We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that can only be that humans were a kind of “biological error,” using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.

The year 2003 opened with many indications that concerns about human survival are all too realistic. To mention just a few examples, in the early fall of 2002 it was learned that a possibly terminal nuclear war was barely avoided forty years earlier. Immediately after this startling discovery, the Bush administration blocked UN efforts to ban the militarization of space, a serious threat to survival. The administration also terminated international negotiations to prevent biological warfare and moved to ensure the inevitability of an attack on Iraq, despite popular opposition that was without historical precedent.

Aid organizations with extensive experience in Iraq and studies by respected medical organizations warned that the planned invasion might precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe. The warnings were ignored by Washington and evoked little media interest. A high-level US task force concluded that attacks with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) within the US are “likely,” and would become more so in the event of war with Iraq. Numerous specialists and intelligence agencies issued similar warnings, adding that Washington’s belligerence, not only with regard to Iraq, was increasing the long-term threat of international terrorism and proliferation of WMD. These warnings too were dismissed.

In September 2002 the Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9-11 atrocities and was planning others. The campaign, timed to the onset of the midterm congressional elections, was highly successful in shifting attitudes. It soon drove American public opinion off the global spectrum and helped the administration achieve electoral aims and establish Iraq as a proper test case for the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will.

President bush and his associates also persisted in undermining international efforts to reduce threats to the environment that are recognized to be severe, with pretexts that barely concealed their devotion to narrow sectors of private power. The administration’s Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), wrote Science magazine editor Donald Kennedy, is a travesty that “included no recommendations for emission limitation or other forms of mitigation,” contenting itself with “voluntary reduction targets, which, even if met, would allow US emission rates to continue to grow at around 14% per decade.” The CCSP did not even consider the likelihood, suggested by “a growing body of evidence,” that the short-term warming changes it ignores “will trigger an abrupt nonlinear process,” producing dramatic temperature changes that could carry extreme risks for the US, Europe, and other temperate zones. The Bush administration’s “contemptuous pass on multilateral engagement with the global warming problem,” Kennedy continued, is the “stance that began the long continuing process of eroding its friendships in Europe,” leading to “smoldering resentment.”2

By October 2002 it was becoming hard to ignore the fact that the world was “more concerned about the unbridled use of American power than about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein,” and “as intent on limiting the giant’s power as in taking away the despot’s weapons.”3 World concerns mounted in the months that followed, as the giant made clear its intent to attack Iraq even if the UN inspections it reluctantly tolerated failed to unearth weapons that would provide a pretext. By December, support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10 percent almost anywhere outside the US, according to international polls. Two months later, after enormous worldwide protests, the press reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion” (the “United States” here meaning state power, not the public or even elite opinion).4

By early 2003, studies revealed that fear of the US had reached remarkable heights throughout the world, along with distrust of the political leadership. Dismissal of elementary human rights and needs was matched by a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes easily to mind, accompanied by professions of sincere dedication to human rights and democracy. The unfolding events should be deeply disturbing to those who have concerns about the world they are leaving to their grandchildren.

Though Bush planners are at an extreme end of the traditional US policy spectrum, their programs and doctrines have many precursors, both in US history and among earlier aspirants to global power. More ominously, their decisions may not be irrational within the framework of prevailing ideology and the institutions that embody it. There is ample historical precedent for the willingness of leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of significant risk of catastrophe. But the stakes are far higher today. The choice between hegemony and survival has rarely, if ever, been so starkly posed.

Let us try to unravel some of the many strands that enter into this complex tapestry, focusing attention on the world power that proclaims global hegemony. Its actions and guiding doctrines must be a primary concern for everyone on the planet, particularly, of course, for Americans. Many enjoy unusual advantages and freedom, hence the ability to shape the future, and should face with care the responsibilities that are the immediate corollary of such privilege.

ENEMY TERRITORY

Those who want to face their responsibilities with a genuine commitment to democracy and freedom—even to decent survival—should recognize the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many ways similar: to ensure that the “great beast,” as Alexander Hamilton called the people, does not stray from its proper confines.

Controlling the general population has always been a dominant concern of power and privilege, particularly since the first modern democratic revolution in seventeenth-century England. The self-described “men of best quality” were appalled as a “giddy multitude of beasts in men’s shapes” rejected the basic framework of the civil conflict raging in England between King and Parliament, and called for government “by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants,” not by “knights and gentlemen that make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us.” The men of best quality recognized that if the people are so “depraved and corrupt” as to “confer places of power and trust upon wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this behalf unto those that are good, though but a few.” Almost three centuries later, Wilsonian idealism, as it is standardly termed, adopted a rather similar stance. Abroad, it is Washington’s responsibility to ensure that government is in the hands of “the good, though but a few.” At home, it is necessary to safeguard a system of elite decision-making and public ratification—“polyarchy,” in the terminology of political science—not democracy.5

As president, Woodrow Wilson himself did not shrink from severely repressive policies even within the United States, but such measures are not normally available in places where popular struggles have won a substantial measure of freedom and rights. By Wilson’s day it was widely recognized by elite sectors in the US and Britain that within their societies, coercion was a tool of diminishing utility, and that it would be necessary to devise new means to tame the beast, primarily through control of opinion and attitude. Huge industries have since developed devoted to these ends.

Wilson’s own view was that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness.”6 Leading public intellectuals agreed. “The public must be put in its place,” Walter Lippman declared in his progressive essays on democracy. That goal could be achieved in part through “the manufacture of consent,” a “self-conscious art and regular organ of popular government.” This “revolution” in the “practice of democracy” should enable a “specialized class” to manage the common interests that “very largely elude public opinion entirely.” In essence, the Leninist ideal. Lippman had observed the revolution in the practice of democracy firsthand as a member of Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, which was established to coordinate wartime propaganda and achieved great success in whipping the population into war fever.

The “responsible men” who are the proper decision-makers, Lippman continued, must “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.” These “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” are to be “spectators, not participants.” The herd does have a function: to trample periodically in support of one or another element of the leadership class in an election. Unstated is that the responsible men get that status not by virtue of any special talent or knowledge but by willing subordination to the systems of actual power and loyalty to their operative principles—crucially, that basic decisions over social and economic life are to be kept within institutions with top-down authoritarian control, while the participation of the beast is to be limited to a diminished public arena.

Just how diminished the public arena should be is a matter of debate. Neoliberal initiatives of the past thirty years have been designed to restrict it, leaving basic decision-making within largely unaccountable private tyrannies, linked closely to one another and to a few powerful states. Democracy can then survive, but in sharply reduced form. The Reagan-Bush sectors have taken an extreme position in this regard, but the policy spectrum is fairly narrow. Some argue that it scarcely exists at all, mocking the pundits who “actually make a living contrasting the finer points of the sitcoms on NBC with those broadcast on CBS” during election campaigns: “Through tacit agreement the two major parties approach the contest for the presidency as political kabuki in which the players know their roles and everyone sticks to the script, striking poses” that can not be taken seriously. 7 If the public escapes its marginalization and passivity, we face a “crisis of democracy” that must be overcome, liberal intellectuals explain, in part through measures to discipline the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young” in schools, universities, churches, and the like—and perhaps even through government control of the media, if self-censorship does not suffice.8

In taking these views, contemporary intellectuals are drawing on good constitutional sources. James Madison held that power must be delegated to “the wealth of the nation, the more capable set of men,” which understand that the role of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Pre-capitalist in his worldview, Madison had faith that the “enlightened Statesmen” and “benevolent philosopher” who were to exercise power would “discern the true interest of their country” and guard the public interest against the mischief of democratic majorities. The mischief would be avoided, Madison hoped, under the system of fragmentation he devised. In later years he came to fear that severe problems would arise with the likely increase of those who “will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its benefits.” A good deal of modern history reflects these conflicts over who will make decisions, and how.