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Reading about the revolt of the FISA court, the internal NSA questioning about the recently disclosed presidentially ordered, uncourt-authorized monitoring of communications of US persons, the Ignatius article today, it is very interesting that so much of the discomfort with and resistance to growing police state provisions -- without a national debate, without a national consensus -- is coming from inside the agencies, the courts, from those who take what their mission is supposed to be seriously. In every agency, there are abuses and people who abuse their powers, but many many people who work in these agencies, in the courts, in intelligence and law enforcement, take the public trust part of their mission seriously and deeply want at some fundamental level the confidence of the American public. They want the American public to support what they do. This has been violated by decisions made by the Bush administration in secret, without debate, contrary to most people's understanding of the law and American values, but you can sense in these stories a desire for a restoration and return to a set of standards the American public has trust in. That they don't have to live in fear of what's on the front page of the NYT, because there are not huge abuses going on in secret, because they deserve the public's trust.
It's no accident that there is no American literature celebrating imperial presidential powers, celebrating a president operating in secret to expand his powers while citing national security threats, celebrating, in short, demagoguery. No great American literature or Hollywood movie has rewarded trampling on the Constitution. No celebrations of the US waterboarding detainees. What is our whole national literature about? (And I went to public school in Kansas -- back when they taught evolution! -- so I imagine my understanding of the common American literature is pretty close to what would be a national sampling.) It's about doing the right thing. Not only that - it's about the right thing prevailing, being rewarded. It's about justice prevailing over injustice. It's about abuses -- deception, corruption, violence, racism -- being ratted out. It's about those who deceive, who seek to grab power, who become corrupted by power, who go on witch hunts, who appeal always to fear as a form of political manipulation -- ultimately being exposed and falling, being censured by a system that is more powerful than they are. In particular, our national literature has celebrated one thing: the individual - the ordinary public servant, the small town lawyer, the ordinary citizen -- who labors to make justice prevail (to kill a mockingbird, sinclair lewis, a civil action, three days of the condor), and has been especially harsh on one thing: the political leader who deceives and who seeks to expand his power. The Watergate break-in is not celebrated in our national literature -- it's those who expose it. The McCarthy witchhunts aren't celebrated in our Hollywood movies -- it's those who finally exposed McCarthy for what he was. No popular movies celebrating the Reagan administration's secret selling of TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran and diverting the proceeds to the Contras. Americans have a fundamental distrust of government conducted in secret, of those leaders who would seek to expand their powers in secret, appealing always to fear. We know what would happen in the movies. The demagogue would fall. The system, we would be assured, works. It would retract back to normalcy.