Democracy Matters
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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):
What should not seem surprising is that at the turn of the century African Americans continue to believe that American democracy is broken—and the 2000 presidential elections did nothing to convince blacks that the nation was on the road to recovery. African Americans are still waiting for black visions of a just and egalitarian society to become American visions. It increasingly is clear, though, that many African Americans fear that Malcolm X was right when he worried that blacks held a vision of freedom larger than America is prepared to accept.
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.
While the right-wing pundits are overt in their superficial pandering, the more subtle and insidious constraints on hard-hitting, truthful reporting are at least as troubling. The bombastic carnival barkers are relatively easy to expose in their sentimental manipulations. The more principled believers in the special role of a balanced and free press, who all too frequently bow to market pressures, are a more serious threat.
Sentimental nihilism is content to remain on the surface of problems rather than pursue their substantive depths. It pays simplistic lip service to issues rather than portraying their complexity. This sad display of highly ambitious yet too often docile and deferential newspeople preoccupied with a market bottom line has not been lost on the public and has contributed to the widespread public apathy about our politics. Yet the hard-hitting, deeply probing periodicals and shows that do exist struggle for market share because the allure of the entertainment offered by the mass-appeal versions is so strong. Most significantly, the obsessive touting of dubious statistics and sound bites by mainstream pundits points citizens away from a true reckoning with the institutional causes of social misery.
Democracy depends, in large part, on a free and frank press willing to speak painful truths to the public about our society, including the fact of their own complicity in superficiality and simplistic reportage. There can be no democratic paideia—the critical cultivation of an active citizenry—without democratic parrhesia—a bold and courageous press willing to speak against the misinformation and mendacities of elites. Democracy matters are in peril when the so-called free press lacks the autonomy or courage to inspire democratic energies.
These pervasive nihilisms in American democracy today have made way for a resurgent imperialism—the ultimate expression of the market-driven grasp for power. The nihilistic market-dominated mentality—the quest for wealth and power—leads to the drive for conquest, and it’s when market morality prevails over democratic principle that imperialism reigns supreme. Market-obsessed nihilism—the corporation as the embodiment of absolute will—is the Achilles’ heel of American democracy that parades as its crown jewel. Free-market fundamentalism has for so long been the precondition of American democracy that we have rendered it sacred—an unexamined fetish that we worship.
These three nihilistic threats connect the spiritual to the social, the personal to the political, and the existential to the economic. They shape every dimension of our lives, from the bedroom to the corporate meeting room, from street to suite. Serious reflection on democracy matters is always more than a view about the next election. It also forces us to think broadly about the future of the American Republic, and the overriding issue we must grapple with in the post-9/11 world is the threat of this rising imperialism. The pervasive nihilism of our political culture and this surging imperialism go hand in hand. The imperialist impulse does not fully define us, but it has a long and brutal history that we must confront. If we want to understand this imperialist nihilism that runs so deep in our culture, we should start by looking at its history, and to do that we must start with race. The pursuit of empire and racist oppressions and exclusions have been intimately interlinked.
Indigenous peoples, Mexican peasants, Asian laborers, and especially African slaves have wrestled with forms of antidemocratic nihilism in America unknown to most European immigrants—even given their heroic struggles against harsh prejudice in America. Anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and antiunionism indeed have been ugly in American history. But the vicious legacy of white supremacy has inflicted deeper wounds on the American landscape. These deep wounds provide a profound lens—they yield painful truths about the limits of democracy in America.
The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the nightside of its own history. This sentimental flight from history—or adolescent escape from painful truths about ourselves—means that even as we grow old, grow big, and grow powerful, we have yet to grow up. To confront the role of race and empire is to grapple with what we would like to avoid, but we avoid that confrontation at the risk of our democratic maturation. To delve into our legacy of race and empire is to unleash our often-untapped democratic energies of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.
To engage in this Socratic questioning of America is not to trash our country, but rather to tease out those traditions in our history that enable us to wrestle with difficult realities we often deny. The aim of this Socratic questioning is democratic paideia—the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry—in order to preserve and deepen our democratic experiment. Race has always been the crucial litmus test for such maturity in America. To acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project is anti-American only if one holds to a childish belief that America is pure and pristine, or if one opts for self-destructive nihilistic rationalizations. One of our most crucial tasks now as democrats is to expose and extricate the antidemocratic impulses within our democracy. It is when we confront the challenges of our antidemocratic inclinations as a country that our most profound democratic commitments are born, both on the individual and on the societal level. Only the nihilists among us tremble in their boots at such a prospect.