A rchive Date
[ 23-05-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1484271
It's time democracy got in way of marketplace
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
Washington Post
July 5, 2002, 6:15PM
On this patriotic weekend, it's worth remembering that the United States is both a commercial republic and a popular democracy. Sometimes our two halves get along just fine. Sometimes they collide. We're living at a moment of collision.
Our commercial side means that standard American political rhetoric is shot through with language celebrating entrepreneurship and individual achievement.
It's hard to think of another country where one political candidate might criticize another because "he never met a payroll." The Bush administration has proudly touted its crisp "corporate" style and contrasted it to the rococo and academic approach to management that characterized the Clinton administration.
Our politicians constantly talk about "getting out of the way" of business, of "promoting work, savings and investment." The flexibility of the marketplace is constantly praised over the rigidity of government.
Dick Armey, R-Irving, the House majority leader, stated the creed of the commercial republican (and Republican) as plainly as anyone. "The market is rational," he has said, "and the government is dumb."
But the government doesn't seem as dumb when there is irrationality and corruption in the marketplace. That's when popular democracy confronts our commercial side. Al Gore's campaign speeches casting "the people" against "the powerful" mined a deep vein in American history.
Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts and condemned the "malefactors of great wealth." His cousin Franklin Roosevelt attacked the "economic royalists." Andrew Jackson broke up the Bank of the United States in the name of opposing an institution that made "the rich richer and the potent more powerful."
Our country shifts back and forth between our commercial and democratic traditions. Events are in the saddle.
At moments of economic expansion - the Gilded Age in the late 19th century is a good example - commercial imperatives beat back the democratic wish. When the economy fails, as it did during the Great Depression, democracy demands that the government put those who benefited most from the commercial imperative in their place.
When government is seen to fail, as it was during the Great Inflation of the late 1970s, the commercialists gain the strength to beat back the democrats, both the small d and large D kind. Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, we have been in a commercial phase.
During times of transition between one phase and another, few things are more amusing than to watch politicians adjust. They eat large helpings of their old words and pretend never to have believed what they had long proclaimed.
Democrats, the party of government, tried mightily after 1980 to remake themselves into the party of business. Business, in truth, often does well under the Democrats.
Nonetheless, the recent eagerness of Democrats to cozy up - especially at fund-raising time - to the very interests they so often claim to oppose has created a certain cognitive dissonance. Now, after Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, ImClone, Tyco and all the rest, it's the Republicans' turn to do the pretending.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney lived important parts of their lives in corporate boardrooms and made their careers as unapologetic corporate advocates. In recent weeks, they've been struggling to turn themselves into forceful critics of the terrible things corporations did.
One thing you can be sure of: The Bushies will lay off comparisons between their administration's behavior and the corporate style. The metaphor is way too close for comfort.
This being a moment to celebrate our country, it's worth considering that the two traditions embedded in our political culture have served us pretty well. Our commercial side has made us a rich nation. Our democratic side has made us suspicious of the abuse of wealth, and of the power that wealth brings. The interaction between these traditions has led not to stalemate, but to a dynamic process of self-correction.
Let's also be clear about the current imperative: Now is the time for the democratic tradition to reassert itself. Some very wealthy people, exercising their power at the helms of great corporations, made themselves even richer by lying, by cheating and by abusing their stockholders and employees.
Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post. postchat@aol.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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