Bully Nation
Saturday, 01 February 2014 09:09 By Yale Magrass and Charles Derber, Truthout | Op-Ed
(Photo: Robert Couse-Baker / Flickr)
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has appropriately been called a bully. This has implications well
beyond Christie. His calling out has the potential to shift the growing public conversation about bullying
from a pyschological narrative about abusive individuals to a new discourse on institutionalized bullying,
carried out by ruling institutions and elites.
The current focus on bullying - like much of the discussion about guns and gun violence - has tended to
focus on individuals and mental health. It is a therapeutic narrative. Bullying is seen primarily as a
psychological problem of individuals. The victim needs therapy, better communication or adaptation skills.
Bullies are characterologically flawed and need therapy or perhaps legal punishment.
But there is little or no discussion of larger social or cultural forces in the United States and the American
institutions or leaders who bully other countries or workers and citizens at home. Institutionalized bullying
is endemic to a capitalist hegemonic nation like the United States and creates death and suffering on a far
greater scale than personal, everyday bullying, as important and toxic as the latter might be.
Moreover, much of the everyday bullying that is the current media focus must be understood as the
inevitable consequence of a militarized corporate system that requires a popular mind-set of bullying to
produce profit and power. The individual bully is the creation of the bully nation.
The United States openly views itself as the world police force, a benign hegemon morally ordained to
impose its interests and values on the rest of the world and justified in the name of freedom, human rights
and antiterrorism to do to weaker countries what it wants. It spends more on weapons than its next 20
largest competitors combined. President Obama proclaimed "[S]o long as I'm Commander-in-Chief, we
will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known." To peasants living in small countries in Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia - where the United States has sent armed forces, used
drones to bomb, and often overthrown the government - polls show that a majority of people see the United
States as the greatest threat to their security, and fear it. Hegemony here seamlessly unfolds as morally
sanctioned, institutionalized bullying.
America makes heroes of bomber pilots like John McCain and offers them as role models for children and
adolescents to emulate. They see the media applaud the bullying behavior of their own government that
dispatches police, soldiers, FBI and CIA agents into foreign nations to kill and wreak havoc - from
Afghanistan to Somalia to Columbia. If you kill enough, whether in a just war or not, you may win the
Congressional Medal of Honor.
If bullying brings esteem to a nation, then surely that is a behavior to strive for. Potential recruits for an
aggressive military need to be immunized against scruples over violence and bullying. This becomes an
implicit part of their education, whether or not it is ever publicly admitted. Accordingly, schools and adult
authorities often turn a blind eye toward bullying. After two world wars, the Army lamented that a majority
of combat soldiers never fired a weapon. They called for a change in the training of soldiers and the
education and upbringing of children to correct that. By that measure, they have been successful. In
Vietnam, Iraq and Afganistan, the majority of combat soldiers killed.
Sports has played a vital part in preparing children for institutionalized aggression, bullying and combat. In
football, the goal is to attack the opponent and knock them down, a hard hit that keeps the opponent dazed
on the ground is sometimes encouraged by coaches and cheered by the crowd. In schools and campuses, the
athletes are often the popular heroes and also the bullies, involved too often in sexual violence or drinking
binges in bars that lead to fights or crimes.
Only recently would they expect sanctions against bullying. Indeed, the more they bullied, the more
popular they would be. Even before World War I, President Theodore Roosevelt insisted that elite
universities like Harvard would have to enhance their football teams if America were to dominate the
world. He declared: "We cannot afford to turn out college men who shrink from physical effort or a little
physical pain." For the nation needed men with "the courage that will fight valiantly against the foes of the
soul and the foes of the body."
The aggression and competiveness of bullying pervades civilian life as well as military. As the beacon for
the rest of the world to emulate, the culture the United States wishes to export is capitalism. Capitalism's
staunchest defenders proclaim competition to be its fundamental operating principle. The monopolistic
corporations and the wealthiest 1% have been the most aggressive, bullying anyone who stood in their way
by outsourcing their jobs, lowering wages, stripping away benefits and firing those seeking to organize
unions.
The bully demonizes their victim. In American capitalism, elites have long defined the losers in the
competitive struggle with the words used by Mitt Romney to defame the 47%: undeserving "moochers."
They are weak and lazy and don't have the stuff to prevail. As victims, they deserve their fate and must
submit to the triumphant. Those, like the wolves on Wall Street who bully their way to the top, should be
there; those who couldn't or don't, belong where they are.
Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller
intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They
brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign
"yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices
continue today. Corporations warn entire communites they will shut down factories and undermine the
local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow
through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear
they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.
Bullying enhances the ideology that the strong are strong and the weak are weak, and each deserves to be
where they are. This attitude pervades America's culture, government, military, corporations, media,
schools, entertainment, athletics and everyday life. The first step to a solution is shifting the conversation to
institutional bullying, moving beyond simply a therapeutic narrative to a political one aiming toward
transformative social change. As long as the United States embraces militarism and aggressive capitalism,
systemic bullying and all its impacts - abroad and at home - will persist as a major crisis.
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber
Yale Magrass, chancellor professor of sociology at UMass Dartmouth and Charles Derber, professor of
sociology at Boston College, have written several books together, the most recent being Capitalism: Should
You Buy It? An Invitation to Politcal Economy.