There is a hubbub today over a recent poll showing majority support for torture in the United States. It's a distressing result that demonstrates just how much progress remains to be made in the United States even vis-a-vis countries as far down on the torture totem pole as Egypt and Iran.
There are many in the progressive community who believe that this poll is reflective of a lack of appropriate leadership by the President on this issue. The theory goes that Obama's failure to prosecute Bush Administration officials for waterboarding and other torture violations has led to a sense of torture laissez-faire among the American people, in an argument strongly reminiscent of conservative arguments about the public's supposed sexual licentiousness in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
There is ample reason to lay blame on the Administration for this state of affairs. But the problem has much more to do with economic policy than with civil liberties policy.
The fact is that the American people are scared and angry right now, and with good reason. With the official unemployment rate at over 10%, and the real unemployment rate approaching Great Depression levels, the American public is in a terrible frame of mind to be dealing with this topic.
Scared and angry people do as scared and angry people have done throughout history: they lash out. They become violent. And they don't always vent their fearful frustrations on the appropriate people, which is why any form of powerful populism always carries inherent risks. One need look no farther for proof of this than Glenn Beck's adoring audience of teabaggers, eager to blame minorities and Nancy Pelosi for the economic depredations of Wall St. tycoons.
President Obama cannot solve the "torture support" problem by talking about torture, or by prosecuting Bush Administration officials even as the economy plunges further into catastrophe and increasing numbers of Americans go without healthcare. From a political point of view, he would be foolish to do so: as a puzzled American public would demand to know why so much energy was being spent on that issue, when their ability to pay their mortgages and stay out of bankruptcy is on the line.
But more importantly, from a practical point of view, support for torture at this moment is less a messaging problem or legal problem than it is a social one, caused largely by economic turmoil, as well as a popular culture that has embraced some forms of torture with scarcely a blink of eye (not only on conservative-leaning shows like 24, but also progressive-leaning films like the latest James Bond episode Quantum of Solace).
The President quite literally cannot tackle the "torture problem" without addressing its economic root causes. To do otherwise is to treat a symptom, while leaving the disease untouched.
As any student of Thomas Frank can tell you, poor economic conditions affecting the poor and middle class create an auto-catalytic negative cycle, with each new blow giving rise to increasingly misdirected populist anger. Some of that anger comes out in protests against abortion or gay marriage; some of it comes out in general anti-government sentiment; and some of it comes out in violent xenophobia, of which support for torture is just a small part.
The American proclivity for torture is but a symptom of a larger ailment causing a whole host of other negative symptoms. Address the economic disease, and the symptom will go away. Address the symptom alone while ignoring the disease, and the patient will eventually die in a right-wing populist upheaval that will make current civil liberties policies look like a progressive utopia.