We have been stupefied
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As the Republicans take the Senate,
these four reasons explain why the republic is in serious,
serious trouble |
By Jim Sleeper |
Salon |
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Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz
(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts/AP) |
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The American republic didn’t end this week because conservative
Republicans captured the Senate. Conservative Republicans
captured the Senate because the republic has been ending, as
liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans surf four
predatory new asymmetries in our national life – in security, in
speech, in investment, and in consumer marketing. These immense
imbalances of power are submerging the elections, delegitimizing
the liberal capitalist republic that promised to give security,
speech, investment, and marketing deeply different meanings and
consequences than the ones they’ve acquired.
Nothing less than a transformation of American citizenship
worthy of Nathan Hale, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.
(who learned a lot from Gandhi), Vaclav Havel, and, yes, Edward
Snowden can free us from yet another spectacle of politicians
who look like pinheads dancing on pins’ heads.
Security: When American civilian planes brought low the American
superpower in 2001, they shook the dollar-driven premise that a
massive, militarized national-security establishment can protect
an open society. Yet instead of re-thinking its premises and
policies the “military-industrial complex” that Dwight
Eisenhower warned against has recovered from the shock of 9/11
to become a global search-and-destroy directorate, nearly
independent of democratic governance, that is making American
society less conducive to the voluntary civic discipline, candor
and trust that alone sustain a republic.
Certainly technological change is driving an Orwellian
transformation of “homeland” security through surveillance.
Henry Kissinger warns that “The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command
has predicted that ‘the next war will begin in cyberspace’” and
that it will be asymmetrical. But the prospect that our vast
military could be paralyzed by hackers is making the
national-security “cure” as dangerous as the disease of
terrorism itself. Not only liberals but especially libertarian
conservatives, who’ve long mocked the line, “I’m from the
government and I’m here to help you,” understand the new
“security” danger well.
No wonder that Edward Snowden, 29, a libertarian conservative,
has sacrificed so much to warn us that with only a “policy
switch,” any administration could use the National Security
Agency’s massive data base to chill individual Americans’
exercise if the most basic freedoms of speech and political
action. Fear of such abuse is already inducing online
self-censorship and chilling public debate, Snowden believes.
Snowden is impressing viewers of Laura Poitras’ documentary
“CitizenFour” as a brave, level-headed citizen reminiscent of
Nathan Hale, who was similarly young when he was hanged in 1776
for defying the only “legitimate” government of his time, a
monarchial, mercantile, multi-national regime, behalf of a
nascent republic. Now Snowden is defying what that republic is
becoming.
Predictably, some people consider Snowden a traitor, as some of
Hale’s contemporaries did him. But just as Hale was reported to
have said, with impressive composure and courage, before he was
hanged, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my
country,” so Snowden has written that “the Obama administration
is not afraid of whistleblowers like… me. We are stateless,
imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid
of… an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional
government it was promised – and it should be.” That an analogy
to Hale isn’t stretch should be frightening in itself; more
frightening is the growing asymmetry between what 18th century
Britain imposed against Hale’s republican spirit and what it’s
equipped to impose on everyone in its close cooperation with our
NSA, as reported in the Poitras documentary and The Guardian.
Speech: An equally chilling asymmetry between citizen
speakers and incorporeal speakers has grown not only with
surveillance but also with recent jurisprudence that compounds a
long trend of equating business corporations with persons.
Rulings such as Citizens United reduce citizens sovereignty over
markets, championed by both Roosevelts, to trivial “consumer
sovereignty” within markets. Markets cannot be free and open, or
their participants hopeful and prosperous, without appropriate,
occasionally aggressive regulation. But today’s market managers,
driven to maximize shareholder value at all other costs, unable
to engage in long-term planning that might defer their
short-term gains, destroy markets’ own contributions to society
by buying off the politicians whom citizens elect to regulate
them.
This is done by funding or otherwise abetting election campaigns
that are prohibitively expensive because over-determined by
advertisements on profit-driven media. The Supreme Court has
intensified this asymmetry. Your speech isn’t free in any
republican sense if a few donors and corporate managers have
megaphones while you have laryngitis from straining to be heard:
As if adding insult to injury in 2012, megaphones were denied to
Occupy protesters against economic and social devastation caused
by deregulated markets.
Investment: Another insult has been the pretension that the
republic is in crisis because Aunt Millie wants Social Security
and firefighters want pensions. They want them all the more now
that predatory, casino-like financing has thrown millions of
Americans out of their jobs and homes or degraded their wages
and working conditions, thanks largely to asymmetries that are
inherent in capitalism itself.
The early 20th-century British writer R. H. Tawney noted “the
naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his
achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland
unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous
support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating
in the desert.” Writing in 1926, Tawney nicely anticipated
investors’ reactions to the crash three years later and the
admonitions of Sen. Elizabeth Warren right now.
The devastation of the American Dream is also partly a
consequence of the global intensification of capitalist
asymmetries: Trans-national businesses that escape regulation
and taxation force governments to compete with one another to
attract them by scanting basic public even needs more than they
already have by being bought off right at home. The genius of
markets in focusing narrowly on investors, workers and consumers
as self-interested individuals quickly become their stupidity in
obliviousness to the social consequences of their gyrations.
That’s why we need for democracy to catch up with plutocracy by
strong transnational regulation. Even in Nathan Hale’s time,
Boston Tea Partiers defied the East India Company, one of the
world’s first multi-nationals. Apostles of global prosperity
such as Fareed Zakaria — and perhaps libertarians such as Edward
Snowden — should revisit that page of both American and global
history.
So should the apostles of markets to parts of the world that
haven’t had them before, promising to empower the tribal and
peasant people by commodifying homes and farms that have never
had deeds that entitled them as capital. The political scientist
Benjamin Barber warns in his book “Consumed” that unless strong
political regulation “secures newly manifested capital against
exploitation and abuse,” the economy that “discloses,
legitimizes, and hence captures” formerly extralegal assets
opens doors to predatory and exploitative encroachments on them.
Consumer Marketing: These daunting new asymmetries in security,
speech, and investment can be reduced only by millions of
citizens as vigilant and mobilized as Snowden and Elizabeth
Warren. Instead our body politic is so drained of candor and
trust that we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of
flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of
anonymous shareholders, and we’ve let lawmakers, bought or
intimidated, render us helpless against torrents of marketed
fear and titillation that are dissolving a distinctively
American democratic ethos the literary historian Daniel Aaron
characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
What might awaken and empower more citizens, instead of
isolating, stupefying, and discouraging them? The answer
involves breaking out of the Catch-22 that runaway markets have
imposed not just by disadvantaging and dividing their supposedly
sovereign consumers but also by actively groping and degrading
us.
The disease that today’s investors and managers embody and are
imposing on the rest of us is their own incapacity to endure
short-term pain for long-term gain – or to endure long-term
planning and deferred rewards for short-term gratification. What
today’s capitalism is becoming no longer permits it, and the
chaos it sows makes democratic deliberation impossible and
authoritarian non-solutions attractive.
Many over-stressed, over-stimulated Americans have adapted to
living with variants of force and fraud that erupt in road rage;
lethal stampedes by shoppers on sale days; elaborate (and
intensively marketed) security precautions against armed home
invasion; gladiatorialization in sports; nihilism in
entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex
without attachment; micro-aggressions in daily relations;
commercial groping and goosing of private lives and public
spaces in the marketing of ordinary consumer goods; and a huge
prison industry to deter or punish broken, violent men, most of
them non-white, only to find schools in even the “safest,”
whitest neighborhoods imprisoned by fear of white gunmen who are
often students themselves.
Stressed by this republican derangement, millions are spending
billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even
surveillance designed to protect them from themselves. All those
vials, syringes, security systems and shootings reflect the
insinuation of what Edward Gibbon called “a slow and secret
poison into the vitals of the empire…” until Roman citizens,
having surrendered their republic to authoritarians in pursuit
of security, “no longer possessed that public courage which is
nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national
honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They
received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign,
and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”
If the situation looks somewhat worse than it really is, that’s
owing partly to profit-crazed media that sensationalize what’s
worst and ignore what’s not. Still, some of us feel like the old
Roman republicans, who, recalling their former freedoms, felt,
as Livy put it, that “We have become too ill to bear our
sickness or their cures.” At Davos, more than a few elite
economic and strategic leaders survey the public wreckage
they’ve caused and tell one another that, after all, the people
must be ruled. But these would-be leaders can barely rule
themselves.
If there’s a silver lining in Snowden’s having to spend all his
energies fighting the state, it’s that his battle spares him the
perverse compromises made by libertarian and free-market
conservatives who can’t reconcile their sincere commitment to
republican ordered liberty with their knee-jerk obeisance to
unregulated market riptides that are dissolving republican
virtue and sovereignty before their eyes.
Global capital has released the genie of power from the
nationalist bottles in which democratic governments held some
strength and, with it, some legitimacy. International diplomacy,
once a velvet glove on the iron fist of state power, often now
finds itself covering only the algorithmically driven
nothingness of mercurial “shareholder value.” The United States
military’s “Africom” may soon become a hired security service
for that continent’s new Chinese investor/owners.
Meanwhile, in China, Africa, and the United States, real
citizens stand alone. But so it was when Nathan Hale defied a
seemingly impregnable British empire (as would Gandhi, whom
Winston Churchill dismissed as “that naked fakir”). So, too,
when Martin Luther King Jr. and impoverished black churchgoers,
unarmed and trembling, walked into southern squares to face
armed men and dogs in what even Justice Clarence Thomas once
called a “totalitarian” system of segregation. So, too when a
hapless playwright named Vaclav Havel and other activists in
Soviet Eastern Europe defied a vast security state that few in
the West had thought would give way. So, too, now, as Snowden
defies what the American republic has become. Control of the
Senate will matter as much as it should only when it reflects a
convergence of Snowden-like libertarians and Warren-like
liberals against Republicans’ perverse determination to subvert
democracy and Democrats’ equally perverse dereliction of it. |
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Jim Sleeper is the
author of Liberal Racism (1997) and The Closest of Strangers:
Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (1990) |
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