Gary Wills writes in the upcoming New York Review of Books:
The momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.
As predicted by many (including me), The Mahatma Obama (pbuh) was never going to relinquish any of these powers:
Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, “Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place.” A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “It’s likeInvasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Whether one is a “constitutionalist” or not (I think Americans’ faith in their constitution is both religious and quaint, and the document is essentially what those who wield power say it is regardless of the text), it is very interesting to note that as a people, we are 68 years into an “emergency” that “requires” the ever-expanding “exercise of executive power.” Sixty-eight years.
That’s longer than most Americans have been alive. If that isn’t caesarism, I have no idea what is.
6:35 am on September 16, 2009
