Maintaining Bush's Authoritarian Infrastructure

Is that what Obama's doing? It would appear so. Charlie Savage:

You know, I had this interesting conversation when I was working on this article that came out this morning with Jack Balkin at Yale Law School, and he compares this moment to when Dwight Eisenhower took over, in 1953, and after FDR and then Truman had built up the New Deal administrative state, which Republicans hated, but then Eisenhower, instead of dismantling it, just sort of adjusted it with his own policies a little bit, and kept it going. And at that point, there was no longer any sort of partisan controversy about the fact that we were going to have this massive administrative state; it just sort of became a permanent part of the governing structure of the country.

And in the same way he said in 1969 when Richard Nixon took over from LBJ, he did some adjustments to the great society welfare state that LBJ had built up, but he didn't scrap it. And at that point, Republicans and Democrats had both presided over the welfare state and the welfare state became part of just how government worked.

That in the same way, Obama now, by continuing the broad outlines of the various surveillance and detention and counter-terrorism programs, is draining them of plausible partisan controversy, and so they are going to become entrenched and consolidated as permanent features of American government as well, going forward. (See full interview here with Greenwald.)

This is, alas, how it works.  Obama's actions so far have confirmed my worst fears that we are too far gone. The system gets what the system wants, and these politicians have neither the will nor the capability to stand up to it and redirect it.  They are simply servants and tools of this transpersonal power they don't really understand or care to.

I know there are a thousand and one justifications for the decisions these people make, just as there were a thousand and one justifications for slavery and torture and the invasion of Iraq and abortion and so many other things that we all know deep down are just wrong. These policy makers are lost in the thicket of rationalizations without a moral compass, and the result is policy after policy determined by the lowest common denominator, which usually means some variation of greed and power aggregation.

I've said before that I would with the deepest gratitude be proved wrong on this, and it may happen yet.  But six months in, it's not looking good.  We have a president whose style is more sophisticated, but if it's in the service of continuing this awful trend, then it's all the more pernicious for disguising the substance of the polices that lie behind.