America: Have We Crossed The Rubicon? Friday, September 21, 2012

  

America: Have We Crossed The Rubicon?

Friday, September 21, 2012

by

Mustafah Dhada, FRSA, FRAS, D. Phil (Oxon)

Professor of History, California State University, Bakersfield

 

 

 

Exeunt Ghost and Hamlet.

Horatio:
 He waxes desperate with imagination.

Marcellus:
Let's follow. 'Tis not fit thus to obey him.

Horatio:
Have after. To what issue will this come?

Marcellus:
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Horatio:
Heaven will direct it.

Marcellus:
Nay, let's follow him. 

Exeunt.

(Hamlet Act 1, Scene 4, 87–91)

 

 

Our own woes began some twenty years ago. The climate appeared different then. We were an empire at its near zenith. But something was afoot. Some of us watched beady-eyed for events to unfold. Unfold they did. Major forces were already at play once the Berlin Wall collapsed. Students, acolytes, and admirers of Leo Strauss, the controversial German-trained American political philosopher and classicist led one such force. While some of Leo Strauss’s works cautioned against polluting philosophy with values and judgment, they inspired his followers to cook up neo-conservatism, designed to inject moral imperatives into the very marrow of American polity. 

 

Romancing the Rhetoric

By the 1990s neoconservatives had crept into the Bush Senior administration, actively re-defining foreign and domestic policy as a battle of norms and values – a fight between evil and good. Ten years later, the neocons returned after an eight-year executive hiatus to firmly roost in several sinecures in Washington. They called themselves The Vulcans. The world was thence split asunder between them, “the evildoers,” and us. George W. Bush shared this view and that did not help the cause of pluralism and complexity in politics, nor did his faith-based conduct, which he publicly avowed while President. Both calcified liberty as a binary. On the other side of the world, plots thickened to strike at the very heart of America. 

 

On the other hand, the world of course was complex, muddy, and steeped in shades of grey. It demanded from leaders of major players in history several things: to continuously undergo silent suffering brought about by self-restraint, engage in self-doubt amidst decisive victories, bear witness to eviscerating pain to induce temperance in leadership, consider nuanced decision-making fit for global complexity, and above all have gobs of charisma with which to win over enemies and skeptics.

 

Some of us watched the rise of the Vulcans in horror. America was about to regress into medieval rhetoric. The middle ages had endured similar discourses. These had resulted in endless conflicts over which value should reign supreme over all others, pure truth, pure goodness, or truth as praxis, that is to say, truth mediated by culture, exigency, and context. 

 

The 13th-century thinker Ibn Taymiyyah had led that discourse, which in essence was no different than the neocons’ assertion, “you are either with us or against us.” Five centuries later, Taymiyyah went on to inspire two forms of “Us and Them” polity in the Middle East. One was Saudi Arabian Wahabism in the 18^th century. The other was Salafism and the Taliban, both puritans in social outlook, and both advocates of jus ad Bellum, i.e., jihad, the war for a just cause. The Qur’an here was the primary text to guide its practitioners when and where to engage in war and how to judge women and men on a good and evil axis. 

 

Europe too had its share of woe-inducing jihadis,  particularly during the Thirty Years’ War. Who could forget Père François-Joseph le Clerc du Tremblay, Cardinal de Richelieu’s diplomatic envoy, and foreign minister of sorts? A strong proponent of a Catholic Europe, he fought his opponent's tooth and nail envisioning Europe without Protestants. Wolfowitz’s avowed vision of a moral world converted by democracy bereft of Osamas was no different than Tremblay’s anti-Protestantism. 

 

Perhaps more tellingly recent, was the Soviet binary view of the world between evil capitalism and its opponents, the communists, who by dialectic definition were on the right side of history. This view remained in force and unaltered until Khrushchev’s rise to power, which ultimately ushered in the concept of peaceful coexistence with capitalism. Last and not least, let us not forget traditional Islam’s world view between the world of peace, the world of war, and wedged in between, the world of tactical compromise.

 

Values Ascendant

The first neocon battle was fought in 1991. It began with bangs and muzzles flashing in basso profundo. We went to war to push Saddam back to Baghdad as we secured our pipes and oil taps in Kuwait. The former Soviets helped us here. Their weakened presence in the region had left us dominant – and we used this position to what we thought was our advantage. Our strikes on Baghdad, at the borders with Iraq, within Iraq, and in Kuwait were visually clinical, the shock of swift defeat for the Ba’athists, awesome. We did this by coopting the free press and US corporations. In one fell swoop, our gatekeepers were sanitized. We saw what they were allowed to see which they communicated to us as a total digital recall. The US corporations on the other hand, turned quasi-governmental, this time to help with logistics at a pre-negotiated price under monopoly conditions. After the Gulf War, both measures became institutionalized. 

 

We had learned lessons from Vietnam. There we had left the press free to tell the story of America’s conscripts as a messy affair. Here we managed truth with a purpose. We fed America tales of heroism, pyrotechnics, and an exceptionally well-orchestrated victory. In Vietnam, the US armed forces carried the full burden of logistics and construction of McNamara’s strategic hamlets. By divesting these functions to the private sector in our recent wars, we sharpened our force’s tactical abilities, leaving the private sector to support the war effort, and profit from it immeasurably. 

 

This co-opting of private capital and journalism wormed its way into the nation’s very flesh and bone. The US government had shown how truth could be diced, cooked, and canned during the fight to repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. If the government could do this and lead the way all the more reason for the private sector to monetize this invention. Why not fox the public with similar tactics by parceling the news to feed into our fears, or nurture partisanship among the susceptible. It was in this climate that the 2000 chad debacle unfolded. 

 

Some of us vividly recall those events. How could we not? The nation’s political faith in the constitution was at stake here. As a paternal oversight, the founding fathers had embedded an Electoral College to protect the nation from self-destruction at the hands of mob-driven delinquents. They had not foreseen what the US was about to undergo in Florida. They may well have taken for granted that those who followed them in positions of power would exercise it judiciously and prove as selflessness as visionaries, and as devoted to higher-order principles as they had been. 

 

The founding fathers had rested their faith in the College and the judiciary as Cartesian upholders of the people’s collective will. They expected US institutions to be unimpeachably fair, and act without a whiff of partiality over and above any other competing interest. Instead, when tested over chads, the college and the judiciary tipped the fate of the Republic in favor of the college and not the majority will. In doing so, they nicked the fabric of the American constitution. That nick is still there. It remains ignored. In some quarters of the electorate, its disrepair breeds discontent. 

 

The college was created as a device to nurture American democracy to full strength. It safeguarded our liberty unquestionably as long as the broader electorate proved illiterate and savagely undernourished as a citizenry. We have grown since then. With over 4400 colleges and universities, 99% of the voting electorate is literate, more perceptive than our predecessors, and substantially more robust to withstand game-changing politics. Our economic and social fabric attests to that. 

 

The Vulcans at War

911 was a wake-up call for the US to change, particularly with regard to intrusions in, and support of, unpopular regimes in the Middle East and beyond. Regrettably, this opportunity inspired the Vulcan led administration to further the axis of the evil theorem. The US exercised awesome firepower without restraint to export democracy overseas. Rather ironic, since our own democracy had taken a tumble down the legal rabbit hole to seat George W. Bush as our elected President. 

 

Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries at the American Declaration of Independence would probably have acted differently immediately after the chad episode. They would seriously have considered a second constitutional convention to critically review, if not consider reforming, the electoral structure for the Presidency. They may even have instituted cast-iron safeguards over and above what was and still is in place to preempt wars undertaken on impulse or personal slight or wars driven by faulty information, faulty premises, and fallacious audacity to export democracy.  

 

911 could have strengthened US leadership as a world power by undertaking a variety of measures. One such measure would have been to reach out to enemies and friends to form partnerships and fraternities based on differences in a shared, albeit anarchic, society. Instead, the US hardened the country’s enemies into viperous combatants. We engaged our men and women in deadly enterprises. We also ossified skeptics into enemies with awesome displays of US Wehrmacht – hard power. We failed to exercise soft power, that is to say, convert hardened skeptics with coaxing persuasion. We failed to behave with utmost self-restraint when face to face with saber-rattling minor players and warmongers. We engaged in renditions of bearded nihilists and pursued a despot sitting on vast oil reserves. 

 

The result is that today the US faces needless challenges overseas. Iraq is in shambles. Its leaders grow more corrupt than ever before. The country itself has reverted to classical antiquity, divided between the Kurds in the north, the Shiites in the south, and the Sunnis just above Baghdad’s bellybutton. Afghanistan has returned to pre-Taliban chaos. Factions and feudalism have returned as old wine in new bottles labeled by us. Opium cultivation has resumed. Neighboring Pakistan teeters on the verge of collapse – and that land has nukes.

 

Yes, Osama is dead, true! However, he was already dead politically, well before 911. The technically well informed in the region, young and old, knew this. They had discovered and tasted virtual freedom on the net, right in the belly of the beast. From that vantage point, they were wedged between the status quo and privately funded al-Qaedah under Salafist ideonomy. That is why the net-savvy in the region sought to court independents, pro-Islamic activists, and Islamic pluralists; and that is why al-Qaedah failed to gain broad support in the region. 

 

To them neither al Qaedah nor the status quo was palatable. They knew that both throttled self-determination. Both dogmatically advocated cultural and social nihilism. Both rigidly adhered to binary thinking, “you are with us or against us.” Put differently, both abridged civil liberties, and the right to access the net-based global marketplace without government interference. That is why the young and some of their elders took to the net – as a grass-root third alternative for regime change. 

 

With Osama dead, and reforms underway, al Qaedah fossilized as a relic of the past, 11^th century Persia to be precise. There the Asasiyun had taken to roaming the mountains of northern Iran as latter-day Nazgûls. Two centuries later, they were coopted by the Mamluks to serve them in two capacities, as professionally trained assassins and as cloak and dagger operatives. In other words, al-Qaedah was a threat as long as its cadres remained cloaked in caves behind armored steel doors protected by local guardians. Incidentally, these were the same very guardians whose predecessors the US had trained to coax the Soviets out of Afghanistan so that we could gain access to gas and petrol reserves in Central Asia. 

 

Bereft of Afghan hospitality, al-Qaedah deflated. It would behoove us to see this for what it is – else we shall be tempted to be in Kabul beyond what is necessary to protect our privately-held assets. Here, I wonder if the corporations should not be told to foot the bill for protecting their assets, now underwritten by our publicly funded defense purse. Just a thought. 

 

This is not to say that Osama’s men do not pose a threat. They do. Of course, they do. For as long as the US backs the status quo in Saudi Arabia and unpopular regimes elsewhere in order to secure a steady supply of oil we remain exposed to opportunistic terror. The only way out for the United States is to engage history on its side, and do what the French did for this country during its fight for liberty from Britain. They supported us first ever so delicately, then surreptitiously, and then quite openly when all seemed appropriate; and they did so without snatching from the jaws of victory America’s inalienable right to its destiny. 

 

We could start the ball rolling by clarifying to interested parties that we stand poised to broker regime change if invited or in the event of a genuine uprising in that empty quarter housing Muhammad’s legacy. I hazard a guess that for a number of reasons, Osama followers, Osama sympathizers, even Salafists, and Muslims from Mindanao to Timbuktu who are eager to usher modernity in that part of the world would view American openness positively.

 

In the interim, events have stolen a march on us. The peoples of the Middle East took the reform bull by the horns without our prompting. There, net-based initiatives toppled several regimes, some without bloodshed, others under hail of bullets and bombs. It is early days yet to assess success in that part of the world, but in toppling despots, its people dispensed with the US as a beacon for their democracy. 

 

Further, the US record in propping up some of the very same despots and their military minions inspired little confidence in this country as their amicus curiae; and where it did inspire such confidence the US proved them resoundingly wrong. We humiliated them ideographically. We portrayed their captured males as curs on leash begging for mercy – witness Abu Ghraib. 

 

Ultimately though the peoples in the Middle East led the way for the US to follow when we began our own anarchic march to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This march was doomed to fail right off the bat. Policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and the systematic curricular assault on teaching civics, the humanities, and the fine arts in schools and colleges put paid to that prospect. This assault severely etiolated among the youth, the basal literacy in civics, problem-solving, critical thinking, assessment, and evaluation, and the tender art of envisioning outside the box. 

 

Secondly, a materially significant portion of the American middle-class, particularly the alienated segment proved absent to lead this march of the discontented. The early demise of OWS was thus assured before it could develop into an action-packed movement for change. Some will argue here that that is what elections are for – to secure change. I have my doubts. I will tell you why.

 

Of Money, Sex and God

The Clinton administration left three legacies as it exited the Oval Office in 2000: a budget surplus, the Lewinsky affair, and the World Wide Web, which was born and raised under its watch. The incoming Bush administration took this inheritance, borrowed additional cash, and marched into Baghdad at the cost of more than three trillion dollars. In response to 911, it also created the third-largest bureaucracy in peacetime history, a 200,000 strong internal security apparatus at the cost of $59 billion dollars. Finally, it then undertook the most important project of re-engineering American society in its history since 1776. 

 

This project had two operative fronts, one socio-economic and the other ideological. The socio-economic front aimed at shape-shifting American society to finance its culture-driven war. This front began with the Bush tax breaks, which effectively squeezed wealth from America’s girth and below. As a result, 85% of America’s private wealth catapulted upwards, pushing 80% of the wage and salary owners down to the bottom. By 2007, America’s socio-economy had been successfully reshaped to resemble an inverted pyramid. 62 million Americans now had 85% of the nation’s private wealth of which the top one percent or 311,591 Americans, that is to say, a population the size of the city of Santa Anna, California, controlled 42.7% of America’s total financial wealth. The bottom 80% of Americans emaciated financially. Today they hold 25% of the national wealth. 

 

Ideally, this dramatic shift in wealth should have fostered successful social discontent from the bottom – and it nearly did thanks to social networking media, which underpinned the rise of the OWS. Ultimately, as stated earlier, the OWS failed for classically predictable reasons. In the past three years, the national discourse had shifted quite dramatically towards culture and change away from contests over political ideology. The rise of the Tea Party attests to that shift in the national discourse.  Other reasons for the failure of OWS included organizational anarchy, lack of a clear sense of direction, lack of strategy-minded leadership, and lack of participation by a statistically significant middle class alienated by the post-Bush era status quo.

 

The second front was as indicated, ideological, to inject into the American electorate values and norms with which to fight secularly defined cultural pluralism. The Lewinsky scandal proved of immeasurable help here, as did the lightning popularity of the World Wide Web, and the 911 attack. In the case of the Clinton episode with Lewinsky, here was proof positive of moral turpitude by no less than the President – clear evidence demanding a value-based conservative narrative for the leadership of America. 

 

The net, on the other hand, provided the best evidence to fight a culture war. The net liberated access to information for the majority of Americans who now inhabited the bottom of the inverted pyramid. With this liberty came also unbridled exposure to materials seen by the right to be morally reprehensible, or socially, and culturally corrosive. The texts here ranged from questioning the right to bear arms to the advocacy-centered exploration of new faiths, sexual practices and lifestyles, use of expletives in music to convey the immediacy of content, and reproductive rights. 

 

Up to this point, diversity within the US was existentially spatial, and asymmetrically interconnected – a salad bowl of peoples and culture. This allowed room for coexistence between neighbors and between demographic enclaves and provided breathing room to those preferring isolation or limited contact with peoples of other cultures and races for whatever reason. Exposure to alternative cultures, races, racial mixes, and outlooks reflective of our own diversity brought across the net by the world outside threatened this status quo; as did everyday exposure to immigration issues, and game-changing innovations in science, technology, and religion. 

 

The US was seen by the conservative right to be on the verge of a cultural meltdown. The net had eliminated the benefit of isolation of that existential space vital for the survival of the socio-cultural salad, making the truth of our diversity more immediate, and palpable. With the net, we truly faced a real prospect of becoming a pot of the melted many, which is what we always claimed we were – E pluribus unum.

 

The 911 attack did not help matters here, nor did Muslim rhetoric by Islamic theocracies such as Iran, which labeled America as “the Great Satan.” Both accentuated the urgency for injecting values and norms into the American electorate. Both fed into the ultra-conservative cause while placing the democrats on the strategic defensive. It particularly strengthened the religious right, which now had even more reasons to campaign for a return to Judeo-Christian values to combat these forces of “evil” and cultural alienation threatening the fabric of American traditions. Liberals and Democrats, it appears failed to see this as a valid argument for change in their strategy for a greater and more inclusive America.

 

The neocon-inspired project would have proved resoundingly successful – and may yet be – had the Bush administration not overplayed its hand in waging wars with heavy borrowing while the middle class saw its prosperity plummet. Obama tapped into this trifecta of war, debt, and discontent, by promising change and by securing a firm hold on his party loyalists just as he reached out across party lines to augment his core backers. 

 

However, for a variety of reasons, the conservative right had nothing to fear with Obama in the White House. As long as the Democrats focused on change as rhetoric, attacked the right as irrational recidivists driven by ideology and dogma, left intact the structure of campaign finances, and failed to reverse the social pyramid, it held all the cards it needed to continue its march forward. It had money. It had grass-root activists. It had the will to obstruct Obama on several fronts. By tapping into the supremely wealthy and their corporate plenipotentiaries at the top of the inverted pyramid, it could effectively bankroll electoral campaigns to back their chosen culture war candidates, and focus on independent voters. This way they could continue scoring Congressional gains in mid-term elections. 

 

Further, using its well-placed activists the conservative right mobilized itself into a counter-force with which to continue the tannin war on several fronts. One was to protect the ideological parameters of the inverted pyramid. The remainder of the conservative strategy split the money-deprived majority of the electorate between value and faith-based conservatives, and the rest: liberals, political neutrals, and socially conservative pluralists. This proved easy to accomplish given that the democrats had until then failed to capitalize on OWS not as a protest movement against the super-rich but as a cultural movement for diversity and inclusion fighting at the brink of social extinction.

 

In the meantime, in Congress itself, the new right successfully blocked any policy and tax initiative that threatened the integrity of the inverted pyramid designed to serve the conservative cause. To this end, all they had to do is ensure gridlock in Washington, consolidate Congressional gains with newly brewed tea party activists, and wait for the November election. 

 

Where Are We Then?

It is clear. In the words of Marcellus, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The forthcoming election will tell us how ‘rotten.’ To whit, a Republican victory will accelerate the pace of the culture war against secular pluralism. The nation will march to the ideological right, and expand its footprint of conflict in the Middle East. We shall then have crossed the Rubicon. 

 

A democratic victory on the other hand, will leave us where we are, stagnating in gridlock for four years at the margins of the river at Rubicon. Such a prospect could imperil us all. In the words of the Nobel Prize-winning laureate Paul Krugman, that said gridlock threatens the US to become a “banana republic” whose politicians are too busy denuding opponents of their credibility rather than constructively engaging each other in furthering the greater common good. 

 

The third scenario is that the Tea Party-infused conservative right returns to Congress severely maimed of numbers. The chances of such a wounded return appear grim. At present, Democrats do not appear to see this imperative; that the electoral contest is a battle in part over culture and values, not just over change; the battle is to empower women, a woman as President, women in equal numbers with men in Congress, women as leaders in all walks of life; the battle, therefore, is not solely against proponents of dogma, and faith-based policies. In the event of a resounding victory, the present administration may have an opportunity to redress the balance of socio-economic inequities – but it will have to act with lightning speed. Otherwise, the prospect of returning to gridlock will increase as we near mid-term elections, which will provide an opportunity for the conservative right to come back, and this time with renewed vigor. 

 

Should we be faced with another four years of gridlock, I wonder what is to become of us? With the rise of the net, the persistent bickering among politicians and party apparatchiks, an increasing social disconnect amidst us, and nation-wide disillusionment with politics there does seem to be a need for a paradigm shift. 

 

In days bygone it used to be “it is the economy, stupid.” We then gave change a chance. I wonder if today “it is culture, stupid.” If so, then the age of political ideology may well be over. If that is the case then should “we the people” of the United States of America, consider with the help of technology a magna vox populi? By that I mean bring 311,591,917 citizens of the Republic together as E Pluribus Unum Convention – to talk about who are we as a people and then perhaps also address some of the issues raised in this article. Of particular concern would be issues exacerbating the present state of our disunion: electoral reform aimed at direct democracy, finance campaign reforms, reform of the judiciary as a value and culture neutral bench with term limit appointments, civil personal and reproductive rights, right to bear arms perhaps, and the place for religious narratives in American public life and public policy. 

 

We have ample evidence to suggest the need to undertake such an enterprise given our recent historical past. The Electoral College during our crucial period in history failed to deliver us what the majority had voted for. The judiciary proved wanting of visionary supra-partisanship during “chadgate.” The restraints placed on the executive that safeguarded us to go to war on unproven fallacies proved too weak to protect us from embarking on foreign crusades.

 

Further, the inversion of wealth resulting from tax policies asphyxiates the opportunity for social ascendance. The culture wars threaten the text of American secular pluralism. God as a narrative in public policy threatens to either determine the course of reproductive rights, or silence discourses on human origins and on advances and applications of science and technology. The right to bear arms has already traversed its original intentions, from a right birthed in a trough of exigency and need to a right borne out by an influential trilogy of culture, testosterone, and ersatz justice. The present structure for financing elections allows the might of money to manipulate collectively the popular voice of the Republic. The list continues.  

 

If these issues lead us to revisit and revise any or ALL aspects of the constitution, so be it. If these issues mean convening the largest meeting of people that the republic has ever seen in its history, so be it. Rather than continue with gridlock. 

 

Depending on the election results this fall, our democracy may well need us to imagine the unimaginable. Resorting to Magna vox populi as a cultural artifact to break the gridlock is one such idea. Thomas Jefferson would agree with the spirit behind such an idea – and we owe that much to the Founding Fathers. 

 

Not to recognize the perils we face ahead is to fall silent. Sentient citizenship urges us not to. I say this to echo Rev Martin Luther King, "A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for” me – and perhaps for some of you. These then are the views of a citizen of this republic from the canyon below. May the power of its people watch over all of us. 

 

Good Night.