Fallen Statues
by digby
Way back in November of 2000, people were chattering online about government overreach, specifically the rubber stamp FISA court:
“Franz Kafka would have judged this to wild to fictionalize. But for us – it’s real”
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“As quietly as possible (although it sometimes breaks out into the open, usually with the sound of gunfire and the death of innocents), a “shadow government” has been set up all around us my friend. It’s foundation is not the constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers.
It has all the tools to be an absolute tyranny and those behind it (on both sides of the aisle) who crave power and their form of “governance” continue to move towards it while we are distracted by so many other goings on.”
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“The article strives to make it clear that the targets of the Kafka Kourt are foreign nationals, but then it also reveals that once a “target” is “approved” all of his or her contacts are also investigated.
[…]
Outlandish? Yes. But then, so is this whole Kafka Kourt outlandish.”
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“This is one of those ideas that has a valid purpose behind it, but is wide open to terrible abuse. And there’s no way to check to see if it is abused.
Like all things that don’t have the light of day shining on them, you can be sure that it is being twisted to suit the purposes of those who hold the power.”
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“The targets need not be under suspicion of committing a crime, but may be investigated when probable cause results solely from their associations or status: for example, belonging to, or aiding and abetting organizations deemed to pose a threat to U.S. national security.
This was discussed previously on FreeRepublic along with a Justice Department list of organizations to target. I saved it but unfortunately have lost it.. there were a lot of pro-life and pro-2nd Amendment groups on the list if I recall correctly. One group they targeted was a pro-life organization run by Catholic priests!”
Yes, that was from a Free Republic thread. It would appear that 9/11 changed the liberty loving, bill of rights supporting, self-sufficient freepers into a gaggle of snivelling little babies who were so traumatized by the terrorists that they now think this jack-booted FISA court is too much oversight and the president actually has the power to spy on any damned citizen he wants to. (Or they are partisan robots, you be the judge.)
I got that link from a great post by Glenn Greenwald about the new authoritarian cult conservatives (reminding me of my own little bon mot: “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.”)
He writes:
Now, in order to be considered a “liberal,” only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a “liberal,” regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more “liberal” one is. Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.
I think the cult of Bush is actually representative of something else. A few months ago Rick Perlstein gave a talk about Barry Goldwater at a gathering of conservative intellectuals on the subject of The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present and Future. To a room filled with the biggest thinkers on the right he said:
As an unabashed ideological liberal in the depths of the age of Clintonian triangulation, I found the recollections of the risks you all took for a cause absolutely inspiring.
In a sense, I considered you political role models.
The name that came up over and over in my interviews with these veterans of Young Americans for Freedom was “Richard Nixon.” They came to the 1960 Republican National Convention determined to draft Barry Goldwater for vice president. They left after making a breathtaking ad hoc run at drafting Goldwater for president instead, and taking down the presumptive nominee as an unprincipled sellout.
Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer, Richard Whalen, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” The conservative movement has understood itself to be the people who unflaggingly answered back to Nixon: “Principle rises above politics.” That’s a quote from Alf Regnery, in a profile of him this fall in the Washington Post. In the same article, David Keene related his answer to someone who criticized the ACU for attacking congressional spending, because Republicans were the ones in charge of it: “Well, that’s too bad.” The man here to my right, Lee Edwards, got the money quote: “What we have here is the principled conservatives vs. the pragmatic conservatives.”
[…]
What to make of the fact that some of the names who pioneered this anti-Nixonian movement of principle showed up in the dankest recesses of the Nixon administration? People like Douglas Caddy, of course, the co-founder of the effort to draft Goldwater for vice-president in 1960 and YAF’s first president, who was the man the White House called on to represent the Watergate burglars in 1972. And people like the guy inaugurated as YAF’s chair in the 1965 with those stirring words about truth: Tom Charles Huston–who, as the author of the first extra-legal espionage and sabotage plan in the Nixon White House, can fairly be called an architect of Watergate.
It is a thread one finds throughout the annals of the Nixon presidency. The notion that what they were doing was moral, the eggs that need be broken in the act of redeeming a crumbling West. Jeb Magruder told the Senate Watergate Committee: “Although I was aware they were illegal we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a cause.” That message came straight from the top. “Just remember you’re doing the right thing,” the president told Bob Haldeman on Easter Sunday, 1973. “That’s what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi.” Then he briefed him on how to suborn perjury from an aide concerning the blackmailing of the Watergate burglars.
I would argue that the lawlessness of the Reagan administration was similarly couched in moral terms. Yes, the congress may have explicitly prohibited the president from aiding the Nicaraguan contras, but helping the contras was an act of redeeming a crumbling west (saving the world from communism), so more eggs had to be broken. I don’t think I need to point out the huge fluffy omelette this administration is cooking up — to redeem the crumbling…well, you know the drill.
So, it isn’t precisely a cult of George W. Bush. It’s a cult of Republican power. We know this because when a Democratic president last sat in the oval office, there was non-stop hysteria about presidential power and overreach. Every possible tool to emasculate the executive branch was brought ot bear, including the nuclear option, impeachment. Now we are told that the “Presidency” is virtually infallible. The only difference between now and then is that a Republican is the executive instead of a Democrat.
This must be a function of psychology more than ideology. David Gergen said this morning on This Weak, that the Republicans are much better at “messaging” than the Democrats, but that they aren’t good at governing. This is true. They win by selling a fantasy of freedom and riches —- and govern as despots. You can see from the examples cited above that there is no real conservative ideology. If they can jettison their most cherished ideals (small government, balanced budgets, checks and balances, states’ rights, individual liberty etc.) whenever a Republican holds office, it is quite clear that what they care about is the power, not the “message” on which they ran.
Today I read that Bob Barr, a man who made his bones by calling for Clinton’s impeachment even before the Lewinsky scandal broke, is now being booed by a room full of arch-conservatives for suggesting that the president saying “trust me” is not adequate. We know very well that if the president were a Democrat, everyone in that room would not find it adequate.
Perlstein ended his speech with this:
For the stations of the cross of a conservatism in power include not merely Sharon, Connecticut, but Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; not merely Mont Pelerin, but the competing Indian casinos whose money was laundered by conservative groups on Jack Abramoff’s behalf. Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson’s ties to Bobby Baker. Now Republicans have made Bobby Baker their majority leader. His K Street Project is a lineal descendant of the attitudes and actions that constituted Watergate: Richard Nixon calling for the heads of Democratic donors and howling, “We have all this power and we’re not using it.” The American Conservative Union has made defending him to the death a point of conservative honor.
Ask yourself, What would Barry Goldwater say?
I believe now that Goldwaterism was nothing more than public relations and the “conservative movement” that sprang from his failed presidential campaign was nothing more than an elaborate con job. Throughout all the years that they decried Stalinism, it wasn’t an idealistic belief in human rights and democracy that drove them. It was quite the opposite, in fact. It was envy. All that control over other people. The huge police and military apparatus. The forced conformity. The only thing they genuinely hated about the Soviet Union was its economic philosophy. The totalitarian system, not so much. When you read about the “conservative movement” you find over and over again that the anti-communists immersed themselves in Stalinism and modeled their organizational style on it, often quite openly admiring its efficient application of power. And as we know, one of totalitarianism’s most obvious features is the cult of personality that always grows up within it.
The modern Republicans do show all the hallmarks of an authoritarian cult. But I believe that the metaphorical statue of George W. Bush will be toppled very shortly after he leaves office after an “election” based on a message of “reform.” They must restore the fantasy. His statue will be replaced, of course, with another infallible leader. That’s how it works.
The Princeton Symposium is now available online. Check out the whole line-up of thinkers on the Right. Perlstein really went into the belly of the beast.
Update: Kevin coincidentally finds a very nice illustration of what I’m talking about.
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