U.S. Government Supporting Democracy? Misleading Bunk

When the U.S. government justifies invading a foreign country like Iraq or supporting a coup d’etat as it has in Ukraine by saying it supports democracy, this is misleading bunk.

I began making this argument here. This blog continues the argument in greater detail by focusing on whistleblowers.

If the government held democracy as a high value, the presidents would not be attempting to rule and succeeding in ruling by executive order.

If the government valued democracy highly, it would not go to such enormous lengths to keep information that’s pertinent to democratic processes secret. The amount of classified documents is staggering.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote an article titled “The NSA Leaks Are About Democracy, Not Just Privacy.” For those who value democratic ideals, and the leaders of the U.S. government claim to do so and justify their actions by doing so, this is a correct statement. He explains why:

“…there is inherent value in citizens being given access to information when it informs their judgments about public policy. Information of this sort is a prerequisite for meaningful civic participation. There ought to be a strong presumption in favor of making it public, especially when the policy at issue is as significant and controversial as targeted killing.”

If the government valued democracy highly, it would be making efforts to bolster its processes in America, but it is doing the opposite. This is clear in the three recent cases of important whistleblowers and earlier cases as well. I speak of Snowden, Assange and Manning.

In referring to the Snowden leaks of information, Jimmy Carter is quoted as saying “America has no functioning democracy at this moment.” He sees the leaks as beneficial to democracy. Edward Snowden himself understands today’s government secrecy as conflicting with “what we expect as a free democratic people”. He too argues “If we can’t understand the policies and programmes of our government we can’t grant our consent in regulating them.”

Julian Assange, who has been hounded by the U.S. government and personally excoriated by many of its high officials, has termed the surveillance programs “a threat to U.S. democracy”.

When the verdict was handed down on Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, he explained that his decisions to release information were made out of a concern for his country and the world. He mentioned its immoral acts. He too in his thinking connected what he did to democracy, saying

“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dredd Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.”

Democracy and the threats to democracy have played a role in motivating each of the three most prominent whistleblowers. Each has explicitly mentioned democracy. Each one has made an enormous personal sacrifice to reveal vital information for the sake of democracy, among other values. Who in the U.S. government has made a comparable sacrifice for the democracy and democratic principles that they so readily invoke to justify intervening in the affairs of foreign peoples? How can such unilateral and unasked for interventions, so frequently involving subversion and military means, even be consistent with the democratic principles that they invoke and supposedly uphold? They surely are not. And if it’s too much to ask of an elected official or hired bureaucrat to make a comparable sacrifice to these three heroes, who has made even a notable sacrifice?

Law professor Richard Moberly has taken the other side of the case. He says that Snowden undermined democracy. In his view, the laws made by the government in regard to secrecy lie in the hands of elected officials and judges. They define the democratic process, not government employees. They balance the conflict among privacy, secrecy for security and the public’s right to know. To him, Snowden and Manning are usurpers.

Moberly’s argument doesn’t hold water because in a democracy public policy has to be public in order to conform with the Constitution and in order that the people, who are supposed to influence what government does, are informed in their decision-making. The people are the single most important check and balance on their elected government, according to the theory of democracy. This is why American government has historically always had numerous leakers and leaks of information and why the press as transmitter of all such material has historically played a large role in the democratic process. If, as Moberly supposes, the government is trusted to do the balancing among conflicts, the result will be in one direction: government secrecy. The system of leaks is actually essential to democracy. Otherwise, power shifts to government because of its control over information. The conflict between secrecy for security with the public’s right to know has to be weighted in favor of the public’s right to know. This means that whatever secrecy for security there has to be so that government can function effectively has to be kept limited. The burden of proof that secrecy is necessary should be upon the government, not upon the public.

It’s very well known that Obama has targeted journalists. John Kiriakou disclosed CIA waterboarding and torture. He is in prison for having done so.

The recent attempts to muzzle journalists are anti-democratic. That’s what AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll has said. She said that the Committee to Protect Journalists report “highlights the growing threats to independent journalism in the United States, a country that has for two centuries upheld press freedom as a measure of a democratic society. We find we must fight for those freedoms every day as the fog of secrecy descends on every level of government activity.”

Elected officials of the U.S. government are supposed to understand what democracy is and what democracy requires to operate at all effectively. Whatever their understanding is, and I believe it is a deeply flawed understanding, they are loyal to government as power, however. That is, they are loyal to maintaining their own scope and reach of applying and extending their powers. They are not loyal to democracy in America or to democratic principles, not if they can violate them and get away with it.

But we also have to realize that when our leaders speak of democracy, it’s a diffuse catchall term into which they place a variety of different concepts and ideals; and these leaders have confused and conflicting ideas of how these concepts relate to one another. To them, democracy is an ill-defined and ill-understood grab bag of terms: freedom, rule of law, economic freedom, political freedom, rights, human rights, equality, elections, full and fair elections, consent of the governed, etc. And they do not have or convey a clear picture of how these elements may or may not relate or conflict with one another. This confusion in their minds is an additional reason why their statements invoking democracy are bunk, useful to them only as propaganda that eases people’s minds into accepting their policies.

A prime example of such bunk is George Bush’s endorsement of democracy for Iraq. This was made in November of 2003 when he thought that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had succeeded. He saw the Iraq War as part of the “global democratic revolution” led by the U.S. This self-contradictory idea that a U.S. invasion can create a democracy is common among U.S. leaders. It draws its support from the aftermath of World War II in which the defeated Japan and Germany instituted new governments that relied on constitutions and could be called parliamentary democracies. Ever since that time, the U.S. leadership has believed that the same kind of thing can be done in other places in the world or even that it’s the mission of the U.S. to make this happen. However, the conditions that led to the new governments in Japan and Germany and the conditions that led to their stability are not the same conditions that hold in many other countries. Furthermore, such conditions that have in fact resulted in more democracies are not necessarily brought about by U.S. interventions. Certainly, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan can’t be expected to produce results like those in Japan and Germany.

Bush’s grand interpretation of history that led him to focus on the Middle East and an American role in the Middle East as a conveyor of democracy has failed miserably. He already had the example of Iranian democracy to show that the American idea of democracy was too narrow and restrictive, but he chose to ignore this case. He chose to forget the U.S. interference that had thwarted Iranian democracy and installed a Shah. Indeed, the U.S. rejected Iran’s democracy, just as it rejected Ukraine’s democratic elections and those of Syria and Egypt.

For Bush and Obama and many other prospective presidents ready to assume that office, global democratic revolution means continued interference in all sorts of foreign countries with a continual diversion of resources away from peaceful development within America. This spells only trouble for Americans. Domestically, the term “democratic revolution” doesn’t apply, unless turned on its head. Democracy is actually thwarted by the government at every turn in favor of a police state. Democracy is secondary to a secret and powerful government ruled by an elite with imperial pretensions.

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10:48 am on August 22, 2014