Nadir

 Do I want to take back some of the optimistic shine of a few days ago?

Upon due consideration, no.

But the House passing the 'compromise' FISA Bill--complete with telecom retroactive immunity--is an horrendous thing, And Barack Obama's support of it makes me think less of him. Quite a bit less, because it's the thing that worried me from early on--his asserted willingness to reach across the aisle. 

The FISA act set up a perfectly adequate framework for foreign surveillance and intelligence gathering. Spy on foreigners all you want--and to spy on Americans, you can do so with a warrant. There's a nice secret court that will here those requests for you, and if time is really pressing , you can ask for one after the fact.

But the Bush administration got caught spying on Americans without warrants, and (after the New York Times sat on the story for a year, until after the 2004 elections) started shouting and lying about the warrantless sex they were having with the American people. 

There arguments had all the effectiveness of a Mafia don shoving his open hand at a camera, but the gesture was repeated again and again and again. (They're still doing it.) Let me just say it: warrantless wiretapping is wiretapping without record. Being without record has absolutely no operational advantage--unless your goals are illegitimate, nefarious, and/or criminal. There's no advantage to not having records kept in a normal intelligence operation. It does not make the bad guys any easier to catch. The only thing it's good for is when you're doing stuff you don't want to get caught at by your side. Things that conceivably have absolutely nothing to do with the Global War on Terror and something to do with high crimes and misdemeanors. 

And so, being caught raping underage children, they went about trying to change the law to make raping underage children OK. They did this with the Military Commissions Act , but they didn't manage it with destroying privacy for a number of reasons. 

This has been typical of Bush Administration behavior--but the curious thing this time round is that it's the Democratic House Leadership that has been trying their damnedest to butcher the Fourth Amendment, and give the telecoms who broke the law with the Bushevikii the kind of immunity that shouldn't be called amnesty, nor even absolution, since those require confession--but rather annulment, since we are called upon to forgive crimes without knowing what they were, so all those boyish hi-jinks will just never have existed. O Philip K Dick, thou shouldest be living at this hour!

Glenn Greenwald--the only reason to visit Salon.com--has been like fire with a law degree about this. He's both minutely clear on the provisions and legal implications and upon just how awful it is.  (Go and sit through  the ad. Look at something else for 30 seconds. It's worth it.)

Glenn has a particularly big Oort cloud of commenters--one of the the things you get used to on the Net after a while and miss when it isn't there . And the reaction when the 'compromise' bill broke was interesting--and for me, part of the other awfulness of this situation.

It was a major bringdown, during the primary battle, to see sites I used to read with pleasure become unreadable because of anti-Barack or Anti-Hillary fulminations--replete with half-truths, slipshod thinking, and characterizations lazily borrowed from elsewhere. It was added proof, if any were needed, that powerful is the dark side, yes, yes. The explosion on Glenn's site showed a whole bunch of that again, and crystallized a few things for me.

The 'compromise' as Senator Russ Feingold said, was a capitulation--which is a mysterious and suspicious thing when surface power seems all on the capitulator's side. A majority of House Democrats voted against the bill--not enough to save the day by a long shot, but enough to show that the leadership was willing to alienate the rank & file over it. And the timing stank out loud--way too close to a Presidential election, splitting the party when doing nothing--or putting off the vote until after November--would have done just fine. It all smacks of desperation for reasons hard to ascertain on the surface. (But easy to fantasize about.)

But in Greenwald's comments section, there were only too many folks expressing their outrage by saying "That does it. I'm voting third party." And "There's not a dime's bit of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats". And there, like the return of the Darth Vader theme music in Attack of the Clones, The Name was again mentioned.

Yep. "Ralph Nader was right." 

(That's the origin of the title of this post, in case you were worrying.)

Now the provocation was great--and some of Glenn's posters were attached to the Democratic party by only a thread of spittle aimed at the Republicans. A few are of the "if voting were effective, it would be illegal' variety, whose smug despair is at least consistent. But, stung as I was, this added injury to insult.

These, therefore, are two major things that are wrong with the Democratic Party: the one, that people in them will trade favors on principle, even when that principle is dreadfully important--and the other, that so many are unwilling to engage in the fight against it.

One of the things that particularly enraged me was the timing of this bill: they had to wait until the primaries were over. Introducing this bill while Hillary and Barack were duking it out would have the candidates falling all over themselves to denounce it. But, two beats after Obama clinches it and the hoi polloi now have no option but to rally 'round our own beloved Muslim terrorist, here it comes. But I don't think this was supposed to be mere arrogance: rather, I think they wanted to slip this by. (Mainstream media coverage? All staring at their shoes.) But the celebrity deathmatch was not supposed to last until June. What to do? What to do?

It's a colossal blunder: they might think that the electorate won't really care--as long as the MSM does their part in ignoring it, then portraying it as old new everybody's tired of hearing about--but the netroots are the Democrats' new fundraising base, and the netroots get their news from Atrios. (or the Great Orange Satan.) But they took at least three bad chances, which means that someone wants it really bad, someone with clout, and they want it before the election, and no damn excuses. There may be a fourth bad chance: they've pissed off Barack Obama's fundraising base, and forced him into a position where he has to either break with them, or with the Congressional leadership. Nothing like bad blood between them and a popular new President. But they did it anyway: they were more tactically successful with the bankruptcy bill, which made life measurably harder for millions of Americans on the sly, but it's the same process and the same people.

But it brings me to the other part of the infernal see-saw. Glenn had the right response to this outrage: 1) make a stink, and 2) work against the people who did this. But in some--in far too many cases, it's to 1) abandon the Democratic Party; 2) abandon the actual political process, and 3) abandon effective action--all for drama.

There's a large number of contributory factors to this debility: the youthful desire to remake society by thought experiment  with no attention paid to how to achieve it; the decades of portraying citizens' role in politics as betting o one elaborately staged horserace every couple of years; and the discomfort with the statistical nature of voting in a large polity.

Nader epitomizes these three dysfunctional mental processes. First, there's the idea that positions are enough. Voters for Nader were not voting for Nader's abilities, but for his positions. Most of the Nader voters I know did not see Nader as superior to them--they were voting for him because he was a mirror image of them. A vote for Nader is a vote for yourself. Sure, Nader has absolutely no administrative experience beyond his own office--but I could do a better job than these jokers! 

I no longer think that's true. Put me in the President's chair, and I'm not at all sure I'd do a terrific job.  Government is a job with necessary skills. Could I have succeeded where Bill Clinton failed on gays in the military? On health care? Could you? Could Ralph Nader? most of this inner assurance stems from contemplation of what we would do if we were dictator, and that (at least so far) is a different thing.

Nader is a guy who shows up every four years i the Leap-year Preakness. That's where we peons are supposed to participate, and only then. That's the representative form of government, after all, isn't it? make your one choice and then shut up. Didn't the annoying guy in your Social Studies class tell you "America is not a democracy--it's a republic, stupid!" 

George W. Bush said as much--that his 'accountability moment' was in 2004, and that means, according to the rules, he can do whatever he wants for the next four years, and everybody is bound by the rules to sit back and watch him take his victory laps. We have to.

For the very survival of our democracy, we have to oppose that idea. And everybody who's in power has a vested interest in having us believe that model. We're not supposed to support, advocate, agitate, or demonstrate for policies, no, no! That just won't do! American politics is, for you guys, only about choosing the proper Men. They deal with policy, and wield power. And oh yeah, you only get two options.

Voting for Nader is buying into that model: "Hulk no like two choices!" But politics is a continuum: Public advocacy, agitation, challenge, and dialogue go on continually Politics are local, they're legal, they're vocal. Voting for a President you don't have complete confidence in is problematic--but only terrible if you intend to sit there and take it for four years.

The good news is that many of these actions have become vastly easier with the advent of the Net. Money, organization, voice--all those have far more obvious effect than they did ten years ago. But it's equally important that we fight that underlying psychology. Support Obama, vote Democratic, yes--but fight them, yell at them, so that they implement the policies you want.

But the Democratic party is so big! Those rich, powerful Democratic House Leaders--how could I influence them! The fix is in! If voting were effective, it will be illegal! There are 300 million people in America! But Ralph Nader--he's an underdog, a small outsider! I have more of a voice there!

If you're an 'I' instead of a 'we', there's something to be said for the first part of that. Something, but not much. Blogs get millions of hits (if they don't publish vast convoluted essays with irresponsible metaphorizing) and communities can arise to the point that thermodynamics is not the dominant law. People in power don't want the Democratic party to be taken over--so if you don't like it, don't try to do it! No! Third parties! That's the ticket!

(And does Ralph Nader really seem to you like a person who will gladly listen to you, even in a smaller group? If he does, I don't think you've been paying attention.)

But over and above personalities, What it comes down to is that deserting a large organization for a small one in search of significance is an illusion. There's no changing that 300 million overall number. (Well, actually there are, and that's what keeps me up at nights.) The comfort of a small organization is paid for by the insignificance of the organization itself. A big fish in a small pond is still the same size as he was in the ocean. No matter what, you are statistical, until you become plural. And when that happens, no structure is immune.

With the Republicans, it's different, and simpler. You are a soldier, and should be proud. Party discipline is all. Of course, what that has given the Republican rank and file is faithfully supported votes on things that deny everything they believe in. (Small Government? Government off our backs? Immigration? Abortion?) In the view of the FISA bill, we should thank our Second Law of Thermodynamics that we don't have party loyalty--at least not at the expense of policy loyalty.

One of the results of our nation's long proto-Fascist ordeal, occurring as it has alongside the rise of the Net,  is the awakening of a lot of people to the necessity of public life. We over here have gotten betrayed by the Kompassionate Konservatives, by The Big Serious Media, and, with disturbing regularity, the Democratic Party. Throwin' that old A-B switch every couple of years alone won't do it, but taking back the poliitical life we've given up by all that prompting from all that people, coupled with our shiny new tools, may be what we need.

That, and Barack Obama to do the right thing.