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Hotel America

Transforming commentaries on Government, Society, and Culture in American Life

Lapham, Lewis. Hotel America. New York: Verso, 1996.

Today, the idea of American democracy as a force of liberation abroad, in Iraq and in Afghanistan is almost universally accepted by both liberals and conservatives as a received truth, not merely a piece of skillfully crafted political rhetoric. But in Lewis Lapham's essay "Democracy in America?" The idea of a truly extant democratic system in America is posed as a question rather than as something to be accepted, and Lapham concludes that "the spirit of Democracy is becoming as defunct as Buffalo Bill" in the America to which he directs his essay. (10) Lapham stresses that because of a perceived unnecessary need for cohesion, in peacetime as well as wartime, and "not because of the malevolence or cunning of a foreign power (the Russians, the Japanese, the Colombian drug lords, Saddam Hussein), but because a majority of Americans apparently have come to think of democracy as a matter of consensus and parades, as if it were somehow easy, quiet, orderly and safe," democracy in America has become defunct. (10)

This is an important reminder, when one despairs of the lack of democratic unity manifest in Iraq, and indeed in other democratic nations. For the institutions of democracy never function safely nor smoothly, nor can one accept such acts as the Patriot Act as mere blips upon the political radar to protect security, even at the expense of democracy. Thus, Lapham offers a transforming vision of American democracy that he states is in fact a return to its 'hands off' attitude roots -- democracy is something messy rather than orderly because it demands citizen and well as governmental responsibility and accountability. It also suggests that American democracy cannot be imposed from without, but must be organically generated by the collective desire and will of the people to assume such responsibility for their own political future.

Lapham's societal article on "Morte de Nixon" in light of recent events regarding the true identity of Deep Throat particularly resonates as a stunning indictment of the levels of disloyalty and mistrust paranoia and secrecy in government can create. (223) Specifically, Lapham contemns "Nixon's distrust of any and all forms of free speech was consistent with his ambition to shape the government of the United States in his own resentful image." (224) Again, when fighting for democracy abroad, one cannot create a climate of hatred for democracy within the American nation itself, as Nixon did, while "conspicuously attempting to suborn the Constitution and betray every known principle of representative government." (223) Thus Nixon "allowed the American people to see what could become of their democracy in the hands of a thoroughly corrupt politician bent upon seizing the prize of absolute power."(223) America is not safe, not even from an ostensibly popular and democratic politican, if that politican uses bureocratic institutions to abuse the power invested in him by the Constitution. Fortunately, the institutions Nixons abused came back, in the form of the CIA operative Deep Throat, to 'bite' the hand that both fed and rebuked the institutions of secrecy that created the negative influences present within the Nixon administration.