Dick Cheney has a point. He has a guiding philosophy. He has a plan.
It's not a compelling point. It's not a just philosophy. It's not a workable plan. But it's there. He doesn't speak its name clearly or explain it publicly, but it's there. To fight it requires recognizing it and bringing it into the disinfectant light of day.
Ready? Here it is:
Dick Cheney does not believe that our country can survive in the 21st century as a liberal democracy.
Dick Cheney does not believe that we can any longer afford the luxury of living in a hostile world without a de facto dictator. He does not believe that the defense of private property (mainly that of people like him) is compatible with continued respect for civil liberties. He believes that we need a compliant populace that will do what it's told if our country (again, by which he means people like him) is to thrive. He believes that America must become a gated nation.
Without understanding Dick Cheney's plan and reasoning, you cannot make sense of his actions. He is not stupid. His plan is not stupid. Rather, it is wrong. Offensive. Anti-American.
More after the jump.
The death of Gerald Ford takes me back to 1975, when Dick Cheney was Ford's young Chief of Staff. It brings to mind two documents from that year that help to explain Cheney's thinking.
The first is the Sydney Pollack film Three Days of the Condor, a wonderful adaptation of Richard Condon's novel Six Seven Days of the Condor. (If you don't want it spoiled -- though you have already had 31 years to see it -- skip to past the block quote.)
Deputy CIA Director Higgins (Cliff Robertson) is defending the agency's dirty operations to low-level CIA researcher Turner (Robert Redford), who survived the massacre of his team by rogue agent Atwood, a man who was intent on precipitating a U.S. invasion of the Middle East to take control of its oil before Turner foiled his plan by uncovering it.
Turner: What if there hadn't been any heat? Suppose I hadn't stumbled on their plan?
Higgins: Different ballgame. Fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh, the plan was all right, the plan would've worked.
Turner: Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?
Higgins: No. It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now — then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!
That is the future for which Dick Cheney thinks we are unprepared. A world of dwindling resources in which we (or at least people like him) cannot maintain the American Way of Life without stealing what we need. China is ascending, population is booming, resources are dwindling, the environment is degrading, and he tells himself that he wants to make sure that people like him -- and maybe he thinks he's doing this for the sake of Americans generally -- are safe, fat, and happy.
He thinks that we can't do it if we remain a liberal democracy.
One reason he thinks so is the very existence of the second document from 1975, the initial report of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee after its Chair, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee report detailed all sorts of misdeeds by the CIA. (A parallel House committee produced a document known as the Pike Report after it's chair Rep. Otis Pike, but this report was not released at the request of the Ford Administration. See the first comment below for more.) The lesson of the Church Committee Report, for the likes of Dick Cheney, is that softhearted liberals will be able to use Congressional investigatory power to expose and undermine the ability of the government to take whatever steps it felt to be necessary to support its policies.
This is why, as we are reminded today, Cheney and his former boss Rumsfeld encouraged Gerald Ford to veto the Freedom of Information Act.
Cheney's philosophy dictates that the President have enormous, essentially unreviewable power. (He may be willing to allow some review so long as it is ineffectual, but he does not want Congress or the Courts to be able to block Executive policies. As with the domestic spying program that Senator Rockefeller was reduced to complaining about by secret memo, he doesn't even want Congress or the Courts to know about them.)
Beyond this, Dick Cheney wants to put as many resources as possible into private -- corporate and individual -- hands. This has three benefits. First, it generally puts these resources beyond the reach of the democratic system he distrusts. Second, it "starves the beast" of government, at least those parts that may impede the growth business by making it responsible for its actions, a notion that has been thoroughly aired over the years. Third, it leaves individual citizens desperate and worried. It may be strange to think of this latter effect as an advantage, but to Dick Cheney it is. A populace that is afraid of losing its jobs, afraid of losing its health care, afraid of losing its access to decent education, is one that will be more compliant. It will not agitate because it cannot afford the consequences. It will be willing to let its children be used for military adventures because that is (theoretically) one of the relatively few ways to get a decent income and financial support for an education.
One problem with this system is that it may not work so well if the reins of government change from time to time. A later Democratic Administration can reveal many of the secrets of a prior Republican one, at least those that have not been locked away in Presidential archives. And so he cannot be trusted with power over the machinery of elections. The top aim of the Bush Administration, above any other, has been to get public money into the hands of Republican Party contributors. Having been inducted into the dirty corridors of power, these contributors then are expected to do their utmost for the Party. (Dick Cheney's model is something between the Chinese Communist Party and Japan's Liberal Democratic Party. Some degree of ineffectual opposition is OK, but they cannot be allowed to take over.) Would Dick Cheney lie and cheat to stay in power? It would appear to be his self-appointed duty.
Does this make Dick Cheney a bad man? He sees himself as a pragmatist, no doubt. Perhaps, in his willingness to see the dirty work of grabbing world resources done, he sees himself as something like the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov's poem, with the unhappy task of executing the hidden and necessary evil work that be believes allows our society to prosper.
And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.
And all Dick Cheney asks from us as compensation for his willingness to suffer for our sins is to be filthy rich, arbitrarily powerful, beyond the focus of media inquiry, and above the law when necessary.
There is a possibility that I find even worse, though: perhaps he's right.
Not morally right -- surely it would be better for our society to learn to do with less oil than to steal it -- but right in terms of the impression of the popular will present in Three Days of the Condor. Perhaps, in its heart, our country is now so addicted to oil that it wants its Grand Inquisitor leaders to steal for its benefit, so long as its own beautiful mind does not become troubled. I can't rule out the possibility. I think that the people of the U.S. will be very unhappy indeed as the scarcity of resources impinges on our lifestyle. And maybe many of us would be happy to stoop to stealing and colluding with dictators -- as the Church and Pike Reports show we had done before.
There's an element of truth there -- but ultimately, I reject it. I don't think we're as amoral as Dick Cheney apparently does. I don't know that I can justify that belief logically; perhaps it must simply be an article of faith. If things will become as bad as we have every reason to think they will, I believe that the American people -- soft and callow and self-indulgent as we may have let ourselves become -- will rise to the occasion. I believe that when the question is put to the nation, we have neither the stomach nor the cold heart to be led in the direction that Dick Cheney would take us. I think that most Americans, deep down, have a fundamental patriotism and love of democracy.
I think, in other words, that we want to continue to be -- or return to be, perhaps -- the United States of America. And I think that, given the fact, we see Dick Cheney's plan for the country as a betrayal of our Founders' legacy. For all of our historical problems, we are not at heart the bandits and thugs and Dick Cheney hopes we are. We believe in democracy. He believes we do not.
Dick Cheney thinks that we can't afford our idealism, that our commitment to true American principles have become an unjustifiable indulgence. I can't prove here that he's wrong. But we as a country can and must simply decide that our values do not allow him to be right. This is the battle we are fighting during this new century of limits: to maintain our ethical birthright.
Dick Cheney's point is that the reality of America's being a moral force in the world is gone and that we have to adapt to the law of the jungle by cowing the world into serving us. For him, an empty assertion of American morality is better than a true assertion because there is no need to live up to it. He might be right -- but if we think he's wrong, this spells out the grounds on which we oppose him:
It is our right and duty and pleasure as Americans to call Dick Cheney what he is: Anti-American. That is why we oppose him. That is why we oppose him.