Consider that along with the ending to a recent Salon.com story on a conservative political action conference. The words are those of Sen. Rick Santorum:

"I'm talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people," he said. "The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives." In other words, government needs to enforce virtue in order to keep government out of our lives.

Philosopundit,
It is an interesting article. It reads as if the phrase:

"...the thousands of blue-blazered students and local activists who come to CPAC each year to celebrate the volkisch virtues of nationalism, capitalism and heterosexuality, Bush is truth."

is meant to evoke memories of the youth movement in German fascism.

That means they are anti-democratic. Are they?

Gary and Philosopundit

I think they are anti-democratic in the sense you point to in your post on Foucault. They do not question the self-evident truths that are presented to them by the system and its leaders. I do not think this group wants real questions raised about the inequities of capital nor do they want to question the competence of their leaders. Their devotion to Bush and the free market is predicated on faith.

Alain,

if that is the case then, it undercuts Shadia Drury's claim in Leo Strauss and the American Right that the American neocon strategy is to use democracy against liberalism.

Drury's claim puzzled me when I read it.It still does.

It would seem that the neo-cons are attacking liberalism and undermining democracy in the process of treating liberalism as the enemy within. In doing so they are making the shift to a national security state that is an authoritarian one.

So democracy turns into its opposite in a time of total war against fundamentalist Islam--a war that the Washington neocons say is eternal.

Is this reversal of democracy into its opposite what is going on?

Gary

I think your absolutely right. They are attacking democracy in order to save it. This is the paradox Derrida pointed to in his later work; leaders often argue for restricting or even undermining democratic institutions in order to ensure the survival of the regime. Derrida called this democracy's "auto-immune" disease.

Any chance you feel like fleshing that out a bit, Alain? 'Auto-immunity' is a concept of his with which I've been struggling for a while, in various ways, but unable to really grasp.

Alain,
I concur with Matt. The references I've found to Derrida's concept of auto-immune disorder are few and far between.

I know that it comes from Giovanna Borradori (Ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

However, there is little about this book on the net.I will dig around, and if I find anything, I will do a post.

Gary and Matt

The only article I have found on line that talks about this in any detail is from John Caputo. It is called "Without Sovereignty, Without Being" and can be found in the August 2003 Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (www.jcrt.org). He not only references the 9/11 interview but also Voyous, which I believe has just been translated into English. The following is a quote (everywhere you see a V used it is referencing the french text of Voyous):

"Democracy today is a victim of the "strange illogical logic" by which a living thing destroys the very thing that is meant to fortify (munis)it against attack by a foreign body (V, 173). The result is that instead of attacking the other, it attacks itself and tolerates or plays host to the presence of the aggressor. So democracies often think that if, as a practical matter, they are to survive, they must make themselves safe from democracy and learn how to tolerate anti-democratic forces within their own bodies. Thus, in order to make the American way of life safe against the threat of terrorists who threaten democracy, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to abridge the democratic rights of American citizens (V, 64-65), or the rights of prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay, even as the Rehnquist court has seen fit to profoundly abridge the civil liberties of Americans to keep the streets of democracy safe.

When, in 1992, the Algerian government saw that the elections were going to result in the election of an anti-democratic Islamic party that would abolish democracy, it suspended a democratically held election in the name of democracy, which means a place where the people enjoy the right to choose their own leaders (V,54ff.). That of course is nothing new. When Salvador Allende was democratically elected in Chile, Henry Kissinger said that the United States was not going to let the interests of democracy (read: the United States) be injured by a lot of damn fools (a loose translation of demos) in Chile expressing their democratic will for a socialist president. Everybody knows that you cannot trust democracy, which has a suicidal side that we have to protect it against (V, 57).

Auto-immunity is thus a kind of pharmakon (PTT, 124), when the body is poisoned by the very drug that is meant to save it. An absolute democracy could bring a democratic end to democracy; that risk is built right into democracy. The National Socialists were democratically elected. The art of governing democratically is to know when democracy should suppress its own immunities to the undemocratic and attack itself (autos)---in the interests of democracy, of course." (pg.)21

Alain
it is a good quote as it gives the basic idea which I agree with. The opening phrase:

"..a living thing destroys the very thing that is meant to fortify (munis)it against attack by a foreign body"

can be redescribed as:

"liberal democracy destroys the very thing that is meant to fortify it against attack by a anti-democratic forces."

What then are democracy's fortifications ---autoimmunity---against the the attack from within?

federalism? an independent judicary? the corporate media?, the checks and balances within liberal political institutions?