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May
5, 2003
The Coalition of the Shilling
The Iraqis Will
Have to Learn Democracy Someplace Else
by SAM SMITH
Tired of killing Muslims, we are now trying to
teach their survivors some democracy.
There are a number of practical problems
with this, among them being that the curriculum is in the hands
of the most authoritarian, deceitful, anti-democratic, and constitution-wrecking
administration we've ever had. But there's an even more disturbing
matter: wander around your nation's capital and try to find
something better. Leaving aside anomalies such as the ACLU and
the Cato Institute, a few members of Congress, and a handful
of anachronic journalists, this town shows virtually no interest
in liberty, the Constitution, or democracy these days--except
when prescribing them to those in far away lands.
This is not hyperbole; it is simple,
grim fact. And also essential, because what makes a democracy
or constitutional republic function are not words written on
paper, not oaths uttered, nor clichés reiterated in public
addresses, but natural, visceral, organic love of the principles
overtly avowed.
You can not find such a spirit, such
love, such loyalty in today's Washington in any corner that
matters. Certainly not in the administration but also not in
Democratic salons, not in the media, nor amongst the ostentatious
ministrations of the think tanks. The nation's capital has given
up on the very principles it wants to teach the Iraqis. With
such leadership, it is small wonder that so much of America
no longer wishes to be America anymore.
There are plenty of signs of our democratic
dysfunction, beginning with the fact that we're sending a bunch
of generals and corporate executives--professionally groomed
to honor anti-democratic procedures--to do the job. Then there
is the  most elitist media in American
history demonstrating its love for democratic debate by blacklisting
voices of dissent before and during the Iraq invasion, turning
its airwaves over to spooks and military brass, and embedding
itself without a hint of skepticism in the administration's
agitprop.
Most of all there is the atmosphere
of hubristic homogeneity that has seized the capital, so full
of arrogance, jingoism, narcissism and the political equivalent
of the hyperbolic deceit that buoyed the economy in the 1990s.
The difference is that instead of a stock market bubble we are
now in the midst of an imperial one. Some day, it, too, will
end and in a manner not of our choosing.
People who truly believe in democracy
are not hard to spot. For one thing, they take an active part
in democratic affairs at every level. But you never see any
of the prominent figures talking about democracy for Iraq at
any meeting in this city other than ones called by the most
established powers. Where do they get their practice in democracy?
On C-SPAN? At the Metropolitan Club? At lunches of the Council
on Foreign Relations?
Admittedly, this is not a new problem.
Once, during the Carter years, a member of the administration
stopped me in the gym to ask how to vote in an upcoming local
election. The guy had been insurance commissioner of his state
and I told him, "I'll tell you, but you sure as hell would
know who to vote for if you were back in Massachusetts."
He smiled and sheepishly agreed.
The disconnect between global rhetoric
and local behavior can be remarkable. Consider a recent conference
described by Dorothy Brasil in DC Watch:
"Last Thursday, the Greater Washington
Research Program at the Brookings Institution held a roundtable
forum on 'Revitalizing Washington's Neighborhoods.' At the forum,
Alice Rivlin released a new study she wrote for Brookings. .
. In conducting the research for the report, Rivlin and her
staff at Brookings relied almost exclusively on information
provided by District government officials, particularly by the
Office of Planning, and they did not attempt to meet with neighborhood
groups or residents or to do any independent analysis. Compounding
the problem of planning for neighborhoods without neighborhood
input, no civic or community leaders or representatives of neighborhoods
were invited to the Brookings forum. Instead the invited audience
consisted of representatives of government, business, foundations,
community development corporations, developers, universities,
hospitals, and other large institutions."
Then, of course, there is the fact the
would-be saviors of Iraq happily operate--without notice let
alone shame--in America's oldest colony: Washington, DC. Those
who have tried to change this situation are the ones who could
teach the Iraqis what to expect, things like the tendency for
large and small concerns to get hopelessly intertwined, for the
colony's interests to be always subjugated to, or negated by,
those of its overlords, and for the place to end up a playpen
for predators of every conceivable variety. If DC is any example,
real liberation for Iraq is at least two hundred years off.
Of course, there is a patina of politeness
in dealing with one's own with which you can dispense in the
case of foreigners, as demonstrated by Michael Ledeen, holder
of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. Said
Ledeen, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs
to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show the world we mean business." When
you sit in the Freedom Chair you get to say things like that.
And in Washington, they call you an intellectual for it as well.
The blood-gorged and brain-drained of
the capital find nothing wrong with such thoughts, for they
have increasingly reached the conclusion that while democracy
was a nice way of getting our country going, it doesn't meet
the needs of a complex world. This is more properly business
for the expert, the profound, and the intelligent--virtues they
rarely associate with the general citizenry. Thus at the very
moment that Washington is blathering over the need for democracy
in Iraq, one of its favorite books, "The Future of Freedom,"
strongly suggests that democracy easily becomes dangerous and
is best left in the hands of those who know how to use it, such
as the author and his friends.
Here is how Salon described the writer:
"This season's intellectual pinup, Fareed Zakaria, author
of 'The Future of Freedom,' explains why the romantic myth of
freedom could harm Iraq -- and why power elites aren't so bad."
For his part, Zakaria writes, "Western democracy remains
the model for the rest of the world, but is it possible that
like a supernova, at the moment of its blinding glory in distant
universes, Western democracy is hollowing out at the core?"
And he adds, "The deregulation of democracy has ... gone
too far."
FORGETTING
The retreat from America's democratic
spirit has been underway for a long time and one of the great
enablers has been television. With television, you no longer
needed a politics that wells up from the bottom, forming a pyramid
built on memory, association, reciprocation, and gratitude.
While lying and mythmaking have always been a part of politics,
television allowed them to become ubiquitous and impenetrable.
It started early, with Nixon's Checkers
speech in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Jack Kennedy used TV to create
the myth of Camelot. Then Kennedy was killed and instantly television
helped create the myth of the lone assassin.
In the 1970s Jimmy Carter rewrote the
meaning of town meetings, turning them forevermore from a fundamental
expression of democratic action into the political equivalent
of a televised papal audience.
By the 1980s we were ready to ditch
politicians altogether and so chose a TV star as president.
Then in 1992 and 2000 we elected deeply corrupt governors to
the White House based on tube-honed false images. We had, by
this time, become couch potatoes of politics.
With television an overwhelming distraction,
those of the kind that live to manipulate power now had a far
easier time of it. All they had to do was come up with some
screen myths to cover their tracks.
One of the most successful of these
myths was that of the infinite wisdom of the "free market,"
launched during the Reagan years. Even a NASDAQ crash paralleling
the 1929 disaster, even criminal charges against a long list
of free market icons, even the collapse of phony corporate balance
sheets were not enough to alter the myth of inexorably beneficent
predation paraded in the media.
Another example was the "war on
drugs," which has killed as many Americans as Vietnam and
which has been a demonstrable failure from the start. Nonetheless,
the contrary media myth was so powerful that even liberals supported
an assault on the Constitution in the name of ending a scourge
far less powerful than the vodka or whiskey many of them drank
each night. The so-called Patriot Act and other Bush regime
obscenities had their roots in the war on drugs and in the cowardly
refusal of liberals to stand up against it.
There was other mythmaking business,
such as redefining the citizens as merely 'customers' of the
American system rather than as owners. This was spurred in part
by a book called 'Reinventing Government' by David Osborne and
Ted Gaebler which would become a Clinton administration bible.
The book was well described by Bill Clinton himself in the cover
blurb: "Should be read by every elected official in America.
This book gives us the blueprint." True, for at its core
the book was a guide showing politicians how to run things their
way and get citizens to like it.
What the book did not do was tell citizens
how to regain control of their government, revive democracy,
or mediate amongst the various cultures and ideologies they
found in their communities. Government was instead reduced to
a matter of management and the citizen to a mere purchaser of
services.
'Customer' and 'consumer' were not the
only words being used to change the nature of citizenship. David
Kemmis, the mayor of Missoula, MT, pointed out that the word
'taxpayer' now "regularly holds the place which in a true
democracy would be occupied by 'citizen.' Taxpayers bear a dual
relationship to government, neither half of which has anything
at all to do with democracy. Taxpayers pay tribute to the government
and they receive services from it. So does every subject of
a totalitarian regime. What taxpayers do not do, and what people
who call themselves taxpayers have long since stopped even imagining
themselves doing, is governing."
Then there was growing use of the term
"stakeholder" that covertly diminished the citizens'
role to that of a minor participant. Ironically, 'stakeholder'
literally means a person who holds the money while two other
people bet. Whoever wins, the stakeholder gets nothing.
Another phrase that started cropping
up was 'civil society,' a patronizing description of people
who, in a democracy, are meant to be running the place. The
term has come to used in elite circles with roughly the same
condescension of a bishop talking about a church altar guild.
Such dispensing with traditional citizenship
even attracted the admiration of former rebel Vaclav Havel,
who wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1999:
"In the next century I believe
that most states will begin to change from cult-like entities
charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities,
into less powerful and more rational administrative units that
will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled
ways in which our planetary society is organized. . . The practical
responsibilities of the state--its legal powers--can only devolve
in two directions, downward or upward; downward, to the non-governmental
organizations and structures of civil society; or upward, to
regional, transnational and global organizations."
Thus in a few paragraphs, Havel scrapped
democracy at every level of society leaving us to be run, presumably,
by business improvement districts and NATO. It was a profoundly
anti-democratic view, because at none of Havel's levels was
the consent of the governed considered.
WARMING UP FOR BUSH
It is comfortable to blame the disintegration
of our constitutional republic on George Bush, but the president--though
arrogant, proto-fascist bully he may be--is walking on well
tilled ground. In a July 1983 series in the San Francisco Examiner,
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Knut Royce reported that a presidential
directive had been drafted by a few Carter administration personnel
to allow the military to take control of the government for
90 days in the event of an emergency. According to Royce there
was a heated debate within the Carter administration as to just
what constituted an "emergency."
A NSC directive written by Frank Carlucci
in 1981 stated blandly: "Normally a state of martial law
will be proclaimed by the President. However, in the absence
of such action by the President, a senior military commander
may impose martial law in an area of his command where there
had been a complete breakdown in the exercise of government
functions by local civilian authorities."
The issue arose again during the Iran-Contra
affair, but even in the wake of all the copy on that scandal,
the public got little sense of how far some America's soldiers
of fortune had been willing to go to achieve their ends. When
the Iran-Contra hearings came close to the matter, the chair,
Senator Daniel Inouye, backed swiftly away:
REP JACK BROOKS: Colonel North, in your
work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work
on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a
major disaster?
BRENDAN SULLIVAN: Mr. Chairman?
SEN INOUYE: I believe that question
touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I
request that you not touch on that.
REP BROOKS: I was particularly concerned,
Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others,
that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a
contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend
the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about
it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked.
I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.
SEN INOUYE: May I most respectfully
request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage.
If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be
made for an executive session.
With a few exceptions, the media ignored
what well could have been the most startling revelation to have
come out of the Iran/Contra affair, namely that high officials
of the US government were planning a possible coup. First among
the exceptions was the Miami Herald, which on July 5, 1987,
ran the story to which Jack Brooks referred. The article by
Alfonzo Chardy revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for
the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal,
state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency.
According to Chardy, the plan called for 'suspension of the
Constitution, turning control of the government over to the
Federal Management Agency, emergency appointment of military
commanders to run state and local governments and declaration
of martial law.' The proposal ignored that Congress, legislatures
and the judiciary even existed.
In a November 18, 1991 story, the New
York Times elaborated:
"Acting outside the Constitution
in the early 1980s, a secret federal agency established a line
of succession to the presidency to assure continued government
in the event of a devastating nuclear attack, current and former
United States officials said today." The program was called
"Continuity of Government." In the words of a report
by the Fund for Constitutional Government, "succession
or succession- by-designation would be implemented by unknown
and perhaps unelected persons who would pick three potential
successor presidents in advance of an emergency. These potential
successors to the Oval Office may not be elected, and they are
not confirmed by Congress. According to CNN, the list eventually
grew to 17 names and included Howard Baker, Richard Helms, Jeanne
Kirkpatrick James Schlesinger, Richard Thornberg, Edwin Meese,
Tip O'Neil, and Richard Cheney."
The plan was not even limited to a nuclear
attack but included any "national security emergency"
which was defined as, "any occurrence, including natural
disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency,
that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national
security of the United States."
That was ten years before September
11. And how did the liberal and centrist media respond to those
who tried to raise warning flags: with an explosion in the use
of the term "conspiracy theorist" to describe anyone
who questioned the stability of American democracy and the righteousness
of those leading it.
Sometimes it became bizarre. Washington
Post columnist Courtland Milloy wrote a piece based on an article
of mine in the mid-1990s about the militarization of America.
One week later, as though in anguished response, the Post ran
a front-page Style section article on the virtues of generals
in civilian life complete with a 13" photo of General Patton
in jack boots pointing his baton. The following week the Post
ran a page one article with the headline: "Generals in
Command on the Home Front." The subhead ran: "In need
of discipline, order, honor, polish? Civil institutions find
old soldiers pass muster."
The author, Marc Fisher, wrote: "A
retired general is spit-and-polish. Order and discipline. Expectations
and results. Retired general. Two words with such Taoist balance.
At once at ease and in charge. Calm yet powerful. Benign yet
can-do." Sounds just like present day reporters writing
about Jay Garner.
From General Don Scott, deputy librarian
of the Library of Congress: "We're proven. We know how
to take orders, we know how to do more with less. Society wants
more order and more structure."
Charles Moskos, a sociologist who studies
the military: "Making the trains run on time is not to
be pooh-poohed. In a world of crumbling institutions, the military
stands out for its cohesion."
Fisher ended his piece with a quote
from a retired general: "Let those in uniform fight the
cold and hot wars. Let those who have retired fight the domestic
war." Fisher forgot to ask the general just when and why
the American people became the enemy.
My story had been based in part on an
article in the winter 1992 issue of Parameters, the quarterly
of the US Army College. The piece was written by Lt. Col. Charles
J. Dunlap Jr., USAF. Dunlap was a graduate of St. Joseph's University,
Villanova School of Law, the Armed Forces Staff College, and
a distinguished graduate of the National War College. In 1992
he was named by the Judge Advocates Association as the USAF's
outstanding career armed services attorney. In short, not your
average paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Dunlap's article was called 'The Origins
of the American Military Coup of 2012.' In it, he pretends to
be writing to a fellow military colleague in 2012, explaining
how the coup had occurred. With eerie precision he described
America's state:
"America became exasperated with
democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability
of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were
looking for someone or something that could produce workable
answers. The one institution of government in which the people
retained faith was the military. Buoyed by the military's obvious
competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned
to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called
for an acceleration of trends begun in the 1980s: tasking the
military with a variety of new, non-traditional missions, and
vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties.
"Though not obvious at the time,
the cumulative effect of these new responsibilities was to incorporate
the military into the political process to an unprecedented
degree."
Dunlap quoted one of Washington's liberal
journalistic cherubs, James Fallows, in a 1991 article:
"I am beginning to think that the
only way the national government can do anything worthwhile
is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the
military . . . The military, strangely, is the one government
institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its
notion of the collective good."
Also in the mid 90s, Stephen Rosenfeld
of the Washington Post wrote a strange and scary column praising
one of the Army's advocates of Dunlap's bad dream. Rosenfeld
described US Army Major Ralph Peters this way:
"At home, use of the military appears
inevitable to him -- though not yet to an American consensus
-- 'at least on our borders and in some urban environments'
. . . He deplores our military's reluctance to join the war
on drugs, which he attributes to a fear of failure. He would
dutifully prepare for the traditionally 'military' missions,
plus the new one of missile defense. But he would be ready to
engage with drugs and crime, terrorism, peacekeeping, illegal
immigration, disease control, resource protection, evacuation
of endangered citizens . . ."
Peters would later become a favorite
military 'expert' embedded in network news shows--including
NPR's--during the second Gulf war.
The retreat from democracy continued
with little attention during the Clinton years. Incidents such
as Waco were only the tip of the iceberg. Lesser known phenomena
included using mercenaries from Dyncorp to help in domestic
drug raids. As Daniel Forbes wrote in Alternet, "This band
of retired military honchos has 1,000 operatives with some sort
of "secret" mojo, spying on the American public at
the feds' behest and helping to hoover up vast sums of money
in over 60,000 seizures."
In 1997, the Washington Post finally
caught up with the fact that mock military urban attacks had
taken place in 21 cities. And the academic journal Social Problems
found that 89% of the over 500 police departments it surveyed
had fully functioning special operations units trained and modeled
on military principles. For all practical purposes, these units
represented a military force whose target was American communities
and citizens. Between 1980 and 1995, the number of incidents
involving paramilitary units quadrupled.
THE GREAT PRETENDERS
Thus, in many ways, America over the
past two decades was an accident waiting for September 11 to
happen. All the pieces were in place--an increasingly powerful
military; a corrupt and leaderless Congress; the disappearance
of civics from school curricula; the slow acculturation to unconstitutional
behavior by police, military and prosecutors; a media more interested
in the power to which it aspired than in the readers and viewers
it was meant to serve; the concentration of formerly devolved
power inside of Washington, and the concentration of Washington
power inside of the White House.
True, contempt for the citizenry has
long been part of the character of the capital. For example,
in 1963 J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and a capital favorite, said, "The
case for government by elites is irrefutable...government by
the people is possible but highly improbable."
What has changed is the impunity with
which those in power can act as though they believe something
different. Washington has become the capital of great pretenders,
where the powerful talk as democrats but walk as tyrants and
where television and advanced agitprop have made it perfectly
possible to create a dictatorship that the people still regard
as a democracy. This is the same coalition of the shilling that
now purports to export its sordid distortion of democracy to
Baghdad. Don't be too hard on the Iraqis if they fall for it.
After all, we did.
Sam Smith
is the editor of the indispensable Progressive
Review and author of The
Great Political Repair Manual.
Yesterday's
Features
Saul Landau
The Cuba Conundrum
Neve
Gordon
US: No Right to Know About the Disappeared
John
Chuckman
Tom Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster
Bradley
Burston
Betting on Abu-Mazen...To Lose
Harvey
Wasserman
Bush's Military Defeat
John
Troyer
Question Those Writing History
Caoimhe
Butterly
Crowd Control American-style
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/02
Website
of the Day
Moussaoui's
Quiz
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