Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying During Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
Assaying Entropy IV: Covid and America
Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America
Elbridge Gerry, who signed the Declaration of Independence but refused to sign the Constitution, said in a debate in the Constitutional Convention that he had been once overly democratic. I wonder about quantifying democracy. Does it mean he was for some power to the people? Or, does it mean power to some people? Or, does it mean some power to some people? It all sounds undemocratic to me. Let that thought hang over the assaying that follows.
I spoke in the last essay about the pressure that our corporate economic system puts on our political system, how an essentially undemocratic system disturbs our intent to be politically democratic. There is another system we all live in which similarly is undemocratic in organization and practice and similarly pushes against democracy by being so embedded in our lives that we accept its ethos automatically. That is the military, to which we devote the vast majority of our public funds.
We were warlike colonies – English, Spanish, French, and Dutch – participating in and instigating military actions regularly against natives and against other Europeans. We gained independence by military action. Thereafter, we’ve engaged in over a hundred wars, invasions, military actions (some against American labor strikers). In over 200 years of our history, the country has had only 15 years of peace. The number of young men who have served in the military during their formative years is enormous. If the War of Independence created the political entity of our country, our physical reality was created through countless wars of conquest across North America. Frederick Turner’s Frontier Thesis celebrated the American “character” as one formed by those wars of conquest as “civilization” conquered “wilderness” in a confrontation between a known “us” and a foreign, barbaric, and threatening “it.”
No other country even comes close to us in belligerence. We’ve just come out of America’s longest war, and seem headed for another one, even while our present military proxy engagements in Yemen and Ukraine are still ongoing. We are so used to war, we hardly notice it (one of the complaints of Korean War vets when they came home). Appropriately, our national anthem is about wartime pride.
Top-down military structures – like top-down corporate structures – imprint themselves whenever the presumably egalitarian government looks for efficiency, so all executive departments are hierarchies of power, and this form of organization is repeated down to local law enforcement departments (which functions as the internal version of the military) or local fire departments. The military invests significantly in major movies about war; it funds over half of pertinent studies in Universities; it places military history teachers in high schools all over the US. Like millions of other American boys, I was made comfortable with military hierarchy, ritual, and regimen in the Boy Scouts: woke to Reveille, ate at Mess Call, gathered at Assembly, and slept at Taps.
Familiarity with the military and with war makes the cultural impact of a military ethos hardly visible, but surely deep. Military terminology like “logistics” transfers easily to the commercial world. Is it too far-fetched to see a connection between our love of the military and our fetishistic love of guns, especially, military style weapons now called “modern sporting rifles”? The Jeep has been a commercial success for three quarters of a century. General Motors is reviving the Hummer. Military clothing continues to be in style. What might be loosely called militarism is commonplace in American attitudes; we revere toughness, bravery, the fighting spirit, leadership, strategy, and like it or not, we recognize the value of disciplined efficiency.
Paradoxically, resistance to military hierarchy, that traditional divide between elite officers and the enlisted man, has come from the militaristic impulses of Turner’s frontier character. We in the Southwest are familiar with the mythology of the frontier, its romance, its heroism, its violence, its paranoia. We recognize that ruggedly anti-authoritarian, insubordinate, anti-intellectual, plain-speaking, self-sufficient, and self-made frontiersman. Sometimes a criminal and always a loner, this figure’s individualized and personal code of fairness and justice dominates our movie world. In Kahneman’s terms this mythic figure values fast think and denigrates slow think because he (and increasingly she), as a frontiersman in his own imagination, is always prepared for survival. He is the minuteman, militant but private defender of our freedoms. As militaristic fantasy, the frontier figure generates in us all the desire of imitation, and we adopt, willy-nilly, his stance of independence and individuality.
But in reality, the frontiersman has had a difficult time in the military. The volunteer militias performed poorly in the War of Independence. Washington had an enormous problem with desertion in his army in spite of floggings, executions, and, then, pardons. [Harry Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army.] Throughout American history, the citizen army has been a headache for the military, and the anti-war movement within the military during the Vietnam War finally caused the country to move to an entirely “professional” (read, “hired”) army joined by mercenary corporations. This transformation of citizen “service” into a “job” (the merging of the military and the corporate), a loss of democracy, demonstrates the tragedy of trying to achieve a collective equality while thinking individually, or to put it another way, the paradox of fighting militarism with militarism. Resistance seems to mirror what it resists. Michel Foucault called it “subjectification,” becoming a subject (or agent) of power by being subject to power.
It may also demonstrate the growing power of the “great national threat” that President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” That conjunction of two hierarchic, undemocratic systems continues many times stronger, more extensive, more invasive than in 1961. Our military industry, the largest in the world by far, contributes a noticeable part of the nation’s economy, and that industry is mostly managed by former military personnel.
Sandwiched between corporate hierarchy and military hierarchy, democracy, as an idea of equality, hardly has space to develop, and given the ways in which these two institutions flood American society and culture with their energies and values, American democracy has very little to do with the word’s meaning. When we position ourselves as “democratic” against “authoritarianism,” we simply are saying – without knowing it – that those authoritarians in China are economic or military competitors to our own authoritarian structures. Hierarchic thought in America turns democracy into its weapon by instilling in us the idea that we are who we are because we are individual, unique identities with our own individual minds thinking our own individual opinions, making us all good workers (obligated to live up to our contracts which we enter into by choice) and good consumers.
As a result, American democratic thinking obscures the meaning of collective ideas such as democracy, society, culture, or even history or language. That individuals are formed by their societies and cultures, by the ideas, attitudes, and histories of those societies and languages violates American individualism. We talk of “our” words (or “our” ideas or “our” opinions) as if the words were not words by being the words of others in the past. Our self-love prevents us from seeing the whole as a whole but only as a conglomerate of independent wills. It’s a little like cells in your body deciding to be independent of you and trying to keep on growing instead of being constrained to their places and functions. What do we call that?
Among major American institutions only the unions have clung through its ups and downs to the democratic principle (or maybe, rhetoric) of equality. The United Auto Workers quotes from the Declaration of Independence in the preamble of its constitution. The organization is dedicated to economic equality in the society as a collective whole, and for several decades unions succeeded in narrowing the wealth gap. This collective effect could not be achieved by individuals increasing their own wealth since individuals climbing the ladder only increase the collective inequality of wealth.
But the union’s position is radical because equality is radical. Democracy is a totalizing concept. It cannot be quantified into more or less democracy. Apologetic phrases such as “equal before the law” are not democratic because if equality only means that we are all born equal but grow into a life of inequality, then it only states a fact of life that everyone knows. It only has significance as a political idea that asserts a life of inequality is unacceptable, a violation of the natural equality of power (the kratos of democracy), and asserts that equality can be formed into a political and social and economic structure, i.e., a democracy.
I will continue my meditations on collective and individual points of view by looking at American education in my next essay.