Homeland Security State

Last week I posted an article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts condemning today's conservatives. One thing he wrote struck me:

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That is, I think, a fair enough thumbnail description of the differences between liberals and conservatives in the 20th century. I consider myself heir to the populists and progressives of the 1880s-1910s because they embraced the role of government in minimizing the effects of an increasingly powerful "plutocracy" and ensuring social justice. At that time it became clear that the government was not the seat of power in society, the corporate and banking world was. So I have seen government as part of the solution. And the conservative dream of a truly competitive, entrepreneurial capitalist world is at least one hundred years out of date.

I was often critical of the Clinton/Gore dream of international liberalization through capitalism -- corporate globalization -- becuase they did not emphasize workers' rights and environmental issues enough. An interesting op-ed in the Times criticizes Bush for not believing enough in the transformative and liberating power of capitalism: The Market Shall Set You Free, by Robert Wright.

While Thomas Jefferson wisely feared a strong and inaccessible central power, by the turn of the 20th century that power was no longer invested in the federal government but in corporations and financial institutions. And from the 14th Amendment to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government was often the instrument for overcoming obstacles to democracy placed by local powers.

I have also never really invested a whole lot of energy in fearing the feds will take my liberties away. I have often worried more about what the credit card companies do with my information than what the government does. Is it time to start worrying? Civil libertarians might want to take note of this Tomgram about the Homeland Security State.