The following found its way into the Boston Globe three weeks ago:
Card says president sees America as a child needing a parent By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff September 2, 2004
NEW YORK – White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said yesterday that President Bush views America as a ”10-year-old child” in need of the sort of protection provided by a parent.
Card’s remark, criticized later by Democrat John F. Kerry’s campaign as ”condescending,” came in a speech to Republican delegates from Maine and Massachusetts that was threaded with references to Bush’s role as protector of the country. Republicans have sounded that theme repeatedly at the GOP convention as they discuss the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.
”It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,” Card said. ”I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.”
The comment underscored an argument put forth some by political pundits, such as MSNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews, that the Republican Party has cast itself as the ”daddy party.”
The "daddy party." Yikes.
Now, I have the kind of job that allows me to studiously avoid the broadcast media, especially the yak-fests that masquerade as 24-hour news. (And thank God!) Most breaking news in the oil and gas industry doesn’t merit broadcast coverage, so for the first time in several years, I’m able to work free of the pointless blather of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. (I confess, however, that I miss Al-Arabiyya, Al-Jazeera and that wonderful piece of performance art, Saudi television’s Channel 1.) So I don’t know how or even if these remarks made the rounds. Did I miss a thoughtful and engaged discussion of the role of the state in American life in early September?
I didn’t think so. Somehow, I suspect that if the hapless Senator Kerry had made similar remarks, the self-appointed "conservative" radio voices of the heartland would have roasted him, ridiculed him, and held such statements high as yet one more example that Democrats cannot be trusted to allow ordinary folks run their lives without the meddling of Washington and its dark minions. That’s what would have passed for a thoughtful and engaged discussion.
However, I take it from the apparent silence of the "Right" that while an awkward statement, because the paid mouthpiece of God’s Anointed uttered these words, they are gospel, and no questioning can be allowed. Most Republicans probably believe this nonsense anyway, they just don’t want to admit it. We are all the children of the Good and Watchful Father George, who will do all he can to protect us (Card said so). And we should be damn grateful.
It is one of those unfortunate facts of human history that minds more curious and thoughtful than George W. Bush’s have viewed the state in much the same way – as a parent that guides, protects, nurtures, disciplines, punishes and even sacrifices its children.
Children. That would be us, according to this line of reasoning.
This is hardly a modern notion owed to Jacobin revolutionaries, utopian communitarians, Fabian socialists, Muscular Christians, Bolsheviks, New Dealers, Great Society Liberals, Reaganites, Ikhwan al-Muslimin members, or fascists, phalangists and corporatists of various flavors and inclinations. Just to prove that antiquity can also be the fount of stupid ideas too, Plato devoted a large part of an entire dialogue, Crito, to this ridiculous proposition.
At the risk of boring those of you familiar with the scene, Socrates – the great threat to public morals – is in jail awaiting execution. Several of his followers, including Crito, have devised a scheme to break Socrates out of prison and hie him out of Athens to a comfortable and probably untroubled exile. The old man will have none of it, and at first it seems he’s actually opposed on real principles – "we ought not to repay any injustice with injustice or to do any harm to any man, whatever we may have suffered from him." (Church, 36) (All citations are the F.J. Church translation as it appears in The Dialogues of Plato, Bantam Books, 1986.)
An admirable stand, a moral stand, one I suspect most of us could agree with and might even espouse ourselves if faced with the same fate.
But the real damage is done in the next few questions and answers (is it me, or does Plato never have anyone ever ask Socrates hard questions or disagree with his stupid answers?). Socrates personifies the law, holds a conversation with it, and in a wee bit of early social contract theory, has the law answer that Socrates, as part of the deal by which he was an Athenian, agreed to "abide by whatever judgments the state should pronounce." (Church, 37)
And then Plato has Socrates, probably using a sock puppet to mouth the words of the law, say:
What complaint have you against us and the state, that you are trying to destroy us? Are we not, first of all, your parents? Through us your father took your mother and brought you into the world. … [S]ince your were brought into the world and raised and educated by us, how, in the first place, can you deny that you are our child and our slave, as your fathers were before you? And if this be so, do you think that your rights are on a level with ours? Do you think that you have a right to retaliate if we should try to do anything to you? You had not the same rights your father had, or that your master would have if you had been a slave. You had no right to retaliate if they ill-treated you, or to answer them back if they scolded you, or to strike back if they struck you, or to repay them evil with evil in any way.
And do you think you may retaliate in the case of your country and its laws? If we try to destroy you, because we think it just, will you in return do all that you can to destroy us, the laws, and your country, and say that in doing so you are acting justly – you, the man who really thinks so much of excellence?
Or are you too wise to see that your country is worthier, more to be revered, more sacred, and held in higher honor both by the gods and by all men of understanding, than your father and your mother and all your other ancestors, and that you ought to reverence it, and to submit to it, and approach it more humbly when it is angry with you than you would approach your father; and either to do whatever it tells you to do or to persuade it to excuse you: and to obey in silence if it orders you to endure flogging or imprisonment, or if it sends you to battle to be wounded or to die? That is just. (Church, 37)
The state is father. The state is mother. It gave you life. And it can take it away, too.
But it didn’t give you life. It isn’t your parent. It never was, and it never will be.
While Plato does his best to personify the state (and, in essence, so does Card, in a roundabout "L’etat c’est Bush" sorta way), the state is not real. It is not flesh nor blood nor bone. It is a fictitious entity that exists only in law and is made real by the imaginations of all those who believe in it, work for it, and shape its aims and goals. (Note I did not say that it is fictional.) It is not a person. It does not breathe. It does not think. It has no soul. It has no rights. It does not hope. It cannot repent, beg for forgiveness, forgive, praise and thank God for its blessings. It cannot dream. It cannot hate.
And most importantly, it cannot love.
Through much of human history and in most human societies – including many today – parents never cease to effectively be parents. Adult parents manage and supervise the lives of adult children, and that realization may help to put Plato’s notions of state as mother and father in context. But knowing that still does not help us, because many of us have a far different ideal of how parents should raise children. We raise our children to be confident and free human beings able to make their own decisions, shoulder their own responsibilities, make their own mistakes, suffer the own consequences, reap their own rewards, and live their own lives. We will always be parents, but there will come a day when we will stop actively functioning as parents.
(I suspect, also, that many parents in antiquity were also happy to see their children become successful, independent adults.)
That isn’t true for the parental state. We, its children, are never adults. We are never capable, we always need its guidance and supervision. We must always be protected, rewarded, educated, and punished. We are never grown.
And surely a loving parent would never sacrifice a child to ensure his or her own survival. We call such people monsters. Yet, when that state which regards us as children to protect then robs us of our wealth, our liberty and our lives, we talk of duty and responsibility and honor. Those who demand the sacrifice are not monsters, but "our leaders" – many of whom, oddly enough, never ever make the kinds of sacrifices they demand of us.
What kind of "parents" are these who live off the labor and profit from the death of their own "children?"
The state is only a tool used by individuals who can think and feel and love and hate. It has no independent moral existence of its own. Those individuals craft its aims, goals and ideals. They assume the right to rule others, often exercising that right by force. One of the great moral puzzles we live with is how fallen but free human beings ought to govern themselves. As long as we live in a fallen world, we will never be able to really solve this problem.
But it is clear to me that no man is more rightly guided than another enough to compel obedience, and certainly not to the point of death. I need no parent in Washington. And neither do you.
September 23, 2004
Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.
