The American Political Paradox: More Freedom, Less Democracy

[Mike Friedman <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

In the article below, Robert Jensen makes some interesting comments about
the functioning of hegemony in the U.S., apparently from a structuralist
perspective. As for his sanguine comments regarding democracy functioning
in the U.S., I wonder if he would have the same analysis if he were a
Muslim detainee or an ILGWU member  instead of a journalism professor
(although he acknowledges this discrepancy)...  He has little to say about
the specific attacks on civil liberties imposed by the Bush administration
post 9/11, and sees "corporate capitalism" as just one more disagreeable
institution in our society (along with the Pentagon) to be swept away,
while preserving others (such as "some aspects of representative
government")... Let me guess: is Jensen a social democrat?

Mike
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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.

[clip]

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]

[clip]

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.

[clip]

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?

[clip]

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."

He can be reached at rjensen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




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