Isegoria

America’s successes did not happen because of America’s unique political system:

They happened despite America’s unique political system. America became great not because American democracy was great, but because America was a great people in a great place. As such, it was uniquely resistant to the poison of democracy, and alone survived its own disease. Now that the bloom is off the continent’s youth, we can see how well American democracy works in a normal country. Others have experienced this disappointment; now, it is our turn.

FDR, like Lincoln, was a dictator:

He governed America more or less personally by decree. Obviously, many people worked forUSGinFDR’s time; but, as with a normal corporateCEO, none could flout his will and survive professionally. FDR was not quite in charge of the courts; Lincoln could disregard the judicial process, but FDR couldn’t. However, these exceptions should be seen as minor details in an overall pattern of general personal government.

Those who hanker for a New Deal 2.0 should remember that FDR invoked a permanent state of emergency in 1933, just like Hitler. And just like Hitler, he ruled for life. For the next 12 years, he and his minions governed America by whim, like Dick Cheney cubed. It’s true that FDR found himself constrained by the Supreme Court. It’s not (entirely) true that when he fought the Court, he lost. And there was certainly no one else in America who could contend with him!

(Nor was FDR, as commonly asserted, a “traitor to his class” — anything but it. FDR’s beliefs, or at least his speeches (in one so seldom praised for candor, the inference of any actual conviction is at best an exercise of imagination) can indeed be studied as almost perfect reflections of the intellectual fashions of America’s apex upper class, the socialite-socialist aristocracy. These fashions have changed somewhat since 1933, but not that much.)

FDR could not, it’s true, order someone arrested or shot for no reason at all. At least, not so far as I know. We still have a lot to learn about this era. FDR did not have the powers of Lincoln, who could have anyone arrested, and did — but not shot. Lincoln was no Lenin or Hitler. For the purpose of managing the normal operations of government, however, FDR, Lincoln, Lenin, Hitler, Henry VIII, Cromwell and Napoleon exercised more or less the same level of authority: personal sovereignty.

So this remedy, hardly new to history, is not even new to us. Rather, America has taken the Dictator Pill in the lives of those now living — 75 years ago. And 75 years before that. And its pet historians, though the grant-fed dogs they are, celebrate these episodes as marvelous renewals. Does it compute? Does any of this crap compute? No, gentlemen, we will have the truth!

FDR, personally, was not much of an administrator. FDR was a charming hereditary socialite and a fine political actor. As an administrator, he gets a D for aptitude, a C for effort, and a D for results. (As an actor, his performances turn the stomach today. Try listening to an FDR speech, or worse — watching a propaganda newsreel. This incredible, heavy-handed, flagrantly mendacious schmaltz was pure dynamite for the unsophisticated radio listener of the ’30s.)

But in his entourage, FDR had some of the most talented administrators in the history of the world, and those administrators had more or less full executive authority. For instance, if anyone in the lives of those now living has held the job of “CEO of USG,” that would be Harry Hopkins. Colonel House dreamed the dream — Harry Hopkins lived it.

There is no Harry Hopkins in Washington today. There is no Colonel House, either. There is no one even remotely like these people; there is no job remotely like their jobs. All the royal powers of the New Deal have been sliced into micron-thick wafers and distributed around ten or fifteen office buildings. These powers have not gone away — quite the contrary. They have, of course, expanded. But they have also become entirely impersonal. (In many cases, they have ended up in the hands of the judiciary — once FDR’s worst enemy.)

The change is for the worse in a thousand different ways, but perhaps the worst is that it eradicates any conceivable responsibility for bad results. Thus 65 years after the death of FDR, post-New Deal Washington displays all the vices of the real New Deal, and none of its virtues. This will not change. This clock does not roll back. There is no fountain of youth for the State. A Brezhnev does not become a Lenin. Fish soup does not become an aquarium. Etc.

Why did it take so long to achieve democracy?

One thing I like to try to do is remember my original reaction, as a child in the ’70s and ’80s, to the present history of the world as revealed to me then by educational sources of unquestionable, or at least unquestioned, reliability.

Of course, I could be just making this up. It is hard to tell. But I distinctly recall wondering: why did it take so long for human progress to achieve democracy? After all, you have many centuries of extremely sophisticated European Renaissance and post-Renaissance thought. Yet the victory of democracy on the European continent was not complete and assured until the lives of those now living. In England, it was not complete and assured until the 20th century. Only in America was it old, and even then not that old. And then there was the Roman Empire… and so on.

Moreover, I learned, in the real world today, there were only two real alternatives. Democracy, or Hitler. Or Stalin. Democracy or tyranny. Yet when I read the history of Europe before the 20th century, ie, the century of democracy, I did not see anyone or anything like Hitler or Stalin.

What, exactly, is the difference — as a matter of political organization — between the regime of Queen Elizabeth, and that of Hitler? Democracy puts both in the same category: nondemocracy. Absolute personal despotism, to be exact. But… there is a difference, isn’t there?

All these objections are neatly summed up in Churchill’s famous aphorism, if it is really Churchill’s. Democracy, whose flaws are not in any way secret, appears to you as the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others. And what do you know of all the others? Nothing at all, of course. (Or at least, nothing nonmagical.) Hence the statement sounds true, because it is true. So far as you know. That migraine spot again!

There’s a hypothesis forming here. We notice that all our blind spots seem to be in the general area of political democracy. Where they lead to misimpressions, those impressions tend to cast democracy in a falsely positive light. What if democracy was like communism? What if, for everything and anything in the world today that is broken, we could say accurately: it is broken because it is democratic. To fix it, get rid of democracy.

This appears unthinkable, of course, to you. You were raised as a true democrat. Note that if you’d been raised a true Communist, you would have perceived Communism in just the same way. And, of course, Catholicism, and Islam, and so on. But Communism (which is in fact best seen as a splinter branch of the global democratic movement) is the best analogy, because it is so recent.

No, comrades, Communism is not the problem! Communism? The problem? On the contrary, comrades — Communism is the cure! We suffer, not because we have been true to Communism, but because we have been untrue to Communism! To get back on the right track, comrades, we must redouble our efforts to achieve Communism… and so on.

I think of this when I hear anyone acting under the delusion that they can restore the American political system, presumably to some imagined youthful vitality. The American political system! The true nature of that system, gentlemen, is now quite apparent. Long has it battened on the rest of the planet; its final dessert is now apparent. As any epidemiologist would expect, America was that country most resistant to American democracy. Resistance is not immunity. In the end, every elm must meet its beetle.