CAN YOU PULL YOUR PUNCHES IN A GOOD CAUSE?

I’ve read Sheldon Wolin’s latest, “Democracy Incorporated”. It’s good, but it might have been much more.

He does an incisive and acute job, explaining how the corporate mentality and the now-monster-sized corporate network have synergized with the ancient foe of wealth-seeking-political-power-and-control, and all to the detriment of democracy. In this regard Chalmers Johnson’s thoughts about the great and ultimate value of the book (see my immediately previous Post) are absolutely correct. So far as they go.

Because Wolin has not told the whole truth here. To hear him tell it, the Republicans are responsible for the whole thing (echoing Mussolini’s final defense in front of the now gimlet-eyed Fascist Grand Council at that last meeting: ‘I tedeschi sono responsabili di tutto’ – The Germans are responsible for the whole thing). As another World War 2 icon would say: Yah.

Although he ranges back to the Greeks and Machiavelli and up through the 17th century English political thinkers to the Founders themselves, he then jumps more or less straight to his chosen point of departure, 1980. With the exception of some hardly irrelevant port calls at the New Deal and the Cold War he moves pretty much straight to a year well-known for the election of Ronald Reagan and the inception of the Republican Ascendancy.

Yes, it’s his book and he gets to choose where to start it, but he was writing the book to help explain how We are in the very serious and real mess We are in, so that noble and urgent purpose ought to kind of … have an influence on him. Not quite.

He discusses the dangerous corrupting effect of concentrated money, especially when it’s made available to politicians and legislators. But he doesn’t discuss PACs themselves. There isn’t even an entry for them in his index. Of course, the PACs were a Democratic invention (a treacherously reverse image of ‘only Nixon could go to China’), invented and pressed upon the initially unwilling corporate bosses by Tip O’Neill (about whom, also, there is no mention in text or index).

He discusses the “inauthentic opposition” of “the Democrats’ politics” without once discussing Tip O’Neill who – as carefully limned by Walter Karp in his masterful book on Carter’s and Reagan’s Presidencies – purposely sought to gut Carter’s administration from the get-go. Nor is there any reference to Karp in the text or the index. Wolin doesn’t really go into this huge issue any further; yet if you have said that the democratic politics of the United States has been insidiously and treacherously undermined by – you say – the Republican party over the course of a quarter of a century, then you should feel yourself obligated to have some thoughts as to Where the frak the soi-disant ‘opposition’ Party was during the whole period. And – face it – in addition to becoming a banana republic (sans bananas) this country has reached its present state via the same route that France did in 1940: all of its Parties contributed their bit. That’s why even after the war went south, on top of 9-11 and all the dreck that flowed from that, it’s almost impossible to get serious light shone on things: NOBODY inside the Beltway wants any light beaming around anywhere – because no matter where the beam lands inside the Beltway, there’s gonna be ‘guilty parties’, Democrats as well as Republicans – nor am I just talking about the likes of Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller and Phil Gramm. And investigations of this economic catastrophe will wind up the same way.

He discusses the tremendously corrosive effects of a concentrated and corporatized media, controlled by the corporations (who are – in Wolin’s schema –allied with the Republicans, of course) and yet he has nothing whatever to say about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (also not in his index), signed by Bill Clinton, that officially opened the floodgates for corporate plundering of ‘the press’. Or rather: treacherously opened the gates of the fort from the inside to let the hordes in – which was, back in the day, a hanging offense.

He makes reference to the hugely damaging practice of “splintering the citizenry into distinct categories” without once mentioning the huge wounds to the body politic and the American social compact wrought by Identity Politics and all its pomps and all its works. Nor is there any index entry for it, or for ‘deconstuctionism’ or ‘post-modernism’ or any of the ‘theory’ that has provided the cloak of intelligent rationality to the vast and hostile changes made in – and against – American society and American identity since the late 1960s.

He spends a great deal of energy dissecting the National Security State’s conscienceless use of “fear” to both motivate and control the citizenry, demonstrating at length how Cold War strategies for control merged political and corporate elites in a common task of reducing the American citizenry to a fearful and anxious rubber-stamp, to be taken out and dusted off only for the ceremony of ‘elections’. But there is nothing about the insidious replay of McCarthyite hysteria, and far more pervasive and ‘successful’ than McCarthy – that sodden, histrionic, mendacious wretch – could ever hope to have been: the victim-cloaked sex-offense mania that got started in 1996 under Clinton and that weird obverse of Hoover, Janet Reno, and still burns like a Southern California super-fire, having reduced much constitutional protection and jurisprudential praxis to desiccated cinders.

And yet he will from time to time make the most remarkably candid statements, only to abandon them on the launch pad. In the matter of the so-called “cultural wars” he says that “The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved [italics mine]. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace”.

Now yes and no. There is and always has been a strong flavor of ‘planned insolubility’ to many of the demands and agendas of the Identities. But the way Wolin frames it, the distracting elements were, you would have to infer, planned by the corporations. And that’s a stretch bordering on the absurd: the corporations ‘planned’ the Revolutions of the Identities back in the late-60s simply as an exercise to divert the citizenry from hugely relevant issues of class and economy? Phooey. The ‘distracting’ elements – including abortion (curiously not mentioned) and the ever-fuzzy ‘full equality’ of this or that Identity – were there all along, generated by the Identities and their advocacies themselves from the get-go. And embraced by the vote-hungry and vote-desperate and thoroughly terrified Democrats.

Yes, the Republicans (the repentant-on-his-deathbed Lee Atwater, of whom Rove is but the spawn, being the most notorious) took advantage of the situation that the Identities created. And that included making efficient political use of huge numbers of citizens who were doubtful, hesitant, skeptical, or resistant in the matter of yielding to those demands. But it’s beyond fantastical to imagine that the whole thing was a corporate-elitist plot to begin with.

And the “planned insolubility” is and always has been something of a guarantee that the vanguards and advocates of the assorted Revolutions would never be out of a job. A neat and hardly unforeseeable consequence of huge and fuzzy and vaguely-justified demands.

And ‘dividing’ the citizenry was pretty much guaranteed by the method of imposing these monster changes from the top down, and stifling general public discussion through the media-assisted muffling called “Political Correctness”.

And as far as ‘black power’ went, and as far as feminism of the Second Wave went, well –dividing was the game plan: the former wanted to separate from ‘honky’ and the latter were pretty much going after ‘men’. And the multiculturalists were after the both of them – white males, dead or alive.

He continues: “Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvement. Actually they are a substitute.” I not only agree, I don’t think he goes far enough here. The gravamen of the Revolutions of the Identities was not only a substitute for a democratic politics, it was a revolutionary anti-politics. But I’m guessing that’s exactly not where Wolin wants to go. I think he’s echoing obliquely a current Democratic thought: if it hadn’t been for the Republicans’ naming and framing the ‘culture wars’ in the 1990s, then there wouldn’t have been any. And that’s just baloney. The Republicans may have named the thing, but the thing itself was going on from the get-go. Why else did all those sturdy blue-collar, New Deal Democratic voters suddenly become Reagan Republicans in 1980?

He points out that a “discouraged democracy” becomes a “demobilized democracy”. Yup, and that would play right into the hands of an elite seeking to turn the citizenry into an obedient, corporate peasantry. And it’s very baad news for this country. But – looking back to those Reagan Democrats again – the discouragement started before the Republicans and the corporations could even dream of it; the herd was stampeded onto their spread by Democratic cowhands a’whoopin’ and a’shootin’ to celebrate the myriad celebrations of the Identities. Only later were the stampedees thoroughly betrayed, once safely penned – as Wolin rightly describes – in the dual grasp of the National Security State and the National Nanny State. And that monster’s limbs fused by the blast of 9-11, fortified by a corporatized media.

And, as Wolin nicely observes, where the Nazis trumpeted a hard and hardened citizenry, the corporatized “inverted totalitarianism” of Our time and place finds it quite congenial to root in the less rocky, more mushy ground of a soft, self-indulgent culture, much given to fantasy and amusing distractions. And, I would add, absent any remarkable chemistry, the infusion of large amounts of ‘feelings’ and ‘sensitivity’ and youthful difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality will only make things go so much the better. And even ‘outrage’, usefully dissipated on insoluble problems not having to do with wealth or the actual wielding of political power, can be added into the brew. Better ruling through chemistry.

But to do all this, Wolin has had to take some mighty circuitous routes to connect the dots believably without stepping on any land mines. Thus, his schematic is that the Founders were really elitists, and their whole plan was to ensure that ‘democracy’ would never gain a foothold in American government; thus the Constitution (which in 1787 replaced the more ‘democratic’ state governments loosely connected under the Articles of Confederation) was actually an elitist power grab, both to prevent the ‘mob’ from running the states and to harness the huge potential of the new country to a centralized government. And in the present, the Republican elites and the corporate elites have joined forces and made their Pact of Steel (Paper, actually, but let’s not complicate things too much).

He asserts that the 1930s – FDR’s first two administrations – were the closest the country has ever come to ‘democracy’, the rule of the ‘demos’, rather than an oligarchic rule by wealthy elites. Not much objection to that.

But then he poses the entire decade of the 1960s as a re-birth of ‘democracy’ that was evilly subverted by the forces of counterrevolution. He only says this once, and doesn’t go down the land-mined road as to what it really means to call the 1960s a ‘revolution’, with all that such a term might imply.

Thus then the ‘democracy’ was crushed in 1980 by the Republicans, who were now a solidly fused corporate-political machine. And with that, as they say at Santa Anita, ‘they’re off!’. We are now free to set Our democratic jaws against the infamy and – in a curious temporal coincidence – head into the elections.

I don’t’ think it works. The ‘1960s’ were two distinct decades, the first ending in the first week of July, 1965, and the second having its high-noon in 1968, and a democratic rebirth the latter most certainly was not. This is not to imply that all of the initiatives of ‘1968’ and of the Identities were or are ‘bad’, nor to imply that there was prior to 1968 ever a golden-age in this country – or anywhere else. But to the extent that there was a moment when Titanic’s hull was intact, and then another moment not long afterwards when its hull was not intact, then I’d say that said 'moment' was somewhere between '66 and '68, and after that moment - well, it's all been mostly ungood. And it also appears that 'intactness’ – as was once said of potential wives – should be a kind of a national priority at the moment. No offense intended.

Finally, an observation prompted by Wolin’s remarkable Freudian slip that “the academy had become self-pacifying:”. He is referring, rather safely, to all of those academics who failed to speak out against the Iraq war. But from what I can make of this book of his, he has pretty much done the same thing. Except on behalf of the Democratic Party. And possibly – a much longer stretch – for ‘democracy’.

We are in the mess We are in at this point because a whole lot of folks upon whom We might have counted for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, gave Us much less – and increasingly – something else altogether. But Us no buts that it was ‘well intentioned’, or ‘in a good cause’, or that ‘the end justifies the means’, or that it was done ‘for the children’ or for ‘national security’ or ‘to spread democracy’ or ‘because the devil made me do it’. Well, OK, maybe that last one. ‘Greed’ and ‘Lying’ and ‘War’ have always been associated with the devil. Although War … well, that could go either way. And it takes a whole lotta Peopling to buck up a Congress to make sure that the Main Battle Tank of national military might only goes over bridges that can support its awefull weight.

Professor Wolin has not given Us what We might have a right to expect from someone of his experience and knowledge. He has given Us a lot, but not enough to completely grasp what is necessary for Us to undertake in order to save Ourselves. To read him is to imagine that if only the Democrats get elected, then the Republican pols and their corporate paymasters can be brought to heel.

And that just ain’t so.

Why he did this is a matter for speculation. Incompetence is out of the question. A desire to stay in the good graces of his colleagues? The Democratic Party? The probable winners of the election? A compromise with publishers?

Who can say?

But in the words of a former manager of the Baltimore Orioles, addressed to a disappointing umpire: Do you get any better or is this it?

GETTING BACK YOUR GIFTS

Over on Truthdig, Chalmers Johnson reviews Sheldon Wolin’s new book “Democracy, Incorporated”. I’m reading the book myself at the moment, but Johnson’s review alone prompts several thoughts. (http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080515_chalmers_johnson_on_our_managed_democracy/)

Wolin recalls to Us the ancient Greek concept of the ‘demos’, the citizenry – whence We derive ‘democracy’ (and whence I derive my habit of capitalizing ‘The People’ and the personal pronouns ‘We’, ‘Us’, and ‘Our’ when referring to the American citizenry in that common capacity and role and identity as The People, as that ‘demos’ envisioned by the Greeks).

Johnson takes Madison and the Founding vision somewhat to task for its “elitism”, nor does he use that term in its current, queasy and almost mendacious Politically Correct term so favored by the Identities and so recently deployed by Hillary Clinton in response to a question as to why she was having such large ‘ideas’ for public policy without conferring with at least a few people who have dedicated their lives to learning the facts. “Facts”, famously, “don’t matter” to revolutionaries or inside the Beltway.

I wouldn’t go quite so far, although I respect Johnson’s and Wolin’s concerns. The Founders were ‘wary’ of direct rule by the demos, by the citizenry, but they were also very certain that they did not want to see ‘monarchical’ and ‘tyrannical’ rule by kings and aristocracies.

The huge loss of the Moment of 1968 – as I call it – was that the possibility of recovering the great democratic strides made in FDR’s first two administrations was quickly strangled and trampled by the Democrats’ mistaken (I would like to hope) embrace of the already bitterly divided ‘black power’ revolutionism of the post-King phase of what had been the marvelous ‘civil rights’ movement, and the outright ‘revolutionary’ content and method of feminism of the Second Wave, which was dedicated to warring upon the male half of the population and of grasping control of political power to carry that war on.

Neither of these first ‘Identities’ (not to be simplistically identified as ‘blacks’ and ‘women’ in general) were committed to anything less – whether they had taken the trouble to look at the hugely probable consequences or not – than the fracturing of the American communal ‘identity’. And that is precisely what has come to pass.

And it was as surely predictable and observable as was the march to financial catastrophe that could be seen as early as Nixon’s day, glared blindingly in any attentive eye in Reagan’s day, but has become so brutally clear in this most recent – and possibly irreversible – financial mess today.

How to avoid both monarchy and yet also the fathomless dangers of any Tom, Dick, or Gwendolyn simply stepping up to the controls and having a go? Jefferson hoped that We would be able to nurture and recognize a “natural aristocracy” of talented citizens, well-formed in character and dedicated to the rational pursuit of the common weal, free from selfish interests for enrichment in any form. That was a consummation devoutly to be wished, but flew (and flies) in the face of human nature, at least as it has been somewhat revealed throughout human history.

The Founders took a less hopeful, more prudent course. They built the checks-and-balances to prevent anybody from fully controlling the Branches. And they also provided not only a House with more popular election, but a Senate that would be drawn from those among the citizens who had at least some experience in ‘responsibility’ in managing earthly affairs – not a guarantee of character and virtue, surely. But they had not so many idealistic hopes for The People as would develop later on, although the concept of a truly competent People serving as the Ground of the Branches, the struts that anchored the entire ferris-wheel contraption of constitutional government … that concept was implicit in the era of the Founding itself.

Wolin and Johnson are both accurate when they advert to the accretion of political control around the propertied class that occurred over time – bolstered especially by the massive (for the time) centralization of the Civil War era, the erection of the ‘corporation’, and the massive amount of money that became concentrated in very few hands during the First Gilded Age, as the country began to tap its huge resources for industrial expansion. And – almost inevitably – for the expansion of its markets, leading in no uncertain terms to McKinley’s purposeful but cleverly-disguised war with Spain for the large purpose of securing the Philippine ‘enduring base’ (if I may) to position American business for the great China ‘market’, as Walter Karp so deftly describes.

Teddy Roosevelt’s deployment of the power of the federal government to counter the weight of the ‘interests’ – the now monster-sized corporations – on behalf of the rest of the citizenry was wise and almost noble in its way, but undercut by his equally cocky and adventurous determination to ‘show the world’ what America could ‘do’ – he was personally a perfect fit for American expansion, having willfully developed from a childish weakling to a more robust maturity (physically, at least) and – in a way not fully realized these days – having been too young to have participated in the ‘glory’ and ‘heroism’ of Union service in the increasingly hallowed Civil War.

Wilson’s almost maniacal self-importance led that gentleman, not twenty years later, to maneuver the U.S. into the Great War, on the pretext of warring to end all war, a Herculean task for which he felt himself most peculiarly and gloriously suited. A massive growth of government control over the American citizenry followed, symbolized perhaps by the rise of an obscure government clerk of curious sexual proclivity to become the head of a nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FDR had to face the monstrous results of unbridled financial shenanigans by the propertied classes, now far and away mutated beyond the wealthy but educated landowners of the Founding era. The Depression raised the possibility that the ‘demos’ would rise up against the government that had failed to serve them in equity and justice, and yet FDR’s efforts actually resulted in a plot by the propertied to overthrow him (recently described by Alan Nasser on Counterpunch, “FDR’s Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him”, October 3-5, 2008); the plotters miscalculated by approaching then-famous Marine general Smedley Butler, who – in an act of civic courage not recently seen among the starred-set – reported the whole thing to the President, who nipped the plot in the bud, though he then quietly avoided exposing the assorted Rockefellers, Mellons, Pews, Duponts, and Heinzes and others who were behind the thing. Present Beltway approval of large detention camps and private military forces, as well as a militarized police, may not have simply jumped full-blown from the fetid minds of the Bush banditti. Absent Smedley Butler, it can be wondered how the Marines will behave themselves this time around.

The American citizenry, it is to be recalled, put up with a lot of tough times without recourse to overthrowing the government. Leaving the glorious wealthy – as a matter of historical fact – as the greatest threat to the constitutional government of the United States since the secession of the Confederacy. Lest We forget. In fact, since the Confederates saw themselves not as overthrowing the U.S. government, but rather as starting their own government, then the very-rich go to the top of the 'dangerous' column. Bets on whether Bush has put them on any lists?

Johnson notes that Wolin has termed Our present monstrous challenge “inverted totalitarianism”. By this Wolin means that instead of the overt imperialist and fascist governments of the last century, wherein the government took control and flaunted itself as having done so, the present ‘totalitarianism’ that has been brewing is sort of a ‘button-down’ affair whereby the now-engorged networks of corporations exercise control over the government and – with touching respect for the temper of the times – do so ‘benevolently’, as merely the next logical step in the working-out of America’s historical destiny to bring peace and freedom to all the world and closure to all its victims.

I had mentioned not long ago, following Walter Karp’s discussion of the years 1976-1988 in his “Liberty Under Siege”, that it was the Democratic leadership’s revulsion at Carter’s populist plans that caused them to undercut him – a President of their own Party – so as to preserve their own power. And with that, the Democratic erection of PACs, both to ensure their cash sources (the almost-immediate fracturing resulting from Identity Politics having convinced them that they wouldn’t be able to rely on donations from large numbers of voters) and to assure the corporations that they had a friend in the Democratic Party.

I’d add that by that time, it was already clear that America’s industrial capacity was falling both in relative and absolute terms and if there was to be any ‘economy’ at all, it would have to be whatever ‘business’ the corporations – and then the lords of the F.I.R.E. sector – decided to carry on, in whatever fashion they chose to do so. Reagan’s election in 1980 only intensified this dynamic.

“Market forces”, shrewdly and intensely advertised, began to drive Our national activity. And not in ways that would help the little people, the ‘demos’. The requirement then became for a citizenry that was really nothing more than a corporate workforce, taking its orders and settling for whatever wage it was decided to give them. The expansion of ‘credit’ in the 1980s allowed ‘ordinary people’ to buy luxuries and foreign cars while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that the great trajectory of American financial wealth and power for all its people was continuing – with Reagan’s MGM-ish stage management – even as the citizenry were being debauched into a modern-day enserfment.

But it was all smoke and mirrors – or, more literally, paper.

And in an echo of McKinley, who engineered the American ‘Griff nach der Weltmacht’ with the lubricant of God’s will to Freedom and Democracy, the now-debauched government continued its overseas machinations for expanded financial vitality under the banner of ‘humanitarian intervention’, saving the ‘victims’ overseas as it was riding to the rescue of ‘victims’ at home. Unlike at home, however, the erstwhile ‘victims’ overseas quickly figured out what was going on – and began shooting back.

Just as the ‘paper tiger’ (to think that Mao got that right, at least) began to choke on its paper.

Thus Our present situation.

The whole of the New Deal has been disassembled, not through outright class war but through the “selective abdication” of the government for the well-being of The People, and since the early 1970s behind the massive dust-clouds raised by the hardly-clear demands of the Identities, which were then also incorporated into the cloak by which “inverted totalitarianism” has continued to subvert the Republic and The People.

Oy.

And in that regard, this country’s incomprehensible imprisonment rate, and the insinuation of ‘registries’ and restrictions of all sorts imposed on the utterly fabricated category of ‘sex offenders’ can be seen as merely the first-phase tests to establish a larger and more thorough control over the activities of The People, and as a mechanism for guaranteeing the acquiescence of The People in whatever it is that the corporate-government decides.

This is not an encouraging state of affairs. We are “meanly losing” this Republic, just as Lincoln feared. Just as Franklin intimated when he said that We had “a democracy – if you can keep it”. It may well be that this generation cannot “keep it”. And what may be lost on Our watch can never be regained.

Indeed, Johnson seems to feel that Wolin’s proposals at the end of his book are insufficient to save the situation. He says that “once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbins of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong”.

Ach.

It seems to me that the first key change has to be disconnecting Congress from its enwhorement to corporate cash: repeal – by popular referendum or Constitutional Amendment if Congress can’t muster the character to do it legislatively – the PACs. A PAC is not a vehicle for individual ‘free speech’; it is a legal vehicle for bribing Congress away from its sworn allegiance and responsibility. Of course, the Supreme Court might reconsider its approval of the PAC – and I am loathe to presume that the Court cannot ‘find itself’ after its initial collaboration with the insidious forces corrupting Us. Slowly, now, the State Supreme Courts are even starting to put the brakes on the sex-offender mania, so who knows what is possible for jurists who can exercise reason and independence?

And in the matter of Law, I think it is also essential to worry about the militarization of Law – on top of so much else – in Our society. The military justice approach – an official ‘arm’ of the command, guided by the supreme objective that the ‘command’ will ‘win’ any case – has migrated into civilian law with noxious effects. The gravamen of the Patriot Act and all its spawn is not at all abhorrent to the military system, a hierarchical, top-down organization completely trained to obey orders and achieve that ‘victory’; no other consideration can be allowed to override that prime objective, to interfere with the hierarchy’s definition of ‘victory’ or its achievement. And that organizing-to-win destroys the checks-and-balances wisely and uniquely built into the system of adversarial justice. And it becomes militarized justice. And militarization is no guarantee of success, as We are seeing on the Eastern Front.

The second key change is to re-establish the independence of the media: no more centralization of ownership of large numbers of outlets, no more treating media outlets as ‘cash cows’ or ‘cost and profit centers’ for corporate owners that have no expertise in, or dedication to, the role of ‘the press’ in a free society.

By these two changes – if quickly effected – We can start getting accurate information and then start making Our mind known to a Congress that actually relies on Us rather than on corporate paymasters.

The danger remains that the dubiously grounded and toxic agitprop of the Identities – hiding under the oxymoronic “radical politics” of the past few decades – will simply be revived by those Identities and their engorged Advocacies, and thus the huge mistake following ’68 will be repeated.

And this is where We must exercise the common will to assert once again FDR’s ringing affirmation: “We are Americans”. Not black or white, not male or female, not ‘oppressed’ or ‘victims’ – but Americans, responsible for the flawed but marvelous gifts of the Republic and the Constitution.

So if you’re not planning to do much shopping this holiday season, I think there’s still a lot that could usefully occupy your time and energies. And if under the tree at Christmas there are not so many gifts, but there is the Constitution and the Republic in the flush of “a new birth of freedom”, well I’d say it’s a gift worth giving. Or getting back again.

Only a certain number of shopping days left now.