The Way Forward

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." --Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death, p. 68.

By Rita Mae Brown's measure, the political process in the United States is--and has been for a long time now--insane.

We are stuck: wedded to a dogma that has proved itself over time to be false. The dogma is that representative government is the be-all and end-all of liberty.

It is not.

Representative government is a stage, a way-station, on the road to greater democracy. The latter is achieved through collective self-governance.

Raoul Vaneigem's A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings, like his 1967 manifesto, The Revolution of Everyday Life, is light-years beyond any thinking about governance that has currency in the present catastrophe we call American politics.

Vaneigem is an authentic visionary. The American body politic, on the other hand, is swept up in government and media induced orgies of fear and greed. Tea-Partiers arrogate to themselves the position of "enlightened ones," but their Constitutional fundamentalism, no less than their religious fundamentalism, cannot distinguish the forest for the trees.

The Tea-Party offers no true cure; it is but a symptom of the disease.

The painful truth is that the storied framers of the Constitution were not omniscient. They were fallible, flesh-and-blood men. As the history of the so-called "commerce clause" cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court clearly shows, the document they produced was inadequate to the needs of the nation as it began to evolve in the post-civil war period. The Judiciary stepped in and, in effect, undermined the power and authority of both the Congress and the Executive branch for the inescapably obvious reason that the framers possessed no crystal ball.

Sorry, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

In recent years, conservative justices on the Supreme Court have held open the door for the Imperial Presidency since Congress appears to lack any notion that the Constitution puts it in the driver's seat. This is precisely the opposite of the Tea Party's diagnosis of a runaway Congress and runaway Judiciary. Tea Partiers mean well, but they are out of touch with reality. Like all fundamentalists, they embrace a romanticized past and have no time for the tedious details of the historical record. But the devil is in the details. And God, too.

We can fault the individuals who hold and have held offices in all branches of government--there is plenty of blame to go around--but the penultimate fault lies with the 18th century inadequacies of the Constitution itself.

The ultimate error rests with the American people who have transferred their indefeasible rights of self-governance to elected representatives and for practicing a civil religion whereby the U.S. Constitution is transfigured from a basic legal charter into omnicompetent Holy Writ.

The Constitutional fundamentalists in the Tea Party are true believers in this false dogma and all of their assertions about restoring the Constitution to its rightful place in governance, if actually enacted as policy, would cause the complete collapse of a broken system.

Which might not be such a bad thing.

I have said it before and I will say it again: what this country needs is a non-violent people's revolution that would result in the calling of a Constitutional Convention to replace the dysfunctional 18th century document with a 21st century one. In this task, our revolutionary re-founding mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, should look to the great social democracies of Europe and Scandinavia for models and guidance. In this task, as in all tasks, the new revolutionaries must not confuse the American context with that of other parts of the world. And whatever they do, they should keep Murray Bookchin's notion of the "third American dream" before them.

Bookchin's third American dream differed from two others (i.e., the dream of rugged individualism and the immigrant dream of endless opportunity) by stressing "community, decentralisation, self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face-to-face democracy" (Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1974).

In the process of such a revolution, we will discover of what we Americans are truly made.

Frankly, I have high hopes but few illusions.

It is very possible that we will only discover, to our infinite sorrow, the degree to which this country is fragmented and polarized along racial, class, ethnic, and religious lines.

We may discover that we lack the heart for mutual aid across such lines and that we lack the imagination and courage that face-to-face democracy requires. Many of us probably do prefer the spectacle of flat-screen talking heads shouting slogans at one another and engaging in ad hominem attacks. For many Americans this is what passes for "democracy"--a variety of "infotainment."

We may also discover the degree to which the National Security State has bankrupted the treasury and undermined whatever chance we might have had to realize the third American dream.

Such risks may well be worth it, in my view. For by taking them, we may be forced to admit to ourselves our true political condition.

Everything then will depend upon our response. Will we panic and uproot whatever is decent in our culture and political traditions or will we find the strength within ourselves to do something unprecedented?

I would hope that we would recognize that the only way out of the corner into which we have painted ourselves is to dismantle the National Security State and the military corporatocracy that runs it, surrender the Empire, and learn to become good neighbors to one another and proper citizens of the world.

Before Bernard Lewis Lost His Mind

Before Bernard Lewis lost his mind and became the darling of Neo-Con Neo-Imperialists--indeed, before he became one himself--he was quite a creditable scholar. One can read Lewis's writings from the late 1950's to the early 1970's and even occasional pieces into the 1980's with great profit and pleasure. But then something happened.

A friend of mine (since deceased), a professor of rhetoric and communications at a state university in Pennsylvania, once did a study of Lewis's writings and concluded that the change in his thinking began to occur in the aftermath of the 1967 war. His theory was that Lewis, like many Jews living in Europe and the United States at the time, had dismissed the state of Israel as the pipe-dream of left-wing idealists and was certain that it had no real chance of survival--not because of Arab opposition necessarily, but because Utopian experiments always fail. The '67 war turned the heads of many Jewish doubters, and Lewis may have been one whose head was turned. For in the wake of the '67 war, Israel appeared to be, in reality, not a Utopian experiment at all, but a Western-financed base of military muscle in an oil-rich region. Geo-politically speaking, Israel made a lot of sense.

Whether or not this was or is Lewis's reasoning is really known only to Lewis himself. It is truly baffling however to read his 1958 essay "On Writing the Modern History of the Middle East" and then compare it to his productions on what-went-wrong-with-Islam of the last decade or so. The former is a measured and scholarly study; the latter reads as if the scholar enlisted Paul Wolfowitz as his ghost writer.

As the late Edward Said asked in his review of Lewis's What Went Wrong With Islam?: What went wrong with Bernard Lewis?

We may never know for sure.