When Abraham Lincoln was re-elected in 1864,
Karl Marx congratulated him on behalf of the International Workingmen's
Association (1). Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London,
replied on his behalf: "The government of the United States has a clear
consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at
the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning,
of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It
strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it
relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and
for respect and good will throughout the world. Nations do not exist for
themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by
benevolent intercourse and example." President George Bush's "You are
either with us or against us" suggests that Lincoln's party has changed.
But how and why?
American nationalism has always alternated
brutal realism with rhetorical idealism. The idealism, cynically exploited
by the realists, was a danger to them. Suppose their fellow citizens were
to take the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence seriously?
The US as described by Alexis de Tocqueville,
with its contrasts of localism and mobility, materialism and religiosity,
privatisation and boastful nationalism, is still with us. It is the
commercial republic deplored by Thomas Jefferson when he died in 1826,
five years before De Tocqueville's visit. Jefferson, like his successors
on the left, missed the redemptive universalism of the Declaration of
Independence. It remains in the nation's self-conception, not as a
community of memory but as a church or, rather, sect. Anyone can join by
agreeing to its tenets. That has made possible the inclusion, however
imperfectly, of Catholic and Protestant, Gentile and Jew, white and black,
European, Latino and Asian.
The present government practices a surrealist
fusion of genres. The Bush administration demands human rights in Iran,
then asks a US court to stop a lawsuit against the multi-national, Exxon,
for complicity in repression in Indonesia.
Those who recall Stalinism will recognise the
symptoms. Stalin, however, did not dispose of the means to commodify
opinion, perfected in American capitalism for more than a century. The
Bush government belongs to a cynical elite long used to buying opinions
and politicians, at home and abroad. The regime includes fanatical
Protestant fundamentalists, convinced that the US is playing a preordained
part in a Biblical epic of good against evil, confident of America's right
to command (2).
How did this come about, after the relative
modernity of the Clinton government, its alliances with multinational
capital, its cooler version of US supremacy, its inclusion of foreign
elites in a new global design, its minimalist version of international
social democracy?
Is Bush a pseudo-traditionalist or a
pseudo-modernist? The Republicans were originally the mortal opponents of
slavery. Theirs was also the party of continental expansion (Lincoln
served in the Mexican war) (3), of forced industrialisation, of limitless
European immigration. Its supreme goal was the defence of the American
experiment and of national interests, in a world unredeemed. Its economic
elements were freedom of trade for the US, protective tariffs for its
economy and the importation of capital.
At the end of the 19th century US triumphalism
turned outward. The West having been won, there was surplus energy for the
conquest of new worlds. Public opinion, chauvinist and interventionist,
demanded war on Spain. The Philippines were acquired by the Republican
McKinley (1897-1901) in a fit of moral imperialism.
Warfare-welfare state
When the occupation resulted in a struggle
against the Filipino independence movement, a cross-class movement of
American dissent ensued, in striking anticipation of the Vietnam debate.
(Recall the 1968 episode in which the "wise men" - our ruling class -
instructed Lyndon Johnson that he had to end a war costing too much in
internal disruption and money.) McKinley could count on the new
capitalism's expansiveness. American imperialism, its ideological roots in
American millennialism, was born.
It was institutionalised by McKinley's
successor. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908) was a reformer who sought to
integrate the new immigrants, domesticate the new capitalism. He took the
US into the concert of great powers. He incited revolution in Columbia to
create a new nation, Panama, so as to build the canal. He declared that
the US possessed, in the western hemisphere, "an international police
power".
Roosevelt's was a social imperialism continued
in the warfare-welfare state of his successors. There was opposition. The
churches, some of the secular intelligentsia, and the socialists voiced
moral disquiet. The farmers of the populist movement were provincial
enemies of urban modernity. They held that the new empire did nothing for
them. They fathered the embittered isolationism of the inter-war years,
which fought within the Republican party with the internationalism of the
bankers and industrialists.
The Republicans eventually rejected Roosevelt
because of his economic reforms, but ceded the presidency to the
Democratic reformer, Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). Wilson was a Calvinist
moral imperialist who intensified intervention in Latin America. His
Democratic government continued the integration of the new immigrants,
especially Catholic, in politics. The internationalist segments of capital
welcomed his war on Germany. Opposition came from the socialists, and from
the populist segment of the Democrats, whose leader, William Jennings
Bryan, resigned as Secretary of State.
But the war united ideologues of the new
imperialism, the technocratic intelligentsia, capital, and much of the
labour movement, in an expanded federal government. Wilson's project, US
membership in the League of Nations, failed because of opposition from
opposed camps. The isolationists of both parties took their revenge for a
war they did not want, the unilateralists envisaged autonomous use of the
new American power. Wilson's great Republican adversary, Senator Lodge,
was a New England patrician who held that the nation's hour had come: it
was now the world's strongest power.
In the inter-war years a national foreign
policy elite set policies for the troubled peace and prepared for the next
war. Academics, bankers, editors, lawyers for large-scale national and
international capital, they were mostly eastern and Protestant. Meeting in
the Council on Foreign Relations, they influenced government and opinion.
They set the foreign policy agenda, distinguished responsible from
irresponsible ideas. John Foster Dulles, future Secretary of State under
Dwight Eisenhower (1953-961), was one of their leading figures, while
representing the Third Reich as a lawyer. Nelson Rockefeller persuaded the
Council to sponsor his younger protégé, Harvard professor Henry Kissinger.
The elite staffed both Democratic and
Republican governments. There were policy divisions within it, but there
was unanimity on the importance of US power. Of course, the eastern and
Wall Street elements of the Republican party were dominant in the elite.
They had to struggle in their own party, however, with the active remnants
of mid-western progressivism and populism. Distrustful of Wall Street,
economically, these Republicans were isolationists, often on explicit
class grounds. Their isolationism was joined to that of the Germans and
Irish, who abjured the alliance with Great Britain.
The Democratic party under Franklin Roosevelt
(president 1933-1945) was a contradictory coalition of socialists and
trade unionists, technocrats and bankers. It incorporated onetime
Republican progressives and provided a political home for Catholics and
Jews. Roosevelt's internationalism was Wilsonian, with a social democratic
cast. The divisions in his own party as well as the Republican versions of
internationalism forced on him and his successor, Harry Truman
(1945-1953), an alliance with capital in the warfare-welfare state.
The Republicans abandoned isolationism in
1941. But, in the form of McCarthyism and a distrust of Europeans, they
provided their mid-western and small town electoral clientele (and later
the southerners) with a truculent nationalism. The Protestant churches
supported missions in China for a century, and were especially bitter
about Chinese communism. The unilateralism of this segment of the
Republicans was visible in their distrust of arms control, their
attraction to thermonuclear theology, their rhetorical bellicosity. What
is striking is that Republican presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and
even Reagan and Bush Senior) obeyed the foreign policy elite and were as
multilateralist as the Democrats.
The covert activities of the CIA, active
economic, political and military interventions in every part of the world
and the brutal manipulation of alliances were all as characteristic of the
Democrats as of the Republicans. Looking back, many of the differences
seem relatively insignificant. With the exception of Reagan, the
Republican presidents did not directly attack the social contract: they
welcomed its inner decomposition as American capitalism changed.
A radical departure
How is the present president different? His
New England grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a partner of the wealthiest of
New Deal Democrats, Averill Harriman. Prescott, Governor and Senator in
Connecticut, accepted Franklin Roosevelt's internationalism, and his
social contract. His son, Bush Senior, the former president, left New
England for post-war Texas as its economy enlarged from cattle, cotton and
oil to arms, banking and technology; electorally unsuccessful in Texas, he
owed his political career to his business connections. (He had been
ambassador to China and the UN and a director of the CIA before becoming
Reagan's vice-president.) He was visibly uncomfortable, as a
representative of the older Republican elite, at the head of a Reaganised,
plebianised party. When campaigning for president, he resigned from the
Council on Foreign Relations: some Republican primitives thought it was a
conspiracy to terminate US sovereignty.
His son, now president, is free of these
constraints. He excelled in Texas politics. He did not frontally attack
its welfare state, and worked with blacks and Hispanics. He defeated a
stellar Democratic governor, Ann Richards, and filled empty ideological
space with the language of personalised and ritualised religion. The
Democrats deride Bush for his nepotism, for treating politics as part of
business. But Bush grasps an essential aspect of American capitalism, its
integration of the entire public sphere in the market. His business allies
(and his father, active as investor, lobbyist, even salesman) are involved
in arms, financial services, petrochemicals and technology. Bush put their
representatives in command of the Federal agencies and departments.
To flatter the nation, Bush constantly
contrasts a hostile or indifferent world beyond its borders with an intact
and healthy society within it. The limited inclusiveness of Bush's
hesitantly welfarist domestic programme evokes the effective period of US
social imperialism - the years 1941 to 1964. The reluctant realisation by
many citizens that much of American capitalism is a criminal enterprise
makes social consensus difficult to maintain (4).
The government tries to compensate by
developing a bellicose rhetoric. The Democratic party, in bondage to the
Israel lobby, which seeks nothing so much as war on Iraq (and, if
possible, Iran too), is unlikely to awake from its present political coma.
It has not recovered from the judicial coup of the 2000 elections.
The Democrats are experiencing an ideological
nightmare. Bush is aware that he is dependent on the near absence of
opposition. He rules as a minority president, moving from one ad hoc
majority to another. The 11 September attack was an opportunity to
proclaim a limitless emergency. The vacuity of Bush's ideology is
combined, however, with authentic mastery of the considerable repressive
apparatus of the American state. Bush constantly evokes the nation as a
church but his version of Republicanism reduces it to a decomposing
tribalism.
