Who's Gonna Save Us?

There is a point in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (in a chapter called "The Coming Revolt of the Guards") where he writes:

All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture, beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and rebel.

There's plenty of fertile ground in there for discussion but for now I'm interested primarily in the form of hero-worship that infects politics. More broadly, I'm talking about the need for Good Guy vs Bad Guy story lines. In some sense that tendency seems to be rooted in human nature. We sympathize with a particular side or find one side to be more in line with our stated values (be they freedom, democracy, liberalism, or whatever). I can't claim to be immune to these impulses. I've elevated certain political figures to hero status, overlooking their many shortcomings and giving in to the urge to demonize their political antitheses.

Two events in the past month have helped to bring this issue into focus for me. The first is the upheaval in Iran following the disputed presidential election there. Discussions of the events with a few friends and readings of select prominent liberal blogs reveal a certain romanticization of the situation similar, I suspect, to the way we romanticize our own country's revolutionary beginnings. This is not to suggest that some immaturity or naivete exists on the part of anyone; rather, it reflects a more general tendency to identify with a side and, for lack of a better term, "root" for them. This does, however, seem to be done often with imperfect knowledge of exactly what it is one is rooting for.

My knowledge of Iranian politics and history is somewhat general and limited but I nevertheless found the Iranian protests last month to be fascinating. My sense from the beginning was that the mere existence of dissent and anger--regardless of how intense it may be--need not lead to large and lasting change. Massive urban unrest has occurred without (arguably) leading to large structural change in stable nations like the United States. Political change in the United States is usually incremental by virtue of the political system's design: legislation has to make its way past a bicameral legislature and a president, making it subject to crucial "pivot points" like the Senate filibuster and the presidential veto. Political change in contemporary Iran, on the other hand, can be nearly impossible, also by design. Legislation passed by the Iranian parliament--the Majlis--must be approved by the Guardian Council, a group of 12 clerics that also must approve all candidates who wish to run for president or for a seat in the Majlis. So even when a reformist candidate is elected--like Mohammad Khatami was in 1997--and reform-minded legislators manage concurrently to win a large majority of seats in the parliament--as was the case when the Sixth Majlis was elected in 2000--large changes can still be blocked by the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader. A likely fraudulent presidential election in 2009 is merely a symptom of a political system in which elections fail to be meaningful.

For this reason I was wary of the Iranian protesters' (apparent) decision to rally around Mousavi (though several protesters also carried signs with the picture of Mohammad Mosaddeq on them). Though he is evidently reform-minded, he was only a candidate in this race because he was approved by the Guardian Council. He may wish to change it but he is undeniably part of the political system in Iran. In the United States, we often lament that our candidates are "chosen" by differential media coverage or corporate donations and we accept that political changes will be incremental, not only because of the design of our institutional features mentioned above but because politicians have a stake in preserving the current power structure that so benefits them. The difference is that most of us believe that the current system is an imperfect one that must be constantly tweaked not a fundamentally flawed one that must be overthrown. If Iranians want free and meaningful elections, they will have to change the very way that their government is structured. And, despite the recent anger over the presidential election, I don't know how much support exists for such a radical move. Rather, I think this illustrates the point Howard Zinn was making in the quote I posted above: many of the political "heroes" we honor and idolize, particularly in the wake of crisis situations, do not seek to pursue large changes that may be called for by the situation or by the masses. Instead, these heroes use their considerable political acumen to pacify the popular will and return them to a state of complacence with a flawed status quo. It is for this reason that I find the excitement and admiration heaped upon Mousavi (no matter how "good" his intentions may be) by American bloggers to be potentially misplaced.

The second event I alluded to above is the ongoing political turmoil in Honduras. This situation is one I know virtually nothing about but it seems that President Zelaya engaged in activities "ruled illegal by Honduras' Supreme Court, attorney general, top electoral body, and human-rights ombudsman" in pursuit of a referendum to potentially extend his stay in office. Zelaya was then arrested and exiled by the military, apparently on the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court. In reading comments on a story about this on a prominent liberal political blog, I was again struck by the need for every political story to have a clear-cut Good Guy and Bad Guy. The consensus seemed to be that Zelaya was the Good Guy by virtue of having been elected to his office; as Americans, it seems, we don't support the deposition of political leaders unless we question the legitimacy of their form of government.

Perhaps, as I speculated above, this sort of black-and-white thinking is ingrained in our psyches but I can't help but wonder if our educational system's habit of building a mythology around all "great" political figures contributes. We stress the need to think critically and along multiple dimensions, yet rarely fail to identify a Good Guy and Bad Guy in every war, nay, every conflict, be it military, political, or even economic. Certainly, I'm not immune to this phenomenon. It's easy to slip into the habit of considering domestic political opponents to be enemies or the liberal Western way of thinking as the only valid political philosophy. But it isn't up to me to decide what form of government is right for Iran; even suggesting that it's up to the Iranian citizenry to decide for themselves betrays a Western liberal bias, with its emphasis on personal liberty and equality, self-determination and consent of the governed. I can only offer a somewhat Darwinian (or perhaps Machiavellian) view: if the Iranian government values self-preservation and throws enough pittances at its angriest citizens to pacify them, it will likely survive in its current form (indeed, for the time being, this is the outcome that seems most likely). If it fails to retain legitimacy (as the Shah's Iran did three decades ago), it will fall. In short, what will happen will happen. Making the value judgment of what should happen would require either a focus on Realpolitik (what would most benefit the United States?) or a more presumptuous reliance on the conviction that one's own political ideology is best for everyone.

The point, from which I seem to have strayed, is that blind hero-worship of a redeeming political figure (e.g. a Barack Obama) or even simply choosing to read a political situation while operating under the assumption that some leader (a Zelaya or a Mousavi) must be "the Good Guy" is dangerous and misguided. Things happen for complex and sometimes obscure reasons. We currently have four bloggers here--a policy scientist, a historian, a medical student, and an engineer (aspiring, all)--and each of us can attest to the veracity of this fact in our respective fields. Identifying political actors as good or bad (/evil) and thus "explaining" their motives is often a shortcut that fails to illuminate the reasons things played out as they did.

Note: The title of this post was taken from the politically-charged song of the same name.