Too Democratic?
By Matt makes an important point here:
A new theory is gaining steam — problems are due to Hollywood and the entertainment media which has failed to produce enough propaganda movies rather than the news media.
In part, this is just low partisanship. I think, however, that it also reflects a real ideological error. The dominant political movement in the United States seems to genuinely believe that democracy itself is a series of potentially intolerable impediments to American national security.
The first response to almost any difficulty is to decide that we need to chuck one of the system’s building blocks overboard. Democracy makes it harder to cheat on international agreements, free speech is a threat to morale, legal restraints on the intelligence apparatus are holding us back. Such things as legislative oversight of the executive and the existence of a professional bureaucracy are intolerable. When disaster relief efforts go poorly, the solution is domestic deployment of the military. Even political competition itself over questions of national security policy is a form of aid and comfort to the enemy.
Kingdaddy reinforces the point that this is not a new tendency:
Back in the good old days of the Cold War, when national security was merely a question of figuring out how to keep a global thermonuclear war from erupting, some pundits who had stared into the abyss of the Soviet Union found themselves questioning the foundations of Western democracy. Case in point: Arnaud de Borchgrave, the conservative author of, among other things, a few lamentable essays in the 1980s about the “ungovernability” of Western democracies. Books like The Crisis of Democracy became faddish in circles where a certain breed of conservative worried that Soviet totalitarianism was proving to be a more organized, efficient, and competitive form of goverment than the sloppy, disputatious liberal democracies. I’m sure that everyone who contributed to this intellectual fad is now embarassed, having seen the “competitive” totalitarian model crumble under the weight of corruption, disaffection, and illegitimacy.
Perhaps we have to be a bit forgiving of Arnaud de Borchgrave and his fellow travelers. After all, until the very end, the USSR put on a very brave face. If you watched the May Day parades of military might, you might conclude that the Soviets remained a determined threat, even while it slowly transformed itself from the tyranny that built Potemkin villages, to the ethnically distinct villages that grew tired of the Potemkin regime.
So, too, people looking at pre-invasion Iraq might conclude that the Ba’athist regime was far more menacing than it was. However, it’s not necessary to be all that forgiving, since the signs of Soviet and Iraqi weakness were there. Instead, you might conclude that a certain kind of pundit or politician wanted to believe in a greater threat than the real USSR or Iraq. The neo-conservatives who peddled their anxious fantasies to anyone who would listen never seemed to have paused to ask themselves, “Is Saddam Hussein as dangerous as we think?”
The willingness to believe in the Iraqi threat, bordering on an eagerness to believe, is what made the abyss fascinating to the point of distraction. It generated fears about our own lack of “competitiveness” that led to excessive secrecy, crackpot theories about the “unitary executive,” and a willingness to gamble on an extremely risky venture. Fearing that it might fall into the abyss involuntarily, the Bush Administration and its supporters felt that jumping into the abyss of our own volition was somehow preferable.
Right. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was conveniently forgottent that many conservatives (including the Team B types) believed that the Soviet capacity to mobilize its society would prove too much for the United States to handle. Democracy was great in the abstract, this line of thought went, but was insufficient to meet the threat of a totalitarian foe. The idea has a long pedigree in conservative circles; Carl Schmitt argued, essentially, that democracies were simply inadequate to the demands of the international system. Hans Morgenthau, in a more qualified, less direct way, made the same argument in Politics Among Nations. The unimaginable and almost certainly unstoppable power of the Soviet Union was a critical theme in the first half of the Reagan administration, and found its way into pop culture via Hollywood. Red Dawn and Rocky IV, for example, are both about an inhumanly powerful Soviet threat, one that can only be overcome by American pluck, commitment, and, I daresay, Will.
And now, again, we see the conservatives begin to suggest that we fail in Iraq because of fundamental flaws in our way of life. Our propaganda isn’t good enough, and our media has too much freedom, our national security apparatus allow too much difference of opinion, and our generals are allowed to criticize after retirement. Finally, our democratic system has made us too soft and too weak to do the things that need to be done.
Democracy: Great in the abstract and a useful bludgeon, but don’t let it slow you down.