Democracy Against the War on Terror

A thoughtful reader left this comment to a previous post: "Your position appears to be that if only there were more 'popular participation in politics,' if only the government were more responsive to 'the people,' there would be no secret prisons, torture, broad surveillance of communications, and other abuses. I would like to see a vigorous defense of this premise, for which evidence seems to me to be scant."

This in fact is not our position. Rather, over a series of posts we've attempted to underscore the relationship between the emptiness of American politics and the ease with which security speak has filled this void. The most fundamental shortcoming we face today is the absence of a coherent set of ideas that can make politics collectively meaningful. Devoid of clear ideological goals, both parties have increasingly resorted to the language of fear and risk management to reach voters. Yet, this emphasis on threat and insecurity simply reinforces the atomization felt by many Americans -- and highlights just how demobilized the public has become.

In a sense, such demobilization is embodied in the mini-crisis of legitimacy confronting the current Administration. With a public in retreat, Bush and his advisors have little sense of which policies enjoy a popular mandate or justify wielding state power. As we've said before, the incompetence of the Administration is as much about an uncertainty regarding what to do, as it is about simple-minded obtuseness.

But, demobilization allows the administration to run rampant, because it means that suspect state decisions -- such as secret prisons, torture, broad surveillance -- can persist without any real popular check. Security-speak, increasingly all that we have left as a political discourse, can work to eliminate what remains of popular control and participation by continually invoking the spectre of crisis and emergency.

Under these circumstances, the call to "participate" is not meant as solution to the War on Terror. Clearly, great popular control is useless if the public has no sense of collective possibility, no vision for the future, or guiding ideals. Ultimately, participation is simply a means -- albeit an important one -- to the end of creating a better, more progressive society. The solution can't be public involvement alone, but must include developing, through debate and collective action, compelling options and ideas that make the act of participation worthwhile.

So far, Against the War on Terror has suggested one simple thought as part of such a public debate. The war on terror must be rejected by American citizens, because ultimately it seeks to eliminate the very possibility of debate -- by reducing politics to fear and collective possibility to the bare avoidance of danger. This thought alone cannot sustain a new politics that links popular participation to meaningful ideas, but it can serve as a ground for thinking through precisely what's wrong with our national politics. It also allows us to recognize that even if "the people" can choose unwisely when wielding power, the practical elimination of public voice (except for the occasional vote) suggests just how empty democratic ideals have become.

As a final note, implicit in the comment above was an unstated thought about mass politics -- that "the people" can't necessarily be counted on to protect civil liberties because they are easily swayed by passions and prejudices. Such sentiment expresses a type of cynicism about democratic politics that embodies the public mistrust infecting much of contemporary politics -- as evidenced by various trends, from the rule of judges to the consolidation of executive power. Such mistrust helps foster an environment that only perpetuates demobilization and, in the end, questions the very ability of citizens to develop new ideas worthy of political action.