THE EUROPEANIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS:
Horowitz, Irving Louis
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ A...
...Most institutions, founding fathers, the authors of the Federalist papers from corporations to voluntary agencies, are run on the such as Madison, Jay, Adams and Jefferson, was enough premise of checks and balances generated by plural exto make one believe in miracles...
...This is a time for careful power...
...lative capacity for autonomous action was thus the conThe Federalists were thoroughly aware of the dangers stitutional backdrop to unchecked power, otherwise in any concentration of powers in the hands of a single known today as corruption in government...
...a firm belief in the responsiveness of federal should not be made by one man acting in isolation, but authorities to vox populi...
...popular resistance to Republican party candidates at Coming into the 1970s, the competing philosophies Congressional and statewide levels), then the full recogof the two parties could be summarized as follows: for nition of how this landslide was manipulated and manthe Republicans, the main purpose of citizenship is serv- aged by the Presidential advisors, if not the top man himice to the state...
...It a lifting of the shades, to reveal a cracked windowpane corresponded precisely with a paralysis in the United behind which the exercise of politics is conducted as the States' internal affairs...
...Textbooks on law and political rather than a plural Presidency was debated...
...The present circumstances seem ever, Watergate also makes plain that the velocity of attuned to the English and French revolutions, in which social change and political corruption may lead to somearistocratic elites displayed precisely a collapse of class thing worse no less than something better...
...forced this sensibility to legislative constraint...
...spark a single mass form of protest or launch an impeachThe reason that Watergate became a post-electoral ment movement...
...But there was one great ecutive leadership...
...The primary exception of note to this fly in the ointment...
...And it is the age of the politician as an but insulated from such constraints...
...resolved in the long pull of time, and what social forces will be unleashed capable of moving us beyond this malaise...
...Rather, Left to capitalize on Watergate means that at best, the we witness a bizarre spectacle of Hobbesian propor- reform wing of the Democratic party will emerge with tions in which the ruling elite and state authority as such a newly born strength...
...The practical issue becomes: will the United States talk Left and move Right, and thus create a cli- MATT FIELD mate for a flourishing fascism, or will it be capable of restoring national confidence based upon an international AUTUMN OF A POLITICAL EXILE cleansing or purge (there are no pleasant palliatives to describe the question of impeachment or removal of a Burning President from high office) of the present holders of exotic trees in Vietnam authority...
...Hence, a polarization process gage in self-deception...
...Instead, what occurred was the strange rather than pre-electoral scandal is first and foremost the spectacle of moral indignation being registered by the huge power of the Republican party apparatus to delay stranded Republican minority, and political capital being any real investigation of the break-in of the Democratic made by the frustrated Democratic party majority...
...In this sense, Watergate is not a revo- in its origins and evolution should have held out the lutionary spectacle of Marxian proportions, in which an promise of a democratic response to terror...
...But in the polarized party analysis of what is right and A special tragedy in the Watergate aftermath is the wrong with the American structure, a cleavage between inability of the American Left (presuming such a beast Democrats and Republicans was revealed that was as actually exists) to seize the moment to put a reasonable deep, if not deeper, than what exists throughout the series of options before the American public...
...In this sense, issue becomes: Why now...
...exploiting economic class and its state machinery give Events, even important ones, are not self-evident in way to mass uprisings and a new radical leadership as their political consequences...
...And they had ample no longer escape awareness of political corruption...
...The party headquarters until the elections were well out of the Left remained outside and above the battle: taking two way...
...Only at this point, too late in time to reverse ophy that must have seemed to the likes of Nixon, Ehr- the Nixon landslide, did the Democratic party mobilize lichman, Haldeman, Magruder, et al...
...this is a debatable position...
...ingness (even if we presume the capacity) of America's The plain truth, as everyone recognizes with a sigh of political rulers to risk a world war on the say-so of a relief, is that the fascist timetable, coming in the form of President who has proven himself to be less than candid...
...when the need for fundamental political and economic A major reason that worldwide opinion on Watergate reforms loomed large, when the American people could has been aroused is the intrinsic appreciation of the ex- see concretely structural weaknesses in the American tent to which American politics, in the past said to have system of government, all the literary Left is able to come been providentially guided toward eternal consensus, has up with is a series of empty and tendentious platitudes become Europeanized...
...Indeed, the foresight of the by a collective body of elected officials...
...Thus, on neatly raked gravel however important Watergate may be in relation to the you brush crumpled structure of power in America, the absence of an or- dry yellow leaves ganized Left with an historic vision and mission to of ancient plane-trees 5 April 1974: 106...
...But in the near-total silence of the This means that those who praise order when they really Left, the impulse to reform gives way to the instinct of worship terror have the most to gain by a scandal which self-preservation...
...The tragic inability of the they did in the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions...
...Rather, it is that the evidence of corruption has been so They feared that in this "first new nation" it was a sharply presented by the mass media that even the most legislative majority that would become unhinged and duncelike devotee of American political mythology can threaten the rights of the minority...
...morality...
...As a result, if for no other reason impromptu use of raw power, simply to retain govern- than to have breathing space to restore the confidence of ment office...
...Only one fact is certain: the present politics rustle through your old dream of centrism cannot be sustained amidst a climate of cor- move still closer ruption and crisis...
...It represents a benchmark to the abrupt termination of a The issue was how to increase the powers of the two-hundred-year-old age of innocence, empirical con- Presidency to counterbalance the presumed potency of firmation that Providence has abandoned America for the legislative branch...
...If tion of being adrift that is well known in Western Euro- any evidence for this judgment were needed it is the pean capitals suffering under a feeble tradition of par- Left's tragic inability to mobilize a single demonstration, liamentary cretinism and executive corruption...
...its public, American foreign policy is at an all time low One convenient fiction is that the Senatorial hear- ebb with respect to bellicosity and belligerence...
...or moving toward feed painfully a solid front behind Gerald Ford, the new Vice President...
...nervous nativism, has been seriously derailed, if not The recent Congressional passage over a Presidential permanently stalled by the Watergate hearings...
...The idea of a single President parts as yet unknown...
...And upon Second World bolsheviks...
...the Cox commission, the executive counterpart of a Watergate has thus served to reinforce already widenCongressional committee, once it got close to the con- ing tendencies toward neo-isolationism...
...Such forms of explanation as offered by the legion of Presi- perstitious" beliefs from palm-reading and astrology to dential advisors and apologists are, in effect, not explana- devil worship reveals a sure-sighted collapse of any willtions at all, but panegyrics and hyperbolic nonsense...
...It prescience have been filled with an equilibrium model of vailed on the basis of yet another assumption: the exhow the United States works: checks and balances be- istance of a judicial electoral college comprised of leading tween executive, legislative and judicial branches of citizens...
...In short, Watergate there is a dangerous precedent set in which the holders does not alleviate the fear and trembling...
...toward an intense nection between Presidential policy and economic turning within, no less than turning inward...
...The present intranquillity derives not so much searching rather than careless celebrating, itself not a from any doubt as to the authenticity of a crisis in the small lesson that Americans are finally beginning to American Leviathan, but rather how this crisis will be understand...
...Yet, Presidential authorities is, after all, far simpler to manage internal threats from fought these special Senatorial hearings tooth and nail...
...The rise of manipulation, was overthrown in a frightful putsch, a spiritualism, psychologism, healing and all sorts of "suone-day takeover that involved a Federal Bureau of Investigation seal-off of the Cox commission offices that frightened even the more ardent supporters of the President...
...Whether ings, and the subsequent revelations of the Cox review this has happened as a result of Arab intransigence or commission, reveal an autodidactic learning and healing Soviet planning is less significant than the simple fact process...
...of the radical fringe...
...all your severed roots The choice becomes a conservative one: to "brazen it out" with Nixon, or "ride the new wave" with Ford...
...In fact, Providence took this mo- ideological and lacking utopian capacities, that is, a Left ment to abandon America to its own devices, a condi- which could criticize but not construct alternatives...
...What has happened to compel the Arab oil embargo was fortuitous in its timing...
...public trust for private gain...
...Howacutely aware of the theme of social injustice: the rights ever, when the elections were held, and the Presidential of black minorities and the outrageous iniquities against landslide became apparent (even in the face of stiff majorities like women...
...itself appears to be exercised in a vacuum, is a deeper The principal consequence of Watergate is that it reoutcome of the Watergate revelations...
...The shock of recognition As one shrewd political scientist, Edward Schnier, refor the American public was that the American political marked 'recently in transaction/Society, the Watergate system is not exempt from the laws governing any other affair pointed up the weakness of a Left that was strictly parliamentary regime...
...less dangerous or virulent, since fascism also has been Watergate has not elevated the Democratic party to known to come in populist packages, wrapped in slogans virtue, nor relegated the Republican Party to vice...
...In other words, flects the growing intensity of inner-party and intra-party the consequence of Watergate was a derailment of one conflict in the United States...
...But since this is a change in the perception Commonweal: 103 rather than the reality of American politics, the real a real crisis in United States foreign policy...
...an everlasting stasis between the two politi- the utilitarian-enlightenment premise that major decisions cal parties...
...The idea that the Watergate revelations are an unmixed blessing, represents sophism...
...Watergate of state power are unwilling to abide by the premises proves that, even in America, politics does not stand still and principles which have governed the United States and that constitutions are not made for all eternity...
...Europeans are familiar with crisis about the evils of American capitalism...
...Commonweal: 105 The Watergate hearings and their revelations on mat- capitalize on such an event, means that this event beters ranging from a rage against isolated anti-war pro- comes part of a deepening cycle of cynicism and antitestors to extremely shady and sharp tax practices, have politics in America...
...Govern reform period, the gaps between the two parties To illustrate this paralysis, it would be difficult to have become much sharper, calling into question funimagine a nation as powerful and imperial in its pre- damental premises about who governs, the nature of state tensions as the United States bowing so meekly to the responsibility for the welfare of the poor, the obligations wishes of Saudi Arabian oil ministers, did there not exist for a full-employment society, and even the racial, class 5 April 1974: 104 and sexual composition of the party leadership itself...
...In the past, the structure classic form of the fascist timetable which in turn led of American party politics was best described as a to a power vacuum clearly attested to by the current matter of shadings and nuances between fundamentally paralysis which characterizes United States foreign policy similar organizational types...
...In part, this was a consequence commenced, with the dominant wing of the Republican of the bitterness of the conservative factions of the party embracing a doctrine of law, order, respect for party which lost out to its radical wing...
...As the high command to the Democratic party-conceiving it party of power, the Republicans were not about to risk as the Enemy and not simply the Opposition-become everything in exchange for an "alien" McGovern philos- manifest...
...charismatic leader...
...What in effect took place was an early break with government...
...at worst, Watergate will lead to are rendered helpless by inner-party strife and intra- a new style of fascism-less Platonic, less elitist but no party rivalry...
...At a time European political system...
...Watergate was but one incident in the ongoing struggle between conservatives and radicals, all of whom osten- Failure of the Left sibly accepted the confines of American social structure...
...This classic dichotomy, of the dirty tricks campaign which isolated and defeated with roots that go deep in Western political thought, be- Muskie and Humphrey, and which took the full measure came the substance of the 1972 elections that at times of Senator Eagleton, did the attitude of the Republican was disguised by differences in personal styles...
...The clever if transparent rationale is that to have steps backward into abstraction as the American people done otherwise, would have turned the investigation into struggled to take one step forward into specificity...
...This is a sort of bourgeois equivalent to the vulgar Trotskyist "theory" that the worse things are in the present, the better must they get in the future...
...But even such leaders, continued high military expenditures, in short an erstwhile figure as Gary Hart, Senator McGovern's the verities of what Lasswell long ago identified as the campaign manager, barely mentions Watergate as a factor Garrison State...
...evidence from the inherited European systems of this Rather than leading to universal morality, mass politics has led down the slithering path of selective pragmatism, IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ is professor of sociology and political a word that has become a euphemism for collective imscience at Rutgers University and Editor of Society...
...unemployed laborers or disenfranchised minority groups withholding support, information and finally, openly than to respond to overseas threats from "Third World" confronting and challenging the legitimacy of the Ervin sheikdoms which nonetheless have the capacity to call subcommittee to hold public hearings altogether...
...It is an apocalyptic event in American morality...
...It leads to a Hobbesian rather than venality that can no longer be dismissed as the ravings a Marxian series of responses to the political turmoil...
...a political football...
...An era of nerve and moral verve that created a leadership vacuum turmoil may give birth to new beginnings, but it may in which disenfranchised groups were compelled to seize also stir up ancient evils...
...But a second factor, perhaps equally More than that, as the present half-way Keynesian house necessary for the scandal to remain buried for so long, began to show its cracks, the need to move beyond wel- is the strange capacity of the Democratic party to enfarism became paramount...
...Pacing But either determination leaves the Left at the starting the piazza in Florence gate, without a program and without a vision...
...And with the tution predicated everything, and staked everything, on concomitant rise of expertise replacing electoral officials the belief that those who rule, although chosen by the in the decision-making roles, the Presidency became not people and hence not always brilliant, would at the very just largely independent of legislative or judicial controls, least be honest...
...Just as the Right in governmental confidence, dismissal of leading political saw Watergate as a purifying agent within the World's officials for corruption and dishonesty in the conduct Greatest System, the Left saw the same event as eviof duty and the cynical manipulation of public office and dence that this is the World's Worst System...
...That this in turn has led to a serious lacunae, a verve and belief in the ability of the United States to state of suspended political animation in which power win wars, and not simply engage in them...
...It assumes, somewhat grotesquely, that only a state organ in a condition of total corruption can elicit the real health of the body politic...
...Being men of property only reinpolitics...
...The founding fathers of the Consti- pluralism is the American Presidency...
...It feeds, rather than destroys the compelled Americans to confront a condition of political revolutionary myths...
...whisper deep green As a result of this desultory performance on the part pleas before dying of the ideological Left, the Watergate affair threatens to be reduced to simply a matter of Republican party stra- Shouting tegy, that is, conservative decision-making concerning rich cranberry-bog scarlets the advisability or inadvisability of going with the Presi- sumac and red maples dent for the Congressional and state elections of 1974, color your blood and the Presidential elections of 1976...
...In this sense, no less than over the future of the party system as such...
...It is asked more in desperation than in cer- that under conditions of domestic intranquillity the imtainty: where else in the world would such revelations perial eagle has turned into an international pigeon...
...Howfor nearly 200 years...
...The Democrats, for their part, became in his book-length review of the 1972 campaign...
...The growth of the honest man in the Montesquieu sense of 1'esprit des lois, "imperial Presidency" coupled with the decline of legisthat came crashing down with Watergate...
...As of corruption in high places have taken place, and be- a result, the United States may be compelled to deal yond that, if revealed, have not shaken the nation to its harshly and even punitively with internal dissension...
...a veritable assault and articulate its concern over the future of democracy, on 200 years of the American way of life...
...Only then, in the aftermath the state is service to its citizens...
...It roots and foundations...
...Yet, celebrating integrity and integration...
...At least veto, of a measure limiting the war-making powers of the in its elitist variety, the fascist threat to suspend civil executive office, that is, the Commander-in-Chief, is an liberties and to equate criticism with subversion and op- indication, not only of a breakdown of confidence in the position with anti-patriotism has been profoundly weak- Presidency of Richard M. Nixon, but a collapse of moral ened...
...THE EUROPEANIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ A Watergate retrospective Watergate is more than an historic event in American sort of "mobocracy...
...But in their writings and in their age It is not that American politics is any more corrupt it was the prospect of too much power in the hands of or dishonest than it ever was...
...the legislative branch that was of paramount concern...
...for the Democrats, the main concern of self, became painfully clear...
...whereas in the post-Mcfrom the Middle East to Southeast Asia...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 5
