Summary: This reflection was written in 2002, after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, for an essay competition held by The Economist. Not surprisingly, it was not the winner. But it seems to me still pertinent. The argument is that the then current debate over “freedom vs. security,” which pitted s civil libertarians against proponents of emergency security measures, needed to be viewed in the context of a much bigger debate that was barely audible. Two crucial pillars of the American political tradition were being eroded in an emergency that focused so much attention on security. The Bush Administration was not respecting the separation of church and state, and felt no obligation to protect the political realm from corporate interests. The year after September 11th proved to be a year of assaults from within America upon not just particular freedoms but political life generally. I wondered it would become a year of debate about “politics vs. anti-politics.”
The answer, it can be said now, was that this debate never arose.
THE BIGGER DEBATE: POLITICS VS. ANTI-POLITICS
For nine months or so after September 11th, there was very little public debate going on in America about the Bush Administration’s policies and actions. The exception, as every newspaper reader knows, was a stream of op-ed page claims and counterclaims that certain freedoms must be sacrificed for security in this dangerous time and that civil liberties must not be compromised. Civil libertarians have been fighting –as they should—to preserve the rights threatened by the precipitously passed “USA Patriot Act” and subsequent Bush Administration initiatives. But it has become obvious that the security camp really has its sights on another, much more ambitious battlefront. They want to seize the moment of security crisis to realign two separations traditionally crucial to American democracy: the constitutionally protected one between Church and State, and the philosophically delineated one between the economic realm and the political realm. Should they be successful, the “freedom vs. security” debate will be moot, for there will be no protected space of freedom left to preserve.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, the “security vs. freedom” debate was set up as just that, a debate, in the manner of debating clubs. Resolved: In the present circumstances, it is reasonable to sacrifice certain freedoms in order to gain security. In that kind of format, Donna Lieberman of the News York Civil Liberties Union faced off in a November 23, 2001 Daily News forum against Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General. Her piece was headlined “Don’t subvert nation’s values,” and his ”Some sacrifices are necessary.”
Donna Lieberman articulated the standard civil libertarian position, arguing proudly and well in a long line of Bill of Rights drafters and defenders. “The danger lies in the view that our fundamental rights undermine security, and thus their diminution makes us safer. To the contrary, one of the greatest sources of strength for our country is our commitment to fairness and our respect for the rights of those accused of wrongdoing by the government.”
Against this position, with which the vast majority of Americans agree, Edwin Meese argued for exceptional measures in exceptional times. But as he did so, he made an extraordinary claim that Americans must ”understand that liberty depends on security and freedom—in the long run–depends on eliminating the threat of terrorism as soon as possible.”
It is Meese’s idea that freedom depends on “eliminating the threat of terrorism as soon as possible” that opens onto the larger agenda of the present Administration, which goes way beyond anything Reagan envisioned. What does “freedom” mean for those who say that it depends on the elimination of terrorism?
To learn the definition of freedom that is becoming commonplace in Washington, the best school is the Justice Department. The head catechist there, Attorney General John Ashcroft, frequently waxes definitional in speeches he delivers to Christian groups. To the National Religious Broadcasters convention last February 19th, he announced: ”We are a nation called to defend freedom –a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God .” Ashcroft never obscures the implication of his view: freedoms (mere secular, political freedoms) emanating from governments and documents like the Bill of Rights must be curtailed whenever and wherever they conflict with “our endowment from God.” Achieving true freedom means transcending mere politics, your own country’s or any other country’s.
Democracy, in the statements emanating from the Bush Administration, is not a form of government, guaranteeing freedom, including freedom of religious expression. Democracy is a shibboleth, which supports an “Onward, Christian soldiers” attitude justifying everything from the unfettered right for Christian soldiers to bear arms to unqualified opposition to abortion of God-given life. Ashcroft hears Commandments in all the controversial issues of the day, and he seems completely unhesitating in his role as interpreter-priest of those Commandments. Unanimity among the faithful is the ultimate in Homeland Security.
People whose beliefs make them unable to appreciate “our endowment from God” are by definition enemies. The ACLU is an enemy, accused of being unpatriotic. But among foreign enemies, the Muslims are the ones who most deserve a terrible swift sword, so the “war on terror” that was launched in October, 2001 has been conducted as a Crusade against Evil. It certainly did not need a congressional debate or declaration; eliminating terrorism is its holy purpose.
Among many Christian fundamentalists in America, the holy war on terrorism has instantly silenced critique of Israel and muted the traditional fundamentalist antisemitism. Israel is now a grand ally against Muslims. However, the wind blows the other way among American “Aryan” religious extremists who have long fulminated about an international Zionist conspiracy. These people—along with their rightist and racist confreres in Europe—are making alliances with Muslim extremists to support international attacks on decadent democracies, including the decadent democracies of the USA and Israel. After a decade of relative dormancy, American rightist hate group memberships are swelling, as they are in Europe. Conflicting as these maneuverings are, they all take inspiration from the now more mainstream idea that the Christian faithful should be running governments.
The ascendancy in America of religiously justified anti-politics requires and rationalizes all kinds of constrictions on political activity and freedom. On December 6th of last year, Ashcroft stood before the Congress and declared criticism of the President to be unpatriotic. This trend is dangerous –and many, many more Americans fear it than speak up in public about it– but it is doubly dangerous because of the way it intertwines with the trend summarized in the term “globalization.”
Debates about what the proper relationship between economic activity and the political realm should be have recently been structured like the “security vs, freedom” debate. Resolved: to achieve economic growth and prosperity, there must be political controls and oversight. Or the opposite, resolved: political controls and oversight should be kept at a minimum to achieve economic growth and prosperity.
The “unregulated markets vs. political regulation” debate looks like it has two secular sides to it. But among the current generation of theocrats in Washington, the secular terms, once again, disguise the greater anti-political agenda.
To see this dimension of the bigger debate, it is necessary to step back and note that the “unregulated markets vs. political regulation” terms became possible as the huge century long clash signified by “capitalism vs. socialism” receded after 1989. From a diversity of philosophical perspectives, it became clear that an era which had opened in the 19th century had ended. The key characteristic of that era was a vast tendency for national governments to take over economic enterprises. As it grew and grew, the tendency took two forms: on the one hand, it produced overseas imperialism, while, on the other hand, it produced state socialism. Since the end of the Second World War, it has been widely understood among historians –prompted by the writings of Hannah Arendt– that both of these forms were proto-totalitarian.
Now, at the end of the era of the European totalitarianisms, the opposite proto-totalitarian tendency threatens, as historically-minded critics of globalization note. The danger is not that national governments will take over economic enterprises, but that economic enterprises will take over national governments. This is not state capitalism or state socialism, but corporate imperialism, capturing the domestic political realm in order to expand globally. On the cutting edge of this tendency are companies that control essential natural resources like oil and electricity and companies that control communication s and finance –the most quickly globalizing economic sectors.
Much of the drive for buying out the political realm comes from economic leaders and the politicians they endow. But greed is not their main motive. Hatred of politics is. And their success will depend upon the existence in America of religiously rhetorical fundamentalist movements in which that basic hatred of the uncertainty and plurality and debate processes of the political realm is shared and propagandized among the masses. Corollary to this hatred is the conviction that it is better to leave mundane matters of feeding, housing, and educating the people to religious business heads –to plutocrats among the faithful—and to private corporations rather than to politicians.
On the world stage, the hatred of politics that characterizes the security-minded and religiously patriotic Bush Administration translates into unilateralism and avoiding international treaties and UN conventions. The trouble this hatred is causing the European allies is much discussed in the media, but the clearest examples of it are in the area of the world where economic turmoil has been most debilitating over the last year. September 11th was such a horrific day in world history that the one fine thing that happened, the signing of the western hemisphere’s new Democratic Charter, which commits the central and south American states to collective action against assaults upon democratic government, was completely overshadowed. But on April 12th when Venezuela’s democratically elected government was overthrown, all the signers of the Charter reinvoked its principles and denounced the coup. However the Bush Administration had meanwhile rocked America’s improving relations with the Charter states by not consulting with them and then seeming to support the military-backed coup in the oil-rich state. It is this kind of failure to support democracy –even on a front far from the main fronts of the “war on terrorism”–that makes America’s allies question whether America’s commitment to its own economic interests and its own security is not its sole commitment.
Within the American context, selling the political domain –the domain Ashcroft called “governments and documents”—to the most successful Christian economic soldiers looks like freedom from politics, and that looks like security, particularly to business leaders. During the Spring debates in the U.S. Congress over campaign finance reform, it was very obvious that the Bush Administration wanted no curbs on buying politicians or elections. Moving Christian business men into Cabinet positions is considered a good idea. The Enron scandal showed the tendency in many of its dimensions: Enron made huge campaign contributions, former Enron leaders were hired into the Bush government, and Enron executives acted as advisors on government energy policy.
The Bush Administration’s patriotic religiosity does not pose a choice between God or Mammon. No austere, isolationist, puritanical theocracy is being sought. On the contrary, the would-be theocrats want alliances with big capital in order to spread “our endowment from God” through the whole domain of capitalism –the whole globalizing domain. It is Crusader capitalism.
Now that the first real domestic political challenges to the Administration are tentatively emerging –because Congressional elections are on the horizon—the “freedom vs. security” debate is taking on new energy and extending to new topics, like the prospect of citizens spying on citizens. A few rulings from a still independent judiciary on secret detentions of immigrants and citizens have gone against the Administration. But the bigger debate that this debate opens onto should also, at last, become public. Will the assault upon democracy –the assault upon politics—be named for what it is and opposed politically? That bigger debate should provide the diagnostic framework for analyzing the acutely symptomatic “freedom vs. security” debate.
