AT FIRST GLANCE
Hausknecht, Murray
Knee-jerk liberalism"—a term not heard much these days—was once used by conservatives to deride the supposed automatic nature of liberal responses to social and political issues....
...But some automatic reactions are fail-safe systems, and in democratic societies knee-jerk liberalism is to be preferred to the authoritarian reflex...
...It is one thing to steer reporters in a battle area so that they see what serves the interests of the military...
...After all, knee-jerk liberalism is likely to protect liberties...
...at least, it is not normally expected of democratic governments...
...It took the extreme line of firing the strikers and destroying the union...
...William Safire, a journalist of impeccable conservative credentials, notes that Reagan has "adopted the view...
...Later George Shultz said that during World War II reporters were "on our side...
...The authoritarian reflex is, in part, a reaction to an open challenge to the policies of those in authority and, in part, a response to the mere questioning of authority...
...Safire's own dissenting view is merely the sound of one ox being gored...
...But Grenada reveals something more...
...The emotions it induces make it more probable that military power will be used the next time there is a perceived challenge to American influence...
...The maximum use of available power is properly expected of decayed totalitarian regimes—the Polish government's campaign to crush Solidarity surprised no one...
...The invasion became an occasion for national pride...
...The Administration's response went far beyond the conventional rhetoric that government employees had no right to strike...
...That a conservative administration would respond with hostility to a strike is only to be expected...
...But dissent and conflict are the very stuff of politics, and the practice of politics consists of finding ways of resolving those problems...
...When Grenada was invaded, the military deliberately did not invite reporters to cover the operation, a decision agreed to by the civil authorities...
...Consider, for example, the authoritarian reflex exemplified by the Reagan administration...
...But antipathy to unions does not require the full use of the legal power to break strikes and destroy unions...
...The authoritarian reflex is not simply relatively uninhibited use of power but a celebration of that reaction...
...antagonism to labor is one of its hallmarks...
...Conservatives conveniently forgot that one function of any set of beliefs is to create an initial attitude toward the world, and that they are no more immune to such ideological reflexes than liberals or radicals...
...They're always seeking to support something that's going to screw things up...
...it is quite another for a democratic government to exclude reporters altogether from a military operation...
...To raise questions about policies endorsed by policy-makers or even to report facts that may raise questions in the minds of others is perceived as but one step away from disloyalty to the political system itself...
...that dissent borders on disloyalty...
...In Grenada, metaphor becomes reality...
...By encouraging a definition of patriotism as pride in the use of force, the authoritarian reflex feeds upon itself...
...At the core of the authoritarian reflex is an unstated assumption that authority is endangered when there is a lack of full commitment to the policies of those in power...
...This reaction to the press is of a piece with the Administration's attempt to censor anything a public official who has access to "classified information" may write once he leaves office, and this proposal, in turn, is related to the Administration's threatening those suspected of "leaking" information with lie-detector tests...
...These days . . . it seems as though the reporters are always against us...
...At the beginning of Reagan's term the air controllers, one of the very few unions that had supported Reagan, went on strike...
...When mobilizing the full coercive power of the state becomes routine political practice, repression may be well on its way to becoming the dominant mode of resolving conflicts and contending with dissenting voices...
...In both the PATCO strike and the attempts to control information, the authoritarian reflex is, metaphorically speaking, to reach for the gun, to use the most force available when a threat to authority appears to exist...
...Liberalism as an unthinking ideological response has its own failings...
...Faced by a country whose character seemed to challenge the American claim to hegemony in the region, the Administration responded with the use of force...
...Americans were supposed to feel a patriotic 131 glow because a challenge to American influence was crushed by armed might...
...That such a response is most likely to occur when the object is unable to defend itself is also characteristic of the authoritarian reflex...
...The authoritarian reflex, however, is distinguished by a relative lack of inhibition to use power for this purpose...
...That is, any ruling group attempts to mold beliefs...
...Any form of censorship is an attempt to control definitions of reality, and the Administration's anticipatory censorship—defining now what may be barred in the future—is the logical extension of a practice common to all groups exercising power...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
