The combination of the MLK holiday and the Bush inauguration in the same week makes for an interesting juxtaposition.
Newspaper commentary on Bush's speech has primarily focused on the
repeated references to freedom, and the punditry this morning furthered that, captured best in George Will's comment that Bush "harkened back to 1776" (paraphrase). Remember though, that we began this week observing the MLK holiday, being seeped in the oratory of Dr. King and reminded of what I have come to see as our democracy's greatest hour: The Civil Rights Movement. I guess that's why Bush's speech struck me as a string of platitudes. There's a standard repertoire, a riff, we have as a nation whenever the question of democracy is invoked. And all of our public discourse on the subject just appears to be a variation on that theme: 1776. But in thinking about King and then reading Bush's speech I was struck by how much we miss from our own history when we adhere to our pre-packaged national mythos about democracy. How that mythos stifles, in some ways, our understanding of the thing itself. We, as Americans, deal with democracy on a mythic rather than a lived plane. And that is one of the problems of our current foreign policy and even the movements that oppose that policy. The language of the American Revolution is simply not appropriate for a 21st century conflict of post-colonial, neo-liberal economic interests and trans-national, Islamic radicalism.
And yet the pundits, the Democrats, and most of us here -- probably most Americans -- don't ever want to look into our own understanding of democracy. We just accept that as citizens of the United States--the "first" [modern] democracy-- we own the franchise. This results in public discussions about the Inaugural Speech that debate only whether or not the "promotion of democracy" and the "elimination of tyranny" is feasible as a stated objective of US foreign policy. What's left unexplored is the question of whether or not the US is the appropriate disseminator of democracy for the 21st century. After our last two presidential elections, the expansion of executive powers of the Presidency (an on-going problem since the 1960's at least), the decline of the labor movement (which represents the principles of democracy spread to the workplace) and the utter lack of democratic principles structuring either the public sphere or our understanding of political discourse, we should be discussing how impoverished our own democracy has become, how little we really understand about democratic principles and how much the problems of the Democratic Party are tied to the decline of US democracy.
So at the end of this week of commemorations: commemorations of a struggle and the visionary leader of that struggle as well as our national commemorations of the institutions of our government I'm left with two visions of US democracy and I can't help but note that the one less celebrated is the one more true. Would that our President took that sense of democracy to heart and built a foreign policy around that.
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