Think of this as Volume 17, Number 24 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.
I have a new friend, an anarchist.
He's a veteran political activist of
the left-wing type, but hearing him talk about current events sounds
a lot like hearing a Tea Party activist rail against ObamaCare.
The essence of the radical case, during
every political crisis, is always that institutions can't be trusted,
even democratic institutions. Democracy doesn't work, they cry, it
works against the people's real interests, which these activists are
privileged to know because, well, they're their interests.
The TV show “Mad Men” is currently
playing-out reactions to the last period of our type, when people
like my new friend were young men and women, marching in Chicago
against the war, becoming radicalized in the face of “tin soldiers
and Nixon's coming.”
Free men and free markets create great
institutions, and great power. Their efforts to protect themselves
against assault from enemies within and without is their first duty.
Establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, and providing
for the common defense all come before promoting the general welfare
and securing the blessings of liberty in the Constitution's Preamble for a reason.
They're necessary pre-conditions.
Every generation, it seems, large
groups of us forget or choose to ignore this fact. To the ad men of
Sterling Cooper, this was the lesson of the 1960s. To the Greatest
Generation, this was the lesson of the 1930s. To the Delmonico era,
this was the lesson of the 1890s. This, too, was the lesson of the
Civil War.
The center must hold. The center will
hold. The alternative is anarchy, and while anarchy is great in the
abstract, for those who think they can ride on top of it, when faced
with power anarchists can either become Lenin or Robespierre. There
is no third choice, save democracy. And democratic institutions.
This is the decisive turn in our
political story. It always has been. When the Union is threatened,
the center must hold. That's how America has lasted for almost 12
score years now. While Thomas Jefferson liked to ruminate about
watering the ground with the blood of tyrants, or the need for a new
revolution every 20 years or so, the system James Madison built was
designed to avoid the bloodshed and enable revolutions through
peaceful means.
A lot of my friends in the technology
space are openly wondering today about the Obama Administration, and
its use of the Patriot Act to gain call records and trace the
country's enemies over the Internet. They see no difference between
what's going on now and what Bush did, just as leftists a generation
ago saw no difference between Lyndon Johnson and Nixon.
As I wrote when this whole thing
started, almost five years ago now, Obama is the Bizarro Nixon. He is
liberal where Nixon was conservative, he is cool where Nixon was hot,
and he is calm where Nixon was paranoid. But his mission in life is
the same mission Nixon had, to turn the ship of state in a different
direction, to set a course that would last through his followers'
lifetime, and to get people to believe in his Thesis of politics, his
myths and his values, just as Nixon had gotten the majority to
believe in his.
This has now happened. The mission is,
in electoral terms, accomplished. We are now playing the 1973 Game,
not the 1965 Game. There is no longer any question that the side of
law and order is the liberal side, that it's conservatives who are
soft on crime. Conservatives seek to turn the country into Dodge
City, forgetting that the first thing Wyatt Earp did when he became
sheriff was take the cowboys' guns. They resist efforts to enforce
the law against big corporations, they resist the tax laws, they deny
that with rights come responsibilities we all must meet if society is
to continue.
I saw this coming years ago, and called
right-wingers hippies, but when I tried this formulation at a recent
family gathering, veterans of the early 1970s blanched and recoiled
from it. They didn't understand that history's mirror reverses the
picture, turns it inside out.
White may become black and right may
become left, the new boss may seem to be just like the old boss, but
in many important ways everything has changed. The side of law is now
our side, and for the most part it's going to remain our side,
increasingly our side, because the scales are now tilted on our side,
thanks to movements and leaders who kept their heads while others
were losing theirs.
Democracy doesn't mean you get what you
want. Democracy doesn't mean police power of all kind disappears.
Democracy means that all people, and all interests, get to have a
hand in directing that power toward the greater good, as they
themselves perceive it, toward ordered liberty and away from chaotic
anarchy that, in the end, only becomes government by the strong.
It may be hard to see this. We don't
take the Administration's words about the NSA at face value. Many
deliberately refuse to see the difference between call records,
stored in a vault for later analysis, and listening to phone calls
without a warrant. We fail to credit that new institutions, even
those that seem like rubber stamps now, are in fact new institutions,
new checks and balances against untrammeled power, checks we can
strengthen at our choosing, and checks our President wants balanced
against the needs of the people.
All the current “scandals” of the
Obama Administration, coming as they do 40 years after Watergate, can
be seen in this light. The IRS “scandal” is that some people
sought to investigate groups that explicitly stated their opposition
to paying taxes, to see if they weren't tax scams. Had unfair charges
resulted, that would have been a scandal. The fact that bureaucrats
double-checked, and investigated, and ticked off boxes, and approved
nearly every application put before them, is the opposite of a
scandal. You only see it as scandalous if you're looking in a
funhouse mirror.
The same will be seen, in retrospect,
with this new “scandal.” The President is inviting controls on
what has been revealed, controls on policies the Bush Administration
did use explicitly against its enemies, and anti-government
Republicans are obliging him by changing their minds.
This President plays the long game
better than any President has in my lifetime, better than anyone has
since FDR. He has beaten his conservative opponents, and is now in
the process of breaking them up. Liberals may not like the surface
headlines, we may be appalled that laws passed by Congress, and
approved of by courts, might actually have to be enforced by the
executive, but that's the way it is.
In the end, democracy will choose
ordered liberty over chaos and anarchy. Every time. And for this we
should be thankful.
