February 2009
In what should have been (but wasn’t) the New York Times’s “Quotation of the Day” one snowy morning last month, Robert Bixby, the director of the Concord Coalition which advocates a responsible fiscal policy, was quoted as follows. “Congress said, we’ll give you [the automotive companies] the [bailout] money but you have to show us a plan for sustainability. Now the government is in the same position of [sic] the auto companies, but they haven’t come up with any plan for sustainability.”
Mr. Bixby’s simple statement goes directly to the heart of the matter in respect of the federal government’s bailout of Detroit. Though devoid of rhetorical implication, it nevertheless impels the sophisticated reader to take the next step forward on his own. The government doesn’t have a plan of sustainability for the auto industry. How could it be expected to have, now or ever, such a plan? A workable one, that is. The federal government is in the business of running the government, not producing cars. If the companies that have spent their corporate existences building cars can’t make a profit at it, how can the government, whose political and bureaucratic staffers have devoted their lives to running successful election campaigns and inefficient bureaucracies, succeed where the company men have failed? To argue that, in time of economic turmoil, government should be put in charge of the financial and industrial sectors is comparable to arguing that, in an era of political confusion--say, the Watergate crisis--Wall Street and Detroit should be appointed to shoulder the politicians aside and operate the federal government. The case to be made for the one is as good as it is for the other.
Why should a presumption exist that the government that cannot deliver the mail efficiently, or win most of the wars it has fought over the past six decades, is the machina ex Deus that alone is capable of inventing every solution and solving every problem, public or private? I think the answer is that the instinctive appeal for help is less to government qua government than it is to the ultimate level of power, which, in a modern totalitarian democracy, is no longer the society of free citizens acting in its cooperative professional, occupational, and social capacities, but the federal government that has supplanted it both in power and prestige. Thus it scarcely occurs to the large mass of the public that the national government has proven, time and again, its inability to proceed beyond charades and games of smoke-and-mirrors, in crises of national emergency as in calmer and more prosaic times. Its only thought is that an emergency of large proportions by definition deserves to be entrusted to the highest power: to do otherwise would be to trivialize the crisis and insult the Power in whose insidious growth the citizens have acquiesced.
Although the most famous book on power is probably Machiavelli’s The Prince, more immediately useful to our own time is On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenel, first published in Geneva in 1945. On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth describes the instinctual, if not blind, thrust of Power toward absolute self-realization and the total fulfillment of its ends. Power, Jouvenel contends, is, was, and will be the same, always and everywhere. The story of Power has a logic that amounts nearly to inevitability, following a curve that begins with a balance of small powers within a society, reaches its apex in absolute tyranny, and collapses finally into a series of independent power cells, developed within the tyranny, that begin the process over again. That process, repeated throughout human history, concurrently as well as progressively, is fated to be a never-ending one as long as human societies shall last. The ever-repeating story is that of Power taking the side of the people against the aristocracy and the social authorities, including the churches and priesthoods, with the aim of destroying these in order to establish direct and total control over the masses. Having accomplished this, Power is eventually dissolved by the cells—the new aristocracies, generally bureaucratic in nature—that undermine and bring it down in their own interests, acting in accordance with the same instinct for Power that their predecessors exhibited. The instinct for Power is never about anything other than Power. It is not about Justice, Equality, Democracy, Freedom, Prosperity, Enlightenment, Progress, or any of the grand goods or values it claims to realize, and in whose name it acts. It is about itself, and for itself, alone. “The nature of Power cannot be reformed”—by, say, democracy. Rather, Jouvenel says, “The history of the democratic doctrine furnishes a striking example of the intellectual system blown about by the social wind. Conceived as the foundation of liberty, it paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.”
That field very much includes the United States and the “democracies” of Western Europe, each of which is coming more and more to represent an unhewn block of solid Power, like black granite. This morning I saw a column by Paul Craig Roberts, who expressed the opinion that nobody in Washington finds cause for alarm in the present financial crisis. Roberts is not really correct in his opinion; rather, he is half right. The politicians, the bureaucrats, the helpful financiers now racing to Washington to help solve the mess that is largely of their own making, are alarmed only by the prospect that they might be deprived of Power at the hands of a vengeful electorate which still, even at this late date in the history of the so-called Republic, still has the minimal power to vote one of the two national scoundrel parties out of office. So long as they can hold onto Power, the collapse of the present system is nothing to them. That is why the outgoing President Bush, and the incoming President-elect Obama, are rushing to Do Something--pass some bill, effect some stimulus, spend a few trillion dollars to “save” the economy. Quite obviously, they don’t know what they are doing—they couldn’t know, without months at least of careful study of the situation and deep consideration of the proposed solutions. But there is no time for consideration, they warn us: the world will collapse if something is Not Done now.
And so the politicians will Do Something. Of course, that Something will not “work.” Nothing works for Power in the present age, because Power has grown so obese it can no longer use its arms and legs. And it has lost its powers of generation. Power is impotent, but it is still Power in relationship to everyone else, for we also have been rendered impotent as citizens by its proliferating powers. Power nowadays is possessed of a negative power alone, the power to destroy what is and to abort what is to come. That much it can do. And that is enough for it, so long as it remains Power. Power doesn’t care about General Motors, or jobs, or homes, or the national infrastructure, or a clean environment—so long as the loss of these things doesn’t mean its end. And to ask or expect it to care is a futile and foolish thing.
One hears people say, “Who would want to be president in a time like this?” We know who: only a man or woman who is satisfied with the substance of Power, while caring nothing for its creative or effective exercise.
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.