"The Limits of Power"

My wife happened to be flipping channels during a commercial break in the Olympics last night when she came across an amazing interview on the program Bill Moyers Journal. Moyers' guest was so startlingly on the mark that we did not return to the Games until the hour-long program ended.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired army colonel and current professor of History and International Relations at Boston University, discussed with Moyers his recent book, "The Limits of Power." It contains a number of observations to which Americans ought to pay some attention. High on the list is the enthronement of a "consumption society." Bacevich explains how it is related to debt, a declining standard of sustainable living, the increasing militarization of American foreign policy and the "imperial presidency." It was one of the most thoughtful and comprehensively concise descriptions of the problems that afflict the republic that I've ever heard.

Bacevich told how the United States started going from being a "production country to a consumption country" as far back as the late 1960s. Then came the Arab oil embargo of 1973. As Bacevich stated, "I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the 1970s came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, compromised our freedom of action. How every president from Richard Nixon down...declared, 'We're going to fix this problem.' (And then) none of them did."

This "consumption society" sense of material entitlement means that Americans expect "this continuing flow of cheap consumer goods. We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they happen to be. And we want to be able to do these things whether or not the books are balanced at the end of the month or the end of the fiscal year." We have a balance of payment deficit of $800 billion a year just on oil. Rather than ask the American people to sacrifice, conserve, or otherwise act rationally to support real solutions to the problem, government has instead proffered the easy line of painless prosperity increasingly financed by debt and sustained to a greater and greater extent by a militarily interventionist foreign policy. Bacevich summarizes, "The likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation will enjoy the opportunities we've had is very slight because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth."

And to support this growing reliance on military solutions to keep the resources flowing, Congress has ceded a larger share of its authority to the executive: an "imperial presidency" which is allowed to ignore the Constitution and commit the nation to dubious interventions. "One of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years."

But the debts will eventually fall due, as the mortgage and energy crises and the devaluation of the dollar make clear. As Bacevich pointed out, "the Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress," while the President makes all the important decisions himself, he might have added. The people's representatives have left themselves nearly powerless to act.

Afraid to ask the people for anything but their votes, afraid to tell them the truth, and content to leave the hard choices in the hands of one man, we have instead turned to an "imperial presidency that has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, has worn very thin." Without an honest effort to get control of our energy and debt situations and rein in the runaway executive, Bacevich leaves the convincing impression that a painful day of reckoning will come, leaving an America few of us will recognize-or look forward to living in.