*The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers, which are cited to justify it.
— President John F. Kennedy
Address to newspaper publishers, April 27, 1961.
by Ralph E. Bunch
Emeritus professor of the Department of Political Science of Portland State University
Secrecy is as American as apple pie. Americans, often characterized as optimistic, naïve, and idealistic, might be momentarily put off by such an assertion, but a bit of thought and observation will confirm the ubiquity of secrecy in American public and private life.
The federal government’s love affair with secrecy is well known and generally acknowledged in the fields of national security and police work. In the specialized fields of taxation, commerce, social programs, education, transportation, medicine, and perhaps all government activity, local, state, and national, secrecy exists officially and unofficially.
The law requires certain information — personnel records, personal information about citizens, plans for land purchases (lest speculators be advantaged and public costs increased), grand jury records, etc., be held tightly secret.
Government imposes secrecy on citizens as it does on its bureaucrats. The law requires some settlements in legal disputes be held confidential, and it prohibits some information about minors being made public. Libel and slander laws prohibit some known facts about persons being published or pronounced; thus, the law requires secrecy.
Corporate officers may not give out financial information to advantage some market players over other market players. Corporations, in keeping with the requirements of capitalist competition, have government- protected secrecy over their internal financial, marketing, and technological matters. Lawyer-client relations and doctor-patient relations are protected. In ordinary personal relations, everyone knows secrets, keeps some, and passes some on, at least occasionally.
Surely, most people keep financial and sexual matters secret.
The Constitution enshrines secrecy. Article I, Sec. 5, requires the Congress to publish its proceedings, that is, tell its secrets, except that by a majority vote in either house, it may keep some secrets. But by a twenty percent vote, a minority may cause any secret to be printed in the Congressional Record. Article VI requires that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States; that is, religious identity remains a secret for all in government, unless they should desire otherwise.
The government’s desire for secrecy — a universal phenomena, according to German sociologist, Max Weber: “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret,” has been in constant conflict with the First Amendment. President Nixon’s request for an injunction against the New York Times for intending to publish the “Pentagon Papers” was struck down by the Supreme Court, even though, according to Nixon, national security and the Vietnam War effort were in danger from the publication. The Court, citing the First Amendment, has quite consistently held that government entities may not suppress speech or publishing, even in severe circumstances, unless there is a strong “clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent” (Schenck v. United States, 1919).
The Fourth Amendment is specifically aimed at protecting the rights of citizens to have and keep secrets from the government. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated … ” But the Court has had much difficulty in regulating the details; the requirements of effective police work run counter to an absolute requirement that a warrant be procured for a search. The police may need to search a person, on the person’s apprehension, to protect the officer’s safety and to prevent any relevant evidence being destroyed, for instance. What to do about phone taps of known criminals? Their acquaintances? How extensive may be a search for evidence of a person’s car, home, or business at the moment of his arrest? If, in the search for evidence of a crime, evidence of another crime is found, but the warrant was issued for only the first crime, what evidence may be presented to a jury? How broad the rights to citizens’ secrecy under the Fourth Amendment is the result of many Supreme Court cases, and changes often.
The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against a person charged with a criminal offense being forced to be a witness against his or her own self is based on the notion that there needs be a balance of respect between the citizen (or person) and the government; the government, at least in a democracy, must accord dignity and integrity to its subjects. Obviously, that would not be evident if the government were able to torture or intimidate a confession out of a person. Criminal law enforcement is more reliable and stronger when based on independently acquired evidence. Furthermore, as Justice Brandeis stated in Olmstead v. United States (1928), in a dissenting opinion,
Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizens. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.
Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means … would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face.
Thus, Miranda rights. But, on the other side, and in order to facilitate “good faith” conduct by officers, a citizen may not keep secret his identity when apprehended by an officer, according to the Supreme Court.
Amendment VI requires that the accused shall “have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor.” In other words, a person may not keep secret exculpatory evidence, if ordered by a court to provide it in a criminal case. The fact that a witness is required to take an oath to tell the truth, sanctioned by the criminal offense of contempt of court, means that witnesses for one side in a trial may be forced, by cross-examination, to divulge evidence that favors the other side.
A detailed list of secret activities and secrecy impositions – by and on government and by and on citizens could fill this and several other books! So if secrecy is as American as apple pie, and as common as apple pie, it must have a function. It does; it functions as an integral aspect of all politics, or, at least, the politics practiced by less than perfect persons in less than perfect societies, i.e., all societies. (One might hypothesize a utopian situation in which all relationships were transparent and overt, thus needing no secrecy). But in the real world of human relations, politics requires — and would be impossible without secrecy. These assertions won’t stand without explanation, nor would they be relevant to the subject of secrecy without an explanation based upon an uncommon definition of politics.
Professional political scientists have had a bit of a problem with their central term. In the attempt to present themselves as scientists, they have, historically (if not hysterically) sought a definition of politics that would be acceptable and understandable to all. It would surely be a great achievement on the road to scientific acceptance if such a definition could be formulated. One must give the discipline credit for effort, if not for achievement; thousands of definitions exist. As it is, in recognition of the absence of a commonly accepted definition of politics, the discipline has agreed to disagree; every political scientist is free to create his own, on the convenient assumption that any agreed upon definition would inhibit free enquiry and cause a straitjacket mentality.
Recall President Bill Clinton’s comment in his defense to the charge of inappropriate behavior in the Oval Office: “It all depends on what the meaning of is is.” Ever the consummate politician, he was exactly right in noting that the definition is the crux of all matters. Likewise, for politics, which is not what you learned in PS 101 – constitutions, legislatures, elections, etc., all of which are but the idiosyncratic formal, organizational, and somewhat regularized, but ephemeral, expression of politics in the hundred plus nations of the world. While such knowledge is necessary and useful for partial understanding of formal governmental and political structures and machinations, one doesn’t build a science on such ephemera; it would be like trying to develop a theory of botany by studying only the roses of the world, but only those roses found organized in formal gardens, or to develop a theory of biology by studying only aardvarks.
A scientifically adequate definition of politics would require that it be presented in terms of behavior known and practiced by all humans. As it is, most people know and care more about licorice than legislation, like elephants more than elections, and worry about constipation more than constitutions. The existing multitude of definitions of politics is the product of academicians and practitioners fascinated by those who hold the reins of public power. Their definitions might be useful and partially valid within the confines of that notable sphere of activity, but one should not confuse, say, a definition of water, adequate to discuss flood control, with a scientific definition of water at the level of its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen or, even at the lower level of its atomic structure. The social cost of defining politics in terms of governmental power was nicely noted by David Ignatius of the Washington Post who wrote, “When the big guys in Washington dream of transforming the world, it’s the little guys who come home in body bags.”
Politics, to be studied as a science, must first be defined as the universal form of human behavior that it is! Every human expresses politics throughout his or her life, just as all individuals expresses psychological, sociological, economic, and biological realities every day of their lives, and the psychologists, sociologists, economists, and biologist can speak to their cohorts sensibly because they have common understanding of their basic terms. Not so, political scientists.
But who can doubt that politics is a universal phenomenon not restricted to only those who govern, seek to govern, or seek to influence those who govern. There is a fundamental parallel between the behavior of Winston Churchill in defining the situation of England in 1940 as dire and seeking to convince Franklin Roosevelt to send guns and butter to England, and the behavior of a baby in the middle of the night. Thus, for example, the plaintive cry of the baby, at 3:00 AM, is a political act — defining its situation as hungry, wet, and/or lonesome. The baby’s definition of the situation will be reinterpreted by the father, who will define it to his advantage; he will fake a few snores. His wife, acting politically in her own interests, using her elbow, will reject the father’s definition and substitute one of her own: “You’re faking, John! You know it’s your turn! Get up and warm the bottle!” Now, that’s politics at its universal human level.
By contrast, the definitions of the subject in the writings of major political science authorities are narrow and idiomatic. Twenty experts: twenty definitions. There is a British book, What is Politics?, in which each authority presents a different definition of the subject. One pundit will define politics as influence, another as power, another as self-interest, another as the art of the possible, and another as the skill of building consensus around a policy option. One expert, writing on the power of the presidency, determined that political power is the power to persuade. That’s close, but he made the mistake of confusing means and results. Thus, all he had was a tautology, asking, then, what is the power to persuade? If, instead, he had concentrated on means, on behavior, he would have found that persuasive behavior (politics in a generic sense) is the effective skill of creating self –serving definitions of reality. Politics is the universal human behavior of defining reality so as to bring about acceptance of one’s desired outcome.
Here are examples that prove the point: “Johnny, stop hitting your sister; be a good boy.” “If you really loved me, you’d buy me that necklace.” “Good friends don’t let each other drink and drive.” “Owning one’s personal weapon is a sacred American right.” “Dan Quayle is no Jack Kennedy!” “Osama bin Laden has insulted and degraded the Moslem faith.” Accept any of these quotes, and you have accepted the speaker’s definition of reality and his or her politics.
With this definition of politics, politics as a universal human goal-fulfilling behavior, consider the element of secrecy in the following example from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Huck finds himself in a real jam and has to come up quickly with an effective definition of the situation! He and the runaway slave, Jim, are on the raft, floating down the Mississippi, when a boat comes along side. In it are two fellows with guns, and they are looking for an escaped slave. Huck has hurried Jim under their tent to hide beneath some blankets. The conversation is pure Twain: The men ask if Huck has seen the slave, and he assures them that he has not, but if he had, he would surely turn him in. The men are somewhat convinced, but just to be sure, they say that they will come aboard and look around the raft.
Huck is feeling “scared as a rabbit,” but he just up and says that, yes, you better come aboard, but don’t get too close to my daddy in the tent, cause he has ‘the sickness.’ And nobody will let me land and take care of him. What do you say, ‘Boy’? Your pappy has the plague? All ends well, with the men each putting a five-dollar gold piece on a shovel blade and, making sure not to get too close, poking the gold over to Huck, ‘cause he’s sure in a poor way!’ Huck, the master politician, defining the situation to his advantage, by keeping the reality secret in order to manipulate his competitors into accepting his contrived redefinition of that reality.
Another example of how politics is an expression of different perspectives of reality is shown in four differing definitions of the little town of Denton, Texas, (where I taught in the late 60s). A huge billboard on Interstate 35 claimed that Denton was “just like Los Angeles, give or take six million people.” Some of the local rednecks had crossed out “people” and painted in “Niggers!” Other citizens (I suspect some of my ACLU friends) had crossed out that obscenity and written in “Racist Trash!” But that had been crossed out by some of the local feminists, who had scrawled, “Male Chauvinist Pigs!” For obvious reasons, the authors of these insights chose to keep their identities secret.
Religion is essentially a subset of politics, the elaborate creation of a particular definition of life and eternity which is then offered to or imposed upon members and others. In requiring unquestioning acceptance, religions practice considerable secrecy. They exhibit much of the same behavior as governmental agencies that become convinced of their role as protector of the nation’s security. Those agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI, approach totalitarian means of secrecy (on which, more later) to carry out what, to them, comes close to being considered a divine mission. Religions create absolute definitions of reality. There is no argument, in that context. (As a friend once said in response to one of my more arrogant pronouncements, “I see you have a very concrete view of this – all mixed up and permanently set”). Thus, some religions require members to police themselves – not read certain books, not allow evolutionary theory to contaminate their minds, not let authorities know of certain illegal practices such as polygamy, child abuse, narcotic use, etc., and violation of this secrecy is sanctioned by the ultimate punishments: banishment, and later, eternal hell.
The material above, in summary, says secrecy is a necessary and integral aspect of American life. It is required and protected by the Constitution, practiced by all bureaucracies and all citizens, and is essential to politics in all its forms, formal and informal, public and private. What becomes apparent is that secrecy, like so many elements of life, is neither inherently ‘good’ nor ‘bad.’ Secrecy, like government, the law, the presidency, the military, the police, religion, politics, money, guns, or drugs, is a tool or device or resource that is to be judged according to the result of its use.
Some obviously bad uses of secrecy, in terms of public policy and social felicity, ironically, are quite well known, but, regardless, seem to be repeated over and over through our history. The exercise of governmental police power, defined as the authority to promote and safeguard the health, morals, safety, and welfare of the people, tends to enlarge the domain of government, local, state, and national, over the citizen.
Surely, the constant repetition of scandals wherein the local or state police have kept secret files on citizens, a practice prohibited by law, speaks to the weakness of dedication to the principle of a government of law by the very bureaucracies assigned to protect it. In Portland, Oregon, twenty years ago, the ACLU succeeded in forcing the police to eliminate such a file, but in 2002, police again were found to have kept illegal files on thousands of citizens. In that same year, the Denver, Colorado, police were ordered to purge their system of spying secretly on citizens. In Denver, great-grandmother Helen Henry, 82, was noted in the secret files as having a “Free Leonard Peltier” bumper sticker on her Toyota sedan (Sunday Oregonian, 9/15/02, p. A21)! While such absurdities may cause a laugh, it is a serious matter; fear of one’s name being placed in a secret file may cause that citizen to give up the constitutional right to protest peacefully. Hearing that a neighbor’s name, or even an unknown citizen’s name may be in a file has a chilling effect on the exercise of civil rights, the life blood of democratic government.
At the national level, the FBI under Director J. Edgar Hoover was found to have maintained extensive secret files on the rich, the famous, and the politically active. Hoover’s long tenure was often attributed to the belief that he held embarrassing evidence on even the presidents and other top leaders, thus no president dared to fire him.
In response to the 9/11/01 terrorist attack on the nation, local police have been asked to work with the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. Many civil libertarians are troubled by the implicit conflict between the need to fight terrorist threats and the quite probable partial misuse of the police power. This fear is augmented by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the aggressive use of secrecy by Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft.
The AG’s office has adopted a blanket policy to close hundreds of deportation hearings of noncitizens suspected of connection to terrorist activity. In August of 2002, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Sixth United States Court of Appeals declared that unlawful. Said Judge Damon J Keith, “Democracies die behind closed doors. When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation.”
It is upsetting to read constantly of the use of secrecy by national leaders. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have kept secret public information publicly demanded, in response to the recent corporate crime scandals, about their activities as CEOs of Harken Oil and Halliburton, respectively. President Bush wants the new Homeland Security Department to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and the Whistleblower Act. Dick Cheney has stonewalled the legitimate demand for the notes and list of attendees at his meetings to create a national energy policy; that “national energy policy development group” was a public body that met in secret. Even diehard Republican conservatives such as Senator Dan Burton of Indiana, who fear big and intrusive government, are aghast at a White House so hostile to open government.
The high cost of misused secrecy was made evident on September 11, 2001. It has become all too clear, in the public hearings in October, 2002, of the joint intelligence committee’s investigating the attacks that the FBI, the CIA and the NSA had failed to protect the nation from calamity because of inefficiency tied to the overuse of secrecy. The agencies failed to communicate with each other, protecting bureaucratic turf rather than American soil. Though FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Director of the National Security Agency, Michael V. Hayden, and CIA Director George Tenet all spoke at length and provided many excuses, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “At crucial points in the 21 months leading up to September 11th, this intelligence information was not shared or was not acted upon and, as a result, numerous opportunities to thwart the terrorist plots were squandered.” (Oregonian, October 18, 2002, p. A2)
As tragic as the incompetence leading up to 9/11 has been, an even more pervasive example of incompetent management of a governmental responsibility is reported by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book, Secrecy (Yale University Press, 1998).
The extreme politics between the Right and the Left in America, in the period leading up to World War II and after, were based on allegations of secret conspiracies. The Right was sure that the Left was aligned with world communism, that Pearl Harbor was the result of a secret plan to bring the US into the war to save Stalin and Russia, and that the Communist International had spies in all the sensitive areas of government.
The Left, citing the Red Scare raids of the 1920s, pictured the Right as a group of fascists led by J. Edgar Hoover who wanted to destroy the legal protections of the Constitution, turn America over to Hitler, and was secretly involved in munitions and other manufacturing in Germany. Senator Joseph McCarthy astounded the Senate with the news that General George C. Marshall was a Communist traitor at the center of “a conspiracy so immense” as to dwarf any in history. McCarthy, it is now clear, would have been nothing without government secrecy. His ability to hypnotize the nation over the radio and the then-new television screen was based upon his claim that all his evidence came from secret documents held by the executive branch, which was dominated by communists.
Within this environment, says Moynihan, bazaar surreal events transpired. Hoover wrote an amazing letter to George E. Allen, Director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, intending that it would then be seen by President Truman (Hoover apparently could not bring himself to write directly to the President whom he personally detested). The letter outlined a huge conspiracy of top government officials working for a communist victory over America: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State; John J. McCloy, Former Assistant Secretary of War; Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Commerce; Alger Hiss of the UN Organization; Dr. Edward U. Condon, Advisor to the Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; popular journalists Raymond Gram Swing and Marquis Childs, and others. The message, six pages long, outlined Hoover’s conclusions, from evidence by an ‘informer,’ that the secrets of the American atomic bomb were being funneled through these people directly to the Soviets! Moynihan characterizes it as a loony message not taken seriously. But what about its inclusion of the name, Alger Hiss!?
That was 1946. In 1949, after the very fortuitous breaking of the Soviet code by which the USSR was communicating with its agents in America, it was found that there was, in fact, an effective Soviet espionage effort in America. This information was in the hands of the forerunner agency of the current NSA, and its head, Admiral Stone, determined that President Truman should be informed immediately. However, General Carter W. Clarke, then chief of the army security agency, strongly disagreed; if the information were spread around, surely there would be a leak, and the Russians would know their code had been broken. At that point, General Omar Nelson Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in spite of his admiration and loyalty to the President, agreed with General Clarke that the fact should be kept secret from the President and from Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA! Secrecy triumphed!
President Truman was subjected to the very heated abuse of the McCarthy period and was required to defend his administration from some wild and baseless charges as well as other valid charges that were not supported by known evidence. Whittaker Chambers was right about Alger Hiss. But Truman was not allowed to know the fact that the Soviet code had been broken, the extent of the communist espionage ring’s success, and the truth about Alger Hiss. The president of the United States was kept in the dark on a most important matter of national security because of the secrecy demands of underlings. The Venona files (the name applied to the deciphered Soviet spy messages) only became public knowledge decades later through the efforts of Moynihan and the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, in 1996. If, as the Constitution requires, civilian leadership is centered in a civilian president who dominates the military service, and if Truman had been informed of the Venona files, how different would have been his handling of the communists-in-government issue that plagued his tenure as President, and how less would have been the trauma of national politics through the late forties and the fifties?
But the battle continues even into this century. Richard Perle, reviewing Moynihan’s book in Commentary (www.findarticles.com/ct), barely concealing his conservative stiletto, writes:
Curiously, Moynihan, a former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not pause to wonder whether Washington might have had good reason to conceal its success in deciphering the Soviet codes. Although one would like to know what lies behind his thinking here, he never tells us. Nor do we learn anything more about his breathtaking revelation that even President Truman was kept in the dark about the decryptions. Can this be true? Or is there some metasecret of which Moynihan, too, remains ignorant? (My emphasis)
Apparently, “Washington,” for Perle, means the CIA, the FBI, and the Military Joint Chiefs of Staff, rather than the democratic structures of the government — the Congress and the Office of the President. He is quick to conjure up a conspiracy theory, in loyalty to his preferred powers.
And surely, the seventies and eighties would have gone down differently if the CIA and the NSA had been less secret. The nation knows now that there was gross incompetence in those agencies in their efforts to evaluate the Soviet Union through the years of the Cold War. Soviet strengths were greatly exaggerated, and the weaknesses of the system were ignored. Only a few, Moynihan included, saw the errors in the analysis in the projections of Soviet power. Even Richard Perle accepts Moynihan’s evaluation on this point.
There can be no doubt that the CIA seriously and consistently over-estimated the size, rate of growth, and potential of the Soviet economy. In 1958, the agency took the view that Soviet gross domestic product (GDP) was growing much faster than ours, and would come within 50 percent of ours by 1962. This was ludicrous, as was the CIA estimate in 1990 that the Soviet GDP stood at $2.5 trillion. . . . As Moynihan rightly observes, any casual visitor to Moscow would have seen more than enough of the appalling circumstances in which most Soviet citizens lived to cast doubt on the plausibility of the CIA’s view.
The CIA soon after its creation at the end of World War II came to exhibit all the earmarks of a usual regulatory bureaucracy – and some quite unusual characteristics: in 1997, the first public statement of its budget was made, and it was $26.6 billion! But regardless of its more than fifty years of existence, its huge secret budget, its ability to exist out of the public eye, and amazing technological developments (communications, U-2s, satellites, and computers), “the overall quality of American intelligence may well have declined over time,” says Moynihan (p. 78).
Surely, the most telling evidence of the CIA’s incompetence was in its main task, evaluation of the ‘enemy,’ the USSR. It continually pictured the Soviet Union as a strong, modern, industrial behemoth single-mindedly pursuing the goal of world domination and equipped with a nuclear age armed force. The reality had not been spotted in the decades of U-2 and satellite photos or in the reams of secret documents. The USSR’s incompetence in Afghanistan and the final collapse of the wall were surprises to those who should have known. Stanford Turner, the director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981, in 1991, claimed never to have heard from the intelligence or defense or state establishment even a hint that non-official sources in the Soviet Union were convinced that the system was broken and would disintegrate from its own internal weaknesses.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s conclusion is that, at least in part, the reason is that collected information was kept secret, analyses were kept secret, and conclusions were kept secret; if these had been allowed to be known, discussed, criticized, and argued, errors, inconsistencies, and illogical aspects could have been eliminated. The price paid for the luxury of secrecy was staggering. What if, Moynihan asks, the US had been less secret, less bellicose, more conservative in its financing of military might, and had been prepared, when the inevitable collapse of the USSR came, to offer a parallel to the Marshall Plan that produced a renewed Europe and a friendly Germany and Italy?
One of the most outrageous uses of secrecy in government in a democracy is one of its most common. It happens at every level of government, local, state, and national. The policy making and enacting institutions of government, the legislative and executive branches, are overwhelmingly the sites of lobbying, a secret process in which the agents of private interests, in league with the majority of elected and appointed officials, work against the public interests.
The political aim of the lobbyists is to convince legislators and bureaucrats to accept a definition of reality favorable to the lobbyists, but to clothe that definition, which is kept secret, behind a definition of the reality that appears to be in the public interest. For example, lumber companies want to log state and national forest lands. They define their desire to see public money spent on roads throughout the forest as a desire to enhance the protection of the forest in case of forest fires, and to enhance the access to the public for hunting and camping activity.
Likewise, the pharmaceutical industry lobbies for extension of patent rights on profitable drugs “in order to ensure that they have enough money for their very important research in the war against devastating crippling diseases;” yet, most of their money goes for advertising, and most of their research money goes to invent drugs to fight the common cold, hemorrhoids, backache and zits. Why? As Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is.” Countless other examples may be found in the alphabet of economic activity in America from agriculture, banking, and commerce through X-rays, yacht ownership, and zinc mining.
Politicians, of course, enter into these conspiracies eagerly so as to collect campaign funds and to win a block of voters whose interests are enhanced. Additionally, coming to light all too often in scandals are the cases of officials accepting bribes or presents or paid trips, with family, to exotic spots to attend “important policy discussions” held quite often on golf courses. Many, even perhaps most, politicians develop great skill in presenting themselves as selfless agents working for the public weal, while secretly more concerned with job security and career goals in the struggle for power. That’s politics!
Secrecy, in an imperfect world, is an essential aspect of all politics. And, as noted above, the process of politics is the creation of self-serving definitions of reality. Secrecy, obviously, rests upon an assumption of mistrust in one’s target of politics. Democrats mistrust Republicans, and vice versa. Nations mistrust each other. Husbands and wives mistrust each other, keeping their affairs secret, knowing their spouses just wouldn’t understand. Likewise between parents and children. Thus, politicians define the reality of their ambitions in terms of service to the public good, nations talk peace but prepare for war, spouses define absence as the necessity of working late at the office, and children, intending to party, claim the need to get help on homework from a classmate.
James Madison, in THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, “Number X,” describes the essential elements in a republic to be freedom to form factions, the necessity that there be many factions, that they be spread over a large area, and that they be composed of a large number of individuals. Minority factions are controllable by the votes of a majority faction. But majority factions present the danger of deprival of rights of individuals and minorities. This danger, however, can be minimized by the difficulties of majorities to act in unison. First, they are, themselves, composed of minorities and, thus, find it hard to organize in concert to oppress a particular minority. And the fact that they are composed of many individuals spread over a large area also reduces their ability to act efficiently. Half of what anyone needs to know to understand American politics can be found in these insights presented by Madison in the five or six pages of “Number X!”
But the politics of conspiracies is not explained by the theory of democracy. Certainly, conspiracies are factions, and they are minority factions, but the defense Madison proposes, a majority vote, does not apply, because conspiracies see all non-members as opponents, and their secrecy aims to prevent opponents from even knowing of their existence, let alone offering themselves up for a vote by the citizens. This is true for the corporation clique that conspires to defraud the public or its own stockholders, for criminals planning a bank heist, for a political conspiracy planning a coup de etat, or a cabal of bureaucratic insiders intent upon using government power for personal and/or political purposes.
All secret societies are conspiratorial factions aimed at achieving goals that, by definition, are contrary to the public interest as determined by citizens in an open society. As Madison says, no faction can be allowed to be a judge in its own cause, because its interests would certainly bias its judgment and corrupt its integrity. And, as Karl Popper says, freedom is impossible unless it is guaranteed by the state; any secret society that weakens the rule of law, creates inequalities among citizens by illegal means, or frustrates the legitimate aims of democratic policy weakens a democratic republic and its objective of guaranteeing freedom to its citizens. Logically, then, secret societies are threats to democratic societies.
The question becomes one of determining how serious a threat to a democracy is a particular secret society. Certainly, Al-Queda is a very threatening conspiracy, as was the conspiracy led by Timothy McVeigh, and as is the mailer of the anthrax germs. One may create his or her own hierarchy of secret conspiracies threatening our society. The list is too long for this article, but would include some of these: all criminal activists, violent Right-to-Life factions, pedophilia traffickers, violent white-power advocates, anti-tax groups that practice fraud, illegal pornographers, a multitude of scam artists operating just within the law, the Elmer Gantrys of religious exploitation, gangs that use violence and intimidation, etc., etc.
Lastly, if I could be allowed a personal expression based on normative values rather than hard facts or academically sound theory, the conspiracies listed in the previous paragraph (other than the first three) are comparatively ‘small potatoes’ based on marginal personal greed or ego or fanaticism not reaching the level of serious threats to American democracy. They are the inevitable garbage created in a society that values liberty over totalitarian order. The real threats to the American democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson in his better moments, not contaminated by his aristocratic heritage and his personal needs, come from the misuse of political and economic power by an undemocratic wealthy elitist clique of materialist ideologues in secret cabals at the highest levels of American society.
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RALPH E. BUNCH is an emeritus professor of the Department of Political Science of Portland State University. He was born in Portland, Oregon in 1927, served in the US Navy during WW II, graduated from Lewis and Clark College in 1951, received an M.S. (1961) and Ph.D. (1968) in political science from the University of Oregon. He has taught in public school in Oregon, Japan, and Canada, and during his twenty-five years as a professor, has taught in Oregon, Texas, Washington, and Russia. He served 16 years as Book Review Editor for The International Journal of Comparative Sociology, edited three books, and has authored numerous articles in professional journals. He is retired and lives with his wife, Eleonora, in Oregon and in Moscow, Russia.