Lewis Lapham [1] served as editor of Harper’s Magazine [2] from 1976 until his retirement in from those duties in 2006. But he has continued on in his writing. In the January 2007 “Notebook” he bristles at the suggestions of Nancy Pelosi and others that impeachment hearings are “off the table.” Lapham advocates holding vigorous hearings to determine the ways in which “a predatory government goes about the work of stealing from a free but inattentive people their lives, liberties, fortunes, good name, and sacred honor.” He argues that malfeasance will not be hard to find. “Never have the attempts at regime change been so stupidly managed.” Further, “the invasion of Iraq was designed to the specifications of a criminal fraud.”
Lapham cites a 1919 essay by Randolph Bourne in drawing the distinction between
the American political democracy (modest, tolerant, easy-going, content to mind its own business) and the American industrial autocracy, the country’s significant classes,” self-important, vain, eager to extend their economic privileges and appear on the world stage in the roles of British dukes, pleased to think of war as an upper-class sport, the means of disguising their own venal and incompetent politics in the dignity of handsome military uniforms.
This American industrial autocracy was clearly identified by Dwight Eisenhower (imagine this sort of speech at a contemporary Republican National Convention):
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the federal government….
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Lapham argues that the main question now before America “is the one confronted by the man afraid of finding out that he’s been robbed. How much longer do we wish to pretend that nothing really happened or that nothing really valuable is lost; that the crime is a losing of the Iraq war, not the making of it?”
He argues that we can’t lay out a new agenda for America unless we make a clear decision about “which America we are talking about.”
I do not want us to get distracted from pressing business by holding hearings designed to blame and to secure political advantage. On the other hand, Lapham raises a good point: if we don’t dig through the “dirt,” (vigorously enough to lead to the impeachment of President Bush), how will we understand what happened and prevent it from happening again?
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