THE SOURCES OF REPUBLICAN CONDUCT
By X Redux
Part I
The political personality of Republican power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Republican leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in the United States. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative role of each in the determination of official Republican conduct, yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to be understood and effectively countered....
It is difficult to summarize the set of ideological concepts with which the Republican leaders came into power. Conservative ideology, in its American projection, has always been in process of subtle evolution. The materials on which it bases itself are extensive and complex. But the outstanding features of conservative thought as it existed in from the 1950's may perhaps be summarized as follows: (a) that the central factor in the life of man, the factor which determines the character of public life and the "physiognomy of society," is the system by which wealth is produced and preserved; (b) that the capitalist system of production is a wholly benificent one which inevitably leads to the elimination of the poverty by the hard work of the capital-owning class and that only corporations are capable of developing adequately the economic resources of society or of distributing fairly the material good produced by human labor; (c) that liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and must, in view of the inability of the working class to adjust itself to economic change, result eventually and inescapably in a revolutionary transfer of power to the upper class; and (d) that freedom and liberty, the final phases of capitalism, lead directly from conservative values.
The rest may be outlined in the Neo-Conservative's own terms: Economic and political development is the inflexible law of capitalism. It follows from this that the victory of Freedom may come originally in a few capitalist countries or even in a single capitalist country. The victorious free people of that country, having encouraged the capitalists and having organized unfettered production at home, would rise against the remaining world, drawing to itself in the process the oppressed peoples of other countries. It must be noted that there was no assumption that oppression in the world would perish without conservative revolution. A final push was needed from a revolutionary conservative movement in order to tip over the tottering structure. But it was regarded as inevitable that sooner of later that push be given.
For 30 years prior to the outbreak of the conservative revolution, this pattern of thought had exercised great fascination for the members of conservative movement. Frustrated, discontented, hopeless of finding self-expression -- or too impatient to seek it -- in the confining limits of the liberal political system, yet lacking wide popular support or their choice of conservative revolution as a means of social betterment, these revolutionists found in Neo-Conservative theory a highly convenient rationalization for their own instinctive desires. It afforded pseudo-scientific justification for their impatience, for their categoric denial of all value in the liberal system, for their yearning for power and revenge and for their inclination to cut corners in the pursuit of it. It is therefore no wonder that they had come to believe implicitly in the truth and soundness of the Neo-Conservative teachings, so congenial to their own impulses and emotions. Their sincerity need not be impugned. This is a phenomenon as old as human nature itself. It is has never been more aptly described than by Edward Gibbon, who wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." And it was with this set of conceptions that the members of the Republican Party entered into power.
Now it must be noted that through all the years of preparation for the conservative revolution, the attention of these men had been centered less on the future form which conservatism would take than on the necessary overthrow of rival power which, in their view, had to precede the introduction of conservatism. Their views, therefore, on the positive program to be put into effect, once power was attained, were for the most part nebulous, visionary and impractical. Beyond give-aways to industry and the expropriation of large common interests there was no agreed program. The treatment of the middle class, which, according to the conservative formulation was not necessarily the engine of the American economy, had always been a vague spot in the pattern of conservative thought: and it remained an object of controversy and vacillation for the first ten years of Republican power.
The circumstances of the immediate post-revolution period -- the existence in the U.S. of political civil war and foreign threats, together with the obvious fact that the Neo-Conservatives represented only a tiny minority of the American people -- made the establishment of total power a necessity. The experiment with supply-side economics and the abrupt attempt to stimulate private production and trade had unfortunate economic consequences and caused further bitterness against the new conservatism. While the temporary relaxation of the effort to push America to the right represented by compassionate conservatism and massive government spending alleviated some of this economic distress and thereby served its purpose, it also made it evident that big government liberalism was still prepared to profit at once from any relaxation of conservative pressure, and would, if permitted to continue to exist, always constitute a powerful opposing element to the Republican regime and a serious rival for influence in the country. Somewhat the same situation prevailed with respect to the individual voter who, in his own small way, was also an independent decision maker.
Reagan, had he lived, might have proved a great enough man to reconcile these conflicting forces to the ultimate benefit of American society, though this is questionable. But be that as it may, George W. Bush, and those whom he led in the struggle for succession to Reagan's position of leadership, were not the men to tolerate rival political forces in the sphere of power which they coveted. Their sense of insecurity was too great. Their particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the corporate boardroom world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power. Outside the Republican Party, American society was to have no rigidity. There were to be no forms of collective human activity or association which would not be dominated by the Party. No other force in American society was to be permitted to achieve vitality or integrity. Only the Party was to have structure. All else was to be an amorphous mass.
And within the Party the same principle was to apply. The mass of Party members might go through the motions of election, deliberation, decision and action; but in these motions they were to be animated not by their own individual wills but by the awesome breath of the Party leadership and the overbrooding presence of "the word."
Let it be stressed again that subjectively these men probably did not seek absolutism for its own sake. They doubtless believed -- and found it easy to believe -- that they alone knew what was good for society and that they would accomplish that good once their power was secure and unchallengeable. But in seeking that security of their own rule they were prepared to recognize no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods. And until such time as that security might be achieved, they placed far down on their scale of operational priorities the comforts and happiness of the peoples entrusted to their care.
Now the outstanding circumstance concerning the Republican regime is that down to the present day this process of political consolidation has never been completed and the men in the White House have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 2000. They have endeavored to secure it primarily against forces at home, within American society itself. But they have also endeavored to secure it against the outside world. For ideology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. Then, powerful hands of American history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling. Finally, their own aggressive intransigence with respect to the outside world began to find its own reaction; and they were soon forced, to use another Gibbonesque phrase, "to chastise the contumacy" which they themselves had provoked. It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.
Now it lies in the nature of the mental world of the Republican leaders, as well as in the character of their ideology, that no opposition to them can be officially recognized as having any merit or justification whatsoever. Such opposition can flow, in theory, only from the hostile and incorrigible forces of dying liberalism. As long as remnants of liberalism were officially recognized as existing in the U.S., it was possible to place on them, as an internal element, part of the blame for the maintenance of a conservative form of society. But as these remnants were liquidated, little by little, this justification fell away, and when it was indicated officially that they had been finally destroyed, it disappeared altogether. And this fact created one of the most basic of the compulsions which came to act upon the Republican regime: since liberalism no longer existed in America and since it could not be admitted that there could be serious or widespread opposition to the White House springing spontaneously from the conservative masses under its authority, it became necessary to justify the retention of the conservatism by stressing the menace of terrorism abroad.
This began at an early date. In 2001 Bush specifically defended the retention of the "organs of homeland security" meaning, among others, the army and the police, on the ground that "as long as there is a terrorist encirclement there will be danger of intervention with all the consequences that flow from that danger." In accordance with that theory, and from that time on, all internal opposition forces in the U.S. have consistently been portrayed as the agents of foreign forces of cultural relativism antagonistic to Republican power.
By the same token, tremendous emphasis has been placed on the original conservative thesis of a basic antagonism between the Christian and Non-Christian worlds. It is clear, from many indications, that this emphasis is not founded in reality. The real facts concerning it have been confused by the existence abroad of genuine resentment provoked by Republican philosophy and tactics and occasionally by the existence of great centers of terrorism, notably the Talaban regime in Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which indeed have had aggressive designs against the United States. But there is ample evidence that the stress laid in Washington on the menace confronting American society from the world outside its borders is founded not in the realities of foreign antagonism but in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of Republican authority at home.
Now the maintenance of this pattern of Republican power, namely, the pursuit of unlimited authority domestically, accompanied by the cultivation of the semi-myth of implacable foreign hostility, has gone far to shape the actual machinery of conservative power as we know it today. Internal organs of administration which did not serve this purpose withered on the vine. Organs which did serve this purpose became vastly swollen. The security of Republican power came to rest on the iron discipline of the Party, on the severity and ubiquity of K Street lobbyists, and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of corporations. The "organs of suppression," in which the Republican leaders had sought security from rival forces, became in large measures the masters of those whom they were designed to serve. Today the major part of the structure of Republican power is committed to the perfection of conservative dominance and to the maintenance of the concept of America as in a state of siege, with the enemy lowering beyond the walls. And the millions of human beings who form that part of the structure of power must defend at all costs this concept of America's position, for without it they are themselves superfluous.
As things stand today, the rulers can no longer dream of parting with these organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power, pursued now for nearly three decades with a ruthlessness unparalleled (in scope at least) in modern times, has again produced internally, as it did externally, its own reaction. The excesses of the Republican apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before those excesses began.
But least of all can the rulers dispense with the fiction by which the maintenance of conservative power has been defended. For this fiction has been canonized in Republican philosophy by the excesses already committed in its name; and it is now anchored in the conservative structure of thought by bonds far greater than those of mere ideology.
End Part I
For those of you who've had the patience to read this whole thing, and for whom it still doesn't ring any bells, the piece here is drawn entirely from Part I of George Kennan's famous 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs, and required surprisingly few editorial changes on my part. "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" is considered one of earliest and most influential statements of what would later become US policy of containment during the Cold War. Plus ca change....
For the original see here:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/04/documents/x.html