In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the real threat to American freedom was not from an outside assault, but from the devious manipulations of our own misguided leaders. "The greatest dangers to liberty," he observed, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding."
Nearly 80 years after Brandeis’s warning, the zealots have been brought in from the far-right fringe on the golden chariot of George W, and they’ve shown that they have no understanding of the essence of America, which includes our hard-won liberties, our rule of law and our system of checked-and-balanced governmental power. —Jim Hightower.
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I would emphasize that it’s not because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are diabolical creatures intent on doing evil. They genuinely believe it’s in the interests of the United States, and the world, that unconstrained American power should determine the shape of the international order. I think they vastly overstate our capabilities. For all of their supposed worldliness and sophistication, I don’t think they understand the world. I am persuaded that their efforts will only lead to greater mischief while undermining our democracy. Yet I don’t question that, at some gut level, they think they are acting on your behalf and mine. They are all the more dangerous as a result.–Andrew Bacevich
Staying away from the question about how cynical or sincere administration policy in the Middle East has been–let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now–nevertheless the one clear picture that has emerged about the engineers of this policy is that they do not understand the world as it is. They have a brutish imagination of the way the world works, and they only understand what happens within worlds which they can control through their brutish methods.
Isn’t that the psychology of all zealots. Because zealots are so impoverished in their imaginations and so incapable of understanding any thinking but their own, they insist that the world think and behave as they do. It’s the only way they can feel safe. And because the world is complex and confusing and does not willingly comply with the zealots’ demand to think and behave as they want it to, they seek in whatever way they can to violently impose their will on it. Ideology is just a cover story to justify their need to control. God is always on their side.
Often enough control freaks are successful in imposing their will. The smaller and less complex the environment the control freak seeks to dominate, the more likely the success. The GOP syndicate, for instance, is capable of dominating the Beltway in this way, but it is not able to dominate a social reality as complex and foreign to their sensibility as the societies of the Middle East. They thought their brutish methods would carry the day, and instead they just made things worse. The zealot has little trouble imposing his will on the sane and reasonable people who stand in his way, but has a harder time when he encounters those who are as zealous as he.
But the worst thing about a control freak is that he only knows one way to deal with what he doesn’t understand or what frightens him, and that’s to strive to dominate it. Fear is at the heart of all zealots. And the more chaotic things get, the less they understand, and the more it frightened they become. And so like cornered animals, they attack. That’s all they know. So now in the Middle East instead of hearing some sane plan of adjusting to failure, we hear talk about attacking Iran. Iran is a problem, but the last thing the world needs is these zealots anywhere near the table where solutions to the problem are being worked out.
We Americans have the opportunity to put these sick people in a straitjacket in November. For the world’s sake, we had better.
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