Surprisingly, the leading stories about illegal spying in Washington and in the boardroom of a top corporation have not been connected by the punditocracy. What could Bush's illegal spying have to do with Patricia Dunn's illegal spying at Hewlett-Packard? Well, duh! Could it be that the cult of unchecked executive power is increasingly accepted as the norm in American society?
Let's take a look at how authoriatarian personalities operate when they conclude that they are bigger than the law.
Bush rationalizes breaking the law by appealing to "Natural Law," the crude instinctive beliefs that still motivate most Americans. In this case, by making his spying a matter of life and death, he persuades himself and his followers that an "emergency" warrants breaking the law. He believes that by keeping the law-breaking secret and by putting it in the hands of proxies he can avoid punishment.
Dunn gets away with breaking the law because she decides that the confidentiality of boardroom decisions is her top priority and that the plugging of information leaks must be accomplished at all costs. She believes that by keeping the law-breaking secret, and by putting it in the hands of proxies she can avoid punishment.
But the most important parallel in these instances of illegal action is the acquiescence of the inner circle of the leadership. Nobody among the inbred zealots of the Bush administration had the sense or gumption to stand up and say: I will resign if you do this. At Hewlett-Packard, Director Perkins did resign, but he learned of the spying long after it was approved.
Somehow American leadership has regressed from sophisticated technocracy to chimp-pack gangsterism, and the evidence is in the newspapers every day. How did we come to this? How did crude Bossism become America's leadership culture?