The massacre in Tucson, Arizona, is a worrying indication of fundamental problems in American society and in American political life.  The overheated rhetoric of the right, with its violent imagery is the least of the problems, though much debated in the past 24 hours.  I think that Vince Carducci presciently got to the heart of the matter in his reply to Martin Plot’s latest post.  Vince agreed with Martin that the pursuit of complete security presents a fundamental challenge to democracy in America.  I also agree, perhaps contrary to Martin’s expectation.  Vince cites Orwell as one of the author’s who illuminated the problem.  I believe that Orwell also reveals a connection between this general problem and the assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six others.

Orwell in 1984 imagined in his dystopia a never ending war, such as the one in which we are now engaged, “the war on terrorism.” He depicted a language, newspeak, which concealed and manipulated, rather than revealed, such as the language we use.  This kind of language is now broadly applied.  On the legislative agenda this week is the bill to kill “Obamacare,”  actually formally named ‘‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.’’  Newspeak is not only used to defend against hidden villains, foreign and domestic, but also political opponents who propose modest social reforms.

And as I am struggling to write this most difficult week in review, I came across a story that compactly indicates how bad things are.  Two members of the House of Representatives, one Republican, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, one Democrat, Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, told Politico that they will be carrying guns to protect themselves in their districts. “You never think something like this will happen, but then it does,” Shuler said “After the elections, I let my guard down. Now I know I need to have [my gun] on me. We’re going to need to do a much better job with security at these events.”

Gun toting Congressmen meeting gun toting constituents at public rallies.  Is that what democracy in America has come to?

Democracy and complete security cannot exist in the same society. This harsh reality fundamentally challenges the future of democracy in America.  I make this bold assertion aware that Jeff has a more positive view.

In some of his recent posts, Jeff has acknowledged some of my criticisms of the current state of American democracy. Although he considers them to be relevant, he nonetheless also considers them to be somehow exaggerated, since democracy is not in such a peril, according to him.

Moreover, I admit to having been particularly harsh on Obama, to which Jeff has responded with accurate and fair points. As Hannah Arendt used to say however–exaggerating can serve a good purpose: it highlights the point you want to make.

And my point is that in the United States the political order has become much less democratic than many of us, including Jeff, would like to admit. Inspired by that motto, I will now address another dimension of the current state of the regime that I consider to be in serious need of critical inquiry: what the war on terror has done—not to the Iraqis, not to the Afghans, not to the hundreds, probably many thousands, of extra-legally detained since 9/11—but to the American political regime itself.

Building again on Claude Lefort’s notion of democracy—a normative point of view I consider particularly useful as an ideal type against which to contrast American actually existing democracy: modernity is characterized by the dilution of the markers of certainty proper to pre-modern forms of society. This modern dilution of the markers of certainty means that equality has become the generative principle of society; social roles, positions, and boundaries are no longer permanently distributed and assigned (a central characteristic of social orders based on the generative principle of hierarchy). What I thus want to suggest here is that certainty regarding personal and collective security is one of those “markers” diluted in modern societies.

In modern democracy, there can be no certainty that there are no risks and no threats to be confronted in social life. When the basis of power, law, and knowledge get disentangled—as Lefort postulates happens in modern democracy—Hobbes’ Leviathan can no longer offer complete protection in exchange for unconditional obedience.

Post-9/11 America has clearly reacted against this dimension of the modern dilution of the markers of certainty. Democracy cannot guarantee total security. When the rule of law strictly limits what political authorities can do in the name of protecting its citizens from others and from each other, there will always be a risk involved in everyday life. In short, I suggest that after 9/11, Americans became obsessed with the fantasy of certain security—a concept that is at its best an illusion.

In the war on terror, there has been a convergence of the exercise of power, the claim to knowledge and the generation of ad-hoc law.

Regarding the sphere or power, the traditional system of checks and balances has accepted the situation of war declared by the former president after 9/11 and has withdrawn to the spheres of social life discretionarily left untouched by the executive.

This withdrawal of the legislative and judiciary branches from all matters executively determined to be related to the war on terror, has generated a void of knowledge and law to be filled by the security forces and the president as commander-in-chief.

And I say the president-as-commander-in-chief because the system of checks and balances is indeed a system, therefore relational. The executive branch defines its functions and roles by intermingling its areas of competence with the judiciary and legislative branches.

When the interplay of this system is suspended, the presidency mutates into a significantly different institution; one defined, precisely, by its self-proclaimed—but also broadly recognized—status of being unbounded by normal law and unchecked in its claim to knowledge on the nature of friends and enemies.

And I also say the president-as-commander-in-chief because I choose to use the expression already used by our political culture to refer to this phenomenon.

If we pay attention to the discourse on the presidency articulated by most in the Republican Party or Fox News, it is clear that, from their point of view, this institutional mutation should be regarded as permanent. On the other hand, it is also clear that those predisposed to oppose this institutional mutation are unable to find a strong position from where to do so. We see this when Democratic candidates bolster their resumes with strong positions that indicate potential as the future commander-in-chief.

From a normative perspective such as Lefort’s, and from a comparative perspective such as the one I introduced a few weeks ago with the current state of South American democracies , these post 9/11 American transformations do not look good.

The pursuit of certain security and the permanent war on terror fundamentally undermine democracy.

We at DC have considered a number of political cultural controversies over the last months concerning: a new political correctness, domestic workers’ rights, celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving, the Tea Party, the problems of a Jewish and democratic state, identity politics, fictoids and other media innovations, the elections, the lost challenging conservative intellectuals, political paranoia in the U.S. and beyond, Park 51 or the Ground Zero Mosque, Healthcare Reform, and the continuing but changing problems of race and democracy in America, among others.

In just about all these controversies, there has been a basic split between two different visions concerning democracy and diversity, and more specifically two different visions of America.  One sign that democracy in America is alive and well despite all its problems, is that the past Presidential campaign was a contest between these two visions, clearly presented by the Democratic candidate for President and the Republican candidate for Vice President, and the citizenry made a choice.  Recalling how Obama and Palin depicted the two visions is an appropriate way to end the old and look forward to the New Year.

In Palin’s Speech at the Republican National Convention, she introduced herself and what she stands for:

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” [quoting Westbrook Pegler]

“I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.

I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA.

I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.

So I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education even better. And when I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and I knew their families, too.

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska…… I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved.

I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”(link)

Obama presents a clear alternative.  His vision and identity have been extensively rendered, in many of his speeches and in his two books.  He cut to the core in his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on Election Day, 2008.  He stood there as the first African American elected President of the United States, and declared:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” (link)

As he opened the celebration of his victory, Obama summarized what he thought his victory means for the American story and American identity.  The contrast with Palin’s presentation could not be more striking.

Palin celebrated the traditional values and the homogeneity of small town America.  She tapped into a nostalgia for a rural American myth, building her speech around the words of Westbrook Pegler, an American racist of the mid – twentieth century.  She returned to this theme during the campaign itself.  In a speech she gave in Greensboro, North Carolina, she declared:

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America,” Ms. Palin said, according to a pool report. “Being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans.”(link)

Although it is not stated, this real America is homogeneous.  It is not black, not foreign born, not the children of the foreign born, not gay, not Muslim, probably not Jewish.

Obama is clearly from the point of view of that world an outsider. He has not looked at the past with nostalgia.  Rather, he has searched the past for the future promise of inclusion.  The American people of all races and creeds chose him to be their leader.  This is a sea change, measured by its distance from the Palin ideal.

America is the place that is open, where a man of African and Muslim, as well as Christian and agnostic, ancestry became the leader of the country.  That this could and did happen re-defines what the nation is.  Much of the controversies during his Presidency involve an adamant rejection of this re-definition.

First, though, I must acknowledge the insight of his media criticism.  I think the Times reporter is inaccurate about politics in Argentina for the reasons Martin presents in his post, and further elaborated in his reply to the post.  The reporter may very well hang around the wrong people, listening to critics who are far from unbiased and with questionable democratic credentials.  And he may not fully appreciate that fundamental change can occur democratically, with radical changes in social policy, because this has not a common feature of American political life since the 1930s.   Such a reporter can’t tell the difference between the democratic, and the authoritarian and populist left.

And when Martin notes that factual lies can persist because they are left unopposed in our fractured media world, in response to my concern about the power of fictoids, I think he is onto something very important.

But I do disagree with Martin’s overall appraisal of Democratic politics and the Presidency of Barack Obama, thus far.  Put simply, I am not as sure as Martin is that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have not offered a significant alternative to the Republican Party and the Presidential leadership of former President George W. Bush, both in terms of platform and enacted policy.  I don’t deny that “mistakes were made” in the development of this alternative.  Perhaps more could have been accomplished.  And I realize that Obama and the Democratic leadership have not played their hand particularly well in the competition with the Republicans, but this doesn’t mean that a different hand wasn’t being played.  And, we should remember that there were significant winnings as the game proceeded.

The Obama and Bush administrations have proven to be fundamentally different in many ways, and it is important that we don’t lose sight of this.  Instead of a failed attempt to privatize social security, there was a successful accomplishment of healthcare reform.  The reform is initially modest and not all that Martin and I would wish, but the precedent has been set.  Decent healthcare is emerging as a citizen’s right.  America’s relation with the rest of the world is on a much different footing.  The repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” is now supported by the Secretary of Defense and the military leadership. It will soon be a policy of the past, no matter how much kicking and screaming comes from John McCain.   And most significantly, for the future prospects for a democratic society, there are very different Supreme Court Justices now being nominated and confirmed.

Given these very big differences in program and enacted policy, I think the notion that there is no empty space for politics in America, which Martin suggests drawing on Lefort, is a sophisticated way of saying that the parties don’t offer different programs, and don’t represent very different visions of the American common good and American identity.  I think this is simply not true.

Of the two volumes in Tocqueville’s classic, I enjoy most reading and discussing Volume 2, which is more a critical examination of the promise and perils of democracy and its culture, less about the institutional arrangements and inventive practices of the Americans, which Tocqueville celebrated and which is the focus of Volume 1 of his masterpiece.  But this year, Volume 1 has become especially interesting to me.  I hope for the students also.

I have taught the course many times.  The way it develops always depends upon what’s going on in the world, who is in the class, and how they connect their lives with the challenges of Tocqueville.  We don’t read Tocqueville for his insights and predictions about the details of American life, judging what he got right, what he got wrong.  Rather, we try to figure out how his approach to the problems of democracy can help us critically understand our world and his, democracy in America back then and now.

Assigning the Constitution

This semester, indeed, for the past two weeks, the course has taken an interesting turn.  As we have been reading Tocqueville on the American system of government, political associations and freedom of the press, i.e. Volume 1, Parts 1 and 2, I felt the need to assign an additional shorter reading, The Constitution of the United States of America.  I did this not because I feared that the students hadn’t yet read this central document in the story of democracy in America and beyond (they had), but because I judged that it was time to re-read the text, to note what is in it and what is not, to critically appraise the use of the document as a confirmation of the partisan passions of today, and also to appraise what Tocqueville had to say about American political parties of his day and how his observations apply to our circumstances.

A few days after assigning the reading, Ron Chernow’s op-ed piece in The New York Times underscored my motivation for the assignment.  The Constitution is a complex political document, the product of serious political confrontations and compromise.  “The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything… Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day…Those lofty figures, along with the seminal document they brought forth, form a sacred part of our common heritage as Americans. They should be used for the richness and diversity of their arguments, not tampered with for partisan purposes.”

Thinking about Political Parties

Because the Constitution was a rich political document in its time, it does not decide the major political confrontations of our day.  Rather, it fuels them, as it did in the first years of the Republic in the tension between the primary advocate of an activist government then, Alexander Hamilton and along with him George Washington, and their primary opponent, Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson.  The competing readings of The Constitution served as the basis of the American party system (much to the regret of the Founders, opposed as they were to factions).

As my class and I moved on in our discussion of Volume 1, we considered the nature of the American party system.  Was it primarily about petty politics, as Tocqueville thought, in contrast to the big issues of European parties?  Or are there fundamental principles embedded within American partisan contests?  Obviously this is a matter of judgment of the observer. Tocqueville thought that Americans agreed on fundamental principles and argued only about details, that the days of great politics in America were over.  While my students generally agree with him, I don’t.

Considering the Constitution carefully and identifying what it has opened up, it is clear to me that major debates have raged about it since.  The relationship between the government and economic life is not settled by the document but raised.  The role of federal and local authorities is not decided, nor at first was the question of the relationship between freedom and slavery.  Such issues have led to competing legal opinions and decisions, but it seems to me, even more significantly, it has led to big politics, including civil war, major social movements and fundamental changes in the relationship between culture and power, in political culture.  Such issues have animated the actions of political parties in America, including right now.

It may seem that politicians are in it for themselves and that advancement in life is based upon not what you know, but who you know.  It may seem that American political practices are petty and cynical. Indeed, they are.  Tocqueville thought that major issues of governing fundamentals were settled in America and therefore it was the conflict of narrow political interest that would be the basis of American political conflict.  Some would advocate a more active role for government because it was in their immediate interests and others would advocate for minimal government, also based on interest.

But then as now there are those who see the political contest as a matter of fundamental principles, and they debate it accordingly.  There are those, such as Barack Obama and before him Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, indeed all the Democratic Presidents since FDR, who as a matter of principle see the democratic government’s positive role in the pursuit of the common good, and there are those who think the common good is best achieved by the invisible hand of the market.  This was the position of Reagan and his revolutionaries, and with post Reagan Republicans, at least in their rhetoric.

And now it is the position of The Tea Party, but they are on steroids.  The present day Tea Party Patriots seem to forget that there is an important distinction to be made between protesting the actions of a tyrannical government, and protesting and criticizing a democratic elected government that follows all the rules and procedures of the Constitution which they purport to revere.  There are competing principles and judgments, and not just competing interests.

What worries me most about the Tea Party and the Republicans and Independents that support it, aside from the craziness, is that they pretend that the debate was settled two centuries ago, in favor of minimal government and the invisible hand.  What worries me about my students’ appraisal of American politics, which I think they share not only with Tocqueville, but with the majority of their fellow citizens, young and old, is that they don’t appreciate what is at stake in the big political debate.