They Doth Protest Too Much

What are we to make of the tidal-wave of liberal outrage over the ‘imperial presidency’, ‘extra-legal executive’, and ‘unwarranted executive power’? In this blog, we too have objected to President Bush’s anti-libertarian policies, but we must call to account both sides in the debate. Liberal finger pointing should not stop us examining their role in the very enterprise to which they now react with such disgust.

Their current stance absolves liberals and the left of any association with what is now represented as a sudden expansion of presidential powers in the past three to four years. In fact, as the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger showed in his The Imperial Presidency, presidents have been accruing more and more powers against the executive since the beginning of the 20^th century. And it was the liberal hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who did more than any other president to create special powers for the president. Conflating Bush with the deeper, structural problems in our society is disingenuous and misleading.

The many faces of the liberal-left tend to be opportunistic in their criticism of Bush, because they fail to offer a real alternative to Bush’s basic principles. Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t something uniquely perverse about the war on terror. As is obvious, we think there is. The problem with the war on terror, however, is not merely with the way Bush fights it, but with its basic premise: the deliverance of total security regardless of the real size of the risk. The one thing that the liberal-left is unwilling to say is that beyond a few shadowy operatives, there is no real enemy to fight in the first place. Terrorism just isn’t the threat it is made out to be (for starters see here, here and here). There are far more important concerns for us to attend to collectively. The abuse of presidential powers does not flow from the peculiarities of the Bush presidency, but from a general acceptance of fear and security as the premise of our political life. If we think the purpose of government is to eradicate risk, then no matter who the president is, we will live in a society that fails to respect our liberty.