Democracy Matters (5 page)

As a consequence of nihilistic corruptions, the reverence for,
faith in, and deep commitment to democracy are so undermined in America today that there is not only a disillusionment with our politicians but also a loss of belief for too many people in the efficacy of government altogether, and in the honesty of corporate America as a whole. Yet many citizens still yearn to hear authentic expressions of democratic values and to believe that policies being pursued are for the public good, not narrowly serving electoral purposes or elite interests.

We are suffering in America today from three particular forms of political nihilism, each with its own false justifications and vicious consequences: evangelical nihilism, paternalistic nihilism, and sentimental nihilism. The classic expression of
evangelical
nihilism is found in Plato’s
Republic
in the person of Thrasymachus, the Sophist who argues with Socrates that might makes right. Thrasymachus mocks truth, integrity, and principle by claiming that power, might, and force dictate desirable political action and public policy. Raw power rather than moral principles determines what is right. For him, the terms of what is just must be dictated by imperial elites because such exercise of power is necessary in order to ensure national security and prosperity. In true evangelical spirit, such nihilists tend to become militant, broaching no dissenting views. The fundamental mission of Socratic questioning is, in fact, to show that this militance is morally wrong and spiritually empty.

In this way, the movers and shakers in the Republican Party—and especially the hawks in the Bush administration—are not simply conservative elites and right-wing ideologues. More pointedly, they are
evangelical nihilists
, drunk with power and driven by
grand delusions of American domination of the world. And they have been willing to lie and to abuse their control of American power in order to pursue that dominance. Unlike their idol, Ronald Reagan—a masterful conservative communicator and true believer in the rightness of America’s might—the new hawks seem to believe that America’s might actually determines what is right. In this tradition of thinking, we wouldn’t be so powerful if we weren’t right, so our might shows that we are right. Accordingly, America’s power justifies the refusal to listen to or reply to our critics, be they former allies in the United Nations or fellow citizens of goodwill demonstrating in the streets. America’s hubris means only that our power moves must be forms of empowerment for others. What we do must be a force for good for others, even if others disagree, dissent, or even are harmed. President Bush and his inner circle have acted like exemplary evangelical nihilists—present-day Thrasymachuses—who show no respect for Socratic questioning of their positions and actions. They even characterize such questioning as unpatriotic.

Yet the present reality of political nihilism is not so simple as that of the evangelical nihilistic arrogance of the Bush administration. There is political nihilism to be found within the ranks of the Democratic Party as well, in the form of
paternalistic
nihilism. The canonical articulation of paternalistic nihilism is put forward in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
in the character of the Grand Inquisitor, a terribly disillusioned priest in the city of Seville during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. So cynical has the Grand Inquisitor become that although he knows the abuses of the Inquisition are a horrible perversion of the teachings of Christ,
perpetrated by a terribly corrupted church, he nevertheless takes part in those abuses—condemning many supposed infidels to death. He has come to believe that the corrupted church is the best that mankind can hope for because human society is simply not capable of living in the way Christ instructed. We are not capable of achieving the world of equality, humility, and compassionate caring that He instructed mankind to strive for. Better not to rock the boat with pipe dreams of a radical transformation of society. The elite of the church can do more good, the Inquisitor believes, by working within the corrupted system, paternally deceiving the public, shielding society from the terrible burden of the mandates of truth. He has cast his lot with corruption.

The elites in the Democratic Party—especially in the Senate and the House—are not only liberal and centrist supporters of social equality and individual freedoms; more pointedly they are
paternalistic nihilists
who have become ineffectual by having bought into the corruptions of the power-hungry system. Though they may wish that the system could be made to serve more truly democratic purposes, they have succumbed to the belief that a more radical fight for a truer democracy, battling against the corruption of elites, is largely futile. So they’ve joined the game in the delusional belief that at least they are doing so in the better interests of the public. Needless to say, they have much more to offer than Republicans, especially President Bush and his chief political strategist, Karl Rove,
and they will play an indispensable role in the crucial anti-Bush united front needed to revitalize American democracy.
Yet they are still more part of the problem than the solution to our impasse.

The paternalistic nihilistic view that much good can be done by
working within the corrupted system is not altogether misguided. The greatest Democratic legislation—that of the New Deal and of the Great Society—was passed due to skillful mastering of the system. But the present Democratic Party has lost its footing in terms of its foundational mission to fight the plutocracy. Corporate elites in the American empire have always cast a dark shadow over the operations of power in American government. And although these elites are mighty, they are not almighty. The Democratic Party leaders seem to have lost the conviction that corporate elites can be forced to make concessions under the pressure of organized democratic forces. But our history has shown they can be forced. The key reason women could not vote until 1920, indigenous peoples until 1924, and most blacks until 1964 was that they could not bring organized democratic pressures to bear in order to limit the power of wealthy white male citizens. Yet, when they marshaled that organized force, they got the vote.

For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites—a small percentage of white men in the country. The uniqueness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his determination to oppose this power and might—a vision and courage that far exceeded those of his earlier progressive precursors Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It is no accident that FDR is so vehemently hated by the evangelical nihilistic elites of the present-day empire. The uniqueness of Lyndon Johnson was that he recognized that the interests of poor whites were the same as those of the vast majority of black people in America, a view suggested by Michael Harrington’s classic
The Other America
(1962).
The achievements of Roosevelt and Johnson are salutary precisely because they promoted the democratic, not the plutocratic, tendency in the American empire. And they did so primarily because of organized pressure from the labor movement under Roosevelt and the black and gray movements under Johnson.

The example and legacy of FDR in the 1930s and early 1940s and of Johnson in the 1960s are the high moments of democratic and Democratic Party electoral politics in the United States, proving that the American government can side with working and poor people, and even with black people, within the context of empire. Under Roosevelt the organized power of working people was made legitimate, and under Johnson one-half of all black people and elderly citizens (of all colors) were lifted out of poverty. These achievements—resulting from intense organized struggle—may feel so far away, in both time and possibility, that holding them up as models may seem pointless. But reclaiming this powerful democratic legacy is precisely the mission before the Democratic Party today. An essential element in achieving this renewal will be for the party to become more genuinely responsive to black concerns—understanding them not as matters of a “special interest” but as being in the public interest. This would lead to a strengthening of both the moral and the electoral force of the party. As Michael Dawson wrote so trenchantly in his
Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies
(2001):

The Democratic Party elites are too often unwilling to tell the American people just how connected they and their Republican colleagues are to powerful corporations and influential lobbyists. Their caving in to Bush’s Iraq war, and their support for the loosening of regulations on corporations that led to the recent wave of scandals, are two blatant examples. In these legislative votes, most Democrats failed to follow their conscience, following instead the polls and their reelection strategies. Unlike their idol, Bill Clinton—a masterful neoliberal communicator who subordinated his conscience to the exigencies of reelection strategies, but was able to conceal his opportunism with his charisma—the vast majority of Democratic Party elites are rendered impotent by their timidity and paralyzed by their cupidity (their courting of corporate donors). Their unprincipled compromises reinforce the idea that corporate influence and lobbyists’ clout run the U.S. government.

Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are exemplary paternalistic nihilists—contemporary Grand Inquisitors who long to believe in a grand democratic vision yet cannot manage to speak with full candor or attack the corruptions of the system at their heart. So
they defer to pollsters, lobbyists, and powerful corporate interests even as they espouse populist rhetoric and democratic concerns. Their centrist or conservative policies on welfare reform, the Iraq war, and justice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict speak volumes—they are opportunistic efforts to satisfy centrist or conservative constituencies. In this way, both follow the lead of Bill Clinton. Inadvertently, they contribute to the conservative drift of the country heralded by Republicans.

The political nihilism in America today is not limited to the arena of party politics; it has infiltrated our media culture as well in the form of
sentimental
nihilism. While an essential mission of the news organizations in a democracy should be to expose the lies and manipulations of our political and economic leaders—and surely many media watchdogs devote themselves to that task—too much of what passes for news today is really a form of entertainment. So many shows follow a crude formula for providing titillating coverage that masks itself as news. Those who are purveyors of this bastardized form of reporting are
sentimental nihilists
, willing to sidestep or even bludgeon the truth or unpleasant and unpopular facts and stories, in order to provide an emotionally satisfying show. This is the dominance of sentiment over truth telling in order to build up market share. Our market-driven media have become much too constrained in the coverage of unpleasant truths, much too preoccupied with the concerns and views of middle-class and upper-class white people, and much too beholden to the political persuasions of the media moguls.

Hence we have witnessed the breakdown in media ethics—going after “good” stories even if the truth has to be stretched or outright
fabrications are condoned. The overwhelming dominance of market-driven pressures has also led to the outburst of blatantly partisan punditry. And even the supposed do-gooders in the media often limit the depth of their analysis and the range of their truth telling so as not to offend advertisers and mainstream opinion.

There is a vibrant upswing in alternative coverage due to the Web, with so many Weblogs on issues getting a wider range of perspectives out—though some go too far into crude advocacy the other way. There are also still many quality reporters who have developed enough of a reputation and following to write harder-hitting pieces, and there are specialty periodicals that offer substantive, analytical reporting. But our mass media are dominated by the ambulance chasers and the blatantly partisan hacks, mostly on the right. Many newspeople are deep believers in the principle of the free press and the special role it’s meant to play in our democracy, and yet that belief all too often amounts to sentiment because they fail to act more consistently on that principle.

The most powerful depiction of such principled sentimental nihilism in recent times that I know of is presented in Toni Morrison’s novel
Beloved
, represented by the family of the Bodwins. Mr. and Mrs. Bodwin, a white brother and sister, are abolitionists who have helped a number of slaves gain their freedom. But in conversations during the course of the novel, they betray the limits of their commitment to racial equality and of their courage to fight for it. They enjoy their comfortable lives, and though they see themselves as bleeding hearts who abhor the evil of slavery, they refuse to speak of the true depths of its horrors to their fellow white citizens, and even to the former slaves they helped to freedom. They
know full well about slavery’s venality, but they lack the courage to exercise frank and plain speech against it because they fear social shunning. Such cowardly lack of willingness to engage in truth telling, even at the cost of social ills, is the fundamental characteristic of sentimental nihilism.

So many of our mainstream media pundits—from neoliberals to the Far Right—are sentimental nihilists. They are aware of the corrupt links of the mass media to corporate interests and government, yet they fail to speak out clearly or consistently against that corruption. Though our cultural mythology has promoted the notion of “fair and balanced” coverage and impartiality, our news organizations have always been more partisanly political than the ideal and have always been subject to market pressures. Yet we now have a media whose vulgar partisanship is corrupting our public life. Those who engage in biased reporting reinforce the deep polarization and balkanization of the citizenry and contribute much to the decline of public trust in meaningful political conversation. The relentless pursuit of power among the media elite—in the form of ratings and market share—is indulged in with little regard for the consequences for our democracy.