The authoritarian trend during the Cheney-Bush Administration

The main thing that concerns me about the liberal enthusiasm over NeverTrumper conservatives criticizing Trump is that it tends to obscure the extent that the whole Republican Party has been pushing an authoritarian style of politics for a long time. It's been a habit of liberals for decades to point to conservatives from 10 or 20 years before and use their words or positions as criticisms of conservatives in the present moment. It's a standard political ploy for conservatives to do the same with liberals of earlier decades. It's noarmally more stock polemics than real analysis.

There's a market for authoritarian ideas and has been for a long time. The "Studies in Prejudice "directed by Max Horkheimer highlighted that trend in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That set of studies built on the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) from the Frankfurt School Horkheimer directed.

Historian Richard Hofstadter - who still seems to be the only expert on authoritarian movements in America that many TV pundits have heard of - wrote in his famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (Harper's, Nov 1964):

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture - it is no more than that - that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

Joe Conason did a book published in 2007 titled It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Here an excerpt from the review I did of it (Contradiciones (Original) 02/24/2007), with minor spelling corrections:

Conason skillfully describes how the toxic combination of lazy and compliant reporters, the extreme governmental secrecy that is a hallmark of Cheney's style of rule, corporate media dominance, and actual government-sponsored propaganda have combined to cripple the functioning of an independent press that is a critical element of democracy. He calls atttention to a trend in the Republican Party toward advocating overt censorship, still alarmed as they are about the amount of genuine journalism still being practiced in the US. He calls special attention to an article by Gabriel Schoenfeld, Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? Commentary March 2006, which lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation.

Conason creates a useful framework in which to view the authoritarian tilt of the Republican Party under the Cheney-Bush administration, from ideological organizations like the Federalist Society (which promotes corporatist legal doctrine) to the effect of having an atmosphere of permanent war. The latter is essential for Dick Cheney's program of authoritarian rule, because only with such a climate of fear and threat can the Cheney policies of preventive war, torture, massive spying and an Executive not bound by any laws completely supplant the legal and Constitutional practices of the old Republic.

The Cold War provided such a framework, too. And in his concluding chapter, Conason fills in the dots leading from the Nixon administration's police-state measures known collectively as "Watergate" and the Reagan administration's secret war program which is best known through the Iran-Contra scandal to the Cheney methods of authoritarian governance which permeate the current administration.

Understanding the roots of the current situation in the darkest side of the Nixon administration is important because, as he writes, "[m]ost Americans, even those who lived through the Nixon era, have forgotten the context - let alone the details - of the Watergate scandal." He also observes, "The parallels are striking, but the difference is that Bush, Cheney, and Rove, and the forces they represent, are far more developed and powerful than the Nixon gang ever was." (my emphasis)

Though he doesn't mention it in the book, this illustrates the need for something like a Truth Commission process after Cheney and Bush are out of power. Not only do we need prosecution of crimes committed - and there have been many - but we also need a process by which the abuses of this administration can be publicly aired and understood. We need to make it far harder for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who learned their governing principles and style from the worst aspects of the Nixon administration, to come to power 10, 20, 30 years down the line determined to succeed where Cheney, Rummy, Karl Rove and the rest will hopefully have failed. The criminal and antidemocratic practices of the Cheney-Bush Administration need to be thoroughly discredited.

That perspective is the basis of my main criticism of the Obama Administration, which is they did not thoroughly investigate those crimes. I'm not talking about the "Lock Her Up!" type of criminalizing political opponents. Whether through the Justice Department, a Special Prosecutor, or some sort of Truth Commission, a real professional investigation should have taken place and appropriate prosecutions under the law should have been carried out as a result.

Conason mentions the Gabriel Schoenfeld article that, as I put it then, "lays out much of the ideological justification for this next level of authoritarian media regulation." The main target in his article was James Risen, then a reporter for the New York Times and now with The Intercept. The article made the case that Risen should be prosecuted for revelations in his book State of Siege and in the New York Times. As his Intercept bio explains:

Risen was himself a target of the U.S. government’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. He waged a seven-year battle, risking jail, after the Bush administration and later the Obama administration sought to force him to testify and reveal his confidential sources in a leak investigation. Risen never gave in, and the government finally backed down. (my emphasis)

Risen described his legal ordeal early this year in The Biggest Secret The Intercept 01/03/2018:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves. (my emphasis)

In other words, the Obama Administration's policy was not just to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" on those crimes. In the kind of legal actions against the press and whistleblowers that Conason rightly warned about during the Cheney-Bush Administration, it was the Obama Administration that applied that next level of authoritarian media regulation. (See also: James Risen, All the News Unfit to Print Intercepted 01/03/2018; Pete Vernon, James Risen’s press freedom battles with Bush, Obama, and The New York Times Columbia Journalism Review 01/03/2018)

But, of course, the drivers of the authoritarian trend in US politics for decades have been the Republican Party, Christian Right fundamentalists, far right groups, woman-hating "men's rights activists," militarists, hate radio, and assorted racists, white supremacists, "Patriot" Militia types, and conspiracy theorists.

On the other hand, Obama proved dramatically that look-forward-not-backwards policies by Democratic Admimistrations will not reverse the authoritarian trends.