A Democratic Life
trudogg
gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule." -- Joe Conason.
The news report that Newt Gingrich admitted to having an affair while
the Clinton Impeachment was going on only underlines the courage that
it took to write The Hunting of the President. In person Joe Conason
does not look like the sort of person who is an exemplar of courage,
instead, his manner is much like that of Amartya Sen, the economist –
calm, almost diffident. In both cases it comes from a deep and abiding
faith in an open society. The ease and understated manner that both
handle critics in person comes from a belief that ideas will win out,
if only those who have them will stand firmly against unreason and
anti-reason. And so he does, in article after article shedding light
on the institutional and structural forces that work against public
democracy and the public good.
This is why his book It Can Happen Here is a book end to The Hunting
of The President - because it details the reverse process. The first
book was about the abuse of power and privilege to destroy the public
mandate of an elected official. The second about the progressive
erosion of rights in the name of propping up an unelected one. In the
middle of the trilogy is Big Lies which documented the mechanisms by
which each was pursued.
If George W Bush has benefited from the "soft bigotry of low
expectations" in his rise, the thesis of Conason's book is that
America now suffers from the soft tyranny of a low fever of
authoritarian – not merely leadership, but culture – the worship, not
of a heroic leadership, nor of leadership itself, but of a kind of
opaque paternalism of "Father knows best". It is not the extreme
version of current events that some would paint. But it is an exact
fix on how far we have fallen, and how quickly.
Mr. Conason does not shy away from strong words or strong warnings, as
his calling the purge of US Attorney's a coup d'etat shows, nor does
he shy away from stark warnings that this step is not the last, we
have not traded some liberty for some security but instead:
The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious
fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave
nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis -- or
whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is
not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The
striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of
Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political
forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning
on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.
There are those who cynically believe that because utopia is out of
reach, that dystopia is here, and action is useless. Conason argues
that, instead, we must do what we can, because what we have is more
than what we might have, and where we are is on the way to much worse.
As the man falling from a 20 story building thought 19 floors down
"this isn't so bad."
As importantly Conason points out one of the powerful motivating
forces at work in our current crisis – that of alienation, alienation
from the basic values that maintain liberty, alienation from the
mechanisms of power – both cultural and political – and ultimately
alienation from ourselves. If the forces behind the "Big Lies" need
only one victory, it is to alienate people from their own sense of
action – the virtu that Machiavelli stated defended all of the
liberties of any Republic.
It is this that Conason places his faith in, in his article on the
birth, and death, of a smear against Senator, and now Presidential
Candidate, Barak Obama argues:
Despite the right-wing regression to such ugly tactics against
Clinton and Obama, there was a moment of hope as well. Rather than
simply repeat the charges and rebuttals as if each bore equal weight,
CNN sent an actual reporter to Obama's old school, who demolished the
tale -- and at the same time, the news network emphasized that there
was no evidence whatsoever linking Clinton to the attack. If such
old-fashioned journalism is the template for campaign coverage this
year and next, the dirty tricksters could soon face the unforgiving
scrutiny they have always deserved.
Send someone to find the facts, state the facts, in the face of
whatever wave of fake outrage and manufactured anger, and continue to
hold to them, regardless of the pressure that waves of insult may
bring. It is not merely something he writes, but something he does,
reflexively, in person, when challenged by heckler or ill-informed
opponent.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who understood that Democracy was not
merely a system of government, but a way of being. In his latest work,
Joe Conason stands up for that way of being against an insidious
corrosion, and an attempt to subvert it and replace it with a life
adrift among manufactured pressures and false dangers. He does so in
his actions, and is, in that most Gandhi-esque of ways, a quiet
prophet for the way in which public democracy, and public life, should
be conducted. It is not so much a book, as an expression of the active
and centered moderation of the good life which Aristotle extolled, as
opposed to the false moderation of capitulationism and flaccid
compromise with those who will not honor the word or spirit of any
agreement.
Mr. Conason lays out, in short, not only that we can act, and must act
before we have irretrievably lost our liberties, but shows us how to
act in the face of hysteria, duplicity and bad faith. The road is to
investigate, to state, to persuade, to push forward, knowing that
while people may deceive themselves in moments of terror or greed
about the generalities, they will seldom do so in the face of
specifics, and will not do so for long if they can feel the walls
closing in that each individual brick of deception and disinformation
builds.
Stirling Newberry