If someone as mainstream as former Bush cheerleader Andrew Sullivan gets it, there is no excuse for anyone else. The only explanation is willful blindness. Commenting on Glenn Greenwald’s new book he says:
The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism [Bush’s Manichean project to defeat the forces of Evil] to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.
It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them – because, right now, it’s mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we’ve degenerated in so short a time.
There is still a chance to repair the damage – but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it’s because I honestly didn’t expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity – indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.
Maybe at some point he’ll get how his Thatcherite libertarian conservatism has greased the skids to get us into this mess. Sullivan understands the limitations of left Liberalism, but not of his own conservative Liberalism, which is essentially what Thatcherites and Libertarians are. On the plus side, their small-government principles incline them to oppose authoritarianism. On the minus side, Libertarian market ideology with its concomitant embrace of deregulation removes the constraints from the power elite and provide it with the ideological cover it needs to accumulate the power necessary for promoting an authoritarian agenda. Isn’t this exactly what we’ve seen?
As Sullivan points out, the system requires "an elite willing to stand up against their own power." But why should it? When in human history has it done so for more than short while? What kind of sane system depends on the already powerful to self-limit their power? What kind of understanding of human nature would incline anybody to think that possible? Even if 90% of elites are indifferent to power accumulation, what
motivation has this majority to prevent the 10% minority which lusts for it? The majority is easily
bought off or coopted with tax breaks and other perqs designed to neutralize its opposition. Isn’t this exactly what we’ve seen happen?
And when inevitably this elite does not self-limit, what means have the rest of us to staunch the erosion of our liberty? Well it requires the power of government to set those limits, and if government has been so weakened by Libertarian principle, we have no means. We will become inevitably like those authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin America with its "terrorist" resistance in the mountains or underground in the cities, and their anti-authoritarian sympathizers getting disappeared. That’s the price that the rest of us will pay for our lack of vigilance and for our too-easy willingness to accept these criminals at their word.
Sullivan has seen the error of his early Bush support; the question remains whether it’s too late. The degree to which we take seriously any of these 2008 Republican presidential candidates, each trying to out-Jack Bauer the other, is an indicator of the degree to which we have failed to understand our predicament.
Update: See also this piece by Robert Parry. An excerpt:
. . .historians will scroll through front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and every other major newspaper – as well as scan the national network news and the 24-hour cable channels – and find not a single story connecting the dots, explaining the larger picture: the end of a remarkable democratic experiment which started in 1776 and which was phased out sometime in the early 21st century.
How, these historians may ask, did the U.S. press corps miss one of history’s most important developments? Was it a case like the proverbial frog that would have jumped to safety if tossed into boiling water but was slowly cooked to death when the water was brought to a slow boil?
Or was it that journalists and politicians intuitively knew that identifying too clearly what was happening in the United States would have compelled them to action, and that action would have meant losing their jobs and livelihoods? Perhaps, too, they understood that there was little they could do to change the larger reality, so why bother?
As for the broader public, did the fear and anger generated by the 9/11 attacks so overwhelm the judgment of Americans that they didn’t care that President Bush had offered them a deal with the devil, he would promise them a tad more safety in exchange for their liberties?
And what happened to the brave souls who did challenge Bush’s establishment of an authoritarian state? Why, the historians may wonder, did the American people and their representatives not rise up as Bush systematically removed honorable public servants who did their best to uphold the nation’s laws and principles?
One could go down a long list of government officials who were purged or punished for speaking up, the likes of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Read more.
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