Home > Author >
21 " a continuing tension between power and authority: power was dependent upon organizing cooperation, enlisting the generality of human and material resources in society, while authority claimed to derive from sources said to be rare or special—from Holy Scripture, from God, "
― , Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
22 " The focus on terrorism elevated fear into a public presence, creating a new atmospherics that could be appealed to and exploited.16 Miraculously, out of the rubble and phoenixlike emerged a stronger state, a “superpower” or “empire. "
23 " Since that September day it is not only the ordinary routines and liberties of citizens that have been changed. The constitutional institutions designed to check power—Congress, courts, an opposition political party—swore allegiance to the same ideology of vengeance and enlisted themselves as auxiliaries. Despite some solitary dissident voices, none of these institutions attempted consistently to block or resist as the president proceeded to mount an unprovoked invasion of one country and threaten others, nor to question as he and members of his cabinet bullied allies, demanding uncritical support from all nations while proclaiming the right of the United States to walk away from solemn treaty obligations whenever convenient and to undercut the efforts of other nations seeking to develop international institutions for curbing wars, genocide, and environmental damage. "
24 " The end of worship amongst men, is power.—Thomas Hobbes "
25 " They charged that liberal relativism, permissiveness (= moral laxity), affirmative action, and secularism were softening the national will, mocking ideals of loyalty and patriotism, and in the process undermining national unity in the global struggle with Soviet communism. "
26 " For that power to crystallize, the ordinary people have to change themselves, somehow finding ways and means to go beyond their immersion in the daily struggle to exist. The demos becomes aware of their potential power: raw numbers, physical strength, and individually scant resources in desperate need of aggregation. Demotic politics means a change from being objects of power to becoming agents. Because a demos has no allotted place within the system, it is compelled to challenge the exclusionary politics of the Few and demand as a matter of right entrance into the political realm and participation in its political deliberations. "
27 " Hobbes reasoned that if individuals were protected in their interests and positively encouraged by the state to pursue them wholeheartedly, subject only to laws designed to safeguard them from the unlawful acts of others, then they would soon recognize that political participation was superfluous, expendable, not a rational choice. Hobbes’s crucial assumption was that absolute power absolutely depended not just on fear, but on passivity. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue, "
28 " We may call this the struggle by which an inchoate people or “multitude” attempts to convert itself into a demos, into a politically self-conscious actor confronting societies in which wealth and inequality were being reinforced in terms different from those employed by the sacred and privileged hierarchies of the past. "
29 " An early attempt to give expression to a modern demos with access to political life occurred in the so-called Putney debates during the English civil wars "
30 " By periodically reminding subjects of the example of his own unchecked actions and triumphs, the sovereign authority could convert fear and terror from a threat posed by foreigners into one more veiled and redirected against its own citizenry: “By this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. "