democracy, a brief definition
The reason we are going to ‘lose’ the war in Iraq is the same reason that we lost the war in Vietnam: they were created by fraud and deceit. That is, they were created outside the parameters and processes defined by democracy. In Iraq, the White House consciously and intentionally misled the American people, utilizing the moment of fear and anger created by the destruction in New York and Washington in the early autumn of 2001 and a trumped up ‘threat’ from Iraq itself. That is, the subversion of the democratic process was open and direct. In the case of Vietnam, the war powers were given to the president on the basis of an incident that later proved to have been generated by the clandestine activity of an agency of the United States government itself.
Democracy, by definition, is an open society. If we define it in terms of the individual, we generally define it in terms of ‘freedom’. But it’s not just that freedom itself requires mutuality, although a society without mutual deference and mutual respect cannot properly call itself a democracy. But democracy itself has to allow for the possibility of dangerous activity, for the possibility of risk. This is inherent in the ‘free flow of ideas’ that is at the very root of democracy. If we are going to have a true democracy, we definitely risk the possibility of violence or other criminal activity. But historically, the best legislative and judicial minds have defined democracy precisely in terms of the absence of ‘prior restraint’. Until a pattern of behavior or thinking passes over into overt criminal activity, it not only cannot be actively restrained, it cannot legally provoke government intervention in the form of surveillance.
So obviously democracy not only requires a certain amount ofcourage on the part of its participants; it is, in essence, a heroic culture. But what I’m talking about here has to be democracy. When I say that liberalism is the ground and center of democracy, this is precisely what I mean. Liberalism is not only a belief in personal liberty, a belief in the right of personal freedom – something a certain percentage of the American population has corrupted to the point that their motto seems to be: ‘Wave the flag. Break the law’ – it is also a necessary openness and welcoming attitude toward alien thinking, ideals and belief systems, and a form of superior patience, a willingness to investigate where certain ideas and belief systems might lead.
I grant you that that the self-styled liberal of 25 or 30 years ago – the last generation willing to self-apply the label – had devolved into a peculiar weakness. But that reflected an equally peculiar degeneration of the ideal. When Lyndon Johnson risked his career, ramrodding the 1964 civil rights law through congress to prove his liberal credentials, only to find the ‘liberals’ favoring Bobbie Kennedy – who may have been a liberal at the end, but whose career belied anything but liberal beliefs and behavior – we have to assume that real or heroic liberalism was already long dead, at least among the voters. Apparently, at that point, a liberal was defined as much by how one pronounced the word ‘nuclear’ as by what one actually believed or did.
Has anyone since acknowledged that the 1964 civil rights law did what a century of pundits, north and south, could not do, namely open the south to northern investment money and industry – that is, to the legitimate beginnings of the ‘new south’ – by giving outsiders a clear law that defined worker relations, as opposed to the byzantine social structures that had obtained in the south hitherto?
This is the nature of heroic liberalism. But apparently a drawling Texan was the last politician to manifest it. And given the response, one can understand why ‘liberalism’ as a label was vulnerable.
Democracy is an ideal, not an actuality. The United States has never been a democracy. But a part of the history of the United States has moved toward democracy.
A perversion of democracy is enshrined in the Constitution. The so-called three-fifths clause is obviously a perversion of the concept of universal freedom, and remains an execrable marker for Americans whose ancestors never tasted slavery, as well as for African-Americans.But to stop there is to miss the real point of the clause. Without the clause, non-slave states would have had the power to end slavery from the first day of the Union. The southern states never would have ratified the Constitution without it, since it gave the south anartificial political equality with the north, an equality it did nothave by nature, because, relative to the north, its actual voting population was tiny. In other words, the Constitution itself wholly subverted the principle of democracy.
This perversion of democracy led to 70 years of ‘compromises’ to preserve the Union in the face of the rising moral indignation of the non-slave states. And finally, when it became clear that even the constitutional perversion of democracy would no longer guarantee the equality of power between slave and non-slave states, the south seceded, leading to the havoc and destruction of one of the first ‘modern’ wars.
I am not suggesting that legitimate democracy will not face conflict or war. Just the reverse, democracy is a kind of war in itself. And I need not stoop to the cliché that it is a constant war against ignorance, although the cliché embodies a certain truth that I also want to point to. It’s not just that democracy does not guarantee security. But it is also true that democracy – in a phrase that is now equally clichéd, but vital in its origins – requires ‘eternal vigilance’. This makes it sound as if democracy is under constant threat, which is not necessarily the case. If democracy does not guarantee security, it guarantees more security, in the long run, than any tyranny. Tyranny begs enemies, both within and without. But the ‘vigilance’ that sustains democracy is not the hyper-vigilance of traumatic fear. Ultimately, a democratic society is a vibrant society – not a society momentarily brilliant with the glitter of excess wealth, of excess concentrations of credit – but a society grounded in anactive and creative culture.
But this cultural creativity is dependent on inclusion, and this inclusion begins at the level of ‘politics’, of the ‘polis’, which in its Greek origins signified the ‘city’ as the embodiment and expressionof the ‘region’, the parallel of the Latin ‘civis’ and our ‘citizen’. The political inclusion means that the government is not hidden from the individual citizen.
Perhaps there is some need to keep the guidance mechanisms of our weapons systems hidden from our enemies. But it seems, first of all, that the technologies largely prove to be common knowledge. And secondly, it would appear that a weapons’ acquisition process which is grounded in the past is in fact destroying our military services, since protracted wars, obviously, are still fought by the soldier on the ground. And this is apparently the branch of the services that is being sacrificed to feed monstrous and apparently ineffective or untenable systems. But since none of this is subject to debate in the public sector – except after the fact – the juggernaut military goes on under the umbrella of secrecy dictated by ‘national security’ – a national security, which from my own peculiarly limited vantage point woulda ppear to be in process of being sacrificed to the errors devolving from this secrecy.
The point of democracy is that our enemies – as well as our friends – know who we are and what we are doing. I do not minimize the threats. But I suggest that our enemies already basically know what our strategies and tactical capabilities are. ‘National security’, at this point, would only appear to be hiding our strategies and policies from the American people. And democracy, of course, is based on the presumption that an educated people know better what they need, in the long run.
The same is true of our basic foreign policy, and has been for more than 200 years. Except for a few brief periods, such as the era of ‘manifest destiny’ or the run-up to the Spanish American war, the bulk of Americans have not been overtly imperialistic. But the government and its agents have been overtly and covertly imperialistic almost from the beginning. I say this not to denigrate my nation, but because I love it and love democracy. Democracy is about the truth. Those who insist on lying to themselves and others about the actions of their government, not only do not love their own government and do not love democracy, they have no clue what democracy actually is, what it means, and what it requires. The real risk of democracy is the truth.
But again, the activity is largely only hidden from the American people. Ask the Nicaraguans how the United States has behaved toward them for the best part of 200 years, and you will get an answer that is not in the history books we read in high school, and probably not in those for college.
It is inevitable that America will use its economic power in the world. And it is inevitable that agents of that power and our government will abuse it for self-serving ends. At this point we justify the behavior, both abroad and at home, in terms of a relatively venal residual social Darwinism, otherwise long exploded, and in spite of the fact that the chief moral model for the supposed moral model forour culture said, ‘You shall not grind the face of the poor.’
If we look at our behavior in the Middle East, the same pattern emerges. Perhaps we can justify part of it in terms of our struggle against the Soviet Union. But our behavior today makes it clear that we were also, all along, serving ourselves.
And what about communism and the Soviet Union? Perhaps if we had allowed an open discussion of socialism and communism in the 19thcentury, as these theories were developing, we might have forestalled the manifestation of their more extreme forms in the instrumentality of governments, by exposing the ‘internal contradictions’ inherent in the theories. But, instead, we hanged the Haymarket martyrs in 1888, the culmination of a governmental terror campaign against these ‘foreign’ ideas, thus endorsing their cultural potency and probably virtually guaranteeing that ‘anti-western’ elements in a nation like Russia would be attracted to them. We violated our own constitutional guarantees of free speech, and, as a consequence, instead of nullifying the ideas, were inforced them in the minds of the enemies of the ‘capitalist west’.
We were not only the adults in the room, we were the dispassionate observers, outside the frame of the ancient struggles and hatreds in Europe. We had come of age, intellectually. We should have been the recipients and arbiters of these ideas. But, instead, we allowed a perceived threat – largely without any grounding force other than the brutalizing poverty produced by an unenlightened enforcement of the worst ‘capitalist’ principles – to subvert the possibility of real democracy.
Had radical communism been discredited at the outset by debate, rather than reinforced by action, could Hitler have arisen in Germany?
The violation of democracy produces its own rewards.
Again, I do not underestimate the dangers in the world. But the question is how much our own violation of our democratic principles amplifies those dangers. Great powers will always stand in danger of confrontation rather than cooperation. And undoubtedly we must be prepared for the possibility of conflict on whatever scale it develops. But we have to ask ourselves how we are contributing to hostility. Rather than trancing out on paranoid navel gazing, it is imperative that we understand the basic courage required by democracy, by ‘liberalism’ in its primary meaning, and understand that it is the courage and creativity of real democracy and real liberalism that are our strongest defense against the unseen possibilities of the world.
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