Favorite Oppressor of the Week

Power never slumbers and fear and self-interest wait upon it as its shadow. —William Hazlitt

If we needed any more evidence of the death of democratic spirit or understanding of what it once was to be a republic in these the United States we can turn to the fatuous article by Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch where he mourns the death of the deal-cutter Gerald Ford an unelected Vice-President and an unelected President. For Cockburn, Ford’s tenure, "all too brief" accounted for a "mood of geniality" that "was the rule." It did not seem to occur to the author that if the people felt "genial" during the brief reign of Ford it was not because of that one man but because of the people themselves.

By this in our late and stumbling Empire how disdained are its citizens by an intellectual elite who consider us obedient slaves to its rulers to whom we are instructed to pay homage for how we felt thirty years ago when the citizenry experienced a democratic awakening not known since 1918. It is the rulers who have taught us along with those who learned it best, the shop-worn intelligentsia of a non-existent left (who measure presidents by foreign policy as if we didn’t exist), that democracy leads to stupidity. After all, the author points out, how much better we would have been if the citizens, silly things, had not exercised their democratic right and voted for the coward Jimmy Carter. How much better off we would be if Gerald Ford had been chosen instead. He would have saved the Republic. Now look at what you’ve done.

The real story of the people’s "genial" mood at that time had nothing to do with Ford and everything to do with the events in America preceding his appointment and continuing to 1976. For the first time in half a century the political elites found themselves threatened by a free people’s immense vitality. For over six years before Carter’s election they had been retreating before a democracy that found its voice. The elites of both parties knew it was time to launch a counteroffensive. For sixteen years the people had exerted a pressure upon its rulers and by the joyous Fourth of July celebrations of 1976, where people acted happy for "no reason at all" according to baffled newspaper accounts, the elites determined it was the end of the people’s dangerous notions of democracy and high time to usurp the power back to themselves.

What had been triumphing, this democratic spirit, had for the first time in decades pressured a threatened Congress out of the grasp of a handful of committee chairman answerable to nobody. The illicit surveillance of the citizenry, something to which we have acquiesced so meekly today, ceased to be practiced by the federal government. In late 1974, revelations in the press that the CIA and FBI had been secretly spying on citizens so enraged the public that a frightened President Gerald Ford abandoned the system without a fight. The awakened public made vocal their disgust with the influence of money in the elections, with official secrecy, with official lying, with ludicrous claims of "national security" to hide those lies. They demanded the executive agencies of government open their meetings to public light. In 1975 the Federal Trade Commission for the first time in its history was preparing to challenge price fixing, mergers and monopoly practices. The people were fed up with executive privilege, were fed up with a president who had been put in only to pardon another who had seized more power to the executive branch since Lincoln. They wanted none of it and they demanded change.

Such was the reason for their "geniality." Such was the reason for their exuberance. Gerald Ford was as terrified at this outburst of democracy as the rest of the elites. But no one was as threatened as the Democratic Party who had been forced by an angry electorate to change the rules of how they chose their candidates. The people had witnessed the convention in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey was rammed down their throats and self-serving party power had been laid bare before millions of astonished Americans.

Into this arena in 1976, came the outsider Jimmy Carter. He raked the Democratic Party over the coals and laid bare its crimes. He insisted he was not one of them. But finding himself elected, he pandered to the Party and betrayed the people who had been imbued with a new sense of democracy and elected him. His greatest enemy was the Democratic Party and its bosses, Henry Jackson, Robert Byrd, who everybody loves so much now, the neo-conservative Richard Pearle. But even Carter, easily destroyable by the Party who relished the act, wasn’t so much the enemy as it was the people of the United States, who for a brief moment in history tasted democracy, felt their own power and were destroyed because of it.

Today that democratic spirit is forgotten. It has no high-hearted champions on the left. No political party speaks for it. No organized movement rallies around it. The left almost seems hostile to it and gives it no intellectual strength. It is unknown to those too young to have tasted it. Today, all that the "left" has left is its favorite oppressors. One year it was Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who was going to save us from the onerous Bush regime. Another year it was Joseph Wilson and his CIA wife for whom the left shed tears. Last month it was James Baker who was elevated from fixer to diplomat and was going to "challenge" the regime and the Democratic party. But most sadly of all, we are now offered Gerald Ford as the one who could have saved us long ago. It is always one of them. Never again will it be we the people, never again ourselves.

Shall we toast our favorite oppressors now or wait until the New Year? Or shall we toast to how soothing it feels to sink into irrelevance?