![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/badlevine.jpeg\" "\\"badlevine\\"")
<\/a>Democrats like Dianne Feinstein, are spinning it for all it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\nCollecting meta-data doesn\u2019t seem quite as onerous as outright eavesdropping. But if the point is to rid the regime of \u201charmful knowledge\u201d \u2014 harmful, that is, to itself \u2013 it may be even more effective, at least in a first run through vast quantities of date. And, when it is not, the bonfire stands ready; it can be lit at any moment.<\/p>\n
Book burning, or its functional equivalents, were supposed to be a concern in fascist countries; not in the Land of the Free. Evidently, times have changed \u2014 and not for the better.<\/p>\n
Without the benefit of hindsight, it would be premature to assign culpability. But enough is sufficiently clear already to make a start.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Everybody understands that this is no longer the country it was before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon twelve years ago, or rather before the reaction to those criminal acts set in.<\/p>\n
What is much less clear is what the pivotal changes have been.<\/p>\n
To add to the mystery: many of the most egregious concessions to the Dark Side happened early on, during George W. Bush\u2019s first term. These would include the establishment through rendition and direct participation of a torture regime, the creation of an extensive gulag of secret prisons, the assault on due process rights and habeas corpus, and (by the standards of the time) the massive extension of foreign and domestic surveillance.<\/p>\n
Then there are the countless lesser and greater annoyances initiated by the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucratic concoction that would have been unthinkable before Bush\u2019s first term, but that quickly became the new normal.<\/p>\n
However Bush moderated his depredations in the declining years of his presidency, even before Barack Obama was elected to usher in an age of \u201chope\u201d and \u201cchange.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless there is a sense that things are getting worse, and that they are worse under Obama even than they were before, and worse still this far into his second term than they were, say, a year ago. How can this be?<\/p>\n
To his credit, Obama did repackage the larger of the two lost wars Bush started, the one against Iraq. That was not exactly what those who voted for him expected him to do. But it was a step in the right (or less wrong) direction.<\/p>\n
Like other \u201cpeace\u201d Democrats \u2014 Howard Dean, for example \u2014 Obama never had any problem with the other lost war, the one in Afghanistan. So he was happy enough to superintend a \u201csurge\u201d there, and then to give the OK to the hapless General Petraeus, that paragon of military genius, to try some of the \u00a0\u201ccounter-insurgency\u201d nostrums he resurrected from the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
So long as there was still a shred of hope, Obama was determined not to look like a looser. That didn\u2019t quite work out, though the Spin Doctors are still trying.<\/p>\n
If instead of a Nobel Prize for Peace, they gave one for Saving Face, and if effort counted more than results, Obama might actually deserve one.<\/p>\n
But at least he isn\u2019t initiating too many new wars; not like Bush did. The worst does seem behind us. And yet, things seem only to have become more hopeless.<\/p>\n
Part of the problem is that, once Obama became President, a good part of what might otherwise have turned into a (pale) Left opposition took up cheerleading for the Democratic Party and its Commander-in-Chief instead. When that proved too much to bear, even for them, they devoted themselves to finding excuses for why there is nothing to cheer.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t have far to look \u2014 not with a Republican Party hell bent on making Democrats seem the Lesser Evil. There is even an entire cable network, MSNBC, with a nighttime lineup devoted to making fun of Republicans. \u00a0It is not a hard sell; Republicans are easy prey.<\/p>\n
But the excuses ring hollow, and mocking characters drawn from central casting at Morons Are Us gets old quickly, especially when there is no election in the offing.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t help either that the MSNBC pundits are themselves nauseatingly servile not just to the Democratic Party but to the regime both parties serve: witness, for example, how even the most \u201cliberal\u201d of them struggle to join the Obama-led, bipartisan bad-mouthing of Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n
In any case, the problem with Obama is not just that because liberals cut him so much slack, he neuters them without even trying.<\/p>\n
The bigger problem has to do with how he has helped make things worse.<\/p>\n
The change from Bush to Obama and from the inner-circle of the former to the inner circle of the latter \u2014 from chicken hawks and neocons to unreconstructed Clintonites and \u201chumanitarian interveners\u201d \u2013 clearly marked a change in style.<\/p>\n
But it also masked a profound continuity in substance that is bound to become more apparent in the future, when it becomes possible to place the period we are living through in perspective.<\/p>\n
In any case, mere weariness with Bush-Obama governance does not explain the sense of doom, of everything becoming worse, which has come to infuse our politics. To account for that, we need a clearer purchase on what has changed since 9\/11.<\/p>\n
On the face of it, it looks like we have just been living through more of the same. Unjust and counter-productive wars are hardly unknown in our history, and neither are gross violations of the rule of law. To the extent that things now do seem worse, could it just be because qualitative changes sometimes emerge out of a piling on of instances?<\/p>\n
No doubt, this is part of the story. But there is also something genuinely new afoot.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Since the dawn of the new century, American governments have been building up a democracy deficit unprecedented in recent history.<\/p>\n
In democracies, the people rule \u2014 if not directly, then through elected representatives who, in theory, implement the peoples\u2019 will.\u00a0 But instead of the American people controlling their state, even to the extent that was the norm just a few years ago, the state increasingly controls the people.<\/p>\n
It may not exercise control overtly very often. But it can whenever it wants, to a degree that it could not before \u2013 and everyone knows it.<\/p>\n
The problem is not just that technologies now exist that enable 24\/7 snooping. It is that the government is delighted to avail itself of them.<\/p>\n
There is some truth, after all, in the National Rifle Association\u2019s otherwise disingenuous claim that \u201cguns don\u2019t kill people; people kill people.\u201d The problem is not so much that the NSA is awash in the means of surveillance, a situation successive Administrations created. It is that the Bush-Obama administration has been deploying those means against \u201cwe, the people.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, they have been undermining a core condition for democratic governance \u2014 that protection from \u201cunreasonable searches,\u201d as the Fourth Amendment calls them, that makes democratic citizenship possible.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
The Obama presidency has played an important role in bringing this sorry situation about. It is not the only factor now working to quash democracy; not by any means. But it has worsened the problem considerably.<\/p>\n
The contrast with the past is staggering. Even with George Bush in the running, Richard Nixon was still the most lawless American President ever.\u00a0 But in his day, democracy was robust enough to correct for some of his major depredations \u2014 not in time to stop them, but eventually.<\/p>\n
Correcting for what Bush and Obama have done is going to be a lot harder because democracy, what little of it we had, was, from Day One, Casualty Number One in what Bush called the Global War on Terror \u2014 that perpetual war regime that Bush and Obama have settled upon us.<\/p>\n
Even before there were neocons, it was the Right\u2019s dream to use terrorism as a pretext for ratcheting up state and corporate control of an anxiety-ridden and depoliticized population.<\/p>\n
But even Ronald Reagan, the \u201cGreat Communicator,\u201d couldn\u2019t quite sell the idea \u2014 not enough to fool (nearly) all of the people all of the time. \u00a0For that, the Right needed help. For their own warped reasons, Al-Qaeda militants were happy to provide it.<\/p>\n
And so, terrorism now haunts our politics \u2014 not the reality, but the specter. And, with that specter working its effects, it has become all but impossible, unlike in Nixon\u2019s time, for the political system to correct itself.<\/p>\n
There is not enough democracy left for that.<\/p>\n
The Bush-Cheney Administration set the process in motion, and they were not subtle about it. \u00a0There is nothing remarkable in that: no one can accuse George Bush of subtlety.<\/p>\n
After Democrats swept the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush and Cheney could surely have been impeached; had that happened, they would very likely have been removed from office, saving the world enormous grief. But the Pelosiite leadership of the House of Representatives would have none of it.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t want to impede Hillary Clinton\u2019s bid to lead a Restoration of her husband\u2019s awful Presidency. By the time it became clear that she wouldn\u2019t be their candidate, the Democratic leadership was already too caught up in \u201chope\u201d and \u201cchange\u201d to act as if they had a backbone.<\/p>\n
Had Obama been anything like what some of his supporters imagined, he probably could have shut the entire Bush-Cheney operation down early in 2009, when he had \u00a0political capital to spare.<\/p>\n
He could have said what many thoughtful people were thinking in the Fall of 2001, before the media fell into line with Bush, Cheney and the neocons: that the attacks in New York and Washington were criminal acts, not acts of war; and that they should have been \u2014 and could still be \u2014 addressed as law enforcement problems that could be engaged through diplomacy, not force of arms.<\/p>\n
For a brief moment, Obama could have hit the reset button. But, of course, that was the farthest thing from his mind.<\/p>\n
Instead, he assumed stewardship of the empire.<\/p>\n
Once that happened, a course reversal was out of the question. A global hegemon, like a mob boss, cannot admit a mistake; that would suggest weakness and vulnerability. \u00a0And so, Obama took up where his predecessor left off, adding his own special touches.<\/p>\n
What Obama did, in short, was bring the war back home \u2013 the war on democracy or, more precisely, on the conditions for its possibility.<\/p>\n
Others are doing that too, of course; fortunately, not in concert with the Commander-in-Chief.<\/p>\n
The five Republican Justices on the Supreme Court have taken it upon themselves to go after democratic procedures. \u00a0In 2010, to the delight of corporate \u201cpersons\u201d everywhere, they turned political corruption into constitutionally protected free speech. Then, last week, they eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important Civil Rights legislation of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
In so doing, they have given states run by Republican legislatures and governors license to keep all but the most determined African Americans and other persons of color from voting. More generally, they have made it easier for Republicans to suppress votes that everyone knows are unlikely to go their way.<\/p>\n
To his credit, Obama has voiced opposition to the Supreme Court\u2019s assaults on democracy. But that is all he has done.<\/p>\n
A stronger President would now do what Lyndon Johnson did in 1965; he would go before Congress and the American people, using all the resources at his disposal, to demand that they restore the basic rights of democratic citizenship. \u00a0Don\u2019t expect anything like that to happen.<\/p>\n
All that Obama has in common with LBJ is that he too should be asked, when he appears in public, how many kids he killed today.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Republicans, with Tea Partiers in the lead, have been acting out in ways that undo another prerequisite of democratic governance, a robust commitment to furthering the public good.<\/p>\n
Except where it comes to war making or to feathering their own nests or the nests of their paymasters, Republicans have become the Party of No. The Chamber of Commerce types for whom the GOP exists, and the Country Club barflies who think like them, have so far managed to keep the lunatics from taking over the asylum entirely. But how long can they hold the line?<\/p>\n
Getting their man Romney nominated may have been their last gasp. How else to explain the renewed push, in states Republicans control and in the Republican led House of Representatives, to undo abortion rights \u2014 in other words, to wage a war on women?<\/p>\n
And, with inevitable demographic changes making the need to court Latino voters obvious, how else to explain Republican resistance to immigration reform \u2014 even the nativist, corporate-friendly kind proposed by the so-called Gang of Eight?<\/p>\n
Evidently, the grownups are losing control.<\/p>\n
Of course, this is not Obama\u2019s doing. \u00a0But, just by being there, he has played an indirect role in creating the monstrosity the Republican Party has become. Because he was perceived (correctly) as weak, and because he is black, he became a lightning rod for all the vileness that emanates from Republican ranks.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, Obama cannot be blamed for the noxiousness of his enemies. \u00a0But there are harms to democracy, graver ones, for which he can be blamed \u2013 because they are in large part his doing.<\/p>\n
The viciousness of his assaults on whistle blowers, especially but not only Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, is an indication.<\/p>\n
The newly revealed \u201cInsider Threat Program\u201d \u2013 a recreation, in caricature, of the everybody-is-an-informant ethos associated with the worst days of High Stalinism \u2014 is an even more graphic one.<\/p>\n
The target is not democratic governance per se; Obama is fine with that, as his opposition to recent Supreme Court and Republican Party antics suggest.<\/p>\n
His target is civil society, the kind that is a prerequisite for people, individually and collectively, to function as citizens, not just subjects \u2013 as political actors who shape their own collective destiny.<\/p>\n
A robust civil society can survive Nixon-style violations of privacy rights, but it can hardly survive Obama-style 24\/7 surveillance and related efforts to keep the public quiescent and uninformed.<\/p>\n
Surveillance chills deliberation and debate, inhibits political participation, and removes that expectation of privacy without which democratic citizenship cannot survive.<\/p>\n
It was because the authors of the U.S. Constitution understood this that they put the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments in place. By putting the protections those Amendments were intended to safeguard in jeopardy, Obama, the scholar of constitutional law, has posed perhaps as deep a threat to democratic governance as can be.<\/p>\n
It hardly matters whether this is his considered view or whether, as seems more likely, he has drifted into it because he lacks the strength and stature to go against the post-9\/11 tide.<\/p>\n
What matters is that this descent into a public world that is qualitatively worse than anything we have known before is occurring under his guidance and with his support.<\/p>\n
<\/em>ANDREW LEVINE<\/strong>\u00a0is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and\u00a0POLITICAL KEY WORDS<\/a>\u00a0(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is\u00a0In Bad Faith: What\u2019s Wrong With the Opium of the People<\/a>. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. \u00a0<\/em>He is a contributor to\u00a0Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion<\/a>\u00a0(AK Press).<\/em><\/p>\n