56 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographythe time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.’ (Adam Goldman and
Robert Tanner, “Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA, NY,” AP via Newsday, May 15, 2008)
TRILATERAL COMMISSION POST-CARTER PERSPECTIVE, 1981-1983
During these years, Trilateral leaders Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington were pondering the
future transformation of the United States into a bureaucratic-authoritarian or totalitarian state. In
his book American Politics, Huntington developed a perspective for the future based on conflict
between increasingly authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian state control, on the one hand, and an
underlying American value system and world-outlook – which he calls the “American Creed” – on
the other. In Huntington’s view, there was no doubt that the regime would become more oppressive:
“An increasingly sophisticated economy and active involvement in world affairs seem likely to
create stronger needs for hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization of power, expertise, big government
specifically, and big organizations generally.” (p. 228) This is a kind of shorthand for what most
experts could identify as the fascist corporate state.
The problem Huntington saw was the American Creed, based on liberty, equality, individualism,
and democracy and rooted in “seventeenth-century Protestant moralism and eighteenth-century
liberal rationalism.” (p. 229) Huntington predicted in 1981 that the conflict between individualistic
values and the centralized regime may explode early in the coming century, specifically between
2010 and 2030, in a period of ferment and dislocation like the late 1960s: “If the periodicity of the
past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of
the twenty-first century.” At this time, he argued, “the oscillations among the responses could
intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions.” (p. 232) Such a
process would be acted out as follows:
“Lacking any concept of the state, lacking for most of its history both the centralized authority
and the bureaucratic apparatus of the European state, the American polity has historically been
a weak polity. It was designed to be so, and the traditional inheritance and social environment
combined for years to support the framers’ intentions. In the twentieth century, foreign threats
and domestic economic and social needs have generated pressures to develop stronger, more
authoritative decision-making and decision-implementing institutions. Yet the continued
presence of deeply felt moralistic sentiments among major groups in American society could
continue to ensure weak and divided government, devoid of authority and unable to deal
satisfactorily with the economic, social and foreign challenges confronting the nation.
Intensification of this conflict between history and progress could give rise to increasing
frustration and increasingly violent oscillations between moralism and cynicism. American
moralism ensures that government will never be truly efficacious; the realities of power ensure
that government will never be truly democratic. This situation could lead to a two-phase
dialectic involving intensified efforts to reform government, followed by intensified frustration
when those efforts produce not progress in a liberal-democratic direction, but obstacles to
meeting perceived functional needs. The weakening of government in an effort to reform it
could lead eventually to strong demands for the replacement of the weakened and ineffective
institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs.
Given the perversity of reform, moralistic extremism in the pursuit of liberal democracy could
generate a strong tide toward authoritarian efficiency.” (p. 232)
Huntington then quotes Plato’s celebrated passage on the way that the “culmination of liberty in
democracy is precisely what prepares the way for the cruelest extreme of servitude under a despot.”