Twenty five years later

I was here yesterday:

That seemed like the right place to be the day before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The men buried in that cemetery died to take freedom back from fascism. They decided, at all of 18 or 19 or 20 years old, that they wanted to live in a world where people like Hitler and Mussolini did not. And they succeeded.

Unfortunately, the impulses that give us dictatorship don't actually die; they're baked into how humans work. That's why we have to keep fighting against the people who want power and control, because they will keep trying to take it.

The 9/11 attacks gave those people a great excuse. When people like me (and, notably, Russ Feingold) were warning that the US response to 9/11 would be worse than the attacks themselves, we got shouted down. But we were absolutely right:

Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act. The vote was 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate. Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, the chamber’s lone dissenter, said later that many of his colleagues hadn’t bothered to read it.

Some provisions had long been on the wish lists of federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarily for routine law enforcement. They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.

Well, welcome to the worst-case scenario. We now have a president who is using the post-9/11 counterterrorism powers for his own ends.

The most ominous, if less obvious, change since the Sept. 11 attacks has been the extent to which Congress and the courts have retreated in the face of this 25-year executive-branch power grab. Congress has all but abdicated its authority to declare war and seems to have accepted a drastically diminished oversight role over American intelligence operations. The Supreme Court’s expansion of criminal and civil liability immunity was in itself a concession of its power to the executive.

In the years after Sept. 11, 2001, national security hawks were fond of the phrase “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” That warning was always a canard. History teems with great states destroyed by autocrats and dictators. The threat to free societies has never been too much freedom. It has always been authoritarianism — and always will be.

The Patriot Act was the first evidence that the 9/11 terrorists were winning the long game. The OAFPOTUS's destruction of our alliances and soft power are what the terrorists dreamt of when they boarded those planes. But we can still prove them wrong, despite the last 25 years of creeping authoritarianism under color of "protection."

Authoritarianism is not inevitable; witness the last 80 years of Western civilization. But as Balko points out, government power tends to ratchet up, as the people who go into government are increasingly the people who want that kind of power. Still, history also shows that they always overreach, and at least in the past 400 years, they almost always lose—often with, unfortunately, a lot of damage to the rest of the world. I just hope enough Americans have seen the damage the OAFPOTUS has caused as the poster boy for concentrating power in the tiny hands of a moron that they'll support the real reforms I hope my party can push through in the '30s. We might just get through this round of authoritarianism with our democracy intact.