James Fallows thinks Ross Douthat is wrong about liberals basically acquiescing to the national-security state now that Obama is in charge:
A harder case is Guantanamo, use of drones, and related martial-state issues. Yes, it's true that some liberals who were vociferous in denouncing such practices under Bush have piped down. But not all (cf Glenn Greenwald etc). And I don't know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama's policy -- as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.
So: it's nice and fair-sounding to say that the party-first principle applies to all sides in today's political debate. Like it would be nice and fair-sounding to say that Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are contributing to obstructionism and party-bloc voting. Or that Fox News and NPR have equal-and-offsetting political agendas in covering the news. But it looks to me as if we're mostly talking about the way one side operates. Recognizing that is part of facing the reality of today's politics.
Glenn Greenwald -- he's everyone's favorite progressive bully until someone wants to use him as an example of the left's integrity. Yesterday, I made some distinctions between liberals and Democrats, but I think Douthat is largely right in the sense that the Democratic Party has been largely silent about the continuity between Bush and Obama on matters of national security.
The most egregious example of this, of course, was the debate over the PATRIOT Act. As I mentioned yesterday, you had Sen. Al Franken making a show of reading the Fourth Amendment to Assistant Attorney General David Kris before voting renewal out of committee. You have Attorney General Eric Holder, who prior to being AG said the Bush administration "acted in defiance of federal law" with its warrentless wiretapping program, only to narrow his critique when he became part of an administration eager to use the same powers. There's Sen. Patrick Leahy, who voted against PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006 but worked with Dianne Feinstein to block Sen. Russ Feingold's mild oversight provisions during renewal last year. The president who once wanted to repeal the PATRIOT Act then meekly signed its extension.
Democrats have, of course, blocked funding to close Guantanamo, fallen almost silent about this administration's aggressive use of state secrets to obscure government wrongdoing despite some early complaints, and have remained largely quiet about the administration's use of indefinite detention, once decried as "illegal and immoral."
To say that Democrats who criticized such things before aren't cheering now sets an arbitrary standard. The point is that, inherited or no, Democrats have lost the urgency they once possessed regarding the expansion of executive powers in matters of national security. No where has this been more dramatic than with the president himself, who once campaigned on reversing many of the Bush-era policies that he has in fact kept in place. The fact that Democrats have meekly acquiesced to this change as opposed to cheering it wildly doesn't speak particularly well of their integrity.
Yes, it's facile and stupid when the media draws false equivalences between NPR and Fox News, between pre-2006 Democratic opposition and the unprecedented Republican obstructionism of the past two years. But the reality is that the supposedly tyrannical Bush-era national-security state is largely unchanged, and Democrats have mostly stopped caring because they aren't going to accuse the leader of their party of shredding the Constitution, even though the 2006 version of him very well might have. In the process, the party has perhaps forever legitimized some of the worst aspects of Bush administration policy by giving them the prized Beltway stamp of bipartisan approval.
The GOP's outrage over the TSA is more partisan politics than libertarian revolution, and while I'm against the new procedures, I don't think they come close to something like legalizing torture. But Douthat is right that on matters of national security, it is accurate to say that Democrats have for the most part learned to live with policies they once found abhorrent.
