Johnson and the Myths of Democracy

...Would it also mean more specific and defincable strategic losses...

...The President kept the whip— Congressionally imposed compulsory arbitration— carefully out of sight, but not out of mind, of course, or the bargaining could not have succeeded...

...The firemen, availing themselves of the right of collective bargaining granted only three decades ago in the Wagner Act, threatened a nation-wide strike...

...The facts are so complex that it would be foolish for an amateur to attempt to elucidate them...

...But this is to put the matter analytically...

...President Johnson blandly explains that "Any nation which wants to preserve its freedom to live its own life can count on our help," but we now know that the Diem regime, an oppressive police state, was not exactly an exemplar of democracy...

...Democracies are in need of myths as are, more obviously, monarchies and countries with Utopian programs...

...The accommodation of these democratic societies to modern industrial civilization, and the acceptance of the industrial workers as competitive partners in the achievement of industrial justice, is a matter of recent history—that is, of the 19th century and, in America's case, of the New Deal...

...Undoubtedly we must continue our support of South Vietnam indefinitely, though there is no indication that more technical support will hasten victory in a vicious guerrilla jungle war...

...Accordingly, the myth that currently presides over their foreign policy suggests that they simply want to "liberate" colonial peoples from the domination of the "imperialists" of the West...

...They are fluid communities in which interests and powers can compete with each other and displace one another as dominant or cooperative forces in society...

...Johnson's ascendancy has many causes...

...The dispute seemed insoluble, for the railroads had much to gain and the workers much to loose...

...Ho Chi Minh, supports the Communist cause under an aura of nationalism...

...Democracies are particularly dependent upon symbols to make complex facts of international relations simple enough for a general electorate...

...the "mother of parliaments" in Britain, with its longer experience in managing imperial power, reserved foreign policy for the cabinet and the foreign office...

...Indeed, the three nations wrought out by the 1954 Geneva agreements, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, are subject to Communist pressure and are scarcely able to achieve valid democratic governments...

...But now let us return to current history and President Johnson as the manipulator of political myths...

...Only Barry Goldwater nostalgically believes in the old free enterprise system...

...Not that actual freedom is a myth...

...This resulted in the emergence of an equilibrium of power manipulated by two quasi-sovereignties: management and labor...

...Thus the concept of freedom obscured the fact that this bargaining was futile except as a contest of power, and that the right to strike was part of the new instrument of justice...

...Current history means that remarkable technical progress sometimes defined as "automation...

...The move was a creative one and it redeemed Western democracy from circumstances which seemed to give plausability to the Marxist indictment of bourgeois democracy as nothing but a coercive instrument in the hands of the "capitalists...

...So we solved the problem by employing the mythical term "free collective bargaining...

...The final settlement proved the disparity of prizes: The roads saved 350 million in abolishing useless jobs and granted only 50 million in various fringe benefits...

...The myth of democracy is "freedom...

...would respond both as an imperial and an anti-imperialist power, ordering them out of Suez in the famous "forthwith" United Nations resolution, which incidentally rescued Nasser's prestige...

...One remembers FDR's "Four Freedoms" address in which he promised that we would universalize "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear...

...In this sense, democracy means "freedom...

...THINKING ALOUD Johnson and the Myths of Democracy By Reinhold Niebuhr Most knowledgeable observers seem to agree that no Republican candidate has a chance of defeating President Johnson in the next election...

...But the complexity of such issues may be beyond the interest and competence of the general electorate...

...President Johnson's strategy as a manipulator of political myths consisted of his stretching the myths of two eras to cover the realities of a radically new period...

...President Johnson sought and was granted a postponement of the strike for 15 days...

...All one can say is that a shrewd politician has, in an election year, veiled the perils of a new age by appealing to the partly mythical symbols of two bygone eras...

...No one can foresee all the realities of power—the negotiating procedures, the role of government and the outlook for justice and order in this new technocratic age...

...The illusion that we are more innocent than our European allies, all of them touched with imperialist sin, worked havoc in the Suez crisis some years ago...

...After all...

...The ironic aspect of this strategy turned on the fact that the right to strike, previously subsumed in the symbol of "free collective bargaining," has now been stretched to cover an entirely new reality: the prospective denial of the right to strike, at least in those jobs made obsolete by technological advances...

...Democratic myths usually also give an extravagant account of their opponents—the Monarchists for our Founding Fathers, the "atheistic Communists" for the present generation of bellicose idealists...

...and its failure indicates that de Gaulle's proposal for a neutralist Indochinese region would be tantamount to capitulation to Communism...

...Since we in the U.S...

...The rise of free governments, propelled by the bourgeoisie against the static structures of feudalism and monarchism, is a matter of ancient history—that is, of the 17th and 18th centuries...

...In this way we give a mythical account of the actual realities of a mixed economy and the complicated balance of planning and initiative which actually saved Western democracies from the Communist rebellion...

...Open societies are not merely political devices for choosing rulers by the "free consent of the governed...

...All the realities of power and interest are obscured in our idealistic eyes by the myth of "freedom...

...Actually, a healthy democracy must always measure freedom in the context of the community's need for order and justice, which makes freedom a regulative rather than an absolute value...

...He is the legatee of the late President's rather impressive domestic and foreign programs, and the beneficiary of the aura of martyrdom which invested those programs with a new dimension of sanctity...

...The Russians are "anti-imperialistic" by definition, because imperialism is, in their ideological lexicon, the vice of capitalism...

...That declaration brings the whole problem into the framework of the symbolic image of America as the big brother of all the oppressed...

...had a bourgeois beginning, and since the tortuous process of emancipating ourselves from an overly consistent bourgeois individualistic outlook throughout the 19th century is not as lively in our imagination as the era of our birth, we prefer to speak of democracy as the twin of "free enterprise...

...The idea that this move represented a victory for the "majesty of international law" proved illusory, because the United Nations was not, as President Eisenhower believed, a world government in embryo...

...We have entered a new era, though...

...We, on the other hand, are "anti-imperialists" because our history shows that we, too, fought a revolutionary war to free ourselves from imperial domination...

...Let us simply say that we are caught in the power vacuum created in remote Indochina by the collapse of the French empire in that region...

...But it has so far proved to be more plausible to cover over the whole desperate problem with the President's bland assertion that "If any nation wants to fight for its freedom, we will help them...

...This concept was mythical only in the sense that it partially obscured the element of power—the right to strike—without which the allegedly rational bargaining process would have been futile...

...This last reason for President Johnson's ascendancy, his great skill in manipulating the political myths of the American democratic tradition, is worthy of special attention...

...and Russia—the two imperial powers of current history—are similarly compelled to find mythical justifications to legitamize their power under the guise of their common "antiimperialism...

...It was a Utopian promise from a very non-Utopian pragmatic politician...

...Monarchies exist by the patent notion of the "sacred" ruler, which enables them to avoid confusion in the crisis of succession by the absurd myth of dynastic legitimacy...

...In the end, we must debate and decide about the conflicting demands of prestige and strategy in a part of the world in which our form of government is not immediately viable and also not obviously imperiled...

...Myths have the function of sanctifying historically contingent value with absolute worth, and of simplifying the complex realities of political life...

...is simply caught in one of the most complex struggles between two imperial nations, and on terrain not very favorable to democracy...

...He has added to this legacy his own considerable skill as a political manipulator...

...Moreover, a strike on a nation-wide public utility meant striking against the economy, the "common welfare" of the whole nation...

...Utopian revolutionary governments utilize the myth of the innocent bearers of political power (the "proletariat"), and the devilish opponents of virtue (the "bourgeoisie," the "imperialists," the "ruling circles") whom they are destined to defeat...

...Ultimately, of course, the substitution of mythical images for the complex realities which confront imperial power will not solve our problems...

...All things indicated a radical change in a new era...

...We are defending "the free world," even though it includes the police state of Chiang in Taiwan...

...When it did succeed, two days before the deadline, Johnson called in the television cameras, and flanked by both the union chiefs and the company representatives, announced: "This is a great day for free enterprise and free collective bargaining...

...The neutralist compromise in Laos has not worked...

...This latter step really justified and saved the democracies, though it involved shaping new realities and complexities to the older, simpler bourgeois myths of "freedom...

...But the realities it created seemed contrary to the original myths of our democracy...

...Incidentally, the ailing railroads were promised some tax concessions by the government to prompt acceptance of the settlement: "free enterprise," the myth of bourgeois democracy, was scarcely relevant...

...Still, the abandonment of the whole peninsula (including not only Indochina but Thailand) to Communism, would mean a tremendous loss in prestige...

...Free collective bargaining" symbolized the achievements of the era of industrial democracy into which bourgeois democracy had been painfully transmuted in the social and political struggles of the 19th and early 20th century...

...International politics is understood even more than domestic politics in terms of symbols and myths because the realities which underlie foreign policy are complex and not directly experienced...

...But even Nelson Rockefeller, conducting his increasingly desperate candidacy, accuses the Democrats of not understanding the "free enterprise system...

...Mounting deaths of American soldiers, coming especially in an election year, is obviously forcing the Administration to prove that Vietnam is not turning into another Korea...

...When France and Britain mounted their abortive attack on Egypt, they did not trust us enough to disclose the nature of their project to us...

...Confronted with this emergency...

...What is mythical is our venerating it apart from the context of social processes involving interest and power...

...Meanwhile the North Vietnamese regime, guided by the tough old Communist...

...Poor Governor Rockefeller will talk eloquently of the "mainstream of American politics" which Senator Goldwater has defied, but his eloquence will be futile...

...They were mistaken, however, in not anticipating that the U.S...

...is using the myth of "freedom" to cover not only its interests as an imperial power but its responsibilities within the whole non-Communist alliance...

...indeed, he may just succeed where it is quite possible that John F. Kennedy might have failed, in the crucial civil rights struggle...

...The U.S...

...In this sphere President Johnson is less the shrewd manipulator than the inheritor of persistent myths in his task of guiding a once isolationist nation to its world-wide responsibilities...

...It is to our credit that "free collecive bargaining" became almost as sacred as the right of suffrage—the old, but not completely adequate, instrument of equal power in a democracy without which justice in a technological age is impossible...

...It was as simple as that...

...Nor is Richard Nixon's proposal for carrying the war to the North very plausible as an alternative...

...We might debate that point, since the European hard core of our open society is not involved...

...In the process of our adjusting to the social realities of modern technology, our bourgeois civilization reluctantly—and belatedly—allowed industrial workers to organize and bargain collectively...

...They are probably indifferent to the issues of democracy and Communism...

...Our present involvement in the struggle between Communism and the "free world" in Vietnam is a baffling situation in which the U.S...

...He hovered over the bargainers like a fond uncle...

...Johnson's was the strategy of our new era, and the jolt of entering this new era was cushioned by his shrewd appeal to the slogans and myths of past eras...

...Johnson has already occupied the mainstream and, in addition, has commanded the ferries which ply from shore to shore...

...The disparity of prizes and the virtual certainty that an act of Congress would prevent the right to strike upset the careful equilibrium of power gradually erected over a century...

...Modern democracies are of course "open societies" with no absolute coercive power in any organ of government...

...But democratic myths are more concerned with the sanctity of their own cause than with the demonic character of their opponents...

...Strangely enough, both the U.S...

...The unhappy railroad workers could only bargain for the dubious right of "featherbedding," i.e., preserving useless jobs...

...Two revolutions have failed to rally the peasants of South Vietnam to the cause of rigorous anti-Communism...

...It means, inter alia, that diesel engines on the railroads have displaced firemen, and thus aggravated the problem of unemployment in a day of prosperity...

...In an era of extremely rapid technical progress, Jefferson and Locke's rather too simplistic veneration of liberty comes in conflict with the endless bureaucratic instruments of order and justice...