I think the social contract in this country, contrary to the myth that was foisted on us all through our school years, is fatally flawed. The American Exceptionalist broth that we have been submerged in from childhood is a disaster that needs to be looked at harshly, something that Andrew Bacevich does in his book, The Limits of Power, which was published in 2008, before the election of Barack Obama.

Alexis de Toqueville identified the five core values of American Exceptionalism in his book, Democracy in America, in 1831. Those values are: Liberty, Egalitarianism, Individualism, Populism, and Laissez-faire. All of us subscribe to these values – having been indoctrinated with them since childhood. The proverbial chickens have come home to roost and we see the results of our uneducated acceptance of these values in the form of the crazies on right-wing talk radio and the Tea Party androids, who repeat the lies that benefit the ruling elite in this country, to the detriment of us all. We also see it in the rising popularity of Libertarianism and schemes to privatize every function of government.

I am going to close this post by publishing a short piece by an author whom I will identify at the end. I would like to know when you think this essay was written. You will find the author and date at the end, but as you read it (and before you find out the truth), when do you think it was written?

“What I cannot understand is why the American people, which has been drilled from the beginning in the necessity and the advantage of the individual and his point of view, does not now realize how complete is the collapse of that idea as a working social formula. For while, on the one hand, we have arrogated to each of ourselves the right to be a giant individual if we can, we have not seen how impossible it is for more than a very few to achieve this.

“It is really not complete individualism for anybody that we need or want or can endure even, but a limited form of individualism which will guarantee to all, in so far as that is possible, the right, if there is such a right, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and also an equitable share in the economic results of any such organization.

“As it is now, we have gotten no further than the right of the most cunning and strong individuals among us to aggrandize themselves, leaving the rest of us here in America, as elsewhere, to subsist on what is left after they are through. And if you will examine our American economic arrangement, you will find that they are not through, since by now 50 families control 95 percent of the wealth of the country, and these families, their trusts and holding companies, are now not only not distributing that wealth in any equitable ration, but even if they were so minded, they are not capable of so doing. Taken collectively, they do not constitute any central authority. And except through the function of government which they seek to, and do, direct for their own private aggrandizement, they have no means, let alone any intention of so doing.

“More, the government, which is supposed to represent all of the individualistic ambitions of all of our people, is in no position to do that. It, too, in turn, has become one of the instruments of this central group of individuals which now directs all of its functions to its particular and very special advantage.

“That leaves the American citizen, 125 million strong, with his faith in individualism and what it will do for him—mainly without his rent, his job, a decent suit of clothes, a pair of shoes, or food. His faith in this free-for-all individualism has now led him to the place where his fellow individualists of greater strength, cunning, and greed are in a position to say for how much, or rather, for how little, he shall work, for how long, and whether, he shall be allowed to make any complaint or even seek redress in case he is unhappy or dissatisfied, ill-treated, deprived, or even actually starved. In fact, his faith in this individualism as a solvent for all of his ills has caused him to slumber while his fellow individualists of greater greed and cunning have been seizing his wealth, his church, his press, his courts, his judges, his legislators, his police, and quite all of his originally agreed upon constitutional privileges so that, today, he walks practically in fear of his own shadow.”

“Individualism” Seen in Destructive Phase

By Theodore Dreiser

January 9, 1932

Mother’s Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.

Julia Ward Howe
Boston
1870

Mother’s Day of Peace was celebrated in a small number of cities, including Boston, in the United States and in London and Geneva every year on June 2. The last one was held in 1912. Julia Ward Howe underwrote some of the cost of these celebrations, but others were independently organized.

Anna Reeves Jarvis died on May 9, 1905 and her daughter, Anna Jarvis, embarked on a campaign to honor her mother by establishing a day in her memory. Today, Anna Reeves Jarvis and the causes she fought for have largely been forgotten, buried in the commercialism of the holiday. If you follow the links in this post, however, you will discover another meaning of Mother’s Day, a meaning that very few people are aware of.

Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics Beyond Barack Obama

by Henry A. Giroux

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
- Hannah Arendt¹

A Turn to the Dark Side of Politics

The American media, large segments of the public and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society.

Authoritarianism is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law. A commonly held perception of the American public is that authoritarianism is always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly “less developed/civilized countries,” such as contemporary China or Iran, or it belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth century totalitarianism in its different forms in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Even as the United States became more disposed to modes of tyrannical power under the second Bush administration – demonstrated, for example, by the existence of secret CIA prisons, warrantless spying on Americans and state-sanctioned kidnapping – mainstream liberals, intellectuals, journalists and media pundits argued that any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian society was simply preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to do with a growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.² On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bush’s domestic and foreign policies might have been, they neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way America’s claim to being a democratic society.

Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the United States close to the brink of authoritarianism, some pundits argued that this dark moment in America’s history, while uncharacteristic of an aspiring democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of American law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W. Bush and its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a serendipitous act of politics – a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a conservative court in 2000, or a poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate.

According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its embrace of an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international law, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view such anti-democratic policies as part of a pervasive shift towards a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of American society. How else to label such a government other than shockingly and uniquely extremist, given its political legacy that included the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the selling off of as many government functions as possible to corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly corporate-controlled media; government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”); furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims and immigrants; advancement of a prison binge through a repressive policy of criminalization; establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common good, and the dismantling of social services and social safety nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of finance capital.

Authoritarianism With a Friendly Face

In the minds of the American public, the dominant media and its accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and through chilling spectacles of extremist government repression and violence. That is, there is no sense of how new modes of authoritarian ideology, policy, values and social relations might manifest themselves in degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly cruel and oppressive social order. There is no sense, as the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, how emerging registers of power and governance “dissolves politics into pathology.”³

It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy from being subverted or lost. And, yet, the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany and Italy. In spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination to entertain what has become the unthinkable – that such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent – what one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character.⁴

Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.

American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of authoritarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what Huey Long said in response to the question of whether America could ever become fascist: “Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.”⁵ Long’s reply indicates that fascism is not an ideological apparatus frozen in a particular historical period, but a complex and often shifting theoretical and political register for understanding how democracy can be subverted, if not destroyed, from within.

This notion of soft or friendly fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Gross’ book “Friendly Fascism,” in which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not embody the same characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority, government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges or the abrogation of the Constitution. In short, fascism would not take the form of an ideological grid from the past simply downloaded onto another country under different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and had the ability to become relevant under new conditions, taking on familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences and political relations.⁶

Similarly, in his “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton argued that the texture of American fascism would not mimic traditional European forms, but would be rooted in the language, symbols and culture of everyday life. He wrote, “No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.”⁷

It is worth noting that Umberto Eco, in his discussion of “eternal fascism,” also argued that any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Like Gross and Paxton, Eco contended that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy. He wrote:

Ur-Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – everyday, in every part of the world.⁸

The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in “Democracy Incorporated,” updates these views and argued persuasively that the United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism, which he called “inverted totalitarianism.”⁹ Wolin claimed that under traditional forms of totalitarianism, there are usually founding texts such as “Mein Kampf,” rule by a personal demagogue such as Adolph Hitler, political change enacted by a revolutionary movement such as the Bolsheviks, the Constitution rewritten or discarded, the political state’s firm control over corporate interests and an idealized and all-encompassing ideology used to create a unified and totalizing understanding of society. At the same time, the government uses all of the power of its cultural and repressive state apparatuses to fashion followers in its own ideological image and collective identity.

Wolin argued that, in the United States, an emerging authoritarianism appears to take on a very different form.¹⁰ Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed through the anonymous and largely remote hand of corporate power and finance capital. That is, political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reigns of governance. The dire consequence, as David Harvey pointed out, is that “raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical, health insurance and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States.”¹¹ The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one’s disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and commanding financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of the health care reform indicate, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies as a badge of honor – a kind of open testimonial to the disrespect for democratic governance and a celebration of their power. The subversion of democratic governance in the United States by corporate interests is captured succinctly by Chris Hedges in his observation that

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the US Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.¹²

Rather than forcing a populace to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship is also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests,¹³ a dominant media that is largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of amnesia works through celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio and entertainment to produce a culture of stupidity, censorship and diversionary spectacles.

Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency

Agency is now defined by a market-driven concept of freedom, a notion that is largely organized according to narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the freedom from constraints. Central to this concept is the freedom to pursue one’s self-interest independently of larger social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the freedom to shop, own guns and define rights without regards to the consequences for others or the larger social order.

When applied to economic institutions, this notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government regulations over the market and economic institutions. This notion of a deregulated and privatized freedom is decoupled from the common good and any understanding of individual and social responsibility. It is an unlimited notion freedom that both refuses to recognize its social consequences and has no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only “liberated from the constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds,” but they are also “stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly offered in the past by that dense network of social bonds.”¹⁴

Freedom exclusively tied to personal and political rights without also enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty and politically dysfunctional. The much heralded notion of choice associated with personal and political freedom is hardly assured when individuals lack the economic resources, knowledge and social supports to make such choices and freedoms operative and meaningful. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed outs, “The right to vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the composition of the ruler and the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could be meaningfully exercised only by those ‘who possess sufficient economic and cultural resources’ to be safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its delegation) at the root…. [Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly assure[s] personal freedoms to the dispossessed, who have no claim on the resources without which personal freedom can neither be won nor in practice enjoyed.”¹⁵ Paul Bigioni has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the emerging fascist dictatorships of the early 20th century. He wrote:

It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such “freedom” was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such “freedom” was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.¹⁶

This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom that now dominates American society cancels out any viable notion of individual and social agency. In embracing a passive attitude toward freedom in which power is viewed as a necessary evil, a conservative notion of freedom reduces politics to the empty ritual of voting, and is incapable of understanding freedom as a form of collective, productive power, which enables “a notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political power in order to participate in shaping the most important decisions affecting their lives.¹⁷

This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday life – a notion of freedom that can only be viable when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals.

Of course, this notion of freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or simply drowned out in a culture that collapses all social considerations and notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of instant gratification and individual gain. Under such conditions, democracy is managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered as passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in shaping all of the essential elements of political governance and decision making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both the suspension of civil liberties and the expanding powers of an imperial presidency and the policing functions of a militaristic state.

I believe that the formative culture necessary to create modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique and critical agency – the necessary conditions of any aspiring democracy – is largely destroyed through the pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of creating such a culture. Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called “embedded” journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates through multiple technologies, screen cultures and video games that trade endlessly in images of violence, spectacles of consumption and stultifying modes of (il)literacy.

Funded by right-wing ideological, corporate and militaristic interests, an army of anti-public intellectuals groomed in right-wing think tanks and foundations dominate the traditional media, police the universities for any vestige of critical thought and dissent and endlessly spread their message of privatization, deregulation and commercialization, exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling all public spheres not dominated by private and commodifying interests. These “experts in legitimation,” to use Antonio Gramsci’s prescient phrase, peddle civic ignorance just as they renounce any vestige of public accountability for big business, giant media conglomerates and financial mega-corporations.

Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate state and the punishing state merge as economics drives politics and repression is increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in the expanding web of extreme inequality and powerlessness that touches everything from the need for basic health care, food and shelter to the promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under pressure from free-market advocates, right-wing politicians and conservative ideologues, the United States has increasingly turned its back on any semblance of social justice, civic responsibility and democracy itself. How else to explain the influential journalist Thomas Friedman’s shameless endorsement of military adventurism in a New York Times article? Friedman argued, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”¹⁸ Freedom in this discourse is inextricably wedded to state and military violence, and is a far cry from any semblance of a claim to democracy.

Zombie Politics and the Culture of Cruelty

Another characteristic of an emerging authoritarianism in the United States is the correlation between the growing atomization of the individual and the rise of a culture of cruelty, a type of zombie politics in which the living dead engage in forms of rapacious behavior that destroy almost every facet of a substantive democratic polity. There is a mode of terror rooted in a neoliberal market-driven society that numbs many people just as it wipes out the creative faculties of imagination, memory and critical thought. Under a regime of privatized utopias, hyper individualism and ego-centered values, human beings slip into a kind of ethical somnolence, indifferent to the plight and suffering of others. Though writing in a different context, the late Frankfurt School theorist Leo Lowenthal captures this mode of terror in his comments on the deeply sedimented elements of authoritarianism rooted in modern civilization. He wrote:

In a system that reduces life to a chain of disconnected reactions to shock, personal communication tends to lose all meaning…. The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor but also in relation to himself; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor, in a moral coma.¹⁹

Implicit in Lowenthal’s commentary is the assumption that as democracy becomes a fiction, the moral mechanisms of language, meaning and morality collapse and a cruel indifference takes over diverse modes of communication and exchange, often as a register of the current paucity of democratic values, identities and social relations. Surely, this is obvious today as all vestiges of the social contract, social responsibility and modes of solidarity give way to a form of social Darwinism with its emphasis on ruthlessness, cruelty, war, violence, hyper modes of masculinity and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien or economically unproductive.

This culture of cruelty is especially evident in the hardships and deprivations now visited upon many young people in the United States. We have 13.3 million homeless children; one child in five lives in poverty; 17,000 have died in the last decade because they lacked health insurance; too many are now under the supervision of the criminal justice system, and many more are unemployed and lack any hope for the future.²⁰

Moreover, we are subjecting more and more children to psychiatric drugs as a way of controlling their alleged unruly behavior while providing huge profits for drug companies. As Evelyn Pringle pointed out, “in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion”²¹ Needless to say, the drugging of American children is less about treating genuine mental disorders than it is about punishing so called unruly children, largely children of the poor, and creating “lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!”²² Stories abound about poor young people being raped, beaten and dying in juvenile detention centers, needlessly trafficked into the criminal justice system as part of a profit-making scheme cooked up by corrupt judges and private correction facilities administrators, and being given powerful antipsychotic medicines in schools and other state facilities.²³

Unfortunately, this regression to sheer Darwinism is not only evident in increasing violence against young people, cutthroat reality TV shows, hate radio and the Internet, it is also on full display in the discourse of government officials and politicians and serves as register of the prominence of both a kind of political infantilism and a culture of cruelty. For instance, the Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan, recently stated in an interview in February 2010, “The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”²⁴ Duncan’s point, beyond the incredible inhumanity reflected in such a comment, was that it took a disaster that uprooted thousands of individuals and families and caused enormous amounts of suffering to enable the Obama administration to implement a massive educational system, pushing charter schools based on market-driven principles that disdain public values, if not public schooling itself.

This is the language of cruelty and zombie politicians, a language indifferent to the ways in which people who suffer great tragedies are expelled from their histories, narratives and right to be human. Horrible tragedies caused in part by government indifference are now covered up in the discourse and ideals inspired by the logic of the market. This mean and merciless streak was also on display recently when Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor in South Carolina, stated that giving people government assistance was comparable to “feeding stray animals.” The utterly derogatory and implicitly racist nature of his remark became obvious in the statement that followed: “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”²⁵

Lowenthal’s argument that in an authoritarian society “stupidity spreads as a contagious disease” is evident in a statement made by Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congresswoman, who recently argued, “Americans should purchase [health] insurance with their own tax-free money.”²⁶ That 43 million Americans are without health insurance because they cannot afford it seems lost on Bachmann, whose comments suggest that these uninsured individuals, families, unemployed workers and children are not simply a disposable surplus, but actually invisible and therefore unworthy of any acknowledgment.

The regressive politics and moral stupidity are also evident in the emergence of right-wing extremists now taking over the Republican Party. This new and aggressive political formation calls for decoupling market-driven financial institutions from any vestige of political and governmental constraint, celebrates emotion over reason, treats critical intelligence as a toxin possessed largely by elites, wraps its sophomoric misrepresentations in an air of beyond-interrogation, “we’re just folks” insularity, and calls for the restoration of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America.²⁷ Such calls embody elements of a racial panic that are evident in all authoritarian movements and have increasingly become a defining feature of a Republican Party that has sided with far right-wing thugs and goon squads intent on disrupting any vestige of the democratic process. This emerging authoritarian element in American political culture is embodied in the presence of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck – right-wing extremists who share a contempt for reason and believe in organizing politics on the model of war, unconditional surrender, personal insults, hyper-masculine spectacles and the complete destruction of one’s opponent.

Authoritarianism feeds on such excesses and the moral coma that accompanies the inability of a society to both question itself and imagine an alternative democratic order. Unfortunately, the problems now facing the United States are legion and further the erosion of a civic and democratic culture. Some of the most glaring issues are massive unemployment; a rotting infrastructure; the erosion of vital public services; the dismantling of the social safety net; expanding levels of poverty, especially for children; and an imprisonment binge largely affecting poor minorities of color. But such a list barely scratches the surface. In addition, we have witnessed in the last 30 years the restructuring of public education as either a source of profit for corporations or an updated version of control modeled after prison culture, coupled with an increasing culture of lying, cruelty and corruption, all of which belie a democratic vision of America that now seems imaginable only as a nostalgic rendering of the founding ideals of democracy.

Dangerous Authoritarianism or Shrinking Democracy

Needless to say, many would disagree with Wolin’s view that the United States is in the grip of a new and dangerous authoritarianism that makes a mockery of the country’s moral claim to being a model of democracy at home and for the rest of the world. For instance, liberal critics such as Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, refers to America’s changing political landscape as a “shrinking democracy.”²⁸ For Reich, democracy necessitates three things: “(1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters,”²⁹ If we apply Reich’s notion of democracy, then it becomes evident that the use of the term democracy is neither theoretically apt nor politically feasible at the current historical moment as a description of the United States. All of the conditions he claims are crucial for a democracy are now undermined by financial and economic interests that control elections, buy off political representatives and eliminate those public spheres where real dialogue and debate can take place. It is difficult to imagine that anyone looking at a society in which an ultra-rich financial elite and mega-corporations have the power to control almost every aspect of politics – from who gets elected to how laws are enacted – could possibly mistake this social order and system of government for a democracy.

A more appropriate understanding of democracy comes from Wolin in his claim that:

democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and one’s self. Exercising power can be humbling when the consequences are palpable rather than statistical – and rather different from wielding power at a distance, at, say, an “undisclosed bunker somewhere in northern Virginia.”³⁰

Wolin ties democracy not merely to participation and accountability, but to the importance of the formative culture necessary for critical citizens and the need for a redistribution of power and wealth, that is, a democracy in which power is exercised not just for the people by elites, but by the people in their own collective interests. But more importantly, Wolin and others recognize that the rituals of voting and accountability have become empty in a country that has been reduced to a lockdown universe in which torture, abuse and the suspension of civil liberties have become so normalized that more than half of all Americans now support the use of torture under some circumstances.³¹ Torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, murder and disappeared “enemy combatants” are typical practices carried out in dictatorships, not in democracies, especially in a democracy that allegedly has a liberal president who ran on the promise of change and hope. Maybe it’s time to use a different language to name and resist the registers of power and ideology that now dominate American society.

While precise accounts of the meaning of authoritarianism, especially fascism, abound, I have no desire, given its shifting nature, to impose a rigid or universal definition. What is to be noted is that most scholars agree that authoritarianism is a mass movement that emerges out of a failed democracy, and its ideology is extremely anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-socialistic.³² As a social order, it is generally characterized by a system of terror directed against perceived enemies of the state, a monopolistic control of the mass media, an expanding prison system, a state monopoly of weapons, political rule by privileged groups and classes, control of the economy by a limited number of people, unbridled corporatism, “the appeal to emotion and myth rather than reason; the glorification of violence on behalf of a national cause; the mobilization and militarization of civil society; [and] an expansionist foreign policy intended to promote national greatness.”³³ All of these tendencies were highly visible during the former Bush administration.

With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, there was a widespread feeling among large sections of the American public and its intellectuals that the moment and threat of authoritarianism had passed. And, yet, there are many troubling signs that, in spite of the election of Obama, authoritarian policies not only continue to unfold unabated within his administration, but continue outside of his power to control them. In this case, anti-democratic forces seem to align with many of the conditions that make up what Wolin calls the politics of inverted totalitarianism.

I think it is fair to say that authoritarianism can permeate the lived relations of a political culture and social order, and can be seen in the ways in which such relations exacerbate the material conditions of inequality, undercut a sense of individual and social agency, hijack democratic values and promote a deep sense of hopelessness, cynicism and, eventually, unbridled anger. This deep sense of cynicism and despair on the part of the polity in the face of unaccountable corporate and political power lends credence to Hannah Arendt’s notion that at the heart of totalitarianism is the disappearance of the thinking, dialogue and speaking citizens who make politics possible. Authoritarianism as both an ideology and a set of social practices emerges within the lives of those marked by such relations, as its proponents scorn the present while calling for a revolution that rescues a deeply anti-modernist past in order to revolutionize the future.

Determining for certain whether we are in the midst of a new authoritarianism under the leadership of Barack Obama is difficult, but one thing is clear: any new form of authoritarianism that emerges in the current time will be much more powerful and complex in its beliefs, mechanisms of power and modes of control than the alleged idealism of one man or one administration. The popular belief, especially after Bush’s defeat, was that the country had made a break with its morally transgressive and reactionary past and that Obama signified not just hope, but political redemption. Such views ignored both the systemic and powerfully organized financial and economic forces at work in American society, while vastly overestimating the power of any one individual or isolated group to challenge and transform them. Even as the current economic meltdown revealed the destructive and distinctive class character of the financial crisis, the idea that the crisis was rooted in systemic causes that far exceeded a few bailouts was lost even on liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz.

Within such economic analyses and narratives of political redemption, the primacy of hope and “critical exuberance” took precedence over the reality of established corporate power, ideological interests and the influence of the military-industrial complex. As Judith Butler warned soon after Obama’s victory, “Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of ’socialism’ proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential.”³⁴ In retrospect, Butler’s comments have proven prescient, and the hope that accompanied Obama’s election has now been tempered by not simply despair, but, in many quarters, outright and legitimate anger.

If Bush’s presidency represented an exceptional anti-democratic moment, it would seem logical that the Obama administration would have examined, condemned and dismantled policies and practices at odds with the ideals of an aspiring democracy. Unfortunately, such has not been the case under Obama, at least up to this point in his administration. Within the past year, Obama has moved decidedly to the right, and, in doing so, he has extended some of the worst elements of the counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration. He has endorsed the use of military commissions, argued for the use of indefinite detention with no charges or legal recourse for Afghan prisoners, extended the USA Patriot Act,³⁵ continued two wars while expanding the war in Afghanistan and largely reproduced Bush’s market-driven approach to school reform.³⁶

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, Obama has done nothing to alter the power and triumph of financial liberalization in the past 30 years.³⁷ He bailed out banks and financial investment institutions at the expense of the 26.3 million Americans who are either unemployed or do not have full time jobs along with the millions who have lost their homes. His chief economic and foreign policy advisers – Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates – represent a continuation of a military and big business orientation that is central to the ideologies and power relations of a undemocratic and increasingly bankrupt economic and political system. While claiming to enact policies designed to reduce the federal deficit, Obama plans to cut many crucial domestic programs while increasing military spending, the intelligence budget and foreign military aid. Obama has requested a defense budget for 2011 of $708 billion, in addition to calling for $33 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This budget is almost as large as the rest of the entire world’s defense spending combined. Roger Hodge provides a useful summary of Obama’s failings, extending from the perversion of the rule of law to the authoritarian claim of “sovereign immunity” He wrote:

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the right to kidnap (known as “extraordinary rendition”) foreigners will continue, just as the Bush administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained. … The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as “the essence of who we are,” no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue – as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that “the King can do no wrong,” to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.³⁸

Moreover, by giving corporations and unions unlimited freedom to contribute to elections, the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission provided a final step in placing the control of politics more firmly in the hands of big money and large corporations. In this ruling, democracy, like everything else in American culture, was treated as a commodity and offered up to the highest bidder. As a result, whatever government regulations are imposed on big business and the financial sectors will be largely ineffective and will do little to disrupt casino capitalism’s freedom from political, economic and ethical constraints. Chris Hedges is right in insisting that the Supreme Court’s decision “carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power…. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.”³⁹

In light of his conservative, if not authoritarian, policies, Obama’s once inspiring call for hope has been reduced to what appears to be simply an empty performance, one that “favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time.”⁴⁰ What once appeared as inspired rhetoric has largely been reduced to fodder for late-night television comics, while for a growing army of angry voters it has become nothing more than a cheap marketing campaign and disingenuous diversion in support of moneyed interests and power. Obama’s rhetoric of hope is largely contradicted by policies that continue to reproduce a world of egotistic self-referentiality, an insensitivity to human suffering, massive investments in military power and an embrace of those market-driven values that produce enormous inequalities in wealth, income and security. There is more at stake here than a politics of misrepresentation and bad faith.

There is an invisible register of politics that goes far beyond the contradiction between Obama’s discourse and his right-wing policies. What we must take seriously in Obama’s policies is the absence of anything that might suggest a fundamental power shift away from casino capitalism to policies that would develop the conditions “that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs.”⁴¹

In Obama’s world, cutthroat competition is still the name of the game, and individual choice is still simply about a hunt for bargains. Lost here is any notion of political and social responsibility for the welfare, autonomy and dignity of all human beings, but especially those who are marginalized because they lack food, shelter, jobs, and other crucial basic needs. But, then again, this is not Obama’s world; it is a political order and mode of economic sovereignty that has been in the making for quite some time and now shapes practically every aspect of culture, politics and civic life. In doing so, it has largely destroyed any vestige of real democracy in the United States.

I am not suggesting that in light of Obama’s continuation of some of the deeply structured authoritarian tendencies in American society that people should turn away from the language of hope, but I am saying that they should avoid a notion of hope that is as empty as it is disingenuous. What is needed is a language of critique and hope that mutually inform each other, and engagement in a discourse of hope that is concretely rooted in real struggles and capable of inspiring a new political language and collective vision among a highly conservative and fractured polity.

Maybe it is time to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and develop a new language, one with a longer historical purview and deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy. As Stuart Hall insisted, we “need to change the scale of magnification” in order to make visible the anti-democratic relations often buried beneath the hidden order of politics that have taken hold in the United States in the last few decades.⁴² It may be time to shift the discourse away from focusing on either Obama’s failures or urging progressives and others to develop “the organizational power to make muscular demands”⁴³ on the Obama administration. Maybe the time has come to focus on the ongoing repressive and systemic conditions, institutions, ideologies and values that have been developing in American society for the last 30 years, forces that are giving rise to a unique form of American authoritarianism. I agree with Sheldon Wolin that the “fixation upon” Obama now “obscures the problems” we are facing.⁴⁴ Maybe it is time to imagine what democracy would look like outside of what we have come to call capitalism, not simply neoliberalism as its most extreme manifestation. Maybe it is time to fight for the formative culture and modes of thought and agency that are the very foundations of democracy. And maybe it time to mobilize a militant, far-reaching social movement to challenge the false claims that equate democracy and capitalism.

If it is true that a new form of authoritarianism is developing in the United States, undercutting any vestige of a democratic society, then it is equally true that there is nothing inevitable about this growing threat. The long and tightening grip of authoritarianism in American political culture can be resisted and transformed. This dystopic future will not happen if intellectuals, workers, young people and diverse social movements unite to create the public spaces and unsettling formative educational cultures necessary for reimagining the meaning of radical democracy.

In part, this is a pedagogical project, one that recognizes consciousness, agency and education as central to any viable notion of politics. It is also a project designed to address, critique and make visible the common-sense ideologies that enable neoliberal capitalism and other elements of an emergent authoritarianism to function alongside a kind of moral coma and political amnesia at the level of everyday life.

But such a project will not take place if the American public cannot recognize how the mechanisms of authoritarianism have impacted on their lives, restructured negatively the notion of freedom and corrupted power by placing it largely in the hands of ruling elites, corporations and different segments of the military and national security state. Such a project must work to develop vigorous social spheres and communities that promote a culture of deliberation, public debate and critical exchange across a wide variety of cultural and institutional sites in an effort to generate democratic movements for social change.

Central to such a project is the attempt to foster a new radical imagination as part of a wider political project to create the conditions for a broad-based social movement that can move beyond the legacy of a fractured left/progressive culture and politics in order to address the totality of the society’s problems. This suggests finding a common ground in which challenging diverse forms of oppression, exploitation and exclusion can become part of a broader challenge to create a radical democracy. We live at a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy, but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.

Notes:

Read the piece that Time Magazine published and see if he doesn’t intrigue you also. If you are, click on the link to Big Think and watch or read that interview, too. Interesting ideas, indeed. A friend of mine said, upon reading the The Dropout Economy, that the homeschool movement has been predicting this for over 30 years. News to me, but then, the older I get, the less I know….

Here is Reihan Salam’s essay, as published in Time Magazine on March 11, 2010:

The Dropout Economy

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

“It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State’s chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.”

As a secular humanist, I have never had a great deal of understanding or empathy for people of faith. Until I started this blog, I thought, like many of my progressive friends, that the world of Christianity was inhabited solely by people like Sarah Palin. In my attempts to understand the Christ that those people worship, I gradually came to the realization that there is much more to Christianity than the black-and-white world that those mis-guided people inhabit. There are a number of links in my blog roll that connect to sites where a more gracious, loving, and compassionate Christianity exists. Back in March, I posted an essay from one of those sites, by David Hilfiker. In my current funk, I re-visited his site and found, perhaps surprisingly, this little gem in another of his essays, entitled “The Church’s Calling to the Coming Crises“:

“Isn’t this just a cover for a liberal agenda? How can we mobilize most of the church along these values? Actually, most of the values we’re talking about are traditionally seen as conservative: challenging materialism and consumerism, love for others, respect for God’s creation. Indeed, the environmental movement is becoming quite strong within many conservative churches, which understand the necessity of protecting God’s creation. What remains to be done is educating Christians to understand how to translate their values into action.”

These thoughts exactly mirror what Chet Bowers was speaking of in his essay that I posted earlier. All of us, along with David Hilfiker, have our work cut out for us. Progressives need to join forces with compassionate Christians in working towards a sustainable future.

In another essay by Hilfiker, entitled “Hope for the Future“, he challenges us to have hope for the future. I needed to read this essay, for I am becoming increasingly gloomy about our prospects. When you encounter the phrase “market capitalism” in the essay, substitute the phrase “market liberal” and you will understand Chet Bowers’ identical understanding of what must be done.

Even though Hilfiker doesn’t say so at the end of his essay, I am increasingly convinced that the only hope for our agenda lies in the Church. Martin Luther King’s vision was not attained without the power of the Gospel behind him. Only visionary religious leaders have the power to counteract the forces that are leading us to our doom.

Hope for our Future

A review of James Gustave Speth’s A Bridge at the End of the World.

“We have not inherited the earth from our parents;
we have borrowed it from our children.”

Honest hope for our future is difficult to find. To look clear-eyed at climate change and the other multiple environmental crises, at global poverty and increasing inequality, at militarism, at capitalism’s domination of the economy and the power of corporations to block meaningful political change, and at the increasing failure of democracy to reflect our deepest values—to look without blinking at all these intertwined threats and still offer not only hope but also possibilities for transformation is a gift we must not let pass. James Gustave Speth’s The Bridge at the End of the World (Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2008) is such a gift.

Speth, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has been for decades the “ultimate insider” within establishment environmentalism, serving, for instance, as environmental adviser to President Carter, the head of the United Nation’s largest agency for international development, and litigator and lobbyist for strong environmental laws. Yet in this fearless review of today’s mêlée of environmental changes, he readily acknowledges that the threats will overwhelm efforts to contain them unless we move beyond traditional environmentalism toward a fundamental transformation of politics, economics, and lifestyle.

In thinking about our environmental future, what ordinarily drains me of hope is not the profound systemic changes or the revolution in personal lifestyle that will be necessary to move toward a no-growth economy. Rather, it is the vast power of the corporations, the enormous influence of advertising on our spiritual and political values, and the seeming incapacity of the American political system to respond. We know what to do about most environmental problems and the issues of injustice. What drains me of hope is the knowledge that virtually every needed change will step on the toes of some powerful group that can stymie public consensus.

In the face of this kind of hopelessness, Speth argues for a thorough transformation. We cannot attack environmental problems one-by-one or in isolation from necessary changes in politics, corporate structure, economy, and injustice.

In general, the world of practical affairs does not truly appreciate how much negative change is coming at us, nor how fast. … So we must look beyond the world of practical affairs to those who are thinking difficult and unconventional thoughts and proposing transformative change. (p. xiv)

“Looking into the Abyss”, Speth’s first chapter, is a careful and almost understated review of those coming negative changes. It is also uncompromising. Climate change is well advanced, and severe damage to human well-being is inevitable, even if we stopped putting excess CO­2 into the air today … which we won’t. It is “highly likely that societies are already too late to head off very serious climate change impacts,” ¹ which will have devastating effects, especially on the world’s poor.

And it’s not just climate change, of course. About half of the world’s tropical and temperate forests have been lost—mostly to clear land for agriculture—leading to loss of species and soil depletion … and worsening climate change. Desertification of arable land—from soil erosion, salinization, devegetation, and soil compaction—has already damaged areas that are together the size of China, and each year an additional area the size of Nebraska is lost to food production. Already human use consumes approximately half of the globe’s total available fresh water supply, and the needs will double by 2050. Already one out of every five people around the world lacks clean drinking water (leading to the deaths of about 1.6 million children every year). Seventy-five percent of the world’s fisheries are already fished to capacity or overfished; the population of swordfish, marlin, tuna, and other large fish has been decimated to ten percent of original stocks. Due to on-going pollution of air and water, virtually every person on earth harbors dozens of toxic chemicals, many of which are already known to cause cancer, hormone disruption, genetic defects or other diseases. Loss of entire species is occurring at a rate one thousand times baseline, so that forty percent of all recognized species on the planet risk extinction, including a quarter of all mammals.

These are devastating changes to our planet. Even writing from a strictly utilitarian perspective that nature is humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit (that is, not considering the intrinsic value of the natural world independent of people and our consequent duty of ecological stewardship), the UN-initiated Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (a four-year effort involving 1360 scientists and other experts) concluded in 2005, “Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide. In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.” ²

Clearly, human activity is overwhelming the earth’s capacity for homeostasis. While exact prediction of the future is a fool’s game, to play Russian roulette without even knowing how many bullets are in the chambers is insane.

The complex interactions between these environmental crises and other economic and political threats are underappreciated. “All these issues can contribute to conflicts over human access to water, food, land, and energy; ecological refugees and humanitarian emergencies; failed states; and armed movements spurred by declining circumstances. They are profound affronts to fundamental fairness and justice in the world,” ³ which, in a vicious cycle, in turn dramatically aggravate environmental degradation.

While acknowledging some significant successes—specifically in protecting the ozone layer and ameliorating acid rain—from the traditional environmentalist response (of which he has been an important leader), Speth makes clear that these successes have been overwhelmed by ongoing degradation. The traditional response—pragmatic and incrementalist, enacting new policies through government bureaucracies or engaging the corporate sector, trusting that problems can be remedied within the system at acceptable economic costs, downplaying the necessary lifestyle changes and threats to economic growth—is inadequate and must be revolutionized.

A central issue is that environmental devastation is built into the capitalist economic structure, exacerbated by the extraordinary power of large corporations and reinforced by the failure of democracy in the face of that power. Environmental tinkering with these structures is not enough; they must be radically transformed. Within the developed world, significant lifestyle changes will be necessary. Unless there is fundamental transformation of society, Speth convinces me, there will be little chance of significant environmental recovery until it is far too late.

Market capitalism was arguably an appropriate mechanism for organizing the economy when the fundamental economic problem was scarcity, when there weren’t enough of the necessities for everyone. Resources were for practical purposes unlimited, human technology wasn’t yet able to drastically alter the environment, and productivity (economic output per worker) was low. But—thanks in large part to the power of market capitalism—those conditions no longer pertain. There is now enough for everyone; the primary problems are maldistribution and injustice; resources (eg oil) are increasingly limited; technology can easily overwhelm the earth’s homeostasis, and productivity is high.

Markets work through appropriate pricing of resources and products. But most environmental damage is external to the market. Under free-market conditions, my polluting the river doesn’t cost me anything but the people downstream have to pay in one way or another. The cost of preventing or cleaning up the pollution is, therefore, not included in the cost of my product. This competitive necessity to “externalize” costs renders free-market capitalism impotent (even in theory) to control environmental damage. The only solution is for government to force internalization of the costs, but global corporate power makes such government response difficult and relatively ineffective. Similarly,

“[t]here are fundamental biases in capitalism that favor the present over the future and the private over the public. Future generations cannot participate in capitalism’s markets. From an environmental perspective, that is a huge flaw because the essence of sustainable development is equity toward future generations.” ⁴

Moreover, built into the legal fundamentals of the corporation are profoundly anti-social structures. The only liability that corporate owners (shareholders) have for the corporation’s mistakes, for instance, is the loss of their investment; they cannot be sued even for the corporation’s culpable malfeasance. The corporation is a “person” whose “freedom of speech” (i.e. advertising) cannot be limited by the community’s best interests. Corporate managers are not legally permitted to make moral (e.g. pro-ecological) decisions that do not enrich the corporation financially; that is, managers are legally driven to externalize any cost they can. All of which is to say that we have created immensely powerful, utterly amoral entities, given them all the precious legal rights of human beings, yet require no human being to be accountable for their actions. John Cavanagh et. al., put it bluntly. “We must dramatically change the publicly traded, limited liability global corporation, just as previous generations set out to eliminate or control the monarchy.” ⁵

But the deeper, even more fundamental problem is that capitalism requires constant growth. Competition forces firms to expand in order to survive. The all-important financial interests of shareholders demand growth. Consumerism (where goods and services are acquired not primarily to satisfy common needs but to create identity and meaning) always requires more. Politicians discover that economic growth boosts approval rates, keeps difficult social justice and other issues at bay and generates larger revenues without raising taxes, so they are unlikely to challenge corporate growth. “Growth has often been America’s ‘out’—the way, many believed, that the nation could somehow square the circle and reconcile its love of liberty with its egalitarian pretensions.” ⁶ The explicit assumption of virtually every national politician is that economic growth is the bedrock of the American Dream, ignoring the inconvenient truth that constant growth is incompatible with the survival of an earth hospitable to human life. In a living organism, constant growth is called “cancer.” Without radical societal transformation, the only remaining brakes on constant economic growth are the earth’s ecological limits. To be sure, those brakes will ultimately be mercilessly effective. We will stop growing … eventually. Whether human beings will find that which remains desirable is an entirely different question.

Speth is writing specifically to Americans and more generally to the people from developed nations since those 20% of the world’s people account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures. But he also recognizes the massive environmental devastation in developing countries, which puts poverty and inequality squarely on the environmental agenda, too. As long as people remain without adequate food, shelter, health care, or education, we cannot expect them to voluntarily slow their economic growth. As it is, the poor bear the brunt of the environment’s rejoinder to our assaults. As a global culture we simply don’t stand a chance unless there is enough redistribution of income to give the world’s poor some recognizable stake in the future of the earth.

The only hope for adequate change is through governmental action, but the rise of corporate globalism has given corporate power a stranglehold on the American democracy. The corporate community is cohesive on issues that affect its general welfare; its financial contributions to campaigns followed by intense lobbying (through an army of 30,000 lobbyists in Washington alone) give it enormous political power, so that on most issues that seriously concern the corporate community there is little disagreement between the two political parties. Furthermore, through commercial advertising, political issue advertising, support for business-oriented think tanks, well-funded studies, positions on non-profit boards and contributions to their causes, and support for university and other research, corporations are able to dominate public discussion of most issues. The few forums for truthful environmental education of the citizenry are marginalized. The largest media outlets, of course, are all corporations themselves, sharing the same broad corporate interests (on, for instance, labor, government reform, economy, and regulation).

On the face of it, I will admit, this does not seem hopeful. The hope, as I see it, is that Speth recognizes and articulates the breadth of the change that will be necessary. Working at things piecemeal—while perhaps necessary in the short run—will only delay the full-blown nightmare unless we are also working simultaneously to transform the entire system: economic, social, political, and environmental all at once. The shorthand is that the ecological disaster can be averted only by a fundamental change in the economy, which will happen only with a fundamental change in corporate structure and power, which will happen only with a fundamental change in governance. The epitome of hopelessness is to work at something that—even if it succeeds—has no chance of changing the larger structures that condemn us to an unacceptable future. Far better, (in my heart at least) is to work as a part of a larger transformation—already well underway, according to Speth—that recognizes and is attacking the fundamental problems at their roots, even if those problems seem profound and vast.

Is this just trading one kind of hopelessness for another? What are the realistic chances of such fundamental change? Speth makes several important points.

First, such deep and wide-spread change is not generally possible during most political eras but does become possible during times of crisis; and our nation is entering such a period of crisis that will become increasingly severe. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial meltdown, and the current recession are merely the foreshocks of what is coming. Quoting Gar Alperovitz, Speth reminds us, “Fundamental change—indeed, radical systemic change—is a common as grass in world history.” ⁷ People rarely see it coming (and it isn’t usually the change they anticipated), but it comes frequently and, often, suddenly. Speth was writing before the 2008 presidential election, which certainly demonstrated the possibility of political change.

Second, the dirty little secret of America’s commitment to consumerism and economic growth is that it doesn’t make us any happier. If more consumption made human being happier, Speth concedes, there would be virtually no chance of stopping the environmental tsunami that is coming. But it doesn’t. Corporate advertising’s core message—that “more” will make you happier—is a bald-faced lie, and most of us know it. Study after study indicates that beyond a certain minimal standard of living, increases don’t raise either the levels of self-perceived happiness or the psychological measures of well-being. In fact, just the opposite appears to be true. As a nation we are—even by objective psychiatric measures—more anxious and more depressed than we were sixty years ago. And the general population is beginning to realize this.

In one survey,⁸ 83 percent of Americans say society is not focused on the right priorities, 81 percent say America is too focused on shopping and spending; 88 percent say American society is too materialistic; 74 percent believe excessive materialism is causing harm to the environment. If these numbers are anywhere near correct, there is a powerful base on which to build. ⁹

Third, and perhaps most hopeful, change has already started and is well under way across our nation and around the world. New forms of business ownership are widespread: ten million Americans work in some 11,000 employee-owned companies; 120 million Americans are co-op members of everything from credit unions to rural electric cooperatives to insurance companies; the top one thousand pension funds own nearly $5 trillion in assets that can be used to influence corporate decisions on behalf of their members’ interests; and cities and states own and earn revenue from their own businesses, for example, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil profits as dividends ($3269 in 2008) to every state resident. The international social movements for change (e.g. the World Social Forum), while widely ignored in America’s mainstream media, are stronger than many imagine and will grow still stronger.

What I find most hopeful in Speth’s book is the wide range of suggestions for action at every level:

1. Personal changes in lifestyle (most of us reading this will have to cut consumption significantly) to even make possible a no-growth, ecologically sustainable society

2. Spiritual/social education about how to strengthen family and social connectedness

3. The movement toward rooting the economy in local areas

4. Organizing to push for measures that guarantee good, well-paying jobs and minimize layoffs and job insecurity

5. Campaigns to modify corporate structure in order to significantly reduce corporate power and inject social values into the decision-making process

6. Changes in government to make our democracy more responsive to the people and resistant to the power of corporations and

7. Even changes in the way we measure economic activity so that we get what we want (human well-being) rather than “growth.”

To be sure, we must not give up the immediate and urgent efforts to address directly climate change and the other environmental crises. But at the same time, we must begin a much broader movement to reorient our society towards our common values. Those who care most about the earth (or poverty, or inequality, or oppression) must recognize that economic and political reform are their issues, too. For example, public financing of campaigns (probably the only way to substantially change the influence of money in politics), limiting the legal “personhood” of corporations and restricting corporate charters, embracing a no-growth economy, redistributing income to assure global equity are now necessary conditions for our future. What is our vision for human society? It includes the primacy of human relationships (especially family), meaningful work, leisure, care for the earth, universal health care, universal education, care for the elderly, global equity, and so on. We can no longer only work for these goals in piecemeal fashion. A Movement to include all of them has already begun. We are invited to join it so the earth may remain hospitable to human life.

Characteristics of a Market Liberal

Everything goes, irrespective of consequences for others, nature and future generations

Economic growth is non-negotiable

Expansion; the more the better

GDP as a measure of success

Living in the moment, 3 months profit time; apres nous la deluge

God has given us the Earth to exploit it

Consumption is always good

Speed, mass

Monoculture (of products, media, mind)

Transnational corporations, mergers, the bigger the better

Global dominance

World trade

Supermarkets

Industrialized production

Industrialized agriculture

Private motor car the norm

Fossil-fuel dependent energy supply

Decisions about life-style, resource use, technological, economic, political and ecological direction of society taken far removed from affected people: UN, US, G8, EU, TNCs, Human Rights Court, etc.

American way of life as global ideal

High-tech, high energy, high mass

Liberalized market economy as master discourse

The winner takes all

Private property

Limitless freedom of the strong

Power equals freedom

Technology determines way of life

Ecological overshoot of the planet’s ability to sustain humankind

Characteristics of a Conservative

Nothing goes, except if it is compatible with ecojustice criteria

Zero material growth; growth in terms of quality and fulfillment

Respecting limits, less is more, sufficiency

Holistic set of sustainability criteria to determine success

Living with respect to a seven generation time frame, planning for the future, precautionary principle

We are stewards who keep the Earth in good health for future generations

Consumption for satisfying basic human needs for food, shelter and clothing is good, but any other consumption is only okay if in line with sustainability principles

Slowness, quality

Diversity (of culture, languages, models of social organization)

Small is beautiful, human scale

Local democracy

Local and regional trade

Specialized local shops

High quality craftsmanship

Work-intensive, local organic agriculture

Well functioning public transport system the norm, private motor car the rare exception

Localized, diversified renewable energy production by users

Self-determination, self-management and mutual aid in all areas

Sustainable indigenous and/or subsistence communities as yardstick

Low-tech, low energy, high quality

Society and economy dependent on subsystems of life-support system planet Earth

Equity as sharing: there is no right to inequitable resource use by some

Ecosystem services belong to the Commons: redefining property as stewardship

Freedom within the limits of sustainability principles; not infringing freedom of others, nature and future generations

Freedom from illegitimate power

Ethical principles of sustainable societies determine way of life; technology serves those principles or it is not used

Ecological footprint within the planet’s carrying capacity

Some Thoughts on the Misuse of Our Political Language

by Chet Bowers

One can only wonder how the recent election would have turned out if the political labels of liberal and conservative had been used in a more accurate and historically ccountable way. Newspapers ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to papers serving the smaller communities across America continue to label President George W. Bush and Vice-President Cheney as conservatives. In a recent New York Times article, for example, Cheney was referred to as a “freemarket conservative”. In one of these nationally prominent papers the so-called conservatives in Congress were described as organizing to overturn of the Endangered Species Act. The formulaic thinking of the reporter required stating that resistance was coming from the “liberal” environmentalists. The same mindless use of our two most prominent political labels is exhibited in the way the American Civil Liberties Union is labeled as liberal, and such think tanks at the American Enterprise Institute as conservative. Both misconceptions are particularly surprising as the ACLU has as its primary goal the conserving of the civil rights guaranteed in the Constitution, while the American Enterprise Institute promotes the liberal idea that unrestricted market forces are the engine of social progress.

It is hard to determine whether the extremist radio talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh mislabel themselves out of general ignorance or because they follow the money—which is largely controlled by corporations. Surely, universities must share a major portion of the blame for the twin sins of omission and commission. The omission is in the failure to present students with an understanding of the history of political thought in the West—from such founders of liberalism as John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill to Milton Freidman and the current CATO libertarian think tank. A university graduate, for example, should understand how Adam Smith’s idea of a free market within the small communities of his era, where the patterns of moral reciprocity that accompany face-to-face relationships with neighbors that must be relied upon in future situations, has been transformed into universal doctrine that combines a competitive, survival of the fittest form of individualism with the myth of social progress. His economic theory is now being used to undermine both cultural diversity and the community’s traditions of moral reciprocity that served as a constraint on the relentless drive to exploit markets and the environmental commons that the community relied upon. A university education should also include studying the history of philosophic conservatism, from Edmund Burke and the authors of The Federalist Papers, to contemporary environmental writers such as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. The failure of commission is in the way most university faculty repeat the formulaic thinking that reinforces identifying Republicans and corporations with conservatism, and the efforts to achieve social justice as the expression of liberalism.

This mindless habit of identifying the efforts to achieve social justice with liberalism and the centers of economic and political power with conservatism is reinforced in many other ways. A case can easily be made that universities simply reinforce this more widely held set
of misunderstandings. The irony is that historically the core values and assumptions of these early liberal thinkers upheld the central role that competitive markets play in achieving progress, just as the rules of critical discourse within universities today are based on the assumption that competition between ideas ensures that most progressive ideas will emerge. Other core liberal ideas, which go back to John Stuart Mill, hold that individuals should be free to create themselves, and that change is necessary for progressing beyond the constraints of traditions and intergenerational bonds. The idea of a linear form of progress, which has the same standing as the acceptance of gravity, underlies the liberal’s proclivity toward innovation and experimentation—and their indifference toward asking about the importance of what is being overturned—in the workplace, in community patterns of self-sufficiency, and in the self-renewing capacity of natural systems.

The twin foundations of conservatism, according to Edmund Burke, include the idea that each generation has a responsibility to carry forward the achievements of the past and to ensure that the prospects of future generations are not diminished. The other core value is to
be cautious in adopting change. The guiding principle that Burke gave us was to ensure that the innovation represented a genuine improvement—and not be embraced on the basis of some outside expert’s claim that it represents progress. Environmental conservatives such as Wendell Berry and Vandana Shiva, while subscribing to the core ideas of Burkean conservatism, place special emphasis on conserving community (that is, intergenerational knowledge and systems of mutual aid) that have a smaller environmental impact. Berry writes eloquently about the dangers of a form of individualism that does not put roots down, and that continually searches for opportunities to turn the environment into an exploitable resource. For Shiva, the patenting of indigenous knowledge, which forces more of everyday life into a money-based economy, is a form of piracy—which she calls “biopiracy”.

The basic differences between liberalism and conservatism continue today, except journalists and others continue to get the labels wrong. President George W. Bush and his supporters, while being labeled as conservatives, pursue policies that support the free-market orientation of corporations and such colonizing institutions as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Indeed, President Bush and his market liberal supporters are unstinting in their efforts to further privatize what remains of the commons. Their liberalism can also be seen in their reliance on abstract ideas, rather than proven traditions of international cooperation, as the basis of foreign policy. In effect, they embrace another core feature of traditional and contemporary liberalism: the idea that change is inherently progressive in nature. Their agenda for average Americans is to reduce what remains of the government’s safety net, thus forcing them to rely upon their own resources in a competitive environment where the fittest will survive and the supposedly less deserving will experience the full consequences of their lack of initiative and responsibility.

The genuine conservatives are focused on sustaining what remains of the commons—those aspects of the human and natural communities that are mutually supportive and freely available to all. This may take the form of upholding intergenerational knowledge as providing alternatives to being dependent upon industrial approaches to food, health care, entertainment, and so on. In addition, they take seriously the Burkean emphasis on the genuine and hard-won achievements of the past, such as protecting the gains in the labor movement, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, the social security system, and the overturning of institutional sources of racial and gender inequality. The fundamental difference between the liberalism that supports the right of corporations to exploit the environment in ways that diminish the prospect of future generations and the conservatism that is reflected in the efforts to achieve greater social justice and to renew the intergenerational knowledge of how to preserve the commons can be seen in the continued liberal assaults on the commons, such as Monsanto’s ownership of genetically altered seeds that the farmer must purchase anew each year. The traditional responsibility of the farmer to save from the current crop the seeds that are best suited to the nature of the local soil, moisture, and length of growing season is thus being replaced by the logic of industrial/liberal culture. The liberalism is expressed in the quest for new technologies that will return a greater profit, while the conservatism of the farmer is expressed in balancing the needs of the family and community with the needs of the environment to renew itself on a long-term sustainable basis.

The widespread nature of the distemper that is causing market liberals to be labeled as conservatives (and letting the self-labeling of extremists such as Rush Limbaugh to go unchallenged) can even be seen in the writings of otherwise perceptive political observers. Thomas Frank’s recent book, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, is typical. The main focus of his analysis—that is, why Biblical fundamentalists in Kansas vote for Republicans whose economic policies drive many working class and rural fundamentalists to the edge of economic ruin—is highly insightful. Frank, however, perpetuates the basic confusion that plagues American political discourse by identifying “business rationality” with conservatism. He further reinforces the confused thinking that most Americans accept as a basic truism by also identifying social justice activists with liberalism. Frank pins the label of conservative on both the Republicans of George W. Bush’s persuasion and on the Biblical fundamentalists whose main political agenda is to impose on the rest of society their moral extrapolations from what they assume is a literal interpretation of the Bible—a book that encodes the culturally influenced interpretations of the men who translated even earlier translations of a printed text that began as an oral tradition. Frank acknowledges that there are differences in the politics of various groups in “conservative” Kansas, which leads him to identify the more reflective and less doctrinaire Republicans in the urban areas of Kansas as the “mods” (meaning moderate) and the free-market/ corporate supporters who align themselves with the moral agenda of the Biblical fundamentalists as “cons” (meaning hard-core conservatives). Frank, like the journalists and media pundits, does not recognize that the limited political language that he forces his analysis to fit into carries forward long and widely held misunderstandings that reduce the accuracy and thus the importance of his analysis.

His two categories of conservatism are fundamentally misleading. The Republicans who promote the primacy of a market economy over all else should have been referred to as freemarket liberals, and the people who want to impose the moral certainties they find from their reading of the Bible should be identified as reactionary religious extremists. That is, the latter group wants to make the present fit a past that supposedly is the source of the unchanging moral templates we all should live by. And they are extremists in wanting to impose their reactionary position on the rest of society—an effort that is partially succeeding at the expense of our country’s tradition of separation of church and state. Their efforts to replace our less than perfect traditions of democratic decision making with a theocracy that is led by a political leader who bases the country’s foreign policies on personal communication with God can in no way be identified with the conservatism of Burke, the authors of The Federalist Papers, and the people who currently are working to renew the cultural and biological commons.

What is needed today is an expanded political vocabulary, one that more accurately designates what people stand for, and thus what they should be held accountable for. The libertarians are the one group that identify themselves correctly—even though journalists and others continue to refer to them as conservatives. For example, in the “about us” section of the CATO Institute website, there is a statement that says that only in America is their political philosophy identified as conservative. What is now needed is a political language that more accurately identifies the values, assumptions, and agenda of other politically oriented groups. Instead of referring to Christian fundamentalists as social conservatives, they should be named “religious conservatives.” As this may still be too general perhaps the specific religious tradition should also be designated, such as Catholic conservatives, Orthodox Jewish conservatives, Evangelical conservatives, Muslim conservatives, and so on. The word “reactionary” should also be used when referring to groups that want to make the supposedly unchanging present fit a past of which we have little accurate knowledge. “Traditionalist” should also become part of our political vocabulary, as this is the word that refers to the mistaken belief that traditions do not and should not change—and there are many people who hold this view. Thus, some groups in the Christian fundamentalist camp might be more accurately referred to as “traditionalist” or even “reactionary” Christians—just as the word orthodox indicates a distinctive set of beliefs and practices within the Jewish community. “Reactionary” may be the more accurate term as it communicates to the average reader that these Christians want to force everybody to live in accordance with what they interpret as the absolutes of the past.

People working to conserve habitats, species, and to reduce the adverse human impact on the viability of natural systems should be identified as environmental conservatives. Those working to revitalize the commons (the non-monetized aspects of cultural and natural systems) should be called mindful conservatives in that their task is to reflect on how new technologies and policies (such as the promotion of economic globalization) will affect the community’s networks of mutual support and intergenerational knowledge that provide alternatives to being dependent upon the continuing spread of consumer culture. The phrase cultural conservatism is also accurate when it is used to designate how learning the language systems of the culture that one is born into reproduces (conserves) the taken-for-granted ways of thinking and acting in ways that generally involve only minor individualized reinterpretation. An example of this process of linguistically based cultural conservatism can be seen in how scientists working on the cutting edge of brain research continue to rely upon the same mechanistic metaphors that Newton and Kepler used to understand natural phenomena. There is another expression of conservatism that we all share; namely, the temperamental conservatism of being comfortable with certain kinds of food, friends, patterns of interaction, ways of communicating ourselves to others, and so forth.

Most people have difficulty in recognizing various forms of social activism as the expression of conservatism. Activists who address issues of social justice, which have ranged from creating safer working environments and a sustainable wage to eliminating the racial and gender barriers that encode centuries of prejudice and exploitation, have a long tradition of identifying themselves as liberals and progressives. The moral legitimacy that these groups now associate with liberalism, which ironically is also shared by many environmentalists who identify themselves as liberals, has caused them to ignore the contradiction between the community strengthening nature of their activism and the core liberal assumptions that are used to justify the exploitation of others—as we can now see in the Bush Administration’s energy, drug, and tax policies. For generations now the idea that liberals work to improve the well-being of others, and that the conservatives are the perpetuators of exploitive and self-serving practices has resulted in a formulaic way of thinking that is now seemingly encoded in the genetic make-up of people who identify themselves as liberals. But the key issue of whether a person is a liberal or a conservative turns on the fundamental distinction of whether the activism is directed toward strengthening the community (and the cultural and natural commons) or is strengthening the market-oriented industrial culture that places more value on profits and efficiency than on the well-being of workers, more value on exploiting the environment for immediate gain than on the practices that do not degrade the self-renewing capacity of natural systems, and that requires a form of education that perpetuates the core abstract liberal values of individualism, progress, and freedom that are essential to a consumer dependent lifestyle. If we take this distinction seriously, it would be more accurate to identify social justice activists as social justice conservatives, and if their activism is in conserving the viability of natural systems they should be called environmental conservatives. And if their formulaic use of language has made it too difficult for these activists to combine “social justice” with “conservatism”, then they should simply identify themselves as social or, better yet, eco-justice activists, and call the faux conservatives what they really are: market liberals.

This expanded political vocabulary should also include the philosophical conservatives, and there are many of them who have addressed the tensions and double binds that accompany the impact of modernization on the traditions of the world’s cultural and environmental commons. This group includes, among others, Edmund Burke, T. S. Eliot, Michael Oakeshott, Ivan Illich, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, and Gregory Bateson. And if we were to consider the important conservative thinkers of non-Western cultures, we would have to include Mahatma Gandhi and Masanobu Fukuoka as sources of wisdom that we in the West should learn from. To return to the earlier question: namely, what would have been the likely impact on the recent presidential election if journalists and media pundits had used the political vocabulary in a more accurate and accountable way? Would President Bush’s chance of being re-elected have been improved if he were correctly labeled as a free-market liberal, or would John Kerry have encountered a ground swell of support if his agenda had been labeled as that of a social justice conservative? Unfortunately, we will not be able to answer this question because of the long-standing tradition of misusing our political language by journalists, media pundits, and the general public. The question, nevertheless, is worth considering.

C. A. Bowers is the author of 17 books that address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. His most recent book is Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future. His recently finished book project is titled: Revitalizing the Commons: Cultural and Educational Sites of Resistance and Affirmation.

The next time a “conservative” starts in on progressives, hand him/her a copy of the following book review, by Richard R. Jurin, and ask him/her to read it and then get back to you:

Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future, by C.A. Bowers. 2003. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 208 pages. Paper. $19.95. ISBN 0-7425-3321-2.

Are you a conservative or a liberal? Before you answer, are you confident that you know the difference? This is the central tenet of Mindful Conservatism—that we have all become confused with the terms, and the modern rhetorical outpouring from the political left and right have done much to create this confusion. For instance, it is now assumed that liberals work to improve the well-being of others and conservatives
perpetuate exploitive and self-serving practices for big business.

Bowers, however, argues that the main difference is whether activism is directed toward strengthening and improving the community and hence the commons (conservatism), or in strengthening the industrial culture that places more value on profits and efficiency that degrade the self-renewing capacity of natural systems (liberalism). One of the most basic questions pertaining to conservationism is, “What is it that is to be conserved?” In liberalism, it is, “What is being changed?”

If you can get past your biases and contextually view how the terms liberal and conservative are presently used compared to their correct historic meanings, you begin to see a fascinating story of how reactionary liberals (such as the Reagan antienvironmental backlash) have created a split in the population on perceived allegiances and beliefs up to the Reagan era. Both main parties considered themselves stewards of a conservation ethic begun by that unique Republican conservationist, Teddy Roosevelt. Nixon/Ford, then Carter and the 1970s Congresses, account for a majority of modern environmental legislation.

In the first two chapters, we are introduced to the terms conservatism and liberalism, and are clearly shown how they have been misused and corrupted with particular emphasis on how reactionary liberals are now masquerading as conservatives to co-opt moderate conservatives and even moderate liberals. Chapter 3 continues with the argument that well-meaning scientists are helping to promote the problem with a belief system that emphasizes reductionism and purely technological solutions while emphasizing ideas that promote only linear change as progress. This is continued in chapter 4 when science and society promote the loss of different languages, cultures, and biodiversity that are not considered mainstream to modern progress. A true conservative wants to “save” all these things and maintain sociocultural integrity as a means to determine which changes benefit the community. Chapters 1 through 4 clearly show us how liberalism based on unrestricted free trade and linear progress is quite the opposite of beliefs rooted in conservatism.

In chapter 5 the practice of mindful conservatism is discussed. Indigenous cultures have an understanding of their environment built into their language that fits true conservative ideals well. Good mindful conservatism means reflective thinking that fits well with Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic.” Many examples of positive mindfulness, including business and resource usage, are outlined to show that environmentalism is really allied with conservatism (intergenerational knowledge and systems of mutual aid). Bowers wraps up with chapter 6, on educating for a sustainable future. It is here that he discusses various educational reformers and philosophers as a means to understanding those that promote ecologically sustainable thinking from those that support an
ecologically destructive form of culture.

Although this is a good book we should all read, I do have some criticisms. In a book that argues about the misuse of terms, it would have been extremely useful to open with the correct definitions of the terms and then build the argument from there. Burke’s classic definition for conservatism is not obvious until pages 37 and 65, a good classical definition of liberalism does not occur until page 115, and the book is only 173 pages long. The target audience would therefore seem to be people already conversant in political theory. Unlike most philosophical books, this one is more readable and easier to understand (although it can be difficult in places); hence, a larger, more general audience was probably intended. High school or college classes in social, environmental or political studies, or government, where the teachers/instructors themselves understand the basics of political/educational philosophy, would benefit greatly from discussion of the terms liberal and conservative and the arguments that Bowers promotes in this book. It behooves all of us to understand the misuse of the terms and to educate others in an attempt to unveil this misuse and how it affects long-term protection of the environment.

Mindful Conservatism is a thoroughly thought-provoking and incredibly illuminating book that is iconoclastic about how we label ourselves and continue to promote cultural myths that perpetuate environmental problems. Does Bowers advocate we all go out and vote Republican? Not in the least. He advocates that we start looking closely at the terms and start educating people in their correct meaning so that we all act on our beliefs, not just identify with some party affiliation that we perceive to fit our beliefs. Mindful conservatism emphasizes that we preserve the best of the past and change what contributes to the well-being of the future. Could George W. Bush gain more votes correctly labeled as a free-market liberal in which “the economic base and mutual support systems within communities and families” are eroded in favor of “antienvironmental efforts with corporate interests” (p. 27)? Would this help environmental protection? In the political climate of the early twenty-first century, this is indeed a critical question.

Richard R. Jurin
Assistant Professor
Biological Sciences/Environmental Education
And Director of Environmental Studies Program

In case you didn’t click on the link to the YouTube video in the previous post, here it is. I think it is that important.

If you doubt the results given for the poll taken in New Jersey, here is the actual poll. Don’t take it from Rachel Maddow, read it for yourself.