Circumstances compelled me to spend a long time in the US on my last visit. I took it as an opportunity to contemplate American political life and how it handles that infernal machine of human beings, resources and technology. There has been much talk about the onset of American “decline”; about that anticipated moment when the US will descend from its lofty heights as the sole remaining superpower in the world. But whether this occurs due to the decline in American sources of power or to the emergence of other powers that are capable of rivalling or superseding Washington, it is still years and even decades away. Some contemplation is in order, therefore. The information is abundant and available, but quite a bit of effort is required to sort through it so as to sift the wheat from the chaff. This process is particularly important in view of the huge rounds of commotion over a whole array of issues from the healthcare law to the terrible winter storms that have been ravaging the north and east, and from record snowfalls and temperature lows that seem to be turning the territorial heart of the US into an extension of the polar icecap to the midterm congressional elections scheduled for next November.
The latter relates to a chief feature of the American condition. The US is a country in permanent elections mode. No sooner does it emerge from presidential elections than it plunges into midterm congressional campaigns, and between these two there are always preparations under way for mayoral or gubernatorial elections, some no less exciting than the presidential campaigns, especially when it comes to the mayoral elections for a major city such as New York or the gubernatorial elections for California.
This permanent election mode creates a kind of dynamic upward moving pyramidical engine for democracy. Encompassing the vast grassroots base and proceeding through various levels to the summit, it is a mill that produces and tests leaders, that gives theories and ideas concrete meaning on the ground. To those of us coming from the Third World, and especially from our Arab region, where elections still mean gruelling conflicts and the ideas of federalism and local government signify preludes to secession, that American condition is cause for wonder. But perhaps that sensation is not restricted to those of us from the Third World. When the French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the 19th century he was awestruck. The same applied to Karl Marx who, in the same century, who was struck by another wonder; namely, the mode of capitalist evolution in the US.
The US was built on an intense plurality of interests and the idea that these diverse interests would balance each other out in one way or another and, therefore, that the state would benefit from the rivalry and become increasingly powerful. But there always remained the question as to what would happen if that rivalry escalated into conflict, as occurred in the American Civil War (1860-1865), which brought the US to the threshold of the dissolution of the federal union. Yet that situation never repeated itself. Perhaps the question at the time was connected with the nature of the sources of the conflict, but to me that anomaly points to something more important. There exists a backbone for that intensive rivalry in politics, economics and society, and between individuals, companies, organisations, institutions and — above all — ideas. That backbone is a political elite that seems ever capable of generating the necessary degree of stability for that ferocious competition.
In formal terms, that elite consists of the drafters of the US constitution and those who safeguarded it through amendments, proper application of its principles, and close supervision of this process on the part of the Supreme Court. But how is such a political elite formed? How does it survive and sustain its values?
I was particularly impressed, in this regard, by Robert Gates's recently released Duty: Memoires of a Secretary at War. This was not so much because of his detailed account of his time as secretary of defense under Bush Junior and, again, during Obama's first term and how he managed a government institution with a budget of $700 billion and with an arsenal at its fingertips powerful enough to destroy the world many times over. Rather, it was because the story of his life was inspiring.
Gates served under eight presidents, from Ford in the 1970s to Obama. Some were Republican administrations, others Democratic. But to him it was not the president's partisan allegiance that counted but the administrative teams with which he worked during those four decades in which he held various offices in the National Security Council in the White House, the CIA and the Defense Department. In becoming secretary of defense he was close to that American strategic elite, having had worked with most of its members before. As I had learned from Dick Cheney's memoir, In My Time, Gates had worked under the former vice president as well as under Donald Rumsfeld in the Ford administration. Rumsfeld served as secretary of defense then and would become secretary of defense again under Bush Junior. In fact, when you look at the White House family tree you will find a series of such links in Republican administrations from Ford to Bush, and you will find similar links in Democratic administrations from Carter in the 1970s through Clinton in the 1990s to the Obama administration today. The thread is always there. It leads from president to president and from one Congress to the next. You will find it in the committees and bodies that the president appoints to study a particular issue and that have to be headed by two chairpersons, one representing the Republican Party and the other the Democratic Party.
Political elites come into power and leave power, and as this cycle continues ideas evolve, whether through think tanks, major firms, hearing committees focussing on any number of the major issues or dilemmas the US has to deal with. This is the system that enabled the US system of government to survive and remain stable. However, recently there have been two important developments the effects of which are difficult to predict. The first is the emergence of extremist wings in both the Republican and Democratic camps: the Tea Party in the former and the “progressives” in the latter. The Tea Party folk are ultraconservative, even radically so. Their counterparts in the Democratic camp are ultraliberal. Both wings — the ultraconservatives and the ultraliberals — are fighting to draw their parties and public opinion in general to their side and this is generating a degree of polarisation in the US unprecedented since the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
The second development is the alarming state of the American media that has come to thrive on the dramas of discord, conflict and tension. As a consequence of both, political elites in the US increasingly find themselves compelled to take the kind of absolutist and intransigent stances that the state had sought to avert for many decades. A prime example of the consequences of the phenomenon is to be found in the temporary paralysis of government that occurred when the Republicans and Democrats locked horns over how to handle the national budget deficit.
Still, it is said that US politics is like a pendulum. After swinging to its furthest point to this side or that, it returns to centre. Perhaps this is true. But what would happen if this side or that pushed the pendulum beyond that furthest point in their pursuit of some purportedly ideological purity?
