Obama, Putin and Exceptionalism

The original star-spangled banner from the War of 1812

[Note: This essay owes a great debt to the book, The Next American Nation, and its author, Michael Lind, whose brilliant and incisive exploration of Americanism has deeply informed and inspired the ideas expressed here.]

Americans know they’re exceptional, unique, special; they feel it in their bones.  But are they?  The question of American exceptionalism is a confused tangle, and President Obama and Russian President Putin each recently tugged on that knot while arguing about intervention in the Syrian civil war.  Both of them added to the tangle, Obama by invoking exceptionalism, Putin by condemning it.  Let’s try to untangle the threads.  What is American exceptionalism?  In what way are we exceptional?  What is the cause or basis of this putative uniqueness?  And what does it imply for American relations with the world?

Putin seems to think that it’s purely a self-serving illusion, an alibi for America’s problematic unilateralism:

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

According to Putin, we operate as if military intervention is our prerogative, but that gets us in trouble.  We claim to be acting from noble motives but we end up looking like a bully.  We claim to be the world’s policeman, but we’re really the world’s vigilante, its rogue, unauthorized, dangerous vigilante: we’re George Zimmerman.  Even worse, we defend our right to intervene in the name of high ideals: we’re a sanctimonious George Zimmerman.  And Putin – despite being a puffed up autocrat who invades his small neighbors and protects murderous dictators – is courageously standing up to our bullying.  And he’s not just questioning American intentions and self-serving self-perception, but American efficacy as well.  He’s saying that our inflated sense of our own moral purity blinds us to both our moral and our practical limitations.  And really we are no better than anyone else:

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

He even invokes the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – expanding its doctrine of democratic equality from individuals to countries, as if to make the astounding claim that it’s impermissible to make moral comparisons between countries.  This is liberal reasoning run amuck, tolerance slipping into relativism.  Was Nazi Germany just as moral as Denmark, which surrendered peacefully to the Wehrmacht to avoid pointless bloodshed and refused to hand over its Jewish population?  Yes, there are big and small and rich and poor countries; but there are also countries that have done great evil and some that have done great good.  Just as there are evil men and good men.  The Declaration doesn’t endorse relativism, applied to countries or to individuals.  It merely holds that no individual has an inherent claim of authority over another.  Even a good person has no such claim over a bad person.  Is there anything in German culture which particularly lent itself to the madness of fascism and war?  Students of German culture may argue over that question, but they can’t dismiss it as fundamentally unreasonable. When Putin complains that America acts as if it’s better than everyone else, the appropriate response is to ask: Is it?

Most Americans seem to think it is.  Christian conservative Gary Bauer relates that in a 2010 poll fully 80% of Americans agreed with the statement, “Because of the United States’ history and its Constitution it has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.”  And a solid majority believes that “God has granted America a special role in history.”  Now that’s exceptionalism!  But Bauer, shrewd rhetorician that he is, never explicitly claims that America is “the greatest country in the world”; in fact, he denies that “America is inherently superior to other countries, or that God loves Americans more.”  Every exceptionalist writer seems compelled to include this particular disclaimer – that we’re not better, just different.  It usually comes just before the passage where they explain how much better we are.  I suppose that propriety demands we not display our superiority too flagrantly, it must be finessed and moderated.  And Bauer does not disappoint, declaring that “America has a special role to play on the world stage that’s distinct from the roles of other countries,” and that special role consists of “protecting and supporting [the] God-given rights” all humans possess.  If Putin quotes the Declaration of Independence in opposition to American exceptionalism, Bauer (like most exceptionalists) cites it as the source of our distinction:

Putin . . . is right that God creates all people equal, but what makes America exceptional is that it was the first country whose founding was rooted in the recognition of this important truth.

So one country has been charged to profess and nurture God’s political truths for the whole world, but it’s no better than any other country.  Is Bauer saying that our mission is superior – indeed, paramount – but we are not?  But that dodge raises another question just as problematic: How did we become the missionaries?

To address that question we must delve further into the American unconscious, down into its darker depths.  Yes, we must listen to Rush Limbaugh, the man whose daily oozings of conservative prejudices, rages and resentments comes across like free association in search of a national psychiatrist.  Let’s play Freud to his fever dream.  He makes the obligatory unconvincing disclaimer:

It does not mean that we're better people.  And it does not mean that we're special, more qualified, smarter, any of that, than anybody else in the world.  It doesn't mean that at all.

So we’re not special, got it.  But a minute later he berates Obama for thinking, “there’s nothing special about us” (inexplicably misrepresenting Obama).  So we’re not special but only European-style socialists like Obama think we’re not special.  OK, we may be special but we’re not smarter; I know we’re not because Rush said so.  But he laments that liberalism clouds people’s minds about our exceptionalism, it “takes over, and they think we're no better than anybody else. We're no smarter.”  So we’re no smarter than anybody else but liberalism hoodwinks gullible people into believing that we’re no smarter than anybody else.  It must be hard, especially for someone utterly without intellectual integrity, to maintain consistency over the course of a three hour discharge of semi-conscious malice.  But this is why we listen to Rush: to discern conservative instincts and the trickery used to obscure them.  Does anyone – anyone? – doubt that Rush thinks Americans are special, smarter – just plain better – than everyone else in the world?

Rush’s rhetoric, like Bauer’s and most exceptionalists, grounds American distinctiveness (not superiority, no, never!) in our political founding, in the philosophy which inspires the Declaration and the Constitution:

The US is the first time in the history of the world where a government was organized with a Constitution laying out the rules, that the individual was supreme and dominant, and that is what led to the US becoming the greatest country ever because it unleashed people to be the best they could be. Nothing like it had ever happened.  That's American exceptionalism.

The history of world is dictatorship, tyranny, subjugation . . . and then along came the United States of America.

The sole reason for our exceptionalism: Limiting government and maintaining the primacy of the individual human being regardless of race, sex, creed . . . It's the primacy of the individual.

America was created to make space for individual freedom, to enable meritocracy and the wealth and power it brings.  This was God’s wish:

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are an attempt to provide a political framework to facilitate God's will that each of us are born and remain free.  Read the Founders and you can conclude nothing other than that.

What a fascinating mix of truth and fantasy!  For one thing, it’s a sick joke to think that from the beginning America has respected “the primacy of the individual human being regardless of race, sex, creed.”  For another thing, the Constitution is not primarily about individual freedom.  It’s about mediating the popular will through limited and competing institutions.  It’s about making the state representative enough to achieve democratic accountability without making it strong enough to enable tyranny.  The American Revolution was not fought primarily to assert individual rights but to assert the right of collective national self-determination.  And the Constitution actually constricts individual rights in some ways.  It endorses slavery, for instance, by prohibiting any law against the slave trade before the year 1808.  If the Founders were so intent on implementing the Almighty’s political program for protecting “the primacy of the individual” then why didn’t the original Constitution even mention individual rights?  Why was it necessary to add the Bill of Rights through the amendment process, almost as an afterthought?  Anti-Federalist demand for a Bill of Rights to protect individual rights does indeed demonstrate that the political folk culture of the period held those rights to be quite important, though it also shows those rights to be a matter of some contention.  But doesn’t it also hint that there was more to the American founding than the ahistorical channeling of God’s politics?  The Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights didn’t create American politics, they expressed them.  And those politics are obviously borrowed from the politics of the mother country, England.  Pre-revolutionary Americans spoke the English language, followed English religion and adhered to English culture; why wouldn’t they practice English politics as well?  The English Parliament had effectively achieved primacy over the monarchy by 1689; the English had their own Bill of Rights that same year, a full 100 years before the American version!  In summary: the American nation existed long before the Constitution; that Constitution wasn’t primarily based upon individual rights; and the bedrock of our politics isn’t even particularly American, but English.  The unique American founding based upon individual rights is a complete myth.

Alexis Tocqueville, the French observer of America in the 1830’s, whom conservatives love to quote, gives a much more penetrating account of American democracy than those same conservatives.  Tocqueville perceived that the animating force in American politics was the desire for equality and the hatred of unwarranted power.  To Tocqueville, American democracy was English society stripped of its aristocracy, leaving the people roughly equal in wealth and power.  English tradition and common law gave them local self-government and due process rights.  Calvinism made their sexual and civic morals purer.  A large, rich and lightly populated continent gave them the raw material for economic growth.  But Tocqueville did not succumb to the myth of individual primacy:

I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it, they love it, and they will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow.  But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.  They will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.

So Tocqueville believed that American democracy was primarily about equality, its bedrock was non-libertarian populism in the form of local majoritarianism.  But, more to the point, he believed it arose from the lucky accidents incurred while transposing English society to the New World.  For our purposes the upshot is: America existed as an independent offshoot of English culture decades before the Revolutionary era created the independent American polity.  We were a nation with our own culture long before we had our own government.  If there is any truth to American exceptionalism it can only be found within our actual cultural substance, not in declarations or constitutions, even those manifesting the noblest elements of that culture.

Even more confusion arises from the peculiar use conservatives make of liberal arguments about American exceptionalism.  Yes, liberal arguments.  The notions of individual rights, government based upon rational principle, popularly accountable government, equality before the law, etc. are classical liberal notions, expressed best by the English liberal philosopher John Locke.  And the mutually exclusive notion that states and governments arise over time from tradition and local authority are conservative notions, expressed best by the pre-eminent British conservative thinker, Edmund Burke.  The overpowering semantic confusion of American politics – American “conservatives” mouthing liberal slogans in support of Puritan moralism reworked as crusading plutocracy; and American “liberals” employing liberal platitudes to justify reworking the state, that conservative institution, for egalitarian populist ends – obscures every other topic of our collective discourse; why should it not obscure this one as well? We can see why it’s so hard for Americans, particularly conservative Americans, to have a clear understanding of the American place in the world when their perception is so clouded by falsity, myth and self-satisfaction.

Please, let’s accept the genuinely conservative notion of American nationhood, that we arose over time from transplanted and slightly modified English culture (and that culture has been modified greatly over time by infusions from the rest of the world).  We did not spring fully grown like Athena from the head of James Madison.  It’s taken all that earnest deconstruction just to get to the proper question: What is exceptional about actual American culture?  It’s not so easy to find writers who even address this question; as we’ve seen, most conservatives confuse the nature of the American nation with its political Constitution, thoughtlessly parroting liberal cant about universal rights and the primacy of the individual. 

More thoughtful writers, such as Josh Good of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank not normally credited for thoughtful analysis), look for the characteristic aspects of American culture itself.  In his review of Charles Murray’s book on exceptionalism, Good lists four “distinct American qualities: industriousness, egalitarianism, religiosity, and community life.”  Good and Murray credit Calvinism and its salvation-inspired work ethic for our tremendous economic vitality and success: “Our Protestant work ethic, reinforced by three Great Awakenings, fused American religious life with an entrepreneurial, hard-working impulse, creating a civic culture unlike any the world had previously seen.”  It seems clear that this is the central cultural factor in American economic success.  Indeed, the Puritans laid the groundwork for all of American culture, with their moral purity, local political control, communal benevolence, sexual constriction, blunt racism, and raging sanctimony.  But there’s one more element of the Puritan sensibility we should note: belief in its own mission to save the world.  Tim Rutten reminds us of the influence of St. Augustine’s notion of “a shining city on the hill” and “Puritans’ belief in the New World as a ‘new Jerusalem’” with a mission to be “a Godly light to the nations.”  From the very beginning, long before the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, before George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and even John Locke, before recognition of freedom of speech and religion, long before the rise of our impoverished modern individualism, America had its special mission.  And that mission was to properly save the world for Christ.

We do have an unusual culture, somehow both modern and unenlightened, capitalist and communal, prudent and utopian, democratic and religious, parochial and generous.  The Puritans came here as England was transitioning from feudalism to liberal democracy; the Puritans themselves represented that transition in their half-conservative, half-democratic values.  They carried that moment in English history to the New World and it has persisted to this day, including our sense of mission.  Let’s be honest.  Almost every American deeply believes that America has some special insight into politics and economics; and we as individuals might not be better (though we probably are), but our way of life certainly is; and the rest of the world would be much happier if they would only be like us!  America represents the teleology of social evolution, the end of history.  This is the psychological and political residue of Puritan Messianism, buttressed by the remarkable political, economic and military success our Calvinist, half-liberal, half-medieval nation has enjoyed.

It’s hard to argue with success.  But success does not substitute for virtue.  And it doesn’t shield us from honest criticism.  Our national culture is far from perfect and our success is not entirely earned.  If Communism had succeeded in conquering the world – which it almost did – would that have meant Communism was superior?  And our success is partially due to our rich natural resources and our long-time isolation from the world.  And much of the rest of the world is quite happy being different from us.  Do the French or the Japanese or the Saudis want to be more like America?  While some societies might benefit from becoming more like us, we might benefit by becoming more like some of them.  And we might start with becoming a little less smug.  It may seem silly to so earnestly address this childish American snobbery, but it is an overpowering and largely unacknowledged force in our national life, and frequently a destructive one.  Some honest national soul-searching might do us some good.

Consider how easily exceptionalism can take an ugly turn.  When Pat Buchanan, a forthright version of Rush Limbaugh, spoke to the Christian Coalition in September 1993 he proclaimed, “Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.”  Now that’s exceptionalism!  Pat voices the patriotism whose name Rush dare not speak; he both acknowledges the existence of pre-Constitutional American national culture and zealously trumpets its shining superiority.  We are free and successful because we live out God’s politics and economics and that’s only because we worship God correctly.  Everyone else has been cast into the outer darkness.  The extent to which other Americans agree with Buchanan is the extent to which exceptionalism hurts both us and the world.  Where Buchanan goes wrong is to confuse those successful American values with their historical origins.  One can whole-heartedly believe in the values of hard work and democracy without being a doctrinal Calvinist; most Americans do just that.  This is the classic reactionary error: the incapacity to judge what’s good and bad in one’s tradition.  Just because the Puritans bequeathed us much of our culture doesn’t mean we must accept their entire world-view.  We can step off the Mayflower.

Many liberals, of course, make the opposite error, the relativist error: Judgments can hurt people, so let’s not make any.  We must not compare nations, cultures, etc., lest some nations feel justified in exploiting others.  After all, it was the European sense of racial and cultural superiority that led to the horrors of imperialism and colonialism.  Putin, himself a purveyor of Russian exceptionalism, invokes that relativism hypocritically, but many American liberals do so quite earnestly.  They are so horrified by the great evil that’s been done in the name of American moral purity – slavery, white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, worker exploitation, environmental degradation, militarism, expansionist war – that they overlook the good – the ending of slavery, the (still incomplete) emancipation of women and minorities, the expansion of democratic rights, protection of the poor and the sick (still incomplete), the defeat of fascism and communism.  Puritan values – for instance, progress and community – have informed the good in America, not just the domineering and the destructive.

Indeed, the genuinely liberal version of American exceptionalism – that America can help to spread universal human rights and values – is simply the modern-day version of the Puritan mission – as Rush’s dishonest appropriation of it so well shows!  We are still saving the world, with the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.  We can never really step off the Mayflower.  Even a modern liberal like Barack Obama, influenced by subjectivism and post-nationalism, accepts this version of exceptionalism:

I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Why, he sounds just like Rush!  Although, like a good and thoughtful liberal, he inserts all the requisite caveats:

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

So why does Rush – like so many conservatives – claim that Obama doesn’t understand or accept American exceptionalism?  Because Obama really believes the liberal formulation that they only parrot.  If American culture is not superior then we are just a country like any other, and our actions should be subject to the same judgments and constraints rightly laid upon other countries.  And Rush would never relinquish America’s special standing above the rules:

What makes us exceptional is what we used to have in situations like this, that was a moral authority.  We had the moral authority because of what we stood for, and we stood for . . . the absolute primacy of the individual.

Rush pretends it’s our goals that make us noble, but really he believes that we can’t help but stand for noble goals, that our cultural superiority endows all we do with shiny goodness.  Rush believes we have authority because we fight for individual rights; that is our nature. Obama believes we have authority when we fight for individual rights; that is our calling.  Obama may have succumbed to Puritan missionary zeal, too, but his exceptionalism is the adult version of Rush’s childish self-indulgence. 

But it’s also an airy, post-nationalist version.  Obama’s primary allegiance is to the universal liberal values that America sometimes supports.  He can’t fully embrace allegiance to an American culture that, because he’s a liberal, he’s not sure even exists!  This is what makes Obama’s patriotism seem like such weak tea to Rush (a weak tea Rush himself pretends to swallow).  There is one truth about America that Rush gets right: it is an actual nation with a remarkably successful and admirable culture.  But Rush takes it a few steps too far.  He holds it self-evident that we are endowed by our culture with certain inalienable privileges, and that among these are arrogance, intervention and the flouting of international norms.  Rush’s primary allegiance is to his rigid Calvinist vision of God’s metaphysical, moral and political truths, not so much to the nation that embodies them less and less.  To Rush, the real America is those truths, and liberals foolishly or deceitfully are making America into some watered-down European-style imitation of her real self, an imitation whose moral emptiness  keeps her from commanding and saving the world as God meant her to do.

But there is a coherent alternative to Obama’s uprooted universalism and Rush’s ignorant nativism. It consists of five doctrines: America is a nation prior to and distinct from its government; the unusual culture of the nation has been integral to its impressive economic and political success; one need not adhere to the rigid Calvinist doctrines that founded that culture to be a full member of that nation; that nation has brought both great harm and great benefit to the world; even culturally powerful nations are not justified in flouting international norms and laws.  Though, of course, some times they are justified.  Maybe targeted bombing of the military installations of a horrible, mass-murdering, thug dictator like Bashar al-Assad is such an occasion.  As Obama has said, it would honor our noblest political impulses to use our terrible power for genuinely humanitarian ends.  There are, of course, compelling arguments for not getting involved.  The point is that our analysis of American exceptionalism (hopefully) allows us to address the issue of something like Syrian intervention less distracted by distorting and self-serving mythology.

We can live better without that mythology, both the conservative and liberal versions. But it doesn’t seem possible that conservatives might give up their myths.  They identify America with their narrow Puritan ideology, which they’re certain can do no wrong and which they defend with liberal, universalist rhetoric; they seem too entangled in falsity to extricate themselves.  As demography, individualism and progress slowly move America away from them, they alienate themselves more and more from the actual living American culture, captives of the mythic idolized America they worship.  Liberals can see more clearly America’s moral strengths and weaknesses; they are more capable of extricating themselves from its mythology.  But most importantly, liberals must come home.  They must understand they are children of that culture too, and they owe it a deeper commitment.  It is, after all, who they are.  Rush doesn’t own America and Obama can’t disown it.  We must cultivate a more mature patriotism.  We must love America for what it is, neither denying its faults nor rejecting it for those faults.  We must hope that its better angels defeat its bitter demons.  We must commit ourselves to the real American faith: that the struggles of American history lead toward something greater, more profound, more free, more just.  We fought, we died, we marched, we sang, we were beaten, we raged, we organized, we worked, we came together, we dreamed of a better life and a better world.  Being American is a heavy responsibility.  It demands that we enlist in that struggle and strive for those dreams.  It demands both commitment and candor, both rootedness and growth, both loyalty and humility.  And it insists that before we can redeem the world we must redeem ourselves.

Partisan Blindness: A Case Study

Tammy Duckworth at the World War II Memorial

Tammy Duckworth was born to be an American soldier.  Her ancestors fought in the Revolution, World War II and in Vietnam.  She entered the ROTC program in graduate school in 1990 at the age of 22.   In the Illinois National Guard, she chose to become a helicopter pilot because it was one of the few combat positions open to women.  In 2004 she flew over 120 combat hours in Iraq.  But on November 12^th of that year, while flying over the Tigris River valley, a rocket-propelled grenade fired by insurgents hit her helicopter directly below her seat.  Her legs were blown off and her right arm was terribly damaged.  During her lengthy and painful recovery, she never lost her spirit and her optimism; she learned to walk on prosthetic legs, and she even hoped to return to her pilot duties.  She didn’t fly again, but she did become a champion of veterans, helping to create a rehabilitation center for wounded veterans and serving as Director of the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.  She is presently a member of the United States House of Representatives from the 8^th district of Illinois.  Her determination, professionalism, patriotism, courage, and dedication to duty should make every American proud.  She is a genuine hero.

She recently received attention for her amazing verbally beat-down of a veteran’s benefit cheat.  On June 26, Duckworth sat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as it questioned businessman Braulio Castillo as part of its ongoing investigation into whether Castillo had obtained a $500 million IRS contract because of his personal friendship with an IRS deputy director.  But what caught Duckworth’s attention was that the IRS had assigned Castillo’s company that lucrative contract as part of a program of contracts set aside for firms owned by disabled veterans.  Castillo’s claim to disabled veteran status was that he twisted his ankle playing football for a military prep school in 1984.  That’s it; there’s no more to it.  Castillo dropped out of that prep school after less than a year and subsequently went on to quarterback his college football team.  He never served in the military in any capacity and he waited 27 years to make an official claim of any lasting physical injury.  An obscure regulation allows him to be treated as a veteran, since he received his “disability” at a military school.  But he is the Holy Roman Empire of bureaucratic classification: a disabled veteran who is neither disabled nor a veteran (nor much of a human being).  So Duckworth, as seen in this amazing video, just tears him apart.  She reads from a letter Castillo wrote to the Veterans Administration explaining his condition: “These are crosses that I bear due to my service to our great country and I would do it again to protect this great country.”  Duckworth’s follow-up is a masterpiece of outrage and sarcasm:  “I’m so glad that you would be willing to play football in prep school again to protect this great country,” she mocks. “Shame on you, Mr. Castillo. Shame on you. You may not have broken any laws but you certainly broke the trust of this great nation. You broke the trust of veterans.”  Watch the video and you will be gratified to see a genuine hero smack down a callous fraud.

Duckworth is a genuine hero, even a righteous hero, but did I mention that she’s also a liberal Democrat?  That shouldn’t matter in this case, and the vast majority of conservative commentators have either supported Duckworth in this instance or ignored the matter entirely.  But there is a small minority of conservatives who actually have defended Castillo and condemned Duckworth.  Consider a writer from the hard conservative website RedState with the pen-name streiff, whose post on Castillo’s shaming calls Duckworth a “Political Hack, Professional Victim, Schoolyard Bully”.  He spins like a top to avoid applauding Duckworth and condemning Castillo.  First he blames the system:

These special carve-outs in contracting laws are wrong on every conceivable level, other than creating a feel good moment for the Congress, and one can no more be shocked, surprised, and upset when they are manipulated than one should be shocked, surprised, and upset when you are hit by a car when walking across the freeway.

So Castillo has no personal responsibility here, he’s merely the victim of overpowering liberal government temptations.  But, somehow, that same evil liberal government must not be questioned: “Regardless of what ‘Doctor’ Duckworth might think of Mr. Castillo’s injuries, the facts are that he applied for the disability rating and the VA granted him that rating. She doesn’t get a vote on it and no one should lionize her for her asshattery.”  So even a democratically-elected, badly-disabled, war-hero congresswoman shouldn’t express her anger when someone tries to steal benefits meant for genuine veterans?  The VA rules were handed down from on high, those rules have spoken and we can only submit.  We can be sure that the fair-minded Mr. streiff would just as categorically defend welfare cheats and frauds.  According to his genuinely wearing-your-ass-as-hat logic, if a government program follows its own rules then its results can never be questioned.  Anyone who does so is merely being a “hack” and a “bully”; they can’t possibly be a responsible public servant rightly condemning dishonesty and policing a public program.  It’s fascinating that such a self-proclaimed and such a self-congratulatory “firm believer that the government is our servant not our master” makes such an absolutist and appalling argument for submitting without question to those same government masters.

And he shamelessly misrepresents the cause of Duckworth’s anger:  “Duckworth took umbrage at the fact that Mr. Castillo has a VA awarded service connected disability rating of 30%.”  Actually, no.  She “took umbrage” because Castillo lied about his condition, wasted the VA’s time and resources and received gobs of IRS money that was supposed to go to actual disabled veterans.  Watch the video and that is utterly clear.  She just used Castillo’s 30% rating to make her larger point: Castillo gamed the system without regard for actual veterans.

But streiff must know all that – it’s all there in the video included in his piece!  So why does he twist himself up into such ridiculous logical pretzels to avoid the truth?  Conservatives constantly speak of “personal responsibility”, but Castillo should not be held responsible.  Government is our servant, but we must obey it without question.  It doesn’t matter if Castillo “gamed” or “defrauded” the system.  Really?  It’s not relevant?  Why does streiff recoil in such horror from that most conservative verbal instrument: the moral harangue?  He abandons all his conservative principles in his desperate need to avoid what even most conservatives find obvious: Duckworth’s condemnation of Castillo is exactly the sort of moral clarity that our political discourse is crying out for and she’s just the person to do it.  It would easy to dismiss streiff’s piece as pure partisan misrepresentation, just a shamelessly dishonest attack – particularly from a website and a writer that have in the past attacked Duckworth and defended her Republican opponent.  Clearly, that is part of what’s going on, but I believe there is something more: blinkered inability to accept a liberal Democrat as a moral authority.

In streiff’s world only conservatives are allowed the moral harangue, because only conservatives are moral in essence.  Obviously, there are liberals who believe that liberals are moral in ways that conservatives are not.  And – as the Duckworth episode shows – most conservatives are easily capable of seeing moral authority in non-conservatives.  But the essence of modern American conservatism consists of these notions: that all issues are moral issues, that all social and political problems can only be addressed by the sufficiently forceful application of simple moral principles, that only morally correct individuals have both the moral clarity and the moral strength to impose those principles, and that moral correctness is itself an essential part of an individual.  Put simply, only a good man knows what’s good.  To the kind of moral simpleton such as streiff whose ideology is unqualified by any pragmatism or generosity – that is, to a constricted and thoughtless conservative – moral correctness and conservatism are the same thing.  To be a liberal is to have a blemished and polluted soul and no such degenerate can possibly be a moral authority.  Nothing can redeem a liberal, not love of country, not love of her fellow soldiers, not courage in face of unimaginable pain and suffering.  All of these are superficialities, distractions from the underlying evil essence that every liberal soul bears like the mark of Cain.

This is the ugly, distorted face of partisan hatred.  It fascinates because it’s such a pure specimen.  And it’s in such a widely read venue.  Liberals, of course, are just as capable as conservatives of being shrill rhetorical bullies and hacks – sadly, both sides amply demonstrate that every day.  But conservatives and liberals tend to bully in different ways, each befitting their natural ideological inclinations. When a liberal slips into the deep end he becomes an egalitarian crusader slaying the dragons of privilege and authority, or a captive of anarchic fantasies.  An extremist conservative sees all politics in terms of authority that must be respected; an extremist liberal denies that any authority deserves respect.  And liberalism, with its pragmatism and meliorism, can just as easily slide into anti-ideological extremism; it can become too ready to sacrifice means to ends, too dismissive of principle; it can become relativist and cynical. Excessive avoidance of idols can itself become idolatry.  But all extremism results from the same fault: the overpowering need to purify and simplify.  The fanatic discards mitigating and conflicting principles and facts and reduces the complexity of life to a single conviction; examples abound: “all politics is class warfare”, “the state must enforce God’s commands”, “nothing should constrain great individuals”.  The logic of fanaticism leads inevitably to seeing all dissidents as enemies of the one shining truth.  And when a fanatical American conservative reviles his opponent this is how his ideology demands he do so: he denies them any moral respect, no matter how well earned.

Stupid’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

That's all that Bobby left me

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s conservative Republican Governor Bobby Jindal badly needs to take his own advice.  Last year, after the Republican Party’s second big election loss to Barack Obama, after losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, after losing Senate elections they easily could have won, after losing the nationwide popular vote for the House, the party began to wake up and reconsider its program, its message and its attitude.  Did they need to reach out to minorities?  Did they need to present themselves better?  Did they need better get-out-the-vote tactics and technologies?  Did they need – gasp! – to reconsider their priorities and principles?  At the time, Jindal made headlines by telling Republicans that they needed to “stop being the stupid party.”  But last week Jindal himself opened up the floodgates of stupid, publishing a truly bizarre column, inundating the nation and his party in a deluge of paranoia, resolute denial and utter foolishness.  Consider that according to Jindal, “the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees.”  And it goes on like that.  And on.  And on.  What has happened to Bobby Jindal?  Well the Republican Party and the conservative movement are in trouble and they don’t have a lot of options.  Is this how a frustrated true believer acts out when he’s got nothing left to lose?

Jindal’s winter criticism of the Republican Party was a little less substantive than usually portrayed in the media.  His use of the phrase “the stupid party” – borrowed from the characterization that the great 19^th century liberal theorist John Stuart Mill made of Britain’s conservatives – made his advice to Republicans seem more radical and more challenging than it actually was.  But this was a superficial understanding of largely superficial advice.  Jindal’s seven point plan from last November to refurbish conservatism consisted mostly of vague ideas about “modernizing, not moderating.”  That is, it was mostly about message, not content.  When it came to the stupid, he advised:

Stop being the stupid party. It's time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It's time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. Enough of that.

That is, Republicans didn’t need their Senate candidate from Missouri, Todd Akin, expounding his fascinating theories about “legitimate rape” and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Indiana, Richard Mourdock, imagining that sometimes “God intends” for rape to result in pregnancy, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Pennsylvania, Tom Smith, comparing pregnancy from rape with out-of-wedlock birth, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, denying being a witch, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Nevada, Sharron Angle, talking about “Second Amendment remedies” to the continuing problem of liberal electoral success.  You get the idea.  But it doesn’t seem that Jindal was saying that conservatism needs to disown its loonier voices so much as muffle them.  It needs spokespeople who “talk like adults,” while selling the same old policies.

And he made sure that no one doubted his commitment to conservatism’s “core principles”: low taxes, low government spending and projections of strength abroad. Many of his other points were either uninspired (“stop looking backward”), tactically aggressive and uninspired (“going after every vote”), uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“bottom-up government that fits the digital age”),  or even more uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“treat all people as individuals rather than as members of special interest groups”).  And amidst all this sloganeering he protested that Republicans had to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans and tag lines for 30-second ads.”  Well, maybe it’s not fair to criticize politicians for spouting thoughtless clichés; a creative politician is a rare creature indeed.

His plan, however, proposed one interesting change: conservatism should become more consistently “populist”; it should oppose all “big” institutions, including “big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, or big anything”.  The Republican Party “must not be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys.”  Instead it should grow and protect the middle class.  Actually, it should “make clear” that conservatism was never about bigness and it was always about helping the middle class.  It actually is quite radical in conservative circles to say anything remotely critical of the wealthy and how they got and keep their wealth.  What exactly was Jindal getting at here?  Is it possible he was criticizing the stridency with which conservative media and Republican Party leaders insist on keeping marginal income tax rates low?  Was he saying that such policy is not genuinely conservative?  Not likely.  In practice, Jindal has proposed lowering taxes on rich Louisianans and raising them on the lower orders.  He seems to be interested in merely giving conservatism a populist veneer.  Jindal’s populism sees government as the handmaiden of elitist, dishonest interests and it sees free markets as automatically benefiting everyone, not just the rich.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to let the rich keep their toys; it’s that letting them keep their toys must not be an end in itself; it must be seen as the means for letting everyone else get toys too.  But believing that what’s good for the top 1% is good for the rest of us is a rather odd version of populism.  If that’s all it amounts to, then, ultimately, this is (once again) more about changing the message than about changing the policy.

There wasn’t much real substance to Jindal’s winter criticism, but what it lacked in boldness it made up for in bland circumspection.  Who could disagree with sounding less stupid?  But with his recent column Jindal jumps on board the stupid train and runs it completely off the rails.  He enlightens us as to what liberals really want:

The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

What the what?  Will Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock now denounce Bobby Jindal for being stupid?  That’s quite a grab-bag of conservative crack-pottery, especially for an elected official, especially for a governor, especially for a potential presidential nominee.  His tirade includes McCarthyite paranoia (“they want the government to explode”), moralized gold-buggery (“money grows on trees”), simple crazy (“red meat should be rationed”), sexual constriction (“pornography is fine”), cultural populism (“people of faith are ignorant and uneducated”), blinkered cultural jingoism (“the Israelis are unreasonable”), deliberate obfuscations (“the Second Amendment is outdated”), extreme exaggerations (“32 oz. sodas are evil”), and damnable lies (“the IRS should violate our constitutional rights”).  This is just a wonderful exposition of the darkness lurking in the American conservative unconscious.  When the fever dream speaks, this is how it sounds.

And it confirms what we already knew: conservatives see themselves as fighting to protect American moral purity against liberal corruption; all issues are moral issues and they demand ironclad commitments to the right moral principles and the policies those principles express.  Liberals are bad because they don’t know what’s good.  That’s why they so foolishly support sexual corruptions such as gay marriage, pornography and abortion.  That’s why they oppose such obviously righteous policies like a balanced budget and a strong dollar.  And it’s moral blindness that delivers liberals to that ugly statism that so hungers to control our economics, our religion, our media, our guns, even our food!  Here we see the real source of that foolish, misguided, destructive philosophy called liberalism: liberals think “moral standards are passé,” that reason and individual choice can substitute for moral correctness.  But conservative misapprehension is understandable: to a simplistic moralist, letting people make independent moral judgments is indistinguishable from relativism.  But conservatives actually have a point here: liberal tolerance may prove to be only the half-way stopover between the starting point of conservative moralism and the final destination of post-modern relativism.  Once you begin emancipating individuals from external constraints it’s hard not to see the notion of objective morality itself as just one more arbitrary constraint.

OK, so liberals really, really suck.  What else has Jindal got?  Boatloads of denial.  The time for conservative self-reflection is definitely over.  The new Jindal rages against “excessive navel gazing”, that is, against the very sort of self-reflection the old Jindal advised.  He now says, “No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed.”  Huh? Did anyone understand the need for conservative re-appraisal as merely therapeutic?  Wasn’t it meant to address the widespread perception of structural Republican failure?  Apparently not, because, according to Jindal there’s been little real failure:

Let’s remember a few things:

1) We have 30 Governors

2) We took control of the House in 2010 and held it in 2012

3) Obama ran a tremendous campaign in 2008, and our outgoing president was unpopular

4) The just completed presidential campaign strategy of playing it safe and assuming a poor economy would win it for us was an obvious mistake.

There is some truth in this analysis, of course; Republicans are not dead yet.  Yes, presently 30 governors are Republican (and actually govern roughly 60% of the population); Republicans did clobber the Democrats in the 2010 elections for the House of Representatives and they did hold the House in 2012; the 2008 Obama campaign was very good; Romney’s 2012 campaign was quite bad.  But there are unnerving responses to all these reassurances: Democrats won 52% of the votes cast in the 13 gubernatorial elections that took place in 2012 (only 4 of which took place in blue states); Democrats won about 1.4 million more votes nationwide in the 2012 House elections (Republicans won more House seats only because of skewed districting); the outgoing president in 2008 was indeed unpopular, but so was the party that faithfully supported him on his most egregious failures (Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street that caused the recession); Obama is the only president to win re-election with the unemployment rate as high as it was.  Obviously, part of Jindal’s job is to spin.

But the GOP has real problems, and they boil down to one word: demographics.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it withers before our eyes.  The current conservative movement is essentially the institutional vessel for all the cantankerous, old, straight, white, Christian, male prejudices and resentments that Jindal’s column so well expresses.  Meanwhile the country becomes younger, less sexually constricted, browner, more secular, tolerant and experimental, less patriarchal.  We become more liberal every day, more accepting of gay marriage and recreational marijuana, more open to government intervention in the economy, more open to non-traditional sex and religion.  But as the country moves, the conservative rump refuses to budge.  They isolate themselves and polarize the country.  Their passionate conviction, their natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, their ideological inflexibility – all these allow them to continue to exert influence beyond their numbers.  This is how they came to dominate American politics from the late 60’s till just a few years ago.

But the traits that served conservatives so well in their ascent now only hasten their fall.  They really only have two choices: change or double down.  And despite hopes to the contrary it’s pretty clear which path they have chosen for now.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it decays before our eyes.  And Jindal has decided his job is to make sure no conservative perceives the decay.  He aims to stamp out conservative doubt.  And the putative political strengths of American conservatism – the passionate conviction, the natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, the ideological inflexibility – make Jindal’s job all too easy.  Those traits readily inhere in anyone who believes that all issues are moral issues, that all problems surrender to the stern application of clearheaded righteous force.  It’s such conviction that makes conservatives notoriously resistant to unwelcome facts and reasoning (consider the furor over the debt ceiling).  Conservative incapacity for self-doubt isn’t incidental, it’s of the essence.  In the past conservatism sometimes actually contributed to the American discourse: it proposed reasonable critiques of the welfare state, it provided fortitude for fighting the Cold War.  There used to be more to conservatism than just its id; there was intellect and even conscience.  Sadly, the latter have faded in recent years to irrelevance and ineffectuality.  They are utterly absent from Jindal’s angry discharge.  To Jindal and his audience, self-analysis, the reconsideration of received truths, self-doubt, etc. are not just inherently threatening to conservatism, they are vaguely un-American, even un-masculine!  “Stop the bedwetting,” scolds Jindal and “put on your big-boy pants.”  Yes, put on your pants and put on your blinders.  Self-doubt may be the prerequisite to self-awareness, but self-awareness is for liberals and sissies.

 
When a prominent conservative worries that conservatives are losing the religion, it’s noteworthy.  Jindal hates liberals – clearly! – but he’s disappointed in conservatives.  His rage is really directed at them.  And his rage has obscured his perception and his judgment; it has made him as stupid as the Akins and the Mourdocks.  Jindal comes home; now he endorses the stupid.  The problem for conservatives is that they’ve got nothing left to lose.  They thought they owned the soul of America, the “real America” as Sarah Palin called it.  For decades they won elections by portraying their opponents as enemies of American values and subverters of American prosperity and betrayers of American security.  But, inexplicably, those tactics have stopped working and the temptation is to turn up the volume even louder, to just shout the accusations that much more vehemently.  The country is changing under their feet, and they are in real trouble, but many of them seem incapable of doing much more than merely shouting louder and louder.  But now they’re not just shouting at liberals and independents and moderate Republicans; now they’re even shouting at themselves.

Government Surveillance and Liberal Instincts

The national government is collecting information on everyone’s emails and phone calls.  Does that make you uneasy?  Does it worry you?  Now, does it worry you more or less when you consider who is president?  Are you a hypocrite if who’s in charge makes a difference?  If so, then, according to the table above (from a poll by the Pew Research Center), many Americans are hypocrites.  As you can see, Democrats opposed (for the most part) such monitoring when Bush was president but support it (for the most part) now that Obama is president.  For Republicans the reverse is true, they were OK with it under Bush, not so much under Obama.  Do partisans just automatically condemn any program run by the opposing president?  Is political tribal loyalty so much more important to them than protecting civil liberties from government abuse?  Clearly some are that cynical or thoughtless, but most are not.  As Seth Masket appreciates, it’s more a question of whether you trust the current president to pursue such a program properly.  That is, state power has the potential for great danger, and fear of that danger lies deep in the American collective psyche, but state power is held by actual individuals and it matters a great deal how much you trust those particular individuals.  You’re not a hypocrite if you trust one president more than another.  You may be mistaken, or even foolish, but you’re not a hypocrite.

Masket seems to believe there’s a sort of ideological empathy that leads people to support their party’s president, that it’s not so indefensible “to think that police state tactics are necessary when someone who shares your values is deploying them but excessive when someone hostile to your values is deploying them.”  But how exactly would that empathy work?  Masket overlooks the cynical interpretation, that Democrats don’t believe Obama would use these extraordinary police powers to persecute Democrats and Republicans didn’t believe Bush would use them to persecute Republicans; no one expects a tyrant to tyrannize his own supporters.  Once again, this may be part of what’s going on, but it’s clearly not all of it.  No, Democrats are mostly OK with Obama running such a program because they believe he will run it for the good.  His values make him trustworthy.  Which values exactly?  Democrats are reassured by two of Obama’s most striking qualities: his humanitarianism and his moderation.  He is a reasonable man, who pursues policy solutions in a measured and thoughtful way.  For example, his concern for the less fortunate motivated his quest for universal healthcare, and his natural conciliation led him to propose a moderate, flexible, market-oriented solution with a respectable Republican pedigree.  Only Tea Partiers find any credibility in the perception of him as a fire-breathing radical, determined to crush capitalism, motherhood and puppies.

But when George W. Bush inaugurated the government surveillance programs that Obama has continued, he did so illegally.  He did not follow the law requiring him to obtain judicial permission before collecting such information (even though such judicial blessings have been all-too-readily dispensed) and he failed to adequately inform Congress.  Obama has at least complied with his legal obligations as secret-policeman-in-chief.  So why did conservatives support Bush’s illegal spying program so much more ardently than they support Obama’s legal and proper one?  Well, for reasons similar to the ones that presently move Democrats to support Obama’s program: partly partisan solidarity, but mostly genuine trust.  But, unlike with Democrats and Obama, Republicans didn’t support Bush because of his values, they supported him because of his character.  Bush was famously a fundamentalist Christian – a “godly” man, as they say – but more importantly he embodied, in the conservative mind, that moral strength and purity which lie at the bedrock of American goodness and greatness.  That is, he was a man of faith and it was the right faith: that the American essence is pure and good and no real wrong can flow from the exercise of its moral power.  Democrats believe Obama spies benevolently, Republicans believed Bush spied righteously.

The national security state was, of course, a liberal innovation that later came to be supported by conservatives, but only after it had lost much of its liberal devotion (the same story can be told of nationalism and capitalism).  At the beginning of the Cold War, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and others from the F.D.R-Truman regime founded the national security state – the Department of Defense, the CIA, the National Security Agency (the agency presently collecting the communication data), etc. – and committed America to permanent alliances and defensive organizations – NATO, the United Nations – all as part of a grand plan to “contain” communist aggression.  Liberals applauded the efficiency and pragmatism of the new institutions.  But conservatives instinctively rejected the new concentration and expansion of power in Washington just as they had done during the creation of the national welfare state in the 1930’s.  And conservative instincts were (and remain) isolationist and Puritan: they were horrified at the thought of American goodness diluted by close association with foreigners.

But subsequent developments changed how both liberals and conservatives came to perceive the national security state.  First and most important was McCarthyism.  When figures such as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy employed the new national security institutions to sniff out (mostly nonexistent) communist operatives, liberals were appalled and conservatives were delighted.  To liberals such activities smelled badly of the very totalitarianism which they had just defeated in a world war and which they were then fighting mightily to contain in Europe and Asia.  Liberals also suspected that the real target of McCarthyism was liberalism, not communism.  And conservatives gloried in a witch-hunt that allowed them to broadly condemn almost the entire left span of the political spectrum as vaguely and not-so-vaguely treasonous, a charge many conservatives, in their paranoia and hatred of liberal policy, genuinely affirmed.  And for many liberals, suffering from guilty consciences earned from excessive leniency toward Stalin before and during the war, such accusations were simply too painful to bear.  So just as conservatives began to see both the moral and political uses of the national security state, liberals decided that the only way to protect against the totalitarian temptation was to become civil liberties absolutists.  McCarthyism made liberals bitter enemies of state police power.

The modern conservative movement that arose in the 1950’s, which was at first primarily an intellectual movement centering on William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, was more libertarian and capitalist-oriented than earlier versions of American conservatism.  But it was first and foremost about anti-communism; the tender libertarian sensitivities it exhibited on issues like taxes and the rights of racist business owners did not extend to the civil liberties of commies, their ideological close relations and their defenders.  And McCarthyism, with its assault on the liberal establishment, provided them with grass-roots support in the form of a populism of the right (such populism would grow to include opponents of both the welfare state and the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960’s).  And these new conservatives, in their anti-communist ardor, came to embrace the national security state as the perfect instrument with which to prosecute the world anti-communist crusade.  They redirected their Puritan isolationism: they wouldn’t keep themselves pure by avoiding the world, they would keep themselves pure by going abroad to destroy evil in its lair.  Containment was for over-compromising, pusillanimous liberals; real men demanded outright victory.  And when the fiasco of Vietnam led most liberals to abandon the Cold War, conservatives stepped up to sustain it, perceiving that their determined moralism made for a better defense against the communist onslaught, but also understanding that Puritan nationalism plus anti-communism plus anti-liberalism made for a potent political combination.

Liberals had created the Cold War state as an instrument of pragmatic, prudential internationalism and conservatives had remade it in their own image as an instrument of crusading, nationalist moralism; and once they had accomplished that transformation they became its most dependable supporters.  Look at that Pew Research Center chart again and consider the numbers for Republicans.  A full 75% supported Bush when he engaged in illegal spying on Americans.  Most Republicans even now support such spying when done by a Kenyan, Marxist, Muslim usurper!  Conservatives instinctively support military and police power as instruments of American moral strength just as they instinctively oppose the welfare state as an instrument of American moral degradation.  Liberals pragmatically support the welfare state as an instrument of humanitarianism while they viscerally oppose the national security state as semi-fascism.  Is it so hard to imagine the great difference in attitude between how Bush and Obama must have approached the issue of domestic surveillance?  Both of them must have felt such enormous pressure to keep Americans safe that civil liberties concerns must have seemed a secondary consideration.  But Bush, eager to bring down American wrath forcefully upon our enemies, must have been happy with the power to ferret out enemies; while Obama, prudential and cautious, must have agreed to spy on innocent citizens only with great reluctance.  Eager vs. reluctant.  That’s the difference between conservatives and liberals on this issue, and the Pew chart seems to bear that out.  And what’s scarier: vindictiveness or expediency?

But what has happened to liberal civil-liberties absolutism?  Shouldn’t liberals be more than merely reluctant, shouldn’t they be outright opposed?  Well, that chart doesn’t show liberal views on the subject, it shows Democratic views, which are not the same thing.  Absent more detailed polls, it seems fair to guess that the most stalwart and consistent supporters of civil liberties, that 34% figure, are also the most liberal.  Consider that Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the recent surveillance story that sparked this entire controversy, is quite solidly liberal (some even call him thoughtlessly left-wing).  Indeed, antipathy to the national security and surveillance state seems to intensify the more left you go.  Does it seem plausible that the same is true of going right?  Do you know any strong movement conservatives who opposed Bush’s surveillance program?  Isn’t it a traditional notion on the right to think the government should protect us from evil?  It seems likely that while liberals are best represented by the 34% figure under 2013, conservatives are best represented by the 75% figure under 2006.

And let’s put aside historically conditioned ideological pre-dispositions for a moment and objectively consider which side of the modern centralized state is inherently more dangerous.  Who should we fear more, the IRS or the NSA?  Liberals created both.  Both conservatives and liberals have abused the power of both.  Nixon wasn’t the first president to bug his partisan opponents, Johnson did it too.  The IRS can withhold your organization’s tax-exempt status while it interviews your business associates, though it’s not supposed to do so based upon your organization’s political views.  And Nixon did famously use the IRS to harass political enemies, as did other presidents.  Such uses of the IRS do constitute thoroughly unacceptable state harassment, but are they really as dangerous as government collecting information on your supposedly private communications?  The distinction may appear murky, since the failure to pay taxes can indeed land you in prison; but the suspicion of terrorism can lead an American citizen without due process into indefinite stay in a military brig.  Has the welfare state locked anyone in jail and thrown away the key?

The terrors of the Cold War and the determination to defend democracy from communism led Truman to create the national security apparatus that has played such a crucial role in American politics ever since, for good and ill.  The expansion of that apparatus after 9/11 – undertaken by both a conservative Republican president and a liberal Democratic one – poses a terrible danger to American individual liberty, for a person is not free whom the state watches so well.  Conservatives embraced surveillance out of righteous anger over 9/11; liberals have done so out of pragmatic concern for our safety.  And this may prove to be a crucial part of the Obama legacy: he has reintroduced liberals to the pragmatic view of civil liberties.  Liberals may trust Obama, but the essence of liberalism is opposition to human interactions in which one party has inordinate power over the other.  This is what leads them to oppose traditional straight, white, male supremacy and to support working people against corporations and to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception to employees and patients.  The point of the entire liberal project of the last 300 years has been to replace the rule of men with the rule of law, to replace personal deference with institutional safeguard.  There must have been a few gentle and benevolent slave-masters, ones that could be trusted to treat their slaves kindly.  But the power the master had over the slave was far too easily abused; that power could not be trusted in general, it had to be taken away, at great cost, to be replaced with universal rights.

Government collecting communications information does not constitute slavery, of course, but it does constitute a dangerous concentration of state police power.  Liberals need to resist their natural pragmatism and remember the dangers of that police power.  The liberal fear of inordinate power is what sustains divided government, independent civil institutions such as the press and the university, and democratic accountability; those principles must be applied much more stringently than they have been to all such surveillance programs.  Liberals need not become absolutists, opposed to even the smallest and most prudent invasions of privacy; even broad surveillance programs, which the very real danger of terrorism probably does demand, might be made acceptable with the proper oversight and public scrutiny.  But we must tread very carefully here, and liberals are the ones who must keep the government on its toes.  Liberals are right to trust Obama, but they are wrong if they think that trusting him is enough.  They must remember the power that Truman gave to Hoover and McCarthy and Nixon, and they should wonder: Who have Bush and Obama given power to?