Thoughts on Empire
- Thesis
I hear progressives who are worried that our Republic has been taken over by Imperialists. What they ignore is that our Empire has been taken over by amateurs. I hear wingnuts complain that the anti-war types are holding us back from acheiving our goals in the world. What they ignore is that seeking naked power for emotional reasons makes the exercise of power more expensive and less effective.
Neither is willing to acknowledge the shape and history of the pax Americana, and so neither is equipped to address its present crisis, which threatens our way of life.
via Texas KAOS
- Crisis
"Democracies don't attack democracies," or rather they didn't before Israel attacked Lebanon after Hezbollah ambushed the IDF. Now, the Cedar Revolution is in flames and we must wonder what Bush has let loose on the world as the push for "freedom," whatever that meant, has destabilized the world system without presenting an alternative.
Within our own empire, we are presented with an ominous spectacle: hundreds of thousands of people, in a nation the US occupies, publically demonstrate for the failure of US policy in Lebanon. Bush is caught between his own failed leadership and a set of rules that will not let him simply kill them all.
The frustration of the would-be hegemons in the rightwing punditocracy is overflowing with calls for genocide and reclassifications of "civilian" that are straight out of the mouth of Osama bin Laden. I would say that we have to choose between a policy of democratization and a policy of power, but the current US government is accustomed to undermining democracy with power either inherited or purchased, and so it has never bothered to understand either democracy or power.
- A Failure of Conception
One of the oddest moments of the 2004 presidential election, for me, was when Bush referred to Iraq as an 'ally.' Iraq is an occupied country. It cannot be an 'ally' any more than a sock-puppet can be my friend.
If we were looking to Iraq for support for US interests in the regions we would be disappointed. Not because the government opposes us (although it has), but because an overwhelming majority of its citizens do. And, unfortunately, Iraq holds elections, so this is a problem.
A dictatorship, as Bush famously observed, would make things a lot easier. That quip is the measure of the democratizer's incompetence. And so here you have hundreds of thousands of people in a country we occupy opposing US policy in the region. Trying to make another Kuwait or Qatar, Bush has instead made Iraq into a giant Palestine or Gaza Strip. Make up your mind, "decider," whose will is it going to be? Yours or theirs? Until you resolve the question you cannot answer the one that follows. Denying the question altogether, which is the most charitable estimate of Bush's policies that I can give, is simply planning to fail.
Spreading "freedom," whatever that can mean to the architects of the Patriot Act and those criminals who spy on their own people, has only managed to empower the enemies of the US. No one is surprised, of course. Spreading freedom, had Bush been serious, would have involved freeing people to pursue their hopes and dreams, and that would mean dealing with them as they are. Instead, "spreading freedom" was supposed to enhance our values among people who don't have our values. For this reason, the hope of spreading freedom was either a ploy or sickeningly stupid. Either way, it doesn't matter, because ...
- Fourth-generation Warring Statelessness
... you can't expect a free people to support your assaults on their values and their friends and families. Of course, Arabs are only worth listening to when they repeat what they have been told to say, right? They should be grateful for the occupation, I suppose, and when they aren't, they're magically the terrorists "we" are there to fight. This mere rhetorical trick pre-sorts all the data so that even a failure to spread freedom is merely evidence that we must continue to spread freedom. Failure is impossible because it has been dressed up as something else.
But these are the faces of people who won't just stand by while their people are slaughtered. I don't support them: they support Hezbollah. But, if they are a "free" people, it doesn't matter if I support them.
From the Levant to Indonesia, we are seeing people vote with bullets and suicide bombs. Their values are denied representation by governments both friendly to the US and otherwise, but these people aren't just going to dry up and blow away. If no nation will stand up for them, they will take action on their own, and identities other than national ones will be the fault lines and battle lines. It is the failure of the nationa state, so long undermined even in our own country for the convenience of capital, that has produced the vogue of fourth-generation warfare.
In the US, we might categorize this kind of armed self-determination under the Second Amendment, just so long as we are talking about US citizens. The debate surrounding the framing of the Second Amendment makes it abundantly clear that the Framers saw an armed populace as a break on tyranny. And, today, the world is better armed than it has ever been. The AK-47 is ubiquitous and, with it, the power to take power where it has been denied has enfranchised more of mankind than ever, with disasterous results.
This is the democracy of violence.
- Unearned Wealth Empowers the Useless
If you would have your way in this world you must learn to co-opt the passions of the masses, the same way cynical politicians have for thousands of years. But our own low-quality leaders do not know how to do that, outside of a media bubble where their corporate sponsors own the conversation. Once outside the US, they have no idea what they are doing. The masters of America assumed that everyone else would be just as easy to push around, marginalize, and intimidate as Americans have been.
These freedom fanatics have never seen a democracy, the messiahs of the marketplace have never had to compete in one. They have confused the accoutrements and consolations of their own elite status with power itself and, offering these fetishes to the natives, they were met with blinking stares that soon turned to hostility. Real freedom, and what they would do with it, these were inconceivable to Lord Fauntleroy and his entourage.
But anyone who had taken a week to learn how previous empires had handled and mishandled these people (who, after all, live in their own distant past) would have known better. But "knowing better" just means that you're off-message, and to the Leninist political machine of the GOP there is no greater sin. Our low-quality leaders despise people who actually know what they are doing, favoring above all the Executive-as-two-year-old, endlessly entitled to whatever its whim is this week. If the spoiled little men who run our country believe a thing is so, it is so. If you know better, you're fired.
- The pax Americana: Rejected abroad, discarded within
Is it any wonder that these "men" are incapable of furthering or even maintaining the pax Americana they inherited? What have they ever built?
Every successful empire has had, as a lever to its power, either a civilizing pretense or at least the appearance of being a superior civilization. The conqueror must at least appear to be further from the animal state than the people he conquers. In this way, their defeat seems inevitable, which means that the power of the sword is mulitplied by the resignation of the defeated to their "fate." Americans make no such pretense. We revel in being free in many senses of the word, but to traditional societies we appear as boors, parvenues, and debauches. (I happen to enjoy being at least two of those). The leverage of the pax Americana had been aid and arbitration, the appearance of adjudicating in favor of our client states, of pretending to rescue the nations we impoverished. While it lasted, this approach was unique in the history of empires.
In America, the disinctly American leverage of the pax Americana was already being rejected from within. No matter how useful in cloaking exploitation in a friendly package (the exploitation that made your standard of living possible), it galled the New Angry Men whose insecurities propelled the corporate socialists back to power at the end of the 1970's. Terrified at the loss of white male cultural hegemony, these insecure little men confused American aid in all its forms with the reverse discrimination and the weakness they believed had cost them their "rightful place" at the top of the American food-chain. Those who were crushing the American middle class could easily make their victims see every transactionpart of a vast, zero-sum game. "They" were getting something, but "we" never get anything. White fright made it harder and harder to offer beads to natives. Archie Bunker wanted his goddam beads, you communist!
The former hegemon of America needed the naked exercise of American hegemony abroad to reassure him that he was back on top. It didn't matter that he saw no benefit, nor did it matter that America would squander the opportunities of a mono-polar world in the 1990's, lasting only as long as the myth of a benevolent America. No, what mattered was the vicarious experience of power exercised in its rawest form: violence. Police beat hippies, Reagan bombs Libya. And, for a while, Archie could actually get it up again. For a while. After Saudi terrorists bombed New York and DC, red state America needed Bush to bomb Iraq. Same thing.
Americans make no pretense at sharing our culture with the conquered, since they already have it. America exported its culture long ago, decades before the bombing began. Through the Cold War, American popular and consumer culture adorned our client states and marked off our bloc from that of the Soviets. Perhaps we expected this calling card to open doors for us during the neocon expansion.
But it had already been rejected. Fundamentalism is everywhere an ironically modern cry for the rejection of modernism, couched in self-refutingly modern terms. Like American Christian fundamentlists, Islamic fundamentalists have already identified the American identity as the opposite of Godliness and declared war on it. So what is left for the American Empire but to seek to maintain power through naked brutality? The sword will have to do. All power is direct and without leverage. A great empire is reduced to what it can do right now, with none of the majesty that might overawe the defeated and thus carry an empire through hard times.
(In the same way, for instance, that Scott Winship is so stuck in Karl Rove's illusion of a Conservative America that Scott can't conceive of striking while that imaginary empire is weakest. Mr. Winship is what we call "colonized." If he were a mid-20th century Algerian, Scott would speak French and try to be as white as possible).
Unleashing the popular will, whether through fostering democracy or terrorism (Bush has done both, badly) at the same time that Bush's policies have lived down to the worst expectations of those who already opposed our hegemony is the worst possible thing you could do. They do not see their defeat as foreordained, they see their emancipation as inevitable. And, in such a situation, if the emperor is not ready to kill them all, the empire is fucked.
- Whither the Republic?
Whose interests will guide us now? We have already botched our own internal transformation into a pluralist society that makes maximum advantage of our human capital. We are in the process of mismanaging the transformation of our relationship with a changing world. If we allow ourselves to be dragged around by the laziness and selfishness of an elite who are spending all our substance in order to maintain their privileged status quo for another generation, at the cost of our national prosperity for generations to come, the American Empire is going to be a footnote.
How will an American empire survive? All of these faces. Right now, they are our enemies. Kill them, or co-opt them? Killing them would cause more problems than it would solve. Co-opting them would take more brains than our leaders have, since what we most want in a leader is not ability but familiarity. We are stuck between the limits imposed on our lethality and the limits we impose on our executive, unitary or otherwise. If the putative subjects of our empire can be seduced by fairy tale notions of a restored caliphate then we really have offered them nothing by way of a competing proposition.
The paradox of the American Empire has been maintaining a Republic on the inside while managing the resources of an Empire on the outside. Reasserting our democratically constituted Republic and directing national policy at national interests are the same thing. Reasserting our interests around the world requires the reassessment of alliances when alignments change. Nostalgia and blind habit are death to empire. The trouble comes when the practices of controlling the provinces become acceptible within a nation itself, since these invariably erode the democratic practices of a republic, just as old Cold Warriors attack our Constitution today.
.