To the Editor:
. . . Had Bruce D. Porter, in “Can American Democracy Survive?” [November 1993], looked longer at the evidence in pursuit of his question, he might have felt more alarm.
Mr. Porter cites “declining governability” as an incipient crisis, tracing it to budgetary and other economic problems, but he surprisingly concludes that these problems need not be destabilizing and may be “healthy.” There is no mention, however, of even more troubling sources of a grave erosion of legitimacy that is fundamental to democratic governance: the growing recognition among ordinary people of routine lying and deception by the state; the deepening chasm of distrust of officialdom and of officials’ explanations for their many failed promises and programs; the clientizing of citizens by remote and inaccessible bureaucracies. Loss of legitimacy is extremely serious (and hard to regain) because it strikes at essential allegiance, at respect for governing authority, and at the willingness of individuals and groups to cooperate without crude (and inefficient) coercion.
Mr. Porter’s treatment of the “crisis of American values” is also disappointing, and not only because he attempts to dispose of it in a few paragraphs. . . . Conflict (or flight) of values has become a major issue in our country. The insults that provoke it are well known: the increase in lawlessness and violence; the essential nihilism of postmodern academic doctrines trickling down through the media; the bumptious selling of diversity/pluralism; the attempts of the pan-sexual bund to impose its ideas on schoolchildren in the guise of hygiene instruction—and more.
So now we hear admissions such as that recently published in a prominent liberal journal, “We made a mistake in ceding the family issue to the Right.” Speechwriters in the White House have taken up the “politics of meaning”; the President now speaks of the “great crisis of spirit” and the importance of “values” and “soul.” All this is more striking after years of his party’s ideologues denouncing as sexist/racist any attempt to introduce such subjects. Presumably long-exiled values will now be rehabilitated and allowed back in the conversation. Small comfort! The language which once made possible moral and ethical discourse has so fallen into disuse that it has become as arcane as Welsh or Romansh; not quite extinct but moribund, covered over with a patchwork quilt of rights talk, emotivism, interests, motivations, demands, calculation, utilitarian preferences, appetites, and therapy chat.
Yes, we should be alarmed. Democracy will probably survive, but in hollowed-out forms of media-driven plebiscites. Worse, the Age of the Enlightenment is fading, coming to an end just as the Age of Myth and Faith closed out many years back, and we are now in a long transition—a Time of Disbelief and Unbelievability—moving (perhaps) toward some other age no one can yet name.
Thomas Fitzgerald
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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To the Editor:
There is nothing essentially to criticize in Bruce D. Porter’s article, “Can American Democracy Survive?” But the superficiality makes it bland nourishment indeed. A review of the major ills currently besetting us is not what COMMENTARY has meant to me in twenty years of avidly devouring each issue. The magazine’s excitement has always been to challenge us, the more or less well-read, if not necessarily intellectual, subscribers. This pallid and cautious discourse produces nothing more than what we are already only too aware of from even a casual perusal of media offerings.
Come on, Mr. Porter, take a stand! Tell us what you would do to make things right in this country. Tell us how you would handle our “new and serious challenges” from abroad, or our “failure to reduce the budget.” Anyone can categorize our deficiencies. The moral relativism you disdain is a by-product of American democracy which is now evolving into an end-product. I grant that this form of government may be the best there is, but it also appears to be heading toward something which may be more than we bargained for.
Just what course would you have America take at this juncture? Neither liberal nor conservative administrations nor Congress seem willing to take risks by fully informing Americans of the economic abyss toward which we are heading and prodding them to swallow the bitter medicine required to avoid it. And for obvious reasons; it gets them where they breathe—in the voting booth. Unable to please all their constituencies, they shrink from antagonizing any of them. And so they are hamstrung—paralyzed. It is the great handicap of governing in a republic.
One point raised in the article did cause me some reflection—enough to reach a somber conclusion: unless and until a major crisis develops, foreign or domestic, Americans will not unite. And when they do, it is always almost too late and involves a great deal of pain. Unhappily, this is the price, I suppose, we pay for our way of life; and yet it seems the only way American democracy survives.
Stanley P. Kessel
Hollywood, Florida
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To the Editor:
. . . Bruce D. Porter, in a generally first-rate and thoughtful article, seems to make at least one point from a Washington perspective. He writes of “rising public resentment over the failure of Washington to address the deficit. . . .” But the deficit . . . is not the primary concern of the public, . . . and NAFTA, for all its press coverage, is far down the list of things keeping the average American awake at night. . . .
Aside from job creation, by all objective measurements the economy is improving. But a good part of the public does not notice a real difference. Being out of a job, or knowing someone out of a job, or being fearful of losing one’s own job, can overcome mounds of economic data. Perception always wins out over reality. Americans fear they are losing control, that their lives are getting less secure, that government at all levels is powerless, or incompetent, to do anything. Unfortunate natural tendencies, conditioned by the Reagan-Bush “free-lunch” attitude toward taxes, cause many voters to deny any responsibility for this situation. . . . They see government as gutless, . . . and politicians concerned only with reelection. Yet officials like Jim Florio in New Jersey who try to show leadership are punished with defeat. . . . Elected officials, especially in Washington, see this. Faint-hearted they might be, but they are not stupid. . . . Increased voter anger leads to an increase in cautious political waffling which in turn increases voter anger. . . . Mr. Porter is right when he sees great problems now facing the country, though his analogy with the 1850’s is probably exaggerated. . . . The national structure is strong; we endured the problems Mr. Porter mentions and, though there is no guarantee, it is reasonable to believe that we will endure and survive in the future. . . . But we need leadership. We must avoid lazy and feeble gimmicks like term limits, the current easy way out. Term limits allows voters to avoid having to make hard choices. . . . Besides, a way to limit terms already exists. Perhaps for the wrong reasons, Florio in New Jersey and David Dinkins in New York had their terms quite effectively limited. We need to tell our elected officials at all levels, no more pandering—we demand leadership now. We need to tell them that we will pay for good government, but we had damn well better get it.
Bruce L. Brager
Arlington, Virginia
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Bruce D. Porter writes:
When I wrote “Will American Democracy Survive?,” I anticipated that critics of the article would brand me an alarmist and charge me with exaggerating the defects of American democracy. It is, therefore, with an odd sense of gratification, bordering on bewilderment, that I find myself confronted by critics whose main objection seems to be that I have understated the case for a crisis in American democracy. I plead guilty. I did understate the case, deliberately, believing that a discussion of any event so calamitous as the possible collapse of a great democracy called for a measure of rhetorical restraint. If that resulted in some readers feeling I was being too cautious, even bland, so be it. I agree with Thomas Fitzgerald, nonetheless, that my article might have profited from a fuller exposition of what I called “the crisis of American values,” but space considerations unfortunately precluded it. As he rightly points out, that crisis is at the heart of what ails the American polity today.
Stanley P. Kessel complains that the problems of which I wrote are obvious from “even a casual perusal of media offerings.” This may be true for readers of COMMENTARY, but unfortunately it is not at all the case with our society or media at large; efforts to criticize the fragmentation of our society or its abandonment of moral values are still too often dismissed as racist, reactionary, or right-wing, none of which they need necessarily be. As for Mr. Kessel’s assertion that I did not take a stand, he is quite wrong. I took a very clear stand. But what I did not do is offer a prescription, which is what he is looking for. I simply believe that an accurate prognosis must precede any search for solutions. If it was presumptuous to postulate a systemic-wide crisis of American democracy in a few pages, it would have been even more presumptuous to propose solutions in the same space—much less in this brief reply.
Americans are typically fascinated with quick fixes and legislative solutions, yet I fear there is no simple political solution to the crisis that faces us—not term limits, not balanced-budget amendments, not welfare or taxation or educational or health-care reform. The crisis we face has political ramifications, of course, but it is not fundamentally political in nature. It derives, rather, from the erosion of the moral and spiritual foundation of our society, and it can only be addressed by vigorous efforts to rebuild that foundation. It is time we faced the truth that an ineffectual Congress, a vacillating administration, and a generation of timid and unimaginative politicians are not the cause of our problems. They are only a symptom of what ails us all.
