The problem with Peter Suderman's argument

Libertarian Peter Suderman deploys a familiar kind of argument:

No, I don't think this is a failure of leadership so much as a feature of democratic politics -- and a reminder of how unpleasant and unsatisfying to nearly everyone the business of politics can be.

Democratic politics is a messy business. It's disorganized and frantic and unpredictable and frustrating. Politics is a matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise....

...

Given my libertarian streak, I'd also add a final thought: The way to avoid the maddening convulsions of politics isn't to change them, or rise above them, or move past them, or transform them, or whatever the trendy term of art is on any given day. It's to avoid them -- and reduce their power to hold sway over how we live. And the more decisions about our lives and welfare we put in the hands of politicians, the harder that will be to do.

It's kind of a sly move that you get from many small-government types, that goes something like this:

1. Politics--the collective activity of everyone in the country deciding laws--sucks, and ends in sucky results.
2. It is better to have less of a sucky thing.
   
3. Therefore there should be "less" politics. (1, 2)
   
4. We should support policies that make government--and therefore, the sphere of politics--"smaller". (3)

There are a couple of problems with this argument. In the first place, (2) is not necessarily true--you may not want less of a sucky thing, if the alternatives are even suckier. There is ample empirical evidence that health care systems that feature more government involvement than ours are more efficient and lead to better results than our system. This doesn't mean that such a system wouldn't suck: it's just that it would suck significantly less than the status quo. To turn Suderman's invocation of Churchill on its head: single-payer is the worst health care system, except for all the others.

Second, if you delve a little further into (1), it becomes apparent that it doesn't make sense to use this claim about the activity of politics in general (which Suderman identifies as the "matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise" that accompanies law making) as a stepping stone to a claim about preferring a specific, first-order set of policies (i.e., libertarian ones). The reason is that, after a moment's reflection, we see that what is actually maddening about politics isn't the process itself, so much as the dismal first-order results it produces. If we lived in a world in which the shouting was every bit as loud, the dissent every bit as pitched, the deal-making, strategy, slippery rhetoric, and compromise every bit as unsavory--but political success, for all that, could actually be achieved--then it wouldn't be very maddening at all. The source of the frustration isn't that mean people on TV yell--it's that, despite sweeping Democratic majorities, meaningful health care reform still goes down in flames. Given all this, it hardly solves any problems to say that, hey, we should adopt a libertarian agenda since that will get this unsavory politics business out of our lives--because that's just coextensive with saying that we should abandon the (non-libertarian) first-order policies that I prefer, the very non-enactment of which is causing my resentment of politics in the first place.

So, nice try libertarians. But if you want to make your case for a specific set of policies, it's going to have to be a substantive one made on the merits, not this "hey-ain't-politics-a-drag-I-know-let's-abolish-entitlements-then-there-won't-be-so-much-politics" mumbo-jumbo.

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room

In case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend taking a look at the International Committee of the Red Cross confidential report that details the torture of prisoners held in US captivity. The ICRC is tasked by the Geneva Conventions to provide an objective analysis of the treatment of prisoners, and if violations of the Conventions are discovered, the country in question must proceed with an investigation or else violate the terms of the treaty. Typically these reports are confidential to encourage government cooperation, but this report was leaked to the New York Times.

The report details the abusive treatment of 14 different detainees. All the claims are "alleged" because they are based on interviews with the detainees themselves (and I think some US officials as well), but there is not much doubt as to the authenticity of their accounts because of their high level of detail and consistency with one another.

Especially gripping are the excerpts from interviews (Annex 1 and 2 in the report), which give you a true idea of how far off the deep end the United States went in prosecuting the "war on terror". An excerpt of the excerpt:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room.... After some time...I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.... I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go the toilet, which consisted of a bucket....I was given no solid food...while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit...Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day....

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face....

Later, the "real torturing" starts:

I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles....

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply....The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

He then goes on to explain that he was routinely waterboarded after that, as well as beaten by being slammed into the wall with the towel as described above. The account of the worst of the treatment ends with this chilling, Nazi-esque image:

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.

The United States tortured, and these actions were authorized at the highest levels within the Bush administration. They were done in accordance with secret memos of dubious legal merit that were drafted by the President's lawyers--memos that were kept secret not just from the public, but from the other co-equal branches of the government. We now know that for seven years since the attacks of September 11, the executive branch continuously and systematically flatly breached the Constitution of the United States--by violating the Fourth Amendment, by internally declaring for itself the power to violate any other number of provisions in the Bill of Rights (including those contained in the First Amendment), by assuming for itself the power to unilaterally strip citizens of their habeas corpus rights, by violating the United States' obligations under the Geneva Conventions...

If these deeds go unacknowledged, let alone unpunished, it means that the Constitution is de facto non-binding. It means that everything that America proclaims itself to be, at it's core--a free nation, a nation of laws--is a simple factual untruth, because it will be the case that any President who has the will can violate those freedoms and ignore those laws without consequence.

So I am now watching the Obama administration with extreme interest, and hoping that he understands the following: that after this serious a bout of lawlessness and quasi-despotism, reinstituting a proper liberal democratic regime is not enough--that he must pro-actively take steps to address what happened in the previous administration, and establish a precedent that such lawbreaking at the highest levels of government will have consequences. If he does not, then he reveals himself to be not a President but a Napoleon--a benevolent dictator who chooses to allow us our freedoms and who chooses to circumscribe his own power in accordance with the Constitution, but is by no means actually required to do any of these things.

Of course, in a way, this is already a lost cause, because I am reduced to pleading to the executive branch to enforce the Constitutional limits of executive power. Just as a legitimate democracy can't be founded by executive decree, a broken democracy can't be relegitimized by executive decree--because the ultimate source of democratic legitimacy is not the decree of a single will, but the consensus of many wills. Sadly, there does not seem to be a sufficient consensus in 21st century America--neither amongst the public, the press, nor the members of Congress--that basic tennants of democracy such as the rule of law and due process are not mere suggestions, but real and rigourously enforced contraints on power.