“Dictatorship Vs Democracy”: Republicans Are Trying To Exercise Powers That Do Not Rightly Belong To Them
Readers familiar with my work know that one of my favorite quotes about the nature of politics, and democracies in particular, comes from Walter Lippmann’s Essays in the Public Philosophy, where the preeminent American journalist of the 20th century tried in 1955 to diagnose why fascism and other forms of dictatorship took root in democratic Europe in the early decades of the last century.
It is possible to govern a great state without giving the masses of people full representation, writes Lippmann. “But it is not possible to go on for long without a government which can and does in fact govern.”
If, because of gridlock, stalemate, partisanship and implacable polarization people find “they must choose whether they will be represented in an assembly which is incompetent to govern, or whether they will be governed without being represented, there is no doubt at all as to how the issue will be decided,” writes Lippmann. “They will choose authority, which promises to be paternal, in preference to freedom which threatens to be fratricidal.”
Because the truth is, says Lippmann, large communities cannot do without being governed. “No ideal of freedom and of democracy will long be allowed to stand in the way of their being governed.”
The standoff between President Obama and the Republican hardliners over the sequester is not, at the end of the day, about taxes and spending.
It is, rather, about whether America can remain a viable democracy in which the country is able to move forward with a program once that program has been put to a vote — as President Obama’s plan of a balance between spending cuts and tax hikes was in the last election — or whether a determined minority supported by little more than 20% of the public will still be able to leverage tools that were crafted two centuries before to arm the minority against majority “tyranny” in order to dictate surrender terms to that majority by holding the nation’s government and economy hostage.
Republicans who insist that President Obama show “leadership” in this crisis by “capitulating” to their political demands are engaging in the same cynical wordplay for which the GOP has become famous. For like those who said the only way to save the village was to destroy it, Republicans say the President must save the nation from the “devastating” consequences of $85 billion in budget cuts by cutting another $85 billion from the budget — only not from defense and without new taxes, which are “off the table.”
But the darker side of these calls for executive action to overcome legislative gridlock is the one that Walter Lippmann understood so well decades ago. It’s one the President referred to obliquely in his press conference when he reminded reporters who wanted to know why he did not just “do something” to end the standoff that presidents under our Constitution are not “dictators” (Obama used that word) who can dispatch the Secret Service like a Praetorian Guard to prevent legislators from catching their planes or forcing these duly-elected, if recalcitrant, democratic leaders to do a thing once they’ve made up their minds not to.
It does not take a genius — or unhinged conspiracy theorist – to imagine that one strategy a right wing authoritarian movement might employ to concentrate political power in the hands of a few would be to: First, allow the wealthy to make unlimited, untraceable political contributions; Second, strike down the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional as part of a broader strategy to disenfranchise the right wing’s opposition; and finally, make democracy so unworkable that a frustrated public chooses “authority to freedom” just as Lippmann predicted.
The rise of Hitler, as Lippmann points out, was fueled and facilitated by the German public’s frustration with a dysfunctional German parliament unable to govern because it had become a battleground between parties of the extreme left and right.
What’s been extraordinary in the recent stalemate over the sequester, however, is that the flight from democracy to dictatorship which Lippmann foretold if popular government proved incompetent to govern, has not been evident among the American people, who are standing solidly with the President.
Instead, it’s Washington’s political class who’ve blinked first, unnerved perhaps by the dysfunction of a political system they no longer understand nor control.
A good example is Ron Fournier, writer for the National Journal and former Washington Bureau Chief for the Associated Press, who says Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans. But, paraphrasing Bill Joel, Fournier nevertheless insists: “You may be right, Mr. President, but this is crazy.”
Even though the public sides with Obama and gives Republicans “pathetic approval ratings,” Fournier still blames Obama for the GOP’s stonewalling because “in any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure.”
Even if Congress is factually to blame, Fournier says “there is only one president” and even “if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history. Fair or not, the president owns this mess.”
The impulse to let the bullies have their way also helps explain, I think, why Bob Woodward has made a fool of himself empowering Republican obstructionists as he, wrongly, accuses the President of “moving the goal posts” when Obama insists on the very same balanced package of deficit-cutting tax hikes and spending cuts the President has been pushing all along, ever since Republicans first pushed the nation to the brink of insolvency two years ago in an effort to win concessions on spending through extortion they could not win democratically at the ballot box.
As John Harwood writes in the New York Times, Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt so much as they aim “to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve.”
President Obama acknowledges that some entitlement cuts are needed to keep the programs solvent, says Harwood. He also based his reelection on the choice he gave voters for his smaller cuts combined with tax increases on affluent Americans versus the Republicans’ bigger ones without tax increases.
Americans chose Obama’s approach. Even surveys today show 50 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance while only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party, said Harwood. Among demographic groups, the only group that views Republicans more positively than negatively are white Southerners, and even then it was by just 39 percent to 35 percent.
“More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity,” said Harwood.
Republicans today are trying to exercise powers that do not rightly belong to them, at least not democratically. So why are so many Beltway elites willing to let them?
It’s the nation’s political elites who seem to be abandoning democracy, not the masses, as they urge Obama to flex executive muscles he does not possess or surrender unconditionally to the non-negotiable demands of an ideological minority that knows it can’t win elections outright but also that the country can’t move forward without it just so long as its capacity for manufacturing crisis after crisis remains undiminished.
By: Ted Frier, Salon, Open Salon Blog, March 10, 2013
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