The Allures and Deceptions of Democracy

CULTURAL POLITICS 243 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2 PP 243–246 RYAN BISHOP TEACHES AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE. HE HAS PUBLISHED ON CRITICAL THEORY, MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, URBANISM AND INTERNATIONAL SEX TOURISM. BOOK REVIEW THE ALLURES AND DECEPTIONS OF DEMOCRACY RYAN BISHOP Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, by Gore Vidal, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 208 pages, $22/£18.95 HB 0–300–10171–6 The title of Gore Vidal’s most recent meditation on US history, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, promises a dramatis personae approach to the early days of the executive branch of the US governmental experiment. And Vidal delivers on this promise, providing fully blooded portraits of the first three presidents, including their financial straits, physical traits and political theories and practices. The book’s subtitle, however, ignores an array of other personages important to Vidal’s deceptively thin book (e.g. Franklin and Hamilton), while also, more importantly, obscuring his main argument: that the flower of US executive power present, no matter how heady or malodorous its bouquet, has its seeds in the nation’s founding and the debates operative at the time of > CULTURAL POLITICS 244 RYAN BISHOP its invention. The warped mirror of historical analogy and antecedent creates the funhouse of Vidal’s political analyses,and it is with gleeful acumen and glib erudition that he wanders the halls of human folly known as political history, fully entranced by his subject matter and its capacity for retaining currency. In this final installment of his trilogy on US policy, Vidal wishes to remind the citizens of “the United States of Amnesia” of several important inheritances at play in the current moment: the import of class in the founding and perpetuation of the nation; the role of property and privilege in US governance; the illusion of democracy the populace clings to; the role of the Electoral College in both thwarting majority rule and maintaining class privilege in governance; the import of capital (and debts) that funded the nation’s invention; and the protection of the ruling elite from potential loss of privilege as well as protection from the tyranny of the majority through the same Constitutional mechanism of indirect representation. In other words, Vidal argues why the “election” of George Walker Bush in 2000, or rather the (re)appointment of class dominance over the popular electorate by the Supreme Court,can be traced to the nascent nation’s earliest moments. The 2000 election provides an important impetus for Vidal’s historical analysis of executive power contra legislative tempering of said power prior to and then during the first three US administrations. The election supplies the context of Vidal’s extended trope of historical analogy and antecedent, especially with regard to the roles property and privilege played then (the late eighteenth century) and now (twentieth and twenty-first centuries) within the US political system. The 2000 election pitted two American mandarins (including one distantly related to Vidal himself) against each other after the first and only US president in the twentieth century, Bill Clinton, truly up from poverty. The election and its fraught finale with the Supreme Court upholding the federal power of the Electoral College as opposed to the popular vote proved tempting for Vidal’s general reading of US polity and policy. Himself a member of the American landed,privileged class, Vidal knows of what and whom he speaks. Of significance in Vidal’s analysis is the incorrect assumption operative within the US popular imagination that the nation is a democracy when it is, in fact, a three-pronged Republic designed to check both mob rule (e.g. democracy) and autocracy. Of the proposed government and its future, Franklin proved prescient in his suspicion of self-rule hogtied by indirect representation. He stated publicly at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the government they had outlined “is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government...