The State of Our Union

RinR: One of the reasons, you argue, that the most popular candidate ended up losing the election is because so many Americans favored partisan rhetoric over an unbiased search for truth during the recounts in 2000. How do you explain this?

LdHS: As far as I can tell, it's the way societies work. One of the things we've learned with public opinion research, the most fundamental finding of public opinion research of the past 50 years is that the masses follow the elites.

Most people don't have time to learn about all these things, and they look to a particular person that they trust. It may not be the president, it may be Jesse Jackson, you know, it could be Rush Limbaugh, it could be somebody who's not in government, but they look at that person and defer to that person. It's a normal thing.

I don't see that changing. It really is a matter of elites being willing to be committed to democracy and the rule of law and the rule of reason.

RinR: And this can be a problem because?

LdHS: Unfortunately, the history of democracy is that leadership philosophy is eroded as the competition between elites becomes more intense. That's what happened with Athenian democracy; that's what happened in the Roman Republic. So you look at our system today; you see our elites doing it, and you know we're in big trouble. It's in my lifetime that this has happened, that elites have begun to put winning ahead everything else, ahead of truth and country.

When Watergate was prosecuted, there were Republicans in Congress that were after Nixon. They thought what he was doing was unconscionable, and today that's not the case. Today, Democrats stick with Democrats, and Republicans stick with Republicans. They don't care what their party leaders have done.

Just in my lifetime, I've seen this civic culture go from something that's respectful of democracy to something that is manipulative of it.

The problem is if you let this go uncorrected, the Democrats are going to do something worse later, and then the Republicans. It's just an arms race almost, and it will just tend to degenerate.

RinR: How does the 2000 election fit into that view?

LdHS: I think my book is at times rather blunt about the illegalities I think that were committed and the political motives that ran rampant.

I wish I could say, "Well, we'll leave it alone; we won't look at it because it would shake people's confidence in our society." But I'm afraid the elite discourse?-unless it's corrected, unless elites start recognizing that they have a responsibility to maintain a democracy among themselves?-we're going to have a big problem....

(But) today, the belief in the truth, that there (even) is a truth, has pretty much vanished across the board. It's not just Democrats; it's not just Republicans. But it's been replaced by cynicism.

RinR: Finally, I'd like to go back to the "big picture" theme of your book. You call for an unflinching search for truth in the tradition of the Ancient Greeks who questioned everything. But Socrates, the top truth-searcher of the day, was put to death for constantly prodding citizens to examine whether their convictions were grounded in a firm foundation of facts?-suggesting he was "too democratic" to live in a Republic. Two thousand and some years later, what makes you think a majority of Americans?-or anybody else, for that matter?-want to stare their democratic shortcomings in the face?

LdHS: I'm not sure that they do.

After Socrates was executed, Plato, his student, went out to the countryside to buy a piece of land. He bought it from the family of a war hero named Academus. … And the academy today is called that by virtue of this decision.

The reason Plato went out of town is, he realized the town people didn't want to hear that their beliefs about the gods were myths, that their institutions were founded somewhat arbitrarily, that they didn't know what they were talking about when they said they wanted justice.

You'd like to hope that in the 21st century people would be mature enough, but I don't know. This is a turning point potentially for us. If we don't recognize the disorder, I don't think we have many years left of democracy in the United States.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's not too late, even as we speak.