Won't Hurt a Bit

I think that when liberals say that the various conservatives teatimers and birthbaggers and nineeleveners and so on would be more convincing in their stand against the coming totalitarianism if they'd managed to evince skepticism during the Bush years is well taken, and I think that the liberal conviction that much of the current madness is driven by displaced anger at their own precarious economic circumstances, catalyzed by racial animus is mostly true. That doesn't mean I think any more highly of liberals, who are water carriers for a president who has willfully and vocally continued the supposedly aberrant, abhorent policies of the Bush administration, from sops to Wall Street to the black-site global gulag--that is to say that liberals would be more convincing in their stand against the conservative stand against the coming totalitarianism if they weren't defending a president who is tempermentally but not substantively different from his predecessor.

Here, for instance, is Yglesias, in typical form:

Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. Indeed, the very same people who spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday complaining that Barack Obama’s “czars” are a threat to liberty not only weren’t worried about czars in the Bush years, they spend Tuesday and Thursday worrying that Obama’s not doing enough to ensure that intelligence operatives can break the law with impunity.

Now that is all true as far as it goes, but it is also true, it is to me more true, that Yglesias' broadly held sentiment would be easier to take seriously were it not for the fact that Barack Obama has repeatedly ratified, extended, supported, embraced, and continued "secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc." Yes, he has made speeches saying "we don't torture." So did George W. Bush. Yes, agencies within his administration have launched or proposed to launch investigations into low-level violations of human rights. So did agencies within the Bush administration. He has made noises about closing Guantanmo, like Bush, without doing so, like Bush, and he is expanding and making permanent the concentration camp at Bagram, even farther in the shadows, out of the public eye. He has forcefully embraced formerly illegal (if nevertheless widely practiced) electronic surveillance. He has, like Bush, talked about Iraqis taking over their own country, or, like, whatver, while preparing the transition from open occupation to the more typical form of American hegemony as practiced through the creation of "enduring" military bases. He has one-upped his predecessor in escalating war with Afghanistan and ordering incursions into Pakistan. He's given billions and billions to failed, abusive business to reward their subterfuge and failure, made secret policy in cahoots with various industry goons, etc. etc. etc.

So while it is true that your average Joe Teabagger suffers from hilarious white-trash racial myopia, and that is something that we can all laugh about, for there is nothing more hilarious and mockable on this good green earth than the incoherent whiteguy rage that has for so long propagated within our unacknowledged middling orders, the notion that these people are uniquely blinkered and hypocritical in their protest is perfectly false.