Part 20 (1/2)
CHAPTER TEN.
DOMESTIC POLITICS IN THE ERA OF SUPERPOWER AND EMPIRE.
1. Cited by Philip Gourevitch, ”Bushspeak,” New Yorker, September 13, 2004, 4142.
2. As shown by the case of a former Young Republican loyalist, Jack Abramoff, ideological fervency is no prophylactic against corruption, in this case fleecing Indian tribes, even as it keeps faith with the long tradition of special treatment, including racist insults, of Native Americans. It is also instructive to note how the last three candidates proposed for Supreme Court appointments by the Bush administration-Miers, Roberts, Alito-had served long apprentices.h.i.+ps in Republican Party organizations and in Republican administrations. In a recent but not unrelated development, right-wing groups have mounted a campaign in several states to make it possible to indict judges whose opinions run counter to the ideology of the groups.
3. Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Report of the Committee on Political Parties, American Political Science Review 44, no. 3, pt. 2, Supplement (1950): 19. Details concerning the composition of the Party Councils can be found at 43.
4. ”On the Road, Bush Fields Softb.a.l.l.s from the Faithful,” New York Times, August 16, 2004, A-11.
5. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), vii ff., and ”America, Unconscious Colossus,” Daedalus, Spring 2005, 1833. Mann, Incoherent Empire, 13, sees the United States as ”a disturbed, misshapen monster stumbling clumsily across the world.”
6. Charles Krauthamer as quoted by Mann, Incoherent Empire, 10.
7. Anthony Pagden, ”Empire, Liberalism and the Quest for Perpetual Peace,” in Daedalus, Spring 2005, 4657, at 52.
8. ”Cheney Sees 'Shameless' Revision on War,” New York Times, November 22, 2005, A-1.
9. Cited in Mann, Incoherent Empire, 11.
10. The major exception is the continuing controversy over procedural rights. This contrasts with the lively academic discourse on justice during the last three decades of the twentieth century, thanks primarily to the focus provided by the magistral work of John Rawls.
11. See Johnston, Perfectly Legal.
12. The long-term objective of the tax reformers is to establish a flat tax. The originators of the idea of a flat tax candidly wrote that the tax ”would be a tremendous boon to the economic elite. . . . It is an obvious mathematical law that lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up by higher taxes on average people.” Cited by John Ca.s.sidy, ”Tax Code,” New Yorker, September 6, 2004, 75.
13. In attempting to erase felons from the voter rolls, the state of Florida managed to erase legal voters as well.
14. In much of previous American history spontaneous movements have played an important role in invigorating politics. Such were the Grange movement, the Populists, and, recently, the Green party. It could be argued that spontaneity also drove the campaign of Howard Dean. The successful effort to crush him, undertaken by both the media and his opponents, ill.u.s.trates the rigidity of the current party system and what it feels threatened by.
15. For details and examples, see Singer, Corporate Warriors, especially 73 ff.; Scahill, Blackwater, 321 ff., is especially interesting for the policing role a.s.sumed by private security forces in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Scahill, chap. 1, is also revealing of the religious element in the Blackwater hierarchy.
16. Santa Rosa Press Democrat, March 7, 2004, A-3.
17. A remarkable variation on winning was described recently in the New York Times. There a former congressman and now consultant suggested that it might be better for the party if it were not to win the 2006 midterm elections. This would force the Republicans to ”struggle” through the remainder of President Bush's term and better position the Democrats for 2008. See Adam Nagourney, ”Hey Democrats, Why Win?” May 14, 2006, sec. 4, p. 1. Yet another symptom of the party's failure to oppose was the large number of its candidates in the 2006 midterm elections whose views were strikingly similar to those of conservative Republicans. See Shaila Dewan and Anne Kornblut, ”In Key House Races, Democrats Run to the Right,” New York Times, October 30, 2006, A-1.
18. Quoted in David M. Halbfinger, ”Shedding Populist Tone, Kerry Starts Move to Middle,” New York Times, May 8, 2004, A-14.
19. For a discussion of the strategies of welfare opponents, especially as they relate to bureaucracy, see Jacob S. Hacker, ”Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (May 2004): 24360. Another tactic favored by lobbyists is to have their proposals inserted in appropriation bills at a stage where the items cannot be removed except through the defeat of the entire bill.
20. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, (2004) is devoted to the question of why the less powerful and poorer cla.s.ses vote against their own interests.
21. A majority of Americans are said to favor having a religious president.
22. Cited in Halbfinger, ”Shedding Populist Tone, Kerry Starts Move to Middle,” A-14.
23. Only in the last month before the election did Kerry attempt a clarification of his views on these matters, and even then the differences seemed more rhetorical than substantive.
24. The takeover of the Democratic Party by the ”center” is an eerie echo of the fate of the Centre Party (largely Catholic) in the Weimar Republic. Amidst the increasingly polarized politics of the 1920s and early 1930s, the party could not make up its mind whether to support the Right (n.a.z.is and extreme conservatives) or the Left (Social Democrats and Communists). It ended up supporting the Right and was abolished soon after the n.a.z.is took power.
25. The Missouri Compromise also stipulated that Kansas and Nebraska would be organized as free territories.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM: ANTECEDENTS AND PRECEDENTS.
1. In March 2006, in response to a lawsuit, New York city police commanders made public reports on their arrest tactics during political demonstrations of 2002. These included ”pro-active arrests,” covert surveillance, seizure of demonstrators who were ”obviously potential rioters,” and the deployment of undercover officers to infiltrate political gatherings. It was proposed that a tactic of ”utiliz[ing] undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds” be resumed, although it had been disavowed thirty years earlier by the city and federal governments. For a further description of police tactics, see Jim Dwyer, ”Police Files Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest,” New York Times, March 17, 2006, A-1.
2. During the traditional New Year's Eve celebration in New York City to usher in 2005, police armed with machine guns patrolled the crowds.
3. The twofold threat presented by Dean was, first, his forthright insistence that the war in Iraq was a gigantic blunder and that the United States needed to withdraw as soon as feasible; and, second, the threat of a popular mobilization, especially of the young. The Democratic Party wanted voters, not militants.
4. On the role of paramilitary forces in preparing the way to power in Italy, see Mann, Fascists, 6869.
5. Ibid., 37 ff.
6. See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), 116 ff.
7. The New York Times reported that in a Roper poll in the summer of 2005, 72 percent of the respondents believed that wrongdoing was widespread in industry; that only 2 percent described CEOs of large corporations as very trustworthy. In a Harris poll of November 2005, 90 percent of the respondents said that big companies had too much influence in Was.h.i.+ngton. The Times's photo accompanying the report pictured an executive shackled helplessly to a target dotted with knives that had apparently missed. ”Take Your Best Shot,” December 9, 2005, C-1.
8. See the curious piece in the New York Times, ”An Unexpected Odd Couple: Free Markets and Freedom,” June 14, 2007, A-4, where a few American intellectuals are said to have become doubtful that capitalism and democracy ”need each other to survive.” Those interviewed were perplexed primarily by China, which is becoming more capitalistic but hardly more democratic; some also seemed to believe that while democracy depends upon capitalism, the reverse is not true. Marx would have agreed. One appeared to suggest that democracy and capitalism were incompatible.
9. Neoconservatives, according to one neoconservative, accept that they live in ”a democratic age.” They ”recognize” the ”fundamental justice of democratic equality” (which the author left undefined). Democracy's ”shortcomings” are its ”low aspirations and dehumanizing tendencies.” He concludes: ”Only neoconservatism among contemporary conservative modes of thought has made its peace with democracy. That fact might also be considered a serious weakness, but would be a subject for another day.” Adam Wolfson, ”Conservatives and Neoconservatives,” in The Neocon Reader, ed. Irwin Stelzer (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 223, 231.
10. Here the essay ”The Neoconservative Persuasion” by Irving Kristol, regarded by many as the intellectual G.o.dfather of neoconservatism, is indicative. While he supports ”economic growth” as the means to ”promote the spread of affluence among all cla.s.ses” so that ”a property-owning and taxpaying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals,” he rejects the notion that conservatives should favor a weak ”State.” In Stelzer, The Neocon Reader, 35. In the same volume he begins his essay ”A Conservative Welfare State” by writing, ”I shall pay no attention to the economics of the welfare state.” He goes on: ”What conservatives ought to seek, first of all, is a welfare state consistent with the basic moral principles of our civilization and the basic political principles of our nation. . . . [W]e should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse, which is the normal conservative predisposition” (145).
11. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 16881783 (New York: Knopf, 1988). Brewer writes, ”The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an astonis.h.i.+ng transformation in British government, one which put muscle on the bones of the British body politic, increasing its endurance, strength and reach. Britain was able to shoulder an ever-more ponderous burden of military commitments thanks to a radical increase in taxation, the development of public deficit finance (a national debt) on an unprecedented scale, and the growth of a sizable administration devoted to organizing the fiscal and military activities of the state” (xvii).
12. Burkean conservatism resurfaced in the late 1950s and early 1960s in writers such as Russell Kirk and William Buckley. They are now somewhat scornfully labeled ”paleoconservatives” by some neocons.
13. The infatuation of American academics with Bentham and J. S. Mill was mostly a twentieth-century phenomenon.
14. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, chaps. 25.