Category Archives: Politics

Joseph Welch vs Joseph McCarthy

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO2iiovYq70

On this date in 1954, Joseph Welch, counsel for the United States Army, brought the McCarthyite juggernaut to a juddering halt with a courageous and heartfelt confrontation of the fatally alcoholic junior senator from Wisconsin.

This is how the democratic body politic is supposed to cleanse itself of demagoguery: with the fearless application of free speech.  Note the spontaneous round of applause from the audience at the end of the above clip.

There was at least one well-known Canadian victim of McCarthyism, Frye’s former classmate and distinguished diplomat and scholar Herbert Norman, whom Frye refers to in an interview (CW 24, 643) as hounded into suicide.  (CBC Radio news report on Norman’s death here.)

Plus ça change: From Frye’s diary entry for February 12, 1952:

We talked American politics with Ken [MacLean].  Nothing especially new — he says if Taft gets the Republican nomination the election will be practically civil war, as Taft could only win with the kind of all-out support he’d get from McCarthy.  (CW 8, 507)

Now imagine a Palin candidacy in ’12 and the Great Rightwing Noise Machine shrieking lies and barely-veiled threats 24/7 for an entire election season.

After the jump, a contemporary demagogue, Ann Coulter, at the grave of her self-declared hero (this last link is to a terrific clip in which now Senator Al Franken takes on Coulter and shows her what being provocatively funny really means).

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Noah Richler: “What We Talk About When We Talk About War”

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An except from Noah Richler’s talk at the Frye Festival last month, soon to be published in its entirety by Goose Lane Press.

We Are at War

If Parliament remains true to the decision it made in 2008[1], then by December 2011, Canadian soldiers will leave Afghanistan and our participation as combatants in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force will have ended. I’m not speaking to you, today, to judge this undeclared war—though technically speaking, we are not fighting a war but are involved in a “counter-insurgency” operation[2] and so conveniently not bound by the Geneva Conventions. No, appropriate to the Festival’s flattering invitation I come to the topic of this war, let’s call it a war, in the shadow of the master, Northrop Frye. As someone with a keen interest in story, I am fascinated by how the manner in which we narrate our lives lays the way for the journey we make through war’s repeating cycle of insult, escalating injury and then exhaustion. I am here to consider how we have talked ourselves into this war[3], through it—and now, finally, are talking ourselves out of it.

The Canadian Military Then and Now

Ten years ago Canada considered itself a ‘peacekeeping’ nation despite having a diminishing presence in actual UN peacekeeping operations around the world. More than 100 000 Canadians have participated in UN operations since 1948[4] but a mere 317 Canadians in blue helmets were serving in small numbers in various missions around the world in September, 2001[5], when Canada’s rank among contributing nations had plummeted to 33rd among contributing nations[6].

Now (at the end of February, 2010) it ranks 57th.[7] Today, our Forces are still nowhere near the 1.1 million who fought over the course of the Second World War when, despite our relatively meager population—of which more than 45 000 gave their lives—this country had the third largest navy, the fourth largest air force and six land divisions fighting[8], but it is probably fair to say that at the present time the Canadian Forces enjoy a much higher and more visible profile than they have done for fifty years and that the solemnity with which Canadian military fatalities are honoured is the envy of other armies and countries fighting in the ISAF in Afghanistan.

It’s unlikely that the character of Canadians was altered so fundamentally in that time, but there is no question that a wholesale revision of a couple of our myths of identity at least provided the suggestion of such a change. It is this occurrence on the narrative plane that I wish to examine through the limited evidence of the voices of a few of the soldiers and their families but more so the journalists and pundits who write and comment on the war for the Canadian news media. Today, in a hyper-narrated world that I believe Northrop Frye would have found tremendously exciting, not just poets but you and I and especially the press are Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Reporters[9], in the heat of the moment, articulate the national story and in this regard I believe their pronouncements to be reasonably scientific barometer of how not just the content but also the form of stories have been manipulated to permit the war and, in the very moment we are living in, are about to excuse us from it.[10]

How Stories Work (According to Northrop Frye)

Stories are the mirror of a society’s worldview and present themselves to us in myriad forms, the range of which is no longer academic. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, presented a “Theory of Modes” in which the form of a story could be classified by the relative “elevation” of its characters who were superior or inferior to we mortals in kind or in degree. Gods, superior to us in kind, operate in a world not subject to the laws of ours mundane one in stories Frye called ‘myths’. Stories that feature characters living in the same world that we do and who are like us in kind but superior to ordinary humans in degree, are romances with heroes. The hero, says Frye, “is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” He is a hero in a high mimetic mode—the hero “of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.”[11] The hero is in low mimetic if he is utterly like us in kind and in degree. Such a character is, says Frye, “of realistic fiction”—and not very grand at all. He is, writes Frye, “one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.”

Frye, however, reluctantly toiling in the ‘Bush Garden’ (a phrase he borrowed from a student of his called Margaret Atwood), was in the habit of judging stories at a remote distance. Today these story forms are close and immediate. We negotiate not just with Islamism but a host of creeds that as recently as fifty years ago entered the imaginations even of scholars merely on paper or as the result of anthropological travels to distant lands. Now they live not just down the street, they’re next door and inside the house and in your son’s or daughter’s bedroom. We live in a world where the means to fabricate or subscribe to a story and disseminate it have never been more powerful or more commonplace—means that are, quite literally, at our keyboard fingertips, and we have come to understand their astonishing power because ordinary life has taught us to recognize and to use our viral capacity as their agents. Stories have never been less remote. They are dynamic to the point of being positively volatile and—I’m much influenced by the English biologist Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes, here—they act as the foot soldiers of narrative cultures that are virulently, intensely competitive.

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More on Reagan

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Further to Joe’s post, more Frye on Reagan:

Of course it takes some effort to become more self-observant, to acquire historical sense and perspective, to understand the limitations that have been placed on human power by God, nature, fate, or whatever. It was part of President Reagan’s appeal that he was entirely unaware of any change in consciousness, and talked in the old reassuring terms of unlimited progress. But the new response to the patterns of history seems to have made itself felt, along with a growing sense that we can no longer afford leaders who think that acid rain is something one gets by eating grapefruit. I wish I could document this change from recent developments in American culture, but I am running out of both time and knowledge. It seems clear to me, however, that American and Canadian imaginations are much closer together than they have been in the past. (CW 12, 653)

Both Governor Reagan and the local SDS issued statements, and there is a curious similarity in their statements. They both say that the people’s park was a phoney issue, and that the real cause was a conspiracy—the Governor says of hard-core student agitators, the SDS says of right-wing interests operating “probably at the national level.” Both are undoubtedly right, up to a point. There is a hard core of student agitators: one of them was grumbling in the student paper, a day or two before the lid blew off, that “not a goddam thing was happening at Berkeley,” and that something would have to start soon because Chairman Mao himself had said, in one of his great thoughts, that revolution is no child’s play. On the other side, Governor Reagan is clearly staking a very ambitious career on the support of voters who want to have these noisy young pups put in their place once and for all. Both are very pleased with the result: the Governor is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator, and the SDS are delighted that the police have “over-reacted” so predictably and helped to “radicalize the moderates.” But the more one thinks about these two attitudes, the clearer it becomes that the militant left and the militant right are not going in opposite directions, even when they fight each other, but in the same direction. For both the Governor and the SDS, the university is ultimately an obstacle, which will have to be destroyed or transformed into something unrecognizable if their ambitions are to be fulfilled. (CW 7, 386-7)

At Berkeley, one sees clearly how the supporters of Governor Reagan and the supporters of SDS are the same kind of people. The radical talks about the thoughts of Chairman Mao, not because he is really so impressed by those thoughts but because he cannot endure the notion of thought apart from dictatorial power. The John Bircher uses slightly different formulas to mean the same thing. In the past week I have seen, and heard about, the most incredible acts of police brutality and stupidity against the students. And yet even this is not one society repressing another, but a single society that cannot escape from its own bungling. Whatever we most condemn in our society is still a part of ourselves, and we cannot disclaim responsibility for it. (ibid., 392)

The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart. But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (CW 5, 398)

BILL MOYERS: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones. I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example. (CW 24, 893-4)

Frye on Reagan, the Pope, and the Illusion of Television

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Further to the previous post, here is some cultural studies avant la lettre: Frye on Reagan, the Pope, and “the prison of television.”

[282] Television brings a theatricalizing of the social contract. Reagan may be a cipher as President, but as an actor acting the role of a decisive President in a Grade B movie he’s I suppose acceptable to people who think life is a Grade B movie. The Pope, whose background is also partly theatrical, is on a higher level but the general principle still holds. It goes with reaction, identifying the reality with the facade. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, just for once, it could be true that Father knows best? Emotional debauch of father-figuring.  (Notebook 27)

[492] American civilization has to de-theatricalize itself, I think, from the prison of television. They can’t understand themselves why they admire Reagan and would vote for him again, and yet know that he’s a silly old man with no understanding even of his own policies. They’re really in that Platonic position of staring at the shadows on the wall of a cave. The Pope, again, is another old fool greatly admired because he’s an ex-actor who looks like a holy old man.

[493] Watching a television panel of journalistic experts discussing the (Bush-Dukakis) election, it seemed to me Plato’s cave again and Plato’s eikasia, or illusion at two removes–show business about show business. All one needs to know about such horseshit is how to circumvent whatever power it has. I’m trying to dredge up something more complex and far-reaching than just the cliché that elections today are decided by images rather than issues–they always were. It’s really an aspect of the icon-idol issue: imagination is the faculty of participation in society, but it should remain in charge, not passively responding to what’s in front of it. Where does idolatry go in my argument? End of Three?  (Notebook 44)

[85] Why do Americans continue to cherish Reagan, including millions of Americans who know he’s an ass? I think they’re bored by their own indifference to the world, but can only focus their minds on a boob-tube leader.  (Notebook 50)

Further Thoughts on Frye and Machiavelli

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Thank you for these posts on Machiavelli (here and here). That we have derived the word hypocrite from the Greek word for actor called up for me the image of Ronald Reagan, an actor whose enormous appeal as a politician had much to do with his ability to wear a mask and speak words that were complete illusions. It also called to mind a passage in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, where the narrator observes of Julien Sorel, a young Tartuffe in training and a secret admirer of Napoleon, that he never felt comfortable in a social or political context–this would be during the very reactionary period of Charles X– unless he were saying something very different from what he actually believed.

I also thought of Michael’s earlier post quoting Frank Rich in the New York Times who, in contrasting Obama with his Republican opponents, refers to Frye’s definition of a good leader. When I first read that post I wondered where Frye had given such a definition. It appears to be from The Fools of Time and the discussion of the nature of the strong order figure in the context of Shakespearean tragedy. I have extracted a couple of passages below.

We are apt to assume, like Brutus, that leadership and freedom threaten one another, but, for us as for Shakespeare, there is no freedom without the sense of the individual, and in the tragic vision, at least, the leader or hero is the primary and original individual. The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob. Shakespeare has grasped the ambiguous nature of Dionysus in a way that Nietzsche (like D. H. Lawrence later) misses. In no period of history does Dionysus have anything to do with freedom; his function is to release us from the burden of freedom. The last thing the mob says in both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus is pure Dionysus: “Tear him to pieces.”

And this passage:

Society to the Elizabethans was a structure of personal authority, with the ruler at its head, and a personal chain of authority extending from the ruler down. Everybody had a superior, and this fact, negatively, emphasized the limited and finite nature of the human situation. Positively, the fact that the ruler was an individual with a personality was what enabled his subjects to be individuals and to have personalities too. The man who possesses the secret and invisible virtues of human nature is the man with the quiet mind, so celebrated in Elizabethan lyric poetry. But such a man is dependent on the ceaseless vigilance of the ruler for his peace.

This view of social order, with its stress on the limited, the finite, and the individual, corresponds, as indicated above, to Nietzsche’s Apollonian vision in Greek culture. That makes it hard for us to understand it. We ourselves live in a Dionysian society, with mass movements sweeping across it, leaders rising and falling, and constantly taking the risk of being dissolved into a featureless tyranny where all sense of the individual disappears. We even live on a Dionysian earth, staggering drunkenly around the sun. The treatment of the citizens in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus puzzles us: we are apt to feel that Shakespeare’s attitude is anti-democratic, instead of recognizing that the situation itself is pre-democratic. In my own graduate-student days during the nineteen-thirties, there appeared an Orson Welles adaptation of Julius Caesar which required the hero to wear a fascist uniform and pop his eyes like Mussolini, and among students there was a good deal of discussion about whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of, say, Coriolanus showed “fascist tendencies” or riot. But fascism is a disease of democracy: the fascist leader is a demagogue, and a demagogue is precisely what Coriolanus is not. The demagogues in that play are the tribunes whom the people have chosen as their own managers. The people in Shakespeare constitute a “Dionysian” energy in society: that is, they represent nothing but a potentiality of response to leadership.

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Frye on Machiavelli

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Frye taught Machiavelli’s The Prince in English 2i, English Poetry and Prose, 1500–1660.  In his 1949 Diary he writes about his lecture on The Prince: “I’m clarifying my view of a militant organization as pyramidal.  In Machiavelli all peacetime activities are geared to a war economy, of course: it’s a state militant as the Roman Catholic Church is a Church militant” (CW 8, 91).   About a later lecture on Castiglione, he writes, the “lecture said very little except to point out the Prince-Courtier link, & link Machiavelli’s doctrine that appearance (e.g. of virtue) is essential in government with Castiglione’s similar doctrine of the continuous epiphany of culture” (ibid., 98).  Three years later at a party for R.S. Crane, where Frye reports on snippets of the conversation, he says “I said Machiavelli’s Prince, if he had a courtier to advise him, wouldn’t draw Castiglione’s Courtier: he’d get something more like Ulysses, full of melancholy Luciferian knowledge of good & evil, of time & the chain of being” (ibid., 562).

In Elizabethan society Machiavelli became, as Frye says in Fools of Time, “a conventional bogey” in Renaissance drama (20).  The Machiavellian villain is, in Frye’s taxonomy of characterization in Anatomy of Criticism, the tragic counterpart of the vice or tricky slave of comedy.  Examples of this “self-starting principle of malevolence” are Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear, along with Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (CW 22, 202).  The Machiavellian villain “often acts without motivation, from pure love of evil” (“Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy”).  In his Notebooks on Renaissance Literature Frye has several references to this unmotivated, automomous principle of evil that makes the villain Machiavellian (CW 29, 130, 144, 275, 278).

The virtues of the prince are force, courage, and cunning.  Frye never tires of pointing out that these are not moral virtues but tactical virtues based on the art of illusion.  This means that for the prince his virtue is not actually virtue at all but only seems to be—a public relations enterprise.  What the prince has to do is pretend to exhibit these virtues.  Appearance becomes more important than reality, and so the prince is like a character in a play—one who puts on a mask.  Frye often contrasts Machiavelli’s view of the prince with Castiglione’s of the courtier (see, e.g., CW 23, 35; CW 7, 266–73, 528; CW 5, 178–9, 232; CW 27, 204; CW 13, 105; CW 20, 171; Myth and Metaphor, 292).  He gives the most extended account of the differences in his essay on Castiglione:

We have derived two words from the metaphor of the masked actor: hypocrite and person.  The former contains a moral value judgment, the latter does not.  If we compare Castiglione on the courtier with Machiavelli on the prince, we see a remarkable parallel: both are constantly on view: what they are seen to do is, socially speaking, what they are; their reputations are the most important part of their identity, and their functional reality is their appearance.  The difference is that Machiavelli’s prince, being the man who must make the decisions, must accept the large element of hypocrisy involved; must understand how and why the reputation for virtue is more important for him than the hidden reality of virtue.  It is essential for the prince to be reputed liberal, Machiavelli says, though he is probably better off if in reality he saves his money.  For the courtier, whose social function is ornamental rather than operative, the goal is an appearance which has entirely absorbed the reality, a persona or mask which is never removed even when asleep. In regard to women, we are told that men “. . . sempre temono essere dall’arte ingannati” (1.40) [bk. 1, sec. 40?], that is, of being manipulated. For the prince manipulation is essential; for the courtier it is not. (“Il Cortegiano”).

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Frye and the Canadian Forum

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Perhaps the sweetest of Anthony Jenkins‘s caricatures of Frye

Now that the journal and the library are taking on the burden of the website’s scholarly purpose, we’ve begun to include in the daily blog a little bit of politics and current affairs, which raises the issue of Frye’s status as a public man, particularly his role as editor of the Canadian Forum.

In the May 1970 issue of the Forum marking its fiftieth anniversary, Frye contributed a piece that turns a specific occasion into an opportunity for remarkably clearsighted prophecy.  Given that the article was written forty years ago and that the Forum itself folded ten years ago, Frye’s assessment of the past in relation to his expectations for the future is extraordinary.  His outlook, not surprisingly, is a complement of the cyclical and the dialectical, history and culture, the past as the “rear-view crystal ball” of the future that gives his piece its title.  Take, for example, his estimation of the previous fifty years and his quick snapshot of what it might mean to the next fifty:

What is surprising about the last fifty years is how little of what has happened is really surprising.  It was already obvious in 1920 that Fascism and Communism were going to cause a lot of trouble, that capitalism would have to be modified and become less laissez-faire, that Canada would soon become a satellite of the United States, that our natural resources were being recklessly plundered and wasted, that separatist agitation in Quebec would continue, that colonies would want and eventually take independence, that the influence of middle-class religion would decline, that man’s capacity to injure himself would increase, not merely in wars but in the growth of cities and industries.  Nearly all these issues are discussed repeatedly in the early issues of the Forum and its predecessor the Rebel, discussed in every tone from hope to fear, and with that uneasy sense of a future looking over one’s shoulder which is so characteristic of twentieth-century prose and yet so hard to characterize.  Similarly, it is possible that nothing will be happening in 2020 except what is obvious now: the future that may be technically feasible is not the future that society can actually assimilate. (CW, 12, 408-9)

That last sentence catches like a burr.  2020 is just ten years into our future, and Frye seems to have rendered it with, well, 20/20 foresight: “the future that may be technically feasible is not the future that society can actually assimilate.”  The reasons for this are many and all are suggested by humanity’s pathologically bad habits which Frye enumerates throughout.

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“Primary Concerns Must Become Primary, Or Else”

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Gaia, Goddess of the Earth, Mother of the Gods

Thanks to extensively funded and aggressively concentrated efforts on the political right, there is still a high degree of global warming denialism going on out there.  In fact, recent polls in the U.S. indicate that the sudden sharp rise in denial is almost exclusively on the right side of the spectrum, which confirms that for such people the issue is not scientific but political.  It’s a familiar enough phenomenon, and it’s the M.O. most conspicuously of Fox News: if the “libruls” are for it, then it is hippy-dippy bullshit that must be shouted down.

The best case scenario (at least for those who understand that science is not a political brickbat to advance the interests of Exxon Mobil) is that we have very little time — measurable in just a handful of years — to reverse trends before the ecosystem tips and the warming process becomes fatally self-sustaining.  The only “debate” here is generated  by the sophistry of shills for the fossil fuel industry who between them cannot produce one piece of scholarship that passes peer review.  This is worth emphasizing: for all of the “debate” as it is characterized by a feckless and complacent mainstream news media (as it may be fairly characterized in the U.S.), there is not one piece of peer reviewed scholarship that denies the fact of anthropogenic climate change.

Again, that’s the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is provided by James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis.  An outline of his doomsday vision can be found here.  Here’s a brief sample:

This article is the most difficult I have written. . . . My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

By Lovelock’s estimation, billions may be dead by the end of this century.  But even if he is wrong, the best case scenario confirms what ought to be our worst fears.  We are all Romanovs now.  Everyone is culpable and everyone is vulnerable.

As anyone who knows Frye’s Words with Power is aware, one of the primary concerns Frye identifies is sex and love, and the prophetic manifestation of that concern in literature is represented by the Garden where the generative power of nature and the recreative power of the human imagination are identified.  Its social vision is pastoral rather than competitive, and it is evocative of the Christian apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation in which nature in its present state falls away to reveal a city-garden at the end of time where God and humanity are one.  The point of course is that this is not an “event” that will “occur in the future.”  The apocalypse, according to Frye (following Blake), is potential in every moment in every one of us.  As that nice Jewish rabbi Yeshua once observed, “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”  In our current fallen state, our power to act in the name of love is the first power we deny, and our loveless rape of an “objective” nature from which we somehow consider ourselves distinct and independent is a delusion that will soon overtake us if we cannot push aside the veil of denial and see where we really are.

As Frye rather ominously put it, “primary concerns must become primary, or else.”

This is not a “partisan” issue — except insofar as partisans make it one with greed, cowardice, and lies.  Canada’s failure to live up to its legally binding commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, for example, falls into that category.

Frye on Law and Democracy

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Thanks for this post, Bob. Frye was quite ready to make his political sympathies–and antipathies– known. I remember him introducing Harold Bloom to a packed house at the University of Toronto just after Reagan had been elected president for the first time. There was something in the title of Bloom’s talk concerning “creation-by-catastrophe,” one of the gnostic concepts he was using at the time of his Anxiety of Influence. Frye, dead-pan as usual, stated that it was particularly appropriate to have an American critic speaking to a Canadian audience on the theory of catastrophe in light of the election results that had just taken place in Bloom’s homeland. The audience, needless to say, broke up.

In response to Mike’s recent posts (here and here), here is a passage I ran across in Frye’s essay “Crime and Sin in the Bible.”

Most of us, I assume, would share the assumptions about liberty and equality . . . that have been formulated at least since John Stuart Mill’s time. We take for granted the principle of equality of all citizens before the law and the principle of the greatest amount of individual autonomy consistent with the well-being of others. To the extent that the laws are bent in the interests of a privileged or aggressive group; to the extent that citizens live under arbitrary regulations enforced by terror; to that extent we are living in an illegal society. If we regard our own society as at least workably legal, we also take largely for granted that the real basis for the effectiveness of law in such a society is an invisible morale. The law in itself is compelled to deal only with overt actions, so that from the law’s point of view an honest man is any man not yet convicted of stealing. But no society could hold together with so loose a conception of morality; there has to a sufficient number of self-respecting citizens who are honest because they like it better that way.

Under Bush and now under our own Stephen Harper, and in both cases in the interests of the same “privileged” and “aggressive group”–the wealthy and powerful–cynical and dishonest leaders are actively undermining their societies. As Frye says, whatever legal system you have, you need “a sufficient number of self-respecting citizens” to make a viable democracy. It is this “invisible morale” that makes all the difference. What happens when it is the government itself that is undermining that morale, when governments themselves have no self-respect and are, to play with Frye’s wording, dishonest because they like it better that way? If we are not vigilant, as Michael suggests, we will find ourselves– if we are not already there– “living in an illegal society.”