After the Future

Creeping Authoritarianism

The Cheney Doctrine. Regular readers of this blog might think that my incessant harping on the authoritarian theme is so much beating of a dead horse, but as long as it remains a threat, it isn't really dead.  And it still remains a threat until we drive a stake through its blackened heart.

The trend in America toward authoritarianism began in the Cold War fears that followed World War II, and the Civil Rights and anti-war revolts of the 1960s and 70s were flawed attempts to push back.  Flawed because it attacked symptoms and not the disease as aspirin covers up for a time chonic joint pain.  Too many Americans complacently identified the threat as limited to a particular personality--Richard Nixon--and not a mentality that was far more pervasive. And the people with this mentality were not going to take Nixon's defeat as the final word on the matter. And in 1980 they were back in the driver's seat.

That push back became characterized by the right-wing backlash as motivated by liberal cultural decadents and anti-war "hippies." Isn't everyone who's against the war, even now, tarred by that hippy brush?  Wasn't fear of being thought one a key motivator for many so-called moderates to get behind the invasion of Iraq? Being for the war seemed the grownup, serious position to take. In any event, the interruption of the authoritarian program in the sixties and seventies really riled folks like Dick Cheney, and they made it their life mission to get the country back on track.  The etiology of the Cheney doctrine of executive power is very nicely laid out in this article by  Charlie Savage in the Friday's Boston Globe.  An excerpt:

In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

"I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff," Cheney said.

Most of Cheney's colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of "disdain for the law."

Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power."

The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power -- nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president's hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast "inherent" powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.

Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration's hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney's staff has also been behind President Bush's record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws.

A close look at key moments in Cheney's career -- from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush -- suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney's long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.

"Cheney has made this a matter of principle," Shane said. "For that reason, you are likely to hear the words 'executive privilege' over and over again during the next two years."

Cheney declined to comment for this article. But he has repeatedly said his agenda includes restoring the presidency to its fullest powers by rolling back "unwise" limits imposed by Congress after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

"In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," Cheney said on ABC in January 2002. "I feel an obligation...to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."

* * *

He's Not the Boss of Me.  Garry Wills comes at the topic of creeping authoritarianism from another angle in this NYT op-ed in which he decries the tendency of Americans to think of the president as their Commander in Chief.  He's not.  He's our employee put in place to execute the laws our representatives pass in Congress.  This tendency of Americans to be so in awe of the president and his powers leads directly to the kind of abuses that Cheney is promoting.  An excerpt:

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

That's why the endless war on terrorism is so important for these authoritarians, and why they must not be trusted to prosecute it.  They must be kept as far from the levers of power as possible.

Sam Harris vs. Andrew Sullivan

I don't know if you've been following the debate between the religion-despising Sam Harris and the religion-defending Andrew Sullivan over here and here.  I'm, of course, on Sullivan's side in this debate, but my tack in debating somebody like Harris would be to say that there is no debate if the terms of the debate are defined by an obsolete Enlightenment rationalist narrative that Harris quaintly clings to. Sullivan is too conventional in his thinking to make such a case, but it's the only one I think that works.

I've written a lot on this and you can find relevant posts among the ones found here and here.  The fundamental mistake materialists like Harris make lies in a belief they hold, even if they are unconscious of it because it is so deeply woven into the Enlightenment rationalist narrative.  They believe that all of reality is potentially knowable by reason, and when it is finally known, science will have proved that reality has no spiritual dimension and therefore no God. 

Well, until that happens--and it's not going to--it's a belief that has no more reasonable basis than theism. Harris calls himself an atheist, and atheism is just as much a belief system as theism.  Harris can believe whatever he wants, but to think that atheism is more reasonable than theism is preposterous. The only rigorously reason-based thinking about God is agnostic--to say you can't know with one way or the other. Pure reason cannot know anything except what it is able to abstract from sense data.  Kant made that point over two hundred years ago.  But sense is not the only human cognitive faculty.  There is also what the heart knows, a point the great mathematician and scientist Pascal understood at the dawn of the Enlightenment over three hundred years ago.  Both Kant and Pascal were prodigies of reason, but they knew its limits and did not make an idol of it.

Perhaps the more interesting point Harris makes lies in his assertion that religion has had more of a negative than a positive effect in influencing human thinking and behavior. He might be right about that if we were to use a purely quantitative measure to settle the issue.  But the argument is kind of along the lines of asserting that singing is something that is bad for humanity because most people do it poorly, even those who think they are good at it.  If nothing else American Idol proves the point. As some people are deluded about their level of singing talent, there are many people who are deluded in their religious ideas.  That doesn't mean that there are no good singers just because most are not good.

As with most things having to do with things that really matter to human beings, there's a wide quality spectrum, and the truth of something cannot be measured by evaluating it on a quantitative basis.  You can't measure quality by a quantitative metric. It's evaluating the redness of something by using a green scale. For if anyone is truly religious it has very little to do with the quantity of his or her experiences of transcendence but with the few moments of quality which make all the difference in the way he or she thinks about the world on the quantitative level on which the bulk of experience takes place.

And this quality of spiritual experience, like the quality of art, has very little to do with cultural or educational sophistication.  Some people, though, and very often the untutored, are prodigies when it comes to expressing qualitative experiences verbally, visually or musically.  As there are artistic prodigies, there are also religious prodigies, people who have had particularly intense experiences of transcendence, and their testimony counts for something. And while it may differ in breadth and intensity from the experience of those of us who are not prodigies, there is enough in our own experience that resonates with it, and while we may not be able to sing as beautifully as the prodigy, our song nevertheless participates in the same melody.

The tone-deaf Harris wants to reduce this song to terms he can understand in his atonal world, and it is impossible to argue with such a person.  Either you hear the music or you don't. The best you can do is help him to listen for it, but if he has made up his mind that there is no possibility that music exists, it's not likely he ever will.

SOTU Tonight

Before the Speech. I'm not going to watch Bush's part.  It's just too painful, and nothing this man says has any credibility.  I am however very interested to hear Jim Webb's response.  That could be interesting.  More on this after the event.

After the Speech.  Well, I watched it anyway.  A couple of obvious points:  The war he wants to continue is going to cost up $8 billion a month, and he wants to balance the budget without raising taxes.  Even if the war ends, what is the debt service going to be? I expect a lot of politically motivated b.s. in a speech like this, but at least don't insult the intelligence of Americans when slinging it.  Anything that he had to say about bipartisanship, health care, climate change, or energy independence has no credibility. Or it has as much credibility as Bush's presenting himself as a compassonate conservative.

Webb was right on and was a beacon of common sense that transcends ideological posturing. I liked the way he limited the focus of his remarks to the two major issues of our time that have been the continuous focus of this blog when posting about politics: First, the aggregation of wealth in fewer hands and with it the threatened disintegration of the economic middle.  Second, that the reckless, buccaneering militarism that led us  into Iraq  must be rejected, and other more responsible leaders must take control of our foreign policy. These two issues should be at the heart of the Democrats agenda, and they should distance themselves from the leftisht cultural values issues that alienate them from most middle Americans. 

It's unclear, at least to me, how that leadership can take hold of the foreign policy steering wheel in the next two years.  The most they can do is thwart Bush from doing more damage, but I don't see how they can move things in a more positive direction.  But it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of months.   

How Fragile the Rule of Law

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales’s remark left Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, stammering.

“Wait a minute,” Specter interjected. “The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there’s a rebellion or invasion?”

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

“You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense,” Specter said.

While Gonzales’s statement has a measure of quibbling precision to it, his logic is troubling because it would suggest that many other fundamental rights that Americans hold dear also don’t exist because the Constitution often spells out those rights in the negative.

For instance, the First Amendment declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Applying Gonzales’s reasoning, one could argue that the First Amendment doesn’t explicitly say Americans have the right to worship as they choose, speak as they wish or assemble peacefully. The amendment simply bars the government, i.e. Congress, from passing laws that would impinge on these rights.

Similarly, Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

The clear meaning of the clause, as interpreted for more than two centuries, is that the Founders recognized the long-established English law principle of habeas corpus, which guarantees people the right of due process, such as formal charges and a fair trial.

That Attorney General Gonzales would express such an extraordinary opinion, doubting the constitutional protection of habeas corpus, suggests either a sophomoric mind or an unwillingness to respect this well-established right, one that the Founders considered so important that they embedded it in the original text of the Constitution.
From Robert Parry on Friday.

I suppose, at this point, nothing should surprise me.  But it's as if these guys don't even feel the need to conceal their disdain for the rule of law anymore.  This isn't some wingnut bloviating on a blog. This is testimony by the Attorney General of the United States before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

How to account for this frighteningly aggressive reinterpretation of the Constitution?  Why would the Attorney General be so bold in such a forum?  All I can say is as long as this administration is in office, we're in a very vulnerable state.  God help us all if we're attacked again by terrorists while Bush/Cheney is in the White House. 

I can't help but think that Gonzales's testimony is a way for the administration to prepare the ground for a drastic restriction of rights during the aftermath of such an attack. If they go so far as imposing martial law, there will be some initial outrage, but it will be eclipsed by the outrage felt toward the terrorists. And the administration spinners will come out in force with the talking point that If Lincoln imposed martial law, how bad could it be?  And enough Americans will say, "Yeah, fine, whatever.  Let's nuke Iran."

Two more years to go.  Will we make it?

The Power of Myth

As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the rhetorical power of mythic narratives.  To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives.  Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not between believing in myths or not believing in them, but in recognizing that some myths have quality and others have almost none.

So ultimately we don't ever really have a battle of ideas; we have instead a battle of narratives or myths. That's what we're seeing now in the contemporary culture wars between the cultural left and right.  It's all a reenactment of the Scopes Trial which represented a clash of mythologies between the William Jennings Bryan led fundamentalist Christian myth and the Clarence Darrow led Darwinist modern myth.  Both myths have elements of truth; both have elements of imagination.  The one that wins is the one that best represents the spirit of the times within a given culture.  The facts are almost always secondary: It took the jury all of nine minutes to find poor Scopes guilty. The power of myth almost always trumps the power of facts.

Facts don't have much power; they are raw and passive.  Myths actively catch up the facts  and weave them into patterns of meaning, sometimes, rarely, in magnificent patterns of meaning that meet our need for profundity.  In order to get mythic truth, you have to have a faculty for getting at the truth that's in poetry.  Scientific truth is just about things; mythic truth is always in one way or the other about meaning-saturated struggle. 

But a good myth, like a good poem, has to resonate in the depths of the soul, and it can't be contradicted by the known facts. The facts have to be there to ground the myth, but the facts by themselves are meaningless.  That's why the fundamentalist Christian myth is inferior: it has neither poetry nor facts, and if it resonates with anything in the human soul it's a rather primitive emotional need for unthinking certainty. Fundamentalism is the crudest kind of mythmaking, and it doesn't just infect religious thinking.  There are Marxist, Freudian, and feminist fundamentalists. There are environmental fundamentalists and pro-choice fundamentalists, and their discourse is always mythological.   

Fundamentalism is the crudest kind of mythmaking, and as a Christian I would unhesitatingly affirm Darwin's evolutionary myth as superior to the Christian fundamentalist myth, but that doesn't mean that Darwin's myth gets the job done--it leaves too much out. The fundamentalist Christian myth has zero resonance for me, but read Teilhard de Chardin and tell me that his great myth of differentiation and convergence has no resonance.  It's not perfect, but I honor him as one who is struggling to develop a myth of reintegration, and it resonates deeply with people like me, at least.

But rationalists are wrong if they think that they have no need of myth. If they think so, they are almost certainly unconscious of the mythic structure that undergirds their worldview.  They think they are being rational when in fact all they have done is substitute a new mythic narrative for an older one.  For some it's the dream of progress through rationality embraced by the Enlightenment and Marxists.  For others it's the great Darwinist narrative of random mutations and adaptation. 

These are all sub-narratives of the larger, deeper Christian narrative.  Marxism and all of the modern myths about human progress are Christian eschatology repackaged in materialistic categories. And there are numerous variations on these themes, but none of the moder sub-narrataives has much resonance anymore, and more primitive myths are emerging to fill the space left by the crumbling of the modern mythic narrative.  For the zeitgeist in a decadent era such as our own is a spirit of disintegration and fragmentation.  This spirit pervades our art, politics, philosophy and religion.  The Libertarian myth, for instance, resonates with so many these days because it ratifies the social atomization that accompanies this disintegration.  Nevertheless, some like Teilhard await and are trying to prepare the ground for the emergence of a new zeitgeist and with it a new myth of reintegration.

A good narrative distinguishes itself from a bad one by resonating with the spirit of the times and in accounting for our experience and the facts that we are aware of in a plausible way.  The Marxist mythology has all but been exploded, and I believe someday the same will be true of Darwin's narrative and its crude transference to the human economic realm in Social Darwinist and Libertarian myths. The facts are not in dispute, just the narrative that links the facts in an intelligible pattern.  One thing I know for sure is that what we don't know is far far greater than what we do know, and what passes for scientific knowledge is just intelligent guesswork, people doing the best they can to make sense of things with only a minuscule fraction of the evidence available to them. 

Do we really believe that in a thousand years human beings will more or less understand the world as we understand it now? It would be ridiculous to think so.  So what will have changed in that time?  What will we know then that we don't know now?  Will we just have more facts, or will we have a radically different mythic narrative?  What factors will contribute to changing the narrative over the centuries?   

I take solace in my belief that we are at the end of a crudely materialistic era waiting to wake up again to what our premodern ancestors took for granted--that the world is shot through with spirit or mind or the Logos.  To remember is not to regress.  There is no going back, but there is retrieving what was lost. The soul faculty for recognizing spirit in its many modes has withered in most moderns, but it's atrophied, not completely gone.  And when enough people start working with this awakened faculty, new powerful narratives will emerge.  And like the disintegrating narratives that dominate the cultural landscape today, they will then resonate with the spirit of the times and they will plausibly account for the known facts.

Here's an example of mythological thinking that I think has great resonance.  It comes from Marshall McLuhan's 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine of all places, long before the impact of the personal computer and Internet was felt.  What he hopes for in the future could all be dismissed as moonshine, but among the icons of the sixties, there is no one for me, at least, beside Teilhard and McLuhan (both like their contemporary mythmaker J.R.R. Tolkien, doctrinally conservative Catholics) who has as much staying power. Read any Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown lately? Would you want to? Read McLuhan's stuff today, and he's still ahead of our time.  He didn't get everything right, but he got right more than most:

I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society--free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age--emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest. No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than myself, I am not, by temperament or conviction a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale. TV and all the electric media are unraveling the entire fabric of our society and as a man who is forced by circumstances to live within that society, I do not take delight in its disintegration.

But:

There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential to realize the Antichrist--Yeats' rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants.

It's inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally I have great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man's potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny--if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image--tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

The narrative here is death and rebirth. Disintegration and reintegration. Do we know for sure that the current disintegration we are suffering will at some point shift into a movement of reintegration? Do we know for sure that the sun will come up tommorrow?  We're in a disintegrative phase right now, and it's not much fun.  But that's just one beat in a larger rhythm. We can't know it in scientific terms, but we can know it nevertheless. Death and rebirth is one of the fundamental rhythms of existence. And at least people like McLuhan and Teilhard, both deeply and perceptively grounded in empirical reality, are focusing their mythic imagination toward a possible positive  future while most of the rest of us are looking at the future in what McLuhan called our rear-view mirrors.  We badly need this kind of looking forward, but we're not ready to do it yet.  The timing isn't right.

We don't know what's going to happen, but I do know this.  The kind of thinking, the habits of mind, that are reflected in our politicians, in our media personalities, in all the conventional thinking we all take for granted as defining the real world, is caught up in habits of mind that became obsolete decades ago, and in some cases centuries ago. Such persistence in obsolete patterns of thinking would be facetious if they didn't have such destructive power, so we must take it seriously if for no other reason than to defend against it.  But none of it points us to where we need to go.  But assuming that we manage not to destroy the planet, all these small-minded squabbles will seem irrelevant by the end of this century. Events are moving too fast and they will have overtaken those still preoccupied by these obsolete preoccupations. The spirit that would move us forward is struggling elsewhere, and it has not yet found its mythic narrative.

Showdown at the OK Corral

Not much drama last night Bush's speech last night.  The drama is yet to come.  As expected a sniggering Bush essentially told the American people, "Stop me; I dare you. " The drama will come only if there are some Wyatt Earps who can get together a posse to face him down.  As I've said before, this could get interesting. Let's hope for the sake of the rule of law it does.

Latent Authoritarians

I have been haunted by viewing of "The Sorrow and the Pity" during the holiday break.  I'm not sure why.  So I'm going to ramble a little to see if I can figure it out.

Creeping Authoritarianism

One thing that has become clearer to me in the last six years is that democracy is for grownups, and most people, whatever lipservice they give to the concept, really don't want the responsibility of self-rule. I didn't used to think that. I don't know what the percentages are, but I've come to believe that far greater numbers of Americans or Germans or French or whoever, would have no problem embracing authoritarian rule or to hand over their republic to a big daddy like Petain if he promises to keep them safe and relatively prosperous and mouths patriotic slogans about the greatness of the national soul. (If you want more on this tendency authoritarianism among a swath of Americans, read John Dean or the new book by former NY Times war correspondent Chris Hedges.)

It doesn't require enormous intellectual capability to grasp this point.  At first I thought the problem was that most people didn't understand the threat, but I'm more inclined to think now that it's not a question of understanding but caring.  If the U.S. became an authoritarian state, I've become convinced that most Americans would accept it pretty much the way the  French accepted the Nazi occupation and Petain's collaboration with it. The Germans were smart enough to give the French the illusion of independence and in doing so to neutralize them for the rest of the war. I believe something similar if subtler is going on in this country-- as long as most people feel independent, they don't care what kind of government they have or what crimes it commits. 

I think that when all the superficial complexities are stripped away, people fall into two political categories that matter: grownups or children. The former, whether I agree or disagree with them, I can respect.  The latter I cannot. The children are subdivided into two prevalent categories--those who are attracted to paternalistically authoritarian regimes and those attracted to maternalistic regimes.  The former we associate with the political and cultural right; the latter with the cultural and political left and their various programs to create a nanny state.  Both are repugnant to me insofar as either treats its citizens as children who must be told how to think and behave, but the second is less of a threat to us at this time.

Libertarians, in my perception of them, tend to exaggerate in their own minds the country's vulnerability to nanny statism and to underestimate how Libertarian principles applied in the political sphere lead to the other extreme. They have a hard time grasping that the program to strip government of its ability to regulate and tax also strips the broad public of any means to protect itself.  The greatest threat that any society faces is its vulnerability to tyranny, and the quickest road to tyranny is for the broad public to allow aggregations of power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

So the irony for me is that the many people who think of themselves as Libertarians also will tell you that they are passionately opposed to authoritarianism.  That doesn't change the fact that their Libertarianism abets those trends that will lead inevitably to the authoritarianism they say they despise.  Sure, they see big government, authoritarian or otherwise, as the enemy, but what they don't get is that big government will be necessary as long as it's possible for the few to aggregate huge amounts of power and wealth in the private sphere. Big  government is the only power with the capacity to work for the interests of the broad public to preserve it from the abuses of concentrated private power.   

But government on any level fails in defending the interests of the broad public to the degree that it is coopted by private wealth and power. And it should be obvious that private wealth and power sees its interests served in either coopting or disabling the only agency that has the capacity to oppose them. This is the primary reason I have trying to snap otherwise thoughtful people of my acquaintance out of the Libertarian trance. It's a dangerous doctrine not because it promotes individual liberty and self-reliance, but because it leads to a disorganized individualism that is easy prey for powerful organized minorities to exploit.  Indvidual liberty and self reliance are important, but also is some concept of interdependence, and the balance between them is precisely what's lacking from typical Libertarian thought.

So if the broad public has no protections against concentrated power other than the government, the broad public must always be vigilant about government's allying itself with or becoming coopted by concentrated private power. As I've been arguing here for years now, our current crisis lies in the American public's lack of vigilance, and allowing concentrated power and wealth to coopt the government. It has come to a crescendo in the current Bush administration. Everything from the Medicare Prescription Bill to the War in Iraq has to be understood in the light of this trend. We no longer have a classical capitalist democracy; it is crony capitalist, and the only cure for it is for people to wake up to its dangers and use their democratically elected representatives to combat it before it is too late.

A Defense of the New Deal

The tragedy is that we already figured this out, and the New Deal was the nation's attempt to institutionalize a remedy.  But it looks like we have to rehearse the same arguments over and over again for an historically illiterate American electorate, many of whom have become infatuated with the idea that Libertarian principles need to be applied to the political sphere to defend against the non-threat that scares them so: maternalism or nannyism.

So before returning to my attack on Libertarianism, let me first defend the New Deal from the accusation of nannyism.  The New Deal is not top-down maternalistic, but subsidiarist.  This is a concept that open-minded Libertarians need to familiarize themselves with, because it integrates the idea of freedom and individuality with the idea of interdependence.  Subsidiarity recognizes that societies naturally organize in hierarchies, but the purpose of the higher levels is to serve the needs of the lower levels.  The higher levels have no jurisdiction in the lower levels unless their help is requested or in those cases when the basic rights of minorities on the lower levels are being abused by the lower-level majority. Subsidiarity opposes both top-down maternalism or paternalism, but it means nothing unless the people on the bottom insist that those who migrate to the loftier levels of the hierarchy behave as servants of the lower levels.  That's what  accountability in a democratic republic is supposed to insure.

The principle is easy to understand and follows common sense.  But at the risk of belaboring the obvious, let's take a basic government function like emergency/disaster relief as a model to show how it works.   Local communities  pay for and develop their own emergency and disaster relief infrastructure to deal with the kinds of emergencies that typically come up in the course of a year--fires, traffic accidents, medical emergencies.  When large disasters occur that overwhelm the local community's ability to respond to it--hurricanes, earthquakes, epidemics--the higher levels in the hierarchy come in to support them: towns are supported by the  county, counties by the  state, states by regional networks, and, if necessary, federal agencies like FEMA or CDC are called in.

Subsidiarity requires that local communities be responsible for managing their own affairs, but that they can count on the support of higher levels of organization when they need it. The Katrina disaster was a dramatic consequence of the current administration's disregard of this principle.  It should not have been surprising that since it has no commitment in principle or practice to the idea that the higher serves the lower, that it should be so neglectful, if not disdainful, of the needs of those who are lowest on the hierarchy.

Subsidiarity, while it recognizes that everyone is responsible to carry his or her own weight (that's the self-reliant part), also recognizes that sometimes things happen that are too huge for individuals and communities to handle without help from the greater society (that's the interdependent part). Subsidiarity is simply a way to organize neighborliness in a way that effectively deals with misfortunes people on the lower levels of the hierarchy cannot handle without the help of the higher levels of the hierarchy.

It's common sense, and  in fact it's the way things work for the most part in the U.S. and elsewhere.  The New Deal and its disciples later worked with this principle in the creation of jobs in the WPA when the private sector could not generate enough jobs during the Great Depression.  Unemployment Insurance was designed in recognition that the creative destructive power of American market capitalism creates huge, system-wide shifts in labor needs and that displaced workers are a problem too great for local churches and communities to be able to handle.  We could talk about AFDC, Social Security, and any number of other programs as following the same logic.   

Are there abuses of these programs?  Sure.  But that does not mean that the philosophy or principles behind their design are flawed even if their execution has been. So why would any sane Libertarian be opposed to any of these uses of government to solve such basic problems?  I think it boils down to this: Libertarians believe that governments are more corrupt than private enterprises and that governments inefficiently implement what would be more efficiently implemented by market mechanisms.  The market principle, they would argue, provides a more efficient guiding star for solving social problems and meeting social needs than the subsidiarity principle .

I think the flaw in this kind of market libertarian thinking is that for them it's either/or--either the government is driving things or the market is.  Subsidiarity recognizes that the market is the natural way that  people interact and that it should be allowed to do its thing, but (1) that there are some needs and problems  for which there are no incentives for the market to solve, especially for "markets" who haven't the means to pay--(e.g., health insurance); (2) that there are some problems that the market creates that it is incapable of solving on its own terms (e.g., chronic unemployment and/or underemployment at subsistence wages,); and (3) that there are some projects undertaken in the public interest that should not be left to the vagaries of the market (police protection, transportation safety, education, essential utilities, food quality, environmental standards, etc.)

The Flawed Libertarian Alternative

Some hardcore ideological market Libertarians might argue each of these points, but hardly anybody with any common sense would.  So why has Libertarianism taken such a hold of so many people whom you would think should know better? Why is there such a passion to follow Libertarian logic to privatize everything?  Why do so many fall back on Libertarian reasoning to vote down school levies and parks and transportation projects that would improve the quality of life for almost everyone?  Why this hatred of governments? After all, isn't government just ordinary citizens pooling their resources to solve problems or to promote the general welfare and quality of life? Is there objection on the level of theory or on the level of practice?

I don't really think that most people would object in principle that government has the roles enumerated above to play. Rather, it's that they have lost confidence in government's ability to manage and deliver, and rather than make the effort to exercise oversight and demand that their governments manage and deliver, they take the easy route and embrace the idea that the market will take care of it.  Because the one thing that governments have that private businesses don't have are mechanisms that allow for public oversight and accountability, and most people would just rather not bother.  Let the market do its thing instead.

This brings us back to the point I was making in the first few paragraphs.  Democracy is for grownups. Libertarianism is a high-minded excuse to justify giving up on holding our governments accountable by transferring its functions to unaccountable private organizations in the name of freedom of choice. But the consequences are not though through, and too often we have to learn the hard way by having to go through more Katrina-like disasters before we come back to what we already figured out.

It might seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but Libertarianism in this sense promotes passivity and spiritual torpor.  Freedom is at it's root a creative, active principle, and freedom as it is exercised in the political sphere should be an active, creative project.  The political sphere ought to be the social arena where people come together to take responsibility for their social welfare, to solve problems and promote the commonweal.  In the Libertarian scheme, to quote Margaret Thatcher, "there is no such thing as society," just individual consumers fending for themselves.  Thatcher gets the self-reliance part, but not the interdependence part.

People who believe only in the individual have a hard time grasping a fundamental truth that is essential for human happiness and well-being:  We're all in this together.  And people who do not exercise their creativity in the political sphere are reduced to the role of consumers.  Libertarianism, whatever it might be in theory, in practice promotes freedom as market-driven consumption.  Sure, consumption involves choice, but it is a fundamentally passive activity.  It's about choosing among choices created by others for you in the product and job market, or in the political market. And right now that means choosing among politicians who are, with some exceptions, second-rate and third-rate human beings distinguished from the rest of us only by their superior greed and/or ego-driven ambition--certainly not their desire to serve. 

And such people flourish in this market-incentive driven political culture justified by Libertarian thought. If the best incentives are provided by the Jack Abramoffs, why not take them?  Public Service?  Sure politicians pay the term lip service, but Beltway culture accepts that politicians are primarily motivated by what is in their individual self interests.  You have to be a rube like Jimmy Stuart's Mr. Smith to think otherwise. And if K-Street lobbyists offer a politician more attractive incentives than the disincentive of possibly alienating his voters, why should Libertarian object if he takes them?  Isn't he just following the Libertarian logic? After all, there is so social responsibility if there is no society--it's every individual fending for himself seeking what is in his best interests.

It follows inevitably from Thatcherism, however much Thatcherites like Andrew Sullivan might object, that free agents when they are powerful and seek their  self interest according to the Libertarian logic, inevitably seek to dominate the less powerful.  That's a lesson history has taught time and time again, and my fear is that we, or our children, are going to have to learn it once again the hard way.

Surging with Kagan & Keane and Other Thoughts

The ISG Report and its recommendations are history and now a report written by Robert Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane under AEI auspices is the key to understand Bush's mind regarding America's near-term future in Iraq.  But as I wrote earlier, the significance of the ISG report was not so much in its recommendations but in  the mainstream power establishment's public repudiation of the Bush/Cheney policy. 

And so the first question to be answered was whether Bush Jr. would recognize that the political reality had changed and like Lyndon Johnson and eventually Nixon/Kissinger recognize that there was no point continuing. Well it didn't take long to realize that Bush was not going to make the adjustment, but that doesn't mean that the political power behind the ISG report was going to evaporate.  It's still there, and you can be sure it's part of the reason the Democrats seem to be getting a spine, because the next question to be answered was whether the new Democratic congress would finally stand up against the president. Statements this week by Murtha, Pelosi, and Reid are encouraging signs that they will. Had the ISG report not come out, I doubt that the Dems would have been able to unite in resistance as they seem now resolved to do.

We'll see if that's the case. This is a hugely important and historically significant showdown between an embattled and discredited minority that is still in the driver's seat at the White House and the Congress allied with the nation's power establishment.  It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out in the next several weeks.  I'm feeling better about the outcome, but I also believe that the Bush/Cheney people are capable of anything, and they don't care about the price that everyone else will have to pay to save their own asses.  It's unlikely they will back down without causing more damage one way or the other.

In the meanwhile for an excellent overview of the basic strategy behind the Kagan-Keane surge idea, read this post by this former CIA analyst Peter Dickson at Consortium News.  By the way, if you haven't already, you should make Consortium News a regular stop in your web reading.  Robert Parry, for years a reporter for the Associated Press, has been for me a trusted source of information about issues rarely explored by the MSM.

Do his stories have a liberal bias?  At this point the question is ridiculous to me, because as I wrote yesterday, the real conflict in our political culture at this time is not between liberals and conservatives but between the constitutionalists bloc which seeks to defend traditional rights and liberties from the encroachments of the authoritarian bloc which seeks to take them away in the name of national security.  The conflict there is far more important than whether your opinion on this or that issue, whether its the future of social security or what to do about healthcare.  Recognizing that this is the most important conflict of our day is the criterion I use to determine whether I can take someone seriously or not, and I fervently believe that no other issue's resolution is more important for our political future. And that therefore there is no more important task than to unmask, discredit, and repudiate the authoritarian bloc as a cancer.

There are plenty of "liberal" Democrats who don't get it.  Sherrod Brown, who voted for the MCA, comes to mind, and for that reason I see him as dangerous. And when it comes to so-called moderates like McCain, Lieberman, and Graham I can only actively oppose them root and branch.  Brown is at best a line straddler, but these three have clearly taken their stand on the other side of the line as collaborationists with the authoritarian bloc.  Their political power lies in their projection of "reasonableness" while at the same time appealing to the latent authoritarianism and militarism in the American psyche, and there is no greater danger to our republic than that latency becoming even more active. 

In any event, there is no question on which side of the line Robert Parry stands, and he is an invaluable information resource for those patriots in the Constitutionalist bloc who care about preserving the Republic.

The Case of Andrew Sullivan

I was interested to see Slate's Robert Wright and Andrew Sullivan in this diavlog.  The formerly hawkish Sullivan recants his previous support of the war.  Apparently he explains why in some detail in his book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, which I have only read the reviews of. The Wright interview is ostensibly about the book. I agree with his critique of the Christian right.  No brainer there.  I've written briefly about the obsolescence of principled political conservatism here which addresses the Thatcherite/Reaganite part of his argument.  But in this post I'm not interested to deal with his arguments, but rather with the phenomenon of his public persona.

Sullivan is a fascinating case.  I've always found it perplexing why this guy has been taken so seriously--what constituency does he represent, the huge bloc of Americans who are British, gay, Catholic, and neoconservative?!  His book tries to explain how all those work together, and from what I've read about it and know about his thinking from my occasional reading of his blog, it's an eloquent muddle.  And yet millions of people continue daily to read his blog.  What is his appeal? 

I'm not sure, and if anybody has any ideas about this I'd be interested to hear them. The best that I can come up with is that he reflects back to his readers the primitive fears and confused thinking of millions of Americans in a time when anxiety and confusion is so widespread.  He has a very personal, honest style, and there is an engaging charm that comes with that.  I think it probably makes people who identify with his positions feel that it's smart to be fearful and confused the way Andrew is. If an articulate, decent chap like Andrew Sullivan thinks it, it must be ok to think it. 

Well it's not ok because most of what he says is an irrational, emotion-driven, if sometimes eloquent, exercise in incoherence.  And he admits his vulnerability to emotional thinking in his conversation with Wright.  People like him played an enormously influential role in defending the administration's specious arguments for going into Iraq, not because it made sense but because it filled an emotional need.  To admit that he was wrong about that now is fine, but why does he have any credibility at all at this point?  He has credibility only so long as people find in him a kindred spirit who articulates their own confusion and ambivalence.

So this is why he interests me.  He embodies a particular mindset that I've become fascinated with in the last six years: the decent, well-educated person who nevertheless is inclined to accept official justifications for policy at face value so long as those justifications have a "truthiness" about them that resonate with their irrational prejudices. We're seeing something similar with the liberal types now who identify with the Democrats. 

How is it possible that with all we've gone through since the early seventies that anybody could think this way?  This kind of thinking--typical of the MSM pundit class as a whole--is like that of pack animals that imprint on the alpha leader. "Whatever you say, boss."  The Italians did it with Mussolini, the French with Petain, and pundits like Sullivan did it with Bush in the period following 9/11.  People are attracted to Sullivan because he's no redneck; his primitive emotional politics are expressed with eloquence and style.

Sullivan snapped out of his trance, but what is it with Sullivan and others like him that they were so easily taken in to begin with?  I'm not asking this in some smug told-you-so mood, but out of a real desire to understand why smart people can get it so wrong.  Sullivan is just one very public person who represents this inclination for reason to be the servant of irrational needs that affects us all. Our thinking about almost everything that has meaning or is important is grounded in irrational assumptions--that's the point of the post I put up last month.  The key is to discern what irrational impulses are being served.  In Sullivan's case, it's clear that he, like so many of the Americans who read him, is driven by the hysteria that followed 9/11.  The  continuing threat  posed by terrorism is real, and we have to find prudent, realistic ways of dealing with the threat, but at a deeper level we have to find more effective ways to deal with the fear.  And as far as I'm concerned, people whose thinking is driven by their fear and confusion are simply not to be trusted.

The Constitutionalist Bloc

Robert Parry today on the Democrats' indifference to the erosion of the American Republic:

Though many issues on the DCCC’s priority list surely have merit, what’s missing is any commitment to the larger purpose of the American Republic.

The Democratic leaders have yet to grasp that the transcendent principles of democracy were a major factor in the national rejection of Bush and the Republican congressional majority on Nov. 7.

Many traditional conservatives and libertarians, who normally vote Republican, switched their allegiances or stayed home out of disdain for the authoritarian tendencies of the Bush administration and the failure of the congressional Republicans to conduct any meaningful oversight.

These right-of-center voters shared the alarm of many liberals and independents over Bush’s assertion of “plenary” – or unlimited – powers for the duration of the interminable “war on terror”; his abrogation of constitutional rights; his “signing statements” that set aside laws; and his excessive secrecy that often left the American people in the dark.

These voters from across the political spectrum – what might be called the “constitutionalist bloc” – were offended, too, by neoconservative hubris that treated average citizens as children to be frightened with color-coded terror alerts and tricked them into surrendering their liberties.

And these voters were fed up with the lies and exaggerations that sent thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths in the misbegotten Iraq War

Thus, the Nov. 7 election held out hope for a new national consensus, pulling together Americans of all political stripes who share a deep reverence for the founding principles of the Republic and who viewed Bush as a threat to what they held most dear. For this voting bloc, all other issues paled by comparison.

Though the congressional Democrats may not have known what was happening – and did little to actively encourage it – they rode this patriotic wave to victory. In the nearly two months since, however, they have largely turned their backs on these voters.

As the Washington Post noted, “Nowhere in the Democrats’ consensus-driven agenda is legislation revisiting last year’s establishment of military tribunals and suspending legal rights for suspected terrorists. Nor is there a revision of the civil liberties provisions of the USA Patriot Act, a measure curbing warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency or an aggressive confrontation of the President on his Iraq War policies.”

As noted here last month, Connecticut's Chris Dodd is proposing legislation to radically alter the provisions of the Military Commissions Act, but it's disturbing to me that we're not hearing more from Democrats on this.  I hope I'm wrong, but at this point the concerns of the "constitutional bloc" that Parry describes above seem as off the radar for the majority of the congressional Democrats as they are for the Republicans.

As I write this NPR in the background has two reports on the detainees in the WOT.  Listen here to this one by Ari Shapiro for an excellent review of where the law stands now regarding detainee treatment policy since the Supreme Court ruled on Hamdan and this one by Jackie Northam about how all this affects the detainees in Guantanamo.  I'm encouraged that at least NPR is keeping this in front of their listeners.

This is not a conservative/liberal conflict; it's a conflict between those who are inclined toward accepting authoritarianism and those who seek to preserve the rule of law and republican ideals.