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CounterPunch
October
12, 2002
The American
Political Paradox:
More Freedom, Less Democracy
by ROBERT JENSEN
Since September 11, I have been speaking freely
in the United States, a nation whose institutions have many democratic
features. My free speech, which has been harshly critical of
the leaders of the United States and their policies, has been
disseminated widely through print publications, web sites, email,
radio, and television. Most of the exposure has been in the alternative
media, but I also have appeared in a few mainstream channels
as well. Extrapolating from the approximately 4,000 email messages,
letters, and phone calls I received in the three months after
September 11 as a result of this free speech, it is reasonable
to assume that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,
of people heard my ideas.
So, while it is true that as a political
dissident I have no chance at the access to mainstream channels
that "reputable" commentators can expect when they
repeat the conventional wisdom, my voice did get amplified by
the combination of: new technologies that are relatively open
and have not been completely commercialized; a limited but active
and committed alternative press; marginal openings in the commercial-corporate
media for dissidents who have some claim to "credibility"
and can provide the appearance of balance; and the ease with
which foreign publications and web sites could pick up my work
(I am aware of translations of my work after 9/11 into Spanish,
Italian, Turkish, Polish, and Swahili). I have been writing in
public as a journalist or scholar since my junior year in high
school, and in the last three months of 2001 my work may well
have reached more people than the total of the preceding 27 years.
This suggests a society that takes seriously the concept of free
speech.
Yet after this experience, it has never
seemed clearer to me that free speech is fragile and democracy
is in danger of disappearing in the United States. This claim
rests on two assertions:
1. Meaningful free speech is about more
than the guarantee of a legal right to speak freely and the absence
of governmental repression.
2. Meaningful democracy is about more
than the existence of institutions that have democratic features.
To talk about the state of intellectual
and political culture in the United States after September 11,
I want to go back to the early 20th century and the life of one
of my favorite radical Americans, Scott Nearing.
A radically
good life
Nearing contended that three principles
guided his life as a teacher, writer, and political activist:
the quest "to learn the truth, to teach the truth, and to
help build the truth into the life of the community." Nearing
began his teaching career in 1906 at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, where he was a popular teacher, author of widely
used economic textbooks, and well-known speaker on the lecture
circuit. He was on his way to what looked like a successful academic
career, if not for one problem. He took seriously those three
principles, and from them he formulated a simple guide to action:
"If there was exploitation and corruption in the society
I should speak out against it."[1]
That's when the trouble started.
By 1915 Nearing had been fired by the
Penn trustees. They gave no reason publicly, but there's little
doubt that his socialist views and participation in the movement
to end child labor played a role. Many faculty members, including
some who disagreed sharply with his politics, rallied to his
defense, but to no avail. Rumors of a demand made by legislators
of the university's trustees -- fire Nearing or lose a key appropriation
-- were never definitively proved but whatever the trustees'
reasons, arguments about academic freedom made by faculty did
not save Nearing's job. So Nearing moved on to the University
of Toledo, a public university with a broader sense of its social
mission. There he quickly became an integral part of the university
and community -- until 1917, when he was again fired, this time
for his antiwar activity.
Nearing lost his job but not his voice,
and he continued his writing and political activity, including
an antiwar pamphlet titled, "The Great Madness: A Victory
for American Plutocracy." That landed him in federal court,
one of the hundreds of political dissidents tried in the World
War I era under the draconian Espionage Act. Charged in 1918
with attempting to cause insubordination and mutiny and obstructing
recruiting, Nearing  went to trial in February 1919 expecting
to be convicted and ready to go to prison; sentences of five
or 10 years were common at the time. But he was determined to
use his trial as a platform to explain his antiwar and socialist
views, which he did with his usual clarity and bluntness (often,
by his account, frustrating his own attorney's objections to
inappropriate questions by prosecutors). His arguments from the
witness stand apparently affected the jury; Nearing was found
not guilty for writing the pamphlet, although the Rand School
was convicted for publishing it and fined $3,000. The U.S. Supreme
Court upheld what Nearing called a "unique decision."[2]
Nearing remained a popular lecturer,
filling halls as large as Madison Square Garden for solo lectures
and debates with Clarence Darrow and other well-known political
figures, until promoters would no longer book radical speakers.
When shut out of lecture halls, Nearing moved to smaller venues,
down to and including the living rooms of other radicals. He
continued to write books and pamphlets, many based on his extensive
travels around the world, focusing on both the corrupt nature
of capitalism and imperialism, and the possibilities for a socialist
future. In 1932 he turned his back on the modern economy and
began a half-century of successful homesteading with his wife,
Helen, first in Vermont and then in Maine.
After 1917 Nearing never held a university
position and was blacklisted by mainstream publishers. But he
continued his writing, speaking, and activism until he died at
the age of 100 in 1983. He went to his grave unwavering in his
commitment to his three principles and clear that his adherence
to those principles had allowed him to live what he called simply
"a good life."[3]
The expansion
of free speech and the contraction of democracy
I tell Nearing's story in short form
here for comparison to the contemporary political landscape.
It is vital to understand both the ways in which formal guarantees
of freedom of speech and inquiry have expanded in this culture
in the 20th century and, at the same time, the ways in which
American democracy has atrophied. Since Nearing was fired and
hauled into court, legal protections for freedom of expression
have expanded and the culture's commitment to free speech has
become more entrenched, which is all to the good. But at the
same time, the United States today is a far less vibrant political
culture than it was then. This is the paradox to come to terms
with: How is it that as formal freedoms that allow democratic
participation have expanded, the range and importance of debate
and discussion that is essential to democracy has contracted?
How is it that in the United States we have arguably the most
expansive free speech rights in the industrial world and at the
same time an incredibly degraded political culture? How did political
freedom produce such a depoliticized culture?
First, the expansion of formal freedoms.
On this front, the progress is clear. During World War I, Nearing
was only one of about 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage
act of 1917, which was amended with even harsher provisions in
1918 by what came to be known as the Sedition Act. Hundreds went
to prison. The war-related suppression of expression also was
merely one component of a wave of repression -- which included
not only prison terms but also harassment, deportation, and both
state and private violence -- that smashed the American labor
movement and crushed radical politics. At that point in U.S.
history it is fair to say that freedom of speech literally did
not exist. There was no guarantee of public use of public space
(such as streets or parks) for expression, and criticism of the
government was routinely punished. In one of the most famous,
and outrageous, cases of Nearing's time, labor leader and Socialist
Party candidate Eugene Debs was forced to run his fifth and final
campaign for president from a federal prison cell after he was
sentenced to 10 years under the Espionage Act. His crime was
giving a speech which pointed out, among other things, that rich
men start wars and poor men fight them.[4]
The struggle to expand the scope of freedom
of expression progressed through the century, although not without
setbacks. Similar harshly repressive reactions surfaced again
after World War II in the 20th century's second major Red Scare.
The Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of political discourse
in what became known as the Communist conspiracy cases prosecuted
under the Smith Act of 1940.[5] The law made it a crime to discuss
the "duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing
or destroying the government," an odd statute in a country
created by a revolution against the legal government of that
day. It was not until 1957 that the Supreme Court reversed the
trend in those cases, overturning convictions under the Act.[6]
The 1960s and '70s brought more cases that continued to make
more tangible the promise of the First Amendment, including landmark
decisions that made it virtually impossible for public officials
to use civil libel law to punish sedition[7] and established
that government could not punish incendiary speech unless it
rose to the level of "incitement to imminent lawless action."[8]
This history leaves the people of the
United States much more free to speak critically of government
action. For example, since September 11 many people critical
of U.S. foreign and military policy have written and spoken in
ways that would have without question landed us in jail in previous
eras. A sampling of the titles of pieces I wrote, alone and with
my political colleague Rahul Mahajan, gives a flavor of the nature
of our dissent: "Why I will not rally around the president,"
"U.S. just as guilty of committing own violent acts,"
"War of lies," "Saying goodbye to patriotism."[9]
In public speaking and in print, I have argued that the U.S.
war on terrorism is a disastrous policy that has more to do with
the maintenance of imperial credibility and the extension of
U.S. dominance in Central Asia and the Middle East than battling
terrorism. I have denounced patriotism as an intellectually and
morally bankrupt concept.
I wrote all this as a faculty member
of a public university in a politically conservative state. Although
there was a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting me fired
and I was publicly condemned as a "fountain of undiluted
foolishness" by the president of my university, there has
been no serious suggestion (that I know of) by anyone in the
university that I should be fired. No law enforcement agents
have knocked on my door. No judge or jury has passed judgment
on me. While many readers who objected to my views have called
for my firing, just as many of my critics have said they defend
my right to speak even if they find what I say stupid or offensive.
I have been called a lot of names, but no formal sanctions have
been applied. And, more important, I have never seriously expected
formal sanctions for these activities.
It is important to note here that I am
white and American-born, with a "normal" sounding American
name (meaning, one with European roots). The hostility toward
some faculty members has not stayed within such civil boundaries,
most notably Sami Al-Arian, the tenured Palestinian computer
science professor at the University of South Florida who was
vilified in the mass media and fired in December 2001 for his
political views. It likely that not only my tenured status --
I can't be fired without cause, protection that few people in
this economy have -- but my white skin helped protect me.
In short: I live in a society that is
more tolerant of dissidents, legally and culturally, than the
one in which Scott Nearing lived. For this, I am grateful. We
must always remember that those expansions of our freedom to
speak were not gifts from enlightened politicians and judges,
but a legacy of the struggles of popular movements -- socialists,
labor leaders, civil-rights organizers, and antiwar demonstrators.[10]
The freedom of speech we enjoy today was won by people who were
despised and denigrated in their time. History has vindicated
them, but in their own time they suffered greatly.
So, in many ways I am better off than
Scott Nearing; it is nice to know one has a steady job and won't
be hauled into court. But even though Nearing's speech was more
constrained than mine, in some ways I envy him. That may seem
odd, given that in formal terms the United States of 1919 was
in many ways a much less democratic nation -- not only was free
speech not guaranteed but the majority of the population (women
and most non-white citizens) were denied the right to vote. Perhaps
we shouldn't call a nation a democracy when it refuses to allow
the majority of adults to vote and the ultimate guardians of
freedom (the Supreme Court justices) see nothing wrong with jailing
a leading intellectual and president candidate for daring to
question the judgment of his opponent.
But in another sense, the United States
was a far more democratic society when Nearing took the witness
stand in 1918. Many commentators have pointed out that democracy
is more than simply the presence of certain political institutions
and rules. The degree to which a society is democratic also can
be judged by how extensive and active is the participation of
citizens in the formation of public policy. Even though marginalized
and oppressed people had more restrictions on them in 1919, they
were in many ways more active participants in democracy, engaging
in political discussion and attempting to assert their rights
in public.
What does democracy
look like?
To make sense of all this requires a
definition of democracy. Here I want to discuss not simply the
structure of the system but the role that people see themselves
as having. One thing that always strikes me as I read accounts
of the early part of the 20th century is the vibrancy of political
life then compared with today. Far more people -- ordinary people,
not the chattering classes -- saw politics as their birthright,
not as an activity limited to politicians and intellectuals.
Nearing describes boisterous meetings of thousands of people
who came to hear speakers and argue politics in the first decades
of the century. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and '20s was designed
to shut down that kind of political engagement, which was inconsistent
with power's conception of democracy. One of the clearest articulations
of that conception came from Walter Lippmann, a leading journalist
and intellectual of the first half of the 20th century. In a
complex society, Lippmann asserted that people did not have the
capacity to understand public affairs well enough to have an
active role in policy formation:
"The individual man does not have
opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct
public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is
happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could
know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical
democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances
in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force
in public affairs."[11]
In such elitist conceptions of democracy,
the role of citizens is basically to vote -- to select which
group of politicians and their allied experts they would like
to run the country -- not to be directly involved in the formation
of public policy. In Lippmann's words, "The public must
be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers,
but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live
free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd."[12]
Unfortunately, the herd is not only bewildered
but unruly, and it keeps jumping the fence; the spirit of participatory
democracy doesn't die easily. Another Red Scare was necessary
in the late 1940s and '50s. Those renewed challenges to power
were beaten down by the end of the 1950s, though it turned out
the politically quiescent times weren't permanent, as an expanded
notion of democracy re-emerged in the civil rights, women's rights
and antiwar movements of the 1960s and '70s. These popular struggles
produced what those in power saw not as a democratic renewal
but as a "crisis of democracy."
Samuel Huntington, a political scientist
with solid establishment credentials, warned that the problems
of governance in the United States stemmed from what he called
"an excess of democracy" and the solution could be
found in "a greater degree of moderation in democracy."[13]
Citing universities and armies, he pointed out that not all institutions
benefit from democratic structures and went on to explain that
"the effective operation of a democratic political system
usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on
the part of some individuals and groups." Acknowledging
that this "marginality" for some groups is "inherently
antidemocratic," Huntington still warned against "overloading
the political system with demands which extends its functions
and undermine its authority." The answer is, "Less
marginality on the part of some groups thus needs to be replaced
by more self-restraint on the part of all groups."[14]
In the real world, it usually turns out
that restraint is expected from the "special interests"
(defined as organized labor, students, women, minority groups,
farmers -- in other words, the bulk of the population) to make
sure there are no restraints on the "national interest"
(corporate shareholders, the managerial class, defense contractors,
the generals). One might reasonably ask how this promotes democracy,
but from the point of view of elites Huntington's assessment
is correct. If one is concerned about "governability,"
defined as the ability of elites to make decisions unimpeded
by the people, then the excesses of democracy that come with
strong popular movements are indeed the heart of the crisis.
But, of course, there are other conceptions
of the role of people in democracy. Political scientist C. Douglas
Lummis suggests that "there is democracy where the people
have the power." But how to understand what is meant by
"the people" and "the power"? For Lummis:
"[D]emocracy is not the name of
any particular arrangement of political or economic institutions.
Rather, it is a situation that political or economic institutions
may or may not help to bring about. It describes an ideal, not
a method for achieving it. It is not a kind of government, but
an end of government; not a historically existing institution,
but a historical project."[15]
If that is true, then one would not speak
of living in a democracy, but instead speak of the degree to
which different features and processes of a society are democratic.
That includes an assessment of the democratic character not only
of governmental institutions but all institutions, private and
public. It is in this sense that I talk of Nearing living in
a more democratic America. By that, I mean simply that even though
they faced more governmental impediments to exercising power,
average people of that time were more actively engaged in political
dialogue, in political life.
September 11
Here, I want to turn to the events after
September 11 to talk about the state of political debate and
discussion in the culture, using my experiences in the public
sphere, not out of self-indulgence but because I think they shed
some light on these issues.
I wrote my first pieces about terrorism
and war the evening of September 11. Like most folks, I had spent
most of the day watching the television coverage. Barely a few
hours had passed before the talk of war was everywhere. Still
trying to cope with the emotion of seeing the towers collapse,
I had to cope with a second feeling -- the realization that more
innocents were going to die if the mad rush to war were not derailed.
I have talked to many other progressive people who felt the same
thing, an experience of dual anguish about what had just happened
and what we feared was to come -- a war we knew we likely would
protest against, but one we knew would not easily be stopped.
That moment, for me, came at 11:43 a.m.
central time on September 11, when I marked in my notes a comment
by ABC's Peter Jennings, ironically the least hawkish of the
network anchors. "The response is going to have to be massive,"
he said. I was monitoring the news on a television in my office,
moving between the TV screen and my computer. I typed those words
and stared at them on the screen. It was barely three hours after
the planes had crashed into the towers. I stared at the word
"massive." There was no way to know what was coming,
how the United States would respond. Yet it was impossible not
to know, not to fear the coming of war. I remember burying my
head in my hands and sobbing for several minutes before turning
back to the television to watch the war unfold.
For the rest of the day I not only monitored
television and the web, but spent time on the phone with fellow
antiwar activists and left/progressive political colleagues and
friends. The voices on the television -- mostly government and
military official, active and retired, and the pundits -- talked
of a war to show the world what was being called America's "resolve."
My friends talked of their fear of a war that would show the
world who was boss, to re-establish imperial credibility (that
is, the ability to destroy at will). So late in the day I sat
down to try to write. I had no expectation that what I wrote
would show up in commercial newspapers; I was writing for the
left/progressive web sites, where people like me would be looking
for analysis. That piece was on the Common Dreams website[16]
the next morning, but two days later it also ran in the Houston
Chronicle, where the op/ed-page editors have an unusually strong
commitment to airing a wide range of views. In that piece I tried
to articulate how for many the grief over the attacks was mixed
with a fear of American militarism, how the deaths of innocents
in the United States sparked a fear for the deaths of innocents
abroad. Many people told me the piece echoed their own feelings.
Others were outraged, especially my assertion that the attacks
of September 11 were "no more despicable than the massive
acts of terrorism -- the deliberate killing of civilians for
political purposes -- that the U.S. government has committed
during my lifetime."[17]
I believe that sentence is accurate.
I believe it is an honest assessment of history. And since September
11, I have continued to write and speak about that history and
those truths, just as I did before September 11.
That writing found wide distribution
through a number of web sites and email lists. I also wrote some
pieces specifically for mainstream media outlets, though it was
difficult to break into those pages. Because of the efforts of
two progressive media projects that work to get critical analysis
on the air (Mainstream Media Project[18] and the Institute for
Public Accuracy[19]), I also appeared on about 80 radio shows
-- everything from a Canadian Broadcasting Company debate with
a pro-war conservative, to interviews with DJs at commercial
stations who weren't quite sure how to make sense of me, to sympathetic
discussions with progressive hosts on community radio stations.
So, my concern is not that I was not
heard, or that the people who heard me had no reaction; many
people told me how much they appreciated what Rahul Mahajan and
I were doing. The problem was that I was writing, speaking, and
being heard in a context for political action that was much different
than in Nearing's time. While it was possible for more people
to hear me, being heard had far more limited effects, not only
on the immediate question of the war but more generally on the
political culture. When Scott Nearing spoke, he spoke to audiences
in which a high percentage of people believed that political
activity by people organized into mass movements could make a
difference. Much of this was no doubt rooted in an understanding
of the class divisions that structured American society, and
the relationship of that structure to questions of war and imperialism.
I am not suggesting no one in the United
States today is interested in building a mass movement around
these issues. I am arguing, however, that many people -- even
many left/progressive people -- do not believe there is any meaningful
channel for action. Based on thousands of conversations and correspondences
with such folks, it is my experience that many, perhaps most,
do not belong to political organizations or are not active in
political organizations. Given that social change in the history
of this country has been largely the result of popular movements
putting pressure on elites to enact progressive policies, the
absence of such collective action is troubling. It does not mean
there are no other possible avenues for social change apart from
mass movements, though I can't imagine what they might be and
we should not be optimistic about alternatives without evidence.
I have yet to hear any strategy for change that leads me to believe
that mass movements are now irrelevant.
American propaganda
This state of affairs is not accidental.
As the late sociologist Alex Carey puts it, "The twentieth
century has been characterized by three developments of great
political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of
corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a
means of protecting corporate power against democracy."[20]
I would add to that the development of propaganda to protect
state power, which is tightly interwoven with corporate power.
Carey's point is that people with power have been engaged in
the process of pacifying the population through propaganda to
make sure that the expansion of formal democracy -- through greater
expression and organizing rights, and an expanded franchise --
does not result in a real democratization of the society, especially
the economy.
Edward Bernays, often described as the
father of the public relations industry, explained -- from a
celebratory point of view -- how propaganda is "the executive
arm of the invisible government."[21] Who are those "invisible
governors"? Those with "qualities of natural leadership"
who "supply needed ideas" and hold "a key position
in the social structure."[22] The opening lines of his 1928
book Propaganda make clear how the system works:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation
of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which
is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our
minds our molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely
by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the
way in which our democratic society is organized."[23]
Bernays acknowledged that some aspects
of the propaganda process -- "the manipulation of news,
the inflation of personality, the general ballyhoo by which politicians
and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness
of the masses" -- are often criticized and can be misused.
"But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly
life."[24]
From a more critical view, Carey described
this same propaganda project as "a 75-year-long multi-billion
dollar project in social engineering on a national scale."
Carey's study of the propaganda campaign suggests that starting
in the 1930s American business leaders realized that they could
not keep labor subjugated indefinitely through brute force. So,
they turned to "a competition for public opinion via the
mass media."[25] Carey's account of the operations of such
groups as the National Association of Manufacturers shows how
corporate leaders used advertising, public relations, media relations,
and their influence on the educational system to deal with threats
to their power.
In addition to campaigns for specific
policies, there have been two key underlying messages to this
propaganda in the past half-century. First, not only is capitalism
the natural economic system and the only one compatible with
democracy, but unions and other vehicles for popular organizing
somehow disrupt what would be an otherwise harmonious system
in which benevolent owners and hard-working managers labor selflessly
to provide for customers and workers. Second, the United States
is unique among world governments, past and present, in its pursuit
of democracy and freedom in the world. While other nations act
out of self-interest, the United States -- that shining city
on the hill -- goes forward with a different mission; we are
the world's first benevolent empire.
The system that propagates these fictions
is happy to concede that sometimes corporations do unpleasant
things and sometimes politicians make mistakes, usually the result
of the bad behavior of individuals. If the problems seem to go
beyond individuals, we are assured that the miraculous workings
of the market and democracy have corrected the problems and produced
a change of course for the institutions involved. Unlike more
totalitarian systems, this arrangement is flexible and better
able to adapt to public pressure: absorbing and co-opting dissent
when possible, coercing through relatively subtle methods when
necessary, resorting to force and violence only when other methods
have failed.
The effects of this relentless propaganda
are clear. Many people accept the mythology, even when it is
directly contradicted by their own experience. But more important,
many of those who reject the mythology do not contest the naturalizing
of the underlying system of domination, or can't imagine how
to contest it. After public talks about corporate domination
or American imperialism, I get two common responses. One is a
judgment rooted in the condescension of the comfortable: "Well,
you are right, but there's nothing anyone can do about it --
people don't want to change." The other is a question framed
by despair and isolation: "Is there anything I can do?"
My answer to the first is simple: There
is nothing in human history that leads to the conclusion that
people inherently crave subordination or cannot find ways to
resist subordination. The response to the second is equally simple:
Organize, become part of a movement. There is always something
that can be done, but it must be done through collective action.
The details of what to do are not quite so easy to work out,
but it is clear they must be worked out with other people, not
on one's own. Those two questions sum up my point about the more
democratic spirit of Scott Nearing's times. People in Nearing's
audiences did not need to be told that humans were capable of
independent thought and action. People did not have to be told
that resisting concentrations of power required organizing. The
political climate of the time took those as givens. By that I
don't mean that every single person believed in the power or
wisdom of participatory democracy and mass movements, but simply
that there was a more hospitable context for people to act. Nearing's
words were spoken to a more politically engaged culture. The
words of contemporary antiwar activists after September 11 were
spoken to a world in which none of those things could be taken
for granted.
Given the contingencies of history and
the difficulty in predicting the course of politics, definitive
judgments are difficult to make. But based on my experience,
I believe that even though my work may be read and heard by more
people than Scott Nearing's, it has far less impact. In a society
in which free speech is in some sense irrelevant, public political
life is little more than a sideshow. And if public political
life is a sideshow, what do we say about the state of our democracy?
Beyond parody
I think our current situation constitutes
a "crisis of democracy," understood not in Huntington's
terms but in the sense used by legal scholar David Kairys in
this summary of U.S. political life:
"[D]espite all the rhetoric about
free speech and our democratic political process, a very large
proportion of us -- perhaps most -- feel silenced and disenfranchised.
There is a widespread recognition across the political spectrum
that the American people lack the effective means to be heard
or to translate their wishes into reality through the political
process. There is, and has been for some time, a crisis of democracy
and freedom that has been ignored by public officials and the
media."[26]
My only dispute with Kairys' claim is
the last sentence; I am not so sure this crisis has been ignored
by public officials or the media. Rather, I think it is a state
of affairs with which most public officials and the media are
perfectly content because, no matter what the rhetoric, those
centers of power either believe Lippmann was right or, in the
case of the more crass, know Lippmann was wrong but find his
conception of democracy useful in taming the "bewildered
herd." But if Kairys means there is a deeper crisis that
even the officials don't understand, a crisis of legitimacy,
he may be right.
A few years ago I would have argued that
the struggle for the soul of the nation was between radical democrats
such as Lummis, who believe that the role of citizens in democracy
should be as full participants, and elitist theorists of democracy
such as Lippmann, who believe that such participatory ideals
are not feasible and that citizens' job is to ratify the decisions
of experts and professional politicians through regular voting.
Today, we may be moving to a society
in which even Lippmann's impoverished notion of democracy seems
idealistic, as we move ever deeper into a sense of democracy
that treats policy proposals not as topics for discussion by
the people but products to be sold to the people. How else to
describe a situation in which the Bush administration can appoint
an advertising executive to be Under Secretary of State for Public
Diplomacy and Public Affairs, charged with the task of "selling"
U.S. policy to the Muslim world? Charlotte Beers' fitness for
the job can be seen in her previous successes -- Uncle Ben's
rice ("Perfect every time"), Head and Shoulders shampoo
("Helps bring you closer") and American Express ("Don't
leave home without it").[27] Of course politicians and policies
have been sold like products for some time. But this was not
only done without shame out in the open, but with some pride,
to indicate how forward-thinking the administration was to realize
it must win the hearts and minds in the world of Islam.
Such a state of affairs is beyond parody.
But it is not beyond hope.
There is no reason to think that a revitalization
of radical democracy is impossible. There is no reason to think
that we are on the other side of some fault line in human history
that makes collective action no longer relevant. Certain institutions
in our society -- some aspects of representative government,
a media not controlled directly by the state, and vestiges of
liberal education -- have democratic features that can be used
to fight concentrations of illegitimate authority. Other institutions
-- most notably corporate capitalism and the Pentagon -- seem
to me to be so fundamentally flawed that they will have to be
swept away.
The hope that will make possible those
changes is what Lummis called "public hope," which
he contrasted with "private hope." Many Americans have
private hope; they believe that they will continue to enjoy a
comfortable standard of living in a reasonably predictable world.
But they also have no expectation that the political system can
or will change to become more open or fair. By contrast, Lummis
described the state of public hope and the atmosphere of freedom
that was in the air everywhere in the Philippines in 1985, before
the fall of the <U.S.-backed> Marcos dictatorship. There,
a state of public despair was reversed:
"People begin to believe that public
action can succeed. It doesn't matter why they believe it --
it could be for the wrong reason. When hope is shared by many,
it becomes its own reason. Public hope is itself grounds for
hope. When many people, filled with hope, take part in public
action, hope is transformed from near-groundless faith (which
it was in the state of public despair) to plain common sense."[28]
Perhaps in the end, all politics is about
where one chooses to put one's faith. Prior to September 11,
many Americans thought they could live comfortably by using the
world's resources without having to be part of the world or accountable
to the rest of the world. Many Americans felt beyond the reach
of the pain of the rest of the world. After September 11, such
self-indulgence is no longer possible; we now know how vulnerable
we all are. If in the past we were not moved by moral arguments
about how our comfort required so much of the rest of the world
to suffer, now there is a heightened measure of self-interest
to be considered. It is difficult to ignore the fact that U.S.
economic, military, and foreign policy must change. Our choices
are fairly stark.
Shall we put our faith in advertising
executives' ability to sell to the rest of the world a story
about why vast disparities of wealth exist, why the resources
of the Third World should benefit primarily people in the West,
and why we must on occasion unleash the bombers to maintain this
system?
Or shall we put our faith in each other
to find a different way, to stop living on top of the world and
start living as part of the world?
[1] Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical:
A Political Autobiography (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea
Green Publishing, 2000), p. 56.
[2] Ibid., p. 117.
[3] Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing,
Living the Good Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).
[4] Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211
(1919).
[5] Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S.
494 (1951).
[6] Yates v. United States, 354 U.S.
298 (1957).
[7] New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376
U.S. 254 (1964).
[8] Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444
(1969).
[9] Available online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm
or http://www.nowarcollective.com/analysis.htm.
[10] David Kairys, "Freedom of Speech,"
in Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique,
3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 190-215.
[11] Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public
(New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 39.
[12] Ibid., p. 155.
[13] Samuel P. Huntington, "The
United States," in Michel Crozier, et al., The Crisis of
Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 113.
[14] Ibid., p. 114. [15] C. Douglas Lummis,
Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996),
p. 22.
[16] http://www.commondreams.org/
[17] Robert Jensen, "U.S. just as
guilty of committing own violent acts," Houston Chronicle,
September 14, 2001, p. A-33.
[18] http://www.mainstream-media.net/
[19] http://www.accuracy.org/
[20] Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out
of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 18.
[21] Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New
York: Horace Liverright, 1928), p. 20.
[22] Ibid., p. 9.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., p. 12.
[25] Carey, p. 20.
[26] Kairys, p. 11.
[27] Martin Fletcher, "Publicity
queen sells America to the Muslims," The Times of London,
October 16, 2001, p. 3.
[28] Lummis, p. 156.
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire." This essay
originally appeared in Global
Dialogue: Vol. 4, No. 2, "The Impact of
11 September".
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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