Democratic Vista

Not since "Mission Accomplished" had President Bush made such an iconic blunder.

When the President insisted to the world on Friday that "this government does not torture people," the gap between the rhetoric and reality of his words was so bitterly obvious that it instantly became the natural compliment to his seminal pronouncement on Iraq.

Yet the parallels, unfortunately, end there. For the sad reality is that the burlesque nature of Bush's "torture" declaration was in another sense utterly unprecedented, even for him.

To see what I mean, we need to start not with what Bush's declaration denies, but what it admits. Watch the video, and you'll see that the dour adamance with which Bush insists his administration "does not torture" betrays him here; it communicates a clear awareness that torture is, in itself, a moral wrong.

That Bush would make such an admission is utterly extraordinary. I cannot think of another instance in which he has implied, however tacitly, that the execution of presidential power could be immoral on its face. Unilateral military action, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention -- in each case Bush has admitted that those policies could be taken too far. But he's never suggested that the they might be unethical in themselves; any time he's challenged on that point, he either dodges the question or exhibits a stark disregard for the moral assumptions of his critics.

Yet even Bush understands that torture is different. Where he has little qualms initiating war or spying on his own citizens, there's something about torture that gives him pause.

What is it?

Presumably, it's that he too can recognize how radically torture undermines the core premise of democracy. In a democratic society, after all, the most fundamental belief is that the human will is sacrosanct -- that each individual has the right to will as they please, if not to act on it.

Yet torture explicitly disavows that sanctity: it violates the human body precisely so that it might control the human will.

That is why no democratic official can endorse torture as a state policy. To take away the absolute sanctity of the human will is to take away democracy's very reason for being -- without it, there's no way to distinguish the moral legitimacy of democracy from that of any other government.

Once again, the good news here is that Bush is aware of this: he wouldn't deny that his administration endorsed torture if he weren't.

The bad news, though, is that Bush doesn't seem to understand that the moral logic of torture exists independently of what we call it. The practice of waterboarding, for instance, inflicts extreme duress on a subject with the express purpose of altering their will. Regardless of whether we define waterboarding as an "enhanced interrogation technique" or "torture," it thus violates the democratic belief in the absolute sovereignty of the human will.

The fact that Bush could admit to such practices, even as he claimed that "this government does not torture," is why his appearance on Friday will undoubtedly remain as his most shamefully iconic moment.

At the very moment he hoped to reassure the world of his moral authority, he instead demonstrated a profound disregard for the moral foundation that makes democracy great.

As Matt Bai noted this morning, the dominant story of the past two weeks isn't so much Congress's haggling over Iraq as its frenetic posturing over the now infamous "Petraeus or Betray Us" ad. Published in the Times on September 10th, the ad has provided a welcome distraction for Republicans dismayed by the grim reality of Iraq -- as well as, in a less sanctimonious way, Democrats eager to dodge criticism of their own inability to end the war.

Yet the catchphrase has also obscured the most significant news of all: namely, the Republican maneuvering to block a bill, introduced by Senator Leahy and Senator Specter, that would have restored America's commitment to due process.

To understand why that's so important, we need to go back to this time last year. At the end of last September -- less than two months before the mid-term elections -- a Republican-controlled Congress forced through the Military Commissions Act, which expressly denies detainees the right either to appeal to the Geneva Conventions or to file a writ of habeas corpus. As a result of those provisions, any person the military now classifies as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant" has no legal recourse outside the military itself. Thanks to the MCA, in other words, America's avowed commitment to universal due process officially went out the window.

The Leahy-Specter proposal sought to change that. Entitled "The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act," the bill would have allowed us to defend our sovereignty without compromising our principles. The military would still have been able to capture, detain, and even try suspected terrorists. But because the bill would have restored habeas corpus, there also would have been judicial oversight.

Yet the bill didn't even come to a vote. Forty-two Republican Senators, along with Senator Lieberman, killed the measure outright. Consequently the MCA was left intact -- and with it, American due process was left in abeyance.

Which brings me to my main point: America's failure in Iraq is less significant than its failure to uphold due process. To say that, of course, is not to diminish the national tragedy that our involvement there has become. Rather, it's merely to say that however disastrous Iraq may be, our operations in Iraq will only ever be a single instance of American foreign policy. Accordingly, our failures there will also only ever represent the failure of a specific strategy in a specific place -- not, that is, the failure of American principles more generally.

By contrast, the MCA's restriction of due process strikes at the very core of American legitimacy. The United States, after all, is the world's most thoroughly post-ethnic nation. What that means isn't merely that Americans define themselves by an idea rather than a bloodline. It also means that the validity of American governance rests not on how well it sustains a given culture or race, but how well it sustains the principles which, in a very fundamental sense, are America.

By contradicting those principles, the MCA effectively calls into question the legitimacy of American democracy. After all, hand-in-hand with our commitment to freedom is our belief that all individuals have an inalienable right to the due process of law. You simply can't have one without the other. Yet in denying habeas corpus, the MCA disavowed at once our commitment to both freedom and due process alike.

In the end, the fact that the MCA threatens what it means to be American is precisely why it needs to be either amended or repealed. Our failures in Iraq will never represent a complete betrayal of America, because American identity extends well beyond any single policy, no matter how regrettable. By contrast the MCA represents a thoroughgoing betrayal. To suspend due process is to suspend an integral aspect of American identity; it throws the entire idea of America into doubt.

Last week, the Senate had a golden opportunity to restore that idea in full. How deplorable, then, that they were too distracted to seize it.

Back on the 4th I announced RepealtheMCA.org, an on-line petition to repeal the Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last fall.

Not two days later, we've already been reminded just how crucial such legislative pressure is. For those who haven't heard yet: an Appeals Court ruled this afternoon that a group of plaintiffs -- including "journalists, academics, and lawyers" who "regularly communicate" internationally -- lacked standing to sue the NSA for its warrantless surveillance under the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Just why did the plaintiffs lack standing? Simple, really. They couldn't access the very information that would have proved they were being spied on. Or as the opinion itself acknowledged: "the plaintiffs do not -- and because of the States Secrets Doctrine cannot -- produce any evidence that any of their own communications have ever been intercepted by the NSA, under the TSP, or without warrants. Instead, they assert a mere belief" that their communications were intercepted.

Nice logic, that. You may know that you're talking with people abroad, and even more, you may also know that the government is spying, warrantlessly, on such conversations. Additionally, you may further know that such surveillance presents, as the opinion itself confessed, "a number of serious issues." Yet despite all that knowledge, you'll never be able to sue the NSA. Because it would be illegal, after all, for you to possess the very information that proved you were being spied on.

What's so remarkable here is that somehow the patent circularity of the ruling's logic isn't even the worst part. Rather, it's the self-conscious nature of the legal dodge it represents. Indeed, the justices in the majority openly acknowledge the gravity of what they're doing. Yet there's nothing rueful in their tone. Instead, there's only a kind of wry insouciance -- the legal equivalent of the bemused grin or casual shrug that says, "Don't look at me, sucker. It ain't my fault."

Yet what troubles me most about that tone, to return to my initial point, is that there's nothing to limit it to only certain types of classified military activity.

In particular, what worries me is that the ruling's tenor and logic will reappear in next year's Supreme Court decision on the Military Commissions Act. As I mentioned on the 4th, the MCA explicitly declares that "alien unlawful enemy combatants" -- ie, the detainees in Guantamano, among other places -- cannot submit a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. As a result, there are even clearer grounds for the Supreme Court to rule that foreign detainees lack standing to sue than there were for the Appeals Court to rule today that the NSA plaintiffs lacked standing.

As I'll be noting again and again over the coming weeks -- beginning with "The Top 10 Reasons to Repeal the MCA" on Monday -- that means there's little sense in waiting for the Supreme Court to strike the Military Commissions Act down. Instead, we need to begin pressuring Congress to repeal the MCA on its own.

For if today's ruling is any guide, we won't have any other choice.

The great charge of justice is not to redeem history but to make it possible. The great failure of Alberto Gonzales is his refusal to heed that charge.

To see what I mean, let's start with the former statement. Redemption no doubt has its place, but human justice isn't it. The problem is that redemptive justice requires too absolute an authority: it cannot acquire a political character without seeking to eclipse the public sphere. Redemptive justice, that is, demands such a moral, religious or even secular absolutism that it will invariably contest the authority of any public realm it enters. And since history depends on that realm, redemptive justice thus risks history itself. That's why the purpose of justice must never be to redeem the wrongs of the past, but to restore our trust in the society of today -- for only from within such trust, by contrast, is history able to emerge.

Which brings us back to our current Attorney General. Thanks to his own incompetence and some great lead reporting, his specific failures are now famously legion. They include the widespread misconduct of his staff, the pathetic dramaturgy of their congressional testimony and his, and the surreal irony that he is now under investigation by the department he runs. Yet again, however, his greatest failure lies far deeper: namely, in the conviction that justice ought to redeem history rather than initiate it.

Admittedly, that's not a particularly original conviction. Every religious and political utopia ever attempted has harbored a similar one. Yet somehow even here Mr. Gonzales has managed to distinguish himself. In short, his justice is unique insofar as its redemptive power derives from neither religious sanctification nor moral justification alone. Instead, it owes to a curious combination of the two: it merges the certainty and absolutism of the divine command with the secular legitimacy of constitutional democracy.

The religious aspect of that combination is most evident, of course, in pawned acolytes like Monica Goodling. But it's perhaps most saliently revealed in the new priorities of the department's Civil Rights Division, which has begun to focus less on race or gender and more on religious discrimination. The logic underlying that focus is supremely telling: it betrays an understanding of politics, rooted in the letters of St. Paul, in which human freedom is inherently pre-political. The primary role of the state, in this view, is merely to allow the spiritual freedom we already enjoy to manifest itself in temporal terms. For Christians in government office (a la Mr. Gonzales) that means they must safeguard the surety of purpose that religion affords precisely by contracting the political sphere. They must be absolutist, that is, about instituting a non-absolutist state.

For the rest of us, the good news is that that paradox has always held American Christianity in check. From the colonial era on, there was never going to be the kind of theocratic state that we see in the Iran of today or the Judea of the Old Testament.

Yet the bad news is that it's still absolutist. As such, it's as prone to abuse and overreach as any instance of political absolutism. In fact, it may be even more so: the overt emphasis on restraint seems to lull those who fail to grasp their own contradictions into dismissing, almost out of hand, any allegation that they might be overreaching themselves.

In that regard, Mr. Gonzales is nothing if not true to form. Once you know what the will of God is -- in his case, "constitutional" democracy -- then any number of transgressions become justified. Being less than honest, as he so clearly was in the congressional hearings this spring, barely even registers. Nor does blatantly politicizing the justice department -- political appointments are in fact necessary, because only conservatives understand what "impartial justice" truly means. Likewise, advocating state surveillance of political opponents, which he seems to have done in his previous capacity as White House counsel, probably didn't cost him much sleep either. In fact, if I had to guess, about the only thing Mr. Gonzales so much as regrets is the use of torture and the denial of habeas corpus -- and that not because either is intrinsically wrong, but because the world must be in a sorry state indeed if we have no recourse but to resort to them.

The sheer bankruptcy of such logic places Mr. Gonzales in a remarkably tenuous position. He is too wedded to democracy and freedom -- albeit very narrow conceptions of each -- to be able to defend his justice in either the prophetic terms of the theocrat or the Machiavellian terms of the tyrant. Yet at the same time, he is too wedded to a species of absolutism, however delimited, to avoid the same totalizing pretensions of power to which all those who would redeem history succumb.

In the end, that tension is precisely what reveals the strange justice of Mr. Gonzales to be no justice at all. Far from redeeming, atoning for, or even completing history, he has instead compromised its emergence. By imposing justice so unilaterally, he has exposed the ideals of our democracy -- without which our actions cannot acquire historic weight -- to be little more than power masquerading as virtue.

Whether we recover from that obliquity will depend on how well we resolve the impasse it's yielded. Since Mr. Gonzales has refused to resign, a public long accustomed to the swift indulgences of democratic power will now have to endure, for the next eighteen months, an unaccustomed impotence.

The dangers of that impasse are twofold. The first and most obvious is apathy: if President Bush has made it clear that there is no political calculus -- shy perhaps of an indictment -- in which the liability of supporting Mr. Gonzales is greater than the liability of removing him, then the temptation is to shrug our shoulders, note there's nothing more we can do, and move on. Yet just because we lack the power to remove the Attorney General outright doesn't mean that we are powerless altogether. Far from it: the Bush administration can still be forced to make a variety of concessions elsewhere. So long as President Bush refuses to replace Mr. Gonzales, we can still exact the full political cost of that refusal.

Conversely, the other danger is what might be termed moral amnesia. The longer Mr. Gonzales continues as Attorney General, the greater the temptation will be to demonize him so thoroughly that we all but exculpate ourselves. Yet Mr. Gonzales didn't become Attorney General all on his own. President Bush appointed him only after an election in which it was clear that Mr. Gonzales, who had long since suggested that the Geneva Conventions were "obsolete," may well be given the office. To neglect that fact -- to distance ourselves completely from Mr. Gonzales' failures -- is to risk repeating the same mistake.

And therein lies the rub. At 27, I more or less take it as a given that my generation will again find itself in a context not unlike that of 2002 and 2004. Once more we will have suffered a major terrorist attack, and once more we'll have to choose between candidates who merely profess the virtues of robust security, and others who also offer the easy allure and false clarity of redemptive justice.

How we respond to the present impasse will prefigure our response to terrorism in the future. If we manage to protest the failures of Mr. Gonzales while also admitting our responsibility for them, then we should be able to restore the integrity of our judicial system over the long term. But if we fail to do so -- which is to say, if we become apathetic, or if we refuse to recognize and learn from our mistakes -- then I'm not so sure.

For when the time comes, we'll need to remember that this strange justice of Alberto Gonzales was in fact no justice at all. Our history will depend on it.

As the son of a pastor, I learned early on that each season of the Christian calendar brought with it its own set of questions. In that regard, Easter was no exception: for one, there the whole resurrection thing; for another, that small matter of the ascension. Not easy to wrap your head around either, even at six.

Yet somehow it was always "Good Friday" that stumped me most. After all, the day commemorates how an innocent man was brutalized, nailed to a cross, and planted upright so he could suffocate from exhaustion. Even Karl Rove, for all his cunning and chutzpah, would have a hard time spinning that as "good." (Rebranding it as a holiday, though, sounds about on par.)

The pat explanation for the misnomer, of course, is that the crucifixion was "good" precisely because it was so tragic. The total depravity of the cross, that is, was beneficial insofar as it allowed Christ to demonstrate the superlative glory and power and mercy of God.

Yet such logic can be as dangerous as it is paradoxical. For starters, note that there's nothing about Good Friday that requires belief. Unlike most Christian holidays, there's no event in the story of Good Friday that defies experience. A false conviction, a cruel beating, a tortured death -- each lies well within the realm of human possibility. Indeed, Good Friday is, if anything, all too human: its narrative admits frankly of our capacity for violence and injustice, as well as of our tendency to couple them.

That admission, however, is precisely what makes Good Friday so problematic. Because its drama hinges entirely on the exercise of a secular authority, Good Friday has become the de facto starting point for Christians seeking to reconcile the gravity of their faith with the reality of their world.

Unfortunately, the two popular understandings of that drama offer grossly inadequate responses to the inevitable conflicts of political life. The first sees in Christ on the cross the supreme example of non-violent resistance, and so encourages its adherents to approach politics with the pacifist's eye of absolute suspicion and the saint's aspiration of perfect righteousness. Crucially, this reading ultimately fails in the political realm -- however admirable its idealism may be -- for in the end it cannot distinguish the despotic tyrant from the elected representative. By contrast, the second understanding errs to the opposite extreme. Here the crucifixion excuses not passivity or withdrawal, but decisive action or outright aggression. The famous dictum with which Luther unwittingly launched generations of bloodshed and war -- pecca fortiter, or "sin boldly" -- is perhaps most emblematic of this approach: if Christ could redeem humanity at its worst, then surely we needn't fuss too much over our own political sins; so long as we mean well and exhibit due contrition, there's no injustice for which Christ cannot atone.

Needless to say, the latter understanding is far more troubling. By insisting that the politics of Good Friday include the theology of Easter, it opens the door to all manner of sins, from the recurrent pogroms of the Holy Roman Empire to the colonial subjugation of entire populations.

For myself, however, what makes those iniquities especially tragic is that another interpretation is so readily available. When we hear of Christ's famous, agonizing cry in Matthew 27 or Mark 15 -- "Father, father, why have you forsaken me?" -- we need only pause for a moment to perceive the silence with which God responds. For the Christ on the cross, there is no miracle, no voice from heaven that parts the skies and relieves the pain. There is, instead, only a chilling silence, its quiet suspense punctured solely by the taunts of soldiers.

To ignore that silence is to miss the Bible's final, most instructive lesson on political authority. When we look at the Judeo-Christian scriptures as a whole, we see that the cross is actually the culmination of a long trend of political disengagement. From Solomon on, God increasingly dissociates His divine will from the exercise of any temporal authority. Although that withdrawal is often seen as a kind of rebuke -- as if God, fed up with humanity, were washing His hands of us -- it can also be read as a kind of tribute. After all, the moment at which God most fully and painfully declines to interfere in our political life is also the moment at which the Roman system of law -- the basis, it bears repeating, of most modern law -- finally takes firm hold throughout the Mediterranean world. Only against that law does the trial and crucifixion appear so conspicuously unjust; only by virtue of its legitimacy does Christ's suffering and death wield such moral power.

The politics of Good Friday, then, are a politics of trust. Theologically God's silence may mean that we are to have faith in a future Easter, but politically it means that God has faith in us here today. To read the gospels closely is to see that God now trusts our ability to perceive injustice and our capacity to mitigate it.

Alone among the many questions of Christianity, "how can the crucifixion can be good?" is thus the one question that God asks of humanity. For if Good Friday is ever to be "good," it's up to us to make it so -- by disavowing arbitrary violence, and living up to the moral responsibility we've been given.

The great irony of American public life today is this: never before have we so fully democratized political speech, yet never before have we so thoroughly misunderstood the nature and meaning of political silence.

To see what I mean, we need to pause for a moment to look at silence and authority in general. Up until two generations ago -- when it was still plausible for a democratic nation-state to claim a divine sanction or absolute sovereignty -- silence always related to authority between the one extreme of complete obedience and the other of total dissent. History is replete with examples of each, but the clearest are actually found in the Judeo-Christian scriptures: think of the unsettling silence with which Abraham's obedience attends God's command in Genesis 12, or the knowing silence with which Christ meets Pilate's all-important question in John 18. The former signals a complete submission to authority; the latter its utter rejection.

Crucially, today neither extreme is possible. In a public sphere assured of free speech, silence conveys neither the total dissent to which the radical protestor aspires nor the perfect obedience toward which the radical patriot strives. On the contrary, the protection of speech renders all silence at least partly collusive and partly defiant.

What this means for us is twofold. First, it means that political silence instead serves as the guarantor of political meaning. Any time silence is stripped of an evaluative function, it becomes the principle criterium by which the sincerity of a given utterance is judged. Consider your last genuine conversation: the fact that the other person knew you would remain silent as they spoke, and vice versa, is what made the conversation possible. Likewise, when we stand silently in the public sphere, we signal an active engagement with the deliberative process that is part and parcel of democratic life; we create the conditions each of us needs to speak. By contrast, if all each of us ever did was talk, we would reduce political speech to naked self-interest.

Which brings us to point two. The genius of the founding fathers was in part the foresight with which they inserted the freedoms of speech and assembly in the Bill of Rights. Yet what the founders did not foresee was the way in which the property protections to which those freedoms were adjoined would turn the public sphere on its head. Sagacious as the founders may have been, they had become so blinded by the virtues of a classical model for the body politic -- in which landed citizens, their wealth static and secure, would have neither cause nor inclination to place their own interests above those of the commonwealth -- that they failed to anticipate just how radically the structures and behaviors of the free market would come to shape the public sphere itself.

Although that reshaping began as early as Washington's presidency, we have largely been blind to it since the Civil War. Once the railroad and telegram nationalized our public life in the late 19th century, political speech on a national scale -- first in print, then in broadcast media -- became too capital intensive for the vast majority of the American citizenry to afford. And after you had to buy your way into the debate to begin with, the commercialization of American public life became a casual fact that need not be mentioned, let alone remedied.

Fortunately, the internet revolution that YouTube, Blogger, and Odeo currently represent has upended that dynamic. But that just means we're back to where we started: for the first time since the days of Franklin’s press, the commercialization of our public sphere means not that too few people can speak, but that too few might listen.

How to address that issue I'm not entirely sure. We are incredibly blessed to live in an era in which governments acknowledge the contingency of their authority and the line between speech and silence is no longer a matter of life and death. But the subtle creep of self-interest poses a more insidious threat, in a way, than the obvious evils of the demigod or tyrant.

The only sure way to contain that threat is for each of us to come to terms with the necessity and meaning of political silence. I'm not saying we all need to refrain from speaking publicly for a year, as I nearly just did. But I am saying that if we want to take full advantage of the blessing that our democracy represents, we would do well to put our own thoughts on hold for a moment and familiarize ourselves with those of our neighbor instead.

Chalmers Johnson on Empire v. Democracy. "As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical."

Iraq isn't the next Vietnam or Yugoslavia. It's the next Spanish Civil War.

When mid-term elections are anti-elections. "It was as anti-election as mid-term congressional election always are. This isn't to say that that is good or bad, simply that it is built into the structure of American politics. It's the norm."

The strange story of Jeppesen International Trip Planning. If the company sounds like your typical high-end travel agent, don't be fooled: it's the Boeing subsidiary that handles the CIA's extraordinary rendition flights.