Naomi Wolf in an interview about her new book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and A Citizen's Call to Action, makes the argument I've been making. I agree completely with the analysis about what's happening to us; I'm less optimistic that there is at this point a fighting chance of doing anything about it. I think the MCA and congress's inability to rescind it is a signal that the game is up in the political sphere:
What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn't happen overnight.
And it doesn't happen even in a clear line on a graph that's left to right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call tipping points. You can chart it, and there may be pressure, pressure, multiple assaults, and, then, a key event that would be like a vertical line on that chart. And then you're looking at another reality.
The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is democracies can reach a point of no return. And it's sudden when that happens. And it's disorienting. There's a point at which democracy can no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We're now in a place where it is legal, the White House has claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through, in three years of solitary confinement -- making it difficult to see a lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.
I'm not saying he's a good guy. But I'm saying the White House is taking the position that the President -- and any future president -- can say: You, Naomi, you, peruser of BuzzFlash -- you're an enemy combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is called an enemy combatant that you and I identify with -- that's going to be another one of these vertical lines, after which you are not going to be having this conversation, because I'm not that brave. The tasering of this student was another vertical line, because, believe me, if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008 election, dissent will close down pretty quickly. People are just not that brave when they start to get physically hurt.
And that's how society is closed down. Suddenly, there's news of someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for publishing something in the Wall Street Journal.
And the next day, there are still newspapers. There's still online shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what there isn't is freedom, because people are scared. And that's why we need to wake up now, because, believe it or not, the President has the power to do that. The President -- any president, President Thompson, President Giuliani, President Obama -- any president now has the power to make it easier to declare martial law and to declare a state of emergency. The president gets to decide what that is. That is not what the Founders envisioned.
People who are fighting overseas for democracy understand better than we do that we are witnessing the classic danger signs. They know how dangerous it is to have a leader relegate for himself or herself the power to do that -- to seize people and to militarize civil society. Or to declare a state of public emergency or to make it easier to define a threat to public order. Those are classic signposts that other democracy activists around the world recognize as flashing warning lights.
. . . We've been so blessed and so spoiled, in a way, by over 200 years of strong democracy, even taking into account the serious moments like the McCarthy era, that we expect the pendulum will always swing back, because the checks and balances have always been in place. I've explained in the book why this is different now -- why the pendulum isn't as free as it used to be, why we can't rely on it, a point Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda made first.
The trouble is that we're so used to a democratic mindset and we're so reliant on freedom, that we, A, don't recognize the dangers, and B, we don't realize what it takes to resist them. When I talk about these threats, people tend to answer before they've thought it through, or before they've read the book, with the correctives of democracy. Well, the ACLU will sue them. Or we'll just vote the guys out. "Vote the bums out." After you've read the book, you'll realize that you cannot rely on democracy to heal democracy, as you could if our democracy was strong, and checks and balances were in place.
So it is a radical shift in consciousness that we need right now, and we don't have time. We need to understand right now that this is a crisis. It's not business as usual. We can't leave it to other people, to Congress, to activists, or until the next election, because we are much further along than people realize.
So we do what we can do to resist. I admire Wolf and everyone who is trying to raise the alarm, but her book will be easily dismissed by the mainstream as leftist loony. And the only people who will read it are the minority who already agree with it.
The bottom line is that most Americans, even if they understood what was happening, don't really care. They don't see this ominous rightward swing in the political sphere as affecting them in any way that really matters. "Hey, it's just the way the world works," they say. And they're right, and any memory of the American ideal as the attempt to do something differently than "the way the world works" was either never understood or is considered romantic, liberal naivete. Liberals are by definition are starry eyed airheads who don't understand how the world works. For these realist Americans, for whom Dick Cheney is the prototype, America means nothing more than "our team" in an us-against-the-world contest.
I hope I'm proved wrong, but the bottom line is that unless there is a mass outcry against this incremental movement toward the historical militarized, authoritarian norm, there's no stopping it. The people for whom this movement toward a closed society is in their interest understand this. They have been working hard to establish the infrastructure and they realize that there is no real opposition to their agenda--certainly not in the media or in the congress. They understand that we're already on the other side of the tipping point, whether most people are aware of it or not, and that there's not going to be any significant roll back.
Wolf is calling for a reverse tipping point, one in which a majority of Americans will become outraged and demand that their representatives stop this movement toward the authoritarian surveillance state. Anybody think such a reversal is possible? Someone give me a scenario in which you might think such a thing will happen. I want to believe it's possible, but I don't see it.
Update I: Interesting that it's Buddhist monks leading the protests in Myanamar:
Earlier Tuesday, the army began deploying troops in the heart of Yangon after tens of thousands of people led by barefoot monks in maroon robes defied orders to stay off the streets and marched for the eighth straight day against the junta.
Troops were also seen gathering at a military center in Mandalay and military trucks rumbled through the streets of both cities late into the night, witnesses said.
The potential for a violent crackdown had already aroused international concern, with pleas for the junta to deal peacefully with the situation coming from government and religious leaders worldwide. They included the Dalai Lama and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates like detained Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Who has the moral stature to lead such a protest in this country? I think that's what it's going to take for such a protest not to be dismissed as fomented by lefty rabble rousers. This is the point I've been making repeatedly, and which secularists don't seem to get. The lead has to be taken by people who have moral stature, or such a movement will be perceived as the predictable politics of the disgruntled.
There has to be a call to conscience by a leader or a group of leaders which has real moral authority. Is there any sense from readers about potential religious figures in this country who could play a leadership role in such a conscience-driven protest movement? I'm sorry to say that for me no one comes to mind. What is it about God-fearing Americans that the emergence of such moral leadership is almost impossible to imagine? Am I being too harsh?
Update II: Read this speech by Daniel Ellsberg entitled 'A Coup Has Occurred'. Ellsberg thinks an attack on Iran and the ensuing Iranian retaliation, perhaps in the form of another 9/11, is very likely. The crisis atmosphere that it will create will give the authoritarian elements in the administration the pretext they need to tighten domestic police and surveillance controls. Does this sound paranoid? I don't know. Such a scenario is certainly within the realm of possibility, and should not be glibly dismissed. An excerpt:
I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.
If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps. . . .Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.