Well, here we are. And there HE is. It’s difficult for me to constrain my thoughts and express them cogently. In truth, as these last few years have yielded up to history, with all their lost potential and frightening realities – I found myself variously proud, hopeful, forlorn and ashamed as concerns my Country. And now these tumultuous feelings have yielded to depression, sadness, and not a little fear about the potentials of our future history. Yet I am determined to find hope…

As a youth I was, like most other American citizens, possessed of an unconscious sense of security, possibility, liberty and normalcy. I took for granted as fully normal, natural and quite boring the social world in which I lived. Surrounded by this perceived banality, I found my curiosity drawn to the odd, the dramatic and the scientific. As I matured, my natural curiosity about form and function, origins and motivational forces led me to appreciate history. I started by savoring the near-mythological histories of Assyria, Akkadia, Sumeria, the Indus, Egypt and other ancient regimes. At the time, I thought my own nation unremarkably bland and was incurious about it. It seemed when my contemporary society was compared to the dramas and surging currents of ambitious empires of old, its machinations and stories were particularly trivial. Certainly we had Washington and Lincoln, and their lives generated interesting stories to recommend them to my scrutiny – but we had no Xerxes, Cyrus, Alexander, or Ramses. World War II was moderately interesting to me, but otherwise I failed to be captivated by the sagas of America. By comparison, the grand persons and conquests of the ancient world beckoned with quiet whispers from beneath eons of dust. One common aspect of all these dusty empires was their transience; always they fell to other conquerors or to corruption. Often the fall took many centuries or even millennia, which seems vast to our modern senses; but changes in and to societies were slower when the pace of interaction was determined by walking and wind. After much curious study I began to wonder by what means a State less prone to failure might be constructed or if such stability were even possible. Thus I started learning and pondering the causes of instability and extinction on a national scale. Eventually I found that other minds in other times had had similar curiosities, and shared a conviction that a people could do better. I found resonance at last in the notions of thinkers of the Enlightenment: Descartes, Voltaire, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hume and there, sitting at the end of the line were names from glossy (but boring) fifth-grade textbooks: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, Paine, Smith, Monroe and all the Founders. It was an astonishing surprise. As is so often the case with the young – wide had I wandered in search of a truth that was always back home.

So began my love-affair with my country.

I studied the incredible thought and debate which went into the founding precepts and institutions of our body politic: The skin thick to totalitarianism, the vital inoculation of disestablishment, the musculature of collective strength, the delicately balanced skeleton of opposing forces for making, enforcing and adjudicating civil law – and the recognition of the inherent value of each person comprising the body. Never before had such a well-formed giant bestrode the Earth. Imperfect – yes; for systems are always vulnerable to chaos in direct proportion to their complexity, and the ever-growing complexity of a nation-state invites corresponding opportunities for chaos. However, unlike any nation previously extant, the United States gave careful consideration to the vagaries of chaos, the means by which it may be introduced, and the strategies for combating it. After great debate and research in to the trials and errors of history, the answer devised by the Founders seems simple and unremarkable: Inertia and dampening. Inertia in this political context is the tendency of a political entity to remain on course once a direction has been selected. The greater the mass of opinion, intention and motivation – the more likely it is that the course will be maintained for a significant time. Dampening is the related notion that sudden or brief perturbations to a political entity will tend to die out over time, in part because of prior inertia and in part because extreme or radical changes typically have short durations. This is a sort of political shock-absorber. Some clarification and illumination is in order…

The early years of our nation were fraught with deadly perils: State vs. National sovereignty limits, individual liberty, national fiscal policy, international relations and competition (violent or not), and a long-standing public heritage of existing (comfortably or not) under near or nearly absolute totalitarian rule. If at any juncture the social, economic, political or cultural chaos introduced by these issues were allowed to grow, the fledgling giant would have been knocked off of its feet. The main things which enabled balance to be maintained were the inertia of the system which, when once set upon a course, would continue thus unless tremendously affected, and the dampening out of changes such that the more radical the perturbation, the greater the resistance to it. The result being that the giant tends to move down a path once directed – in large part due to the great time and effort required for generating consensus about a course-change, and that changes to the “body” are dampened – by checks and balances and the averaging of the opinions of the electorate.

Another effect of dampening concerns reactions to corruption. As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his insightful “Democracy in America”, every political institution will necessarily be subject to corruption. One of the measures of a “good” or successful democratic government is the extent to which it minimizes said corruption. Within the American system, term limits, a free press (or rather the result: an informed electorate) and the voting mechanisms associated with democracy all conspire to limit or dampen corruption.

Over the years great social, ethical, fiscal and philosophical currents have exerted constant pressure on the national body. Some currents are so protracted and strong that the course of history has been altered (e.g. emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, federal fiscal control, federal taxation) and some have caused momentary lurches since dampened out (e.g. Jim Crow laws, Native American extermination, prohibition, McCarthyism). The large tendency has always been toward political centrism, social inclusiveness and economic expansion, though the discreet and various means of achieving such ends have been more or less successful and long-lived.

Jefferson and his paean to the virtues of a regular bloodletting of revolution notwithstanding, the Founders recognized that long-term viability was more likely to result from ponderous caution and structured governmental infighting than from a system inclined to reacting to the whims and temperaments of the moment. Yet some moments require immediate response; moments such as natural disasters, acts of war or civil strife. To accommodate this need, the Executive was imbued with the power to act immediately and decisively. The Executive could not be a collective such as the Triumvirate used by the Roman empire, for any collection of minds larger than one necessarily invites opportunities for protracted debate, schism and stalemate. The Founders viewed the powers of the Executive as the most dangerous threat to the system they created; for the proclivities, personal ambitions, malevolencies, philosophies and charisma of a single person could effect immediate and radical change if the powers invested in such person were too great. And there’s the rub, what constitutes “too great”? The Founders left enough up to interpretation, and the context of the world has changed so dramatically (15-minute war anybody?) that this issue is the single most important one with which our Republic struggles.

For two hundred and twenty-five odd years, our nation has striven to variously contain and expand the power of the executive. Before Lincoln, the power of the Federal government, including the executive, was vastly more limited than today. Lincoln, by asserting federal rights of control greatly expanded the reach of all branches of the national government – some of which were of dubious legal standing based on an interpretation of the previously-existing framework (e.g. the Emancipation Proclamation and the suspension of Habeas Corpus). Likewise, under F.D.R. the national course was altered dramatically by the power of the executive. His programs of entitlement and national welfare constituted a vast expansion of the role of the federal government, though at least in his case the other branches of the government knowingly participated in his scheme for extension. Conversely, presidents such as Wilson (League of Nations) and Clinton (national health care and gays in the military) have had their ideas (or idealism, as the case may be) thwarted by the intervention of the other governmental branches. It is prudent to recognize that the power of the executive branch is most easily expanded in times of national crisis, during which the natural human tendency to look to a single guiding personality subverts the more abstract and intellectual approach associated with periods of banality.

So here we are today: November 4th, 2004. Once again our nation is beset by crisis, the most obvious symptom of which was that September day these few years past. Once again we turned to the president seeking immediate and decisive action. And not surprisingly, once again the executive branch is taking the opportunity to expand its purview. It’s business as normal in America. But with a twist…

Prior crises have comprised clear and present dangers: Civil war, international war, huge and violent strikes, debilitating economic depression. Although the events of September 11th were a clear affront to our psychological sense of security and immunity, and an indisputable attack on our citizenry – the Bush administration has leveraged the event for political capital (and it’s hard to imagine a political entity or machine which wouldn’t given realities about the world and personalities), and this leveraging is a reaction in kind to the nature of the threat. Insomuch as the crises of the past (with the exception of the political specter of communism) have largely been tangible assaults on material and persons by other tangible persons, the threat of today is hard to define, impossible to localize and disassociated from any but a very few identifiable persons (we can call them “Terrorists”, but that only labels or characterizes them, it does nothing to identify them). Thus, today’s threat is shadowy, and it plays against our primal fear of shadows, of beasts at our backs, of knives around the dark corner. It is then, I would argue, quite logical (though perhaps not most effective) that the response to the threat would be similarly nebulous in scope, specification and application. In this light, it makes sense that the easy and quick response was for the executive branch to acquire and retain for itself the broadly reaching and ill-defined powers such as exemplified by the Patriot Act, preemptive war and indiscriminate identification and nullification (via Guantanamo imprisonment, killing of foreign insurgents, torture of those suspected of having useful information, and imprisonment of American citizens). The executive branch is doing what it’s supposed to do: react quickly to an immanent threat. Only in this case the threat is generally held to be cloudy and ill-formed, thus so must be the response. I could argue strongly that the threat isn’t so inscrutable as many believe; or would have us believe – but here I will but summarize: In a free-market world with very limited resources, there will always be the privileged and the impoverished – on every scale from the personal to the international. Combining exponential growth in technology, and lowering costs of incredibly impactful mechanisms and compounds with the growing ease of transportation and the permeability of international boundaries; it is inevitable that the “have-nots” will acquire the means to do great and perhaps grievous harm to the “haves”. As great power becomes cheaper and targets more accessible, great damage is inevitable when motivated by righteous indignation and deadly despair.

Back to the topic of the executive branch reacting to the current non-localized threat; where is the twist? It is that the current administration is able, due to the shadowy and ill-formed nature of the threat, to extract vast political capital from our base fears. The adds of the Republican party which blatantly showed dark, shadowy figures and howling wolves are a prime (or primal) example. In World War II, our government characterized, dehumanized and satirized German and Japanese people as variously menacing or sub-human, depending on the desired result. During the late 19th century Native Americans were similarly stigmatized. In order to feel good (or at least be complicit) about aggression towards others, we must dehumanize them in order to diminish the natural capacity for empathy. All of this is standard practice well known to propagandists, sociologists, the military and statesmen. The danger is twofold: The first lies in the fact that given such an ill-formed and unidentifiable threat, the temptation is very strong to subsume ALL suspect persons into the dark fog of threat. The second is in the temptation to classify all philosophies which contradict the norm (or in the case of the executive, his own), as contributing to the threat. Combining the two ideas, the tendency is to broaden the perceived scope of the threat and to quickly throw individuals into the “threatening” category based on generalizations, stereotypes and scant evidence. This is exactly what happened socially with the backlash against Islam, and diplomatically with the war against Iraq. Further, I believe that the GOP platform which played on primal fears of terror at the same time it talked about gay marriage, religious advocacy, gun control, the democratic party and every other item – leveraged this tendency toward over-generalization with the (perhaps unintended) effect that all contrary opinions, philosophies and persons were thrown into the dark fog of THREAT. This is due in no small part to the psychological tendency of the electorate to subconsciously rely on the veracity, protectiveness and good-intentions of the innately paternalistic office of the executive. Something rather like, “Daddy, protect me from all the scary monsters!”

In summary, I believe the GOP has abused the political and psychological clout arrogated to itself by virtue of the ill-defined threat of asymmetrically violent anti-Americanism – “Terror”. However, this abuse is not surprising, since it is human (and political) nature to leverage one’s assets to achieve one’s goals: We all use what we have to get what we want. It is sadly disheartening though, as we like to imagine that our leaders can rise above such base personal or political motivations to help us transcend our primal fears and base reactions; to temper our judgment with reason and our actions with justice. I would have liked to see so much more strength of character Mr. Bush, but such individuals I posit, are extremely rare, and rarer still do they acquire positions of power.

Unless our national body exercises caution and care, we may well fall prey to that great murderer of ancient empires – internal corruption. An informed electorate is in truth the fourth branch of our government, able to curtail any known egregious vice through our vote. We the people can, if we choose, disassemble our more perfect nation through destructive action or inattentive inaction.

So whence this hope to which I alluded at the beginning? It is this: That our system is imbued by its very nature with the tools to combat radicalism, irrational behavior and corruption. Sometimes it takes a while for these dampening effects to evince themselves, but historically dampening typically has occurred. Such ugly incidents and inclinations in our history as slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, extermination of Native Americans, subjugation of the Philippines, child labor, institutionally sanctioned prejudice and McCarthyism (though the national legislature and courts played an important role in these policies as well – lacking the moral guidance of a strong executive) have all been abrogated over time. There are two existential dangers: First, given the unprecedented huge military, cultural and economic power of the United States at this juncture, the dampening may not happen in time to save our nation. Second, will the fear and inaction of the citizenry cause our aberrant behavior to be amplified beyond our political machinery’s ability to compensate? In either case, it comes down to an issue of time. How long before either the citizenry spins out of control, or the government breaks its own bonds. Time is of the essence, for we no longer live in a world driven at the pace of walking and wind.

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 @ 8:26 am Towards a New Liberalism
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