Democracy Crisis: We Are Enslaving Ourselves to Illegitimate Power
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December 7, 2014 |
This will long be remembered as the week when another grand jury declined to prosecute another white police officer in the death of another unarmed African-American man, this time in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, a supposed bastion of liberalism. For many black people, and indeed for many people of all races, this seemed like a disturbing lesson on race and state power in America. For all the apparent progress we have made, and all the enormous social change of the last half-century, it seems evident that those who wield state power on the most direct and intimate level – the police – still have the right to exercise lethal violence against ordinary citizens with impunity. At any rate, they have that right when it comes to some citizens.
It was also a week when another news nugget flashed by in my Twitter feed, noticed by hardly anyone and unlikely to be much remembered. But there were disturbing lessons to be found there also. A British legal nonprofit called Reprieve reported this week that, on average, every United States drone strike in the Middle East kills 28 unidentified people for every intended target. In America’s fruitless quest to kill al-Qaida head Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Reprieve report alleges, your tax dollars and mine have paid for the deaths of 105 individuals, 76 of them children. In its attempts to kill 41 specific people deemed “high-value targets” in the war on terror, the U.S. has apparently killed more than 1,000 people as unintended collateral damage. Incidentally, al-Zawahiri and at least five other of those celebrity villains remain alive. No one has taken to the streets to mourn those deaths and cry out for justice, largely because they took place far away in a murky war we are told nothing about. (Finding any media coverage of the Reprieve report proved to be a challenge.)
As the daughter of Eric Garner, the man choked to death by cops on Staten Island, said on Friday, this is a moment of national crisis, and one that is long overdue. But the true crisis is not limited to the relationship between African-Americans and the police, as urgent as that issue appears at the moment. Indeed, that is only one aspect of the crisis, which is not something that can be fixed with cop-cams or by sending a few rogue officers to prison. On a larger scale, the crisis is about the corruption and perversion of democracy, and in many cases the willing surrender of democracy by those who live in fear of terrorists from distant lands and criminals from the inner city. To borrow an explosive concept from Nietzsche and turn it to new purposes, it’s about the “slave morality” that characterizes so much of American life, meaning the desire to be dominated and ruled, to give up control over one’s own life and allow others to make the decisions.
Since the word “slave” carries special meaning in American history, let me be clear that I’m not talking here about the legacy of 19th-century human slavery (although that too is still a factor in our national life). I’m talking about the plurality or majority of contemporary Americans who have enslaved themselves – in moral and psychological terms — to the rule of a tiny economic oligarchy, and to a state that serves its interests, in exchange for the promise of order, safety and comfort. That order, safety and comfort then become the absolute values, the only values; they become coterminous with “freedom,” which must be defended by the most exaggerated means. If the leaders hint that those values are under attack from sinister forces, or might someday be, the timorous, self-enslaved majority consents to whatever is said to be necessary, whether that means NSA data sweeps, indefinite detention camps, mass murder by remote control or yet another ground war in the Middle East. Compared to all that, letting a few killer cops go free is small potatoes.
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