In a recent post on my
brother’s Facebook page, one of his friends commented on a graphic deriding
those who could not differentiate between Joseph Stalin and Barack Obama. He
quoted Alexis De Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, as follows:
"A democracy
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the
voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public
treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates
promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a
democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a
dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been
200 years.”
He then added,
“Sounds like Obamacare and many more of the entitlement programs to me.”
I am offering this
lengthy treatise because I think that we fall too easily into the use of catch
phrases, code words, and intellectual short cuts to demonize rather than think
about real issues. “Obamacare,” “entitlements,” “nanny state,” “socialism,”
“big government,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “tax and spend,” “job killers,”
etc., are pejoratives used to obfuscate and denigrate rather than to understand
problems and find real solutions.
Benjamin Franklin, in
his “Speech to the Convention, 1789,” after a very clever use of irony and self
deprecation in his intro, said, “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this
Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general
Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be
a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is
likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in
Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so
corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
Forty-five to fifty
years later, De Tocqueville made a great number of astute observations and
suggestions about democracy in America in Democracy in America. In the above quote, De Tocqueville echoed
much of Franklin’s sentiment.
I would suggest that,
in this case, his prediction and admonition in Chapter XX, comes much closer to
what has actually happened in the last forty years. He said, “I am of the
opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up
under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at
the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous [What do you
think he would say now?]. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep
their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent
inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it
may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”
Speaking of “slippery
slopes,“(another of the commentators suggested this premise), we actually have
two occurring, both of which are conflicting impulses found in De Tocqueville.
One slippery slope that he championed was equality and social justice. He saw
the rise of these trends over hundreds of years of history, and the demise of
the aristocracy was one of the most important in the evolution of equality and
social justice. He deeply admired America for having created the world’s best
effort at accomplishing these principles both consciously, through the creation
of its institutions, and unconsciously, through the character and aspirations
of the people.
The other slippery
slope is the rise of another aristocracy that could exploit what he called the
principles of “manufactures” to the point where the workers are essentially
disenfranchised, and the “owners” control the government; thus, another route
to despotism other than “majority” wanting to feed off the largesse of
government.
Only thirty years
after De Tocqueville published his tome, we had the rise of the “Robber Barons”
and the exploitation of wage slavery until the rise of labor began to curb some
of the most egregious excesses. With Theodore Roosevelt, we get the first
inklings of “progressive” government as an actual protector of the “people’s”
interests and rights and a hedge against the exploitation and domination of
bosses and corporations. Jim Crow, of course, was still alive and well, and
women were still disenfranchised, but workers began to have a glimmer of hope
in achieving the equality and social justice that the author of Democracy in
America envisioned.
Until the latter part
of the 1960’s, we saw a steady rise in equality and justice which some might
argue created a strong middle class and others might suggest resulted from that
strong middle class. Either way, pensions, health care, overtime, five day work
weeks, concern for the environment, concern for the health and safety of
workers and consumers, all became attainable. These improvements were, of course, fought viciously every
step of the way by those who profited from a workforce at the mercy of their
masters (as De Tocqueville called them). After the massive defeat of Barry
Goldwater’s brand of fiscal conservatism, the corporatocracy put millions of
dollars into think tanks and media manipulation. Eventually, they found their
front man in the form of affable but feisty Ronald Reagan who gleefully
attacked government as “the problem” and espoused deregulation and the free
reign of business to exploit and manipulate at will.
A slavish acceptance
of Milton Friedman’s fantasy “free market” philosophy, a whole-hearted adoption
of Arthur Laffer’s laughable (but devastating) “supply-side” economics,
combined with a similar cherry-picking of Ayn Rand’s antithetical distortion of
Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” and you get forty years of lax regulation,
deregulation, and manipulation of the marketplace that have lead to the
destruction of journalism and objective reporting, the savings and loan
debacle, the energy fraud (Enron), the dot com bubble collapsing, the housing
crisis, the banking crisis, “too big to fail,” ad infinitum.
Thoreau said, in his
essay, “On the Duty of Resistance to Civil Government (1848)” (aka “Civil
Disobedience”), “The only obligation
which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a
corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” On the
other hand, Milton Friedman declared that profit was the only moral duty of a
corporation or a business man, and he lambasted the idea that business had any
kind of social responsibility as “socialism,” which was, to him, of course, the
most extreme negative attack in his arsenal of derision.
I see the current assaults
on women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, gay rights, health and
safety regulations, environmental regulations, et al, as a last gasp of a newly
emerged and rapidly expanded oligarchy to turn back the inevitable march of
equality and social justice and promote the specious fable of a “meritocracy”
that in reality rewards fraud, malfeasance, and injustice. Unfortunately, last
gasps can last a long time, and if we, as a society, buy into the grotesque
misuse of “Self Reliance” as a justification for “Social Darwinism,” a premise
which the corporate oligarchs have been trying to sell us for over thirty
years, rather than understanding the actual moral import of both Emerson’s
essay or Darwin’s book, it will be a long slog indeed.
"The Greatest Threat to
Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!"
Tim McMullen
