The American Political Paradox

Since September 11, I have beenspeaking freely in the United States, a nation whose institutions have many democratic features. My freespeech, which has been harshly critical of the leaders of the United States and their policies, has beendisseminated widely through print publications, web sites, email, radio, and television. Most of the exposurehas been in the alternative media, but I also have appeared in a few mainstream channels as well.Extrapolating from the approximately 4,000 email messages, letters, and phone calls I received in the threemonths after September 11 as a result of this free speech, it is reasonable to assume that tens of thousands,if not hundreds of thousands, of people heard my ideas.

So, while it is true that as a political dissident I have no chance at the access tomainstream channels that "reputable" commentators can expect when they repeat the conventionalwisdom, my voice did get amplified by the combination of: new technologies that are relatively open and havenot been completely commercialized; a limited but active and committed alternative press; marginal openings inthe commercial-corporate media for dissidents who have some claim to "credibility" and can providethe appearance of balance; and the ease with which foreign publications and web sites could pick up my work (Iam aware of translations of my work after 9/11 into Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Polish, and Swahili). I havebeen writing in public as a journalist or scholar since my junior year in high school, and in the last threemonths of 2001 my work may well have reached more people than the total of the preceding 27 years. Thissuggests a society that takes seriously the concept of free speech.

Yet after this experience, it has never seemed clearer to me that free speech isfragile and democracy is in danger of disappearing in the United States. This claim rests on two assertions:

1. Meaningful free speech is about more than the guarantee of a legal right to speakfreely and the absence of governmental repression.

2. Meaningful democracy is about more than the existence of institutions that havedemocratic features.

To talk about the state of intellectual and political culture in the United Statesafter September 11, I want to go back to the early 20th century and the life of one of my favorite radicalAmericans, Scott Nearing.

A radically good life

Nearing contended that three principles guided his life as a teacher, writer, andpolitical activist: the quest "to learn the truth, to teach the truth, and to help build the truth intothe life of the community." Nearing began his teaching career in 1906 at the University of Pennsylvania'sWharton School, where he was a popular teacher, author of widely used economic textbooks, and well-knownspeaker on the lecture circuit. He was on his way to what looked like a successful academic career, if not forone problem. He took seriously those three principles, and from them he formulated a simple guide to action:"If there was exploitation and corruption in the society I should speak out against it."[1]

That's when the trouble started.

By 1915 Nearing had been fired by the Penn trustees. They gave no reason publicly, butthere's little doubt that his socialist views and participation in the movement to end child labor played arole. Many faculty members, including some who disagreed sharply with his politics, rallied to his defense,but to no avail. Rumors of a demand made by legislators of the university's trustees -- fire Nearing or lose akey appropriation -- were never definitively proved but whatever the trustees' reasons, arguments aboutacademic freedom made by faculty did not save Nearing's job. So Nearing moved on to the University of Toledo,a public university with a broader sense of its social mission. There he quickly became an integral part ofthe university and community -- until 1917, when he was again fired, this time for his antiwar activity.

Nearing lost his job but not his voice, and he continued his writing and politicalactivity, including an antiwar pamphlet titled, "The Great Madness: A Victory for AmericanPlutocracy." That landed him in federal court, one of the hundreds of political dissidents tried in theWorld War I era under the draconian Espionage Act. Charged in 1918 with attempting to cause insubordinationand mutiny and obstructing recruiting, Nearing wentto trial in February 1919 expecting to be convicted and ready to go to prison; sentences of five or 10 yearswere common at the time. But he was determined to use his trial as a platform to explain his antiwar andsocialist views, which he did with his usual clarity and bluntness (often, by his account, frustrating his ownattorney's objections to inappropriate questions by prosecutors). His arguments from the witness standapparently affected the jury; Nearing was found not guilty for writing the pamphlet, although the Rand Schoolwas convicted for publishing it and fined $3,000. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld what Nearing called a"unique decision."[2]

Nearing remained a popular lecturer, filling halls as large as Madison Square Gardenfor solo lectures and debates with Clarence Darrow and other well-known political figures, until promoterswould no longer book radical speakers. When shut out of lecture halls, Nearing moved to smaller venues, downto and including the living rooms of other radicals. He continued to write books and pamphlets, many based onhis extensive travels around the world, focusing on both the corrupt nature of capitalism and imperialism, andthe possibilities for a socialist future. In 1932 he turned his back on the modern economy and began ahalf-century of successful homesteading with his wife, Helen, first in Vermont and then in Maine.

After 1917 Nearing never held a university position and was blacklisted by mainstreampublishers. But he continued his writing, speaking, and activism until he died at the age of 100 in 1983. Hewent to his grave unwavering in his commitment to his three principles and clear that his adherence to thoseprinciples had allowed him to live what he called simply "a good life."[3]

The expansion of free speech and the contraction ofdemocracy

I tell Nearing's story in short form here for comparison to the contemporary politicallandscape. It is vital to understand both the ways in which formal guarantees of freedom of speech and inquiryhave expanded in this culture in the 20th century and, at the same time, the ways in which American democracyhas atrophied. Since Nearing was fired and hauled into court, legal protections for freedom of expression haveexpanded and the culture's commitment to free speech has become more entrenched, which is all to the good. Butat the same time, the United States today is a far less vibrant political culture than it was then. This isthe paradox to come to terms with: How is it that as formal freedoms that allow democratic participation haveexpanded, the range and importance of debate and discussion that is essential to democracy has contracted? Howis it that in the United States we have arguably the most expansive free speech rights in the industrial worldand at the same time an incredibly degraded political culture? How did political freedom produce such adepoliticized culture?

First, the expansion of formal freedoms. On this front, the progress is clear. DuringWorld War I, Nearing was only one of about 2,000 people prosecuted under the Espionage act of 1917, which wasamended with even harsher provisions in 1918 by what came to be known as the Sedition Act. Hundreds went toprison. The war-related suppression of expression also was merely one component of a wave of repression --which included not only prison terms but also harassment, deportation, and both state and private violence --that smashed the American labor movement and crushed radical politics. At that point in U.S. history it isfair to say that freedom of speech literally did not exist. There was no guarantee of public use of publicspace (such as streets or parks) for expression, and criticism of the government was routinely punished. Inone of the most famous, and outrageous, cases of Nearing's time, labor leader and Socialist Party candidateEugene Debs was forced to run his fifth and final campaign for president from a federal prison cell after hewas sentenced to 10 years under the Espionage Act. His crime was giving a speech which pointed out, amongother things, that rich men start wars and poor men fight them.[4]

The struggle to expand the scope of freedom of expression progressed through thecentury, although not without setbacks. Similar harshly repressive reactions surfaced again after World War IIin the 20th century's second major Red Scare. The Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of politicaldiscourse in what became known as the Communist conspiracy cases prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1940.[5]The law made it a crime to discuss the "duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing ordestroying the government," an odd statute in a country created by a revolution against the legalgovernment of that day. It was not until 1957 that the Supreme Court reversed the trend in those cases,overturning convictions under the Act.[6] The 1960s and '70s brought more cases that continued to make moretangible the promise of the First Amendment, including landmark decisions that made it virtually impossiblefor public officials to use civil libel law to punish sedition[7] and established that government could notpunish incendiary speech unless it rose to the level of "incitement to imminent lawless action."[8]

This history leaves the people of the United States much more free to speak criticallyof government action. For example, since September 11 many people critical of U.S. foreign and military policyhave written and spoken in ways that would have without question landed us in jail in previous eras. Asampling of the titles of pieces I wrote, alone and with my political colleague Rahul Mahajan, gives a flavorof the nature of our dissent: "Why I will not rally around the president," "U.S. just as guiltyof committing own violent acts," "War of lies," "Saying goodbye to patriotism."[9] Inpublic speaking and in print, I have argued that the U.S. war on terrorism is a disastrous policy that hasmore to do with the maintenance of imperial credibility and the extension of U.S. dominance in Central Asiaand the Middle East than battling terrorism. I have denounced patriotism as an intellectually and morallybankrupt concept.

I wrote all this as a faculty member of a public university in a politicallyconservative state. Although there was a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting me fired and I was publiclycondemned as a "fountain of undiluted foolishness" by the president of my university, there has beenno serious suggestion (that I know of) by anyone in the university that I should be fired. No law enforcementagents have knocked on my door. No judge or jury has passed judgment on me. While many readers who objected tomy views have called for my firing, just as many of my critics have said they defend my right to speak even ifthey find what I say stupid or offensive. I have been called a lot of names, but no formal sanctions have beenapplied. And, more important, I have never seriously expected formal sanctions for these activities.

It is important to note here that I am white and American-born, with a"normal" sounding American name (meaning, one with European roots). The hostility toward somefaculty members has not stayed within such civil boundaries, most notably Sami Al-Arian, the tenuredPalestinian computer science professor at the University of South Florida who was vilified in the mass mediaand fired in December 2001 for his political views. It likely that not only my tenured status -- I can't befired without cause, protection that few people in this economy have -- but my white skin helped protect me.

In short: I live in a society that is more tolerant of dissidents, legally andculturally, than the one in which Scott Nearing lived. For this, I am grateful. We must always remember thatthose expansions of our freedom to speak were not gifts from enlightened politicians and judges, but a legacyof the struggles of popular movements -- socialists, labor leaders, civil-rights organizers, and antiwardemonstrators.[10] The freedom of speech we enjoy today was won by people who were despised and denigrated intheir time. History has vindicated them, but in their own time they suffered greatly.

So, in many ways I am better off than Scott Nearing; it is nice to know one has asteady job and won't be hauled into court. But even though Nearing's speech was more constrained than mine, insome ways I envy him. That may seem odd, given that in formal terms the United States of 1919 was in many waysa much less democratic nation -- not only was free speech not guaranteed but the majority of the population(women and most non-white citizens) were denied the right to vote. Perhaps we shouldn't call a nation ademocracy when it refuses to allow the majority of adults to vote and the ultimate guardians of freedom (theSupreme Court justices) see nothing wrong with jailing a leading intellectual and president candidate fordaring to question the judgment of his opponent.

But in another sense, the United States was a far more democratic society when Nearingtook the witness stand in 1918. Many commentators have pointed out that democracy is more than simply thepresence of certain political institutions and rules. The degree to which a society is democratic also can bejudged by how extensive and active is the participation of citizens in the formation of public policy. Eventhough marginalized and oppressed people had more restrictions on them in 1919, they were in many ways moreactive participants in democracy, engaging in political discussion and attempting to assert their rights inpublic.

What does democracy look like?

To make sense of all this requires a definition of democracy. Here I want to discussnot simply the structure of the system but the role that people see themselves as having. One thing thatalways strikes me as I read accounts of the early part of the 20th century is the vibrancy of political lifethen compared with today. Far more people -- ordinary people, not the chattering classes -- saw politics astheir birthright, not as an activity limited to politicians and intellectuals. Nearing describes boisterousmeetings of thousands of people who came to hear speakers and argue politics in the first decades of thecentury. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and '20s was designed to shut down that kind of political engagement,which was inconsistent with power's conception of democracy. One of the clearest articulations of thatconception came from Walter Lippmann, a leading journalist and intellectual of the first half of the 20thcentury. In a complex society, Lippmann asserted that people did not have the capacity to understand publicaffairs well enough to have an active role in policy formation:

"The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does notknow how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought tohappen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mysticaldemocrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce acontinuous directing force in public affairs."[11]

In such elitist conceptions of democracy, the role of citizens is basically to vote --to select which group of politicians and their allied experts they would like to run the country -- not to bedirectly involved in the formation of public policy. In Lippmann's words, "The public must be put in itsplace, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may livefree of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd."[12]

Unfortunately, the herd is not only bewildered but unruly, and it keeps jumping thefence; the spirit of participatory democracy doesn't die easily. Another Red Scare was necessary in the late1940s and '50s. Those renewed challenges to power were beaten down by the end of the 1950s, though it turnedout the politically quiescent times weren't permanent, as an expanded notion of democracy re-emerged in thecivil rights, women's rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and '70s. These popular struggles producedwhat those in power saw not as a democratic renewal but as a "crisis of democracy."

Samuel Huntington, a political scientist with solid establishment credentials, warnedthat the problems of governance in the United States stemmed from what he called "an excess ofdemocracy" and the solution could be found in "a greater degree of moderation indemocracy."[13] Citing universities and armies, he pointed out that not all institutions benefit fromdemocratic structures and went on to explain that "the effective operation of a democratic politicalsystem usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals andgroups." Acknowledging that this "marginality" for some groups is "inherentlyantidemocratic," Huntington still warned against "overloading the political system with demandswhich extends its functions and undermine its authority." The answer is, "Less marginality on thepart of some groups thus needs to be replaced by more self-restraint on the part of all groups."[14]