So in the midst of all the election hoohah happening there’s, you know, the defense of the realm or the equivalent. And right now, things are tangled:
The House today overwhelmingly rejected an attempt by Democratic leaders to extend a controversial surveillance law by 21 days, increasing pressure on lawmakers to approve White House-backed legislation by the end of the week.
The 229-191 vote to kill the extension followed a toughly worded veto threat from President Bush, who said he would reject any delay and urged the House to adopt surveillance legislation approved by the Senate Tuesday.
“Terrorists are planning new attacks on our country…that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison,” Bush said.
Today’s vote is a setback for Democrats in the House, who oppose granting legal immunity from lawsuits to telecommunication providers who helped the government conduct a warrantless wiretapping program after the terrorist attacks more than six years ago.
So this is going to hash out for a bit and I’ve no doubt that eventually after all his footstamping the president will get what he wants. He’s not the only one footstamping, by the by — thus Andy McCarthy at NRO, who ever since the tanking of Giuliani and Romney in quick succession seems to have focused all his energy in a series of complaints about McCain, Democrats, or both:
It would be unconscionable for Democrats to allow that to happen while our nation confronts an enemy hell-bent on reprising 9/11 and while we have 200,000 men and women in uniform relying on the continuing flow of information from our intelligence services.
Well it looks like the unconscionable is about to occur. I am hearing from several sources that the House is planning to recess on Friday without taking up the Senate bill. That would mean the lapse of our surveillance authority at midnight.
This is a game of roulette with our national security, spearheaded by the Democratic leadership in the House, which is following the lead of the party’s two presidential contenders, Sens. Obama and Clinton. Both of them voted against the emergency authorization last summer, and Obama voted against the Senate bill on Tuesday (Clinton did not bother to vote). Make no mistake. The MoveOn.org crowd is calling the shots on that side of the aisle.
President Bush has to keep pounding this, as does Sen. McCain. This is not politics, folks. For grown-ups, this is life and death.
This is just one example and there are plenty of other posts on the matter out there in the digital world from the right — why, there’s even a cute countdown clock, at the conclusion of which, I am sure, the entire country will blow up thanks to some specially planned virus or the like.
But why, instead of being scared or concerned, do I just find myself chuckling at all this bad theater?
A few days ago Cunning Realist had a post linking to an essay by another writer on a phenomenon that has been a hallmark for this country for too long now — the Paranoid Truculent Male, or PTM:
A malign and poorly understood influence on foreign policy is the paranoid truculent male (though a few females share the ailment). The PTM is a fairly well-defined type, who believes that They Are Out to Get Us. He doesn’t much care who They are. If one They fails him, he will find another. These They must be fought to the death. It’s us or They.
As a current example, I get email telling me that Moslems hate us and want to enslave us. We must therefore gird our loins and prepare for an apocalyptic conflict that will determine whether Western civilization will survive. A war of peoples approaches, and we must win it.
This of course is transparent nonsense. A week or so ago I spoke with a friend in government service who recently returned from an extended period in Jordan. Perfectly friendly people, he reported. That was my own experience, years back. They knew he was an American, and consequently wanted to talk to him. He traveled by public transportation to Petra and so on. Not the slightest problem.
The difference between documentable fact and ferocious email was predictable. An unvarying characteristic of the PTM is the belief that his current enemies are implacably evil and united in pursuit of his enslavement. Frequently he hasn’t had the most minimal experience of this relentless enemy. Few of today’s PTMs have passed time in Moslem countries. Many do not have passports. The proportion who speak Arabic or Farsi or actually know any Moslems is very low. It doesn’t matter. PTMs share a specific personality that wants an enemy. They will always find one.
It’s a brief piece and is more of a general reflection than anything else, but serves as a kind of update to and riff on a classic piece of popular American political science, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in Harper’s in 1964. To say that the first two paragraphs alone could have been written today, the Goldwater reference aside (but substitute whoever you like — even a radio show host, say) is an understatement:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
In respects I don’t really have much to add right now to these two pieces beyond the suggestion that they should both be read. They are, however, useful correctives to the kind of overheated rhetoric Andy McCarthy says above (and yes, I could make all the jokes about another McCarthy but never mind that).
A key point of Hofstadter’s bears particular emphasis, though — as he says, he’s not talking about crazy people, but the embrace and use of rhetorical approaches. This is absolutely key — people like McCarthy, Hewitt, Malkin, others aren’t crazy, and neither are they motivated by evil intentions. The whole point, which is often missed, is that they are patriots, by their own definition perhaps but then again how often do we see things through our own lens, and how far can we truly step away from them for a broader picture? Yet in their love for country I think they love not too wisely but too well — one of Shakespeare’s defter phrases and still powerful all these years along. As a result, it’s hard for me to take them seriously, especially after all these past few years. The shrieks of rage over something like FISA’s potential expiring is yet another in a series of events that ends up, the longer time passes, feeling like crying wolf.
To this the counterargument is obvious — the existence of 9/11, directly mentioned by McCarthy and used as the eternal justification ever since. The goal is to prevent a repeating of that tragedy, and only a moron or a fool wants such a repeat. This said, an implied basis of a lot of the commentary on FISA, intelligence gathering and so forth from the McCarthys of the world boils down to this: the government is acting in the country’s best interests at all times, it needs these tools to operate at top efficiency, and must be absolutely trusted that it will use these tools correctly, without complaint or question.
Indeed.
Call me suspicious (dare I say paranoid) — but also call me curious: the longstanding argument from many conservatives has been to resist government intrusion and interference, as conceived however you’d like. Go anywhere you like and you see it and sense it, the idea that the government bungles, imposes, causes problems, overtaxes, cares nothing for ‘real’ people, the salt of the earth. Milton Friedman is invoked, if not Ayn Rand, and many other figures besides.
Now, this is an incredible oversimplification on my part, intentionally, and I don’t pretend otherwise. As we’ve seen in the primary season, the huge crisis of confidence among self-described conservatives at present can in part be defined by the question of whether or not government action is warranted. The success of Huckabee, who embraces government regulation in a variety of areas such as nutrition, caused howls of outrage from folks like the Club for Growth, and that’s just one higher profile example. But moving beyond that, a newer formulation can be considered:
Many conservatives of all stripes, who regard the federal government in particular as being the very definition of utter incompetence, back-scratching, a trough for political spoils and more besides is at the same time not willing to grant that government remarkable — overwhelming, even — self-oversight in issues of national security, and regards any questions, objections or arguments against this as an example of not being ‘grown-up,’ of political gain, of living in denial. Apparently questions of utter incompetence and so forth need never be asked once in this sphere because it is obvious that there will never be such a situation there.
The government is a mess. The government is a success.
Which is it?
Again, I formulate and simplify. Yet there seems to be an interesting, if implied, division between the professionalism of those who just work for ‘the government’ as bureaucratic machine and ‘the government’ as Spycatchers Inc., making the world safe for those making the world safe for democracy, as it were. It also seems that there needs to be a need for keeping an eye on the former — thus projects that track earmarks, for instance, and indeed the whole question of earmarks to start with — while turning a completely blind eye to the latter, trusting that ‘the grown-ups’ will always be handling it fine, or know to surrender control to those who will.
Ask yourself this, to turn back to the question of the paranoid style — how many of those paranoid about the fate of the republic, fearing sleeper cells on every corner, figuring that an eye on everyone is the only way to go, slamming attacks on restrictions as being unpatriotic or worse…how many of them seem to lose their paranoia and concerns when it comes to the question of whether things are being done to the best of their ability, who take it as read that the sluggish and incompetent government is suddenly near perfect in this sphere?
How many respond to the question ‘who watches the watchmen?’ by angrily complaining the question shouldn’t be asked to start with? How many might one day wonder why it is they had those tools they argued for used against them for some reason, perhaps? (Stranger has occurred.)
Who knows how many do. But I can readily sense who complains the loudest these days, and who finds that their answer to the question ‘Do you trust the government?’ undergoes some surprising shifts without their recognizing it.
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Ned Raggett Ponders It All
The expiration of FISA…and the paranoid style
February 14, 2008 — Ned RaggettSo in the midst of all the election hoohah happening there’s, you know, the defense of the realm or the equivalent. And right now, things are tangled:
So this is going to hash out for a bit and I’ve no doubt that eventually after all his footstamping the president will get what he wants. He’s not the only one footstamping, by the by — thus Andy McCarthy at NRO, who ever since the tanking of Giuliani and Romney in quick succession seems to have focused all his energy in a series of complaints about McCain, Democrats, or both:
This is just one example and there are plenty of other posts on the matter out there in the digital world from the right — why, there’s even a cute countdown clock, at the conclusion of which, I am sure, the entire country will blow up thanks to some specially planned virus or the like.
But why, instead of being scared or concerned, do I just find myself chuckling at all this bad theater?
A few days ago Cunning Realist had a post linking to an essay by another writer on a phenomenon that has been a hallmark for this country for too long now — the Paranoid Truculent Male, or PTM:
It’s a brief piece and is more of a general reflection than anything else, but serves as a kind of update to and riff on a classic piece of popular American political science, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in Harper’s in 1964. To say that the first two paragraphs alone could have been written today, the Goldwater reference aside (but substitute whoever you like — even a radio show host, say) is an understatement:
In respects I don’t really have much to add right now to these two pieces beyond the suggestion that they should both be read. They are, however, useful correctives to the kind of overheated rhetoric Andy McCarthy says above (and yes, I could make all the jokes about another McCarthy but never mind that).
A key point of Hofstadter’s bears particular emphasis, though — as he says, he’s not talking about crazy people, but the embrace and use of rhetorical approaches. This is absolutely key — people like McCarthy, Hewitt, Malkin, others aren’t crazy, and neither are they motivated by evil intentions. The whole point, which is often missed, is that they are patriots, by their own definition perhaps but then again how often do we see things through our own lens, and how far can we truly step away from them for a broader picture? Yet in their love for country I think they love not too wisely but too well — one of Shakespeare’s defter phrases and still powerful all these years along. As a result, it’s hard for me to take them seriously, especially after all these past few years. The shrieks of rage over something like FISA’s potential expiring is yet another in a series of events that ends up, the longer time passes, feeling like crying wolf.
To this the counterargument is obvious — the existence of 9/11, directly mentioned by McCarthy and used as the eternal justification ever since. The goal is to prevent a repeating of that tragedy, and only a moron or a fool wants such a repeat. This said, an implied basis of a lot of the commentary on FISA, intelligence gathering and so forth from the McCarthys of the world boils down to this: the government is acting in the country’s best interests at all times, it needs these tools to operate at top efficiency, and must be absolutely trusted that it will use these tools correctly, without complaint or question.
Indeed.
Call me suspicious (dare I say paranoid) — but also call me curious: the longstanding argument from many conservatives has been to resist government intrusion and interference, as conceived however you’d like. Go anywhere you like and you see it and sense it, the idea that the government bungles, imposes, causes problems, overtaxes, cares nothing for ‘real’ people, the salt of the earth. Milton Friedman is invoked, if not Ayn Rand, and many other figures besides.
Now, this is an incredible oversimplification on my part, intentionally, and I don’t pretend otherwise. As we’ve seen in the primary season, the huge crisis of confidence among self-described conservatives at present can in part be defined by the question of whether or not government action is warranted. The success of Huckabee, who embraces government regulation in a variety of areas such as nutrition, caused howls of outrage from folks like the Club for Growth, and that’s just one higher profile example. But moving beyond that, a newer formulation can be considered:
Many conservatives of all stripes, who regard the federal government in particular as being the very definition of utter incompetence, back-scratching, a trough for political spoils and more besides is at the same time not willing to grant that government remarkable — overwhelming, even — self-oversight in issues of national security, and regards any questions, objections or arguments against this as an example of not being ‘grown-up,’ of political gain, of living in denial. Apparently questions of utter incompetence and so forth need never be asked once in this sphere because it is obvious that there will never be such a situation there.
The government is a mess. The government is a success.
Which is it?
Again, I formulate and simplify. Yet there seems to be an interesting, if implied, division between the professionalism of those who just work for ‘the government’ as bureaucratic machine and ‘the government’ as Spycatchers Inc., making the world safe for those making the world safe for democracy, as it were. It also seems that there needs to be a need for keeping an eye on the former — thus projects that track earmarks, for instance, and indeed the whole question of earmarks to start with — while turning a completely blind eye to the latter, trusting that ‘the grown-ups’ will always be handling it fine, or know to surrender control to those who will.
Ask yourself this, to turn back to the question of the paranoid style — how many of those paranoid about the fate of the republic, fearing sleeper cells on every corner, figuring that an eye on everyone is the only way to go, slamming attacks on restrictions as being unpatriotic or worse…how many of them seem to lose their paranoia and concerns when it comes to the question of whether things are being done to the best of their ability, who take it as read that the sluggish and incompetent government is suddenly near perfect in this sphere?
How many respond to the question ‘who watches the watchmen?’ by angrily complaining the question shouldn’t be asked to start with? How many might one day wonder why it is they had those tools they argued for used against them for some reason, perhaps? (Stranger has occurred.)
Who knows how many do. But I can readily sense who complains the loudest these days, and who finds that their answer to the question ‘Do you trust the government?’ undergoes some surprising shifts without their recognizing it.
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