(DISCLAIMER: Pardon the long and possibly rambling nature of this diary. It is my first real diary, and I have so much to say. I apologize in advance for its unwieldiness.)
I am a law student and deeply devoted to the American experiment and all that it represents. Like many of you, recent events have caused me to fear for the future of this country and the vulnerable candle-flame of democracy that it has miraculously guarded and kept alight for 250 years, in the face of the hostile elements of human nature that rage and howl and threaten from age to age to snuff it out.
I believe that we are currently in a constitutional crisis, and a crisis of democracy, that is not the greatest this country has ever seen (that would be the Civil War, of course), but threatens to reach that level.
The blue states joke about secession, with a twinge of fear in the back of their minds that the joke could one day be a joke no longer. (What must the North have thought in the years before the South
actually seceded? It must have seemed like a joke at first, too.) Gays and lesbians -- myself among them -- see the tenor of the rhetoric and legislation targeting us and, though we dismiss the thought as ridiculous, can't help but wonder what the Jews thought when Germany started passing the Nuremberg Laws banning them from teaching in schools, marrying non-Jews, and otherwise removing their rights little by little. When, on the path from there to the Holocaust, did they first realize where that path would ultimately lead? Might we be on a similar path? Would we know it if we were? Did the Jews know it in 1933 when Hitler was appointed Chancellor? In 1935 when the Nazi
Nuremberg Laws were passed? In 1938, when
Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, a nationwide pogrom against Jews) occurred? In retrospect, historians say that
Kristallnacht "portended the Holocaust," but did the Jews know it then? Clearly not, because millions and millions of them stayed put. I can hear them now -- including my great-grandparents, who would later die in Auschwitz -- dismissing the alarmists among them as crazy liberal leftists with tinfoil hats on, even as Hitler planned the "Final Solution."
In light of the portentous signs issuing from Washington, I asked myself two questions: First, "What happened to enable things to get as close to totalitarianism as they have in this country?" And second, "What can we do now to prevent full-on Nazi-style totalitarianism from happening here?" Of course, the first thing is to retake the White House and Congress, but Democrats have held the White House and Congress before and will lose it again in the future, even if we do take them back in 2006 and 2008. I'm talking long-term. In the event that we retake the Presidency and Congress, what can we do to prevent things from ever again going as far down the road to totalitarianism as they have under George W. Bush, let alone further?
Thinking about the "how did it get this bad" question, and doing some reading and research, I realized an incredible and vital thing that we must all understand if we are to begin to address the second question of what to do about it. Namely, I realized that we liberals are responsible for enabling things to get this way. Yes, the immediate blame for putting W. in office falls on the Supreme Court, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Diebold, Karl Rove, the mainstream media, Grover Norquist, Big Oil, and the like. But we (or rather, our liberal forebears) are the ones who first created the structural conditions of government that allowed for awesome and unprecedented concentration of power in Washington, D.C., and in the executive branch in particular. We must realize this before we can hope to address this situation, and we must address the situation soon.
Allow me to quote at some length from Robert Dahl's Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, written presciently in 1982. Read these passages, and you may experience the same guilty revelation that I did upon reading them:
Liberalism, and in particular liberal ideas about democracy, were [originally] formulated in opposition to concentrated power. Liberal democracy [when it was born in the American Revolution] represented a movement away from the uniformity of centralized regulation imposed by means of power concentrated in the crown. . . .
The hostility of liberalism to concentration of power runs deep . . . . Yet even in the United States, liberalism in the twentieth century yielded up a great deal of its earlier commitment to dispersion. Progressive liberalism, reform liberalism, the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, all demanded that certain national policies be enforced uniformly throughout the United States. As a direct consequence, the new liberalism sought greater centralization of control over policies and decisions in federal agencies and a greater concentration of political resources at centers in Washington. Even more important, reform liberals quickly discovered that without strong presidential leadership no reform program could fight its way [through] the American political process . . . . Liberal reform therefore required that political resources be concentrated in the hands of the president. Richard Nixon did not create the Imperial Presidency; he inherited it. In point of fact it was mainly liberals, not their conservative opponents, who designed, encouraged, supported, and brought about the shift of resources to the White House that finally facilitated the creation of an Imperial Presidency . . . .
While George W. Bush and his administration are no doubt the most greedy, scheming, and power-hungry in modern history, we liberals must own up to the fact that we liberals are, in a sense, ultimately responsible for Bush and the "Imperial Presidency."
Of course, our liberal ancestors had the noblest and most compelling motives for concentrating power in the central government and in the Executive, in particular. An unbelievable shift in power to the federal government, and to the executive, was necessary to pass and enforce civil rights legislation, the unprecedented economic reforms of the New Deal (Social Security, etc.), anti-trust laws, meaningful environmental regulations, all over the objections of a portion of the states.
Yes, this centralization and strengthening of the executive was necessary to bring about the modern state as we know it. But the awesomely powerful weapon that we liberal reformers created to train on racism, corrpution, and inequality -- to defend the American people against the predatory advances of the would-be plutocratic elite -- has, in the fullness of time, been pried from our hands and is now pointing squarely at us and at the American people.
Pardon the geeky analogy, but think of the "One Ring" from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy: a weapon of awesome power that was created for good, but now threatens to fall into the hands of the Evil One, thus reducing the entire world to servitude and darkness. An all-powerful weapon is potentially either a force for good or a force for unmitigated evil, depending on whose hands it chances to fall into. In Lord of the Rings, the all-powerful One Ring almost fell into the hands of the Dark Lord through happenstance. In our case, the all-powerful "One Ring" that is the central government and imperial executive was quite intentionally taken over by the Right over the course of a thirty-year strategic cabal.
In Tolkien's books, the only way to prevent the ultimate destruction of the world was to destroy the One Ring forever. The race of Men, meanwhile, wanted to keep the ring for themselves rather than destroy it, confident that they could use it for good and not for evil. Yet they were corrupted by its absolute power, despite their best intentions, for absolute power corrupts humans absolutely (even if it doesn't do the same for elves or hobbits).
This is my second point: even if we liberals do end up with control over the "One Ring" again -- that is, if we reclaim the presidency and the federal government as a whole -- we must remember two things:
First, that while we may start with the best intentions, we must admit that we will not stay pure and uncorrputed for long. Total power over the government has corrputed the Democrats before, and it will again someday if we regain it. Of course, it only took the Republicans six years of total power to become absolutely corrupt, while the Democrats managed to hold out much longer when they controlled the government. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, no matter how good our intentions, as long as we are talking about humans and not elves or other mythical creatures. This much we must recognize. And we must tie our hands in advance by committing publicly and in a binding and believable fashion to destroy the One Ring if the American people will return it to us. This means pledging to reduce the power of the federal government and devolve some amount of power to the states. Not to go back to the pre-New Deal era, per se, because to an extent, that ship has sailed. But cut back we must, because if we allow the One Ring to keep existing, one slip-up is all it takes for it to fall into the wrong hands and do unimaginable evil.
I know the natural response to this talk about cutting back on the power of central government is to think of Grover Norquist and his line about reducing the federal government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub, and thus to think of Katrina and the ills that result from disempowering the federal government. I intend to address this concern later.
Second, we must remember that if we gain control of the One Ring again in 2006 and '08, we will not have it forever, and that the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron (I mean Karl) remain poised to retake it and use it for self-enrichment and violence and pettiness and revenge at their first opportunity.
And of course, as much as we are loathe to admit it, there are actually men more evil and dangerous than Bush and Cheney and Rove, and modern history shows us what horrors can happen when the One Ring of unchecked central government power, and especially strong executive power, falls into their hands. In Dahl's words:
Although the institutions of [democracy] have not collapsed under this new weight [of unprecedented centralized power and a strengthened Executive], it would be wrong to say that anxieties about the consequences of concentration have thereby been shown to be irrational. For one thing, the flourishing of dictatorships, sometimes in the extreme form of totalitarian rule, has once again demonstrated that democracy depends on a dispersion of power and resources . . . .
So, back to the problem I skipped over before: this talk of destroying the One Ring of all-powerful central government sounds like the talk of a wacko far-right gun-toting white supremacist militia type. And we saw with Katrina, especially, what can supposedly happen when the central government is made powerless and ineffective.
As for the "wacko far-right-wing" sound of this type of talk, there is a misperception that must be cleared up. There are two separate divides being mixed up here. One is the divide between "socially liberal" (progressive, reformist, embracing change and differences) versus "socially conservative" (backward-looking, pro-establishment, afraid of change and differences). The other is the divide between those who believe in centralized, concentrated power and authority, versus those who believe in dispersed power and authority. The two divides are quite separate; they both constitute distinct dimensions on which a person's beliefs can vary. There is a widespread misconception these days that "socially liberal" necessarily requires that you also believe in centralized, concentrated power ("big government"), and that "socially conservative" necessarily requires that you also believe in dispersed power and authority ("states' rights," etc.). This is patently false, and the best thing we progressives can do right now is realize this and abolish this misconception. The social conservatives at the center of the cabal have brilliantly succeeded by slowly but intentionally de-linking their social conservative agenda from the agenda and values of dispersed power that social conservatives used to espouse, just like we liberals succeeded in our radical liberal transformation of America during the New Deal and Civil Rights era only by de-linking our ancestral emphasis on decentralized government from our pro-equality and pro-everyman agenda, and creating the "One Ring" of the imperial Presidency and all-powerful federal government.
Meanwhile, today, we progressives cry and howl and point out how hypocritical the "conservatives" are being. They are not necessarily being hypocritical. Being a social conservative has nothing to do, inherently, with small government and decentralized power. And being a social liberal has nothing to do, inherently, with being pro-centralized power. We must overcome this misconception, and help the American public overcome it, too, because once they realize that pro-civil rights and pro-civil liberties progressivism does not necessarily entail a centralized Big Brother state and that reactionary social conservatism can definitely entail a centralized Big Brother state, we win over the vote of the "libertarian West" and all good Americans who are wary of dictatorship. Recall from the passage I quoted above that liberalism was born in America in opposition to the authoritarian centralization of absolute power in the King and an unresponsive, unrepresentative Parliament, who cared only for the interests of the nobility. In response, the Founding Fathers invented American liberalism, and it was radical liberalism, too: what can be more liberal than "we hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal?" This notion at the time was radical. Abolishing titles and nobility and an official patrician class was radical. Now, of course the Founders implemented their social liberal vision imperfectly -- slavery and women's rights being the prime examples -- but what they did do was still radical and a fantastic start. We liberals are the inheritors of the social liberal tradition of the founders, not the Republicans, with their modern-day King George and their modern-day Parliament in thrall to the modern-day landed nobility. Let us not forget this, and let us not let America forget this.
But the Founders were not just social liberals: they were incredibly anti-centralization and pro-dispersion. We are called the United States of America, and not just "America," for a reason. The Founders, fresh from their rebellion against a dictatorial, oppressive, all-powerful "unitary Executive" and his central monopoly on power, took pains to ensure that our federal government would be one of limited powers and that the true sovereignty would remain with the States, the government closest to the people, most familiar with their concerns, and the easiest for the people to monitor. Also, with the real power dispersed among the States, and not in the center with a unitary executive, there is no "One Ring" to worry about falling into the wrong hands. The Founders knew that true social liberalism (equality for all, and no ruling class) required a good deal of dispersion of power, for concentration of power is what creates a ruling class in the first place.
We social liberals changed our tune after Reconstruction, when it became obvious that to enforce desegregation and civil rights on the intransigent southern states, we had to remove power from them and place it in the Center. We further drifted from our roots as pro-dispersion and anti-centralization when it became clear that to effect the sweeping social liberal reforms of the New Deal, we had to remove power from Congress and the Supreme Court, and place it in the Presidency. (Did you know that FDR tried to add six extra spots on the Supreme Court so he could "pack" it with pro-New Deal justices, thus getting around the Supreme Court's tendency to strike down all his New Deal legislation as unconstitutional? Sure we may like FDR's ends today -- Social Security, regulations guaranteeing rights for labor, etc., but don't his means sound a lot like what the Right is trying to do today?) We further drifted from our anti-centralization roots when we realized that in order to save the environment, guarantee abortion rights, etc., over the protestation of unwilling states, we had to further siphon power away from the states and locate it in the federal government.
Of course, all these things -- civil rights, the environment, social welfare, privacy and choice -- are substantively correct and good for America. However, the precedent that we created in bringing them about over the protestations of unwilling states by gradually empowering the Center at the expense of the uncooperative States has slowly created a One Ring, without us ever noticing. And it is only now, once the One Ring has fallen into the hands of the Dark Lord, that we see the terrible power of what we have wrought in drifting so far from the anti-centralization roots of our social liberal Founding Fathers.
Do I think we should not have empowered the Center and the Executive? This is so hard to answer. What does Robert Dahl say?
[But] [a]re we all really in favor of dispersion? Not necessarily. Once we accept the premise that there must be definite even if not perfectly clear limits to concentration [of power], then within these limits [a] dilemma becomes perfectly real. For whenever (a) uniform enforcement of a policy is desirable, (b) uniformity cannot be attained without centralization, and (c) centralization requires a concentration of power and resources, then either one must forego a desirable uniformity or else accept concentration [of power]. Everyone who is not an anarchist is likely to agree that the risks of concentration are sometimes offset by the advantages of a uniform policy. The conflict between the advantages and risks of concentration is genuine, and citizens and leaders cannot escape the force of this dilemma in any democratic country.
On one hand, without an all-powerful Congress and Presidency, we may have gotten civil rights legislation, Social Security, environmental regulations, labor law, etc. much later, if at all. Without a Supreme Court that thought itself capable of making controversial pronouncements not grounded explicitly in the text of the Constitution and enforcing those pronouncements on unwilling states, we would never have had Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, or Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down anti-gay sodomy laws). As a good social liberal, I am loathe to say that I think the mechanism of centralization that brought all these things about was illegitimate or somehow bad.
But that same mechanism of centralization -- especially the empowerment of the Executive, but also of all three branches at the expense of the States -- has brought us the Iraq War, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping, the Patriot Act, Bush v. Gore, tax cuts for the rich, an unconscionable bankruptcy bill, empowerment of corporations, empowerment of Big Oil, empowerment of the Christian Right, abolition of the separation of church and state, the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, the Terri Schiavo incident, the gutting of state environmental standards that are higher than the federal government's pitiful ones, and the all-out capture of the now quite powerful regulatory agencies by the very corporate interests whom the regulatory agencies were originally intended to regulate. The corporate interests and their government enablers have gotten so bold, they don't even try to be subtle about the capture anymore, placing blatant industrialists at the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example.
The point of all this is that social liberals must come to see that the One Ring of massive federal power, and especially executive federal power, that they have created to do good is what is ultimately responsible for the enablement of so much evil. It is a Catch-22, for sure, because, as I already said, so many things that we would not give up for the world would have come much later, if ever, if not for our creation of the One Ring. But we should consider destroying the One Ring now, or at least removing some of its power. It may have been necessary in the singular context of the civil rights movement, following directly from the singular-in-our-history upheaval of the Civil War and Reconstruction, in order to finally and completely carry out the mission of emancipation that the Civil War started. It may have been necessary in the terrifying and singular-in-our-history context of the Great Depression, where the very economic future of our nation was in question and decisive emergency action was perhaps necessary to save it. But it is no longer necessary. Bush will tell us that it is necessary to fight the "War on Terror," but we see through this. In fact, I can think of no foreseeable reason why the One Ring is essential anymore. Anything else that is left to be done -- gay rights, environmental protection, narrowing the rich/poor divide -- is, for all its unquestionable importance, not crucial enough to have immediately that we should risk the destruction of democracy and world war that the One Ring threatens if it falls into the wrong hands. Although it is a painful choice to make, I think I would settle for having to take the slow, arduous route toward these reforms -- i.e., convincing the masses that it's in their own best interest, state by state -- rather than leaving these decisions up to the Center and risking the One Ring falling into Sauron's hands. It just takes one slip-up for this to happen. If it turns out that Bush doesn't destroy our country completely, the next one might. We have to destroy the One Ring the next chance we get, or more accurately, split off 50 small rings from the One Ring, giving one to each state, and leaving a still-powerful but not all-powerful ring in the hands of the federal government. This remaining central ring, unlike Tolkien's One Ring, must not be powerful enough to wage war or de facto amend the Constitution against the express wishes of half the country and the entirety of what we now call the "blue states." Neither should it be powerful enough to let the federal government do momentous things against the express wishes of the entirety of the "red states," should we win the ring back by recapturing a mere few thousand votes in Ohio in 2008. Better, in my opinion, to settle for the frustration of a slow but inevitable trudge toward equality and enlightenment, largely on a state-by-state basis, than risk these manic-depressive swings from absolute power being used for good and absolute power being used for evil -- especially since with such centralization of power, despite the potential advantages, it just takes one Adolf Hitler to come into control to cause the Holocaust.
So what about Katrina, again? I keep promising to address this. Here is my answer: Katrina happened not because of the disempowerment of the federal government. The lesson of Katrina is not that we need a more powerful federal government. The lesson of Katrina is that we need a more accountable federal government, a more transparent federal government. Someone wearing the One Ring needs not worry about doing anything competently, because he can never be held accountable and has no incentive to make competent decisions. Who will criticize an absolute monarch for spending lavishly and unproductively against the best interest of the masses? No, I think Katrina was not caused by an insufficiently powerful central government. Reducing the power of the Center, making it answerable to the States and the People again, will not cause more Katrina situations. I think it will prevent them. And in any event, devolving some power to the States will allow the States to do more in such a situation. Louisiana could do so little because the federal government had all the authority, all the power, and it did not act. (We all remember Bush playing the guitar, Condi shoe-shopping, Brownie worrying about his clothes and hair, and Cheney nowhere to be seen.) I think it's far from clear that devolving power to the States, within limits of course, will cause the next Katrina. It may be necessary to prevent it.
This rambling tale is the story about how, against all the weight of my instincts and liberal conventional wisdom, I started to see the wisdom of scaling back the power of the federal government and of advancing states' rights, even if part of me still can't really believe what my mind now knows to be true. The very words "states' rights," as I've admitted, call to mind Strom Thurmond, the KKK, Jefferson Davis, Fort Sumter, the Michigan Militia. But they should not. They should call to mind Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The Founding Fathers had it right. As a law student, it kills me inside to say anything that might just as well have come from the mouth of a Rehnquist or a Scalia. But, while I disagree with them on many things, I now see that they have at least one valid point. By empowering the federal government and the Presidency, we liberals, in our zeal to carry out our progressive vision with all deliberate speed, created a One Ring in the process. We used it for good at the time. But over the past six years, we have seen an unnerving preview of what it can do when used for evil. As much as this President and this Congress have damaged America and the community of nations, this is only a pale shadow of the unthinkable consequences that could result if it truly fell into the wrong hands. My fellow liberals, when the Ring comes back into our hands, we must not be tempted to put it on, lest we lose what may be our only opportunity to stave off eventual totalitarianism in America. We must undo the Ring the first chance we get, or at least drain off some of its power. Our ideas are right and the American people are good at heart; in time, we can convince them. We do not need the One Ring to convince them over the long haul. But a would-be totalitarian dictator does need it.
Can there be such a thing as a states-rights liberal, a liberal crusading to reduce federal power (especially, but not only, Executive power) and devolve it "to the States respectively, or to the people" (to quote the Tenth Amendment)? We had better hope there can be such a thing, and we had better at least consider what it would mean to move in that direction. Remember, we liberals laid the groundwork generations ago on which our present-day King George's throne rests. We owe it to America to own up to it and to set things right again.