ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODproper names? Defined properly, ‘‘economic democracy’’ would designate a political sys-
tem in which the people, as a collective self, is at home (oikos) with itself, keeping its
wealth to itself and keeping its own house in order according to its self-given laws.
Economic democracy in this sense would designate home rule, rule of the peopleat
home with itself.In view of such home rule, all the efforts of that people would be directed
at the preservation, maintenance, and defense of its homeland security, building ever
higher walls of defense to protect its home against intrusion from the outside—but also
against subversion from the inside, from those rogue elements that are always already
pursuing their own self-interest and that continue to do so. And yet, since today, more
than ever before, walls are not enough, such homeland security would necessitate forays
outside: not just into the world, but throughout the world, to identify and neutralize
potential threats to the home and to the homeland. All of this could be part of what might
be called ‘‘economic democracy.’’ We would also have a picture not so very different from
the image presented today by many if not most states that call themselves ‘‘democratic,’’
and first and foremost, by democracy in America.
It can happen, however, that this pursuit of homeland security produces exactly what
it seems to fear: the extension of indebtedness and guilt, which can reach a point where
the very notion of the ‘‘homeland,’’ as a geopolitical basis for democracy, has to be called
into question. The linking of a territorial entity to a specific ethnic or national grouping
tends to dissolve in the face of such indebtedness, which confirms the dependency of the
group ‘‘itself ’’ upon other groups, other ‘‘selves.’’ The celebration of the ‘‘immature’’ and
‘‘secret’’ deity—money—both promotes and undercuts the adherence to other groupings
(ethnic, religious, local, fan clubs, etc.) that seek to define themselves through visible
representations and binary opposition.
The question then can become, in the face of a tendency that can also be designated
as ‘‘auto-immune,’’ just what the relation of ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘death’’ will be, and whether it
will continue to be defined within an ‘‘economy’’ of the self—an ‘‘autocracy.’’
The question is not simply when such a point is reached, but perhaps even more
significantly, if it will allow for a reconsideration of the processes that have led up to it,
and of the alternatives that have been marginalized along the way. If democracy can be
induced to reconsider itself, to reconsider its relation to the sovereignty of the self, to a
self that defines its liberty in terms of its power to say ‘‘I can’’—which is to say, its power
tostay the sameover time and space, and perhaps this is the not so secret message of
‘‘globalization’’ today—it may be able to recall that, although the images and effigies on
which it reliescirculatelike banknotes, they do not necessarily come full circle and provide
a return. From the tortured—and torturing—experience of a democracy seeking to con-
trol past and future in the name of ‘‘Number One,’’ a democracy to come could begin to
envisage itself otherwise than as an incessant capitalist cult of consumption and reproduc-
tion celebrated in an unremitting series of holiday sales, promising to ‘‘save’’ but only
within the scope of their limited duration. Or in the incessant binarism of professional
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