BEN'S JIHAD VS. MCWORLD :

A Failure of Democracy, Not Capitalism (BENJAMIN R. BARBER, July 29, 2002, NY Times)

The truth is that runaway capitalists, environmental know-nothings, irresponsible accountants, amoral drug runners and antimodern terrorists all flourish because we have diminished the power of the public sphere. By privatizing government functions and refusing to help create democratic institutions of global governance, America has relinquished its authority to control these forces. Within the United States, we foolishly think we possess a private liberty that allows us to work and prosper individually, not together or in conformity with a social contract. In the international realm, we seem to believe that our claim to national sovereignty allows us to operate unilaterally--America first and foremost, not together or in conformity with a global contract.

On Sept. 11, no one looked to Bill Gates or Michael Eisner, let alone Kenneth Lay or Martha Stewart, for national leadership. On that day Americans remembered the true meaning of words like citizen and public servant and relied upon firefighters, mayors, Congress and the president. Why then today do we expect corporate executives or "market professionals" to cure the disorders of anarchic market capitalism--which, as Theodore Roosevelt understood, responds only to democratic oversight? And how do we expect a go-it-alone superpower to depose terrorists who exploit the global interdependence America is reluctant to recognize?

These ends are public, the res publica that constitutes us as a common people. To secure them is the common task of every citizen--as well as the principal responsibility of the president and Congress, whose problem is not that they may have once been complicit in the vices of capitalism, but that they are today insufficiently complicit in the virtues of democracy.

This is even more insipid than Mr. Barber's usual fare. In point of fact both the private sector and the public sector did the jobs they are designed for in these two circumstances. After the nation was attacked militarily, our government responded militarily, in the way that only government can. It has routed al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, killed Osama (presumably), toppled the government there that supported al Qaeda, and has the remnants of the group on the run across the globe. That's a pretty impressive performance.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2002 2:50 PM