Doubt, debate and democracy
In 1958 President Eisenhower received a letter from a war veteran named Robert Biggs. Politely, the letter complained about a “feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty” that Biggs had detected in the president’s recent speeches. It continued: “We wait for someone to speak for us and [will] back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”
Rather than ignore this criticism, Eisenhower responded at length – possibly because Biggs was terminally ill – with a thoughtful defence of democracy’s shortcomings. “I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed” he replied. “Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”
Eisenhower’s humility, and his careful phrasing, are one indicator of how much America’s political norms have shifted during the last 60 years. Some readers may recall the 2016 Republican convention speech in which Donald Trump set forth his dystopian assessment of America, a country racked with “crime and terrorism and lawlessness” before adding, with no trace of irony, that: “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” Not content merely to dispense with traditional appeals to God, or one’s fellow Americans, Trump promised to restore law and order personally. He even barked out the line: “I am your voice” with a level of conviction that would have impressed Mussolini. Two years later it is clear that he has never seriously doubted about the truth of these assertions. What is equally clear is that for him politics is a zero-sum bloodsport and democratic debate little more than smokescreen for the schemes of his enemies.
The discovery of crudely made bombs mailed to at least a dozen of the current administration’s most prominent critics is suggestive of the febrile political climate that Trump has cultivated. His constant disparagement of the press has even led to a lawsuit that blames him for infringing on first amendment rights to free speech. His response to the current crisis speaks volumes about his grasp of the underlying issues. Two days ago, he tweeted: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!” The penal-
ties the media could face are left unstated, but the implied threat of government action is clear enough.
The murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a horrifying example of what happens when a government believes itself entitled to sympathetic press. As it desperately seeks a clean exit from its diplomatic nightmare, the Saudi government has changed its account of the killing at least five times. Butt no amount of revisionism can obscure the obvious truth. What happened to Khashoggi in Istanbul was what the Saudis have been allowed to get away with internally for decades, with nary a peep of criticism from Western governments. Lured by the prospect of large military and business contracts, the West has chosen to ignore human rights violations within the Kingdom, including the wholesale imprisonment of peaceful critics and activists and thousands of barbaric executions. During the first four months of this year alone the Saudis executed 48 people, half of them on non-violent drug charges, according to Human Rights Watch.
It seems fitting then that one of the most telling rebukes of Trump’s moral obtuseness with respect to the Khashoggi killing, namely that however bad it may be it should not jeopardize US arms deals, should belong to Pres. Eisenhower. In his farewell address of 1961, Eisenhower warned his fellow Americans of “[t]he potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power”, specifically through the workings of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” whose influence permeated “every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Presciently, Eisenhower worried that if “[w]e want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow” then “we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”
In the most famous part of the speech, Eisenhower noted that “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” Although he did not explicitly say so, Eisenhower would have seen a robustly independent national media as the surest guarantee of that citizenry. It should give every American pause that their current president tends towards a more Saudi Arabian view of these matters.