Beyond Election Reform
Not Just a Fix, But an Upgrade
By James Heddle - EON
Author’s Note: From the memory hole. This article was written in April of 2005 - before Substack - but never published. I discovered it in an archive search for something else. So much of it remains relevent today, however - despite the time-bound references - that I’ve decided to post it without updating
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy….
But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, …by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.” - Carroll Quigley -Tragedy and Hope – 1966
"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval - 1816
Quigley’s Mistake
He taught at Harvard, Princeton and the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. He helped visualize coming US weapons systems twelve years into the future at the Navy’s Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California. He was a teacher of young Bill Clinton and other movers-and-shakers-to-be. He wrote with authority and arrogant certainty about the evolution of civilizations and about how the innermost machinery of establishment politics in America really works. Professor Carroll Quigley, and his students who went on to run America and try to run the world, believed he had all the answers. Like many before and after, they were dead wrong.
Admittedly, Quigley knew a lot, penetrated the veils of illusion that constitute popular politics in America, and got a great many things right about how an elite-run system actually functions. His fatal flaws were his pragmatic acceptance of that system as adequate to the demands of democratic governance, and his assumption of the absolute unarguability of what many would now call the “eastern liberal consensus.”
For Quigley, “The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method: we must
remain strong,
continue to function as a great world Power
in cooperation with other powers,
avoid high-level war,
keep the economy moving without significant slump,
help other countries to do the same,
provide the basic social necessities for all our citizens,
open up opportunities for social shifts for those willing to work to achieve them,
and defend the basic Western outlook of
diversity,
pluralism,
cooperation, and the rest of it, as already described.
These things any national American party hoping to win a presidential election must accept.” [Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, Macmillan, NY, 1966, pg. 1248 ]
How quaint seems Quigley now.
New Century, New America?
The counterforce that would soon demolish the apparent inevitability and impregnability of Quigley’s monolithic worldview was already taking form, not in the intellectual strongholds of the ‘Eastern Establishment,’ or in the military’s academe, but in the ‘heartland,’ at the University of Chicago, under the tutelage of a political philosopher named Leo Strauss.
Strauss came to the US as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938. He saw the handwriting on the wall foretelling the rise of genocidal fascism in his homeland and got out while he could. How ironic that his ideological descendants have now created conditions in American which many see as similar to those which caused Strauss to flee Germany.
First at the New School for Social Research in New York, and then for many years at the University of Chicago, Strauss became a powerful influence for generations of students who became academics in their own right and spread out through the colleges, universities and burgeoning conservative think tanks of the land. The Strauss lineage includes such neo-con luminaries as Francis The End of History Fukuyama, William “Project for a New America” Kristol, Richard ‘Prince of Darkness’ Perle, Bush’s Man-in-Afghanistan (and now, Iraq ) Zalmay Khalizad, and Khalilzad’s mentor, the newly anointed head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. [From June 1, 2005, to June 30, 2007.]
According to Straussian.net, “Leo Strauss was the twentieth century’s greatest teacher of political philosophy, and this site is dedicated to the Straussian tradition. Its specific intention is to serve as a guide to students caught up in this wonderful, overwhelming, and persecuted academic movement.” A 1999 book entitled Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime lists nearly 30 ‘Straussians’ who have rotated regularly in and out of high government posts since the ‘80’s. To the Quigley-ites of the Bush I administration, they were ‘the crazies.’ Not any more. Their number, and their influence, has increased significantly under Bush II. Persecuted, indeed. Good bye, Quigley.
But the sense of being persecuted, perhaps a sociopathic projection, seems to run through the Straussian mindset. As philosopher and former U of C student, Anne Norton tells it in her recent Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,
“The students of Strauss (and the students of the students of Strauss) who now walk the corridors of power walked a different set of corridors in the sixties and seventies. In Chicago some of them formed what my professors called ‘Straussian truth squads.’ They constituted themselves as bands of intellectual vigilantes, entering the classrooms of professors thay disliked or distrusted, asking questions not to hear the answers but as a form of disruption and intimidation…. Professors who had less respect for Leo Strauss than for political theory were read quotations from [his] Natural Right and History.”
Such intellectual brownshirt tactics will sound familiar to those who have been following the Ward Churchhill brouhaha and the rise of Campus Watch intimidation activities and StudentsForAcademicfreedom.org’s Orwelian campaign against ‘progressive’ faculty members on US campuses today.
It’s not fair, perhaps, to pin all the sins of the descendants on poor ol’ Leo, who thought of himself as being in the lineage of the Greek Socrates, the Jew Maimanides and the Arab al Farabi. Suffice it to say in this brief space that, whatever the nuances of their individual beliefs, Strausians would agree in disagreeing with all but the first two tenets of Quigley’s quaint credo quoted above. ‘Keep the power and screw ‘diversity, pluralism, cooperation, and all the rest of it,’ they say. No more gentlemanly domination a la Quigley. No more American Nice Guy.
Ruling neo-Strausssians don’t agree with Quigley’s take on the American two-party system either, because they have been hugely instrumental, along with the corporate evangelicals who own the electronic voting machine industry, in privatizing the electoral system and eliminating even the illusion of democratic choice in America.
Significant and mounting evidence indicates that massive and widespread election fraud occurred in the 2004 U.S. presidential election – not to mention the one in 2000. Many analysts say the electoral integrity of the Republic has been virtually stolen, and a growing citizen movement - representatives of which will be meeting in Nashville April 8-10, 2005 at a national conference entitled “Gathering To Save Our Democracy” - is determined to take it back.
I wish the delegates all power. I hope the gathering will be, as one hopeful activist put it, “THE most important event in the history of our country since May 1775.” May it be so. But I urge them to face squarely the fact that the late, lamented Republic was designed to limit, not encourage democracy. And it worked very well, thank you very much, unless you happen to think democracy is more than a forced choice between two identical alternatives determined by a small elite. As Green presidential candidate David Cobb puts it, “The biggest danger to American democracy is the belief that we have one.”
So loud is the clamor of popular dissent from an election that calls into question the very legitimacy of the ruling regime, that the parties have joined forces to ‘investigate’ and make recommendations. Co-chairing this ‘bi-partisan’ Electoral Reform Commission will be veteran global election observer Jimmy Carter and, believe-it-or-not, James Baker, the Bush family consigliore who, in his own words, ‘Fixed the 2000 Florida election for George Bush.’ Things are getting curiouser and curiouser, thought Alice.
If we are to resuscitate and reinvigorate US democracy, reclaim the Republic and reconstitute the Constitution, we must think in terms not just of ‘reform,’ but of reformation.An ‘evolutionary’ politics is called for now. We must think of designing and bringing into being by non-violentmeans, a multi-party, non-corporate, transparent, publicly financed electoral system.We must re-engineer the Republic in order to save it.That’s a tall order.Not a patch or a workaround. Not just a fix, but an upgrade.
James Heddle is co-founder with CEO Mary Beth Brangan of EON, the Ecological Options Network.
The multi-award winning EON feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy, was chosen as the opening film in the 13th annual Global Nonviolent Film Festival and has won awards from a number of internatinal festivals. SOS is available for viewing worldwide. The film was directed by Brangan, Heddle. and Morgan Peterson, who also served as editor. For information, please visit the SOS website .
The EON filmography of reports and documentaries on Election Protection is extensive and useful. Please vist our YouTube Playlist.
nice blast from the past- still relevant in different ways. Ward Churchill first became a target when he wrote about COINTEL-PRO in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_COINTELPRO_Papers