PRESENTATION BY
SENATOR
GARY HART
SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 2006
We salute the flag of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands. If you were to go outside this room, you would be hard-pressed to find 1 in 10 or perhaps 1 in 100 Americans who know what a republic is. We talk about our country as a democracy and we are. But if that’s the case, why do we salute the flag of a republic and not of a democracy? What does the term “republic” mean? Does it have content? Does it mean anything?
The Founders did not use the language of democracy in the constitutional debates. It scared John Adams and particularly Hamilton to death because democracy in those days meant mobs in the street. Jefferson was more comfortable with the term because he didn’t mind mobs in the street – part of the reason I’ve always admired him.
In any case, the Hamiltons of the world didn’t want to talk about democracy; it wasn’t popular to do so. The debate about the kind of country this would be was couched as a discussion about a republic, dating back, in those days, 2300 years or more, and now, 2500 years or more. Start with Athens or the Greek city states or anywhere you wish, and then move forward. The republic has risen and fallen throughout history. It disappeared in the Middle Ages. Venice was a republic. The Swiss cantons originally were republics. Machiavelli was largely responsible in the renaissance for restoring the ideal of the republic. In the English and Scottish enlightenment and to a degree the American enlightenment, the notion of the republic was revived.
Throughout history, republics have shared certain characteristics. I think there are about four characteristics of republics throughout history or the ideal of the republic. The first is the notion the ancients used of civil virtue. Today, we talk about values. While I much prefer the phrase of virtue, it’s fallen out of favor. Today we talk about “civic duty” or, more popularly, “citizen involvement” or “citizen participation,” but that’s sort of what the ancients – the Greeks and the Romans – had in mind.
The republic could only survive if people participated in self-government. That was required by the second quality which was popular sovereignty. Democracies today take popular sovereignty for granted. However, when you think about it a minute, particularly in the context of 500 B.C., popular sovereignty meant that power and sovereignty did not rest in a king, a monarch, a prince, a single individual, an autocracy. It rested with the people. This is a profound notion in political theory and philosophy. Power to the people.
A third and a very important quality of republics is resistance to corruption. The ancients and indeed our own Founders, didn’t define corruption the way we do: Jack Abramoff, money under the table, subornation of public officials. They defined it as public officials putting their own personal or the special interests of others ahead of the common good. Under this classic definition, today’s American republic is massively corrupt.
Finally, republics shared a sense of the common good, also known as the commonwealth. That meant all the things all of us hold together. Today, we could define that as our national forests, our military, the list goes on. This isn’t a popular concept today because we’re in an age of privatization, where people want to make everything private. In contrast, ancient republicans and our founders felt that what we held in common was what we held together.
Against this backdrop of what it is we’re saluting when we salute our flag, we have to think about our role in the world today. Unfortunately, we had a great opportunity in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War to do what happened in Harry Truman’s day, basically to redefine America’s role in the world. It was that yeasty period of 1945-47 in which the greats of that time – the George Marshalls, the Dean Achesons, and Avril Harrimans, and George Kennans and others – laid the groundwork for America’s role in the world for the rest of the century. In a phrase you could put in on a bumper sticker, it boiled down to “containment of communism.” And it worked. It worked so well that we succeeded with that doctrine, in its various applications, in a 72-hour period at the end of August 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed and the time arrived for us to redefine our role in the world. If it’s not to contain communism, what is it?
We drifted forward almost exactly a decade, from August 1991to September 2001 without an answer to this question. Then one three word doctrine, containment of communism, gave way to another three word doctrine: “war on terrorism.”
In my own view, terrorism is a crime not an act of warfare. By reducing to warfare, we’ve heavily tilted the equation, under the guidance of American neo-conservatives, in favor of the existence of an American empire.
We also ought to be as precise as we can be about the qualities of an empire. Throughout history, empires have had the following characteristics. First, a military presence over time in a foreign state. Second, a role in structuring the government of that state on a continuing basis or at least in having a veto over who governs and how. Third, a centralized administration. Here again, I think the British in the 18th and the 19th centuries are the model. India is perhaps the most classic example, but not the only one. Fourth, all republics have monopolized resources to some degree. Empires don’t go abroad just for fun. Quite often, they have gone abroad to dominate a resource or set of resources or to structure a trade relationship in their own favor. Query: whether the role of America in the Middle East today, in the Persian Gulf particularly is not, in that respect, a classic empire? You can’t fight two wars in the most volatile region in the world, the most productive one in terms of oil supplies, and deny that oil had anything to do with either one of them, which we’ve more or less tried to do. Finally, I would say the imposition of the occupiers political will and, to a degree, its culture on the foreign society and the foreign country and the foreign culture.
Let me conclude with a thought on energy, because I think America is becoming an empire and it is an empire driven by our need for oil. Sooner or later, if Latin America continues to drift leftward and Venezuela or Mexico become so unstable as to jeopardize our dependence on their oil supplies, our empire may conceivably stretch beyond the Middle East.
At the same time we’re headed into an economic conflict with China and India, which is currently playing itself out in Iran. China’s and India’s role in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue is a prototype of what we’re going to be facing in the future. The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, which I co-chaired between October 1998 and January 2001, not only predicted major terrorist attacks on America, but also predicted this kind of conflict. In fact, prominent Commission members believed that we were headed toward military conflict with China, a nation they viewed as the next Soviet Union, and thought we ought to prepare ourselves for that kind of conflict.
I disagree. I think that China is becoming our principle creditor. We are borrowing money from the Chinese so we can buy Chinese goods – a sweet deal for them, but not so good for us, because we’re leaving the bills for future generations. The only reason China is going to invade this country in the 21st Century is to collect its debts.
We have to think about energy and America is 60% dependent on foreign supplies of oil. This is driving our foreign policy and our military policy, and I think it will ultimately drive us into disaster.
We cannot at the same time, be a republic and an empire. I know of no nation in history that has been simultaneously a republic and an empire. One need only look at Rome circa 50 B.C.
Thank you very much.
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