To some, my essay at the SSRC forum on "9/11 after a decade" seemed overly pessimistic. This piece may provide another perspective. "Opportunity, Opportunism, and the New Democratic Spirit" was written in the week after President Obama's election in 2008 (with one change at the time of his inauguration). In 2008, I could not find anyone to publish it, or to take on the short book for which it was meant as a precis (I have to believe that my agent is now less than happy about this missed opportunity). You will see that it identifies clearly two facts, two social-historical developments, that since then have been played out much further and have become part of global common sense across the range from activist to pundit: the so-called Arab Spring (which in fact is one, albeit very significant, instance of the larger process I identify here) and the fact that what is happening in the United States, including the election of Obama himself, is part of that same global transformation. Some notables, for example from the occupation of Wall Street, have begun to make this connection in recent weeks; it was obvious to me as I was writing Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen.
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As Barack Obama presides, will America undergo a resurgence or slip into final decline? Either way, future generations may see this extraordinary President in an unexpected light, as a tame moderate overcome by a world-wide tsunami of transformation.
For the force that carries Obama to the White House and draws millions to the Washington Mall is not of his making. Nor is it under his control. It is a new democratic spirit, and it is growing here and there around the globe.
This wakening impulse moves the hands that pelt George W. Bush with shoes in Baghdad, that set Athens ablaze, that affix signatures to Charter 08 in China. It inspires songs like "Corruption e do so" in Sierra Leone or "Yes we can" in the United States. It drives student marchers through the Parisian streets and demonstrations in Budapest. With this force the 21st century begins in earnest.
It does not yet have a name. Are we seeing an 18th century revolt against despotism? A 19th century revolution against capitalism? A 20th century rejection of consumerism? These movements are dead.
All we can say for now is that the new democratic spirit emerges today as a reaction against an astonishingly pervasive fact of the last forty years: the globalization of opportunism.
This is a specific form of corruption. It has economic and political and ethical features, but it is more than the sum of these parts. The global epidemic of opportunism must be understood everywhere as a plague upon the Citizen. It is a civic disorder and it is calling forth a democratic cure.
Of course, America plays a special and ambiguous role in this global process. Within living memory our nation purveyed a dream everyone could understand. At home and abroad, America was seen as "the land of opportunity." The open-endedness of our economic, political, and ethical life incited admiration and envy.
Since the Reagan era, however, the picture has been changing. Abroad and at home, people bound to everyday life are increasingly revolted by America's unmeasured appetites and actions. The land of opportunity has come to represent an opportunism that each day surpasses yesterday's limits with impunity.
Whether we are the cause, the effect, or the paradigm, the whole world is more and more twisted this way. And while despotism, capitalism, and consumerism thrived on unchecked powers, there is something new in the way that corruption that has worked itself into every facet of life.
This corruption is at once systemic and personal. It is not essentially immoral. Nor is it typically illegal. Rather, it cuts away at the foundations of the rule of law itself. It is an offense against the oldest maxim of human communities: nemo judex in propia causa, or no one should be judge in his own case. What it corrupts is the civic way of life.
The globalization of opportunism is not the result of some central or obscure power pulling our strings. Opportunism -- as bribe or bent-rule, as family favor or averted eye, as skim, kick-back, free-riding, or "whatever it takes" -- reproduces itself in each local person, place, and institution. It is an infectious frame-of-mind and way-of-doing.
And everywhere it has the same intolerable effects. Doors closed, hopes dashed or detoured. One step forward and two steps back. Everything to one and nothing to the other. The honest buried alive under work, debt, and risk.
You can recognize this corruption in America as it runs from pay-to-play to usurious interest rates, from the insidious "you can afford your mortgage" to the fictitious "weapons of mass destruction," from the nepotism of education and career to the bailout of bankers, from closed-door energy policy to disavowal of environmental destruction. Even Madoff would be nothing if one thing. But he is the apotheosis of a system.
Thus we can find ourselves in the unequivocally global language of Charter 08, published in Chinese last year, where major features of the phenomenon are laid bare:
"...endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people."
Today's corruption is long-brewed. It cannot be reformed in a single season. Its great paradox, therefore, is that precisely this durability starkly prejudices the short-run. Speed and grab are of its essence.
We say seize the day to our children, but opportunism's obsession with the short-run is above all else an assault on the young. For however much young people see only today their lives are the most back-loaded. Systemic and globalized opportunism makes the space of youth's vital now suffocatingly small. The earnest endeavor of youth becomes a bridge to nowhere.
History shows that the energy for profound transformation comes from the young. Today, the social forces behind that fact are greater than ever. Those riding high on the bandwagon of opportunism are partly to blame. More devastating, though, has been a generation of "role-models" -- teachers, parents, doctors, lawyers, politicians, celebrities of all stripes -- who even when they had nothing to gain stood by in silence.
Opportunity loves equality. But opportunism is not egalitarian. And there is no clear-cut line that divides between them. That is why what appears as an economic or social or ethical problem can only have a civic solution. And this explains the coming democratic wave. Nothing could be simpler.
The new democratic spirit is a reflex of judgement, an objection to absurd excess, an urgent need to re-draw the lines. It may be powered by "hope" but the foremost motto of the 21st century will be...enough!
For now, the new democratic spirit is just a rising voice. It is shimmering across the web and resounding in the streets. Blog, text, and twitter congeal it here and there. But what will it say? Who will hear its message? Will it become a dialogue? Or remain relegated to the brutal language of the scream?
For the force that carries Obama to the White House and draws millions to the Washington Mall is not of his making. Nor is it under his control. It is a new democratic spirit, and it is growing here and there around the globe.
This wakening impulse moves the hands that pelt George W. Bush with shoes in Baghdad, that set Athens ablaze, that affix signatures to Charter 08 in China. It inspires songs like "Corruption e do so" in Sierra Leone or "Yes we can" in the United States. It drives student marchers through the Parisian streets and demonstrations in Budapest. With this force the 21st century begins in earnest.
It does not yet have a name. Are we seeing an 18th century revolt against despotism? A 19th century revolution against capitalism? A 20th century rejection of consumerism? These movements are dead.
All we can say for now is that the new democratic spirit emerges today as a reaction against an astonishingly pervasive fact of the last forty years: the globalization of opportunism.
This is a specific form of corruption. It has economic and political and ethical features, but it is more than the sum of these parts. The global epidemic of opportunism must be understood everywhere as a plague upon the Citizen. It is a civic disorder and it is calling forth a democratic cure.
Of course, America plays a special and ambiguous role in this global process. Within living memory our nation purveyed a dream everyone could understand. At home and abroad, America was seen as "the land of opportunity." The open-endedness of our economic, political, and ethical life incited admiration and envy.
Since the Reagan era, however, the picture has been changing. Abroad and at home, people bound to everyday life are increasingly revolted by America's unmeasured appetites and actions. The land of opportunity has come to represent an opportunism that each day surpasses yesterday's limits with impunity.
Whether we are the cause, the effect, or the paradigm, the whole world is more and more twisted this way. And while despotism, capitalism, and consumerism thrived on unchecked powers, there is something new in the way that corruption that has worked itself into every facet of life.
This corruption is at once systemic and personal. It is not essentially immoral. Nor is it typically illegal. Rather, it cuts away at the foundations of the rule of law itself. It is an offense against the oldest maxim of human communities: nemo judex in propia causa, or no one should be judge in his own case. What it corrupts is the civic way of life.
The globalization of opportunism is not the result of some central or obscure power pulling our strings. Opportunism -- as bribe or bent-rule, as family favor or averted eye, as skim, kick-back, free-riding, or "whatever it takes" -- reproduces itself in each local person, place, and institution. It is an infectious frame-of-mind and way-of-doing.
And everywhere it has the same intolerable effects. Doors closed, hopes dashed or detoured. One step forward and two steps back. Everything to one and nothing to the other. The honest buried alive under work, debt, and risk.
You can recognize this corruption in America as it runs from pay-to-play to usurious interest rates, from the insidious "you can afford your mortgage" to the fictitious "weapons of mass destruction," from the nepotism of education and career to the bailout of bankers, from closed-door energy policy to disavowal of environmental destruction. Even Madoff would be nothing if one thing. But he is the apotheosis of a system.
Thus we can find ourselves in the unequivocally global language of Charter 08, published in Chinese last year, where major features of the phenomenon are laid bare:
"...endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people."
Today's corruption is long-brewed. It cannot be reformed in a single season. Its great paradox, therefore, is that precisely this durability starkly prejudices the short-run. Speed and grab are of its essence.
We say seize the day to our children, but opportunism's obsession with the short-run is above all else an assault on the young. For however much young people see only today their lives are the most back-loaded. Systemic and globalized opportunism makes the space of youth's vital now suffocatingly small. The earnest endeavor of youth becomes a bridge to nowhere.
History shows that the energy for profound transformation comes from the young. Today, the social forces behind that fact are greater than ever. Those riding high on the bandwagon of opportunism are partly to blame. More devastating, though, has been a generation of "role-models" -- teachers, parents, doctors, lawyers, politicians, celebrities of all stripes -- who even when they had nothing to gain stood by in silence.
Opportunity loves equality. But opportunism is not egalitarian. And there is no clear-cut line that divides between them. That is why what appears as an economic or social or ethical problem can only have a civic solution. And this explains the coming democratic wave. Nothing could be simpler.
The new democratic spirit is a reflex of judgement, an objection to absurd excess, an urgent need to re-draw the lines. It may be powered by "hope" but the foremost motto of the 21st century will be...enough!
For now, the new democratic spirit is just a rising voice. It is shimmering across the web and resounding in the streets. Blog, text, and twitter congeal it here and there. But what will it say? Who will hear its message? Will it become a dialogue? Or remain relegated to the brutal language of the scream?
