Notes on resistance, p.14
Notes on Resistance, page 14
The same year that Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the American Revolution broke out. A couple of years later, the Constitution was formed.
The English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century is presented, as I said, as a conflict between the king and parliament. And it ended with the king being subordinate to parliament, the rising merchant and manufacturing class. But that’s not the whole story.
There was also the general public, which didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament. It was a lively period. Itinerant workers and ministers were writing pamphlets that reached much of the general public. Their pamphlets and talks called for being ruled by countrymen like ourselves, who know the people’s wants, not by knights and gentlemen who only want to oppress us. They called for universal health, universal education.
They were finally crushed. So, Hume and Smith are both writing after the victory of the merchants and manufacturers, not only over the king but the general public.
This was reenacted a few years later in the US Constitution. The public wanted democracy. The Framers, wealthy men, mostly slave owners, were meeting in Philadelphia. They wanted to prevent the threat of democracy, much like “the men of best quality,” as they called themselves during the first democratic revolution.
In fact, it didn’t take more than a few years for Madison to realize what Adam Smith had realized before. In 1792, Madison wrote a letter to his friend Jefferson in which he deplored the collapse of the democratic system that he hoped he had established, with not too much democracy but at least some. What Madison said was that by now, the “stockjobbers”—in our day that means the financial institutions—had taken so much power that they are, as he called it, the “tool” and “tyrant” of government.5 They both work for government and control government, and they work for their own interests, no matter how much they oppress the public. This is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Many of the same problems exist today. Gramsci gives an account of the same principles in modern terms.
Talk about the role of intellectuals, organic and traditional. The latter, sometimes called disparagingly, stenographers to power. It was Reinhold Niebuhr, the liberal theologian, who coined the phrase “responsible intellectuals.” Gramsci called them “experts in legitimation.”6 And then there’s of course what Henry Kissinger added to the widening definition.
The terms responsible intellectuals and responsible people come from the main liberal theorists of modern democracy. People like Walter Lippmann; Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science; Reinhold Niebuhr, considered the theologian of the liberal establishment, highly revered; Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the public relations industry.
They’re called progressive theorists. They all wrote texts about how democracy should function. And the idea was similar. Actually, it’s similar to what Hume and Gramsci talked about. They said that what they called the responsible men, which means responsible educated intellectuals, have to essentially maintain power. The general public, in their view, is stupid and ignorant, and cannot be left to run their own affairs. They’re not capable of it. They have to be controlled by what Niebuhr called “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications,” so that they keep in their place.7
They have a place, as Lippmann put it. They are “spectators,” not “participants,” but they do have a role. They’re supposed to show up every four years and push a lever to pick one or another of the responsible men to lead them, and then they go back to their own affairs and not bother us. We, the responsible men, are to be “free of the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”8 We should not, as Lasswell put it, be overcome by “democratic dogmatism” about people being able to take control, to work for their own interests. They were much too stupid and ignorant for that. We must run it.
The term intellectual in its modern sense was really developed during the late nineteenth century when Émile Zola and other French writers and lawyers were criticizing the gross mistreatment of Alfred Dreyfus. They were criticizing the army and the state for his sentencing on fabricated charges. They were bitterly condemned by the immortals of the French Academy for daring to criticize our great institutions and claim there was a serious miscarriage of justice.
Zola had to flee France to escape the attacks. Others were jailed. This is history. If you dare to go beyond obeisance to the powerful, you are likely to suffer in one way or another, depending on the nature of the society.
Henry Kissinger, who’s a master in the art, put it pretty well himself. He said the role of the policy intellectual is to articulate the thinking of those in power. If they don’t put it exactly right, we’ll articulate it correctly for them.
That’s the role of the serious intellectual—and that’s how you become a respected, responsible intellectual.
During the Civil War, something occurs involving Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Talk about that and how it intersects with the role of intellectuals.
That was quite interesting. When the Civil War broke out, Emerson, who was the leading philosopher of the time, was very enthusiastic about the war, because he thought it would break down social structures and lead to a freer society. Not that he was in favor of the North. He was against all calls for patriotism. He criticized and denounced them. But he did hope that it would undermine repressive social structures. Very soon, he became a great enthusiast for the war. He wrote famous poems about how young people from Harvard were going out to die in order to fulfill their duty and in service to the Union.9
Most of the intellectuals in Concord, Massachusetts, the main intellectual center at the time, went along with Emerson. They were strongly in favor of the war. Hawthorne was one of the very few who didn’t. He kept mostly quiet. But he did do something quite interesting. He went on a tour through the South in the latter days of the war. It was clear the Union was going to defeat the South. He visited Washington. He wrote about Abraham Lincoln.10 He didn’t deify him in the manner that was considered appropriate at the time. He wrote a mildly critical, mildly favorable comment. He went to prison camps, where Southern soldiers were being held. He talked to them. He wrote a major article for the Atlantic Monthly, the main intellectual journal of that period.11
In the article, I’m paraphrasing, he said, Look, these young men in those Southern prison camps, they’re just ordinary people who were called to battle in a cause they thought was just. We have to treat them with dignity, as honorable human beings. And in general, he gave a very measured picture of the victory. He wasn’t calling for enthusiastic triumphalist acclaim for our magnificent victory and our magnificent leaders. He was critical and serious, very muted.
Well, the Atlantic agreed to publish the article. But if you read it, the article is interpolated with comments from the editors denouncing Hawthorne for what he says. He wasn’t laudatory enough of Lincoln. He was too favorable to these Southern soldiers in prison camps.
It’s a humane and decent article. He was very sharply attacked for it. He actually died shortly after. We don’t know what the repercussions were. But the distinction between him and Emerson was very sharp.
Mars is in the news. Perseverance rover is on the Red Planet, sending back photos. Years ago, you talked about a journalist from Mars. How would she cover the pandemic and the introduction of vaccines?
It’s a very strange thing that’s happening with the introduction of vaccines. In the United States, a substantial number of people are refusing to take it. They’re overwhelmingly Republicans, and for many reasons: distrust of government, distrust of science, other objections.
But it’s not restricted to the United States. So, in France, for example, according to their most recent reports, about 40 percent of people are refusing to take the vaccine. This is a strange phenomenon. There’s overwhelming evidence of the importance of taking the vaccine if we want to get this plague under control. But fear and dislike of government, science, and authority has reached such points that people are taking very dangerous actions to avoid what needs to be done.
You can compare this with other countries. It varies. Australia got the disease very quickly under control. One main reason is they have a highly effective health system, which people trust. We have a dysfunctional health system. Others do, too. Secondly, they just are willing to take collective responsibility for one another. So, they accepted harsh lockdowns, which were very successful, and the disease was essentially controlled. The same has happened in New Zealand, Taiwan, and other countries.
But there are places—the United States is one, interestingly, France is another—where the discontent and distrust is so high that a great many people are just unwilling to join in the collective effort to control and put down the disease. And there are many lives being lost.
There was recently a study in the United States, which compared the city of Seattle with the general situation in the United States. Seattle is one place where the virus was pretty much well controlled by the kind of means that were successful in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, South Korea, other places. And the estimate was that if that had been applied to the whole United States, it might have saved three hundred thousand lives.12 These are not small things.
That discontent you spoke of took a dramatic turn on January 6, with the assault on the Capitol. What was your understanding of what went on there?
First of all, it was explicitly an attempt at a coup. They were trying to overthrow the elected government. That’s a coup.
The participants were a mixture. It was rather striking if you looked at the photographs, there were very few young people. That’s quite unusual. Political events and demonstrations are mostly young people. This was middle-aged and older people. They were all enthusiastic Trump supporters. He was egging them on.
They all apparently fervently believe that the election was stolen, and their country is being stolen from them by evil forces. Remember, almost half of Republican voters think that Trump was sent by God to save the country from evildoers, ranging from Democratic pedophiles, to minorities, to others who are undermining and destroying their traditional Christian form of life.
There were elements there from the more violent militias, such as the Proud Boys. It was a pretty violent affair and came close to serious casualties among Congress and others. Five people killed. It could have been much worse. It was a desperate act by people who are desperate. We can’t overlook that fact.
A large part of the country supports the assault. In fact, popularity for Trump actually increased after his instigation of the coup attempt. This is a large part of the country. If half of Republicans think that Trump was sent by God to save us from evil forces, the country is facing serious problems.
It’s kind of interesting to see what happened to the Republican Party after January 6. The people who basically own the country, Adam Smith’s “masters of mankind,” the donor class that funds the party, they’ve been tolerating Trump. They don’t like him. He interferes with their image of soulful, humane people. They don’t like his vulgarity, his antics, but they tolerated him because he was lining their pockets. Trump’s entire legislative program was designed to pour money into the pockets of the superrich and benefit the corporations—smash labor and eliminate regulations that protect people but interfere with profits. The whole program was that. So as long as he was doing that, they were willing to tolerate him. But January 6 was too much. And almost instantly, on January 6, the major centers of economic power, the Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, and major corporate executives moved very quickly and told Trump straight out, this is enough, get lost.
Well, Trump took the plane off to Mar-a-Lago. Mitch McConnell, the most important figure in the Republican Party, heard the voice of the donors and began to sharply criticize Trump, and he and other Republican senators began to race to the exits. But they didn’t go too far. Because when they reach the exits, they face the raging crowds that Trump had mobilized. So, they’re stuck. And the Republican Party is stuck. Are they going to listen to the donor class and restore a more genteel version of Trumpism? Or are they going to be swept away by the forces that remain in Trump’s pocket?
McConnell and Trump, the two major figures, are personally at sword points. They can’t stand each other, but they have a common interest. The common interest is to ensure that the country is ungovernable and that Biden can’t achieve anything. It’s not a secret. It’s what McConnell announced clearly and explicitly when Obama was elected.13 At that point, McConnell didn’t have Congress. He said, our task is to ensure that Obama can’t succeed in doing anything. So, he cut back the stimulus that was needed and in other ways hampered efforts to govern the country and deal with the country’s problems. There’s every reason to suppose he’ll do the same right now.
Trump wants the same thing with different goals. The two of them are combined in the effort to ensure that the country is ungovernable, that the population suffers as much as possible, in the expectation it will be blamed on the Democrats and they can come roaring back in 2022 and 2024.
The Republicans right now are kind of like the old Communist Party. They follow the principle of what the Leninists call democratic centralism. The party has a policy. It’s handed down from above. Everyone uniformly must accept it. No deviation is tolerable. So even though some Republican senators and representatives may support aspects of the stimulus bill, and they know their constituents support it, they have to vote against it. That’s the situation we are in now.
I must say what Biden has done so far is a rather pleasant surprise to me. It’s better than I would have expected. He’s pretty sharply criticized on the left for flaws and omissions in domestic policy. Foreign policy is a different issue. These criticisms are in my view correct, but a little bit unfair. There’s only so much you can do when half of the Senate, no matter what you say, is going to be 100 percent opposed. And when there are Democrats who will go along with the Republicans, it puts a limit on what you can achieve.
Would you favor the elimination of the filibuster, which Barack Obama called a “Jim Crow relic”?14
First of all, I doubt that it can be done. So, it’s basically a nonissue. Whether it should be done is another question.
The filibuster has been used in very destructive ways. But in the past, it was also used in ways to bar racist legislation. It’s basically not a good idea, but it’s not the fundamental issue. The basic issue is: why do we have two political parties, both of them dependent on the same narrow class of wealth and power, the donor class, basically? And one of them is so extreme that it has simply abandoned parliamentary politics. It’s now fighting desperately to maintain itself as a minority party.
A lot of the major struggles underway now have to do not so much with the stimulus bills but with legislation that’s passed in the House. HR1, the first legislation passed by the Democratic House, is very significant. It basically fortifies voting rights. That’s critically important.
There’s a major Republican assault on voting rights. There are literally hundreds of legislative proposals around the country in states where Republicans control the legislature to try to prevent minorities and poor people from voting at all, so that the Republicans can somehow maintain power. They are a minority party. They almost always lose elections. But they maintain power through various means. And this is becoming more significant. They are now in a major effort to try to cut down voting rights so that they’ll be able to hang on by a thread. HR1, the Democratic proposal, calls for strengthening voting rights. The outcome of this battle will have a major effect on the future.
The Republicans have a kind of structural advantage in elections, in that the Democratic voting base is mostly concentrated in cities, which means that—given our parliamentary system—a lot of the votes are just lost. If you have 80 percent votes for a candidate in one place, it means 30 percent of them are essentially lost.
The Republican votes are scattered in rural counties, small states that have representation far beyond their population. All of this gives the Republicans a structural advantage. They can win an election, even if they lose the vote by 4 or 5 percent. And the current efforts they are undertaking are an attempt to try to sharpen and strengthen that. So, they’ll be able to maintain power, even if they have even fewer votes, even if they’re more of a minority party, which they’re becoming for demographic reasons.
This goes along with the major McConnell project while he’s been in power, to try to staff the judiciary with young, far-right lawyers who will be there at every level of the judiciary from the Supreme Court down to the lowest courts. So, they’ll be in a position to bar any progressive legislation for a generation, no matter what the public may want in the years ahead.
These are all struggles going on. They’re part of our highly regressive political system, which, even under the best of circumstances, would lead to a constitutional crisis. That’s built in. You cannot continue to function as a formerly democratic society under the radically antidemocratic provisions of the Constitution.
The most extreme case, of course, is the Senate. The electoral college and many other things are deep problems in the whole constitutional system that can’t be fixed by amendment. Smaller states won’t allow it.
Talk about the potency of the canard that the election was stolen. Go back to post–World War I Germany and the stab-in-the-back theory that the Nazis used so effectively. We won the war, but communists, socialists, and Jews sabotaged us and sold us out.
I don’t particularly like the word hypocrisy. People believed it. It wasn’t hypocritical. If it was hypocritical, it wouldn’t have been a problem. It’s because it was not hypocritical that it’s a problem. And the same in the present case. The people who say Trump won the election are not being hypocritical.
