Overt Ops
A natural starting hypothesis would be that Americans, or the American ruling class, benefit from the abandonment of the rule of law. It’s certainly true that the suppression of basic rights has gone hand in hand with the development of a culture of impunity for the ruling class, particularly in relation to crimes committed in the name of security. But there’s very little evidence to suggest that Gitmo, military commissions and so on have done anything to promote security.
John is pondering the Obama administration’s acquiescence (or worse) in the torture of Bradley Manning and restart of Guantanamo-based show trials for terrorism defendants. While he’s got two more theories in his post, I think he discards his first one too quickly. Specifically, the objection he adduces – lawless “security” policy hasn’t actually promoted security – isn’t a refutation of the theory on offer – the American elite benefit from abandoning (I’d say flouting) the rule of law.
As John says, the bald obliteration of “due process” for the weak – starting with brown foreigners early in the GWOT Era, moving through dusky American men and uniformed American women of all races, now to the glaringly white Manning and distressed homeowners of any color – has paralleled the destruction of any system of consequences for elite malfeasance. Billions of dollars in Iraq funds can go missing; powerful officials admit to guilty foreknowledge of settled crimes; billionaires replenish their piggie banks at the Treasury after a bender; pliant agencies scramble to upend four hundred years of settled law so to legitimize outright forgery.
But these twin trajectories aren’t ironic, they are the point. Abandoning the rule of law certainly provides, as it were, the ruling class with “security.” They can get away with enormities themselves, and get away with ever more blatantly high-handed measures against anyone less powerful who opposes them or is simply inconvenient. It’s a nice racket. As for what Barack Obama has to do with all of this, which is what John’s post speculates on, the answer appears to be, nothing consequential. His first and possibly last consequential act was to leave the real centers of American government power – Defense, Treasury and the Chair of the Federal Reserve – in the hands of the supposed opposition party. Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democratic White House allowed Republicans to destroy the effectiveness of key components of the liberal base – ACORN; the SEIU; etc. – with a succession of fake scandals, never lifting a finger to defend the people and organizations who did the actual work to get them elected. They discouraged the nascent grassroots web network the Obama presidential campaign fostered from becoming an effective post-election pressure group. Then, a miracle! a devastated Democratic electoral machine delivered unusually pathetic electoral results even for a midterm election in a bad economy.
The best construction you can put on the record of two years of Democratic “rule” is that it featured rank incompetence at practical politics. At the end of it, the institutional centers of the Republican Party were stronger and growing stronger yet, while the institutional centers of the Democratic Party were smashed and vulnerable to further destruction. Not being a mindreader, I can’t say why Barack Obama and his party’s leadership (if I can use that word), have been so willing to accomodate themselves to the imperatives of American militarism and plutocracy. I can only look at their actual behavior and conclude that Barack Obama and his party’s leadership don’t especially matter.
Settled precedent, bipartisan elite behavior and media consensus all ratify an increasingly high-handed regime of controls on most of the country in the name of an uncontrolled minority. Like John, I find it “hard to avoid a feeling of fatalism” about the course of enough of the country’s future that I’ll be too old to properly enjoy any eventual turnaround. What I find, though, is that political despair doesn’t make much of a muse.
[UPDATE: In comments TGGP points out that Tim Geithner was not a registered Republican at the time Barack Obama nominated him for the Treasury post. Geithner is apparently a former Republican turned independent. Also, the reference to SEIU here is sloppy. While it’s a favorite target of conservatives, it didn’t suffer material harm against it in 2009-10 the way ACORN did. What I should have written about was the damage to the Democratic/progressive base by both hostile conservative action and Democratic-party inaction on key base issues. The end result remains a compromised activist machinery.)
Comment by Ginger —
March 12, 2011 @ 10:58 am
that political despair doesn’t make much of a muse.
This is why I quit blogging politics.
Comment by TGGP —
March 12, 2011 @ 11:01 am
His first and possibly last consequential act was to leave [...] Treasury [...] in the hands of the supposed opposition party.
What? Did Geithner get replaced without me hearing about it?
destroy the effectiveness [...] SEIU
I recall a big hubbub about defunding ACORN (which I was all in favor of, and hoped it could be used to catch contractors) and O’Keefe’s video, but what happened to SEIU?
Comment by dhex —
March 12, 2011 @ 12:03 pm
we’re back to the evil party and the stupid party narrative again? really?
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 12, 2011 @ 12:36 pm
@dhex: I wouldn’t put it that way at all. I’m talking about an elite consensus that makes trying to mindread “the stupid party” an irrelevant exercise.
@TGGP: Geithner is a former Republican and apparently a registered independent at the time of his nomination, and does not seem to have ever been an actual Democrat. But it’s wrong on my part to have essentially identified him as a current Republican, so I just posted a correction.
On SEIU, that was sloppy of me. There was, as always, a lot of anti-SEIU rhetoric on the right, but no material action at the level of what happened with ACORN. I was hazily thinking of something else and got lazy.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 12, 2011 @ 12:44 pm
Jim-
Excellent post! Glad to see you back! I’ve been too depressed about it to blog about Manning and Gitmo lately, so I’m glad you stepped up.
dhex-
I would say that it’s more like “good cop/bad cop”.
Comment by Kevin Carson —
March 12, 2011 @ 1:57 pm
In trying to explain why the Democrats were so ineffectual in squandering away a supermajority, I keep falling back on cultural and demographic factors.
It goes back to what Josh Marshall called the “bitch slap theory of politics”:
“One way—perhaps the best way—to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves…”
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/003295.php
The larger context in which this is happening is a couple of mutually reinforcing demographic shifts over the past several decades.
First, the GOP’s geographical base has shifted to the South, the Plains and Rockies—places still inhabited by “inner-directed” personality types who value obeying the authoritarian rules they’ve internalized more than they worry about other people’s feelings. Blue states tend to be populated, on the other hand, where “works and plays well with others” is an important value.
Second, there’s been a major shift of the working class, starting with the Reagan Democrats, to the GOP over that same time period. Core Democratic supporters are more likely to be upper middle class professional types in white collar suburbs.
The upshot of all this is that Republican pols are more likely to come from a cultural background in which you respond to aggression on the playground by stomping the shit out of somebody. Democratic pols are more likely to come from a background where you go find a teacher to intervene.
Back when Democratic politicians were hard-assed ward heelers, someone like Truman or LBJ would have ripped off Tom Delay’s balls and made him eat them. Now they could have a 99-seat supermajority, and still curl up in a fetal position and beg the GOP not to steal their lunch money.
They act, in the kind of playground vernacular that the GOP understands, like “a buncha pussies.”
Comment by Thoreau —
March 12, 2011 @ 2:21 pm
I dunno, Kevin, it could be that they are a bunch of pussies. Or it could be that they don’t fight back because Good Cop and Bad Cop are on the same team and it’s all an act.
I do know this: There are crazy people of every political persuasion, but Democrats run from crazies who lean left while Republicans woo crazies who lean right. I just haven’t figured out whether it’s because the Democrats are more mature, more intimidated, or part of the same act. I lean toward the latter on an institutional level, but I’m sure the other factors come in for some individuals within the team.
Comment by Asteele —
March 12, 2011 @ 3:00 pm
Kevin that’s just not true working class voters vote democratic. Obama won people who make less than the medium income by like 60%. It’s true that working class white men vote r but that’s about it.
Comment by dhex —
March 12, 2011 @ 3:38 pm
Not being a mindreader, I can’t say why Barack Obama and his party’s leadership (if I can use that word), have been so willing to accomodate themselves to the imperatives of American militarism and plutocracy.
a simpler explanation (to me) is because it’s their bag and the donkey gloss of the presidency blinded people who would normally either a) recognize this or b) at least be more upfront about the lesser (or “lesser”) of two evils. everyone’s still playing football. why is the assumption that half the wealthy and powerful people playing this game are somehow not driven by the same base desires for power, vengeance and control? why is there an assumption that a (D) somewhere in their cspan chiron means they don’t believe the state’s interests are more important than any individual? (when it comes to security and torture in particular)
perhaps i am too cynical to see the forrest or the trees. but as you point out, the same people are picking up the check and the same overarching drive – all that disconnected tea party stuff* aside – is more state, better state, heavier state.
Blue states tend to be populated, on the other hand, where “works and plays well with others” is an important value.
days after the egypt uprising really took off, one of my wife’s colleagues (english phd, from michigan) sent out a bunch of stuff about the “heroes of wisconsin”.
i laughed; then i realized she was serious.
* i think the whole narrative that emerged when the tea party ball of semi-populist gibberish started rolling that this was the beginning of a right wing racist war against our holy president**, real and true, was part of the frustrated desire for some kind of real conflict i.e. blud and bullets. maybe it’s just irritation due to typical pov blindness (my friends and i are allies; you are a conspiracy) and not nearly that serious or even coherent. i.e. it’s more frustrated half-blind ramblings a la the tea party.
** this still makes me laugh, because so many dems have internalized this idea that they’re the victims of the world rather than co-conspirators just because they stick a few bucks in the tip jar now and then.
Comment by abb1 —
March 12, 2011 @ 3:52 pm
What Thoreau 7 said: they are on the same team, serve the same boss, paid from the same purse.
I don’t know if it’s the good cop/bad cop game though, it’s more like a kabuki dance, or bait-and-switch or something. One clique doesn’t deliver (or, usually, makes things worse) – the other one gets elected. That one fails – time for the first one again. And so it goes.
Comment by TGGP —
March 12, 2011 @ 8:41 pm
Apparently, Bob Kuttner was fooled into thinking Geithner was a Dem:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=meet_the_next_treasury_secretary
Comment by Happy Jack —
March 13, 2011 @ 12:56 am
As Arthur Silber said, “They’re called the ruling class because they rule.” On the bright side, we’re finally getting the transparency in government people have been longing for. The pols don’t pretend to care anymore, they’re showing their plumage.
As for the Team Blue stuff, Jimmy Carter should have been the canary in the coal mine. After McGovern, any noises made about the concerns of the “working man” slowly devolved into a whisper, then to the sound of silence.
Comment by Ayn R. Key —
March 14, 2011 @ 12:37 pm
You may find this an odd suggestion, but being conspiratorially minded I’ve been suspecting that Obama has been deliberately playing to lose.
Social Security is toast. When it finally completely upends (2016 is supposedly when) then the budget will be broken and so will the government. Obama is doing his best to push the collapse (and not just SS) out just a little farther.
Whoever presides in the next term will, fairly or unfairly, get the blame for the bust and crackup, the fully collapsed economy and the hyper-inflation.
If Obama plays to lose now, he can set up the Republican winner in 2012 to take the blame.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 14, 2011 @ 1:08 pm
I don’t believe that any President is actually smart enough to play 11-dimensional chess.