A Dictator We Can Believe In (with user polls!)

posted at 4:14 pm on April 28, 2009 by CK MacLeod

HISTORICAL PRELUDE

I was hesitant to put this post up, because I figured people would think I was panicking, or nuts, or just searching for the “worst possible thing” to say about President Government on the eve of his 100-day review and as he “thrills” to the news of an addition to his party’s senatorial complement.  I’ll have to leave it to others to judge my sanity, and I admit that the Specter news made me feel my argument was even more timely, but I’m not feeling panicky, and I don’t think that “dictatorship” is the worst thing you can associate with an American president – unless you think having your bust carved into a mountainside, statues put up in your honor, schools and automobiles named after you, and your portrait featured on major currency denominations are signs of disfavor.

As I just happened to be reading in a Lincoln biography, the man whom many consider our greatest president once explicitly discussed the subject of dictatorship in connection to himself.  At a low point in Union fortunes, Lincoln spoke directly to the newly appointed fourth commander of the Army of the Potomac, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, about the latter’s loose talk that the country might need a dictator:

Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.

I confess I experience some difficulty understanding exactly what Lincoln meant to convey with those words.  I read them as “leave the dictator business to me.”  If so, then, by that time – long after his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, long after his radical re-conceptualization and expansion of Commander-in-Chief powers, long after the Emancipation Proclamation – even many of his admirers might have accused him of joking on the square.

IS OBAMAISM PAVING THE WAY TO AN AMERICAN DICTATORSHIP?

This post is not a “wingnut calls O a dicktator!” post.  Nor is it a ” wingnut advocates dictatorship!” post.  It’s not even a Glenn Beck-wannabe post.  And it’s far from an “Arlen Specter’s switch means we’re doomed, doomed!” post.  This is just a wingnut wondrin’ about scenarios and inviting discussion near the 100-Obamaday mark kind of post.

OK – while we wait for the real panicky types to calm all the way down, how about some more history?

Lincoln was hardly the the only American president ever accused of exceeding his brief – or, if you prefer, of taking advantage of constitutional gray areas.  Lincoln himself began his political career as a Whig – an “anti-royalist” opposed to the excesses of “King Andrew” Jackson.  Woodrow Wilson ran a quasi-totalitarian war administration complete with secret police, extra-judicial detentions, and the abuse of war resisters.  A few years later, Franklin Roosevelt had his first attempt to seize total control of the US economy turned back by the Supreme Court, and, though his counterattack on judicial oversight was also turned back, World War II put him in position to rule and reign far beyond any prior president – somewhat in the mode of the military dictators he was combatting.  In more recent decades, the requirements and exigencies of national defense and civil order in an age of instant communications, global commitments, WMD, twilight struggles, and shadow warriors were thought to have conditioned the rise of an “Imperial Presidency.”

Finally, beginning last year under the constitutionally highly questionable TARP Bill, and continuing this year under a raft of legislation envisioning the massive expansion of the public sector without even notional means to pay for it, amidst the the stirrings of a witch-hunt against officials of the prior administration, amidst discussion of “irreversible catastrophe” accompanied by self-conscious quotation of Lincoln’s wartime statements, with the assumption of controlling partisan margins on Capitol Hill, and much, much more, we see at least the outlines of yet another American-style soft dictatorship, a liberal dictatorship – and not just of a dictatorialist rationale, but of the real circumstances in which Americans might yearn for dictatorship.

How far along are we, really?  My own argument follows the poll.

I VOTED “Yep!”

…but maybe not for the reasons you think.  My argument:

• Whereas the national political class now perpetuates itself virtually independently of meaningful democratic republican control, on the basis of a media-power-money iron triangle;
• Whereas the Obama Administration in cooperation with the Reid-Pelosi Congress, rather than counteracting has instead been compounding and exacerbating this tendency;
• Whereas an interlocking fiscal, political, military, and cultural crisis looms, amidst ever more desperate and unlikely attempts to defer the crunch and crash to ever less distant “out-years”;
• Whereas facing and surviving that crisis – with constitutional government, the integrity of the nation, and the prospects for its citizens’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness intact, as well as the health of our nation’s allies and the global bases of international cooperation and commerce – will require urgent and uncompromising action that our system is neither designed to produce nor is capable of producing;
• Whereas prior presidents have been forced to go beyond or outside the Constitution in order to preserve constitutional government, yet the country has generally emerged better and stronger, less vulnerable to anti-democratic and anti-republican distortions, foreign enemies, and internal strife;
• Whereas the institution of “dictatorship,” despite having fallen into disrepute due to the excesses of a few, since ancient times represents a reasonable, in some cases arguably the only, method by which a democratic republican polity can survive inevitably recurring periods of turmoil and danger, and while effective dictators, in US history and not, under the specific title and not, have repeatedly salvaged the hopes and fortunes of their nations;

Therefore be it resolved Face the facts: Pretty darn soon we may have a dictator or reasonable facsimile in these parts (if we don’t already), and, if we don’t, we may wish we did.  If you agree, and, all the more if you don’t, please explain why in the comments.

IF SO, THEN WHAT KIND OF DICTATOR?

Just as important – and regardless of what you think about Obamaism:

I voted “righty,” and not just because it gave me an evil wingnutty thrill, certainly not because I believe cons are more dictator-minded than libs, and not because I’m unable to count seats in Congress or am unfamiliar with the usual poll numbers and demographic arguments.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up in the distinct minority on this one.

If I thought we and the world could pay for Obamaism, and if statism and international retreat would work, I’d have voted differently.  Maybe someone could persuade me that the left-liberals really could sustain their rule indefinitely, regardless of real, mathematically virtually inexorable outcomes.

I think the dictator we could end up having no choice but to believe in is more likely to be a conservative than a liberal for three main reasons::

1. This (look around you) is their hand, and they’re blowing it.  I expect to have more to say on this subject down the line, but for now I’ll suggest that, though Obama and Obamaism have established the modern shape and the underlying rationales for a crisis dictatorship, he’s Hoover, not Roosevelt – the crisis has only just begun.  The people are only now getting wise to him (most are hardly paying attention and still trying to think the best of their Prez), and the odds are that he’ll have to face re-election in the shadow of his own unmet expectations, broken promises, and disastrous performance.
2. The primary political objectives – national security including rolling back the (Obamaist-encouraged) advances of adversaries worldwide; massive financial reform possibly including an urgent re-structuring of international currency laws and regulations; massive political reform including the shrinking of the federal government and the size and scope of the public sector; massive cultural reform including the dismantlement of the left-liberal-totalitarian ideological state apparatus from the schools to the mass media – will be conservative objectives;
3. The real crisis – coming to a head under the auspices of a unified (judiciary, congress, executive, media) left-liberal statist pseudo-consensus that only worsens, rather than solves it – will tarnish left-liberal statism for a generation at least.

“Save us, General Petraeus, you’re our only hope!”

The term “military dictator” is almost a redundancy, and dictatorships tend to represent or to require in some degree a militarization of the state and public affairs.   If things go badly enough, quickly enough, then we might in fact turn to the “man on a horse” (person on hybrid-drive Humvee), empowered not just to rule by decree, but to enforce those decrees at bayonet-, gun-, and precision-guided munition-point.

On this note, I’ve seen many apparently quite sane people discussing the possibility of a frightened and desperate post-Obamaist nation turning to a General Petraeus for leadership, in the hope and expectation that he would indeed conduct himself more like a dictator than like your average president.   Such a candidate would likely be opposed on just that basis – either with the argument that being a good president isn’t the same as being a good general (dictator), so he wouldn’t be effective; or with the argument that dictatorship is contrary to the spirit of American democracy, and must be avoided.

By the way, as far as I know and can tell, Petraeus himself would be offended even to be mentioned in this context.  It’s nothing personal, sir:  Please take it as a measure of the respect and affection in which you’re held (plus you kind of asked for it by showing up at the Super Bowl).

IF NOT HE, OR THE OTHER HE, WHO?

Presuming the crisis isn’t, however, overwhelmingly a military crisis or a crisis of massive social disorder, or that the American armed forces for whatever good reasons can’t or don’t put together a Roman-style Praetorian Primary, in effect removing our direct role in the decision – what other choices would we have?

Now, needless to say, you don’t want just anyone to be your dictator, though many observers of current events and recent history, might argue that randomly picking someone off the street and making him or her Duce, No. 1, Big Brother, or Boss, couldn’t be much worse than what we’ve beeen getting, and that there’s no intrinsic reason why, say, the most responsible person in your neighborhood wouldn’t, properly advised, do as good a job as any typical survivor of our modern electoral demolition derby.   Still, barring cataclysm, and even in the case of most cataclysms, our president-dictator will likely be just such a survivor – that is, will have to be elected by constitutionally prescribed methods under some semblance of the familiar system.

If only the nation possessed an experienced, well-known leader; a vetted candidate trusted by a conservative base of everyday American citzens; a successful executive also known to be of strong moral fiber and unquestionable courage and patriotism; a budget-restraining corruption fighter; tested on the national political stage and under extreme and near-constant fire; a real man or woman “of the people” and of abiding faith, not of the current (to be rejected, chastised, and overturned) national governing and chattering elites…

So, one last critical poll question needs to be asked. Please think long and hard about it before casting your irrevocable and fateful vote.

HAPPY HUNDRED DAYS, OBAMANAUTS!

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