Political and Civic Virtue
I’ve been thinking about this for the last few weeks. It may be too pessimistic for some, but I think it is an objective glare into the near future of our republic. I used Political and Civic Virtue as the title to draw attention to the necessity of virtue in public life, on the part of citizens and politicians.
But rather than go on about the most recent news flashes about the incredible corruption of the Republican Party and Republican politicians, and about the tyrannical nature of the bush administration I found myself being pulled in another more important direction on the issue of civic virtue. So political junkies, better take a break for a more long term meditation.
In Western history, before the physical existence of republics, monarchy was the general form of government. The issue of the longevity of the society never arose because of the hereditary nature of succession and the ideology of the divine right of kings. Put simply, the divine right of king’s notion of government stated that God appointed this particular monarch to rule this particular society and that his rule was an analogue of God’s rule.
Monarchies don’t have citizens; they have subjects. The virtue of a subject is to obey: the king and God said so. In addition, the European universe of the mind did not have the symbolic language to convey what can be called political time. Things were the way they were because that was the way they had always been. When an unforeseen event occurred, it was understood as either revelation or custom, but not as something that could be affected by human agency.
All that changed with the emergence of a new republican form of government in the city states of Italy during the Renaissance. Machiavelli’s opposition of political virtue and Fortuna (or the unexpected) is perhaps the first attempt to understand the new particular event as something that is caused by human agency and must be responded to in the same way.
When the republican idea resurfaced so did the problem of maintaining that republic in physical existence in time. If God and the king’s line of succession provided both concrete organization for action in the world and a symbolic meaning for its subjects, how would a society organize itself for action in the concrete world (e.g. protect itself) and how would it find a meaning for itself that went beyond simply kicking everyone else’s ass.
By the time of the Founding of the American republic political virtue was defined as being involved in both protecting society through the willingness to bear arms as part of a citizen militias and owning property (usually land that would provide economic self-sufficiency). Men who fulfilled these requirements were thought to possess the political virtue necessary to be citizens and to make the decisions about how the republic would defend itself and seek to serve it’s interests (organize itself for action in the world) and to create the political language that would give these concrete efforts symbolic meaning.
The salient need of any republic was to create these citizens, create property owners and militia members. These are the people that fought the revolution. Thomas Jefferson held this notion so strongly that he made the Louisiana Purchase and virtually tripled the size of the new republic so that there would be enough land for everybody to own property and be citizens. Our genocide of the Native Americans was driven by our definition of what a citizen was. As our society has grown so has our political membership expanded to include those who were originally excluded, but the material basis for the republic envisioned by Madison and Jefferson is limited by who can own property and who was willing to bear arms.
Public education is the means to create citizens. New citizens will take up the republican duty to take up arms to protect the republic and to carry the symbolic meaning of the society to the next generation. This foundational purpose of public education in America is under attack today by fascists who want not to create citizens but clones.
It is no accident that as the American populace becomes more interested in who will be the next American Idol than in who will be the next American President, our self-identity as citizens has been twisted by the Right into an identity as taxpayers. For the last 35 years the Right in America has successfully destroyed the American definition of its society’s members as citizens who took part in and were the government and replaced that definition with that of a taxpayer, a consumer of government services who is beset on all sides by those who don’t have to buy those same services; i.e. “welfare queens,” “people who choose to be poor,” etc. Our shared citizenship has been flushed down the fascist toilet and replaced with an exclusive definition of who an American really is. We should all be justifiably terrified. This is the stuff of the concentration and re-education camps.
With the complete transformation of the last bastion of the American republic with the collapse of the Democrats in the Senate who failed to stop the confirmation of Alito, the groundwork is complete for the change of our republic into a tyranny justified by a Christian fascist ideology. The idea that our republic was both organized for action in the world and created a self-meaning that could be transferred from generation to generation is now replaced by a monstrous imitation. Now the fascist Right in America controls all three branches of the government that was created to protect the conditions that fostered the creation of citizens and the means to create a shared symbolic meaning that would carry society into the future.
The Greeks and the Romans saw tyranny as a part of the life cycle of a republic. They theorized (and observed) that as a republic ages it actually goes through a life cycle of youth, maturity, decay, and finally collapse into tyranny. The machine that drove this transformation was the degeneration of citizens into subjects. The mechanism that transformed citizens into subjects was (and still is) the failure of public education to re-create the citizens the republic needs and this leads to people who simply want to be taken care.
George Orwell is a hero to me and many of my generation (boomers). He was a socialist who fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the fascists because, as he put it, “it was the right thing to do.” Unlike Hemingway who spent most of his time in bars in Madrid so he could write his novel, Orwell was in a front line unit. After the Second World War, Orwell wrote the books we know him for, Animal Farm and 1984. While Orwell created those worlds in his novels to condemn Stalin and the communists in the Soviet Union, these two novels should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the Right in America and our emerging Stalin, George, “the Dubya” Bush.
As MSOC put it with her Time magazine cover “WE ARE FUCKED.” We will continue to be fucked unless we can combat the culture war of the Right (our 21st century version of bread and circuses combined with an exclusivist, triumphalist, really fucking bizarre Christianity) with a culture of progressive citizenship.
Progressives are the only force in America that can defeat this new fascism. The reason we can do it is because we understand that the meaning of America doesn’t reside in one particular definition of what America is: the meaning of America is what we create together and agree to as what we as Americans are going to stand for. Our republic was created not by a definition but by a process of defining. This is not just a political battle; it is cultural and spiritual. We will lose it unless we hurry up and recognize that fact.
