The Clown and the Spectre

Every intellectual circle needs its catalyst, its goad to spur passed dogmatic lethargy or collective agreement and Morgan has done an invaluable service in being so terribly wrong so often. He is both the darling of the party and its scratching post, and my claws owe him so much sharpness. That said, Morgan frequently plays the role of clown with a bit too much fervor, often by personalizing global political shifts as if he were a direct participant. It takes very little depth psychology to see that the glee he extracts from the current contagion of democracy is bruited about to atone for his past political sins: the belief in the late 90’s that “Capital” would soon collapse; a few kind words for Milosevic during the Dayton accords; and a Chomskyite dalliance with the Taliban back in March of ’01. For shame. Evidence of his bad conscience abounds in his prose. What sort of gnarled and bitter gnome would claim that: “I feel, in many ways, that I missed out on the wonders of the collapse of the Soviet empire partly because of my smoldering Marxian resentments. I don't intend to repeat that mistake.”

How completely bizarre! You’d have to be either a bilious Marxist poseur or Norman Podhoretz to indulge in those sentiments, and Morgan, at times, aims for both. Luckily for him, I believe his “missing out” on the “wonders of collapse of the Soviet Empire” is a tendentiously silly exaggeration. By my calculation he was but a youth of 16 when the Soviet empire began to crumble and 18 when the Soviet Union itself became no more, which is a somewhat precious age to be holding on so dearly to the “smoldering Marxian resentments” of a 70 year old Berkeley professor, even if he really was reading Horkheimer in high school. “Baby tantrums of ideologists” indeed. It is one thing to play the politics of memory to cover one’s mistakes and smooth rough ideological transitions, but a whole other level of pathology and recherché pandering to create bad memories in need of expiation.

Now we have a full throated embrace from our red diaper baby for the bold new Bush doctrine: “And I don't intend to take it very seriously when I'm told that I can't have my cake and eat it too. Which would be to say that I can't be enthusiastic about the Bush Democracy Doctrine and still keep my critical credentials. Fuck that.” Well let me challenge those credentials and ask, just how critical of the Bush doctrine? If he has criticisms, any criticisms, let us hear them and then we can discuss what to take seriously. How does one square the democracy doctrine with the undemocratic means with which its catalyzing war in Iraq was launched; with the dark republic of torture that runs alongside it; and with the rabid disdain for democratic states -- “Old Europe” and Turkey – that thwarted America’s political will? Stripping a singular aspect to embrace from an otherwise loathsome foreign policy should never be done without heavy caveats. That said, as I’ve remarked on here, there are some intriguing instances in which Bush’s bold new “democratic globalism” is undercutting America’s hegemonic interest. When the Ayatollah Sistani mobilized over a 100,000 Iraqis onto the streets of Bagdhad to oppose the CPA’s rigged caucus plan, proconsul Paul Bremer was summoned back to Washington and told to accede to democratic demands. The US risked a popular uprising if it did not. In particular instances like this, it is possible both for a Leftist politics to support movements that are both democratic and anti-Imperial and for that delicious double billing we can’t afford to “miss out”.

But too often we read from Meis, not of any critical engagement in the successes and perils of democracy movements in the Mid-East and the former Soviet Union, but the cry “You go good people! Make good things happen!” A sweet sentiment but a real politics needs to run far deeper, especially if we are to engage in those changes. Marxism, like Jesuitism, leaves its imprint on the soul long after conversion and in following these impressions Morgan may be making similar mistakes. Marx, is his Communist Manifesto ominously and rapturously summons a “spectre that is haunting Europe,” and by naming it, invoking it, he believed he was making it manifest. But Marx was wrong, the “spectre” made substance, the contagion that infected and spread was not communism but national republicanism, a wave that swept Europe and left behind reordered nation-states, the rise of parliamentarianism and often, bourgeois enfranchisement. The revolutions of 1848 failed in their most “revolutionary” aspects because the three kinds of demands at their core —socio-economic, liberal, and national—were not easily reconciled. I understand that Morgan wants to exult in the current democratic moments, coloring in his map as to the next outbreak, but one can’t assume that those moments, as a matter of historical course, will leave sustainable democracies that genuinely provide freedom, justice and a better quality of life to their citizens. They are heartening for protending change but let's not indulge in messianism. It is the messianic aspects of Bush’s doctrine that the cynic is most suspicious of, especially those best expressed during the Presidents’ speech of March 8th at the National Defense University (a Morgan favorite):

"It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors.

It should be clear that the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies."

Bush is quit right that America should beneficently “kindle” free societies (which is more intensive a task than he has put to practice in Iraq), and that established democracies must support civil society movements within authoritarian regimes for democracy and justice. What he gets wrong is the claim that free societies are above unwarranted aggression or atrocities of their own. From 1969 to 1973 the United States covertly bombed the nation of Cambodia under the secret orders of Richard Nixon, a sideshow of terror that cost 500,000 civilian lives. What does this crime against humanity mean for the American Republic, what does it mean for democracy and its exportation? How could it have gone unpunished by the Republic? Democracy is not a panacea but an ideal and a method, and presently the best method for cracking apart the dictatorships of the Middle East. But let’s temper the Bush messianism with a little Niebuhrian awareness as to the sins of our country and the limits of democracy before lecturing the world on “radicalism and terror”.

Something is indeed happening in the world, and yes, it is often exciting, but what is its nature and impact? I propose that what we are witnessing, in some of the more notable instances, is a developing contestation between a renaissance of individual cultures versus a precarious parliamentary nationalism. To date, in the most prominent of recent “democratic” revolutions in Lebanon and Iraq, we’ve witnessed surging individual cultures stalemate inchoate nationalisms. The mobilization of Kurds, Shiites (Southern Iraq and Southern Lebanon), Sunnis, Christians and Druze, all agitating for increased representation must be made to fit into Lebanese or Iraqi nationalism if the states are to hold together. A multiethnic tapestry with all its bureaucratic mechanisms and checks and balances is a hard thing to rally around in the midst of so many historical grievances, violence and political jockeying. It is easy to cheer on varied democratic movements, but what if they can not adjudicate their grievances within the present boundaries of the nation-state? That is the real question should nationalism fail. And if it succeeds, what form of nationalism will exert enough henotic force to compel compliance? As Anatol Lieven has noted, a central feature of nationalism is precisely its ability to feed off a very wide range of “other resentments, loyalties, identities, hopes and fears.” One can admire Kurdish democratic movements as Morgan does, but is he willing to see it succeed (Kurdistan) at the cost of a unified Iraq? It is the difficulty in striking those delicate factional balances that have presently stalemated the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (see “Twisted Cedar” by Mitchell Prothero on Salon.com), and the Iraqi parliament is struggling through similar difficulties. Morgan, is not ignorant or blind to these problems; he just has a tendency to jump ahead, assuring us that they have already been resolved.

Coming Next: Imperial Democracy, Liberal Democracy and Indigenous Democracy plus a look at Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy”, the heart of the Bush doctrine as currently constituted.