This is a story about the failure of The People and how their failure led inexorably to the Iraq War. But before we can get to that a history lesson is in order about the development of a taboo so powerful it is making good government all but impossible.
The idea that there might be any taboo topics left in a country in which people feel free to talk about priests having sex with choir boys or the shape of the president's penis may seem almost preposterous. But while we have been busy adding to the number of subjects we feel comfortable discussing in public we have quietly subtracted one. Today almost no one wants to get caught openly acknowledging the limits of public opinion. We are all populists now. The voice of The People -- as measured daily and sometimes hourly in public opinion polls -- is the voice of God.
Given the expanding circle of areas into which democratic values have intruded the triumph of this dogma may appear to have been all but inevitable. The history of the United States is, after all, to a certain extent, the history of the unfolding of human freedom, the kernel of which was planted in July of 1776 when Jefferson exclaimed, "all men are created equal." All of the advances in democratic freedoms we have been witness to since the dawn of the Revolution have grown from that simple and powerful idea.
In a profound and disturbing way though our worship of The People has grown so rigid that we are in danger of losing touch with our own history. It is one thing to pay ordinary people the respect due them as human beings, quite another to pretend that everything they believe is beyond questioning. We used to understand this, but no longer seem to.
Ubiquitous among the papers of the Founding Fathers are palpable fears about The People's wisdom. No other self-governed society in history had ever lasted, after all. So the Founders fretted, like new cooks in a kitchen worried about the proper adjustments that needed to be made in a recipe conjured up on the fly. Quite often they acted with prudence, providing in the Constitution, for example, that merely one half of one branch of the three branches of government were to be subject to popular control. Some figures like George Mason expressed their suspicions about popular rule in terms we would regard as almost rude. "It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper magistrate to the people," he opined, "as it would to refer the choice of colors to a blind man." Even Thomas Jefferson expressed misgivings about public opinion. When the popularly-elected legislature of his own beloved Virginia came under the sway of demagogues like his arch enemy Patrick Henry, Jefferson snarled that liberty was as much in danger from 173 despots as from 1.
Leaders felt free to issue warnings about The People from the era of the Founding Fathers down through the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and the start of the Cold War. Even liberals, casting a glance over their shoulders at the mobs Hitler was rousing to a frenzy, worried openly about the susceptibility of Americans to the black arts of propaganda. They worried so much they got the nickname: "nervous liberals." Then suddenly, like a thunder clap, the carping, caviling, and outright condemnation of The People ceased abruptly.
What happened? Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. It would be too simple to lay this dramatic change wholly at Reagan's feet, but he more than anybody played the key role in the evolution of democratic fundamentalism, as one writer put it. Reagan, whose effusiveness for the common man made him sound like his one-time political hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, turned optimism into political gold. As John Patrick Diggins, a Reagan biographer, astutely observes, the Founding Fathers believed that "the people are the problem and government the solution" while Reagan convinced us that the people are virtuous and that government's the problem. "It worked," Diggins notes. "Reagan never lost an election."
As conservatives, following Reagan's example, joined in praise of The People -- the ordinary working class folks whom liberals had demonized as racists, homophobes and sexists -- they rung up victory after victory at the polls. That was the last anyone heard for a long time of conservatives complaining about The People.
What about liberals? Caught in the contradictions of their own ideology -- their professed love of The People and The People's seemingly misguided rejection of them at the polls -- they turned
angry, convinced that they were being punished at the polls not for their many mistakes but for their forthright stands on issues of conscience like civil rights and women's liberation.
It would have been helpful to Democrats to hold an honest conversation about the real sources of their discontent. But they couldn't without facing foursquare the myth of The People. So instead they entertained a series of excuses for their electoral failures, claiming in election after election that they had been cheated out of victory by politicians willing, like Richard Nixon, to engage in dirty tricks, or Reagan, who manipulated the media, or George H.W. Bush, who rode to power by slyly exploiting racial fears and faux patriotism.
What has all this to do with the Iraq War? We are used to thinking of the war as the Bush administration's failure. But it could not have taken place had ordinary Americans not been taken in by the administration's deceit, chiefly the dropped hint that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11. One study by the University of Maryland found that nearly 60 percent of Americans were convinced that Saddam was helping al Qaeda when we undertook our invasion. A majority based their support for the war on this flagrant misunderstanding. A near-majority persisted in believing Saddam was responsible for 9-11 even after the 9-11 Commission flat out said he wasn't.
Why have we not had an open conversation about The People's failures? One answer is that it is more fun to beat up on the Bush administration and the media, both of which share the blame for the misinformation that polluted the public debate. But a more honest answer is that neither liberals nor conservatives want to break the new taboo whose history I outlined above in reaching a more balanced assessment. Neither want to find fault with The People.
And yet shouldn't The People come in for criticism, too? That al Qaeda and not Saddam was behind 9-11 was a well-established fact by the time of the invasion. While a rational argument could be made in favor of the war, the argument linking Saddam and 9-11, which won over most people, wasn't.
It's time to face that.
