly defined as the capability of a state to project force anywhere in the world and at a time of its own choosing. It might also be described as power that is continually challenging the forbidden as its predestined other. The terrorism being combated by Superpower, while real enough, is one whose image Superpower's representatives have constructed. Superpower's understanding of the requirements of its own powers has been guided by the character it has chosen to bestow upon terrorism. Terrorism repays the mimicry by embracing advanced military technology and countering ”shock and awe” with displays of beheadings on television. Two irreconcilable forms of power, terrorism and Superpower, locked together, each dependent on the other.

No previous administration in American history had demanded such extraordinary powers in order to muster the resources of the nation in pursuit of an enterprise as vaguely defined as ”the war against terrorism” or demanded such an enormous outlay of public funds for a mission whose end seemed far distant and difficult to recognize if and when it might be achieved. World Wars I and II ended conclusively when armistices were negotiated by representatives from both sides. Terrorists, however, are reported as operating a highly decentralized organization-even a.s.suming that they could properly be described as having ”an” organization-making it unlikely that any individual or group could plausibly claim to negotiate on behalf of all terrorists.

Since that September day it is not only the ordinary routines and liberties of citizens that have been changed. The const.i.tutional inst.i.tutions designed to check power-Congress, courts, an opposition political party-swore allegiance to the same ideology of vengeance and enlisted themselves as auxiliaries. Despite some solitary dissident voices, none of these inst.i.tutions attempted consistently to block or resist as the president proceeded to mount an unprovoked invasion of one country and threaten others, nor to question as he and members of his cabinet bullied allies, demanding uncritical support from all nations while proclaiming the right of the United States to walk away from solemn treaty obligations whenever convenient and to undercut the efforts of other nations seeking to develop international inst.i.tutions for curbing wars, genocide, and environmental damage.18 II.

The end of wors.h.i.+p amongst men, is power.

-Thomas Hobbes.

[I]n every Christian commonwealth, the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor.

-Thomas Hobbes.

The new prominence of terror and fear brings to mind Thomas Hobbes, perhaps the first Western political theorist to correlate fear and power and explain how those two elements could be exploited to promote an awesome concentration of state power and authority, and, crucially, how that outcome could be represented as the product of popular consent. It is appropriate that apologists for the Bush administration's imperialistic foreign policy should have suddenly discovered Hobbes's relevance for ”an anarchic world.” According to neoconservative intellectuals, ”The alternative to American leaders.h.i.+p is a chaotic Hobbesian world” where ”there is no authority to thwart aggression, ensure peace and security or enforce international norms.”21 It is striking that, without exception, the neo-Hobbesians have suppressed that half of Hobbes's story which dealt with the domestic implications of his defense of the principle of absolute authority and of the sovereign's role as ”supreme pastor.”

Hobbes asks us to imagine what life would be like in the absence of a strong authority armed with the power to enforce law, administer justice, and keep the peace. He likened that condition to a ”state of nature” in which human beings lived in constant fear of violent death, an unending war of each against all.22 Hobbes's solution to the problem of fear and terror required individuals to agree to establish, and then to obey unconditionally, an absolute power. He named that state ”Leviathan” to emphasize that the price of peace was the invest.i.ture of a power freed from the restraints of other inst.i.tutions such as courts or parliaments. ”There is nothing on earth,” Hobbes wrote, ”to be compared with him.”

Leviathan was the first image of superpower and the first intimation of the kind of privatized citizen congenial with its requirements, the citizen who finds politics a distraction to be avoided, who if denied ”a hand in public business,” remains convinced that taking an active part means ”to hate and be hated,” ”without any benefit,” and ”to neglect the affairs of [his] own family.”23 Hobbes had not only foreseen the power possibilities in the oxymoron of the private citizen, but exploited them to prevent sovereign power from being shared among its subjects. Hobbes reasoned that if individuals were protected in their interests and positively encouraged by the state to pursue them wholeheartedly, subject only to laws designed to safeguard them from the unlawful acts of others, then they would soon recognize that political partic.i.p.ation was superfluous, expendable, not a rational choice. Hobbes's crucial a.s.sumption was that absolute power absolutely depended not just on fear, but on pa.s.sivity. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue, the sovereign having established and maintained the conditions of peace that enable individuals to pursue their own interests in the sure knowledge that the law of the sovereign would protect, even encourage them. Virtually unlimited power, on the one hand, and, on the other, an apolitical citizenry now a.s.sured of its security so that it can single-mindedly pursue private concerns: a perfect complementarity between apolitical absolutism and economic self-interest.

Hobbes insisted that the power of ”that mortal G.o.d to which we owe under the immortal G.o.d, our peace and defence” could be inst.i.tuted and endure only if legitimated-if, in other words, those it defended became willing collaborators, conscious accomplices. According to his argument extraordinary, concentrated power had to originate in the freely given consent of individuals: the sovereign could therefore claim that his act was that of their ”Sovereign Representative,” hence the act of the whole body of citizens.24 His power was their power, the power they were to transfer to him who would protect them from what they most feared, not death itself but ”violent death”-the kind of death visited upon Americans on September 11.25 He was to have an absolute right to their bodies and their fortunes. In that ”covenant” each would swear obedience and surrender to the sovereign his own power of self-defense and natural freedom. The consequence of the exchange was that the citizen reverted to the status of subject.26 As subject he would receive protection as compensation for complicity in every future action of the sovereign.

Once the original covenant was adopted, the obligation to obey its authority was perpetual. There was no requirement for it to be periodically reaffirmed. The one exception to absolute obedience was that if the sovereign failed to protect the citizens, they were freed from their obligations toward him. That stipulation, far from tempering power, was an incitement for the sovereign to take advantage of any opportunity to extend his authority as far as circ.u.mstances allowed and all in the name of the security of his subjects.

The most striking aspect of Hobbes's argument was the increased potential of ”fear” and ”terror” for justifying unlimited power and authority. The ”fear” and ”terror” caused by external enemies did double duty, as it were. Not only did they serve to justify giving the sovereign all the power necessary to combat threats from abroad, but fear and terror could be made reflexive. Instead of being fearful only of foreign enemies, the citizenry, having observed the effects of extraordinary power used against foreigners, would become conditioned to fear its own sovereign, to hesitate before voicing criticism. By periodically reminding subjects of the example of his own unchecked actions and triumphs, the sovereign authority could convert fear and terror from a threat posed by foreigners into one more veiled and redirected against its own citizenry: ”By this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.”27 In antic.i.p.ation of the 2004 presidential campaign a Bush aide described the strategy to be followed by the president as ”a healthy mix of optimism and the fear factor.”28 III.

It is tempting to dismiss Hobbes's account by arguing that in times of crisis American citizens should be willing to concede extraordinary powers to the state, secure in the knowledge that they retain safeguards against the danger of absolute authority and the abuse of power. According to this argument our Const.i.tution places limits on authority, prescribing what it can and cannot do. The limits, in turn, are enforced by a system of checks and balances whereby each of our major inst.i.tutions of Congress, the executive, and the judiciary is given authority to check the actions of the other branches. In addition, unlike Hobbes's stipulation that individual consent would be given once and for all time, our democratic system of periodic elections and of free political parties makes it possible to remove officeholders. Moreover, the Const.i.tution guarantees to every citizen the right to criticize and organize opposition, and grants to the press and other media of communication the right to expose and criticize the actions of public officials.

Thus const.i.tutional guarantees, a two-party system, inst.i.tutionalized opposition, democratic elections, and a free press would seem formidable safeguards against the emergence of a Hobbesian sovereign. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of September 11 those guarantees have proved ineffectual.

A cla.s.sic example was the charade that was played out shortly before the midterm elections of 2006. With the prospect of severe losses at the polls the Republican administration and its congressional supporters proposed a sweeping bill curtailing the rights of detainees, including those who were American citizens. The charade began when three prominent Republican senators, two of whom harbored presidential ambitions, a.s.sumed the lofty pose of protesting the provisions covering the interrogation techniques applied to detainees. They threatened to block the bill unless it respected the articles of the Geneva Conventions proscribing certain forms of torture. After much huffing, puffing, and public posturing they claimed that the White House had given in to their demands. When the bill was pa.s.sed and its details made public, it was clear that the senators had partic.i.p.ated in a sh.e.l.l game. The illusion was promoted that presidential power had been checked when in fact presidential authority was expanded. What they and sixty-two other senators had accepted was the most radical invasion of the rights of defendants since the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798. The act reduced the power of the courts to hear appeals from detainees and relied instead on military commissions to handle the cases-and this an obvious attempt to reverse the setback that the administration had received in the Hamdan case a few months earlier when the Supreme Court had struck down the military tribunals the administration had established following 9/11. The Court had held that the tribunals were in violation of the Const.i.tution and of international law. The most striking provision of the new law denied detainees the right to habeas corpus and to challenge the legality of their detention. As for the Geneva Conventions and their prohibitions against torture, the law gave the president the authority to decide the meaning of the human rights treaties while relieving courts of jurisdiction over any appeals to his interpretation. Moreover, the provision also allowed the president to delegate that authority to (of all people) the secretary of defense. Yet during the political campaigns of fall 2006 neither party called attention to the law.

The sole form of protest against the preemptive war and the repressive policies of the administration took place not in the Congress, the courts, or an opposition party, but outside ”official channels,” in the streets where hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens organized themselves to protest the actions of the administration. Equally striking, the administration consistently ignored the protesters. The major media, attentive to official cues, followed suit with belated, condescending, and minimal coverage.

IV.

Two centuries after Hobbes had conceived of a superpower based upon democratic consent, and about a half century after the ratification of the U.S. Const.i.tution, Alexis de Tocqueville published the final volume of Democracy in America. That work was the first comprehensive inquiry into the phenomenon of American democracy and, while not uncritical, was largely sympathetic and, on occasion, even admiring.29 Toward the close of that work Tocqueville posed the question of how democracy might go wrong and what form a perverted democracy might take. Unlike Hobbes, whose theory of the absolute sovereign was inspired by the historical reality of an England whose political order had been shattered by revolution and civil war, Tocqueville imagines ”the new features” of a despotism evolving naturally and peacefully out of a democracy.

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them. . . .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of a.s.suring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. . . . It seeks only to keep [men] fixed irrevocably in childhood. . . . It provides for [the citizens'] security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their princ.i.p.al affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

Thus after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpa.s.s the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them. . . . it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.30 Tocqueville's democratic despotism might seem as far-fetched from contemporary America as Hobbes's Leviathan. Instead of embracing Big Brother and submitting to government regulations most Americans want government ”off their backs.” Far from meekly living in a drab condition of equality, the United States is a land where success is richly rewarded, so much so that it is at least as notable for its striking inequalities as for its professions of equal rights and equality before the law. Far from being pa.s.sive Americans are renowned for their drive and inventiveness. In their high energy Americans more closely resemble Hobbes's chilling portrait of a man who cannot remain content ”with moderate power” because ”he cannot a.s.sure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.” If, as Hobbes claimed, there ”is a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death,” how might that translate into the culture of state power?31 Tocqueville's democrat comfortable with despotism and Hobbes's free rationalist who opts for absolutism share an elective affinity. Tocqueville imagines a despotism made possible because citizens have chosen to relinquish partic.i.p.atory politics, which he had singled out as the most remarkable, widespread, and essential element of American political life. By abandoning their intense involvement with the common affairs of their communities in favor of personal ends they, like the signatories to Hobbes's contract, have chosen to be apolitical subjects rather than citizens.

V.

The contemporary moral to be drawn from our detour through Hobbes and Tocqueville is this: while it may prove possible to mobilize voters around the slogan ”Anything to beat Bus.h.!.+” it takes more persistence, more thoughtfulness to dismantle Superpower and to nurture a democratic citizenry. The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the ”mute b.u.t.ton.”

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Utopian Theory of Superpower: The Official Version.

I.

to show . . . the very age and body of

the time his form and pressure.

-Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.

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