“A democratic political system is inclusive, participatory, representative, accountable, transparent and responsive to citizens’ aspirations and expectations…A functioning democracy…requires many interdependent elements and processes that are based on a culture of citizen participation in public affairs.” (emphasis added)
–International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA)
Here’s what I know about Singapore.
Singapore is a beautiful place. It’s clean. It’s tidy. They have free markets and a thriving high-tech business culture. You can walk down streets aseptic enough to eat off of and purchase a Sony entertainment system and a Nokia phone and a Mercedes with a DVD player. Graffiti and wads of chewing gum on the sidewalks are unheard of. You can watch a Scarlett Johanssen movie in an immaculate, air-conditioned theatre. You can drink fancy cocktails in swell hotels with beautiful people, imagining yourself to be some aristocratic colonial in some gentler, more civilized time than your own.
You can also get thrown in jail for opposing the prevailing political party, who’ve been in power since 1959. A phalanx of restrictive legislations severely hampers your freedom of expression and assembly. You can be tortured for vandalism. The press is tightly controlled by the state; censorship is commonplace. The writer William Gibson describes Singapore as “Disneyland with the death penalty”-they have one of the highest rates of execution in the world.
For Americans reared to believe that choosing between Coke and Pepsi is tantamount to political freedom, it’s hard to imagine these two realities-the consumer-friendly and the totalitarian-existing hand in glove. Yet similar situations exist in places like Saudi Arabia ; China provides a high-profile example of a consumer police state on the rise. As BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus said of both China and Russia, the economic success of these countries suggests “to some governments that there is, indeed, an alternative model that can lead to significant progress without pursuing all of these democratic niceties.”
If you are unfortunate enough to be living in these scenarios, the civil and political tension seething around you can be soothed away by another cocktail, some furniture-browsing at IKEA, a visit to the therapist or perhaps an extended trip abroad.
It’s a common method of mind control to present people with a false array of choices; to program a certain prescribed amount of leeway between their mental goalposts. Consumer culture may give us things we need, but it also sets false boundaries of possibility in our minds. It insists that money is the only thing that can have any worth or meaning. We become distracted from pursuing those intangibles that truly define quality of life: an accountable government; communities whose members look out for one another while still being tolerant of eccentricity and individuality; leisure time for meaningful activities and relationships; access to a true diversity of ideas; a connection to the natural world; strong public institutions like schools, libraries, and cultural opportunities that are convenient and accessible to everyone; the exercise and valuing of critical thinking; a respect for the past and an understanding of how we’re continuing the line of history for future generations.
Quality of life also means we need not fear government nor authority, nor the possibility of our basic human needs going unmet. Citizens who spend most of their energy just trying to survive from day to day are not likely to see civic involvement as a priority.
In 21st century America, too many of us are lulled into passivity by the advertising/public relations state, which routinely supplants our dreams and desires with the more lucrative ones it has concocted for us. It pacifies us politically, depresses us emotionally, and stabilizes a mediocre status quo.
Without the restoration of legitimate public debate, reliable sources of information we can all trust, and a lively creative sector encouraging the exchange of ideas, democracy is endangered by a growing sense of apathy and powerlessness. If a healthy public life is not there to incubate our individual and collective sense of entitlement, we can be easily primed for mass submission, intimidation and self-censorship.
Singapore provides an extreme example of how consumer culture, with its feigned controversies, false intellectual life and decoy dialogue, can act as a stopgap in a society’s gaping need for an authentic public square. How long would it take for us to become like Singapore-especially now?
Author Laurence Britt, former corporate finance specialist and international trade consultant, carefully studied seven fascist regimes, from Mussolini’s Italy to Salazar’s Portugal. He came up with a list of fourteen attributes that these extreme right-wing governments seemed to share. The first eleven are:
1) powerful and continuing nationalism, 2) identification of enemies and/or scapegoats as a unifying cause, 3) supremacy of the military, 4) rampant sexism, 5) obsession with national security, 6) the intertwining of religion and government, 7) the protection of corporate power, 8 ) the suppression of labor power, 9) obsession with crime and punishment, 10) rampant cronyism and corruption, and 11) fraudulent elections.
In post-9/11 America, there are several examples of each of these attributes. But let’s look at the evidence for each of the remaining three points: 12) disdain for the recognition of human rights, 13) controlled mass media, and 14) disdain for intellectuals and the arts.
1. Disdain for the recognition of human rights. Since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has been operating a system of secret detention centers around the world designed to hold terror suspects without granting them due process or a public airing of evidence. The Pentagon and intelligence experts estimate some 9,000 prisoners are held in these facilities, some of which are under the auspices of foreign governments known to abuse human rights. Some 340 detainees are still held at Guantanamo Bay without charge, trial or sentence; Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the president to name any U.S. citizen an “enemy combatant” and to define what an “enemy combatant” is.
Meanwhile, for ordinary citizens like us, our rights to privacy in the workplace and elsewhere have been whittled away to alarmingly small proportions. The lion’s share of legislation, not to mention a robust surveillance industry, supports your employer’s ability to legally monitor your emails, web surfing and network activity. Section 215 of the Patriot Act now has a sunset date of 2009, but in the meantime it allows the government to more easily monitor the books we check out at the library, our private medical records and our political activities.
In our schools, as funding for media programs like school newspapers are increasingly axed, students know-and care-less and less about their First Amendment rights. A 2005 study by the Knight Foundation found that nearly three-quarters of high school students either said that they took the First Amendment for granted, or didn’t know how they felt about it. Three-quarters thought that flag-burning as political protest was illegal. In all of the study’s findings, there was a direct correlation between the completion of media studies, and students’ appreciation for tolerance of unpopular ideas, of publishing stories without the permission of authorities, and thinking about how the First Amendment applied to them personally. Yet only 17 percent of school administrators responded that media and journalism studies ranked high among their school’s priorities.
2. Controlled mass media. After World War II, the U.S.-led forces occupying Germany enacted strict media ownership laws to prevent the repetition of history: i.e., a handful of powerful press moguls ushering a dictator into power. In present-day America, five behemoth corporations-NBC Universal, News Corporation, Viacom, AOL TimeWarner, and Disney-now control most of we read, listen to and watch. There may be mind-boggling numbers of media outlets to choose from, but most are owned by this oligopoly of six; the bar to market entry is almost impossibly high.
History illustrates that once large concentrations of wealth and power have accumulated, they exist mainly to preserve themselves. Media giants prove no exception to this rule. Between 1998 and 2004, the communications industry spent $1.1 billion attempting to influence election outcomes and legislation. Its lobbying expenditures alone were more than $957 million-nearly twice of what the oil and gas industry spent in the same period. And the spending is going up: from 1998 to 2003, communications lobbying expenses swelled by 16 percent.
How does this cycle of consolidation impact a journalist’s ability to do his or her job informing the public? In 2004, 57 percent of local newsroom journalists and 66 percent of those in national newsrooms said that “increased bottom-line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage”; those numbers had jumped up from less than 50 percent in both categories five years ago. A survey of media workers’ unions found that 83 percent thought there had been “a lowering of journalistic standards,” citing the industry’s obsession with profits as its most pressing problem.
How seriously does a consolidated media take its moral duty to serve the public interest, and how vigorously do corporate newsrooms fulfill their traditional role as watchdogs of those in power? In the fall of 2003, a study by a group at the University of Maryland found that 60 percent of Americans surveyed believed at least one of three major misconceptions about the Iraq war: a) that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, b) that Saddam Hussein had worked closely with the 9/11 terrorists, and c) that people in other countries either supported the war or were evenly divided over it. Commercial media consumers were most likely to believe at least one of the misconceptions; public media consumers were least likely to. The wealthier our media corporations become, the more they identify and collaborate with those in power; the less likely they are to aggressively question the official story pumped out by government and corporate PR machines.
Much has been made in recent years of the blogging phenomenon. While D.I.Y. media in general holds great potential to enable a citizens’ media movement, it still bears asking what kind of citizens we are. When and why will media we produce rise above the level of the things we’ve been watching and reading all our lives? Who is teaching us to question our own assumptions? Where can we locate a universal canon of basic rhetorical skills where civil dialogue and sober analysis are defined and agreed upon? Don’t count on the Big Five - or anyone who’s been consuming them exclusively - to deliver.
3. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.
In the U.S. we’ve never been known for our intellectualism, more for our populism-a general mistrust of elitists, be they aristocrats or experts, academics or wonks. The problem with this is that nearly anybody can be scapegoated as an “elitist” of one kind or another, and intellectual scrutiny (being itself understood as “elitist”) is not employed to sort out the real story.
This phenomenon unfortunately lends itself to a facile culture of mass manipulation. The more people mistrust the very process of questioning their elected officials, governmental policies or media, the more they abandon the potential envisioned by our Age of Enlightenment founding fathers for a society of intellectual freedom and popular rule.
The University of Maryland study quoted above may illustrate the extent to which a culture of heightened nationalism and fear further enables a suspension of critical thinking among us. Eighty percent of respondents who listed Fox News as their primary source of information believed one of the three major misconceptions about the Iraq War. In addition, the U.S. news media in general rarely cover international stories that don’t directly involve us in some way-stories that would broaden our understanding of, and concern about, the world beyond our borders. A media as uninformative as this is probably both the symptom and the cause of an especially anti-intellectual climate in the early 21st century, fueled by a legitimate fear of terrorism but unnecessarily fanned by xenophobia, witch-hunting, binary either-or thinking and a failure to understand any context outside our home territory.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in this atmosphere, the arts are under attack. For a country as obsessed with freedom as we are, American attitudes towards art are surprising. In the bohemian Mecca of San Francisco, 41 percent of adults believe that artists contribute a lot to society. This rate sounds paltry until you compare it with a national average of 27 percent.
Yet the arts play a vital role in helping us to think for ourselves as citizens. A study by the state of North Carolina cites evidence that K-12 arts education helps kids develop skills such as creative problem-solving, teamwork, and using old information in new ways. But arts education funding has been systematically undermined for decades, and recent years have proven to be more brutal to the arts than ever. In the fiscal year 2004, 36 of the 57 U.S. states and territories slashed cultural funding, and California has nearly eliminated its arts funding altogether.
So while we are hardly in a fascist police state in 2008, the warning signs are clearly there. Between a secretive government, a media that frightens more than it enlightens, and a real threat of terrorism to “legitimize” it all, we as Americans are witnessing the active dismantling of the very principles we purportedly stand for: human rights, a diversity of voices in the public square, freedom from disinformation.
It is not enough to have our civil rights enshrined in law alone. We must also have a culture of democracy that breeds engagement, knowledge, and an active exchange of information and ideas among citizens. Support for quality independent arts, media and journalism will act not just as a tonic to a toxic situation, but as “nutritional supplements” boosting the long-term emergence of a healthy, citizen-driven democratic future.
News, media and the arts are the primary venues through which citizens learn about-and subsequently change-the world. Once unplugged from the dead circuit of Profit Culture, the public will benefit from, while also creating, a live circuit of their own making.
In an essay for Remember.org, a “cybrary” of the Holocaust, writer Chip Berlet defines 20th century fascism in Europe as a reaction to the principles of the French Revolution that underpin our Constitution: liberty, equality and fraternity.
Berlet describes Fraternity as follows: “…the sense of the brotherhood of mankind. That all women and men, the old and the young, the infirm and the healthy, the rich and the poor, share a spark of humanity that must be cherished on a level above that of the law, and that binds us all together in a manner that continuously re-affirms and celebrates life.”
Fraternity is the cultural component of democracy that takes us beyond mere representational government. Fraternity means that all of us as individuals act with an ingrained sense of entitlement to self-expression, power and dignity, while helping each other along the way. Fraternity in this sense is the element from which all other worthwhile values flow: the element that is all too sorely lacking in our present culture.
One need not be a Democrat, or vegetarian, or activist, or extrovert, or “joiner” to believe in a culture of democracy. The ideas set forth here are American ideas. They are ours to cultivate and defend in whatever way we see fit.
What if you took the Berlet quote above and shared it with your neighbor, your accountant, your family, your enemy-not with an agenda of changing who they are or what they think, but as a radical act of offering something valuable, something that might clarify the common-sense, civilized impulses that live within us but too often go unacknowledged and unrewarded? What you hear might surprise you.
It’s a conversation that has to start somewhere.
Printed versions of these articles can be found in the “Culture of Democracy” folder in IA&M’s office.
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