Grow up, America - Democratic Underground

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Sat Apr-25-09 12:12 AM
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Grow up, America

We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know… is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them – William Greider, from his new book, “Come Home, America – The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) of our Country”.

Almost two years ago I posted an essay on DU titled “Unmentionable Things in U.S. Politics”. I said about these unmentionable things:

Mere mention of these things brings down the wrath of conservative pundits and moderates as well, and even some who consider themselves to be liberal or progressive. The wrath is likely to be so intense that few U.S. politicians dare mention these things because of the risk of being booted out of office – or worse. Three such things are: 1. the stealing of a U.S. presidential election; 2. referring to American military or covert actions as immoral, rather than merely as “misguided”; and, 3. imputing bad intentions, rather than mere incompetence, onto a U.S. president.

Other than being unmentionable, there are two characteristics that these things have in common: 1) They attack the arrogant myth that the United States and its people are so indisputably better than every other nation and people that we have the moral right to impose our will on them, and 2) The major purpose of this myth, as propagated by the American elites, is to maintain the status quo, and along with that, their own wealth and power and place at the top of the food chain in our nation’s hierarchy.

William Greider touches on the American taboo, its importance, and its solution in the first two paragraphs of his book:

We are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge… We must be honest with ourselves, face the hard facts, and put aside some comforting myths. Then, we must find the nerve to take responsibility again for our country and democracy…

I don’t want to argue whether Americans are better or worse than other people. My assumption is that we are no better and no worse, but that in the past several years we have strayed so far from many of our ideals that it is the height of arrogance to believe that we have the moral right to impose our will on the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that even if it was true that we are better than other people – in intelligence, wisdom, and morality – we would still not have that right. If we are so much better than other people that we have the right to lead them, then we should do so by example, not by military threat and violence. That other nations of the world are deciding more and more not to follow our lead should cause us to rethink our position in the world rather than continue to expand our military to the point of absurdity.

American arrogance

Greider is one of a very few American journalists who has for a long time violated the standard American taboos. He notes the arrogance that pervades the thinking of the American elite and their “super-patriot” followers, as well as the taboo against challenging that arrogance:

We Americans have many outstanding qualities but, let’s face it, humility is not one of them…

When people like me come along and suggest that our claim on sole world leadership is no longer valid and may be dangerous for the country, it sounds to many like heresy, maybe even treason. But I and others like me are arguing from the perspective of a different American tradition – a self-critical and tough-minded tradition that could be called patriotic realism…

A major theme of his book is that we’d better get over this arrogance and find a better way to deal with the world, or else we’re going to pay an awful price for it:

America as “number one” is over. The United States is headed for a fall, a great comeuppance that will impose wrenching changes on our society and deliver humiliating blows to our national pride… In spite of their reluctance to speak of this honestly, I have a sense that many Americans – perhaps most of them – know this is happening…

A nation blinded by the arrogance of its own power may eventually wind up… lunging after delusional solutions and searching for scapegoats to blame…

REASONS FOR U.S. DECLINE

In chapter three, Greider discusses five reasons for the coming fall. I’ll just discuss just four of them here, since, as Greider points out, one of them, globalization, globalization, can be easily compensated for through domestic economic policies.

Militarism

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. spent $711 on its military in 2008, which amounted to nearly half of the military spending in the world:

Consequently, Greider’s statement that the uses of our military “have been expanded far beyond the original idea of national defense” should be self evident. Today the major purpose of our military spending is the enrichment of our military industrial complex and the domination of much of the rest of the world.

Our preemptive invasion of Iraq demonstrates this point as well as any. Here was a military action that only the most delusional could honestly characterize as self-defense. Nor was the idea that its purpose was to bring democracy to the Iraqi people any more credible – in light of the million dead Iraqis, four million refugees, and anti-American hatred caused by our invasion and occupation, as demonstrated by this not atypical reaction from an “unknown Iraqi girl”:

People are seething with anger… Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It's like a nightmare that has come to life. Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, "True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…" Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained… In the New Iraq, it's "guilty until proven innocent”…

Why is no one condemning this? … You've seen the troops break down doors and terrify women and children… curse, scream, push, pull and throw people to the ground with a boot over their head. You've seen troops shoot civilians in cold blood. You've seen them bomb cities and towns. You've seen them burn cars and humans using tanks and helicopters…

I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can – while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances – just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.

Yet, there is no acknowledgement of the underlying problem by the American elite. Greider points out:

After the disastrous invasion of Iraq, politicians and policy thinkers argued about whether “mistakes” were made, but very few were willing to oppose the assumption that the United States has the right to invade another country based only on our own justifications….

The end result is that we arouse the hatred of the Muslim world, waste hundreds of billions of dollars to combat that hatred, and ruin our international reputation and standing among former allies – all at the same time. None of this augers well for the future of our nation.

Free market ideology

The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was characterized by government intervention in the economic life of our country on an unprecedented scale. Those interventions brought our country out of the Great Depression, created the American Middle Class, and led to what Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls “the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history”.

But with the advent of the Reagan Revolution in 1981, characterized by a return to the “free market” ideology of the Gilded Age, the process reversed itself. Since that time, except for a brief respite during the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the income of American workers has been virtually stagnant, despite large increases in American productivity which has greatly enriched the already wealthy.

The reign of “free-market” ideology has been characterized by an ideological ban against government intervention in economic matters to help those who most need it, which has played out domestically and internationally. Greider explains how this played out on the international stage:

The World Trade Organization enforces rules that protect capital investors and corporations, but it has no rules protecting workers and communities, that is, people. The so-called Washington Consensus – a stern dogma imposed on developing countries that borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund preaches that national governments must not try to protect their people from the harsh side effects of capital and commerce. America’s representative democracy, meanwhile, is offered as the model the world should follow, despite the democratic breakdown that Americans well know is in progress….

Greider mentions globalization as another of the factors contributing to the demise of the United States. However, he also notes that other nations are affected by globalization just as much as the United States is, and yet:

The advanced economies of Europe and Asia do not adhere to the economic policy prescriptions of Washington or Wall Street. Japan, Germany, France, and most other successful industrial nations pursue their national interest in the global economy quite differently than the United States does. They also get very different results – including less economic inequality – because their systems shield citizens and society from the harsher effects of market capitalism.

James Galbraith, in his book, “The Predator State”, explains why globalization and free trade agreements need not cause serious adverse effects for American workers:

The populist objective is to raise American wages, create American jobs, and increase the fairness and security of our economic system… Is there a better way to do this…? Of course there is – and that is to do it directly. You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them.

The decline of American democracy

With the increasing role of money in politics and the increase in the income gap to unprecedented levels, our elected representatives have become relatively much more focused on serving the needs of wealthy individuals and corporations, to the exclusion of other people. Greider explains:

The political system that allows powerful interests to exercise virtual veto power over major reforms is not a new condition. But the stakes of failure and paralysis are much higher today because the country is on far more dangerous ground… The status quo is stuck, deformed by the concentration of power… We may want to ask ourselves whether the great accumulations of wealth and power actually deliver the “good life” and for whom.

The result has been that the biggest divide in American politics today is no longer between the two major parties:

One crippling divide in American public life is the great gulf between the authority of the government experts and the rest of us. That separation is far more damaging than the much lamented partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Many Americans, and probably most, are effectively disenfranchised – cut out of the democratic process…

Under both Democrats and Republicans, the US government first and foremost promotes and defends the fortunes of America’s multinational corporations and financial firms. If the multinationals are winning in the global competition, then it is assumed that America is winning. That assumption is clearly wrong….

Global environmental crises

The challenges of the environmental crises will affect the whole world. And yet, on a relative scale, they are likely to most severely affect the United States. Greider explains why:

We are particularly vulnerable, first because our society consumes more than any other nation and is wasteful on a bloated scale, and second because the United States lags far behind other advanced nations in developing ways to cope with the well understood imperatives. Global warming is the greatest and most obvious danger, but it is compounded by the overall destruction of nature as industrial capitalism steadily encroaches upon and undermines the finite capacities of the land, air, water, and ecosystems needed to support all life on earth.

THE HEALING POWER OF DEMOCRACY

Greider chooses to take an optimistic viewpoint and believe that our democratic foundations could help to pull us out of our crisis.

It is not that Americans are uniquely virtuous and wise. We definitely are not. We get things terribly wrong and ignore intolerable transgressions. Our saving grace lies in the hope for the self-correction a functioning democracy can achieve when people make themselves heard… Like any other people, we harbor good stuff within us, but also foul qualities that go against our proclaimed values and lead to destructive errors. The human condition is not perfectible. But democracy can alter social arrangements and economic circumstances in ways that help people uncover their better selves….

Therefore, a major theme of Greider’s book is that improving upon our democratic system will be a prerequisite for our salvation. He suggests that we should not hope that an American president will make a big difference.

Our newly elected president’s victory and inauguration have stirred the national spirit… but during the campaign Barack Obama did not stray far from the accepted assumptions about the American condition…. The ominous historical circumstances moving against the nation pose adversities that dwarf any single leader. One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naïve notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems… First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail…

Consequently, if there is any hope for solving our problems it will have to come from ourselves. The first step is to recognize the problem and be honest about it:

Democracy begins within the self by thinking and saying what we truly feel and believe, even if only among our family members and close friends… It starts with people asking themselves gut-level questions… What are the private dreams you may be too shy to share outside the family? … Talk about… what makes you feel good about being an American. What makes you sad or angry. This is the raw material for thinking like a citizen. If you had the power to change the country for the better, where would you start? …

GROW UP, AMERICA

The title for Greider’s book, “Come Home, America”, was borrowed from the George McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, which in turn was borrowed from Martin Luther King. In my opinion, those are two great American heroes, if for no other reason than that they had the courage to talk bluntly about the problems that our nation faced. McGovern suffered through one of the worst presidential election landslides in American history, and King was assassinated. As Greider says, talking about our nation’s faults has never been very popular in this country – as necessary as it may be. But even the phrase “Come home, America” somewhat sugarcoats the reality of the matter. That phrase implies that there was a time when our country came close to achieving its ideals. At the end of chapter four, Greider portrays what is probably a more accurate analogy:

I think a better word for what’s facing America is “maturity”. Remember, this country of ours is still quite young as nations go… and we are still developing in many ways… This is a critical stage in human development, and for our nation it could go either way. Some nations that acted like willful children when they were young formed balanced societies when they became adults. Other nations have never really grown up. The question, I think, is whether we can mature as a society. The country can develop a deeper sense of what matters most in life and what doesn’t. It can shed some self-destructive reflexes and acquire a wiser sense of national self-interest that is anchored in the nations’ ideals.

Either we do that, or else we could go through the hell that some older nations went through:

Older societies… possess something Americans typically lack – historical memory. They remember what can happen when utopian ideologies are in the saddle. They experienced the social destruction and moral debauchery that arose when an extreme idea imposed its will. Whole sectors of society were first marginalized and then decimated. Civilized values were destroyed, along with the order of law and individual freedom. It was called fascism…

With modern weaponry and the grave crises facing the world today, that road could mean the end of world civilization as we know it.