Faking Civil Society

Perhaps the most beautiful achievement of political life in the latetwentieth century was the international movement for democracy that brought downseveral dozen dictatorships of every possible description -- authoritarian,communist, fascist, military. It happened on all continents, and it happenedpeacefully. It began in the 1970s, with the collapse of the Greek junta and ofthe right-wing regimes in Portugal and Spain; it continued in the 1980s,mysteriously jumping the Atlantic, with the collapse of dictatorships inArgentina, Chile and Brazil; then, vaulting the Pacific, it claimed thedictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Finally, in the early '90s,it spread to South Africa, where the white apartheid regime yielded to majorityrule, and returned to the Eurasian continent where the great Soviet empireitself shuffled off history's stage.

The actors in this benign contagion acquired a name: civil society."Civil": they were peaceful, meaning that the bomb in the cafe, theassassination of the local official, the paratrooper invasion of the Parliamentbuilding, were not their tactics. "Society": they expressed popularwill, not the will of governments. The movement broke or made governments. Itwas their master.

Recently, however, the movement has undergone a change both at home andabroad. Civil society groups in the more prosperous societies began to lendwelcome assistance in poorer ones. But governments also joined in. Unlikeprivate civil groups, governments are in their nature interested in power, andthe civil society movements clearly exercised it. Here in America, the NationalEndowment for Democracy was created in the early eighties. Funded by Congressand governed by a board that includes active and retired politicians of bothparties, it nevertheless calls itself a "nongovernmental"organization. Its declared mission was to support democracy per se, not anypolitical party, but the distinction was soon lost in practice. Most of the$10.5 million handed out in Nicaragua during the elections of 1990 went to theopposition to the Sandinistas, who were duly voted out of power. In 2002, theEndowment funded groups in Venezuela that backed the briefly successful coupagainst President Hugo Chávez, in which the Venezuelan Parliament, judiciaryand constitution were suspended.

The day after the overthrow, which Omar Encarnación of Bard College hascalled a "civil society coup," the president of the InternationalRepublican Institute, which is loosely tied to the GOP and is a conduit forEndowment funds, stated, "Last night, led by every sector of civil society,the Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country."Speaking for the U.S. government, presidential press secretary Ari Fleischerstated that the coup "happened in a very quick fashion as a result of themessage of the Venezuelan people." In fact, the Venezuelan people opposedthe coup, and Chávez, notwithstanding his own repressive tendencies, almostimmediately returned to power.

More recently Endowment contributions went to groups in Ukraine thatsupported presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko, who became president afterfraudulent results engineered by the opposition government candidate werereversed by popular pressure. In Venezuela, the outcome was the destruction,however brief, of all democratic institutions, whereas in Ukraine the outcomewas the rescue of democracy; yet in both cases the integrity of civil society,which depends on independence from governments, was partially corrupted.

Something similar was meanwhile happening within the United States. TheRepublican Party and its supporters have been the pioneers, creating what mightbe called a shadow civil society and seeking to merge it imperceptibly with thereal one. Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley summarized the process in aMarch 30 op-ed in the New York Times: Large donors founded partisan thinktanks more interested in propagandizing than in thinking; then proceeded toestablish seemingly independent but actually politically subservient newsorganizations such as FOX News and the Rush Limbaugh show. Recently, some newwrinkles in the process have emerged: the use of fake newscasters, pretending toreport from an independent news station while actually working for a departmentof government, and fake reporters, such as "Jeff Gannon," the imposterpermitted by the White House to ask sycophantic questions of the President atWhite House press conferences. There is also the fake "town meeting"(the very emblem of civil society) with the President, at which a screenedaudience asks pretested questions.

The strategy of faking civil activity has a long tradition in the foreignsphere. For example, the CIA virtually cut its teeth manipulating popular andintellectual movements in Europe in the late 1940s and '50s. (Indeed, historianAllen Weinstein, who was the National Endowment's first acting president, hascommented, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five yearsago by the CIA.") But the domestic practice is more recent. One of thelesser-known points of origin is the presidency of Richard Nixon, who onceordered his aide Charles Colson to firebomb the Brookings Institution, thencalled it off. But he also had some more workable ideas. He told PatrickBuchanan, then his communications director, that he wanted somehow not only tocut off existing "left-wing" foundations "without a dime"but also to found a right-wing institute that would seem to be independent butactually be managed by the White House. As Buchanan commented in a memo,"some of the essential objectives of the Institute would have to beblurred, even buried, in all sorts of other activity that would be the bulk ofits work, that would employ many people, and that would provide the cover forthe more important efforts." In this matter, as in so many others, today'sRepublican Party is the legatee of Richard Nixon.

Some Democrats want their party to respond in kind. For urgent andunderstandable reasons, they want to level the playing field. But the cost couldbe high. In such a world, nothing would be what it seemed. Behind every bloggerwould lurk the PR spinmeister, behind every reporter would stand the politicalhack, behind every charming demonstrator holding her banner -- rose, orange,purple, or cedar --would lie the cold hand of the state. In the name of civilsociety, civil society would be spoiled.

Jonathan Schell, author of TheUnconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. TheJonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books. CopyrightC2005 Jonathan Schell.  This article will appear in the next issue of TheNation Magazine. Courtesy,TomDispatch.Com