Benjamin R. Barber
Published in the The
American Prospect, November 4, 2002
As President Bush rushes headlong into war with Iraq, there are
endless reasons for concern; but the one that is most disturbing
has been least remarked on. The president can be faulted for waiting
so long to consult Congress, the United Nations, America's allies
and the Middle Eastern nations likely to be affected (Jordan, Turkey,
Iran). And he certainly can be faulted for rashness, impetuosity,
arrogance and an impressive indifference to the rule of law —
even if, in the end, he is compelled to play by the UN rules that,
ironically, he himself invoked. But accountability is a two-way
street, and Americans should be equally concerned with their —
make that our — dramatic failure to register in politically
relevant terms the unease (if polls are to be believed) that we
putatively feel about an Iraq invasion.
A few passionate Democrats — Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich,
Paul Wellstone and John Kerry, and (finally!) Al Gore and Ted Kennedy
— along with a handful of Republicans including Chuck Hagel
and Dick Armey (!) have been audibly remonstrating with the administration.
But the Democratic Party leadership has been working more to change
the subject rather than to join the debate. More significantly,
though there have been a few petitions and full-page ads, none of
the national interest groups and social movements that might have
an interest in slowing the rush to war has been heard from.
Where is the women's movement? Sitting out the debate because certain
varieties of fundamentalist Islamics belittle women? And the unions?
Angry with free-trade liberals and third-world sympathizers who
disparage textile and steel subsidies and refuse to feel their pain
at jobs hemorrhaging abroad? What about the civil-liberties lobby?
More interested in protecting those rounded up without warrant in
the war on terrorism than protecting us from an unwarranted war?
And the Greens? Oblivious to the connection between the oil lobby
and the war lobby? And, again, where is the leadership of the Democratic
Party? Playing the same election politics it accuses George W. Bush
of playing by mortgaging its civic conscience to a desperate gamble
that if it can give Bush his war it can get Americans to focus on
the economy again?
What's going on here is an unhappy convergence of trends that predate
both the war fever and the Bush administration. First, there is
a certain lassitude that appears to have resulted from the well-publicized
erosion of social capital that Robert Putnam spent the last decade
regretting. Putnam's chief worry was the impact on Democratic activism
by citizens, and these worries now seem well-founded. The bridges
and connections that link people locally are no longer as effective
as they once were. Folks who neither eat nor pay nor learn nor pray
together are not easily mobilized around national political debates.
Lassitude is also a consequence of several decades of privatization
ideology that has made government programs and public philosophy
suspect even to liberals. If you can't trust government and you
can't trust politics, then why bother to try to act? If markets
are more efficacious than government institutions and consumers
more powerful than citizens, there is no point in trying to change
public policy. At best, we can boycott a war we don't approve of,
but we can't stop it.
Political cynicism has been building for decades on the liberal
left. It peaked with that toxic combination of policy compromises
and personal scandals that engulfed the Clinton administration.
Why does Jason Mark of the activist group Global Exchange seem so
down on political action? Why does Andy Burns of the 180/Movement
for Democracy and Education insist that "no one sees any real
change coming out of Congress," leaving himself without a political
strategy? (Both were quoted in The American Prospect's Oct. 7 issue.)
Cynicism is not only dispiriting, it is demobilizing. People who
think their votes don't count — or, as in Florida, don't even
get counted — are not prospects for political action. The
liberal left seems particularly vulnerable on this score, in danger
of simply collapsing under the weight of too much rapid change,
too many counterintuitive issues, too much business-friendly Democratic
Leadership Council centrism and too few electoral victories that,
when they have come at all, have come at too high a price. Like
the neoliberals it reviles, the left often appears to have given
up on government, and on democracy itself.
As things stand, if the president goes to war, then he is likely
to go without eliciting either the consent or the dissent, the support
or the opposition, of the storied American majority, more silent
today than ever before at a moment when the raucous contestation
of democratic deliberation is desperately needed. Progressives will
blame the president and his Cold War veterans and his corporate
honchos, but this won't wash.
We have to admit our own democratic complicity in the outcomes that
our choices — or our disengagement — produce. The term-limits
movement, for example, suggested a deep distrust by voters not of
politicians or of the system but of voters themselves. Like an alcoholic
hiding the bottle from himself, the American voter pleading for
term limits seemed to be saying: "I don't trust myself! Don't
let me do it — unless I'm legislatively blocked, I may just
go off the wagon and vote for the same stupid SOB I voted for the
last three times!" In fact, we already have "term limits"
— they are called elections. But we no longer trust ourselves
to discharge our civic responsibilities prudently or effectively.
It's the same with the preoccupation with a constitutional limit
on spending; the constitutionally authorized limit is Congress itself.
Except we don't trust it to do what we want, or — more to
the point — we don't trust ourselves to want what we supposedly
should want.
This profoundly disturbing democratic distrust of democracy, this
self-loathing tendency not to trust ourselves to act aright or even
know what's right, is a form of moral disarmament — and one
that further empowers a president beset by no such doubts (and willing
to enact his convictions at the drop of a hat). When the popular
sovereign hesitates and falters, "the sovereign representative"
is empowered to act as it will.
Our reticence to jump into the fray amounts to a full-scale retreat
from politics. Nothing could be more dangerous — not even
the war itself. For the president to strike preemptively against
a nation, however detestable its government, that has not attacked
America is certainly an affront to the rule of law and a radical
shift in American principles. But for those who know better and
who oppose preemption to look on in truculent silence is an affront
to democracy and a radical shift in our tradition of popular dissent.
A people that abjures its own responsibility to judge those it elects,
that alienates its own right to oversee and, where necessary, blocks
imprudent acts by its representatives, is a people that has yielded
its sovereignty.
The people of Iraq are not to blame for the despicable deeds of
Saddam Hussein (one reason for not making war on them to remove
him). He rules by brute force and intimidation, which is precisely
our complaint about him. But we the people of the United States
are fully responsible for George W. Bush and his deeds; that's what
it means to live in a democracy, Florida and the Supreme Court notwithstanding.
(That's another liberal cop-out; closely contested elections are
also part of our system.) When the Iraqis and other enemies of America
say, "We have nothing against the people of the United States,
we are hostile only to its government," they project their
own powerlessness on us, misjudging our culpability by reflecting
on their own lack of responsibility. There is a world of difference,
however. In a democracy, we are responsible for what our government
perpetrates in our name, and we can and should be regarded as culpable
for the consequences. Otherwise, there is no accountability, hence
any democracy (which is more or less what the cynics are saying).
But unless we are willing to join the America-bashing zanies who
see no difference between the United States and Iraq, who insist
America, too, is a "terrorist" state, we must acknowledge
the president's preemptive unilateralism as our own.
President Harry Truman hung a sign in the oval office declaring,
"The buck stops here." He had it half right. Finally,
it is the sovereign American people who need to insist, "No,
Mr. President, the buck stops with us."
Let's be clear: I am not appealing here to false consciousness,
trying to suggest that while Americans appear to support the war
they really don't or shouldn't.
Despite President Bush's ongoing general popularity (hovering in
the high 60s), and despite months of an all-out media campaign by
the administration to make its case for intervention, a CBS poll
in late September reported that four out of every 10 Americans thought
Congress had not asked enough questions about the president's Iraq
policy. Moreover, slight but real majorities continued to want the
United States to follow the recommendations of the United Nations,
preferring that a vote in Congress come only after UN approval has
been secured.
Polling is not politics, however. Registering opposition to a policy
in private via a poll simply doesn't constitute citizenship. Contestation
demands deliberation and information. The president once had to
learn the names of foreign leaders and the geography of the foreign
capitals from which they came. But how many Americans for or against
the war can identify Iraq's neighbors or describe the geography
and politics of the Kurdish minorities where the frontiers of Iraq,
Syria and Turkey intersect? Can they tell us whether Saddam Hussein's
"evil" lies in his being an Islamacist, a Marxist or a
Baathist? Or what the difference is between the three? We tolerate
ongoing popular ignorance in the domain of foreign policy more or
less forever. When have presidential debates featured foreign policy?
When has the evening news contained a quarter of the world events
covered regularly by the British Broadcasting Corporation?
The blip of interest after September 11 dissipated in an orgy of
White House moralizing in which the need for us to think subtly
about the world (Why did this happen? What was the context for terrorism?
Are there indirect ways in which the United States contributed to
the conditions that made terrorism an option?) was replaced by a
simplistic demand that we judge it ("the axis of evil")
and fix it (preemptive war).
By conceiving of foreign policy as what America does to rather than
with other nations, the U.S. government and its citizens are relieved
of the need to know anything about our enemies (other than that
we are superior to them) and anything about our friends (other than
what they need to do for us). From the president on down, we have
been exempted from the demands of historical complexity, political
uncertainty and the gray zones where right and wrong, black and
white, are insufficient guides to effective policy. The media cottoned
to this easy (and ratings-friendly) line, reinforcing simplemindedness
by turning foreign policy into still another installment of Crossfire:
"Are you with the president or are you another flabby peacenik
who still doesn't get what 9-11 was all about?" more or less
defined the debate.
This is not the place to argue the merits of going or not going
to war — although along with the realists (who include the
former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as well as such conservative
national security stalwarts as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski),
I am fully convinced that the argument against can be made on prudential
and realpolitik grounds no less than on moral and legal ones. But
there is also a case for war, even a case for preemption —
yet the debate between the two arguments has not been meaningfully
joined in the media or among the general public. What is troubling
is the absence of a real debate in the Congress, in the media, in
the schools and the universities, and in the streets.
Where are the teach-ins? During the Vietnam War, Americans changed
the policies of their government and, in time, changed the government
itself through public debate, educational engagement and political
action that included mobilization, demonstrations and civil disobedience.
Is it because no conscript sons and daughters of the middle class
are at risk that the thought of a tide of body bags leaves the progressive
movement cold? Or is it because smart weapons will do the job of
killing without putting too many Americans at risk?
There are myriad core questions that have scarcely been asked by
the American public (though some have been gently posed in opinion-elite
op-eds and congressional hearings). Around such questions a national
debate about the future of America in an interdependent world needs
to be kindled.
Policy debates are rooted in reasonable arguments and prudent judgments,
not science. There can and will be differences among the goodwilled
and fair-minded. But until the hard questions are posed to and debated
by the American public and its representatives in the media and
the government, until the Bush administration deigns to answer them
other than by impugning the patriotism of those who pose them, the
country surely cannot afford to enter into a war as risky, potentially
costly to ourselves and others, and scarily precedent busting as
this one.
On one thing the president is right: We ought to support vibrant
democratic states throughout the world. But perhaps we ought to
start (as we do with the fight on terrorism) at home. We've got
the USA Patriot Act; we need a USA Citizens' Act. We've got a Department
of Homeland Security; now we need a Department of Homeland Democracy.
In the 19th century, critics of representation worried that electoral
democracy opened up an abyss between a people and their delegates.
At the moment of election, the people's representatives started
to become distanced from them. By calling this the iron law of oligarchy,
they suggested that the process was inevitable.
Our response must be to make democracy stronger, more engaged and
participatory — especially when it is under siege. This is
merely to recognize that democracy starts not with our leaders and
representatives and the quality of their administration but with
us, with the quality of our citizenship. For my own part, I intend
to wear a lapel button that reads "WTPx2!" It'd be my
way of saying, "We the people want to participate!" You
don't have to be against war to wear it. You only have to be in
favor of debate and deliberation first.
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