Democracy Matters (6 page)

While the right-wing pundits are overt in their superficial pandering, the more subtle and insidious constraints on hard-hitting, truthful reporting are at least as troubling. The bombastic carnival barkers are relatively easy to expose in their sentimental manipulations. The more principled believers in the special role of a balanced and free press, who all too frequently bow to market pressures, are a more serious threat.

Sentimental nihilism is content to remain on the surface of
problems rather than pursue their substantive depths. It pays simplistic lip service to issues rather than portraying their complexity. This sad display of highly ambitious yet too often docile and deferential newspeople preoccupied with a market bottom line has not been lost on the public and has contributed to the widespread public apathy about our politics. Yet the hard-hitting, deeply probing periodicals and shows that do exist struggle for market share because the allure of the entertainment offered by the mass-appeal versions is so strong. Most significantly, the obsessive touting of dubious statistics and sound bites by mainstream pundits points citizens away from a true reckoning with the institutional causes of social misery.

Democracy depends, in large part, on a free and frank press willing to speak painful truths to the public about our society, including the fact of their own complicity in superficiality and simplistic reportage. There can be no democratic
paideia
—the critical cultivation of an active citizenry—without democratic
parrhesia
—a bold and courageous press willing to speak against the misinformation and mendacities of elites. Democracy matters are in peril when the so-called free press lacks the autonomy or courage to inspire democratic energies.

These pervasive nihilisms in American democracy today have made way for a resurgent imperialism—the ultimate expression of the market-driven grasp for power. The nihilistic market-dominated mentality—the quest for wealth and power—leads to the drive for conquest, and it’s when market morality prevails over democratic principle that imperialism reigns supreme. Market-obsessed nihilism—the corporation as the embodiment of absolute
will—is the Achilles’ heel of American democracy that parades as its crown jewel. Free-market fundamentalism has for so long been the precondition of American democracy that we have rendered it sacred—an unexamined fetish that we worship.

These three nihilistic threats connect the spiritual to the social, the personal to the political, and the existential to the economic. They shape every dimension of our lives, from the bedroom to the corporate meeting room, from street to suite. Serious reflection on democracy matters is always more than a view about the next election. It also forces us to think broadly about the future of the American Republic, and the overriding issue we must grapple with in the post-9/11 world is the threat of this rising imperialism. The pervasive nihilism of our political culture and this surging imperialism go hand in hand. The imperialist impulse does not fully define us, but it has a long and brutal history that we must confront. If we want to understand this imperialist nihilism that runs so deep in our culture, we should start by looking at its history, and to do that we must start with race. The pursuit of empire and racist oppressions and exclusions have been intimately interlinked.

Indigenous peoples, Mexican peasants, Asian laborers, and especially African slaves have wrestled with forms of antidemocratic nihilism in America unknown to most European immigrants—even given their heroic struggles against harsh prejudice in America. Anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and antiunionism indeed have been ugly in American history. But the vicious legacy of white supremacy has inflicted deeper wounds on the American landscape. These deep wounds provide a profound lens—they yield painful truths about the limits of democracy in America.

The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the nightside of its own history. This sentimental flight from history—or adolescent escape from painful truths about ourselves—means that even as we grow old, grow big, and grow powerful, we have yet to grow up. To confront the role of race and empire is to grapple with what we would like to avoid, but we avoid that confrontation at the risk of our democratic maturation. To delve into our legacy of race and empire is to unleash our often-untapped democratic energies of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.

To engage in this Socratic questioning of America is not to trash our country, but rather to tease out those traditions in our history that enable us to wrestle with difficult realities we often deny. The aim of this Socratic questioning is democratic
paideia
—the cultivation of an active, informed citizenry—in order to preserve and deepen our democratic experiment. Race has always been the crucial litmus test for such maturity in America. To acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project is anti-American only if one holds to a childish belief that America is pure and pristine, or if one opts for self-destructive nihilistic rationalizations. One of our most crucial tasks now as democrats is to expose and extricate the antidemocratic impulses within our
democracy. It is when we confront the challenges of our antidemocratic inclinations as a country that our most profound democratic commitments are born, both on the individual and on the societal level. Only the nihilists among us tremble in their boots at such a prospect.

In examining the deep roots of imperialism in American history, it is important to know that most of the grand democratic projects in human history—from Athens to America—have xenophobic and imperial roots. The most famous of all speeches in democratic Athens—Pericles’ great funeral oration rendered in Thucydides’ classic
History of the Peloponnesian War
—celebrated democracy at home while glorifying Athens’s imperial domination of other peoples abroad. “For Athens alone of her contemporaries,” Pericles proclaimed, “is found when tested to be greater than her reputation…we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” Even the democracy at home he lauded was seriously compromised, rooted as it was in slavery, patriarchal households, and the economic advantage of the cheap labor of resident aliens (like the great Aristotle) who could not vote. Similarly, the democratic experiments of Rome, France, England, and Germany had deep imperial foundations.

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population
consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three-year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson—who himself embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia—offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.

The reference in the Declaration to indigenous peoples as “Savages” worthy of American expansionist domination for an “empire of liberty” further reveals this contradiction. In listing the colonies’ charges against British oppression, Jefferson sounds this theme in his last charge: “He [the British oppressor] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” A few years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson proclaimed that he trembled for his country when he thought of the suffering of slaves and that God was just—a suffering that he was all too aware enabled his political career, since his slavocratic views were so popular with his constituencies, and a suffering he intimately and directly contributed to in a mighty way in both public policy and personal behavior. Yet in 1783, less than a decade after Jefferson’s Declaration, the chief justice in Massachusetts declared an end to slavery in his state because
“a different idea has taken place with the people of America” in which “all men are born free and equal” that is “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.”

George Washington wrestled with this tension on the battlefield for his country and within his soul. With his victorious Continental army at Yorktown 25 percent black, he struggled to shed some of his slaveholder’s mentality, ultimately freeing his slaves at his death. He warned his countrymen about getting involved in the imperial affairs and wars of Europe, yet he acknowledged that the future of the young democratic republic rested on westward expansion and imperial subjugation of indigenous peoples. In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, in his closing speech at the Constitutional Convention, uttered a dreadful warning that America would likely end up as a despotic republic with docile citizens:

From the birth of American democracy, then, the battle was raging over the scope of freedom, the reach of equality, and the tension between democratic and xenophobic elements.

The most painful truth in the making of America—a truth that shatters all pretensions to innocence and undercuts all efforts of denial—is that
the enslavement of Africans and the imperial expansion over indigenous peoples and their lands were undeniable preconditions for the possibility of American democracy.
There could be no such thing as an experiment in American democracy without these racist and imperial foundations. It is no accident that from the nation’s founding (1789) to the Civil War (1861) the vast majority of Supreme Court justices—the highest rule of law in the land—were slaveholders and imperial expansionists. And for forty-nine of these seventy-two years, the presidency of the United States was held by slaveholders and imperial expansionists. And the only ones reelected president were slaveholders and imperial expansionists.

The most powerful and poignant work ever written about America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic two-volume
Democracy in America
(1835, 1840)—reached a number of dark conclusions about this lethal mix of race, empire, and democracy. Tocqueville feared that America would produce a new form of despotism in the world—a democratic despotism, a term also used by W. E. B. Du Bois almost one hundred years later. This despotism would be guilty of genocide against indigenous peoples and unable to create a multiracial democracy owing to the deep white supremacist practices of the country’s tyrannical majority. The last and longest chapter of Tocqueville’s first volume—a chapter often skipped over or treated lightly by scholars who fan and fuel America’s denial of its racist and imperial roots—put forward the most difficult and delicate challenge to the American democratic experiment: would race and empire undermine American democracy?

The prophetic astuteness of Tocqueville’s critique is sometimes attributed in part to his outsider status, and yet powerful voices from within the country, both the famous and the largely forgotten, expressed the same fears of the ultimate consequences of racism and imperialism earlier. Their words speak more powerfully than we can today about the menacing nature of these twin forces as the
country wrestled with the paradoxes implicit in its founding. The free black man David Walker and the white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child—two public intellectuals in the grand democratic tradition—had already raised Tocqueville’s explosive question. In 1829 Walker published his excoriating
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
, a work banned in much of America and the cause of his murder in 1830. Highlighting Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy as the author of the Declaration who also, in his notorious
Notes on the State of Virginia
, put forth a degrading analysis of the inferiority of African Americans, Walker wrote: