"Process" is now considered a bad word by political consultants. After writing Worse than Watergate in 2004, which was about the secrecy of the Bush administration, I learned that the Kerry campaign did not use the subject of secrecy because they thought it was a "process" issue. It seemed almost standard policy of Democrats to avoid process issues, with the Congressional leadership telling candidates not to use process issues because they’re wimpy. Well, the name of the game played in Washington is process.
Republicans are manipulating the process to their advantage. –John Dean
My argument has not been that George Bush and Dick Cheney are singularly wicked people who have been seized by some aberrational impulse to hijack our democracy. Rather I see their project as normative, and it’s precisely for that reason that the media and everyone in the mainstream political class see no urgency in doing anything to stop it. Issues like signing statements and the unitary executive, the politicization of DOJ, torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus are framed as if these were issues about which reasonable people can disagree. There’s the GOP take on them, and the Dem take. Ho Hum. If you accepted the mainstream media framing of these issues, it’s only the cranky, hardcore extremist left think that gets really upset about what’s happening around these issues. But every American with any common sense should be outraged.
It’s so discouraging. Because the real story is about the underlyiing structural changes in process. These changes make us now more than ever structurally disposed toward increasing levels of authoritarianism, and if it were not Bush/Cheney pushing these changes, it would be and will be someone else. We will see at a certain point down the road, that Bush/Cheney’s role was to have laid the groundwork for the future. We will see that with the institutional checks they have systematically dismantled, the only thing that stands in the way of a future executive with near dictatorial powers will be the will of the other branches of government to stop such a development. And we’ve seen time and time again, that they are not disposed to do it.
In my more hopeful moments, I think that surely some counter movement toward reversal of these process changes is taking shape out of the media spotlight and behind the scenes. Surely there are people in positions of influence that are as alarmed about what’s happening as people like me are. But there has been very little sign of it. The Beltway political class is either ok with these process changes or they are resigned to it.
We all tend to think of the American system as so solid and impregnable, but it is a house of cards with no more substance than the will of the people who work within its institutions to resist its gradual degradation. We have seen there is no will to resist on the level of process changes, and the structural integrity has been severely undermined. As a result we are witnessing this house of cards collapsing right in front of our eyes in slow motion. It’s surreal. It’s as if we’re in a dream watching some absurdist concatenation of events that we are incapable of comprehending. We slap ourselves a couple of times in the face, and decide to think about something more pleasant. Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.
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