Unjoin the party

Following up on Friday’s great post comparing the at least sometimes courageous British Right with its gutless and decrepit American counterpart, Glenn Greenwald takes the Democrats to task for their own weakness on civil liberties. Money quotes:

When the history of the post 9/11-era in America is written, it will record that our country was ruled by an administration as radical as it was contemptuous of our laws and basic liberties, but was also aided and abetted every step of the way by a putative “opposition party” too craven and/or supportive even to attempt to impede any of it, let alone succeed in doing so. The very few times when certain of its members tried to take principled stances of the type Britain is now witnessing — such as Feingold’s vigorous opposition to Bush’s illegal spying program, the Military Commissions Act, and excesses of the Patriot Act — the Democratic Party leadership itself intervened to quash them and ensure they failed.

The lawlessness, excesses and civil liberties abuses of the last seven years began as secret Republican initiatives but are ending up as fully bipartisan policies, with the Republican and Democratic Party establishments sharing roughly equal responsibility for all of it. It may be unpleasant to have to accept that but it is nonetheless true.

…

Democrats are about to institutionalize a proposition that has been rejected since the Nuremberg Trials — namely, that individuals (or, more accurately, lobbyist-protected corporations) are free to break the law as long as they can claim afterwards that they were told by the Leader to do so. That’s the principle which the Democratic Party — following their standard pattern of having enough of their members join a virtually unanimous GOP while the Democratic leadership enables it all — is about to write into our laws.

The excuse Congressional Democrats are using for this behavior — that passing a FISA/telecom bill is necessary to avoid political harm — is as false as it is cowardly. As I noted the other day, there are all sorts of easy ways to avoid political controversy if that goal were really what was driving them, including simply extending the existing PAA orders by 6-9 months so that they don’t expire in August.

But the broader and more important point is the one illustrated by the bold and principled acts being undertaken by British politicians in several parties there, the same principle illustrated by numerous acts of Russ Feingold over the past seven years: defending basic liberties, the core principles of our political system, and the rule of law is of such overriding importance that any worthwhile politician, by definition, will do so even if it entails some political cost. As British members of Parliament resign their seats and defend members of other parties in defense of their liberties, our own Democratic Party this week will — yet again — endorse and legalize the most extremist and illegal aspects of the Bush agenda in pursuit of the craven, illusory and increasingly irrelevant goal of protecting its own political interests.

As I said last time, read the whole thing.

The idea, which one hears occasionally from certain quarters, that it’s the influence of the lame and intensely unpopular Bush, as opposed to a much more deep-seated cowardice and lack of principle, that’s behind this phenomenon, seems to me to be tremendously naive: the fact is that the Democrats (like the Republicans, of course) are simply so caught up in the frenzy of the “post-9/11 mindset” that they are incapable of calling a spade a spade and taking real steps to roll back even the worst and most blatantly illegal of the measures that were put in place by the Bush Administration and its Congressional enablers. Like many on the Right, most of the American Left has become so fearful of the political fallout that comes being labeled “soft” or “scared” or “isolationist” or “appeasing” that, when push comes to shove, they end up funding the war and getting out of the way of illegal domestic spying, pledging to expand the military and “obliterate” Middle Eastern countries, making irresponsible and inflammatory statements in public addresses, and so on. Whether they will actually find their, er, cojones once they have an even larger Congressional majority and a more supportive President of course remains to be seen; I, however, remain on record as having a less than rosy outlook for the future.

Which brings me to Matt Yglesias’s take on America’s non-ideological politics:

Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust two-party system. Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country. Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties. Consequently, practical politics in the United States revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy. The primary fact about an American’s political allegiance, under the circumstances, is his attitude toward those coalitions not his or her abstract ideas about how things ought to be. A “conservative” in this sense just is someone who supports the Republican coalition versus the Democratic one and who in internal debates tends to support the institutionalized conservative movement’s “three pillars” approach against various reformist tendencies.

To the (very extensive) extent that this is true, I think we should be a lot less glib about it than Matt is here. It is certainly true that excessive ideology can be a dangerous thing, and that an anti-transactional politics of “aspirations to purism and total victory” is not what we need. But when politics is driven by the aspirations – that is to say, the aspirations for power and success – of coalitions and institutions rather than the attempts to realize, in what will of course be slapdash and always only partial ways, various sets of political ideals, that is exactly when we end up with political “leaders” thoroughly obsessed with the advice of their pollsters and unwilling to stand up and speak uncomfortable truths. The situation Greenwald is describing in Britain, where politicians on both sides of the aisle are putting their careers and their partisan coalitions in serious peril because they refuse to bend on matters of principle, could not be more different than most of what we’re seeing right now in the U.S., and that suggests to me that a bit more ideology would do us quite a lot of good.

(Cross-posted at Postmodern Conservative.)

Filed under: civil liberties, conservatism, politics, war