Loyalty, Democracy, Authority

A red carpet is rolled out after Air Force One arrives in Port of Spain, Trinidad on April 17, 2009. (Image and caption taken from Whitehouse.gov)

I don't know what triggered my memory, but something led me to revisit an essay I first read last summer. It was published in Harper's Magazine almost exactly one year ago in June of 2008 during the maddeningly slow-moving final months of the Bush Administration and the heat of a very uncertain presidential campaign. "Democracy and deference" is the essay's title by author Mark Slouka. If you're pressed for time, do yourself a favor and leave my blog immediately to go read it right now. Slouka elegantly communicates in only about three-thousand words all of the fear, anxiety, and frustration that eight years of a near-tyrannical administration inflicted on American culture. Actually, that's not quite right. His essay was much more poignant than that. Slouka never accuses the Bush administration of inflicting anything on us citizens. Instead, he points out what willing and gracious hosts we Americans were to the authoritarian impulses of the administration, and he makes a very convincing case.

Slouka's essay is especially timely as America sits at a crossroads of accountability for torture, civil liberty abuses, unjust wars, and titanic fraud perpetrated in collusion between Wall Street and Capitol Hill. The temptation is to sit back, relax, and pat ourselves on the back for having the wisdom to replace the past occupier of the White House with the current elegant, intelligent, and charming occupant. However, to forget how quickly and easily our media and populace became a tag-team of sycophantic, subservient subjects to the throne of monarchic power grabs will only make the next aspiring tyrant's job that much easier. More importantly, though, we should remember that just because Obama is elegant, intelligent, and charming, does not mean that he isn't susceptible to the worship of (what is now his own) authority.

"The temptation is to sit back, relax, and pat ourselves on the back for having the wisdom to replace the past occupier of the White House with the current elegant, intelligent, and charming occupant."

In fact, that is the very thesis of Slouka's well-argued essay - that American deference to authority (be it in the form of political, cultural, or economic power) is quickly replacing any democratic impulses that might still linger. Slouka describes the almost unnoticed power dynamics of the American presidential press conference and the regal manner with which the President is treated (Bush at the time of his writing, but the same applies to Obama). The exuberant chuckles at every modest quip are illustrative as is the palpably unequal manner in which each party addresses the other: "Thank you for taking my question, Mr. President..." vs. "Who's next? OK, Tony." Imagine the "scandal" that could erupt among the chattering classes if a Fox correspondent addressed the current president as "Barack" during a press conference or an MSNBC reporter addressed the former as "George." Of course, press conference protocol is not the meatiest example of deference to authority, but it is instructive nonetheless.

Slouka also discusses a White House interaction between Senator Jim Webb and President Bush. The supposedly liberal press (including the New York Times) criticized Webb as acting rudely and offensively for simply noting to Bush in fairly benign language that he wished his son, a Marine in combat, could get out of Iraq. The grand "Breach of Manners" (as the Times article put it) was that Webb dared express an unprompted difference of opinion in the "President's" house (which is our house, of course.) Slouka quickly points out that our culture is more than willing to tolerate, even celebrate, every manner of rudeness, crassness, and cruelty so long as the object of ridicule is in a less powerful position than the antagonist (witness the delight taken in the cruelty inflicted by American Idol's Simon Cowell to his defenseless targets.) It is only when someone in authority, someone better, or "more" as Slouka describes it, is challenged that we chastise the "offender" and not the "offendee."

The rhetorical stakes of Slouka's argument get decidedly higher, though, when he discusses Colin Powell's knowingly false U.N. testimony regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Powell's betrayal to himself becomes the essay's prime exemplar of an American ethos that reveres "loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right." The essay states the consequences like this:

"Powell’s excuse—that he did not want to betray the ethic of the loyal soldier—was precisely the one used by the defendants at Nuremberg, and if you say that the analogy is a reckless one, that Colin Powell is no Rudolf Hess but a generally decent man—an A student, a team player, a loyal employee, a good soldier—I’ll agree, and say only this: God save us from men and women like him, for they will do almost anything in the name of 'loyalty.'"

These are the very thoughts that cross my mind when I hear Obama say that we need not bother with prosecutions or accountability regarding torture. This reflexive loyalty to authority is what I see when Obama economic advisers and longtime Wall Street fixtures Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers are described as the only ones "smart enough" to fix the very crisis they helped to create with reckless, shortsighted deregulation. When the millionaires and billionaires of Wall Street and Detroit are bailed out with taxpayer money at the same time that "progressive" Democratic Senator Charles Schumer proposes we can't use tax dollars to fund public health care, I can't help but think that Slouka's argument is correct.

Perhaps he's right when he says that American citizens "seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance." Despite all of our gooey rhetoric regarding democracy and equality, I sometimes find it hard to locate much evidence that we really believe in either. Instead, we seem to fecklessly hope that we've chosen a benign monarch to replace the failed tyrant that fooled us last go round. This is a dangerous mindset and only has one outcome if left unchecked. Slouka put it better than I could ever hope to:

"Once the idea of inequality is allowed to take root, a veritable forest of ritualized gestures and phrases springs up to reinforce it. The notion that some bow and others are bowed to comes to seem natural; the cool touch of the floor against our forehead begins to feel right: from classroom to corporate cubicle to the halls of Congress, deferential way leads on to deferential way, and at the end of the road, as Tocqueville foresaw, stands a baaa-ing polity 'reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.'"

While I am somewhat relieved to have a new administration with many tendencies toward democratic ideals, I also know that the machinations of Washington are such that nothing meaningful ever happens unless the populace as a whole demands change (or accountability or anything else.) I pray that Slouka's essay is a hyperbolic warning of what we might become and not a correct diagnosis of what we already are. Maybe this time next year I'll revisit "Democracy and deference" with an answer to that question.