In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union and gave his famous "Secret Speech" denouncing the atrocities of the Stalin era. After decades of iron-fisted, totalitarian rule, Khrushchev repudiated Stalin:
We have to consider seriously and analyze correctly this matter in order that we may preclude any possibility of a repetition in any form whatever of what took place during the life of Stalin, who absolutely did not tolerate collegiality in leadership and in work, and who practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything which opposed him, but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts.
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed these concepts or tried to prove his [own] viewpoint and the correctness of his [own] position was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.
Reading Al Gore's recent book, "The Assault On Reason," I could not help but think of Khrushchev's Secret Speech. None of the individual facts contained in this sweeping indictment of the present administration will be new revelations to those of us who have been paying attention: the lies about WMD leading up to the Iraq War, the illegal wire tapping, the rampant cronyism, the failure to take seriously the warnings prior to 9/11, the assault on science, etc....
What makes Gore's book remarkable is, first of all, the way Gore pulls together the various outrages over the past six years and conveys how complete the Bush assaults on our democratic institutions have been. (It is a sad commentary that the revelation of Bush administration abuses now comes at such a rapid-fire rate that any book attempting to catalog them is out of date before the ink is dry.)
This is not just a political attack. It is a wake-up call for Americans who think that Bush's conduct over the last six years has been "just politics." Ask yourself, if someone was going to subvert American democracy and institute totalitarian rule, how would they go about doing it?
Obviously, no one is going to run for president on the platform of ending democracy. A would-be dictator would to wrap himself in the flag of patriotism, create a culture of fear and hysteria, and methodically weaken the checks on executive power until what is left is an arrangement that bears no resemblance to the system we understood to represent the American system.
And that, Gore demonstrates, is precisely what has happened.
Making this all the more remarkable is the fact that the author is not Michael Moore or MoveOn.org; this is the former Vice President, a man who was a handful of stolen votes in Florida away from becoming President. When Al Gore says this about a sitting President, it means something:
The lie about a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq was also the key to justifying the constitutional power grab by the president. And in the end, for this administration, it is all about power. As long as their big, flamboyant lie remained an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush was seen by the majority as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He was seen as justified in suspending many civil liberties at his personal discretion. And he could continue to distort the political reality experienced by the American people.... If Bush and Cheney actually believed in the linkage that they asserted -- in spite of all the evidence to the contrary presented to them contemporaneously -- that would by itself, in light of the available evidence, make them genuinely unfit to lead our nation. On the other hand, if they knew the truth and lied, massively and repeatedly, isn't that worse? Are they too gullible or too dishonest. (Pg. 112-113.)
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Gore attempts to put the Bush experience into historical context and make the case that Bush's ability to achieve such a massive incursion into previously settled Constitutional limitations, with what Gore sees as relatively little outcry, demonstrates that something has gone wrong with the electorate's ability and willingness to engage in reasoned discourse on public issues.
My quibble with the book is that Gore often forgets a very true statement that he makes in the introduction: "We often tend to romanticize the past, of course, and there was never a golden age when reason reigned supreme, banishing falsehood and demagoguery from the deliberations of American self-government."
Although I would have hoped for a quicker recognition of Bush's smoke and mirrors, which have seemed so painfully obvious, history teaches that every 30 years or so, things get very bad. Civil rights and liberties are violated, our democratic traditions are trashed, and eventually (agonizingly slowly, but surely nonetheless), the voters reach the end of their long rope and set things right. But again, it takes time.
Let's review the two most recent cycles. The Red Scare after World War II began in 1947 with the implementation of the federal employee loyalty program, House Un-American Activities Committee investigations, blacklisting, and so forth. It took seven years of this process running amok for Joseph McCarthy to finally overplay his hand. During that time, gross constitutional abuses took place.
More recently, there was Watergate and Vietnam. I mention these together because they were really part of the same story. We should not forget that, with Vietnam, our troop levels were over 500,000 in 1968 and remained over 300,000 from 1966-1970. The big escalation happened in 1965, and it wasn't until 1973 that the Paris Peace Accord effectively ended the war. Nixon ran roughshod over the Constitution essentially from day one, and it was not until 1974 that he was forced out of office.
Taking note of the fact that the really gross Bush administration abuses started in 2002, after the initial shock of September 11 provided an opening, and further noting that the Bush Administration enjoyed a window of time after September 11 where it was essentially immune from criticism (and a similar window after the Iraq War began), the 2006 election defeat for the Republicans and the firestorm of scandals, Congressional scrutiny, and disillusionment that has driven Bush's ratings into the low 30s seems to be about right on schedule, historically.
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Let's agree, then, that there have been other times in history that demagogues have played to Americans worst instincts in an attempt to expand their power. I still think that Gore may be onto something in concluding that this particular adminstration has been unusually aggressive and grandiose and serious about subverting our Constitution and bringing about what Karl Rove described as a "permanent Republican majority," a phrase that too many of us shrugged at, not realizing that Rove was really talking about a dictatorship. (There is a truly disturbing reference in Gore's book to a time when Tom Delay enlisted the anti-terrorism people in the FBI and Homeland Security to track down Texas legislators, who had left the state in order to prevent a quorum for Delay's Texas congressional redistricting vote.)
When Bush is gone, we will need a president who understands our democratic institutions to fix the damage. I happen to think the Gore is the person to do it, and with this book, he seems to be signaling that he is going to step in.
