Food For Thought

I actually agree with a lot of he says:

"We the People" Are Complicit

By Andrew Bacevich - October 28, 2008, 9:47AM

I largely agree with Eugene Jarecki's assessment of the problem - a badly abused Constitution, a political system that is fiscally irresponsible and fundamentally corrupt, a reckless overemphasis on military power. The list goes on.

Yet it is not as if these tendencies have evolved when no one was looking. They have flourished in broad daylight - with the majority of the American people either tacitly or explicitly (through their own political behavior) buying in.

Take the case of the imperial presidency - not exactly a new phenomenon historically. Apart from occasional moments of buyer's remorse - chiefly occurring in the wake of Watergate - the idea of empowering the chief of executive is one that has for decades appealed to liberals no less than conservatives. Do the legions supporting Senator Obama expect their champion if elected to shrink the presidency and hand power back to the Congress or to the states? Don't kid yourself. Those who enthuse over Obama do so because they believe that their emperor is preferable to the emperor offered up by the other party.

So when Jarecki issues his call for the people to rise up and redeem their country, he overlooks the fact that the people themselves bear considerable responsibility for the straits in which we find ourselves. Blaming Bush and Cheney or Washington or Wall Street lets the real culprits off the hook.

That would be us, a people who have long taken it for granted that the rules that apply to other nations - rules like the imperative of living within your means -- do not apply to those accustomed to viewing themselves as God's new Chosen People.

My point is simply this: the essence of our problem is as much cultural as it is political and economic. Who we chose as president-emperor certainly matters. It just doesn't matter nearly as much as all the election-related hoopla would seem to suggest.

Will Obama be an improvement over Bush? Sure - almost anyone would. But Obama won't save the country. He won't even "change the way Washington works." To believe otherwise is simply naïve.

Preserving American freedom will require changing the American way of life - less consumption, more saving; less dependence, more self-sufficiency; less individual self-indulgence, more attention to communal needs; less today, more tomorrow.

No president-emperor, regardless of how powerful or how charismatic, can impose such changes. The change we need will have to come from the bottom up.

But change will require sacrifice. It will entail settling for less, at least in the near term, so that we can set our house in order. It means belt-tightening so that we can balance accounts. It means, as Randolph Bourne counseled nearly a century ago, cultivating our own garden rather than trying to remake the world in our image.

Nothing in Washington, on the campaign trail, or in our own households suggests a willingness to undertake change on anything like this scale.


Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/28/we_the_people_are_complicit/

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