CONSERVATISM, DEMOCRACY, AND AUTHORITARIANISM

Radical Society, Jul 2003 by Zafirovski, Milan

liberty, social control, and conservative revolutions

IN HIS OBSERVATIONS of America's early democracy, the nineteenth-century French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville admonished about the "very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny" in this country. Other perceptive European observers, from Dickens to Weber and Pareto to the Frankfurt School and French postmodernists, have also considered or predicted the prospect of undemocratic tendencies and outcomes in the United States. By contrast, most domestic analysts have, in a head-inthe-sand approach, apologetically participated in the grand celebration and glorification of the U.S. polity (the U.S. way) as the best or even only form of democratic governance (mode of life). The specter of tyranny or an undemocratic outcome of an ostensibly democratic political system could be psychologically daunting for native (brainwashed and brainwashing) U.S. apologetics, but theoretically challenging in terms of explanation and prediction for more neutral social scientists. Seemingly, given what most native analysts (not to mention conservative politicians) hail, especially in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, the resilience of democracy in the United States (Lipset 1996), such a prospect is unrealistic, if not fantastic, especially m the near future.

In general, the historical story of democracy as well as capitalism is far from coming to a happy ending, despite the apparent triumph of democratic ideals and capitalist ideology/practice over the alternatives in the 1980-90s and the pompous declarations of the "end of history." Prospects of antidemocratic (and anticapitalist) reversals are not unlikely contrary to what many observers from Western societies expected in the aftermath of this triumph of democracy (and capitalism). The current movement toward a "new world order" of liberal democracy, civil liberties, and human rights-and a global free market economy-may not be totally irreversible. This is not just because of the historical experience of earlier setbacks in Western society like fascist regimes in Europe during the 1920-30s, it is also because of some present tendencies casting doubt on such order and democracy, leading instead to the "new world disorder" (Bauman 2001:3 5) and threatening the "culture of democratic freedom" (Beck 2002:40).

Ironically, most of these threatening tendencies reportedly come from what has been considered a paragon of democracy, the United States, since, to some observers, the U.S. social system appears to be "to real freedom what Disneyland is to [culture]" (Baudrillard 1994:27). As some leading U.S. economists admit, for example "by most Millian [freedom] criteria, [economically] regimented Scandinavia was freer than my America" (Samuelson quoted in Tilman 2001:39). Another irony is that in terms of a "free-world" order projected by conservative U.S. politicians, these tendencies counter the global trend to political democracy, social liberties and civil rights, and international openness. While most of the world, especially Europe, has been moving in this direction, the United States has taken the opposite path of deformations of political democracy, limitations of social liberties, human rights, and private choices, as well as international closure, parochialism, and ethnocentrism (e.g., protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia), even imperialism (obstruction or abuse of the United Nations, preemptive wars of aggression, etc.) since the 1980s and culminating in the early 2000s. In particular, the period following September 11, 2001, has been characterized by a "reassertion of U.S. imperialism, political boundaries, and centralized state power" (Steinmetz 2002:210). The above path appears as another expression of perennial U.S. nativism or exceptionalism (Lipset 1996) that U.S. conservatives celebrate.

However, these most recent forms of U.S. exceptionalism may turn out to be a "double-edged sword" (Lipset 1996) in sociopolitical terms. These exceptionalist tendencies are likely to be less benign (or "funny") than most previous ones, so long as at stake is ultimately the fate of political democracy and human freedom in the United States, even the Western world. In the event of the continuation of such processes and their consummation in an antidemocratic outcome, future social historians (or novelists) may designate this development as a mutation from exceptionalism, as a sort of modern comedy-the United States as a regular "international laughingstock" (Hill 2002:24)-to one as Dreiser's "American tragedy," though elements of grotesque are not and probably will not be absent. The latter is likely to assume the political form of Tocqueville's tyranny of the "silent moral majority" or elite minority ("good old boys"), i.e., a blend of economic plutocracy, antidemocratic oligarchy and fundamentalist semi-theocracy, as witnessed in the U.S. Southern Bible Belt (Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, etc.). Its social pattern tends to be near-total moral control of "unAmerican" behavior and suppression of civil liberties, private choices, and human rights. This noneconomic nirvana is joined with economic paradise a la Huxley's Brave New World of production cum "free enterprise" for the plutocracy and semi-slavery for workers (a sort of macroscopic sweatshop), of distribution governed by the Wild-West rule of the strongest as a variation on the law of the jungle, and of consumption as near-imperative and universal commodification (the soma principle).