The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2003, Page 6, Image 6

PAGE 6
ALL THE POWER
Democracy, which is a pragmatic compromise between
the longing for freedom and the urge to subjugate it, is incom­
plete in its concentration on political rights without enough
attention placed upon economic or social rights. At the heart of
radical myth is the claim there are no neutrals in the great
struggle to eliminate tyranny and poverty (or to maintain them)
but in real life most people prefer to be neutral. They would
rather work to improve their lot within a familiar framework than
risk the imponderables of a new one. It is not so much poverty,
inequality or repression that incite public clamor for change but
more usually the fear of losing comforts already attained.
DAVID SHANNON
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
A dictator’s dictum (a fascist mantra):
“With unity as the end, the use of every means is
sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, prison, death.
For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual
must be sacrificed to the common good.”
This was the manifesto of a fictional character, a highly
popular governor of a New England state just prior to Pearl
Harbor who seemed to believe that the “tide in the affairs of
men" had turned for him. He meant to use a labor strike, which
he fueled from both sides, to declare martial law and take over
radio stations, power plants and railways.
“The strike gave him his pretext. He had pretended to
mediate, but underneath he had been inflaming one side against
another.. .He would speak over the radio to all his people
(organized into “unions" all over the country). He believed the
whole country was tired of its outworn institutions and was ready
to tear them down and follow him.*
He had formed his unions, or “cells" as he called them,
“in every town and village...He had his campaign mapped out
to the last detail....Sometimes he tried to justify himself. He saw
how disunited we were, how we weakened ourselves in a crisis
with our quarrels, our violent opposite ways of thinking. He had
forgotten what we had once known, that that disunity was our
real greatness, the measure of our dignity as a free people."
The book this is from was written in 1942 by I. A. R.
Wylie, Keepers of the Flame. It was made into a movie with
Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Book and movie begin
at the death of the governor just before he reached for ultimate
power. He had organized his patriotic “unions" all over the USA
and was just about to "seize the moment" when he was killed
during a storm — his car crashed into a flooded river that had
collapsed a bridge. Not exactly an accident, but a happy ending
for book and movie.
The Man On The White Horse, the strong, powerful,
capable, charismatic, even seemingly omnipotent leader who
simplifies the complex into ready solutions has always been an
attractive figure, and too often a figure of menace and devas­
tation once he has grasped power. It has been a recurrent theme
in American literature and politics, generally through fear of his
rise rather than hope for it. George W. Bush, when he claims he
is God's Chosen Man to rule the USA and encompass the world
with his reign is not the first American leader who has attempted
to fit into britches much bigger than those he has been granted.
Particularly in the years preceding World War 2 it was popular to
caricature ruthless power-hungry men after Louisiana Governor
(later U.S. Senator) Huey Long, aptly called the "kingfish" for his
ambitions of being crowned a populist king. He revealed his own
stratagem inadvertently when he said that fascism would attack
democracy wrapped in the flag.
This new millennial period of U.S. history is one of
intense spiritual and social decline, perpetrated by intellectually
dishonest and avariciously ambitious leaders who celebrated the
end of the Cold War a decade ago by beginning to dismantle
any final pretense of Constitutional democracy while publicly
ballyhooing it as if it were a tawdry commercial for a second-rate
product. Listening to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as well
as the country's political and military leaders is like reading a 5th
grade history textbook about the greatness of America and the
heroes who have made it great with the blessing of God. They
separate patriots from nonpatriots and weave into their stem
platitudes clumsily crafted slogan-speak earlier used in old
communist agit-prop such as their favorite, “Freedom loving
peoples of the world." which they repeat nearly as constantly
as "God bless America."
The keystone of the Bush Administration is the USA
Patriot Act, which has been dusted off from the Nixon era’s
appalling Huston Plan that was designed to eradicate domestic
dissent but never fully activated because Watergate got him
first. Denial of representation by an attorney, suspension of
attomey/client privacy, arrest and secret imprisonment without
charges, these sections of the USA Patriot Act (soon to be
cemented by its successor Patriot Act 2) are legislative outlines
of a police state, for now narrowly targeted on a minority
(Muslims, with middle American support) but soon will broaden
to cover the entire society. Precedents are being set and
virtually occur unopposed: arrests without trial or right of
attorney; people jailed for more than a year without charges
filed or indictments; secret interrogations that might or might
not include torture, we are not allowed to know. All this is being
conducted in the of so-called Homeland security against
terrorism, but soon enough even that pretext will be discarded
to reveal a perpetual iron heel
Our ancestors, as imperfect as they were, fought a
revolution and conceived a Constitution, as imperfect as it is,
because they thought of the future. The USA Patriot Act turns
the clock back to the past in direct refutation of the hopes and
ideals that fired the first generation.
The “abyss from which there will be no resurrection" that
Jefferson proclaimed federalism had fallen into with his election
in 1801, has not been so deep — a new more virulent strain of
federalism has crawled up from its crypt in a intensively post­
modern form of concentrated wealth clustered with political
power fueled by ultra right-wing ideologies.
Joseph Ellis wrote that the election of 1800 became “the
revolution of 1800 when the money changers were driven from
the American temple." Martin Van Buren said in a Senate
speech in 1828 that Hamilton and the Federalists had been
covert monarchists who highjacked "the Spirit of 76" and sold
the soul of the American Revolution to investment bankers.
(Ellis) He might have been describing the noveau Federalists
who have re-emerged at the beginning of the 21st century.
This second Bush administration is perhaps the most
radical and reactionary in American history. The Bushies are
also more arrogant than any other previous administration as
they trample over rights in blatant contempt of democracy,
flexing naked power and corporate profit (they are being called
the “Mayberry Machiavellis”). Perhaps their swagger and rush to
consolidate all power into their hands as quickly as possible is
because they occupy the Presidency under false terms — they
certainly wish for us to forget Bush was not elected, and seek to
dismantle any possibility of recall or impeachment.
Our current government perpetuates political and
Constitutional paralysis. It attempts to make itself seemingly
omnipotent to such a degree that any dissent to its policies,
actions or decrees is treated as treachery, or at the least as
unpatriotic. If someone disagrees with our bellicose and
insensitive President or tries to curb the power of the Pentagon
that person is treated as a terrorist; such is the noxious decline
of our current national dialogue. These policies are rapidly
changing our nation into an autocracy. The reascent of the
military is especially ominous, not entirely for the threat of
perpetual war or the increased threat of nuclear holocaust but
for the obliteration of civil law and the assumption of military
rule which considers citizens only as economic and utilitarian
objects of no personal worth or independence.
It is exactly that which our vaunted ancestors attempted
to break away from and remain free from, though of course
some of them wanted only to substitute themselves as the local
authority in the absence of a King’s power.
Jonathon Swift wrote in a letter to Boilingbrook in 1729:
“...for I will venture all I am worth that there is not one human
creature in power who will not be modest enough to confess that
he proceeds wholly upon a principle of corruption."
The owners of capital own the media, the Congress, the
armed forces and every instrument of state, in the view of V.l.
Lenin, who was certain that liberation of the appeased classes
was impossible without a violent revolution and destruction of
the apparatus of the state. Karl Marx spoke about the inevitabil­
ity of history as if it is a primary momentum that by its own “iron
necessity" progresses toward the breaking of nations and the
obliteration of the rich and powerful.
Marx, Lenin and their communism are considered as
history’s failures and false prophets. The perestroika of the late
1980s had more as a motive the saving of a dying system rather
than evolving into another, yet the consequence might well be
revolutionary and superior in the long run to the ruthless aspects
of capitalism which are grossly apparent since the demise of
communist Russia. In the 1930s the Great Depression was
thought to spell the doom of capitalism. Many Americans
believed that U.S. society was not merely doomed but did not
deserve to survive because it had failed the aspirations of its
people; its institutions were not just unworthy of preservation but
should be eradicated. Capitalists were under attack, their values
repudiated, their careless unconcerned greed held responsible
for the ruin of society. Bankers and businessmen were found
as guilty of crimes as the 1950s were to despise domestic
communists (many of whom were Party members in the 1930s
and upon whom revenge fell twenty years later).
The American dream so extolled by the flim-flammers
appeared flawed and fatally cracked during the Depression's
early years and radical reformers tried to dismantle the doomed
structure. Most Americans, however, did not believe their
system was mortally ill. Its decline was far more astonishing
than its subsequent recovery.
Seventy years ago, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt
became President in 1933, he said at his inauguration that there
was nothing for Americans to fear but fear itself, and he set off
on the busiest 100 days of a Presidency bringing in as he had
promised in his campaign a "new deal for the American people."
Roosevelt perceived that democratic capitalism could only
survive and prosper if the basic principles of democracy were
applied to achieve economic and social justice as well as civil
and political freedom (Mikhail Gorbachev might have also
discerned the same about the basic tenets of communism; he
turned to democratic reforms to preserve the fundamentals of
state socialism in somewhat the same manner FDR utilized what
his enemies called “socialist" reforms to save democracy in the
USA )
Underneath the plethora of serious problems battering
the nation is the most important of all: the growing inequality of
class in a society that smugly and blindly claims to be classless.
The nation’s stagnating productivity of virtually everything but
military products is the major cause of the economic decline that
has backlashed in domestic xenophobia against the poor and
racial minorities who are both economically and politically
crippled by the downturn and who are expected to pay for the
deficit caused by the irresponsible avarice of those who manage
the economy. In the meantime the working class is reduced to
what might be considered post-industrial serfdom — as jobs
disappear welfare and unemployment insurance is ripped away
from the laid-off workers, and those who do work are denied
living wages or union protection from abuse or threatened job
losses to keep them in line.
The USA has seldom been kind or generous to its poor
or minorities. Each time an outcast population struggles for
equality the powerful and others who fear diversity or do not
wish to share wealth or power attempt to squash individuals and
movements responsible, usually in the names of law and order
and/or national security. Yet compelling the underprivileged to
remain in poverty and dejection is at once volatile and ultimately
calamitous to the nation. The real best and brightest are kept out
and all of us in the end suffer.
The imbalance that results corrupts the core of our
democracy and produces mendacious mediocrity at the upper
levels of power. We are governed by pious hypocrites who are
mostly white males in a nation in which women are the majority
and the great variety of races outnumber Caucasians. Women
have made it into the middle levels of politics, as have a few
blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans: but for the present
and most likely beyond the end of the century the top national
positions are closed to all but a small club of white males, a
minority of upper class men who strain to hold onto power,
clinging desperately, defiantly and ruthlessly to their peculiar
form of country club apartheid.
Candidates of the political parties appeal to the masses
for their votes but usually serve the minority at society's upper
end. It is not entirely the fault of office seekers that the system
is tilted toward the top. Elites take root in every society and
wield disproportionate power unless a counterbalance restrains
them. In a democracy that force of resistance is constitutionally
the power of ordinary people. Political parties are formed to
reflect and channel the passions of ordinary people and publicly
represent them fairly, efficiently and powerfully — in theory at
least — with a minimum of corruption and disruption. The two
party system fails in this purpose. It is too exclusive and com­
pressed, and it eliminates too many people and ideas from the
actual process of governance. The parties in realty serve politi­
cians and their favored patrons rather than the voters.
Reflecting the world at large which has generally been
divided into rich and poor nations, politics in the USA are an
ever-widening bicameral separation between haves and have-
nots, with the Democratic Party accumulating a disproportionate
membership of the impoverished that for a long time gave it
numerical superiority but recently percolated a major defection
of its traditional (white) middle-class base, tremendously bene-
fitting the Republican Party.
The degeneration of the Democratic Party intensifies
the problem and leaves a black hole in the center of American
politics. The Party's own center has fallen out, deserted to the
Republican Superparty, leaving disenfranchised minorities cling­
ing to a disintegrated corona.Perhaps like the Soviet Communist
Party its ruins should be abandoned, the surviving fragments
reformed into a new party (as in Russia) or a multitude of parties
that might at least reflect the disparate new majorities that have
moved into the American electorate but so far have not gained
real or representative power.
A kinder assessment of the Democratic Party is that it is
weak and second rate; and that it must acknowledge it has failed
as an alternative to the GOP since Nixon transfigured southern
Democrats into Republicans.The response of the Democrats has
been to imitate the Republicans, which characterizes the Clinton
years. The Democrats, like the Whigs of the 1850s, are a dying
party but hopes that a vigorous new party will be reborn to
replace it in time for 2004 is exceedingly dismal.
An old joke about the difference between optimists and
pessimists might apply to Bush's claim that he is in line with the
thinking of the American people. An optimist is certain that the
U.S. is the best of all possible worlds: a pessimist agrees. Bush
might be right. There is strong evidence that the country is
indeed conservative, slow to change and in constant reaction to
it. The problem is that blacks and the poor (which includes all
other racial minorities in the U.S. as well as a significant number
of women) are shoved out by the rightward politicians and party
hacks and they drop away, either too disillusioned or too angry
to register or vote. So a conservative minority rules in its claim
as a majority. Almost 50% of eligible voters did not vote in 2000;
a slim majority of them voted for the Democratic candidate
Al Gore. The Green Party and Ralph Nader in particular are
blamed for taking votes away from Gore, but a real reason the
Democrats were flimflammed was that they did not have the
courage or intelligence to register the vast numbers of eligible
unregistered voters.
George Bush reflects the post-industrial move toward
the U.S. becoming the dominant headquarters nation of the
world. Intensive technological production has given way to
administrative, social and military occupations. Highly skilled
workers who once commanded high salaries are rotting in
unemployment, welfare or lowpaying unskilled jobs and are
among the increasingly homeless. Their skills are obsolete,
their knowledge and experience of lessening value in a society
increasingly preoccupied with relatively unskilled clerical and
service work. Unions are broken because plutocrats are aware
that profit margins in a service economy demand a low-wage
workforce with few of the medical or retirement benefits that
were hardwon by unions in the smokestack industries. Both the
value of work and the worker has eroded.