Neo-Cognitive Dissonance
A spectre is haunting the American Presidential election - the spectre of neo-conservatism. This is the philosophy of those within the Bush administration who argued most vociferously for the invasion of Iraq. Their rationale is the belief that people prefer freedom and democracy to autocracy, and that if the correct conditions are created people will insist on being free. A curious theory. Putting aside the question of how killing civilians and razing cities is creating the conditions necessary for democracy to thrive, let us examine the dissonance between this approach and the central message of the Bush/Cheney campaign for re-election. That message is: be afraid, the world is full of scary people, trust us to protect you. Don't ask too many questions. Allow us to curtail your freedoms to help fight the scary people. In short, while the neo-cons are intent on proving in Iraq that people will choose freedom, the Republicans here in America are intent on proving that people prefer the illusion of safety, and will willingly give up their freedom to attain it.
Not that this is a new development in the conservative assault on democracy here at home. For many years there has been an all-out assault on civil liberties in the name of protecting the rights of corporations. Activist conservative judges have enshrined in law the spurious claim that people are free to select their place of employment in a fictional 'labor market.' Since the law has said that people are voluntarily working for them, corporations have argued that those people should have no guarantee of civil liberties while they are at work. The orderly functioning of the corporate environment is held to be of greater value to our society than the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The right to free speech: not valid in the workplace. Freedom of association: not valid within the workplace. Be assured, when employers are allowed to strip people of their constitutional rights for the time they are in the workplace, these people are less inclined to value those rights in the rest of their lives. When you train people to believe that civil liberties are conditional, it weakens their resistance to government curtailing them. When faced with the choice between freedom and employment, most people will choose employment.
But the problem may lie even deeper than this. I have been asking myself the following nagging question: do people really prefer democracy over benign autocracy? I think that ultimately people are more concerned with the issues that directly affect their lives in an understandable way. Being scared of terrorism is easy for people to grasp. Being employed or not is simple. But almost all of the abstract policy issues are just too big. Global warming? Forget it until it starts to obviously affect lots of people, at which point it will be too late. And the same is true of the economy: people base their understanding of the economy on their personal experience, not on what the national press says. This may, in part, explain, why the social issues which many of us think of as distractions, have such resonance for people. Abortion and gay marriage are far more accessible to most people than trade policy or taxation of investments.
Democracy is hard work. It is often messy. It requires sacrifice, compromise, and long-term thinking. It is far easier to let others make all of the big decisions. To trust government or business or the market or god. To prefer freedom is to prefer uncertainty. To prefer democracy is to commit to not just voting, but to educated voting. And to involvement in civil issues beyond what affects one personally. The neo-cons may succeed in proving that Iraqis prefer their own mess to military repression by either Saddam Hussein or the United States. To date there is no sign that they prefer cooperation among ethnic and religious factions to in-fighting and strife. Meanwhile, here at home, we have a president who is betting that, the neo-cons aside, we the people will take subservience and the pornography of fear over doing the hard work this fractured world so desperately needs to begin healing.