In 1945, Karl, Popper, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, published a two volume work entitled The Open Society and Its Enemies.
In his work, Popper criticized the writings of Plato, Hegel and Marx.
Popper argued that their political philosophies were based upon a
teleological historicism which falsely asserted that the movement of
history was governed by universal laws. Popper also claimed to detect in
the writings of Hegel and Marx, in particular contained the seeds of
20th century fascist and communist ideology.
However
mistaken Popper was in his understanding of the writings of Plato, Hegel
and Marx, his work was an emphatic endorsement of liberal democracy.
Popper insisted that liberal democracy was the only form of government
that permits continued political evolution without revolution or
violence.
Although Popper's choice of the phrase "the open
society" has sometimes been narrowly interpreted by right-wing admirers
of his writing to apply only to liberal democracies such as the United
States and Switzerland, there is no doubt that the non-Western world
clearly understands that the social democracies of Western Europe are
equally open and tolerate wide ranges of dissent and argument within the
context of robust, secular democratic institutions.
Unfortunately, Popper himself did not fully recognize that sometimes
the most ardent advocates of liberal democracy might simultaneously be
among its enemies. Within the liberal democratic project, there exists a
profound sense of insecurity that liberalism has fostered, predicated
as it is upon individualism. Liberalism's emergence from the Protestant
Reformation seems to have instilled within it a permanent sense of
anxiety and apprehension.
Although Luther's insistence that
personal salvation could be gained by one's one receptivity to the Word
alone released the self from the bonds of obedience to the universal
church and its magisterium, the penalties for personal
emancipation have continued to exacted a severe psychological toll. As
Hobbes observed, the severance of man from nature - the natural order,
natural law - estranged man and left him alone and afraid. Fear and a
sense of personal isolation, and therefore personal vulnerability, in
turn, can lead to panic and hysteria.
So, too, Locke's
emphasis upon the self was the obverse of his fear of the exercise of
traditional political authority. With the gradual demise of the Great
Chain of Being came also the demise of the imperium - the
traditional authority of the magistrate to bind his subjects and his
power to command. Even the ascension of the Protestant William of Orange
to the throne of England was effectuated not by the right of
succession, but by an invitation from the Parliament.
Thereafter, the power to command would depend upon the need to receive
formal, legislative consent which, while a significant advance for
democracy, was not without its downside. Since political institutions
were, in Locke's view, of dubious legitimacy and should exercise only
limited, arbitral, transitory authority, there has always dwelt within
the corpus of the liberal consensus of thos country a sense of the
fragility of social and public institutions because they were created in
the American Republic by an act of covenanting.
This toxic
brew of fear, anxiety, vulnerability, and concern about the fragility,
and hence, stability, of political and social institutions, has
contributed to the periodic eruptions of extremely ugly incidents in
American politics. Harvard historian Louis Hartz in his justly famous
study of The Liberal Tradition In America characterized this phenomenon as "irrational Lockianism."
The Salem Witch trials and the frequent preemptive forays into Indian
territories by colonial settlers who feared Indian insurrections (which,
in turn, lead to the extermination of countless numbers of the
aborigines) were precursors to the kind of hysteria that gripped the
newly-independent United States after the French Revolution. The XYZ and
Citizen Genet affairs were the precipitants for the passage of the
Alien and Sedition Acts in the administration of John Adams.
Later, recurrent fears of slave insurrections in the first half of the
nineteenth century prompted the enactment of ever-more punitive laws in
the slave-holding states to punish "run-aways," abolitionists, and
anyone who tried to educate a slave. In the 1840s, the Native American
Party -the Know-Nothings -emerged in the Northeastern United States in
response to a climate of intolerance and fear that had been preceded by
the burning and sacking of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown,
Massachusetts in 1834, and by frequent attacks upon Irish and other
Catholic immigrants.
In the twentieth century, the
imprisonment of war critics, such as the socialist Eugene Debbs during
World War I, and the aggressive acts of Attorney General Palmer's "Red
Raids" after the Bolshevik Revolution exemplified the kind of war frenzy
and jingoism to which Americans have so often succumbed. Two decades
hence, after the isolationism espoused by Father Coughlin and the
America First Committee proved to be delusional, the attack on Pearl
Harbor made palatable the confinement of thousands of American
citizens--citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United
States were forced into internment camps, without trial or any evidence
of personal guilt, for the duration of World War II.
Justice Black's infamous decision in Korematsu v. United States,
321 U.S. 760 (1944) excused this mass imprisonment. His decsion is
stark evidence - which has been confirmed on countless other occasions
throughout American history - of the timidity of the federal judiciary
within this putatively liberal democracy to defend the most basic civil
liberties whenever the courage to decry public hysteria is required.
Instead, the courts have, with few precious exceptions, routinely
deferred to the executive branch's claims of a national emergency even
where the evidence has showed that the alleged emergency - such as the
terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 - did not threaten or imperil the
continued existence of the United States.
An exaggerated
fear of vulnerability and danger was continually fueled by politicians
during the Cold War after World War II. Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon,
Ronald Reagan, and a cabal of professional fear-mongers and political
opportunists successfully inflamed the worries and concerns of ordinary
citizens about the evils of socialism and the purported Communist
infiltration of American institutions and now the threats of terrorism.
Later, this lamentable penchant to induce and to pander to the most
base fears and anxieties of ordinary Americans for purely partisan
political purposes was honed and perfected by the administration of
Bush-Cheney and by their Svengali, Karl Rove. Equally appalling was the
unsuccessful attempt by Rudolph Guliani to win the 2008 Republican
Presidential nomination by running, as then-Delaware-Senator Joseph
Biden remarked, "on a noun, a verb, and 9/11."
Sadly, even
President Obama has acquiesced to the emergence of the "Homeland
Security" state with his continued endorsement of extra-judicial
imprisonments in Guantanamo , wiretaps and other forms of extensive
surveillance that strike at the very heart of all notions of legitimate
privacy.
The root of this exaggerated fear on the part of
the courts and our elected political leadership can be directly traced
to the liberal ethos of our politics: Because we have accepted the
proposition that our institutions and even government itself are fragile
because they are mere creatures of contract, we fear that all of our
institutions are vulnerable to dissolution and disruption, particularly
when subjected to outside stresses.
This country's legacy
of individualism has contributed to the sense of social isolation,
fear, and vulnerability that so many Americans harbor. It poses a danger
and a challenge to the American body politic, our sense of who we
are, and how confident we are in our ability to confront the challenges
of the future. The attendant fear - that forces more powerful than the
self pose a threat to personal autonomy - may, in large part, explain
the anger, frustration, and vitriol exemplified by the Tea Party
movement which first came to prominence in the summer of 2009.
As Erich Fromm observed in The Escape From Freedom, "The
individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the
hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an
'individual' but a bewildered and insecure individual." Hence, as Fromm
notes, "Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are
severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a
completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to
overcome the unbearable stage of powerlessness and aloneness. By one
course he can progress to 'positive freedom'; he can relate himself
spontaneously to the world in love and work...he can thus become one
again with man, nature and himself, without giving up the independence
and integrity of his individual self. The other course is to fall back,
to give up his freedom, to try to overcome his aloneness by trying to
eliminate the gap which has arisen between his individual self and the
world."
If we heed Fromm's sage advice, in the midst of our
adversity, we will discover an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to
remain an open society in which all of us accept our obligations to
look out for one another. We will also not to be cowed by the forces of
evil or the advocates of repression, but rather will choose to respond
rationally and proportionately to every single incident of terrorism. As
Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, as Americans we have nothing to fear
but fear itself.