Part 8 (1/2)

but that doesn't mean we have to support governments that

get elected as a result of democracy.

-President George W. Bush13

Today references to ”corporate culture” are commonplace. Corporate culture might be defined as the norms and practices operative at various levels of the corporate hierarchy that shape or influence the beliefs and behavior of those who work in a particular inst.i.tutional context. Today corporate culture is not confined to the corporation. Managed democracy depends upon managers, and managers are the product and creators of corporate culture. The question is this: what are the characteristics of the culture that corporate managers bring to government? how are the corporatists likely to approach power and governance, and how does that approach differ from political conceptions?

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists-starting with Plato's Republic-have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power. In recognition of the temptations of power and self-interest a variety of constraints-legal, religious, customary, and moral-were invoked or appealed to in the hope of limiting rulers or at least inhibiting them from doing harmful or evil acts. At the same time rulers were exhorted to protect and promote the common good of society and the well-being of all of their subjects. With the emergence of democratic ideas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it fell to the citizen to a.s.sume responsibility for taking care of political and social arrangements, not only operating inst.i.tutions but ”cultivating” them, caring for them, improving them, and, ultimately, defending them. Democracy presumed the presence of a ”popular culture,” not in the contemporary sense of packaged pleasures for a perpetually adolescent consumer, but culture in its original meaning: from the Latin cultus = tilling, cultivating, tending. The ideal of a democratic political culture was about cooperating in the care of common arrangements, of practices in which, potentially, all could share in deciding the uses of power while bearing responsibility for their consequences. The a.s.sumption was that if decision-making inst.i.tutions of a community were left untended, all or most might suffer. A medieval aphorism summed up the traditional idea of the political, ”that which touches all should be approved by all.”

In contrast, the ethos of the twenty-first-century corporation is an antipolitical culture of compet.i.tion rather than cooperation, of aggrandizement, of besting rivals, and of leaving behind disrupted careers and damaged communities. It is a culture for increase that cannot rest (= ”stagnation”) but must continuously innovate and expand. It accepts as axiomatic that top executives have to be, first and foremost, compet.i.tion-oriented and profit-driven: the profitability of the corporate ent.i.ty is more important than any commonality with the larger society. ”The compet.i.tor is our friend,” according to an Archer Daniels Midland internal memo,”and the customer is our enemy.” Enron had ”visions and values” cubes on display; its chief financial officer's cube read, ”When Enron says it will rip your face off, it will rip your face off.”14 Perhaps the most striking embodiment of the aggrandizing culture of the corporation is Wal-Mart, the consumer's low-cost paradise and the perfect economic complement to Superpower. In its own way it is an invasive, totalizing power, continuously establis.h.i.+ng footholds in local communities, destroying small businesses that are unable to compete, forcing low wages, harsh working conditions, and poor health care on its employees, discouraging unionization.15 It is inverted totalitarianism in a corporate, imperial mode.

As the scandals about Enron and WorldCom demonstrated, the self-interest of the corporate executive takes precedence over the interests of the inst.i.tution. During the last decade corporate crimes and abuses involving the highest executive levels have been commonplace: cheating, lying, deceptive practices, extraordinary bonuses despite corporate failure, ruthless conduct, and so forth. Recall that in the Reagan presidency, corporate managers rather than public serviceoriented officials dominated the upper levels of government, bringing with them a corporate ethos.16 Not surprisingly, ”conflicts of interest” flourished. Equally unsurprising, the reverse did not occur; no corporate executive stood accused of sacrificing private interest to the common good. The effect of persistent, pervasive corporate misconduct is to promote public distrust of power-holders in general. From Superpower's vantage point public cynicism, far from being deplorable, is one more element contributing to political demoralization and languor.

Although the doctrine of the ”preemptive strike” is a controversial topic in discussions of foreign policy, there is less political controversy about its economic counterpart. Corporate compet.i.tion has its preemptive strike in hostile takeovers, poison pills, and the like. These tactics of corporate power politics form a complement to Superpower politics.17 The corporate ethos is not one that favors conciliation and fairness or worries over collateral damage.

The broad question is whether democracy is possible when the dominant ethos in the economy fosters antipolitical and antidemocratic behavior and values; when the corporate world is both the princ.i.p.al supplier of political leaders.h.i.+p and the main source of political corruption; and when small investors occupy a position of powerlessness comparable to that of the average voter. ”Shareholder democracy” belongs on the same list of oxymorons as ”Superpower democracy.”

At stake are the conditions that serve forms of power ant.i.thetical to democracy. The citizenry is reduced to an electorate whose potency consists of choosing among congressional candidates who, prior to campaigning, have demonstrated their ”seriousness” by successfully soliciting a million dollars or more from wealthy donors. This rite of pa.s.sage ensures that the candidate is beholden to corporate power before taking office. Not surprisingly, the candidate who raises the most money will likely be the winner. The vote count becomes the expression of the contributor.

”Managed democracy” is the application of managerial skills to the basic democratic political inst.i.tution of popular elections. An election, as distinguished from the simple act of voting, has been reshaped into a complex production. Like all productive operations, it is ongoing and requires continuous supervision rather than continuing popular partic.i.p.ation. Unmanaged elections would epitomize contingency: the managerial nightmare of control freaks. One method of a.s.suring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic la.s.situde on which a managed democracy thrives. A large campaign contribution represents the kind of surplus power a dynamic capitalist economy makes available. It begins as the production of an ordinary commodity, say a computer chip, which eventually turns a profit that is then ”invested” in a candidate or party or a lobbyist in order to purchase ”access” to those who are authorized to make policies or decisions. A law or regulation favorable to the donor mysteriously emerges-an immaculate deception or ”earmark” with no apparent ”father.” No one wants to acknowledge paternity or reveal the consensual act that produced it.18 At issue is more than crude bribery. Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quant.i.tative and objective terms, whose interests have priority.19 The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-s.h.i.+rted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not those of the n.a.z.is, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered f.e.c.kless.

VI.

[In a direct democracy] the countenance of the government

may become more democratic; but the soul that animates

it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged,

but the fewer and often, the more secret will be the

springs by which its motions are directed.

-James Madison20

Early in the American occupation the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members had been handpicked by the occupiers, proposed a solution to the problem of governance: let the council enlarge itself and then proclaim that body to be the interim legislature. That grab for power seemed too crude for American tastes, and so the deputy secretary of state vetoed it, saying, ”I think we need a little bit more transparent and partic.i.p.atory process than that.”21 That version of democracy has been tested successfully at home, which is why the Bush administration's trumpeting of ”regime change” is more ominous than rea.s.suring. It revealed the administration's understanding of democracy, and why control of elections loomed so large for the leaders of the American occupation. The initial attempt by the American authorities to set a June 2004 date for the Iraqi elections may have been an unsubtle maneuver to gain a talking point in the impending American presidential election in the fall, but it was also a tacit admission that the two electoral systems belong to the same project, one that a sympathetic pundit described as ”making democracy safe for the world.”22 While a ”managed democracy” might seem a contradiction in terms, the idea of an exportable democracy was not invented on the spur of the moment to justify the invasion of Iraq. The mere existence of Superpower was testimony to democracy's reliability and availability for export-otherwise its leaders would not have felt sufficiently confident to impose it upon Iraq and persuade themselves that the whole Middle East needed only the example of Iraq to incite a regionwide stampede that could be corralled for democracy.

Such confidence was inspired by the ways in which democracy had been shaped at home. Inverted totalitarianism had perfected the arts of molding the support of the citizens without allowing them to rule. Having domesticated democracy at home, the administration knew the specifications in advance; hence a proven product could be exported, along with expert managers boasting honed skills, tested nostrums, and impressive resumes.

For the American conquerors majority rule has certain negative connotations a.s.sociated with uncertainty of outcome and probable excess. As one important American adviser remarked in warning against introducing direct elections before safeguards were in place, ”If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected.”23 Managing democracy requires a process by which ”extreme” views are filtered and control rests with a favored guardian group, the ”right people,” who have been preselected by the conquerors and rewarded with being the first to gain a foothold in power. From that strategic vantage point, and under the watchful supervision of the conquerors, they are expected to produce the political structures of a democracy in which power is distanced from the people in whose name it is to be exercised.

VII.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist

Workers' Party . . . campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the

1,300 Spanish troops stationed in Iraq if the United

Nations did not a.s.sume control of the occupation. . . . The

Zapateros of Europe . . . seem bent on validating the crudest

caricatures of ”old European” cowardly decadence. . . .