Contrary Notions
Page 18
Not all conservatives and reactionaries are affluent. Many people of rather modest means, are conservative about “family values.” They want government to deny equal rights to homosexuals, impose the death penalty more vigorously, propagate the superpatriotic virtues, and take stronger measures against street crime, issues about which they feel liberals are dangerously deficient. As one newspaper columnist writes, they think that government has a prime responsibility to protect “their right to kill themselves with guns, booze, and tobacco” but a “minimal responsibility to protect their right to a job, a home, an education or a meal.”3 Conservative politicians talk about “upholding values,” but they make no effort to uphold values by rooting out corruption in the business world or protecting the environment or lending material support to working families.
The same conservatives who say they want government to “stop trying to run our lives” also demand that government regulate our personal morals, keep us under surveillance, and deny us the right to habeas corpus, open dissent, antiwar demonstrations, and safe and legal abortions. They want government to put God back into public life, require prayers in our schools, subsidize religious education, and shove their particular notion of Jesus down our throats at every opportunity. They blame the country’s ills on secular immorality, homosexuality, feminism, “liberal elites,” and the loss of family values. TV evangelist and erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful Pat Robertson charged feminism with hatching diabolical and even murderous plots against family, marriage, and capitalism.4 The religious right supports conservative causes. In turn, superrich conservatives help finance the religious right.
Toward the center of the political spectrum we find the moderates, also known as the centrists, exemplified by former president Bill Clinton. Like the conservatives, the centrists accept the capitalist system and its basic values but they think social problems should be rectified by piecemeal reforms and regulatory policies. Along with conservatives, many centrists support “free trade” and globalization, claiming that it will benefit not just corporations but everyone. They pushed for the elimination of family assistance (“welfare”), and regularly vote in Congress for big subsidies to private business and big military spending bills. They often back military interventions abroad if convinced that the White House is advancing the cause of peace and democracy—as with the massive 78-day U.S. bombing of women, children, and men in Yugoslavia in 1999, and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq (withdrawing their support in the latter instance when Iraq proved more costly than anticipated).
A shade to the left of the centrists are the liberals who see a need for improving public services and environmental protections. They support minimum-wage laws, unemployment insurance, and other wage supports, along with Social Security, nutritional aid for needy children, occupational safety, and the like. They say they are for protection of individual rights and against government surveillance of law-abiding political groups, yet in Congress (where most of them are affiliated with the Democratic Party), they sometimes have supported repressive measures and have gone along with cuts in programs for the needy. Some of them also have voted for subsidies and tax breaks for business. At other times they have opposed the reactionary rollback of human services, the undermining of labor unions, and shredding of environmental protections.
Further along is the political left: the progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, and issue-oriented Marxists. (There is also a more ideologically oriented component of the left composed mostly of Trotskyists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, “libertarian socialists” and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion. What they all have in common is an obsessional anticommunism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of “Stalinists” whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals.)
The issue-oriented progressive left wants to replace or substantially modify the corporate free-market system, putting some large corporations and utilities under public ownership, and smaller businesses under cooperative worker ownership when possible. Some left progressives would settle for a social democracy—as might be found in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and a few other countries—with strong labor unions and firm controls on corporate business to safeguard the public interest and the environment. A democratically responsive government, progressives insist, has an important role to play in protecting the environment, advancing education, providing jobs for everyone able to work, along with occupational safety, secure retirement, and affordable medical care, education, and housing. In sum, a left-progressive government would spend far less on the military and on business subsidies and far more improving the social wage and the quality of life.
There remains a problem with this alignment of left, right, and center. It has to do with the tendency to ascribe “moderation” to those on the center, and “extremism” indiscriminately to those on the “far left” and “far right,” based on an inclination to conflate spatial relations with moral meanings. Labels such as “left,” “center,” and “right” refer to the political spectrum. They are metaphoric spatial terms used to signify one’s position on social, political, and economic issues. By virtue of its linear nature, the political spectrum can be extended at both ends to allow for limitless left-wing and right-wing extremes. The extreme, by definition, is the “utmost part, utmost limit.”
It follows that an “extreme center” is a contradiction in terms, the extremes of the center being nothing more than the beginnings of the moderate left and moderate right.
But “extreme” has another meaning, a behavioral one that evokes an image of intransigence and violence. In news reports and common parlance, this second meaning is blended with the first and then ascribed to the left and right, but by definition never to the center.
By the same token, “moderate” has a purely quantitative meaning, as in a “moderate amount” or “moderate placement.” However “moderate” also connotes “fair-mindedness” and “not given to excess.” Again, the two meanings are conflated, and the political center is said to be occupied by moderates who, by definition, cannot be excessive or immoderate.
Other laudable concepts are associated with centrist moderation. Political moderates in various countries are described as defenders of stability. But whose stability? For whose benefit? At whose expense? Centrist moderates are “pragmatic,” “undogmatic,” and “free of ideology,” a judgment made by ignoring, say, Chile, where the Christian Democratic centrists supported the fascist overthrow of a democratic government because, like most centrists, they were far more afraid of those to the left of them, even a democratically elected coalition of leftists, than they were of the militarists to the right who tore up the Chilean constitution and murdered thousands.
As our unexamined political vocabulary would have it, the moderate centrists can do no evil, while the immoderate extremists can do no good. In truth, those who occupy the mainstream center are capable of immoderate, brutal actions. It wasn’t fascist extremists who pursued a massively destructive war in Indochina. It was the “best and the brightest” of the political center, the extremists of the center, the moderate extremists, if you will. These same moderates supported the overthrow of popular governments in Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, and Chile, and helped install fascist military regimes in their stead.
It wasn’t the leftists or rightists who waged a war against Yugoslavia, with its repeated bombings of civilian populations and its military assistance to ex-Nazi Croatian and Muslim Bosnian separatists.5 It was that paragon of centrism Bill Clinton and all the centrists and moderate liberals who stood shoulder to shoulder with him and with NATO and the CIA (along with a gaggle of those anarchists and Trotskists I mentioned earlier who convinced themselves that the destruction of the Yugoslavian social democracy was a blow against Stalinist communism).
The crucial point is that
those who occupy the extremes of the political spectrum (in accordance with beliefs about changing the politico-economic order) are not necessarily extremists in the pejorative or moral sense. We might ask what is so extremist about landless peasants and destitute laborers in countries such as El Salvador taking up arms against death squads and starvation? What is so moderate about governments that maintain such repressive conditions? A glance at the many miseries of the Third World should tell us that extremism, in the worst sense of the word, is embedded in the prevailing “moderate” stability.
Our understanding of politics should allow us to distinguish between racists and anti-racists, between those on the “far left” who work with low-income ethnic minorities and those on the “far right” who want to exterminate low-income ethnic minorities. But the presumptive label of “extremism” imposed by centrists is designed to blur just such essential distinctions. Indeed, the French go so far as to fashion a slogan, les extrêmes se touche; the extremes extend so far that they “touch,” that is, they resemble each other and end up doing the same things. That is a rare thing if ever it does happen. At opposite ends of the political spectrum, the extremes stand for quite markedly different socio-political worlds.
The question of who is and who isn’t extremist in the moral sense, then, is not to be settled by resorting to a linear political spectrum. Different varieties of extreme moderates or centrists have long been in power. In collaboration with the rightists, they have given us Vietnam, Watergate, global counterinsurgency, gargantuan military budgets, dirty wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a regressive tax burden, huge corporate subsidies, and the promise of a rigorous repression of dissent—all in the name of security, stability, patriotism, religion, family, and other such things. Look then at what they do, not at how they are labeled.
22 STATE VS. GOVERNMENT
We might best think of the American polity (like any other polity) as a dual system of government and state. The government deals with visible officeholders, pressure-group politics, and popular demands. It provides the representative cloak and whatever substance of democratic rule that has been won through generations of mass struggle. In contrast, the state has little if anything to do with popular rule or public policy as such. It is the ultimate coercive instrument of class power. Max Weber wrote that the state’s essential trait, its irreducible feature, is its monopoly over the legitimate uses of force—“legitimate” in that they are legally sanctioned by the duly constituted authorities.
To fulfill its role as protector of existing order, the state often circumvents the democratic restraints that exist within government. The late FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover noted in a 1970 interview that “justice is merely incidental to law and order.” And, as Hoover made clear by his actions, the real goal of law and order is to protect the dominant social order.
Roughly speaking, the difference between government and state is the difference between the city council and the police, between Congress and the armed forces. The government mediates public policy. The state orchestrates coercion and control, both overtly and covertly. However, this is a conceptual distinction between what are really empirically overlapping phenomena. The overlap is especially evident in regard to the executive, which is both the center of government policy and the purveyor of state power.
The conceptual distinction between state and government allows us to understand why taking office in government seldom guarantees full access to the instruments of state power. When Salvador Allende, a Popular Unity candidate dedicated to democratic egalitarian reforms, was elected president of Chile in 1971, he took over the reins of government and was able to initiate some popular policies. But he could never gain control of the state apparatus, that is, the military, the police, the intelligence services, the courts, and the fundamental organic law that rigged the whole system in favor of wealth and corporate property. When Allende began to develop a reform program for the benefit of the common populace and against class privilege, the Chilean military, abetted by the White House and the CIA, seized power and murdered thousands of his supporters, destroying not only Allende’s government but the democracy that produced it.6
In Nicaragua, after the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election to a right-centrist coalition, the army and police remained in their hands. However, in contrast to the Chilean military, which was backed by the immense power of the United States, the Nicaraguan military was the target of that same power and was unable to keep the government on its revolutionary course. Sandinista police and military were seriously defunded by a U.S.-backed government.
Capitalist countries with ostensibly democratic governments often manifest a markedly undemocratic state power. In the United States, not just conservatives but Cold War liberals have used the FBI to suppress anticapitalists and other dissidents in the interest of state security and often in violation of the U.S. Constitution. In 1947, President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency to gather and coordinate foreign intelligence. As ex-Senator George McGovern noted “Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress.”7
With its secrecy, laundering of funds, drug trafficking, and often unlawful use of violence, the national security state stands close to organized crime. State agencies sometimes find it convenient to collude with underworld elements. Anthony Summers found that the FBI retained close links with organized crime. Former CIA-operative Robert Morrow, along with others, discovered that the CIA too was cozy with the mob. And over the years, several congressional investigative committees uncovered links between the CIA and the narcotics trade.8
In other Western democracies, secret paramilitary forces of neofascist persuasion (the most widely publicized being Operation Gladio in Italy) were created by NATO, to act as resistance forces should anticapitalist revolutionaries take over their countries. Meantime, these secret units were involved in terrorist attacks against the legal left. They helped prop up a fascist regime in Portugal, participated in the Turkish military coups of 1971 and 1980, and the 1967 coup in Greece. They drew up plans to assassinate social democratic leaders in Germany and stage “preemptive” attacks against socialist and communist organizations in Greece and Italy. They formed secret communication networks and drew up detention lists of political opponents to be rounded up in various countries.
These crypto-fascist operations “flowed from NATO’s unwillingness to distinguish between a Soviet invasion and a victory at the polls by local communist parties.”9 As far as NATO was concerned there was not much distinction between losing Europe to Soviet tanks or to peaceful ballots. Indeed, the latter prospect seemed more likely. The Soviet tanks could not roll without risking a nuclear conflagration, but through the ballot box the anticapitalists might take over whole countries without firing a shot. One is reminded of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s comment, supporting the overthrow of Chilean democracy: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist [that is, voting for Allende’s coalition government] because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
In the United States, various right-wing groups with well-armed paramilitary camps and secret armies flourish unmolested by the Justice Department, which does not find them in violation of any law. Were they anticapitalist armed groups, they would likely be attacked by federal and local police and their members killed, as happened to the Black Panther Party in various parts of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Today, conservative theorists represent themselves as favoring laissez-faire policies; the less government the better. In practice, however, the “free market” system is rooted in state power. Every private corporation in America is publicly chartered, made a legal entity by the state, with ownership rights and privileges protect
ed by the laws, courts, police, and army.
While conservative elites want less government control, they usually want more state power to contain the egalitarian effects of democracy. They want strong, intrusive, statist action to maintain the prerogatives and privileges of corporate America. They prefer a state that restricts access to information about its own activities, takes repressive measures against dissidents, and in other ways acts punitively not toward the abusers of state power but toward their challengers.
Conservative propaganda that is intended for mass consumption implicitly distinguishes between government and state. It invites people to see government as their biggest problem, while at the same time, encouraging an idolatrous admiration for the state, its flag and other patriotic symbols and rituals, and the visible instruments of its power, such as the armed forces.
The executive, be it monarch, prime minister, or president, usually stands closer to state functions than does the legislature. Some European systems have a prime minister, who deals with legislative and budgetary agendas and other governmental affairs, and a president, who is commander in chief of the armed forces and head of state—a duality that gives unspoken embodiment to the distinction between government and state. In the U.S. system, the executive combines the functions of prime minister and president, of government and state, of party leader and constitutional monarch.
In Italy, from 1969 to 1980, high-ranking elements in military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with secret and highly placed neofascist groups, embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the “strategy of tension,” involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres (i stragi), including the explosion that killed 85 people and injured some 200 in the Bologna train station in August 1980. This terrorism was directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary left, and was designed to “combat by any means necessary the electoral gains of the Italian Communist Party.” Deeply implicated in this campaign, the CIA refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating i stragi in 1995. Of special interest is that the rightist terrorists understood the importance of a strong executive in maintaining state control. Their professed objective, according to the commission, was to create enough terror to destabilize the multiparty social democracy and replace it with an authoritarian “presidential republic,” or, in any case, “a stronger and more stable executive.”10