Part 15 (2/2)

XIII.

The best hope for a democratic revival is to make use of the experience represented by the demos and by fugitive democracy, thereby identifying promising sites for a democratic revival. An essential preliminary is to distinguish popular from elite-managed democracy.

How are the two distinguished by the characteristic political disposition of each governing their approaches to the world of human and other natural beings, and to the natural world? We might put it as the difference between a commonality and an economic polity, between managing a society and its ecology in terms of the common good and subordinating the political system to economic criteria-for example, being driven by the possible effects of a political decision on the sensibilities of ”financial markets.”

The inst.i.tution that provides a model for the economic polity is, appropriately, the free market. It has as its motor principle individual self-interest and its variant, the national interest. Accordingly, no one excepting the deluded, and no nation excepting one led by starry-eyed idealists, is a.s.sumed to act disinterestedly to promote the interests of others. In contrast, democracy's idea is based on a culture that encourages members to join in common endeavors, not as a flagellating form of self-denial but as the means of taking care of a specific and concrete part of the world and of its life-forms. At stake are not only the natural environment but inst.i.tutional and especially democratic inst.i.tutions that, too, need tending.48 It is not solely a question of what kind of physical environment we leave to those who follow, but of what will be the condition of the political inst.i.tutions and the Const.i.tution that later generations inherit.

Commonality stands for the idea that the care and fate of the polity are of common concern; that we are all involved because we are all implicated in the actions and decisions which are justified in our name. What makes political power ”political” is that it is made possible by the contributions and sacrifices of many. The perfect example of the difference between the politics of democratic commonality and corporate politics is represented by the contrast between the present Social Security system and the proposed alternative of a system based on private investment accounts. Under the current system one generation contributes to the support of another, so that the program becomes a shared endeavor resulting in a common good. Under the proposed replacement each would be on his or her own; commonality would be lost and inequality promoted. That contrast, between self-interest and commonality of concerns, involves contrasting mentalities, each with its own form of rationality; one is exploitative, the other protective.

To examine both the fugitive character of the modern demos and its form of rationality, consider how a citizenry materialized in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. That response was a political act on behalf of commonality. While the administration's vaunted ”Homeland Security” agencies and highly disciplined White House floundered, there was a spontaneous outpouring of aid, financial and material, from ordinary citizens, civic and religious groups, and local governments from all parts of the nation. It was as though the United States could express democracy only by bypa.s.sing a national government preoccupied with distant fantasies of being democracy's agent to the world.49 In other words, the effectiveness of demotic action can go beyond the local when it can empathize. The fact that New Orleans and parts of Mississippi were in dire need of the necessities of life-food, shelter, clothing, medical a.s.sistance, and the like-was something that ordinary Americans elsewhere could spontaneously understand.

The survival and flouris.h.i.+ng of democracy depends, in the first instance, upon the ”people” 's changing themselves, sloughing off their political pa.s.sivity and, instead, acquiring some of the characteristics of a demos. That means creating themselves, coming-into-being by virtue of their own actions. While it cannot be emphasized too strongly that democracy requires supporting conditions-social, economic, and educational-the democratization of politics remains merely formal without the democratization of the self. Democratization is not about being ”left alone,” but about becoming a self that sees the values of common involvements and endeavors and finds in them a source of self-fulfillment. Transformation is not a rarity but happens all the time. Generic high school students can, before long, become principled lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, even MBAs who learn to behave, think, and speak according to ethical and demanding mores.

To become a democrat is to change one's self, to learn how to act collectively, as a demos. It requires that the individual go ”public” and thereby help to const.i.tute a ”public” and an ”open” politics, in principle accessible for all to take part in it, and visible so that all might see or learn about the deliberations and decision making occurring in public agencies and inst.i.tutions.50 Demotic rationality is rooted in a provincialism where commonality is experienced as everyday reality and ”civic spirit” is unapologetic. In that setting schools, businesses, law enforcement, the environment, the conduct of public officials, taxation all have an immediacy. That immediacy serves to chasten the actions of those entrusted with power, whether as council members, teachers, business-owners, police, or environmentalists. Inhibition does not preclude fierce controversies, strong grievances, prejudices, animosities, or nasty tactics, but usually they do not result in the victors' pursuing Rove-like fantasies of a ”permanent” grip on power. And this because most decisions, rather than being abstract, visibly affect daily life, and hence their consequences can be evaluated by ordinary reasoning tempered by past experience.

Demotic political interventions are, at the national level, necessarily episodic or fugitive. Among other considerations, this means dependence on the political elite and its modes of engaging political matters. What is at stake is a fundamental difference between, on one hand, reason in the service of commonality and, on the other, elite rationality or reason in the service of the economic polity. It is revealing that the Bush administration's negative view of social programs and environmental regulations is that these fall outside the paradigm of profit; or that its favorite form of public spending is for the military, for sheer power; or that it should promote privatization of public functions that transforms a public service into a form of profit making.51 Elite irrationalism is encouraged by the ethos and ethic shared by political and corporate elites. Their mentality is expansionist, opportunistic, and, above all, exploitative; it exhausts resources-natural, human, public. It is not just the earth's atmosphere that is being destroyed or human beings who are ”burned out” at fifty. Public inst.i.tutions are being savaged. A legislature, a court, a system of law, a civil service are the equivalent of a public ecology and, like the natural world, an inheritance to be cared for and pa.s.sed on. They can easily be ”used up” by, for example, corruption, partisans.h.i.+p in the wrong places, denigration of public servants, dismissal of scientific evidence and the reports of whistle-blowers, systematic lying to the public, and the stretching of legal authority to the point where it sanctions torture.

XIV.

The demos will never dominate politically. In an age where ident.i.ties are potentially plural and changing, a unified demos is no longer possible, or even desirable: instead of a demos, democratic citizenries. Democratic political consciousness, while it may emerge anywhere at any time, is most likely to be nurtured in local, small-scale settings, where both the negative consequences of political powerlessness and the positive possibilities of political involvement seem most evident. Further, a vital local democracy can help to bridge the inevitable distance between representative government and its const.i.tuencies. There is a genuinely valuable contribution which democracy can make to national politics, but it is dependent upon a politics that is rooted locally, experienced daily, and practiced regularly, not just mobilized spasmodically.

Democratic experience begins at the local level, but a democratic citizenry should not accept city limits as its political horizon. A princ.i.p.al reason is that the modern citizenry has needs which exceed local resources (e.g., enforcement of environmental standards) and can be addressed only by means of state power.

While the project of reinvigorating democracy may strike the reader as utopian, it requires an accompanying, even more utopian project: to encourage and nurture a counterelite of democratic public servants. The ideal is not of neutral, ”above politics” technocrats who would service any master. Ideally a public servant of democracy would combine knowledge and skill with a commitment to promoting and defending democratic values, lessening the inequities in our society, and protecting the environment. For decades that ideal has been the target of corporate-inspired attacks on ”government bureaucrats” aimed at preventing a revival of effective regulation of corporate power and of social democracy.

A democratic counterelite would not consist solely of government workers. In fact such a corps already exists among the numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to environmental conservation, famine relief, human rights, AIDS prevention, and other likeminded endeavors. A crucial element in these efforts is that solutions are typically aimed at the local level and at encouraging the local populations to take responsibility for their own well-being.

As I have argued earlier, the local character of democracy can provide a crucial reality check on the conduct of national politics and governance, perhaps even inhibit the elite's temptation to foreign adventures. But that will require serious changes in the quality of public discussion, which, in turn, would depend upon the reclamation of public owners.h.i.+p of the airwaves and encouragement of noncommercial broadcasting. This contemporary version of the old struggle between ”enclosure” and the ”commons,” between exploitation and commonality, pretty much sums up the stakes: not what new powers we can bring into the world, but what hard-won practices we can prevent from disappearing.

Notes.

PREFACE.

1. There are numerous instances, such as in the practice of torture or of elevating political or ideological considerations to limit or override scientific findings (e.g., in the areas of birth control, stem cell research, and environmental pollution), wherein the Bush administration approximates totalitarian practice. Throughout this volume I try to avoid the mistake of claiming that in a particular matter inverted totalitarianism ”subst.i.tutes” one of its policies for a particular policy of the n.a.z.is-for example, racism. That would be to presuppose that inverted totalitarianism and cla.s.sical totalitarianism have the same structures. My point is that they do not. For a discussion of these problems, see Anson Rabinbach, ”Moments of Totalitarianism,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 72100.

2. Consider the Internet. It is touted as a revolutionary development for promoting popular political partic.i.p.ation and providing for ”democratic input.” But, as recent disclosures demonstrate, it also allows for expanded governmental surveillance of the opinions and actions (e.g., financial transactions) of citizens.

PREVIEW.

1. Cited in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 19331939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 183.

2. National Security Strategy of the United States,, sec. 1, pp. 34. Hereafter NSS. I have used the text from nytimes.com of Sept. 20, 2002. This doc.u.ment was drawn up by the National Security Council for transmission to Congress as ”a declaration of the Administration's policy” and released in September 2002.

3. Quoted in Ron Suskind, ”Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

CHAPTER ONE.

MYTH IN THE MAKING.

1. New York Times, September 12, 2003, A-19.

2. Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 2.

3. According to the 9/11 commission's report, the White House was originally on the list but was later omitted for reasons that are not clear.

4. According to one survey 74 percent of the TV coverage of 9/11 was ”all” or ”mostly pro-U.S.,” while 7 percent dissented ”all” or ”mostly.” Cited in Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 143.

5. After Giuliani completed his term, he became an entrepreneur whose business advised governments and corporations on the arts of leaders.h.i.+p under conditions of extreme stress. In 2007 he announced his presidential candidacy and indicated that his actions in the aftermath of 9/11 would be his major qualification.

6. A notable fact about the contemporary political climate and its widespread fear is that when some striking event occurs, such as the power failure of August 14, 2003, when several of the northeastern states and parts of Canada were blacked out, the first response of authorities was to rea.s.sure the public that it was not the result of a terrorist attack. Yet a few weeks later, and a few weeks before the anniversary of 9/11, officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the body that had administered the World Trade Center) released new audiotapes of the voices of victims trapped in the Twin Towers, thus ensuring that the events would remain fresh in the public memory.

7. New York Times, September 10, 2003, A-11.

8. The phrase ”holy politics” was used by an English divine, Richard Baxter, during the seventeenth-century civil wars.

9. Subsequently the families of the victims were awarded sums equivalent to their expected earnings had they survived. Even death has a salary scale. Meanwhile, the police and firefighters whose heroism was praised to the skies at the time were later unable to gain the wage increase they had bargained for prior to 9/11.

10. At the memorial service commemorating the second anniversary of those killed at the Pentagon, the director of the FBI read this from Ephesians 6:1218: ”We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Quoted in New York Times, September 12, 2003, A-19.

11. A cla.s.sic example is the New York Times 's ”public editor,” the self-described ”readers' representative.” He characterizes himself as ”a registered Democrat but notably to the right of my fellow Democrats on Manhattan's Upper West Side.” He declares he can be located between the ”left” of the Times 's editorial page and the ”right” of William Safire's ”right.” ”But,” he declares audaciously, ”on some issues I veer from the noncommittal middle” to become ”an absolutist on free trade and free speech and a supporter of gay rights and abortion rights.” He thinks it ”unbecoming” for the rich to ”whine about high taxes” and ”inconsistent for advocates of human rights to oppose all American military action.” He prefers ”exterminating rats” to reading a book by ”either Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore.”

12. New York Times, December 28, 1993, A-4.

13. Quoted in David Sanger, ”U.S. Goal Seems Clear and the Team Complete,” New York Times, February 13, 2002, A-14.

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