Peak democracy
A growing disenchantment with the 200 or so year-long experiment with self-rule, a disenchantment as prevalent among the right wing as the left wing, makes for the biggest challenge we've ever faced
by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>
The undeniable core buried deep in the American neo-conservative movement is that democracy is sometimes capable of producing catastrophic outcomes. Those outcomes can be so devastating, goes the central theme to the work of neo-conservative father Leo Strauss, that it is less risky to entrust higher-order thinking on the most urgent of matters of state policy to a secretive council of initiated wise men.
Many critics have wrongly suggested Strauss raised up a generation of anti-democrats to invade American university campuses and recruit initiates to become those secret rulers of the land and the world. They pointed to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense in the Bush cabinet, and among the strongest, if not the loudest, of hawks for war on Iraq, and a student of Strauss, as proof.
Strauss' defenders successfully combated that unfair anti-democratic characterization by pointing to volumes of his work in which he clearly extols the value of democracy. Some of them even started showing up on the Sunday morning talk shows, lending an air of unreality to the public debate prior to the engagement of war, what with the impenetrable writings of obscure, foreign-born philosophers mixing it up with forged documents about yellow cake and tubes. Strauss' defenders had nonetheless thereby succeeded in throwing investigators completely off the neo-conservative trail, and the neo-cons have remained unmolested ever since.
The catastrophe that gives shape to the entire Strauss ouvré is not, as one might suppose for a German-Jewish émigré who escaped Europe for America in 1939, the holocaust. Strauss by then had familiarized himself with the plight of Jews in Europe and in the world generally throughout that people's peculiar history enough to note that amidst pogroms, mass exiles, attempted exterminations, and always the constant suspicions over the course of millennia, the holocaust in mid-20 th Century Europe, although among the most significant for Jewry, was only one event of many in an unrelenting chain. It was only to be expected, in more ways than one, as far as Strauss was concerned.
The real surprise, and tragedy, for Strauss was the fact (a loose one) that Germans democratically elected the perpetrator of the holocaust, in 1936. In fact, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party did not win a majority or even the largest minority of votes, placing third. The two leading minority parties could not broker a deal between them, leaving the Chancellor no choice but to invite the third place party to try to form a government. It was far from a mandate for the Nazis. But they took it, thereby convincing Strauss that democracy could not always be trusted with the right answer.
Strauss, as well as Hannah Arendt and thousands of other German-Jewish political intellectuals, fled for the safety of American universities from where they watched the counter-example of democracy in America elect a leadership capable of successfully rousing the nation to make enormous sacrifices on foreign fields of war apparently out of the goodness of their own hearts, and out of a sense of the mission of the savior to the world, a sense of mission not unfamiliar to the Jewish community generally.
Thus was tied the first knot in that odd weave that today is the apparently solid coalition between conservative Christian voters and the strongly pro-Israel neo-con-dominated administration they have elected to the White House.
Thomas Frank could have, with more sympathy, emphasized the genuine piety felt by the secularly-threatened Red State voters, and if he had, he'd have more accurately banged the nail he was swinging at in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas? : people the world over turn to religion when this world gets harder, and turn away from religion when it becomes easier. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, in Sacred and Secular , explain away the apparent American contradiction to this otherwise obvious observation by pointing to unique features of religion in America, but also by persuasively discounting, through a remarkable perseverance with numbers, the popular notion that America is significantly more religious than equally economically prosperous Western Europe.
It is almost exclusively a part of America's founding mythology that there is a global mission the nation is charged with to save the world. That mission has been woven over many generations into the genetic code of American life and forms the foundation of what is today called “American values,” even while, in the devastating aftermath of World War II, or more poignantly, the aftermath of the 75-year-long inter-imperial war of which World War II was only the grand finale, peoples of all other powerful states in the West were carefully pulling that very same thread clear out of their own national founding fabrics, so dangerous did it now look to them.
The 19 th Century European imperial grab on virtually the entire world was popularly fueled by rhetoric heavy on the much older Christian mission to save the world, and political leaders borrowed liberally from it to justify their industrial patrons' economic empire, which was essentially the enforcement of new trade routes bringing resources to manufacturers in Europe and finished products to foreign markets, where they were sold for more gold than it took to do all this.
One might suppose, with all the Christian rhetoric flying around in the most quickly developing nations of the 19 th Century, that Europeans also were strangely becoming much more religious, even while becoming much more prosperous. That could only be the conclusion if one remained unaware that Christian rhetoric had been deployed by states to provide cover for their less inspiring economic expansion plan that would not have garnered nearly as much public support. That expansion was certainly necessary to save Europe, which had quickly consumed already whatever resources at home were then easiest to grab hold of, and without it, Europe might have collapsed. Save the world, indeed, would have been a powerful rallying cry if Europe was your world, and Christianity certainly provided more than enough handy catch-phrases on that subject.
So too the American middle. Ralph Reed, executive director of The Christian Coalition, as early as 1996 published virtually the same book Thomas Frank did eight years later, if only one changes Reed's future tense verbs in his Active Faith to Frank's past tense verbs. Where Frank attempts to reverse-engineer how the Republicans, now under the control of Christian conservatives, had won the hearts and minds of destitute and dispossessed workers throughout wide swaths of America's vast middle ground, Reed provides the owners manual for when the Christian conservatives he represents take control of the Republican Party, an event for him still in the future at the time of writing this book.
But a curious side-note with Reed must be brought to light. In 1996, before his Coalition had won the controls of the Republican Party, it was equally interested in the Democratic Party. One is left with the startling impression, given what happened in November elections and the implications for foreign affairs, that had Democrats resuscitated the visages of their great Christian leaders of the past, like Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, and even the philosophers who gave Christian foundations to the New Deal, Reed's avowedly non-partisan Christian Coalition could just as easily have turned all those middle states Blue as Red. He says as much, after his chosen one, Dan Quayle, was forced to abandon a bid for leadership of the Republican Party in the 1996 primaries.
There isn't necessarily such a tight fit as everyone supposes between pro-Israel neo-cons high in the Republican food chain and Christian conservatives who ran the ground game so impressively this past summer and fall. Nor are those Christian conservatives necessarily so Christian or conservative. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton were no less infected with the American—and not necessarily the Christian or the conservative—mission to save the world, and perhaps could be characterized as more zealous in that mission than Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr ever were. It wasn't that middle America had suddenly got religion and intoxicated itself with a new brew of American mythology and evangelist missions that drove Bush Jr back to the White House. The American founding mythology is evangelism. Bush had only to annunciate it once it was clear no Democrat candidate would, just as Hitler had only to annunciate German founding mythologies in the similar, but by no means as extreme, vacuum of defeat in the twixt-war Germany he came across.
Many Democrat supporters announced prior to and immediately after the November elections that they were prepared to evacuate America for Canada in the event of a victory by Bush, evoking the evacuation of Jews from Germany following the rise of Hitler. Is it because they had been convinced, like their surprising predecessor Strauss, that democracy cannot ultimately be trusted to return the right result? Perhaps so.
Consider this title, unimaginable ten years ago, but certainly one Strauss 60 years ago would have ordered up: The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing . Michael Mann's thesis here is that ethnic cleansing, a disturbing characteristic of modern, more democratic times, does not come about by the handiwork of “evil elites” or “primitive peoples” but rather arises spontaneously in the complex and shifting matrix of power wherever democratic redistribution of it runs counter to ethnic and religious perceptions of what should be.
The more rudimentary and basic, though unstated, premise here is that democracy cannot be trusted everywhere all the time, which in the case of organizing political principles, is tantamount to saying democracy cannot ever be truly trusted anywhere. In case after case cited by Mann, the argument is well put. Combined with Amy Chua's groundbreaking World on Fire: How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability , the argument against democracy is so well put, in fact, that disaffected Democrats could well become Straussians if the American military adventure in Asia Minor and economic instability at home both start to get a lot worse than they already are. They'd be neo-liberals, then, if only that term hadn't already been used and exhausted by free-traders.
American attempts, genuine or otherwise, to export democracy around the world in the nearly 100 years since President Wilson gave the nation the new mission have gone well by some measures, and badly by others. What has enflamed the American middle class is the noticeable lack of global gratitude for this self-appointed, and self-sacrificing, mission. For all the good America's done for worldwide democracy, September 11 is how the world repays it, goes the argument nearly universally throughout the American polity today.
With the democracy-subverting neo-cons having captured the mantle of the American founding mythology, and democracy-doubting neo-liberals retreating to their study halls to re-think their support for it, all in the milieu of real complications for democracy with the dynamics of it getting mixed up in increasingly alarming, and frequent, instances of ethnic cleansing and other horrors, we are perhaps witnessing today the wholly unpredicted phenomenon of peak democracy. Here and there rising and falling over the last quarter of a millennium, democracy generally has over that whole time been undeniably rising globally, and doing so relentlessly and for so long, no one thought there could possibly be an end to its rise, much less a growing foundation of support for its premature drowning. But that time may have arrived now, at the very moment when the world is arguably at its most democratic ever. But then, don't all things fall right after reaching their highest point by definition?
If democracy is going to be rescued, it's going to take someone who can not only show where Strauss went wrong, but who can also show how more democracy, not less, can help avoid destructive conflicts. It's a hard argument made all the more difficult to pose while the world's leading exporter of democracy the last half century is currently initiating some pretty destructive conflicts of its own.
Books discussed in this article:
The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing by Michael Mann. Cambridge 2005
Sacred and Secular: Religion and politics worldwide by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. Cambridge 2004
What's the Matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America by Thomas Frank. Metropolitan Books, 2004
Active Faith: How Christians are changing the soul of American politics by Ralph Reed. The Free Press, 1996
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German émigrés and American political thought after World War II , Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, editors. Cambridge, 1995
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