On November 3, 1988, just before the U. S. presidential election, I debated Dr. Richard Plano, a Professor of Physics at Rutgers University, at the Busch Student Center. The topic was United States policy of nuclear weapons. The debate began with a screening of “Mandate From Main Street: Americans Advise the Next President,” a videotape produced by the Union of concerned Scientists and the Better World Society. The video consisted of a presentation of information about nuclear weapons to a small group of Americans, who discussed the presentation amongst themselves. The strategy was to have the audiences for the video watch and listen to the audience in the video, then to carry on the discussion.
Dr. Plano and I were each given twenty minutes for our opening statements.
EMPTY MANDATE
What is the “mandate from Main Street”? According to this film, it has two components:
1. Americans don’t want nuclear war; we find the prospect of violent death distasteful.
2. Americans want to proceed with peace treaties, but with caution.
Polling data suggest that these sentiments have held fairly steady for the last three decades at least. Within this consensus, there are fluctuations: one year we’re passing nuclear ‘freeze’ resolutions, the next year we’re reelecting Ronald Reagan in a landslide. We know what we want; we’re not so sure about what we should do to get it.
Why, then, does the discussion filmed here, make the participants so happy? At the end, they heartily congratulate one another for reaching these utterly unexceptional conclusions. I imagine that many of us who watch them find their enthusiasm contagious.
The answer has nothing to do with the content of the film. Its conclusions are too general to give any useful guidance to a president, and the information offered, such as it is, will mislead anyone who takes it seriously. But the technique here is admirable.
Most films of this sort present their case by offering statistics, some ‘visuals’ designed for maximum emotional impact, and opinions delivered by authority figures. This film goes a step further. It uses these ordinary techniques on an audience that we, the second audience, watch. The ‘group dynamic’ of the audience in the film thus reaches out to involve the audience watching the film. Anyone here who’s interested in marketing or advertising might study this carefully. I don’t know if you can sell cars or laundry detergents this way, but it might be fun to try.
As for the substance of the film, it is weak. I’ve listened twice, now, and unless I’m mistaken, no one in the discussion group ever cites a single fact, with the exception of the former Coast Guardsman who assures everyone that the billions spent for defense actually bought things.
All else is emotions, opinions, and short commonsense arguments. None of the participants really knows anything about the issues.
Let me be more specific. The film commits errors in four categories: history, military strategy, economics, and politics.
In History: The film tries to portray the Reagan Administration as having changed its policies with respect to the Soviets. The producers try to contrast Reagan’s “evil empire” statement with his recantation in Red Square. They ignore the context of the two statements. “Evil empire” was [a phrase in a speech given at] a convention of evangelical Christians. “No longer an evil empire” was during a summit conference, with Gorbachev at his elbow. What do you expect?
Beyond the rhetoric, Reagan’s policy has been completely consistent throughout his two terms. In response to the well-documented decline of American strength in the 1970s, and a steep Soviet buildup, Reagan undertook an American buildup accompanied by several small-scale, rapid military forays—Grenada and Libya—and longer-term efforts in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf. This balance of action and talk has remained consistent for more than seven years.
In treating the Pershing and Cruise missile deployments as if they occurred in a vacuum, the film is misleading. In claiming that “Reagan’s popularity plummeted” in 1983, not 1982, the film is wrong—and for a purely polemical reason. [The producers] want to link Reagan’s popularity with arms talks, instead of the economy. And in claiming that Reagan was “playing on the fears” of the American people, the film conveniently ‘forgets that these fears were our response to the very real Soviet military buildup, and to [Soviet] strategic advances through proxies in Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Latin America throughout the 1970s.
In terms of military strategy, the film has no substance at all. The participants agree that we have more than “enough” bombs because we can “blow up the world.” This is simply irrelevant. We won’t blow up anything if we can’t deliver warheads on target. Nuclear deterrence rests on the perceived ability to retaliate after your own forces have been attacked. We manufacture a variety of weapons, in large quantities, precisely because we want to have a formidable arsenal left over after an attack—enough so the Soviets won’t attack us in the first place. The film never grasps this elementary point of strategy.
Similarly, the film assumes that more weapons are more dangerous than fewer—wrong again, and for the same reason. Survivable and deliverable weapons are the key to security, not ‘more’ and ‘fewer.’ This is why Reagan can build up [our nuclear arsenal] and negotiate for reductions, simultaneously.
It is on the issue of enforcement of treaties that the film plays its cleverest sleight-of-hand. You’ll recall that one of the participants says he wants to see arms treaties enforced. The narrator responds with a videotape on verification. There are some problems, here. [Former CIA Director] William Colby is a poor choice as an authority on verification, having presided over the CIA at a time when it underestimated Soviet nuclear strength. Even this year when the Soviets revealed the extent of their INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] arsenal, we learned we had underestimated the number of their weapons by 33%.
But the real point is this: To verify a violation is not the same as to respond to it. The man wanted to know what to do after verification. He never got an answer.
In terms of economics, the participants claim we’re “losing ground” and blamed military spending. The facts contradict them. Our GNP is $4 trillion. We generate one-fifth of the world’s wealth. If the Japanese, or the South Koreans, or any other nation is rising faster and now competes, good for them. It’s up to us to compete successfully, and the 6.33% of our GNP we spend on defense, only one-fifth of that on weapons, and less than that on nuclear weapons, poses no real obstacle to that—as our own history proves. In previous decades it has run as high as 12%, and there is no prospect of anything near that, again.
Further, if economic pressures and not the Reagan arms buildup drove the Soviets back to the negotiating table [as the film claimed], why did we get the INF Treaty only after proving we had the political capacity to get Pershing and Cruise missiles deployed in Europe? and why has the military share of the Soviet GNP continued to escalate? It’s now at approximately 17%, up from 12% fifteen years ago.
Despite the seriousness of these historical, strategic, and economic flaws, the film’s greatest deficiency is its superficial conception of politics. On the simplest level, we see this in the silly suggestion that America should somehow “help” Gorbachev by expediting arms treaties. The Soviets have shown that this sort of thing is useless; they were the ones who walked out of the arms talks in 1983, only to accept every one of the American terms on [the] INF [Treaty], only a few years later.
I’ve been involved with negotiations among politicians—nothing on this level, of course, but I know how it’s done. Adversaries don’t “help” each other; they help themselves. Sometimes, what they do is mutually beneficial. If Gorbachev is deposed, it will likely have nothing to do with whether or not he obtains treaties from us. It will be a power grab over which we will have little or no control.
The film’s narrator asks, “What is national security?” The [discussion] group’s answers are, “Economics and the prevention of drug trafficking.” That’s all right as far as it goes, but it misses the political character of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
When Lincoln said the United States was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he wasn’t just playing with words. The United States was founded as the first really practical anti-tyrannical regime.
The Founders wrote the Constitution to insure liberty, not merely by stating those liberties in the Bill of Rights (what good would that do?) but by structuring our government in such a way as to re-channel the ambitions of political men away from tyranny and toward liberty. They did this by separating sovereignty from government.
America was something new: Novus ordo seclorum. The highest secular authority is the people; as the Declaration of Independence says, “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But the people don’t govern directly, as in the old democracies that failed. Instead, they elect representatives to govern during fixed terms.
This principle of consent also governs the economy. We don’t have a ‘command economy,’ as the Soviets do. We have a commercial economy.
Government by consent is a commercial republic.
Contrast this with the Soviet founding, accomplished by Lenin. Lenin explicitly condemned government by consent, and the commercial economy that goes with it:
“Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century… violence means neither a fist or a club but troops. To put ‘disarmament’ in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!”
The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is really the dictatorship by the Communist Party over the proletariat, is nothing less than a new form of despotism directly opposed to the new form of liberty founded in America and since then initiated and sustained in many other parts of the world. This is why Soviet propagandists deride the American regime as an example of “bourgeois formalism”: both a commercial economy and a government separated from the people, its powers are divided and balanced within the government. All of this protects consent. The American regime prevents dictatorship, ‘proletarian’ or otherwise.
Where does this leave Gorbachev and his perestroika, his ‘restructuring’ of Soviet society? At this July’s Soviet Communist Party Conference, Gorbachev left no doubt:
“The wish to see the Party still stronger has resounded here most passionately and resolutely. This can only be welcomed, and I think all of us are pleased. As put down in its resolution, the Conference demanded that our Party should in every respect be a Leninist Party not only in content but in its methods.”
The political methods have if anything been more Leniniist than Lenin’s: to merge the party leadership with official state leadership to a degree seen only in another Communist-bloc country—Romania, where it has been a disaster.
The rhetoric is glasnost [openness], but the deed is centralization—more than ever. Perestroika is an attempt to reform centralism, not to abolish it. Consent still has no real place in the politics and economy of command. Liberty is granted as a privilege, not preserved as an unalienable right. There is still no reliable way to re-channel ambition into constructive purposes.
There’s no separation of sovereignty from government. There’s no separation and balance of powers within the government. There’s no genuine rule of law, based upon consent. For all of these reasons, there is no real recognition of, or solid protection for, human rights.
Perestroika has been attempted before. Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Khruschev’s de-Stalinization program are the most memorable examples. These efforts failed. Such efforts have to fail, because they are not radical—they don’t go to the root of the problem.
The great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov understands this. In today’s Christian Science Monitor, he criticizes proposals for constitutional reform, which make Gorbachev not only the Party chief but the head of government. “As in the past, we are relying on one man,” Sahharov writes. “This is exceptionally dangerous, both for perestroika as a whole, and for Gorbachev personally. Today it will be Gorbachev, tomorrow it can be anyone.”
All of this has direct relevance to “Mandate from Main Street.” Arms treaties cannot get to the root of the political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Gorbachev himself implies as much. “Our restructuring is demolishing the fear of the Soviet threat, and militarism [he means the military defense of the commercial republics] thereby loses its political justification.” Gorbachev does not say perestroika demolishes the Soviet threat itself, or the military justification of our arms buildup. He suggests that restructuring will affect the political situation, which determines military policy.
As the Oxford University historian Michael Howard has written, “Arms control becomes possible only when the underlying power balance has been mutually agreed.” This comes about only with a political settlement.
Commercial republics don’t fight among themselves. Britain and France, two countries with a long history of mutual hatred, possess nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy one another. But neither nation worries about this. There is no arms treaty, there. Rather, both are commercial republics, regimes designed to re-channel military and political ambition toward liberty and consent, not violence.
Until the Soviet Union solves that [regime] problem, arms treaties will merely re-channel the conflict from one class of weapons to another. This can be worthwhile in a limited way. But it cannot mean real peace.
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