On the Erosion of Democratic Habits

I think it's worth putting the link to Naomi' Wolfe's article "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps" here for the record.  Her points are similar to one's I've been making, but it's pulled together in a useful way that I think is worth reading.  I particularly liked these paragraphs:

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

We're not talking about a coup or a putsch.  It's about the gradual erosion of our democratic habits. It's about the slow process of normalizing the horrific.  We elected George Bush after learning about Abu Ghraib and knowing what his administration has done in Guantanamo.  It's about the precedent set by his hundreds of signing statements.  It's about provisions in the Patriot Act that even lawmakers are unaware of.  It's about the loss of habeas corpus. It's about dozens of other little things that we aren't paying much attention to. These things don't affect most Americans directly, and so they shrug and go mow the lawn.

Americans tend to look at these little moments of erosion as isolated incidents and fail to see the larger pattern.  They tend to think that Bush is so politically weak right now that he can't possibly do more harm.  But whether or not Bush himself is still dangerouss, he has laid a foundation for future authoritarians to build on.  All it will take is another terrorist attack to push us over the edge.  American democracy is far more fragile than most Americans want to believe.

So here's the thing.  In a fallen world the powerful instinctively seek to dominate the less powerful. Societies inevitably segregate into factions that either possess power and wealth serve those who have power and wealth. Democracy is not the natural social state; it's maintenance requires the collective spiritual will of its citizens. Feudalism in any of its various forms is the way of the world if vigilant citizens don't strenuously resist the gravitational force that pulls them toward it. And this force is the master/slave dynamic I wrote about last week. 

It is possible to transcend it, and democracy is one social form that seeks to institutionalize that aspiration in the political sphere.  But those institutions suffer continuously from these forces that seek to erode these institutions at their foundations.  We Americans have currently a democracy only in a minimalist sense.  Our institutions in the political sphere have become less responsive to the will of the people as they have become more responsive to the will of well-funded, highly motivated, and well organized factions who care not a whit for the common good, only for promoting their own interests.

I think our political regression is linked to a lack of spiritedness in the cultural sphere which in turn is linked to how the economic sphere shapes our lives.  We haver very little control in the economic sphere.  Most of us are not free and self-reliant economically, and that encourages a slavish, security-centered mentality.  Most of us lack deep spiritual convictions regarding the destiny toward freedom that is at the heart of the human project, so we go along whatever path seems easiest, safest in the economic and political spheres.. Complacency and drift come naturally to us, and I accuse myself of this as much as I do anyone else. The forces of gravity, the forces that seek to pull us back and down are so strong.  It really does take an extraordinary act of commitment and will to resist them.  But I believe it's precisely in our resistance to those forces that we discover most deeply the spirit that makes us human.

Comments

[Brian]

"The United States may well experience episodes of authoritarian government in the future but these are unlikely to resemble the mobilizing, chauvinistic dictatorships of interwar Europe, all marching bands and banners. Dictatorship in the United States would most likely be demobilizing, seeking to keep people in their homes, rather than putting them on the streets or in uniform. An American dictatorship would clothe itself in constitutional and legal forms; it would cultivate an aura of nonpartisan technocracy and business expertise, not a feverish cult of the genius-leader and the masses. An American Fuehrer would not rant and strut, but crack jokes and adopt the relaxed, ironic, 'cool' style of a television host."

- Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (1996)