Dumbing Democracy Down
I have had in mind for some time a post on the subject of how little correlation there is between the abstract idealized concept of "democracy" and the on-the-ground manifestations at home and abroad. I would almost have sworn I had so posted not long ago, but cursory skim of archives suggests not.
As you might imagine, recent events in Pakistan have definitely acted to galvanize this concept that has been festering with me for several months.
One of the primary contributing allergens here was the desperate flailing by george-the-even-lesser after his first several pretexts for attacking and occupying Iraq came up empty. This sanctimonious business about spreading democracy and freedom only arose when the venality of his first desperate attempts to justify his criminality was exposed. But this "spreading" rationale is obvious hooey also; we have treated Iraq like a foix gras goose, force-feeding what we need down the national gullet with sufficient vehemence to overcome the gag reflex. Of course, given how devoid of actual imagination and creativity these thugs are, the result necessarily bears a strong resemblance to a noir-ish takeoff on something that Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair would have a field day with - or would if the killing and violence could be contained.
So there's that side of the equation, and comparably dark descriptions could doubtless be developed for the outcome of our efforts in Afghanistan.
And then there is the other realm of the quality of government and human rights in those countries we cozy up to and call our bosom-buddies (although I don't recall seeing any bush neck-rubs for the like of Bandar-Bush, Musharraf, et al). How do you suppose an actual unbiased auditor might rate the state of democracy and human rights in, say Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, or Pakistan, just to pick a few examples?
I'm guessing those grades would be pretty low.
Which brings me around to the second part of the equation. The destruction of human rights and abuse of the Constitution here in these united states in the last seven years is from what I can tell wholly unprecedented. There have certainly been abuses in the past (Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War comes to mind), and presidents (Hoover, e.g.) with a disdain for actual individual people and their critical central priority, at least as the founders seem to have had it.
Obeisance to corporations, and the elevation of the corporation to a status of greater importance than an actual person, is a long-standing issue that already had the country out-of-kilter since well before Clinton. But Reagan, Ford, Clinton, and now Bush have definitely been devilish when it comes to abandoning the needs and rights of actual people, all of them to varying degrees succubuses to Big Business, selling out human rights at home and abroad as they pocketed huge wads of cash.
But we are experiencing a new thing here. Bush has of course pursued this destruction of the principle that actual live People have priority over the East India Company/ENRON/megacorporation X/Boeing/Microsoft/military-industrial-complex that our nation's founders fought so hard for to a nadir unimaginable a decade or so ago. The multitude of ways in which our rights as Persons are in the process of being suborned, and the basic principles of what we came to take for granted as our rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights is absolutely appalling.
Which, in a round-about way, brings me to my original Ironic-thesis.
George the never-accountable, persistent semi-psychopathic schoolground-bully, and AWOL stealer of expensive flight-training may indeed find a way in his ever-so-twisted narcoleptic, addictive, narcissistic saurian brain-stem to rationalize that he is indeed "spreading democracy." How so? Well it's a lot like the "torture" thing. It's all in the words, you know. Change the definition and you change the zeitgeist. We as a country now seem to be semi-complacent with a rampantly corrupt election system, torture as a matter of national policy, and spying and surveillance of the citizenry in violation of the laws passed in response to far more limited Nixonian transgressions. We have barely managed to come around to regretting the consequences of a wholly-uncalled-for aggressive invasion and occupation of a non-threatening nation with a human cost of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, apparently solely in the interests of braggadocio and a chance to swagger in a codpiece, one-up dad, and control oil resources.
Given a few more months of erosion of democracy here at home at the current rate, it won't be a huge stretch to find some fuzzy equivalency between the degree of "democracy" in any number of nations that are (appropriately) flashing red for human rights organizations (e.g., because they are receiving our renditions and doing the torture for us so John McCain can still run for office) with life here in the good old usa.
Frank Rich has some similarly dark ruminations, and I tip my hat to him for inspiring me to get something like the post I though I had already done together:
As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.
General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
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But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.
In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
-clip-
As you might imagine, recent events in Pakistan have definitely acted to galvanize this concept that has been festering with me for several months.
One of the primary contributing allergens here was the desperate flailing by george-the-even-lesser after his first several pretexts for attacking and occupying Iraq came up empty. This sanctimonious business about spreading democracy and freedom only arose when the venality of his first desperate attempts to justify his criminality was exposed. But this "spreading" rationale is obvious hooey also; we have treated Iraq like a foix gras goose, force-feeding what we need down the national gullet with sufficient vehemence to overcome the gag reflex. Of course, given how devoid of actual imagination and creativity these thugs are, the result necessarily bears a strong resemblance to a noir-ish takeoff on something that Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair would have a field day with - or would if the killing and violence could be contained.
So there's that side of the equation, and comparably dark descriptions could doubtless be developed for the outcome of our efforts in Afghanistan.
And then there is the other realm of the quality of government and human rights in those countries we cozy up to and call our bosom-buddies (although I don't recall seeing any bush neck-rubs for the like of Bandar-Bush, Musharraf, et al). How do you suppose an actual unbiased auditor might rate the state of democracy and human rights in, say Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, or Pakistan, just to pick a few examples?
I'm guessing those grades would be pretty low.
Which brings me around to the second part of the equation. The destruction of human rights and abuse of the Constitution here in these united states in the last seven years is from what I can tell wholly unprecedented. There have certainly been abuses in the past (Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War comes to mind), and presidents (Hoover, e.g.) with a disdain for actual individual people and their critical central priority, at least as the founders seem to have had it.
Obeisance to corporations, and the elevation of the corporation to a status of greater importance than an actual person, is a long-standing issue that already had the country out-of-kilter since well before Clinton. But Reagan, Ford, Clinton, and now Bush have definitely been devilish when it comes to abandoning the needs and rights of actual people, all of them to varying degrees succubuses to Big Business, selling out human rights at home and abroad as they pocketed huge wads of cash.
But we are experiencing a new thing here. Bush has of course pursued this destruction of the principle that actual live People have priority over the East India Company/ENRON/megacorporation X/Boeing/Microsoft/military-industrial-complex that our nation's founders fought so hard for to a nadir unimaginable a decade or so ago. The multitude of ways in which our rights as Persons are in the process of being suborned, and the basic principles of what we came to take for granted as our rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights is absolutely appalling.
Which, in a round-about way, brings me to my original Ironic-thesis.
George the never-accountable, persistent semi-psychopathic schoolground-bully, and AWOL stealer of expensive flight-training may indeed find a way in his ever-so-twisted narcoleptic, addictive, narcissistic saurian brain-stem to rationalize that he is indeed "spreading democracy." How so? Well it's a lot like the "torture" thing. It's all in the words, you know. Change the definition and you change the zeitgeist. We as a country now seem to be semi-complacent with a rampantly corrupt election system, torture as a matter of national policy, and spying and surveillance of the citizenry in violation of the laws passed in response to far more limited Nixonian transgressions. We have barely managed to come around to regretting the consequences of a wholly-uncalled-for aggressive invasion and occupation of a non-threatening nation with a human cost of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, apparently solely in the interests of braggadocio and a chance to swagger in a codpiece, one-up dad, and control oil resources.
Given a few more months of erosion of democracy here at home at the current rate, it won't be a huge stretch to find some fuzzy equivalency between the degree of "democracy" in any number of nations that are (appropriately) flashing red for human rights organizations (e.g., because they are receiving our renditions and doing the torture for us so John McCain can still run for office) with life here in the good old usa.
Frank Rich has some similarly dark ruminations, and I tip my hat to him for inspiring me to get something like the post I though I had already done together:
As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.
General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
-clip-
But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.
In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
-clip-
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:34 PM
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