Democracy Incorporated Part 16

14. President George W. Bush, September 14, 2001, in the National Cathedral, cited in NSS, 5.

15. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, [1974], 1980), 196.

16. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. William Finlayson Trotter (London: Dent, 1948), no. 233, p. 67.

17. I have followed the text as printed in the New York Times, January 24, 2007, A-16.

18. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139, 148, 155.

CHAPTER TWO.

TOTALITARIANISM'S INVERSION: BEGINNINGS OF THE

IMAGINARY OF A PERMANENT GLOBAL WAR.

1. Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 46. Kennan was speaking at the Naval War College.

2. Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Const.i.tution (New York: Knopf, 1947), 4. A respected contemporary of Corwin's, Bernard Brodie, wrote, "To a community alerted to national danger the F.B.I. or its counterpart becomes the first line of defense, and the encroachment on civil liberties which would necessarily follow would far exceed in magnitude and pervasiveness anything which democracies have thus far tolerated in peacetime." The Atomic Bomb and American Security, 9, cited by Corwin, 9.

3. The Oxford Universal Dictionary, rev. and ed. C. T. Onions, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

4. Quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 45.

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, n.d.), 64, 112, 113.

6. The Doolittle study group on foreign intelligence, reporting to President Eisenhower, advised that the nature of the enemy set the standard for American intelligence: "We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. . . . There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective means than those used against us." Quoted in Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 34.

7. Michael Ignatieff, as quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 25.

8. In what follows I am not suggesting that the New Dealers and FDR entertained totalitarian designs. They did not; it is, however, a well-tested homily that power claims may be established and exercised by those who have no dark designs, but those same claims may be exploited by successors whose purposes are unbenevolent.

9. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 1. The Age of Roosevelt consisted of three volumes; in citing them, I shall refer to the subt.i.tles, e.g., The Coming of the New Deal.

10. Cited in Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 95, 13, 3.

11. At the time there were writers and journalists who strongly sympathized with Mussolini (e.g., George Bernard Shaw) or the USSR (Walter Duranty, John Reed).

12. See Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 92.

13. See ibid., 184.

14. For examples of the hostile anticapitalist rhetoric, see ibid., 9293, 115, 12021.

15. The three movements are discussed-for the most part critically-in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 43 ff., 242 ff., 327 ff. (Long); 16 ff., 556 ff., 62730 (Coughlin); and 3341, 55060, 62627 (Townsend). For a perceptive account of Long and Coughlin, see the splendid study by Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Random House, 1982). For a broader discussion of populism prior to as well as beyond the 1930s, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995); for the earlier movement, see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

16. Long's record is discussed in Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 2435.

17. Brinkley unfavorably contrasts the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century with Long's Share the Wealth and Coughlin's Social Justice. Ibid., 16067. He argues persuasively that the Populists succeeded in genuinely involving the rank and file, while Long and Coughlin did not.

18. James MacGregor Burns has drawn attention to FDR's speech of January 1944 that called for "a second Bill of Rights" which would emphasize education, jobs, health care, and housing. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 424. This speech came to my attention in the essay by Taylor Branch, "Justice for Warriors," New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007, 4043, at 42.

19. Quoted by Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 14. As his source Bacevich cites Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 128.

20. Quoted by Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 12. Oddly, Reagan was quoting the eighteenth-century radical Tom Paine.

21. The depiction of j.a.panese soldiers and kamikaze fliers excepted.

22. Shortly after the end of World War I the so-called Palmer Raids (Palmer was the U.S. attorney general) resulted in the violation of virtually every procedural safeguard including deportation of aliens without trial.

23. It is often forgotten that the United States actively intervened in the Bolshevik Revolution, siding with its opponents, the so-called White Russians.

24. Michael J. Hogan makes the point that conservatives succeeded in decoupling "the national security state" from "the economic and social policies of the New Deal." A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 19451954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 36465.

25. Ibid., 365.

26. Senator Hubert Humphrey, who became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, was the primary sponsor of the Communist Control Act of 1954, which declared the American communists to present "a clear and present danger" and deprived the party of "all rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies."

27. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, l962), xxiiiii, xxiv. The first edition was published in 1949. Although the first edition was published before the McCarthy phenomenon, the second edition made no mention of it. Schlesinger also followed the line of NSC-68: the United States is in "a permanent crisis" with "no a.s.surance that any solution is possible" to "the tensions between ourselves and Russia." The Vital Center, 9, 10. There is an interesting contrast between the critical view of the business community expressed in the first edition and the more comfortable views in the foreword to the second edition. See 3334, 153. For Schlesinger's critical view of workers and unions, especially for the communist influences, see 4647, 120, 18788. Schlesinger's embrace of Niebuhrian pessimism leads to a remarkable pa.s.sage where war becomes the savior of American democracy because it heals divisions. "It is perhaps fortunate for the continuity of the American development that the Civil War came along to heal the social wounds opened up in the age of Jackson; that one world war closed the rifts created by the New Freedom and another those of the New Deal" (173).

28. According to Bernard Baruch, one of the unofficial sages consulted by American officials since World War I, "Our aim should be to organize the nation so that every factory and farm, every man, every dollar, every bit of material can be put to use where it will strengthen our defenses." Quoted in Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 342.

29. This is the viewpoint of Gaddis, The Cold War, especially 22224, 264.

30. The quotations are from the National Security Council (1950), and the officials cited include Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and Paul Nitze. I have taken the quotations from Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 300.

31. Ibid., 12. NSC-68 is reproduced and discussed from various perspectives in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, ed. Ernest R. May (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1993).

32. "The potential within us of bearing witness to the values by which we live holds promise for a dynamic manifestation to the rest of the world of the vitality of our system. The essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations are a.s.sets of potentially enormous influence." NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, in Naval War College Review 27 (MayJune 1975): 51108; VI-A, p. 2.

33. Ibid., a.n.a.lysis, I, II, p. 3.

34. Ibid., III-A, pp. 45.

35. Ibid., V-A, p. 9.

36. Ibid., IV-B, p. 6.

37. Ibid., VI-A, p. 3.

38. Ibid., VIII, p. 14.

39. Ibid., VIII, p. 13.

40. Ibid., III-B, p. 6 ; C, p. 7. The strategy of encouraging peoples in the satellite nations to revolt was tested in the ill-fated Hungarian revolt in 1956 when, despite the desperate pleas from Hungarian resistance fighters, the United States did nothing.

41. NSC-68, VI, pp. 7, 10, 11.

42. Ibid., VI-B, p. 10.

43. Ibid., VIII, pp. 13, 14.

44. Ibid., VI-A, pp. 23.

45. Ibid., VIII, p. 13.

46. See John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 34, 44144.

47. NSC-68, VII-A, p. 9.

48. Ibid., Conclusions and Recommendations, p. 1.

49. Ibid., IV-B, p. 6 ; C, p. 7.

50. Quoted in Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 330.

51. Quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 8.

52. Quoted in ibid., 7. According to the minutes of the March 1953 meeting of the National Security Council, "the President and Secretary Dulles were in complete agreement that somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed." Quoted in ibid., 8.

53. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 19461948 (New York: Knopf, 1975), 196, 243, 272, 298.

54. Gaddis, The Cold War, 80.

55. See Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 46970, 473; also the spirited contemporary polemic, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, by Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997).

56. I have relied on the excellent account in Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 11957. See also Freeland, The Truman Doctrine, 28185.

57. See the numerous references and discussion in Hogan, A Cross of Iron (see references in his index under "garrison state").

58. The fact that the n.a.z.i regime was proudly racist evoked little self-examination by Americans of their own support and toleration of racism. Throughout the war segregation was enforced in the American armed forces.

59. On the government's recruitment of intellectuals, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000).

60. Cited in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 44.

61. See Hogan's account in A Cross of Iron (42644) of the "Freedom Train" and the role of corporate sponsors; and also of the tragicomic episode in Mosinee, Wisconsin, where the town produced a mock communist takeover of the town.

62. Quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 34. The study group was chaired by General James Doolittle, who had led the first bombing raid on Tokyo during World War II.

63. Ibid., 9297. See also the brilliant study by Michael Rogin, McCarthy and the Intellectuals: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). For the impact on the State Department, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 36265. For a readable account emphasizing the effects of McCarthyism upon the media, see Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005).

64. Gaddis, The Cold War, 192.

65. NSC-68, Conclusions, p. 4.

66. Gaddis, The Cold War, 79.

67. On the messianic element, see Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 298, 384; and on the defense economy, see ibid., 47273.

68. See the discussion in James P. Young, Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea (Boulder, Colo.: West-view Press, 1996), 60 ff., 166 ff., 276 ff. Also Christopher Lasch's splendid The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), especially 455 ff.

69. "The effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups." Samuel P. Huntington, "The Democratic Distemper," in The American Commonwealth: 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 37.

70. Elitism was not solely an academic construction. Here is Dean Acheson describing NSC-68 as "a formidable doc.u.ment [that] presents more than a clinic in political science's latest, most fas.h.i.+onable, and most boring study, 'the decision-making process,' for it carries us beyond decisions to what should be their fruits, action. If it is helpful to think of societies as ent.i.ties, it is equally so to consider their direction centers as groups of cells, thinking cells, action cells, emotion cells, and so on. The society operates best, improves its chances of survival most, in which the thinking cells work out a fairly long-range course of conduct before the others take over-provided it also has a little bit better than average luck. We [i.e., the authors of NSC-68] had an excellent group of thought cells. . . . In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical 'average American citizen' put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. a.s.suming a man or a woman with a fair education, a family, and a job in or out of the house, it seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average. . . . [Our] points to be understandable had to be clear. If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise." Acheson, Present at the Creation, 37475.

CHAPTER THREE.

TOTALITARIANISM'S INVERSION, DEMOCRACY'S PERVERSION

1. New York Times, June 9, 1991. See Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 68.

2. "2nd Presidential Debate . . . ," New York Times, October 12, 2000, A-20.

3. Hans Mommsen, "c.u.mulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the n.a.z.i Dictators.h.i.+p," in Stalinism and n.a.z.ism: Dictators.h.i.+p in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Levin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75.

4. "The Bush Doctrine," Weekly Standard, June 4, 2001. Cited in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 83.

5. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2004), 72 describes how after World War I, German politics and culture were saturated with talk of violence.

6. The remark is attributed to Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform.