In his first couple of days in office, President Barack Obama signed executive orders closing secret prisons, ending state torture, and erasing eight dangerous years of official government secrecy. Obama’s moves were deeply democratic. He repudiated some of the Bush Administration’s most visible authoritarian ways.
Those accompanying Bush on his plane ride back to Texas complained that Obama had impolitely criticized their hero in his inaugural address. But such criticism is inevitable when Obama’s philosophy of democratic government is juxtaposed against Bush’s contempt for the people’s will. The GOP can no longer claim to be just libertarian-lite that wants government off our backs and out of our lives. It is the party that wants desperately to tell us what to do. The video (found on youtube) accompanying this essay reminds us of the consequences of authoritarian rule.
The press, by and large, refuses to acknowledge the real battle line in American politics. It assumes that both parties share a devotion to democracy. That may, once, have been true. But it is no longer. Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location. Domestic spying. Voter suppression and ballot manipulation at unprecedented levels. Torture. The theory of the unitary executive. The so-called “Noble Lie.” War based on deceit. Efforts to give government the power to determine acceptable behavior in private lives. End of habeus corpus.
I don’t believe most conservative Americans share this authoritarian vision. Many who vote for Republicans are simply blind to the party’s real values. Those values have been hidden behind lofty rhetoric about freedom or compassionate conservatism. The many failures of the Bush Administration helped make its motivating values more visible. But not visible enough.
Democrats have made gains in recent years in Western states where voters are more individualistic and libertarian. This is telling, because the GOP gained dominance by pasting together an unholy alliance of Western individualists and Southern bigots comfortable with enforced class- and raced-based hierarchy — along with suburbanites who like John Wayne movies but don’t like racism made obvious at their dinner parties. That alliance has cracked.
But old habits die hard, and party affiliation is sticky. Much of the GOP magic depended upon a kind of us-against-them social glue that held unlikely allies together. Ideology has little to do with the social and cultural clubbiness that defined much of Bush’s GOP.
Democracy, as I’ve written before, is resilient, and the 2008 election was a sign of that resiliance. But we have much further to go if democracy is to survive the 21st Century. To survive, its advocates cannot shy away from the real battle line. We are not fighting conservative opponents who share a commitment to democracy. Our disagreements are much more fundamental than any line items in federal or state budgets.
We believe in the wisdom of the people, all of the people. We believe all are born morally equal, that is, due the same dignity and respect and deserving of equal protection and opportunity. Bush Republicans do not. They believe in a natural hierarchy that (what a coincidence) they are born to lead. Fundamentally, they believe they are above the law, above responsibility, above accountability. They believe that our lives, the lives of the people, belong to them and not to us.
That is what we are fighting for. That is the engagement that will mark the Obama years. We need to describe it for what it is.
