The Republican Dictatorship

by Glenn Greenwald
by Glenn Greenwald

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The following is an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald’s new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. The excerpt is drawn from Chapter Five entitled "Small-Government Tyrants":

Ever since Ronald Reagan famously declared in his 1980 inaugural address that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," Republicans have masqueraded as the party of limited government. Its leaders reflexively pledge to keep government off the backs of regular, hardworking Americans. Homage is paid to the wisdom and insight of the American people, which, Republicans endlessly insist, is far superior to the judgment of government officials.

This political battle cry is, in reality, grounded in a populist cultural argument – namely, that the Republican Party takes the side of ordinary Americans against the faceless, power-hungry, freedom-abridging Washington bureaucrat. In this rendition of America’s culture war, which pits normal folks against D.C. politicians, right-wing leaders are on our side, doing everything in their power to keep government out of our lives.

But then the Bush administration ushered in truly unprecedented expansions of federal power – including virtually unlimited detention and surveillance powers aimed at American citizens even on U.S. soil. And all but a handful of right-wing Republican ideologues immediately shed their small-government pretenses as they cheered on almost every one of these power grabs, transforming themselves almost overnight from liberty-defending warriors to loyal authoritarian followers.

Throughout the 1990s, conservatism was defined by its fear of expansive powers seized by the federal government – particularly domestic law-enforcement and surveillance powers. Conservatives vigorously opposed every proposal to expand the government’s investigative and surveillance authority on the grounds that such powers posed intolerable threats to our liberties. More than specific policies, the right-wing ideology was grounded in warnings against the dangers of unchecked government power. Illustrating this ideology was the speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in accepting his party’s nomination at the 1980 GOP Convention:

"Trust me" government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs – in the people.

Following this path, conservatives have endlessly claimed that they stand for limitations on government intrusion into the lives of Americans. One article in 2000 on the right-wing web-site Free Republic actually decried the dangerous loss of liberty and privacy as a result of what it alarmingly described as the Clinton administration’s use of a "secret court" (something called the "FISA court") that actually enables the federal government to eavesdrop on American citizens! Worse, warned the article, the judicial approval that the government obtains for this eavesdropping is in secret, so we don’t even know who is being eavesdropped on!

The conservative commenters at Free Republic – having been fed a steady diet of anti-government rhetoric for decades – predictably reacted to news of expanded eavesdropping powers under FISA with such liberty-minded sentiments as "This is beyond frightening"; "This does not bode well for continued freedom"; "Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us – it’s real." One worried right-wing commentator wondered: "Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face." Another pointed out – quite rationally – the severe dangers of allowing the government to exercise power in secret and with little oversight:

This is one of those ideas that has a valid purpose behind it, but is wide open to terrible abuse. And there’s no way to check to see if it is abused.

Like all things that don’t have the light of day shining on them, you can be sure that it is being twisted to suit the purposes of those who hold the power.

Conservatives thus used to claim that they considered things such as unchecked surveillance powers to be quite disturbing and bad – and the secret eavesdropping about which they were complaining back then was at least conducted with judicial oversight. But with a Republican president in office, all of the distrust conservatives claimed to have of the federal government evaporated. Because they trust in George W. Bush and he knows what’s best for us, he should have not just those powers but many more, and he should exercise all of them in secret, too, with no interference from the courts or Congress.

Few things are more striking than the gap between the actual power-expanding behavior of Republicans when in office and the manipulative limited-government rhetoric they spew when they want to win elections or attack Democrats. What Republicans claim to despise when they are out of power is exactly what they do when they are in power.

Indeed, if one goes back and actually reads the statements made by GOP leaders throughout the 1990s, the complete and total reversal of all their views upon taking over the government in 2001 is truly mind-boggling. Such a trip down memory lane shows how boisterously conservatives used to pretend that they believed in principles of limited government powers, the need for investigations into lawbreaking accusations, and the preference for individual liberty over increased security.

Let us begin with then-senator John Ashcroft, one of the architects of the wild expansions of secret federal surveillance powers in the early years of the Bush administration. Back in July 1997, Ashcroft was warning of the profound dangers posed by far less invasive government powers than the ones he would go on to implement.

Specifically, Ashcroft was sounding the alarm bells over the Clinton administration’s proposals for the federal government to overcome encryption technology in order to enable the government to monitor international computer communications – powers that were justified by the Clinton administration on the ground that terrorists use such communications. Ashcroft – who as Bush’s attorney general would go on to approve wholly unprecedented warrantless spying on Americans’ telephone calls and e-mails – wrote, in an article titled "Keep Feds’ Nose Out of the Net":

J. Edgar Hoover would have loved this. The Clinton administration wants government to be able to read international computer communications – financial transactions, personal e-mail and proprietary information sent abroad – all in the name of national security.

In a proposal that raises obvious concerns about Americans’ privacy, President Clinton wants to give agencies the keys for decoding all exported U.S. software and Internet communications. . . .

Not only would Big Brother be looming over the shoulders of international cybersurfers, he also threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.

Granted, the Internet could be used to commit crimes, and advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. . . .

Every medium by which people communicate can be exploited by those with illegal or immoral intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records or translate our international communications.

Those who made such arguments in 1997 when Democrats were in power were deemed by the right wing to be great patriots defending core American liberties. But once Bush was ensconced in the White House, anyone who urged limits on government power was an ally of the Terrorists working subversively to destroy America.

The right-wing political movement spent all of the 1990s claiming to distrust governmental power and even printing bumper stickers like this to prove it:

These are the same people who continue to publish screeds like this one – from National Review in 2004 – still pretending to believe in these conservative principles:

Yet in the long run, Goldwater had an extraordinary influence on the Republican Party. . . . He did as much as anyone to redefine Republicanism as an antigovernment philosophy: "I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow," he said – and this from a cold warrior who had once suggested lobbing a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin. . . .

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. . . .

The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility toward the state than any other modern conservative party. How many European conservatives would display bumper stickers saying "I love my country but I hate my government"?

How many would argue that we need to make government so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub?

The American Right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party. . . .

The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort or another.

These "rugged individualists" of the frontier, these swaggering skeptics and despisers of government power, these Burkean defenders of individual liberty who hate "centralized government" and – above all else – are guided by "a deep suspicion of the power of the state," now want to vest virtually unlimited secret power in the President to detain, interrogate, and spy on Americans. When George Bush was caught breaking the law by spying on Americans without warrants, they insisted that he had the right to do so, that it was for our own good, for our protection, and that we ought to be grateful. Has there ever been a political movement more antithetical to the political values they pompously espouse than the right-wing movement – those "small-government" authoritarians – epitomized by National Review editors?

Once securely in power, these small-government conservatives churned out brand-new theories that enabled some of the most severe expansions of federal power in our nation’s history. They insisted that congressional investigations and judicial oversight of the activities of the President are all unnecessary, that they are merely partisan obstructionism. We could and should place blind faith in the Leader to exercise power for our own Good, said the limited-government deceivers.

A belief in endless expansions of government power is – along with endless wars – now the defining feature of today’s Republican Party, at least its dominant right-wing faction. In April 2007, The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb participated in a conference call with former senator George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. The following day, this is what Goldfarb wrote about that call:

Pam Hess, the UPI reporter who gave us this extremely moving and persuasive glimpse of the liberal case for the war in Iraq, asked if timetables for withdrawal "somehow infringe on the president’s powers as commander in chief?" Mitchell’s less than persuasive answer: "Congress is a coequal branch of government . . . the framers did not want to have one branch in charge of the government."

True enough, but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive in matters of national security.

So according to our nation’s right-wing liberty warriors, the American Founders risked their lives and fortunes in order to wage war against Great Britain and declare independence from the King, all in order to vest "near dictatorial power" in the American President in all matters of foreign policy and national security. And, of course, for the Michael Goldfarbs of the world, war and national security – and the near-dictatorial power vested in the President in those areas – now encompass virtually every government action, since scary and dangerous Muslims are lurking on every corner and the entire world, including American soil, is one big battlefield in the War on Terrorism.

Until the Bill Kristols, Dick Cheneys, John Yoos, and other authoritarians of that right-wing strain that define today’s Republican Party entered the political mainstream, one never heard of prominent Americans who describe the power that they want to vest in our political leaders as "near dictatorial." Anyone with even a passing belief in American political values would consider the word "dictatorial" – at least rhetorically, if not substantively – to define that which we avoid at all costs, not something that we seek, embrace, and celebrate. If there is any political principle that was previously common to Americans regardless of partisan orientation, it was that belief.

Indeed, under the rule of the "love-my-country-but-fear-my-government" party, it is no exaggeration to say that the United States has turned into a lawless surveillance state. If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what databases the federal government has created and maintained – everything from records of all domestic telephone calls we make and receive, to the content of our international calls, to risk-assessment records based on our travel activities, to all sorts of new categories of information about our activities obtainable by the FBI through the use of so-called National Security Letters. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history.

This endless expansion of federal government power by the small-government, states-rights wing of the Republican Party is no longer even news. They barely bother to espouse these principles except when it comes time to win elections. In April 2007, leading conservatives Andy McCarthy, David Frum, and John Yoo participated in an event to argue for this Orwellian proposition: "Better More Surveillance Than Another 9/11." In the right-wing mind, there is the ultimate irony: We need to empower the federal government to maintain comprehensive dossiers on all Americans; otherwise, our freedoms might be at risk from The Terrorists.

The results of this complete abandonment of alleged small-government principles by the Republican Party are as predictable as they are dangerous. This November 11, 2007, report from the Associated Press is extraordinary, yet barely caused a ripple:

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States change their definition of privacy.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco, California.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines. . . .

"Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms," [privacy lawyer Kurt] Opsahl said. "The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. . . .

"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties," he said. "We shouldn’t have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy."

"It’s just another ‘trust us, we’re the government,’ " he said.

At the end of 2007, the nonpartisan groups, Privacy International and Electronic Privacy Information Center, released their annual survey of worldwide privacy rights. The United States had been downgraded from its 2006 ranking of "Extensive Surveillance Society" to "Endemic Surveillance Society," the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore, and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the United States now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons, including the vastly expanded domestic surveillance and data-collection powers ushered in during the Bush presidency, all exercised with virtually no oversight.

The same political party that spent decades tricking Americans into believing that they stood for limited government has now ushered in a virtually limitless framework of government spying and unchecked power. Its top officials are telling Americans that we must fundamentally redefine what we understand privacy to mean when it comes to the power of our own government to spy on us. The right-wing faction that formed weekend militias to guard against a tyrannical government it claimed to hate and distrust now meekly and submissively cheers on every expansion of power, including powers completely anathema to core American freedoms.

Printed with the permission of Glenn Greenwald and Crown Publishers.