220 Years Ago
A crisis among the deaf led to radical surgery
By Br. Bede Vincent

As the money being given to America's financial elite soon exceeds the capacity of mere mortals to count, while the billions "lost" in far away places have not even been counted, everyone is staring at Washington, fixated on the palace and the Estates, they moan and wait earnestly for the king and his council to act, to save the country from financial dissolution. This herd of deer standing trancelike on the great American highway includes many on the Left who have now been caught in the headlights of a fast moving semi. Unable to take their eyes off the lights and the smiling face of the driver, they remain oblivious of the coming impact. And we watching from the side of the road want to scream, "get out of the way, cross the road, don't get run over". Whichever metaphor you choose, the great popular election of 2008 has not brought the juggernaunt to a halt, let alone to reduce its speed.

Cries go up from some of the deer not directly blinded by the light but due to the mass of animals on the road, are unable to move from the path. Some try to tell the other deer that to survive they have to move to the other side of the road. Some say they should clear a path big enough for the semi to drive through unobstructed. But almost none of these deer ask themselves why this truck is able to drive at full speed through their forest in the middle of the night with no regard for the nocturnal habits of the residents.

Of course there are the biggest deer in the herd, the Deerocrats, who keep the rest of the deer from moving in any direction that might save them from getting hit. These big deer snort and grunt that if the truck is not allowed to pass it will be bad for the deer population as a whole. Some of these big deer say we just need to reintroduce speed limits. Some say, "oh the driver sees us, he wont crash into our herd. That would just mess up his truck and he wouldn't want that." The discussion goes on and no deer move, not even the ones who would like to move because they are hemmed in by those Deerocrats and the deer who are blinded by the headlights. But most of all it is the Deerocrats, big and powerful, who keep the herd in place. What the rest of the herd does not know is that these big deer intend to jump off the road just before the truck is due to hit. The great mystery to those huddled on the road or to those non-deer watching from afar is why don't the deer just leave the road while there is still time. Why do they rely on these big deer? Why would the big deer sacrifice the bulk of the herd?

To understand this one has to go back to a much neglected part of deer history...

The French Revolution. This event much maligned-- esp. in Anglo-American historiography-- was among other things motivated by the absolute intransigence of those at the top in the face of an exhausted and dysfunctional accumulation system run by the Bourbon monarchy, the Church and its supporters. Even Thomas Carlyle's generally unsympathetic history [1] cannot avoid the refusal of this rentier class to budge one inch from their privileges. Despite the interventions of humanists like Thomas Paine who had no passion for regicide, the Bourbon king and his court were absolutely unable to grasp even a "constitutional monarchy". What emerged from that revolution was something articulated by a Swiss republican (with a small "r") named Jean-Jacques Rousseau-- also rather unloved in the Anglo-American world-- namely the Popular Will [2].

That meant the constitution of a public good by the people assembled, not the ecclesiastical and baronial estates (as has been the case in Britain and formed the basis of US constitutionalism). This idea of popular will, whether it be legitimising or actually governing was so repugnant to Britain's ruling classes that they joined the rest of Europe's monarchies just to defeat the French Revolution and more importantly to restore a derivative notion of the rule of law, which denied the validity of the popular will. (It should be added that Britain at first welcomed the revolution as an event that would incapacity her arch-rival-- wishing her enemy chaos as it were.) However, this sympathy wore off as soon as the popular movements gained control and influence.

The most influential British pamphleteer against the Revolution was the Irish propagandist Edmund Burke who wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France to show that nothing in France was relevant to Britain and to portray the revolution as mere mob rule. [3]  Nonetheless there was considerable popular sympathy for the French in Britain, a country which was a far cry from democratic or egalitarian. That support was also suppressed. The Scottish national poet Robert Burns once wrote of Burke:

Propaganda against the French Revolution was focussed on attacking this idea that the people assembled could express a will, an interest and that this was as legitimate if not more so, than the rule by an absolute monarch or the clerical and landed estates. History written from the English side portrays the French Revolution as if it naturally produced the so-called "Terror" and after that led to Napoleon. The same thinking prevails today among Germans and other Europeans who say that Weimar constitutionalism led to Hitler. Just as later in this century the Sandinistas and the followers of Castro or Chavez have been made into caricatures with the assertion that these men must be tyrants or demogogues who both dominate and give free rein to the unwashed masses. In Britain and America its citizens are taught that the popular will leads to mob rule (strangely enough that never led to an anti-lynching law or similar restraints on real mobs).

This legacy has led to an uncritical and even more authoritarian doctrine of the rule of law-- derived from the Natural Law school of which Leo Strauss and his followers at the University of Chicago and in the Federalist Society have been the most virulent exponents.

The conservative/ reactionary forces in Britain and the US have worked assiduously to banish the notion that people make the laws-- not because there is Natural Law, but in order to deny that the laws once made to benefit the elite could somehow be changed without the elite consent. To maintain constitutionalism and opposed popular sovereignty or the volonté populaire as a basis for democracy, it has been necessary to constantly make policy the realm of experts and economics into the pseudo-science it has become.

Behind many who cry for a second "New Deal" in the US today are those who were grateful to Roosevelt for preventing an outbreak of popular movements to demand social change. Roosevelt was also a fiscal conservative who was committed to follow Hoover's policies. In 1932, Hoover, with the help of people who would go on to be “war heroes” like Douglas McArthur, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower (whereby Eisenhower later expressed shame for his role) ordered cavalry and tanks against the some 17,000 unarmed Bonus Army veterans and their families camped in the shantytown "Hooverville" in Washington. They were protesting the refusal of the government to pay bonuses granted by Congress for wartime service-- money which would not only help them, but stimulate the economy. Coolidge had vetoed the measure. It was passed over his veto but left unpaid. Hoover refused to pay it and called out the army. In a perhaps unprecedented and scarcely repeated show of heroism, the most highly decorated Marine in US history, retired General Smedley Butler, stood on the side of the protesters against the banksters and racketeers on Wall Street and in the military.

Roosevelt was elected and also refused to pay the bonus. Instead he created the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ veterans (sound familiar). When Congress again passed bonus legislation, Roosevelt vetoed it but the level of strikes and protests was increasing throughout the country. Roosevelt also faced serious challenges from people like Huey Long with his "Share the Wealth" plan (Long was assassinated in 1935) and in an election year (1936) Congress passed the bill over his veto. Throughout the US there were strikes in nearly every industry, not just pompous speeches in Congress. Roosevelt was forced to act to preserve public order and prevent an outbreak of the popular will.

The great spectre which the US elite has tried to banish from history is not that of "communism" but that of the popular will itself. Political science, history and mainstream media have worked very hard together to stamp popular will as either fascist or communist, or merely "populist". This has led to the absurdity of pundits and politicians telling the public that a good elected political leader-- esp. a President is one with the courage to "resist public pressure", to "take hard decisions even if it hurts his constituents". Every day the Press and public officials repeat that economic policy, which reduces wages, increases the cost of living for natural persons (as opposed to corporations) and sends their hard earned dollars to offshore tax havens or weapons manufacturers, is better for than affordable food, housing, schools and health care. In other words, the electorate is supposed to choose people who are committed to ignoring them in the service of some higher interest or worse to punishing them and prefer policies that have no benefit whatsoever for them.

What never gets said is who that higher interest is—for whom is all this sacrifice necessary? Opinion polls were introduced to short circuit the popular will whether at local level or in elections. The people like PR “inventor” Edward Bernay and the Gallop brothers knew that when they introduced them as sales tools. Yet the public is now conditioned to treat polls as substitutes for real deliberation and decision-making.

If there is to be any way to cross the road on which the American people find themselves, before they are hit by the oncoming truck, they will have to find their way past the big Deerocrats and the sedated deer that surround them staring into the headlamps.

It is necessary to reconstitute a meaningful and active notion of popular will and action. Today the only remaining half-way functioning institution that still recognises this principle is the jury system. As has been pointed out elsewhere, jury nullification and mandatory sentencing laws are part of a vicious attack by the same Natural Law reactionaries who are supporting today's plundering Estates.

This will require popular education to restore literacy to people who have only learned what Paulo Freire called "banking education". [7] Educators like Paulo Freire and John Dewey [8] understood to different degrees what education was needed to allow the popular will to be formulated and expressed in law and governance—not just or even primarily for jobs. No accident that they have been marginalised in favour of "testing regimes".

Behind the volonté populaire was not mob rule but the necessity to completely reorganise an economy whose sole purpose had been to feed kings, clerics and bullies with letters patent. The banks are not going to surrender one dime in the interest of the country because for them the dictum is "le pays, c'est moi". Was it the queen in Carroll's Alice who screamed, "off with their heads"? Two hundred twenty years ago, an absolutely incorrigible combination of landowners, financiers, courtiers and rentiers together with a man on the throne who would listen no more, their ears were of no more use.

1- Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1837.
2- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, 1755; The Social Contract, 1762
3- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
4- Robert Burns, On Edmund Burke by an Opponent and a Friend to Warren Hastings
5- Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791; part two 1792.
6- 1688-89, The Roman Catholic James II was deposed and the crown was settled on Protestant William of Orange and Mary, essentially establishing Protestant succession and supremacy in Great Britain.
7- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970.
8- John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1910.

Recommend this article...

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto:

Be first to comment this article

Write Comment

Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site. Such material will be removed. Just ensure to *Refresh* your browser for a new security code to be displayed prior to clicking on the 'Send' button. Keep in mind that the above process only applies if you simply entered the wrong security code.
Name:
E-mail
Homepage
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*
	I wish to be contacted by email regarding additional comments

Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4