In a recent opinion column in the NYTimes, Thomas Friedman made the smart connection between Barack Obama’s election to the U. S. presidency and the democratic uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East. Might it not be possible, Friedman ruminated, that the election of a black man to the presidency inspired young, dispossessed members of nations currently ruled by used-up dictators to rebel? It will be an enduring irony of this period of history that a nation and a society – the United States of America – which is in many ways moving rapidly away from the demands of living democracy, has inspired others to take up the “struggle for democracy.”
The phrase, “Struggle for Democracy,” which has been used in book titles and television series and in common parlance, is an apt one in regard to what democracy is. Democracy is not a place of arrival, it is a process of living together in a nation and a society. Many Americans ascribe to that understanding. Even more Americans struggle in some way for inclusion in their own society, or to extend liberties essential in a democratic state. The political culture of the United States as a whole has eroded into something entirely different, however. The U. S. has arrived at the doorstep of post-democracy.
The phrase – post-democratic – is oxymoronic, of course, but it does describe the process of cultural drift and the evolution of political mental states that has occurred in the U. S. since at least the 1950s. The neo-conservative, consensus history that emerged in the 1950s with historians like Daniel Boorstein, proclaimed a history of fulfillment and accomplishment for American democracy – as if the struggle were over. The election of John F. Kennedy gilded the lily of accomplishment, offering us less an effective presidency than a cult of personality and a royal family Americans could call their own. Then everything went wrong. Political assassinations were followed by the impeachment of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the election of an anti-government president, Ronald Reagan. “Camelot” became a wistful remembrance. Politics became something dirty, something a decent person avoided. And, ordinary citizens and elites alike began to avoid political engagement.
This decline in a vital political culture in the U. S. was accompanied by the rise of baby boomers who claimed they had a right to prosper, and they did prosper. Indeed, the raison d’etre of that generation, despite the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, was not social service and the collective improvement of society (except for a few counter-culture individuals) but one’s own ability to become rich and to hold onto those riches. Baby boomers passed on to their offspring the ideals of material wealth and entitlement. The term democracy elided into something akin to the sanctity of the individual and claims for individual privacy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the importance of politics and government in democratic America was eclipsed by the quest for individual prosperity, greed, and the anti-political, anti-democratic culture of “looking out for number one.”
The rise of popular culture from the 1950s onward was both symptomatic of these fundamental changes, and a driving force away from democratic political engagement in its own right. Over time, young and old alike could name prominent bands and singers, or members of sports teams, but could not name their congressman/woman or identify the principle political issues of their time. As my students would say with pride, “I am not political.” By our own time, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent Tea Party spokespersons could not even distinguish the different phrases and contents of the Declaration of Independence (which has no legal standing) and the Constitution of the United State. Over the past sixty years, we have not only become “dumbed-down,” we have become proud of our stupidity. It matters not that one knows nothing of complex issues: “this is what I believe, and my opinion is as good as yours.” In contemporary America more than any place on the face of the earth today, one’s mere opinion successfully claims equal status with scientific theory, rational arguments, or even truth itself. In the realities of democratic government, politics as the “art of the possible” has been replaced by ideological certainties born of one’s mere opinions, much to President Obama’s dismay.
In my own field of America History, the evolution of historiography has been from the prominence of political history in the 1950s to social history in the 1970s and 1980s to the prominence of cultural history today. I respect this shift in emphasis and have participated in it myself but I find that many of today’s American historians have limited understanding of political history and therefore little interest in the issue of democracy, insofar as democracy is a political or governmental matter.
It has been suggested to me that in the American context perhaps democracy follows a natural pattern not unlike that of a climax forest. We should all hope that this analogy is appropriate, and that we can anticipate the peaceful decline of the old stands of timber for new growth from the bottom up.
