Wedge Democracy
Divide and conquer.
But people get confused because it’s called “democracy”.
Democracy was supposed to be the weapon of the lower and middle class against the upper class.
But the upper class decided not to surrender its wealth, privileges, and political ascendancy so easily.
Lower and middle class political solidarity had to be broken.
It had to be wedged.
The democratic forces had to be split. They had to be broken into mutually exclusive groups. They had to learn to hate and attack each other instead of using their public power to restrain and moderate the aggressive private power of capital and business.
In the United States, the populist base that pursued its economic self interest through the political process was shattered by the wedges of race and religion.
It didn’t matter what the wedge was, as long as it worked.
In the Terri Schiavo case, the right wing can turn on a dime and go from “get big gummint out of my face” to “let’s see how many branches of the state and federal government we can fit in the death room”.
If people are screaming at each other on opposite sides of a hopeless divide, well, “Mission Accomplished”!
It took money, it took media, it took openly and aggressively polarizing and divisive policies, but I don’t think it was that hard in the end.
The divisions were there to be exploited.
The loss of our national unity and sense of purpose — the creation of a nation terminally divided against itself and unable to recognize, let alone promote, its own interests — is probably the greatest achievement of the conservative movement.
Now teaching the world to fear and to hate is becoming our leading export.
We call it “democracy promotion”.
Our democracy promotion efforts in Iraq, Lebanon, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan all share a common theme: the exploitation and exacerbation of divisions within nations.
Sunnis vs. Shi’ites
Christians vs. Muslims
Russians vs. Central Asian stanians.
We no longer prop up client states.
We support client factions that look to us for monetary and moral support.
Factions that flirt with treason as they sacrifice national unity and sovereignty for the sake of the advantages that they hope their democratic predominance might bring.
The result is congenitally divided regimes that have forsaken nationalism in favor of open fealty to globalization and free markets combined with the hidden pursuit of narrow and sectarian interests.
Just like us!
The British built an empire in India and beyond on the divide and conquer model, identifying and supporting favored political and ethnic collaborators to topple weak, despotic kingdoms, which were then integrated into the British imperial system through administration, military muscle, and trade.
They wanted to make it work.
Our goals are nowhere near as lofty.
America’s goal is not the creation of empire. It is the destruction of empire.
The destruction of two vast, multi-ethnic empires, to be exact.
Russia and China.
The “tulip revolution” fiasco in Kyrgyzstan should serve as a blaring wake-up call for Putin, who has mismanaged Russia’s response to the U.S.-promoted democratic transitions in Georgia and Ukraine as well.
If Russia shows itself incapable of successfully projecting its power and influence to manage relationships with its ex-satrapies in Central Asia, then it will be vulnerable to dissent, subversion, and mortal challenge in the countless ethnic enclaves that riddle the interior of the Russian state.
Meeting the American challenge in Russia’s backyard is now a matter not only of Putin’s political future, but of the survival of Russia itself as a major power. Look for Putin to clear his desk of distractions and figure out how best to strike back.
Hard.
And maybe in concert with China.
Up until now, China has officially inhabited that blissful 20th century world of optimism, multi-lateralism, economic development, and shared social and human progress.
But it’s getting ready to join the Bush zero-sum era of confrontation and fundamental hostility.
If China harbored any illusions about the basic aim of the Bush administration to encircle and destabilize it, they were dispelled when Japan joined the United States in openly declaring Taiwan’s security as a shared concern.
We’ll find out sooner than we’d like if Koizumi made a mistake by chaining Japan’s fate to the anvil of American superpower a la Tony Blair.
For now we’ll have to wait and see if China has decided now is the time to make its move.
The overall strategic signs aren’t very good.
Despite Bush’s desperate bravado, America is militarily and economically vulnerable.
Note to peaceniks: the world likes the mess in Iraq because it’s tying down 135,000 U.S. troops and keeping them out of the hands of a cynical, serial destabilizer and warmonger. When Bush gets the troops out of Iraq, he’ll just send them somewhere else, or — even worse from the Russian and Chinese viewpoint — be able to brandish them promiscuously across the Middle East and Asia as a threat.
I don’t think the Chinese will move against Taiwan.
It’s useful as a symbol, a rallying cry for the Chinese nationalism that the PRC regime relies on as a counterweight to capitalism and “democracy promotion”. If invaded, it turns into an existential military, political, and moral crisis that would threaten everything the Chinese have been trying to achieve for the last 30 years.
But I expect that the Chinese will look for a way to achieve an anti-American rollback in Central Asia while America is bogged down in Iraq; while the PRC can threaten the U.S. economy through its position as a primary purchaser of U.S. debt while nobody else is eager or able to pick up the slack; and before a natural or Uncle Sam-led oil dearth flattens the Chinese economy.
Rollback may not be that difficult since American democracy promotion by design leaves the target countries weak and divided, with ample contending factions to pick and choose between. The U.S. supported factions are relying more on U.S. soft power — an increasingly devalued and distrusted commodity, vulnerable to assertive Yankee Go Home nationalism — than the kind of hard power grimly desperate Russian and Chinese supremos are probably willing to inject into those distant, underpopulated countries.
And if the Russians and Chinese decide that Bush has at long last consumed the political capital he accumulated with the U.S. people as a result of his arrogance and incompetence, they may decide to grasp the nettle and precipitate the financial and economic crisis we all fear and anticipate — in order to precipitate a political crisis within our weakened and divided country that will bring down Bush’s house of cards, both domestically and internationally.
So don’t be too surprised if the democracy wedge shatters the countries in which we use it.
Including our own.
Copyright 2005 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
