"Great leader democracy": most Americans are disinclined to think deeply about the tyrannical actions of government, but James Bovard's Attention Deficit Democracy will open their eyes.(Brief article)(Book review)

Attention Deficit Democracy, by James Bovard, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, 291 pages, hardcover, $26.95. For ordering information, see the ad on page four.

Every ruling elite covets a subject population who will trust, rather than think. This is emphatically true of our own government, observes investigative author James Bovard in his bracing new book. Surrounded by the trappings of prosperity (albeit, in most instances, purchased on credit) and marinated in rhetoric equating democracy with freedom, most Americans are disinclined to think deeply about the actions of the government that rules them. This paralyzing complacency, dangerous in the best of times, is potentially fatal in the post-9/11 era.

During this era, complacency has been punctuated with engineered outbursts of politically useful fear. Describing the Bush administration's transparent use of terrorist threat warnings to control the tenor and tempo of the 2004 presidential campaign, Bovard writes: "Each time the feds issued a new warning of a terrorist threat after 9/11, the president's approval rating rose by an average of almost 3 percent. As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. Politicians cow people on election day in order to corral them afterward."

The message disseminated by the president and his partisans, writes Bovard, was that "blind obedience provides the equivalent of body armor for the entire nation." And this message worked to get Bush reelected.

In an interview with a friendly biographer, President Bush recently admitted that his reelection owed much to an election eve message from Osama bin Laden that seemed to reinforce the incumbent's credentials as a protector. The Bush reelection campaign treated the 2004 presidential election as a simple implied transaction: "Support me, and you won't get killed." After he was reelected, President Bush was asked if he was responsible for any wrongdoing. He responded that the election was an "accountability moment" and that our citizenry had absolved him of any wrongdoing, and invested him with "political capital" to do as he sees fit.

Bovard refers to this vision of government--in which a popularly elected executive sees himself as the embodiment of the General Will, and accountable only to himself and "The People"--as "Great Leader Democracy."

Democratic tyranny, Bovard points out, requires the canny manipulation of two impulses: Trust and fear. He also noted that Montesquieu, an 18th-century French baron, "identified fear as the principle of despotic governments ... [stressing that] 'fear ought to be the only prevailing sentiment' in such regimes," in his The Spirit of the Laws, which greatly influenced the thinking of America's Founding Fathers. John Adams offered a similar warning in his 1776 Thoughts on Government: "Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of ...