Chalmers Johnson on Our ‘Managed Democracy’

Chalmers Johnson on Our ‘Managed Democracy’
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080515_chalmers_johnson_on_our_managed_democracy/
Posted on May 15, 2008

By Chalmers Johnson

It is not news that the United States is in great trouble. The pre-emptive war it launched against Iraq more than five years ago was and is a mistake of monumental proportions—one that most Americans still fail to acknowledge. Instead they are arguing about whether we should push on to “victory” when even our own generals tell us that a military victory is today inconceivable. Our economy has been hollowed out by excessive military spending over many decades while our competitors have devoted themselves to investments in lucrative new industries that serve civilian needs. Our political system of checks and balances has been virtually destroyed by rampant cronyism and corruption in Washington, D.C., and by a two-term president who goes around crowing “I am the decider,” a concept fundamentally hostile to our constitutional system. We have allowed our elections, the one nonnegotiable institution in a democracy, to be debased and hijacked—as was the 2000 presidential election in Florida—with scarcely any protest from the public or the self-proclaimed press guardians of the “Fourth Estate.” We now engage in torture of defenseless prisoners although it defames and demoralizes our armed forces and intelligence agencies.

The problem is that there are too many things going wrong at the same time for anyone to have a broad understanding of the disaster that has overcome us and what, if anything, can be done to return our country to constitutional government and at least a degree of democracy. By now, there are hundreds of books on particular aspects of our situation—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bloated and unsupervised “defense” budgets, the imperial presidency and its contempt for our civil liberties, the widespread privatization of traditional governmental functions, and a political system in which no leader dares even to utter the words imperialism and militarism in public.

There are, however, a few attempts at more complex analyses of how we arrived at this sorry state. They include Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” on how “private” economic power now is almost coequal with legitimate political power; John W. Dean, “Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches,” on the perversion of our main defenses against dictatorship and tyranny; Arianna Huffington, “Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe,” on the manipulation of fear in our political life and the primary role played by the media; and Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” on “Ten Steps to Fascism” and where we currently stand on this staircase. My own book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” on militarism as an inescapable accompaniment of imperialism, also belongs to this genre.

We now have a new, comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of the prize-winning classic “Politics and Vision” (1960; expanded edition, 2006) and “Tocqueville Between Two Worlds” (2001), among many other works.

His new book, “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States—including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Götterdämmerung are remote, but Wolin’s is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.

<more>

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080515_chalmers_johnson_on_our_managed_democracy/

Chalmers Johnson is a treasure and now I have to check out Sheldon Wolin as well...

The future is ours to do what we will with. With decent, conscientious, and intelligent leadership the United States can be a great place.

First, we have to expose the "inverted totalitarians" (American fascists) for what they are, and throw some of them in jail.

:woohoo:

I have been waiting seven years (as the DU archives would show to anyone who cared to look) for this New Totalitarianism, which I have called BushPutinism and a few other names.

But now we know what this new thing is to be called, what it IS (considering this is a wonderffully and accurately descriptive term:

Inverted Totalitarianism

or even to Reagan. He ties it to Madison, to Jefferson, to Lincoln, etc.

"“No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper,” Wolin points out, “helped to write the Constitution.” He argues, “The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete."

Thus, given the author's seeming contempt for our Constitution from the start, it's hard to see in what ways it is subverted. He concludes that we will not have democracy unless certain liberal policies are enacted.

"Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: “rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power.” "

I happen to be in favor of many of those policies, but I don't think it's accurate to say that an America with laxer environmental regulations is a totalitarian state while an America with stricter environmental regulations is a democracy. In fact, when Wisconsin implemented some of its mandatory recycling that seemed to create more contrictions on consumers. Suddenly I had to find some unknown and elaborate way of disposing of my fluorescent lightbulbs. Recycling is a burden I willingly undertake for the greater good but it does, at least on the surface, take away the freedom to just put things in the trash.

the forest.

This does not invalidate your points, far from it. But for the purposes of Wolin's thesis (and I have not yet read the book, though a scan of the DU archives shows that I had already practically written it, metaphorically-speaking, before Wolin even took up his "pen") they are tangential and less relevant to the discussion.

Why?

1) I personally do not share what you deem Wolin's contempt for our Constitution (having not yet read the book yet I am not qualified to judge the truth or falsity of that sentiment) however, contemptuous or not, the fact that the Founders avoided the practice of direct democracy, with things such as the Electoral College and the fact that only white property-holders could vote, and even then could not select for higher offices, as Senators were chosen by State Legislators, a practice only overturned in the early 20th Century.

http://www.leftjustified.org/leftjust/lib/sc/ht/const/cam17.html#am17

Contemptuous or not, Wolin is correct. The skepticism of the Founding Fathers toward direct democracy is well-documented in all their papers, even Jefferson and Madison, perhaps the most liberal of that bunch of radical liberals that were the Founding Fathers.

2) Just because Wolin's overall thesis is on the mark does not mean that every aspect of his every assertion and argument is on the mark, as well. It is one thing to see the problem, it is another to propose the correct solution. The discussion about the place of executive regulations is a massive, multi-faceted discussion that would require it's own thread, nay, dozen or hundred of threads, to flesh out. There's no easy answer, and you bring up a good point.

But I maintain that, valid as your point is regarding "liberal" environmental regulation, it still does not diminish Wolin's overall thesis about the problem. It just means his proposed solutions perhaps are not as insightful as his understanding of the problem. But that is a separate discussion for another day.

We can ALL see the many ways in which the Bushies have subverted the Constitution, and your point that he does not connect the Bushies with our current calamity is distressing, since they are it's primary authors, all the way back to the 30s when Granpda Prescott Bush was laundering Hitler's money for him and conspiring to overthrow FDR and the Constitution.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

But the fact of the matter is that the precursors that have allowed the Bushies to have done what they did were in place, it is clear in hindsight, that they did not spring into being overnight on 12/12/2000, but that the foundations had been being laid for years, maybe decades before. Maybe (though I disagree with Wolin as much as you do on this point) much longer.

3) Finally, you comment I don't think it's accurate to say that an America with laxer environmental regulations is a totalitarian state while an America with stricter environmental regulations is a democracy also illustrates my forest and trees analogy. The presence nor absence of environmental regulations has nothing to do with whether or not a country is free or BushPutinist, what we now know is Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin's projected solutions do not necessarily imply that each solution he proposes is 100% necessary for the return of Liberty to America's shores. They are just suggestions, but they in no way change the existence of the problem.

"Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film “Triumph of the Will” was repeated on May 1, 2003, with President George Bush’s apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq."

Please READ this whole article. It's amazing!