From The Editor's Desk
I Want to Believe
“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.”
— Tacitus (on the Roman Empire)“Evidence is worthless if you’re dead.”
— Dana Scully, The X-Files
Late last month, in an attempt perhaps to investigate the possibility of impeachment and to examine and try to understand the unprecedented national failures of the last eight years, the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Congressman John Conyers, held hearings to investigate what it called “the constitutional limits of executive power.” For more than six hours, witnesses, including Representatives Maurice Hinchey and Brad Miller, Bruce Fein, author Vincent Bugliosi, Frederick Schwarz, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich testified to the abuses and misuses of executive power under the leadership of President Bush. These witnesses gave critical, often harsh, sometimes vitriolic testimony on a rap sheet of executive malfeasance that ranged from the control of information and the criminal manipulation of intelligence, to the continuing and disastrous mistakes being made in Iraq and Afghanistan, to our administration’s inability to do anything about our crumbling infrastructure and our flailing economy.
Watching these hearings, after so many years of congressional cowardice, was like eating chocolate cake in the pouring rain: uncomfortable and kind of dirty, but oddly satisfying. Listening to Bruce Fein make the argument that President Bush “has taken the nation perilously close to executive despotism,” it was tempting to believe that our congressional representatives were finally taking the steps needed to defend the balance of powers from the Bush administration’s tyrannical assault upon constitutional limits. More recently, Representative Conyers — the man with, let’s face it, the smoothest radio voice since Billy Dee Williams — has begun to make noises about the possibility of real impeachment hearings. In an August 14 appearance on Democracy Now Conyers vowed to open a congressional probe into Ron Suskind’s recent accusations that the Bush administration coerced the CIA to forge documents that would show ties between Saddam Hussein, African uranium, and Al Qaeda. This new claim by Suskind has received a surprising amount of attention in the major media, and has stirred up, once again, a public outcry for impeachment.
Despite the initial excitement that these unlikely events might create for someone like myself, who would like nothing more than to see the president and his political cronies rotting in a Guantanamo cell, it’s hard not to feel that all of this is far too little and far too late. More aggressive, more militant, even more violent responses have surely been in order, but the deeds have been done and the men and women who performed those deeds, like so many before them, have accomplished their tasks and moved on with little opposition. Like the archetypal agents Mulder and Scully, our nation seems to stumble upon the truth only after the aliens have departed or the labs have been scrubbed clean, the camera zooming out on the figure of a cigarette smoking man hidden in the foreground. This seeming ability to see the truth only after it has lost its power and influence, points to something fundamental to our current political culture; and that is that we do not, in fact, really “want to believe.” Despite the abundance of facts, we still refuse to believe that there is something truly dangerous “out there,” opting instead for the more comforting and seemingly logical arguments of administrative incompetence and stupidity. For most of us it’s just more comfortable to rest safe in the Panglossian assurances that in the end, after the idiots have left office, all will be right with the world again, and that our institutions will somehow magically continue to support us and protect us from evil without the burden of our constant and vigilant participation. However, deep inside we still know, and the Bush administration has taught us well, that our democracy, what little is left of it, is more fragile than ever. But why? What have we done wrong? What did we do or what did we fail to do, that allowed this administration to drive its ungodly agenda right through our front doors?
In this issue of the GC Advocate we have asked some of the world’s leading intellectuals the question: “what is the greatest open secret in America?” I would like to offer at least one answer to that question, and that is the sad fact that our democracy is broken and in danger of imminent disintegration. Like it or not the United States is already in the mature stages of a dictatorship of the few condoned by the many, and unless there is some radical program for change instituted soon — and I’m not talking about Obama — there’s not going to be any democracy left by the turn of the quarter century. Sadly, it appears all too obvious that we have forgotten how to rule ourselves, not to mention think for ourselves. We have lost touch with the institutional and cultural habits needed for a real democracy, and safe in the comforts of our patriotism, our SUVs, or our intellectualized and fashionable cynicisms, we have forgotten just how important that self rule actually is. As Representative Miller made clear in his testimony before congress that day, there is more at stake here than just the legacies of our bumbling leaders.
"The Bush Administration’s insistence on acting in secret," said Miller "is more dangerous and more sinister than just an extravagantly ambitious claim to executive branch powers. Control of information stifles dissent. It insulates the administration from challenge, either by congress or by critics. Control of information is incompatible with democracy. Informed criticism, as annoying as it frequently is to people with power, is the stuff of democracy. Democracy dies behind closed doors. It is congress’s duty to throw the doors open and keep them open in future administrations democratic and republican alike."
Yes, we know the Bush administration has been a disaster; however, the crimes of the Bush crew are nothing more than a reflection and an extreme extension of the real political and economic forces that shape our culture, our economy, and our futures. It is not only the duty of Congress to make our government more transparent, but ours as well.
Our constitutional form of government has, for better and for worse, historically insured a fragile but sustainable compromise between the desire for direct, participatory democracy and the need for political stability, assuring that power remain in the hands of an elite, but largely accountable ruling class. However, none of our forefathers, when they were drafting that compromise, could have anticipated the devastating power of global capital, which has destroyed the very concept of national sovereignty and rapaciously taken over our government one senator at a time; nor could they have imagined the liberating technologies of information distribution that would make functionally possible a more direct and participatory form of democracy. Ironically we are now at a stage in our development where we are simultaneously least capable and best equipped to move toward a greater, more participatory, more radical form of democracy. But how do we make that happen? For one, we need to have a serious and unflinching public discussion about the very structure of our democratic processes, which have moved further and further away from direct forms of participation and active and lively discussion toward more and more centralized and limited forms of influence and discourse. This discussion must do more than just talk about campaign financing, but must be willing to tackle the difficult constitutional changes necessary to make our democratic processes more direct and our leaders more accountable. We must make room for real political disagreement and opposition through the cultivation and creation of multiple political parties; we must get rid of the electoral college and devise new methods of voting that insure that no one “wastes” their vote on the candidate that actually represents their needs or their values, and we must begin the long and difficult process of engaging our fellow citizens to actually participate in their democracy. Lastly, we must build into that new system a method for the cultivation of continual change and transformation that makes democracy itself possible.
At the heart of this process is what the philosopher John Dewey called “intelligent practice.” For Dewey, thought and action were of the same cloth and thinking was a vital part of the world and not something separate from it. In order to make the world we want, it will be necessary for us to adopt this spirit and to recognize that democracy is not something given, but something created. Therefore we must learn again to cultivate new and responsive forms of intelligent practice and democratic habits as a method and a means of achieving our needs. Toward that goal, it is my sincerest hope that the discussions in the GC Advocate this year will offer not only a rich trove of ideas and suggestions, but a space for the creation and cultivation of that practice.
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