Obama and Holder Get Weird

We're accustomed now to stories coming from China about government suppression of information. No one is surprised to hear that North Korea has arrested someone for speaking truth about what goes on over there. Totaltarian governments fear information because they hate to be embarrassed. Their legitimacy is so tenuous that any inkling of trouble could cause huge trouble down the line.

In the United States, however, we are supposed to trust that information will flow relatively freely. Sure, we'll hear about national security trumping clarity at times, but the 1st Amendment limits that kind of thing.

That's why the Attorney General's argument that a defamation lawsuit against a wholly private company is so bizarre. There really are only two options here, neither one of which is especially attractive. Either the company in question is in fact a front for a cover operation -- in which case the cover is blown just by the government's position -- or it is not -- in which case the Obama Administration has lost its bearings.

According to the New York Times, Holder's argument is classic double speak:

In this case, however, the Justice Department said that “the concerned federal agency, the particular information at issue and the bases for the assertion of the state-secrets privilege cannot be disclosed” without jeopardizing national security.

Why can't we sue? "Secret." Why is the information secret? "Secret." 

That's it.

But that cannot be it. Not here. Not ever.

Why the American Government is failing

The United States faces a number of challenges demanding government action. These problems are not unprecedented, but they are serious. ISIS looks a lot like Hitler to me; Ferguson looks a lot like Selma; the economy looks like has for most of US history outside the 30 years following World War II. Real people may suffer if we manage to ignore some or all of these things.

Yet the current federal government appears unable to respond in any meaningful way. Executive action is stymied by Congress and the courts not out of principle but out of dysfunction. It's not that Congress disagrees with any particular action, it disdains all action. It's not that the Supreme Court guards against abuse of power, it stands in the way of the narrow agenda of five people. President Obama, like President Bush, has not found a way to rally the necessary popular or political support to overcome these obstacles.

Francis Fukuyama, writing in Foreign Affairs makes a compelling case for the view that these failures are systemic and pervasive. The constitutional system designed 250 years ago may work in a general sense, but the way we are applying it right now will stymie or efforts at progress.

Francis Fukuyama
http://governanceproject.stanford.edu/people/fukuyama/

At bottom, Fukuyama argues that we have sucked all the flexibility out of our system. The combination of entrenched special interests (sugar producers, oil producers, unions) and populist resistance to technocracy has stifled the kind of innovation and dynamism that is supposed to be the hallmark of democratic systems. As Exhibit A he offers the US Forest Service, which used to be run by scientific experts insulated from pork barrel politics and narrow regulation by Congress. For a long time it made decisions -- some of them based on faulty information -- in the interest of the long-term good of the country. But soon the agency was eroded by the decay that Fukuyama says is inherent in any system, and the rational, fleet decision-making process bogged down in competing and even conflicting agendas.

The TEA Party is a the worst symptom of the problem, in my view, but it is not the cause.

As I have been saying for twenty years now, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. These cause existential crisis because they reflect a change in the fundamental reality on which all our assumptions are based. We may be seeing the last decline of our particular form of liberal democracy.

Then again, we may not. If we as a group, as a society, can muster the energy and innovation necessary to see the change we need -- the kind of thing about which Americans have been most proud in their history, justifiably so -- we can transform rather than dissolve.

Now is the time, though. We need to get going.