CASTING ABOUT FOR A COUNTER-ARGUMENT

There is no escape from the wretchedness that stalks the earth. 

I cast about for a counter-argument, for an idea that will put the scales in balance….

Paul Auster

The Brooklyn Follies

This nugget of wisdom from Paul Auster has become my coping mantra, together with a famous quote misattributed to Albert Einstein, which defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  I’ve been doing that.  It’s crazy.  So, taking Auster’s approach, and instead of doing the same thing over and over again, (shouting clarion calls into the wilderness; waiting for doomsday), and expecting different results, (message received; crisis averted), I’m looking for a counter-argument to balance out the wretchedness.

Turns out, counter-arguments are everywhere:  a long talk with a best friend, going for a walk and paying attention to my surroundings, enjoying the cat curled up in my lap, listening to music or looking at art, laughing with abandon, reading a good book by lamplight on a dreary winter afternoon, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of photos that languished for years in four large IKEA bins and seeing proof positive that we were happy, and appreciating the companionship of someone I love.  It just takes determination and focus.

I’ve written so often here about the existential threat to democracy, I fear falling into not-Einstein’s definition of insanity.  Since those in charge aren’t listening to me anyway, and since I’m not actually insane, I’ve taken Auster’s advice.  I’m casting about for a counter-argument to democracy’s demise, and I’ve found one in a recent New Yorker essay by Jill Lepore, called The Last Time Democracy Almost Died.  I’m going to quote it at considerable length, but here is the link:  New Yorker Lepore.  Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard, reflects on the 1930s to gain perspective on the state of democracy today:

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.”

Lepore reminds us that 20 years earlier, in 1917, Woodrow Wilson promised that winning World War I would make the world safe for democracy.  But it didn’t.  

The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

By 1931, discussions about the viability of the western social system ensued worldwide.  In 1932, Mussolini predicted, “The liberal state is destined to perish.  All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.”  In 1933, Hitler came to power.  More democracies fell:  Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia, Portugal, Uruguay, and Spain.  Japan invaded China and Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, declaring, “The present century is the century of authority, a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”  (I am reminded of Steve Bannon’s touting as biblical truth the return of right-wing nationalism predicted by The Fourth Turning:  An American Prophecy, What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.  Here is a link to the controversial and somewhat discredited book:  Wiki The Fourth Turning.  Still, by definition, the future remains to be seen.)  But back to Lepore’s counter-argument.

She paints a picture of 1930s America that resonates today:

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered….Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

How?  By casting about for counter-arguments to put the scales back in balance.  In his first election campaign, in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to rescue American democracy with his New Deal, a rejection of both a malign state-run economy and a merciless laissez-faire capitalism.  But as Lepore relates, while his New Dealers were trying to save the economy, they ended up saving democracy, too:

They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

A new America built on work and shared stories.  Could the Green New Deal, or even that chimeric infrastructure spending bill we've been promised, accomplish this kind of community building today?  It’s a counter-argument with historical precedent that could tip the scales.  But will it happen?  We'll have to wait and see. 

But it wasn’t just the New Deal’s massive construction projects that forged a sense of shared purpose.  It was debate itself, among ordinary people all across the country, participating in a kind of national civics class, as Lepore explains:

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker [that's his book below], who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When … a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,”… a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism….The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and…the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding….

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered?

Do Company Unions Help Labor?

Do Machines Oust Men?

Must the West Get Out of the East?

Can We Conquer Poverty?

Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?

Is Propaganda a Menace?

Do We Need a New Constitution?

Should Women Work?

Is America a Good Neighbor?

Can It Happen Here?

Sound familiar?  Same questions, 90 years later.  These radio-broadcast town hall debates on democracy came to a halt in 1941, with the onset of World War II.  (By the by, in Bannon's secular bible, each "saeculum" of history lasts about 90 years, contains four generational turnings of about 22 years each, and each fourth turning ends with war.  Coincidence?  Fake history?  Time to start looking in earnest for that counter-argument.)  

Lepore eventually brings her story around to the wretchedness of the here and now:

[M]easured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed.

With the benefit of historical perspective, Lepore points us toward a counter-argument to put the scales in balance:

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. 

Every idea, every argument, has a counter-argument.  Some are false; some are true; some are weak; and some are strong.  But all deserve to be  heard.  On that note, Lepore leaves us with this positive:

In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “The Meaning of Democracy.” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does.

Indeed it does.  Ms. Lepore, your brilliant essay has swung my pendulum back from despair toward the joy of sorting those photos.  Thank you.

Keep it real!

Marilyn