Part 12 (1/2)
VIII.
In a general election, the candidate with the most hopeful
message is going to win it. Most people in the U.S. want
to be rich, they want to get ahead, and that's why an
opportunity-oriented message works.
-Al From, founder of the Democratic Leaders.h.i.+p Council.
What kind of politics is encouraged when the president is strong and Congress weak? A politics set by a decisive leader, a politics of action rather than the deliberative politics that is the forte of the legislative branch.
Ominously, the decline of congressional power and prestige in the United States is one of the most striking recent political developments. Historically, the legislative branch was supposed to be the power closest to the citizenry, the main reason being that lawmaking was held to be the highest, most solemn, and most important of all governmental powers, the symbol of rule by consent of the governed. A law was viewed as a command that all citizens had to obey because the people's representatives had approved it. Legislation made tangible the notion of equality: no one was above the law and everyone was protected by it.
Unlike the cla.s.sic totalitarian systems that tolerated only the unanimity of pseudolegislatures, our rulers have come to exploit a nearly evenly divided electorate and a consequent near parity of representation of both parties in the Senate and House. Majorities do exist, but either they are narrow or, when they are substantial, they tend to be limited to one chamber. However, the politics of near gridlock, as it works out in Was.h.i.+ngton, does not mean that all interests are equally and adversely affected by what appears to be a politics of inaction or stalemate. Executive orders can still be issued that roll back environmental gains or withhold funds from programs disliked by the administration, or that insert into trade negotiations items favored by campaign contributors.19 And regulatory agencies, now stacked against regulation, are not prevented from doing the bidding of the major party and corporate interests. Moreover, even a gridlocked Congress will likely support, even enthusiastically increase, military spending. Similarly, gridlock does not prevent tax breaks for the wealthiest cla.s.ses from being legislated.
The true significance of near gridlock is not that it paralyzes governmental action but that it prevents majority rule. Sharp and nearly equal divisions, the stuff of gridlock, are in the interest of some powerful groups who would be less influential, more threatened by majority rule.
What is made more difficult by the politics of stalemate is the capture of state power to advance the social interests of the Many. The politics of programmatic social democracy, which had defined politics throughout much of the last century-the politics of populism, Progressivism, the New and Fair Deals, and the Great Society-has all but vanished. Does this suggest that a broad consensus exists, that social conflicts have disappeared even as the society becomes more sharply divided in terms of income and of all the attendant values of education, cultural opportunities, health, and environmental safety? Why are those sharp differences not reflected politically?
Returning to the narrow margin between the major parties in the Congress: if one believes that they correspond to sharp and widespread ideological divisions in the society, one might conclude that social inequalities are in fact being registered, that what is being represented are really deep divisions in society and boiling cla.s.s conflicts, and that Marx's scenario of cla.s.s struggle has begun. In reality, the much publicized polarization of the electorate is less a sign of division than of a politics shaped to prevent the expression of substantive differences. Polls that provide the evidence for a sharply divided electorate typically collect responses to questions so broad as to be meaningless. What could follow substantively from questions such as ”Do you think the president is doing a good job?” Electoral politics is integrally connected with polling so that elections tend to be contested over narrow differences in emphasis that do not disturb a pseudoconsensus. In the compet.i.tion for the votes of the center, for the so-called independents or undecided, the deepening social, educational, and economic inequalities remain submerged, unevoked in political rhetoric, immobile.
The resulting despair produces strange contortions of allegiance. Workers find themselves in an era of declining trade union power, yet many respond by opposing unions, voting Republican (”Reagan Democrats”), and hoping to improve their economic prospects by joining the military and going off to defend corporate America.20 Traditionally the meaning of the ideal of consensus was that the fundamental inst.i.tutions and practices of the political system, ”the rules of its game,” were accepted by all citizens and politicians; that a winning party would not proceed to stack the system against the losers and make it impossible for them to gain controlling power (e.g., gerrymandering); and that some political inst.i.tutions (e.g., the courts and independent regulatory agencies) should not be systematically and deeply partisan. In recent times, roughly since the Reagan counterrevolution of the 1980s, an ersatz consensus has evolved: from agreement about basic political inst.i.tutions and practices to one that accepts as permanent the inst.i.tutions and practices of corporate capitalism and the dismantlement of the welfare state; that equates taxation of the wealthy with ”cla.s.s war”; and that anoints Protestantism as the civil religion of the nation.21 Traditional consensus stood for agreement upon political fundamentals and, as such, beyond ordinary partisan politics. Ersatz consensus exploits that notion in order to reduce the s.p.a.ce for acceptable contestation. Certain matters, such as tax increases, are declared to be ”off the table.” How influential the phony version can be was ill.u.s.trated when, during the 2004 elections, the Democratic presidential candidate testified plaintively, ”I am not a redistributionist Democrat. Fear not.” He identified himself as ”an entrepreneurial Democrat.”22 The nationalistic, patriotic, and ”originalist” ideology being hawked by Republicans promotes a myth of national unity, consensus, that obscures real cleavages in order to subst.i.tute synthetic ones (”the culture wars,” school vouchers, abortion) that leave power relations.h.i.+ps unchallenged. Manufactured divisiveness complements the politics of gridlock; both contribute to induce apathy by suggesting that the citizenry's involvement in politics is essentially unneeded, futile. In the one case, of consensus, active involvement is superfluous because there is nothing to contest-who wants to dispute the wisdom of The Founders? In the other, gridlock, it appears that active engagement can accomplish nothing. Meanwhile divisiveness is a.s.signed to the make-believe politics played on talk shows or by pundits. Thus consensus, pseudodivisiveness, and gridlock establish the conditions of electoral politics. In elections the parties set out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote. Afterwards, post-election politics of lobbying, repaying donors, and promoting corporate interests-the real players-takes over. The effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their efficacy.
One striking example of the suppression of deep differences was the 2004 electoral campaign of John Kerry. There is wide agreement among observers that during the winter and spring presidential primaries the Democratic Party was galvanized by the deep antagonism toward the Iraqi war. Moreover, as a side effect, the growing antiwar sentiments threatened to activate segments of the population that had become resigned to the impotence of the Democratic Party. Yet the party organization and its centrists, abetted by a Dean-hostile media, succeeded in squelching the bid of the antiwar candidates and threw their resources behind Kerry. Kerry's nomination and subsequent meandering campaign furnished no focus for debate over the decision to go to war, the tactics of the administration in misleading the public about the threat posed by Saddam, the need to rethink the terms on which the ”war on terrorism” was to be waged, and not least the terms by which ”homeland security” had been cast into opposition with civil liberties.23 The threat that antiwar sentiments might embolden anticorporate elements to entertain hope of reversing the trends embodied in Superpower, combined with the determination of the Democrats to prevent that from happening, points to the crucial significance of the lack of third party alternatives. The historical role of third parties has been to force the major parties to cherry-pick third party proposals, typically those of a democratic or social democratic tendency. The 2004 presidential election marked the tragicomic playing out of the ineffectualness of third parties: the Democrats employed every dirty trick possible to discourage Ralph Nader from merely gaining a place on the presidential ballot for November 2004. At the same time the Republicans were deploying resources to enable Nader, their severest critic, to secure a place on the ballot. The episode, in its absurdity, shed a sharp light on how the two major parties connive to create as many obstacles as possible-in the form of requirements-for discouraging genuine alternatives to the established parties and their policies. While the Republican Party is ever-vigilant about the care and feeding of its zealots, the Democratic Party is equally concerned to discourage its democrats.
The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working cla.s.s, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and by a.s.suming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.24 Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans, with their combination of reactionary and innovative elements, are a cohesive, if not a coherent, opposition force.
The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has s.h.i.+fted its location and meaning. Formerly it was a.s.sociated with the Left and with the use of political power to lift the standard of living and life prospects of the lower cla.s.ses, of those who were disadvantaged under current distributive principles. Radicalism is now the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves ”conservatives” and are called such by media commentators. In fact, pseudoconservatism is in charge of and owns the radicalizing powers that are dramatically changing, in some cases revolutionizing, the conditions of human life, of economy, politics, foreign policy, education, and the prospects of the planet. It is hard to imagine any power more radical in its determination to undo the social gains of the past century. The transformation of the Republican Party reflects the domestic requirements of an imperial Superpower and is an indicator of the future forms of party politics in this country.
Paradoxically, liberalism and its historical party, the Democrats, are conservative, not by choice but by virtue of the radical character of the Republicans. At the historical moment when the citizenry is strongly antipolitical and responds to immaterial ”values,” the Democrats, in order to preserve a semblance of a political ident.i.ty, are forced into a conservatism. Out of desperation rather than conviction, they struggle halfheartedly to preserve the remains of their past achievements of social welfare, public education, government regulation of the economy, racial equality, and the defense of trade unions and civil liberties.
The imbalance between, on the one hand, const.i.tutionally limited state power and, on the other, the relatively unconstrained power of science, technology, and corporate capitalism makes little difference to the Republican Party. It is content with an ancillary role of encouraging capitalism and allowing it to shape the directions of science and technology. By relying on corporate capital to provide major funding for the other two powers, the party can then even adopt a mildly disapproving stance toward public subsidies of some forms of scientific research (e.g., on stem cells) or of some technologies. The Democratic Party mirrors the problem more acutely. As the party with a history of both favoring state regulation of economic activity, especially of large corporations, and being well disposed toward subsidizing science and technological innovations, it would appear to be well positioned to use state authority to redirect the dynamic powers that are driving American imperialism. But in recent decades, as it has become dependent on contributions of corporations and wealthy donors, it has become less willing to mount an electoral challenge that would take on the Republicans at the level of the fundamental political question of whether democracy can cohabit with imperial Superpower.
At best, if state power were to fall into the hands of a reform-minded Democratic administration, that administration would, perforce, expend considerable ”capital” (i.e., the patience of its corporate sponsors) playing catch-up. No area of policy better ill.u.s.trates the ”game” of catch-up and how it can a.s.sume desperate proportions than that of environmental or ecological issues. Scientific evidence regarding global warming, air pollution, water and food shortages, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuel continues to acc.u.mulate; yet, in the face of what appears to be a looming global crisis, the political system, at best, can manage spasmodically to enact regulations in those areas-only to have them weakened or rolled back by a new (i.e., Republican) administration. The frustrations of environmental policy reveal a profound inability of the system to deal with long-range problems requiring consistency of purpose, allocation of public funds, taxes, and a determined commitment to controlling corporate behavior, qualities that a porous policy process lacks. At the same time, the economy, with its highly focused quest for profits, generates new products, new dangers to consumers and the environment, and new tactics for circ.u.mventing existing safeguards.
IX.
In their beginnings political inst.i.tutions and their practices typically incorporate a notion of proper scale. Their ”sphere” of operations is defined by geography, socioeconomic circ.u.mstances, available technologies, and cultural values. Our system was originally conceived as a federal structure that recognized the presence of sovereign states but also envisaged an arrangement flexible enough to absorb the addition of new states. Virtually from the beginning of the republic it was a.s.sumed that the nation would expand westward. It was expected that the main national inst.i.tutions of president, Congress, and courts would be enlarged to accommodate additional representatives in the Senate, the House, and the Electoral College without altering the practices governing those inst.i.tutions. In other words, while a new scale would come into existence, the old inst.i.tutions would have to adjust only in a quant.i.tative sense (new states would mean additional senators, representatives, and electoral votes). Thus the operative norms would continue unchanged. It was a.s.sumed that the admission of new states to the Union could be orderly and need not disturb issues that the Const.i.tution had either suppressed or postponed, such as slavery, women's suffrage, and the status of native Americans.
The a.s.sumption that politics could comfortably accommodate an expanded scale was first put in doubt in the decades preceding the Civil War. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was an attempt to settle the crucial issue of whether new states entering the Union would be free or slave. It admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state but prohibited slavery in the rest of the territory acquired under the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36-30 lat.i.tudinal line.25 The Compromise of 1850 allowed inhabitants of the New Mexico and Utah territories, acquired by the Mexican War, to decide the question of whether they wished to enter the Union with or without slavery. In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.
X.
Today this failed a.s.sumption, that free politics could be reconciled peaceably with an ever-increasing scale, has been demonstrated again by the imperial ambitions of Superpower and its distinctive nonterritorial conception of empire. It used to be said of the late British Empire that it was not the consequence of a premeditated plan but casually established in ”a fit of absent-mindedness.” There were, of course, ”imperialists” who dreamed of empire, and some of them, such as Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill, who consciously fought for its realization. But there is a larger truth in the notion of an empire that begins without much forethought or conscious intention at work: empire building is likely to have contributing causes other than, or in addition to, the conscious intentions of imperialists. Those causes could include the actions of non- or even anti-imperialists. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, who set out consciously to establish one-party dictators.h.i.+ps and to extend their rule beyond their nation's original borders (Lebensraum, mare nostrum, world revolution), inverted totalitarianism comes into being, not by design, but by inattention to the consequences of actions or especially of inactions. Or, more precisely, inattention to their c.u.mulative consequences.
The lobbyist who seeks to influence a legislator by campaign contributions or other inducements does not set out to weaken the authority and prestige of representative inst.i.tutions and thereby contribute to inverted totalitarianism. The legislator who votes in favor of a resolution giving the president virtually unlimited discretion in deciding when to wage war does not intend to weaken the powers of the legislature to the point where it lacks the will to check the president in matters of war, peace making, and foreign policy. The federal regulator who, despite thousands of letters of protest, approves a regulation allowing large media conglomerates to extend further their control over local markets may not intend to eliminate the possibility of outlets that give a voice to dissenting political, economic, and ecological views. The employer who ”busts” unions does not seek to weaken the structure of civil society and the power of its a.s.sociations and nongovernmental organizations to counter the state and corporate capital. The occasional citizen who, muttering about corrupt politicians, retreats into political hibernation and emerges blinkingly to cast a vote does not mean to make himself an easy object of manipulation or to confirm the elite's view of democracy as a useful illusion.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
Inverted Totalitarianism: Antecedents and Precedents.
I.
In late November and early December 2004, a million citizens of Kiev and from other parts of Ukraine a.s.sembled in the public square of Kiev to protest the results of a national election, claiming that it had been deeply flawed by fraud and that the true winner was the candidate of the opposition party. Foreign observers largely agreed that the election had been marred by widespread irregularities. The protesters demanded a recount and held firm for several days until an agreement was reached that set a date for a new election. This in a society that had no strong tradition of democratic politics.
Following the American presidential election of November 2000, there were numerous claims that proceedings in the crucial state of Florida had been marred by irregularities of various kinds, including fraud, voter intimidation, and racism. The issue was eventually settled by a process that was as flawed and partisan as the election itself. Yet no crowds took to the streets; no one sat down before the Supreme Court in protest; no one mounted a ma.s.s march on Was.h.i.+ngton. This in a society that boasted of being the world's oldest-and presumably the most experienced-democracy.
II.
The crisis, it seems, is that there was no crisis. In its literal meaning a crisis is ”a turning point.” Adapting the formulation ”a turning point but no crisis” to the condition I have designated ”inverted totalitarianism,” we might ask, why does the existence of that turning point go unrecognized? how are the facts of radical political change concealed when there is no evidence, say, of a coup or revolutionary overthrow? how can we recognize that the country is at the political turning point of inverted totalitarianism?
As a start, we might pause over the notion of ”recognition.” As commonly used, it implies a prior knowledge of an object: we recognize (i.e., identify) an old schoolmate. But if we bisect the word into ”recognize,” a somewhat different meaning is suggested: to rethink, to reconsider, in our case, to reconceive the possible forms that totalitarianism might a.s.sume and to question whether the political history of the United States really is the triumph of democracy in America. That double strategy might enable us to avoid the presumption that fascism or totalitarianism necessarily means a distinct break by which a political society is suddenly and radically transformed by a coup or a revolution, as were Lenin's Russia and Franco's Spain.
The second aspect of our strategy calls for collective self-examination: is the United States the model democracy or a highly equivocal one? If we were to list the essentials of a democracy, such as rule by the people, we would find that democracy in that sense is nonexistent-and that may be a substantial part of the crisis that is no crisis. That our system actually is democratic is more of an unquestioned a.s.sumption than a matter of public discussion, and so we ignore the extent to which antidemocratic elements have become systemic, integral, not aberrant. The evidence is there: in widening income disparities and cla.s.s distinctions, polarized educational systems (elite inst.i.tutions with billion-dollar endowments versus struggling public schools and universities), health care that is denied to millions, national political inst.i.tutions controlled by wealth and corporate power. While these contrasts are frequently bemoaned, they are rarely considered as c.u.mulative and, rarer still, as evidence of an antidemocratic regime.
To claim that antidemocracy is a regime means expanding the meaning of democracy so that it is not confined to political matters but applies as well to social, cultural, and economic relations.h.i.+ps. If it is objected that this stretches the meaning of democracy beyond what it can reasonably bear, my response is this: not to do so implies that democracy can operate despite the inequalities of power and life circ.u.mstances embedded in all of those relations.h.i.+ps.
An inverted totalitarian regime, precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary, as evolving out of a continuing and increasingly unequal struggle between an unrealized democracy and an antidemocracy that dare not speak its name. Consequently while we recognize familiar elements of the system-popular elections, free political parties, the three branches of government, a bill of rights-if we re-cognize, invert, we see its actual operations as different from its formal structure. Its elements have antecedents but no precedents, a confluence of tendencies and pragmatic choices made with scant concern for long-term consequences.
For example, the contemporary phenomenon of privatization by which governmental functions, such as public education, military operations, and intelligence gathering, are shared with or a.s.signed to private entrepreneurs represents more than a switch in suppliers. The privatization of public functions is an expression of the revolutionary dynamic of capitalism, of its aggrandizing bent. Capital brings its own culture of compet.i.tiveness, hierarchy, self-interest. Each instance of the private inroads into public functions extends the power of capital over society. Services such as public education that had previously been viewed as essential, not only to the literacy of the citizenry but to its empowerment, are now increasingly being ceded to private entrepreneurs. From a democratic perspective the effects of privatization are counterrevolutionary; but from a capitalist viewpoint they are revolutionary. Privatization of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations, perhaps to blend popular education and media culture so as to better manage democracy.
III.
As the example of privatization suggests, re-cognition enters as we discern connections between phenomena that, when naively noted, seem unrelated. Thus at first glance forms of popular culture such as newspapers, cinema, TV, or radio seem more or less unchanged except in technology. Occasionally we are told of changes that we cannot see, that ”owners.h.i.+p is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.” Even less frequently are we told that owners.h.i.+p brings control of content, how that control is manifested, and what its political bearing might be. TV might present what we recognize as the familiar figure of a uniformed policeman at a political demonstration; but, again, if we have been reading about the new technologies (e.g., databases), tactics of crowd control, surveillance methods, and weapons (stun guns, pepper spray) being used by police, as well as the broader authority available to them by virtue of ant.i.terrorist laws, we may re-cognize the police as a force for controlling popular expression rather than simply as ”the arm of the law” dedicated to the protection of life and property.1 Antecedents but not precedents: Police repression is far from being novel in American history; it has antecedents. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, not uncommonly, police and National Guardsmen were used to break strikes and to aid employers against unions; and throughout the twentieth century, from Selma to Watts to Berkeley and Chicago, the police have been employed to quell populist political protests; it was National Guardsmen who shot dead antiwar demonstrators at Kent State. Those actions are rarely, if ever, invoked as precedents that justify repression. They are viewed as singular, ad hoc interventions rather than a practice. There are few antecedent examples of repression of the rich, much less precedents.
But does terrorism, that war without end, that perpetual emergency, cause us to re-cognize repression or, instead, to normalize it? When do the police evolve from the obvious but occasional agent of employers into an element within an evolving system of control, intimidation, and repression; or when does the expanded domestic role of the military seem a natural response to terrorists-or to a natural disaster such as a hurricane? How does good old American pragmatism, supposedly the least ideological, most practical of public philosophies, become the unwitting agent of a regime with affinities to the most ideological systems?
A possible answer: The normalizing of deviations occurs when the main political inst.i.tutions, such as legislatures, courts, elected law enforcement officials (e.g., district attorneys), mayors, governors, and presidents are able to exploit a fearful public and promote the powers of an increasingly militarized police but not their accountability. The usual justification is one that draws the citizenry into complicity: the public, according to polls, favors harsh sentences, safer streets, the names of s.e.xual predators publicized and their residences listed, and no coddling of prisoners in those rehabilitation programs favored by liberals at taxpayers' expense. In these examples we see the ingredients whereby antecedents become precedents: an empowered police, an officialdom that sanctions expanded police powers and reduced legal and political safeguards, and public opinion that appears to favor methods which weaken legal safeguards and diminish the inst.i.tutions whose traditional role is to oversee, check, and alert the public to dangerous tendencies in the system. The remarkable thing about public opinion is that it is self-justifying, never accountable.
Thus the invasive Patriot Act, with its inroads into personal liberties and the reduced power of the courts to check overly zealous officials, is first accepted by the public as a practical response to terrorism, but then it is soon cemented as a permanent element in the system of law enforcement. What may have emerged without premeditation is quickly seized upon and exploited. The response to 9/11 is soon declared to be a ”war on terrorism.” Then, when that war appears to be flagging, it is redefined as the war against ”radical Islamism” or an ”Islamic caliphate.” It then seems logical to coordinate all the relevant agencies-federal, state, and local, and all armed forces, from police and National Guard to the traditional armed services-and, voila!, we have a system. The n.a.z.is called it Gleichschaltung (coordination). We might call it ”management” to indicate its place in an opportunity society.