Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 6 of 6
You're exploring in your essays where the greatness of the U.S. lies, and you're thinking about the ethos of democracy. I want to read to the audience one of the things that you said:
The health and well-being of the American democracy depends less on the swagger of its police forces than on the capacity of its individual citizens to muster the strength of their own thought. We can't know what we're about, or whether we're telling ourselves too many lies, unless we can see and hear one another think out loud. Democracy works best when people try to tell each other the truth.
We're talking about a fundamental political problem as we talk about this lack of the literary skills on the one hand, but on the other the new media which people in power seem very able to manipulate.
Yes, and they're able to manipulate because of its nature. It's an easy form to manipulate, if you're only dealing with a fifteen-second spot, or if you can pin an entire set of election ideas on one word or on one slogan, if you can reduce the entire coming election for the Congress to a matter of sexual misbehavior on the part of a congressman from Florida, if you can substitute an emotional simplification for a more complicated understanding of a larger political context. This is, of course, the way the language of advertising works, and our political language at the moment is the language of advertising, and it's not a very subtle or expressive or meaningful form of discourse.
What is the solution? How do you build such a new language?
People are fooling around with it on the internet. I don't read the blogosphere. I have learned, with manuscripts -- a manuscript comes over the transom and I don't know who the writer is, and I read the first three pages. If I can hear a voice in the three pages, then I will continue to read it and probably end up buying it and putting it in the magazine. But most manuscripts you can't hear a voice, you hear jargon of one kind or another, or you hear repetition of standard brand opinion, you don't hear an individual thinking out loud. I don't know how expressive the internet really is, [but] most of what I've read on the internet doesn't come up to that kind of standard. I can see it as a useful tool to convey information or data, but to convey meaning is harder.
I'm a theorist of blogging and cyberspace, but I think that what is emerging is identifiable voices; you just have to know where you want to go and find those voices that are having a meaningful exchange. But it still has to evolve and there's so much information out there. It's not like Harper's, a place that you can go and have a sense of what you get.
This event was billed as the "Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration and the Impeachment Process," and so I want to deliver the goods. But I'm going to do this quickly by quoting you and asking you if you have anything you want to add. I picked out four things [with the question of] "What can you say to a Berkeley audience beyond this?"
Is there anything you want to add to that chronicle? [audience laughter]
Well, I guess I could fill it out [audience laughter] with specific example, but the -- I mean, that's being done for me in ...
Daily.
Daily. That was written a number of years ago but we now have Bob Woodward among others to confirm the generalization.
So, I guess the question is, are we at a tipping point so that impeachment [can proceed]? You wrote an essay on some work that Representative Conyers was doing in the House, and in essence I believe he was saying, "I'm doing this even though it may not have an effect now, but I will have taken a stand." As all of this is now coming out to a broader audience, the failure in Iraq, the failure in response to Katrina, and so on, are we at a tipping point so that impeachment could conceivably become a political reality, that the Democrats come in, in both houses of Congress and begin investigations? Do you think we could realistically hope for an impeachment of George Bush?
No, but I do think like Conyers. The piece in the book you're referring to is called "A Case for Impeachment," and it follows from the bill introduced into Congress by John Conyers of Michigan last December suggesting that there be first censure and then investigation as to whether there were grounds for impeachment now.
I think that we owe it to ourselves to impeach Bush. [audience applause] Whether the Congress will do that or not is -- I would expect not, and that would be, to me, a failure on the part of the Congress, because what we're talking about, at least what I'm trying to talk about, and what Conyers was trying to talk about, is not the failure of a particular policy vis-à-vis Iraq, or tax cuts for the wealthy, or the Homeland Security and Katrina, and minimum wage, and so on. It's the Bush administration's attack on the constitutional order on which this country is based. It is the abuse of power. [audience applause] It is a usurping of power on the part of the executive, and there are many proofs of that.
The denial of habeas corpus -- this was as recently as last week -- to persons suspected or detained on suspicion of terrorism, the taking of the interpretation of the president's action out of the jurisdiction of the courts, the granting to the president the authority to declare, to decide who is and who is not an enemy combatant, whether a foreign national or an American citizen, the flat statement on the part of Bush with regard to the warrantless tapping of telephones and the interception of email messages, and he says, in fact, "I will do as I please."
The muzzling of the Congress, the Republican majority acting sort of as a storm trooper for the Executive, for the administration, or the refusal on the part of the government to give to the Congress information that it constitutionally deserves to have, the conduct of government behind closed doors, the increased seizure of power to interfere with the lives of citizens, and so on. There's a whole long list. The refusal to recognize international treaties.
The impeachment process is not to punish Bush. Any competent criminal court could send Bush to jail for, you know, fraud. It's not the responsibility of the Congress to censure Bush morally. The Yale divinity school can do that!
Take back his degree!
Or Jerry Falwell can do that. But it is the responsibility of the Congress to maintain the balance of power on which the country is based and not to completely abdicate the power of the legislature, and the founders recognized this. They recognized that the abuse of power could become so excessive on the part of the Executive that it would be harmful to the mechanics of decent government. And so, to remove Bush is like removing a tumor. It's a malign growth on the body politic. That is the way the impeachment should be understood. I'm afraid the Congress won't understand it that way, but I do think if we as a country or as a political body continue to believe in democracy in the way that we say we believe in it, we would impeach him.
I think that what has been happening over the last twenty-odd years is a loss of faith in the possibility of the democratic idea, and that's not only happening in the United States, that's happening in Europe, it's happening in England. Many of the same kinds of things that the Bush administration is doing in the U.S., the Blair government is doing in England. And funnily enough, you get more belief in the idea of democracy in the East than you do in the West. That strikes me as a profound irony. So, I do think, to go back to your question, yes, it is a tipping point.
We want to leave our audience, especially the young people, with some element of hope here. [audience laughter] Looking at our history, our traditions when they haven't been corrupted, what kind of political movement do you see emerging that might turn these things around? It's not clear to me at all that it will be in the Democratic Party. It's conceivable it could be in something like the environmental movement which is [addressing] a real threat to the world as we know it, based on what we as humanity are doing to the environment. What are the possibilities here that you have thought about, or you're hoping for?
There are a lot of possibilities. I had coffee this afternoon with a friend of mine named Arthur Blaustein who's a teacher here at Berkeley and has organized a number of volunteer organizations. AmeriCorps, I believe, is one of them, and I think you have the largest contingent of those kinds of volunteers than anywhere in the country, several hundred undergraduates who are approaching the notion of the common good as participants. Whether it takes the form of teaching in the poorer school districts, or working on environmental issues, that is the democratic idea. It's still alive and well in the country as a whole.
You have a ballot, I think, in Berkeley and in San Francisco to impeach Bush, but as a local initiative. The trouble is that the idea of democracy, if you go back to Montesquieu and the spirit of the law, he distinguishes between democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, despotism -- he runs through a number of forms of government. The one that's implicit in democracy, in his mind, is virtue. It's a willingness to take care of, look out for, one another. This is, of course, the way it makes a connection to the New Testament. The Bush administration is a great -- the Old Testament is their text, the miserable, bloody-minded God, right?
[laughs]
But Ralph Nader made the point very forcefully in the election of 2000 when he said if a million people in this country would give over the course of a year $100 and 100 hours to I believe what he called civil or civic service, we could make great changes in the country. We don't see enough of that in our media, and we don't see enough programs like this one, or like the other ones that you do with people who think out loud.
If I could raise enough money I'd try to have a television channel like CSPAN that would just do events like this, or put the camera in a laboratory, or put it in a dance troupe in New Mexico, or in a theater in Minnesota. There are a lot of very creative and engaged people in the United States, but the major news media blocks them out. What you get instead is Paris Hilton. We've got to do more of the kind of thing that you do, and more of the kind of thing that the kids here at Berkeley are doing, and to me there's a lot of hope in that.
William Sloane Coffin, who was the chaplain at Yale University in the sixties, was very active in both the civil rights movement and in the anti-war movement, and his notion of democracy was that it was the great escape from the prison of the self. In other words, the public interest is more interesting than I am. It gives you the chance to take part in a bigger, more interesting self. That was his way of explaining the idea.
In this conversation we've gone back to where we began, because it was that sense of the public sphere that you learned as a young person that affected the choices that you made, both in your career and the way you see the world.
Yes. I was very lucky in my childhood in San Francisco to see the formation of the UN, which is based on these kinds of ideas. It's an imperfect organization, but Churchill said of the UN, "It is not about arranging the ascent to heaven, it is about preventing the descent to hell."
On that note, we have a timeframe that it is just about ending, and I want to recommend your book to everybody, and I want to leave everybody with a quote from that book, which is: "In order to provoke political change you need language that induces a change of heart." Thank you very much for doing this public interview.
Thank you.
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