Have
you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew
that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and
let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on
developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a
new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet,
we have no name.
And
here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is
all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make
sense of it or even say that it might be so.
Let me make my case,
however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint
outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and
elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the
corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional
system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as
an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of
“we the people.”
Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be
based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and
power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national
security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway,
and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally
categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system
somewhat in disarray.
Check
out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly
feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most
associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar,
highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent
presidential contests. (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and
again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled
the presidency for
Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a
recent piece Nate
Cohn wrote for my hometown paper. A noted election statistician, Cohn
points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead
in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could
lose the general election. He bases this on what we know about her
polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the
present. Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic
Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy
victory.” It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit
reassurance about the near future. (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the
world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D.
Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)
Cohn may be right when it
comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this
year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time,
the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New
Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among
party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.
The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and
billionaires,
a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex
networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns
of candidates of their choice. So the early primaries — this year
mainly a Republican affair — are taking place in resort spots like Las
Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been
widely reported.
These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck
and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral
system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a
kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop
almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)
Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010
Citizens United decision,
each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money
donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first
$2 billion election; campaign 2016 is
expected to hit the
$5 billion mark without breaking a sweat. By comparison, according to
Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of
Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats
spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his
second term.
In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016
primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows.
The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost
almost $4 billion, a record despite the number of small donors
continuing to drop. It also represented the
lowest midterm voter turnout
since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below — and add
in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of
organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the
return of
voter suppression laws visibly
meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of
new money does in such elections, when you can feel the
weight of inequality bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.
2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)
In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the
Clintons of yore in wink-wink, you-know-how-
they-are-style
reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an
election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are
going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes
over, etc., etc. Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a
you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.
However,
you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little
brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted. An American
secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email
system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her
communications. If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second
thought. But it didn’t happen in some third-world state. It was the
act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing)
superpower, which — even if it
wasn’t the
first time such a thing had ever occurred — should be taken as a tiny
symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of
history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at
least the national security part of it.
Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the
warrior corporation only
occurred after 9/11. Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a
seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this
country. Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that
has not experienced major forms of privatization. The U.S. military
could no longer go to war without its crony corporations
doing KP and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including
training the
militaries of foreign allies and even fighting. Such warrior
corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security
state, including
torture,
drone strikes, and — to the tune of
hundreds of thousands of
contract employees like Edward Snowden — intelligence gathering and
spying. You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly
privatized.
All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book,
Pay Any Price,
on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know
that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption,
scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might
normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy. And all
of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary
Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.
Though it’s a
subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the
corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the
non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as
well.
3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency
On
a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic
check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling
outfits, continues to fall. In 2014, Americans
expressing a
“great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%;
in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.
(The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.) The figures for
“hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than
50%. All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four
decades.
It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has
been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself. Where that body
once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now
“debating” in a
desultory fashion an
“authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and
possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and
whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress
authorizes it or not.
What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “
do-nothing”
Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about
nothing? Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new
Congress their due, not quite nothing. They are proving capable of
acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well. House
Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president’s Iranian nuclear
negotiations and the
lettersigned
by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are
striking examples of this. They are visibly meant to tear down an
“imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.
The
radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its
de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei
proclaimed it
“a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the
American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either
being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“
treason!”) or, as Jon Stewart
did on “The Daily Show,” as part of a
repetitive tit-for-tat
between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy. It
is, in fact, neither. It represents part of a growing pattern in which
Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness
to
take on and potentially take out the presidency.
In
the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and
“big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially
unconditional support to the military and the national security state.
The Republican Party — its various factions increasingly at each other’s
throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats — seems reasonably
united solely on issues of war-making and security. As for the
Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those
who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with
and fusing with the national security state. A president who came into
office rejecting torture and promoting
sunshine and transparency in
government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify
himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the
like. While it has launched an
unprecedented campaign against
whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the
Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably
dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the
imperial presidency.”
4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government
One
“branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly
gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight. Its ability
to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a
striking feature of our moment. But while the symptoms of this process
are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon — the creation of a
de facto fourth
branch of government — gets remarkably little attention. In the war on
terror era, the national security state has come into its own. Its
growth has
been phenomenal. Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be
considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale
“defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it
and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by
its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied
politicians. The militarization of the country has, in these years,
proceeded apace.
Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its
17 major agencies and
outfits is staggering. Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a
global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian
states of the twentieth century
to shame. That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of
accountability in
a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor. As wealth has
traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first
Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security
state in an almost plutocratic fashion.
New reports regularly
surface about the further activities of parts of that state. In recent
weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of
the
Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to
break the encryption on
Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to
attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its
production process are actually in China). Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of
the
Wall Street Journal reported that
the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort,
has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice
Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.
Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that
“mimics a cellphone tower.” This technology, developed and tested in
distant American war zones and now brought to “the homeland,” is just
part of the ongoing militarization of the country from
its borders to its
police forces. And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in
June 2013 when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.
News
also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization,
and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports
that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives.
Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan
announced a major reorganization of the CIA meant to
break down the
classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while
creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among
other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage. At about the same time,
according to the
New York Times,
the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure
State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in
coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against
online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much
larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security
and intelligence agencies.”
This sort of thing is par for the
course in an era in which the national security state has only grown
stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the
various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure. And keep in
mind that, in a structure that has
fought hardto keep what it’s doing
cloaked in secrecy, there is
so much more that
we don’t know. Still, we should know enough to realize that this
ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no
one cares to notice).
5. The Demobilization of the American People
In
The Age of Acquiescence,
a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it
was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic
excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians,
and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets
with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of
time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute
power of the state was called out against them. In our own moment,
Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar
developments been so striking?
After all, a grim new American
system is arising before our eyes. Everything we once learned in the
civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now
seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the
rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of
society are all evident.
The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military. It was initially a response to the
disruptive and rebellious draftees
of the Vietnam-era. In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the
citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was
turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of
the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle
in military affairs. Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been
etched in stone and
transformed into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.
Since
then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate
ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans
about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality
on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party
movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least
partially funded by
right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the
de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of
post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of
the police in black and brown communities around the country.
The Birth of a New System
Otherwise,
a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of — to use
Fraser’s word — “acquiescence.” Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far
better how this all came to be. In the meantime, let me be as clear as
I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t
represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as
usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we
experiencing Washington as usual. Put together our 1% elections, the
privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and
the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security
state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the
American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you
have something like a new ballgame.
While significant planning has
been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or
design. Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants
fashion. In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that
something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional
convention. Still, don’t for a second think that the American political
system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in
Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests,
lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security
state.
Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the
shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new
kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you
want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.
