| Background
First, let's reveiw where we are. The longer series is about grappling with a conundrum: Democrats are as incompetent with political process as Republicans are with policy.
A significant key to why this is so lies in the realm of cognitive development: On policy matters, Republicans (dominated by movement conservatives) cling to "traditional values"--the set of expectations and understandings that are generated out of the pre-existing social system--what psychologist Robert Kegan identifies as "level 3" consciousness. These work reasonably well in traditional societies, but cannot cope with the complexity of modern ones. And yet movement conservatives cannot question them, because they serve to define the very ground of being for level 3 consciousness. Liberals and Democrats operate on a higher level--level 4--which takes the social system and its defining roles and relationships as object--but they do so only on policy mattes. When it comes to political manuevering, the roles are reversed: Liberals and Democrats operate at level 3, playing by the rules because they cannot conceive of doing otherwise.
Clearly, however, liberals and Democrats do have the capacity to think at level 4. It is merely that they habitually do not do so with respect to political processes, and a large part of the reason is bound up in their relationship to conservatism. Historically, liberals have been quite restrained in advancing their ideas, seeking more to build on existing structures and assumptions--the level 3 foundations of law and custom--than to build totally anew. Having done so initially in the creation of the modern liberal order during the New Deal, liberals and Democrats have similarly been quite procedurally conservative in seeking to maintain the stability of the existing political order.
However, such intentions are inherently self-defeating in the face of a radical reactionary conservative movement whose aims are to utterly subvert that system by any means necessary, using its key features when convenient, and casting them utterly aside when not. Faced with such an onslaught, which treats the level 3 system of existing political arrangements (all the way back to Magna Charta) as an object for unrestrained manipulation, the only possible successful response is to likewise adopt a level 4 stance that views such arrangements as object--but does so from a principled position, which is how normal, healthy level 4 thinking works in the first place.
Re-Drawing The Distinctions
The immediate problem that confronts liberals and progressive is a confusion between two distinct things: the conservatives lawless pursuit of power as an end in itself, and the flexibility of action entailed by level 4 thinking, which is guided but not constrained by traditional roles, relationships and social responsibilites. The former--conservative lawlessness--is a function of attitudinal factors, such as rightwing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) which shape a threatening dog-eat-dog worldview in which all's fair on the presumption that one inherently has God on their side. The Spanish Inquisition was right: Torture is fine, because one is torturing in God's name. Such is their fundamental logic, which George Lakoff has sketched out in detail based on the Strict Father model which he first introduced in Moral Politics.
It is this logic which causes each conservative venture into manipulating level 3 customs, practices and instutitions to be so ruinous and immoral. It is not the manipulation per se that is at fault, but the motivation and the logic behind the manipulation. Of course it is quite prudent to be wary of level 4 manipulations, when our constitutional system of checks and balances is itself a level 3 entity. However, we must never forget that it was intentionally created, and such an act of creation was inherently a product of level 4 consciousness.
There is a lesson here: we can trust ourselves to venture into level 4 waters, provided that we do so openly, deliberatively, tentatively and without guile. The aims must be for the good of the whole level 3 system of relationships that will proceed in altered form after our level 4 intervention, not merely for one particular set of actors.
Impeachment As An Example
With this in mind, we are ready to consider the example of impeachment. There is no doubt that impeachment is called for. As John Dean pointed out years ago, the current crisis is Worse Than Watergate. As he explained in his interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman:
AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called, "Worse Than Watergate." Why?
JOHN DEAN: Well, actually, the title, as I explain in the preface of the book, had multiple purposes. It is declarative. Is subjective in a sense, it is also interrogative. The title actually came from a column that I had published in my regular column, and then it was republished by "Salon," magazine and they put the title, "Worse Than Watergate" on it. My editor happened to see that, and about the same time that happened, Chris Matthews on "Hardball" had Ed Gillespie of the Republican National Committee on, and it was about the time that Valerie Plame(?), her true identity as a C.I.A. covert agent was released. Chris said to Gillespie, "That underlying conduct is worse than Watergate, isn't it?" And the Chairman of the Republican National Committee agreed it was. These things sort-of came together about the same time we were titling this book. The editor suggested this title and I said it really works in many ways, more ways than I ever anticipated. There are, as I outline in the book, something like 11 inchoate scandals that are available right now to really become a serious part of this administration. The worst problem, though, is the problem that Senator Kennedy just addressed. Nobody died during Watergate. None of the Watergate -- so-called Watergate "abuses of power" resulted in the loss of a life. And we're in a situation now where the abuse of power has cost a lot of lives.
AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed you when you were talking about the impeachable crimes of George Bush, if in fact he lied. Are you convinced he did now?
JOHN DEAN: I am convinced he did lie, and in fact I put an appendix in the book to really show others how they can establish that for themselves. What I did is I looked at one of his major speeches. And took the statements that he had made relying on rather publicly available material. It's not highly classified. There are reports that anyone who takes the trouble to look online can find. And you can see where he literally takes a statement and drops all of the qualifications, all of the modifiers and makes it a declarative statement. He does it time after time after time. This is a misrepresentation of the facts. When he went to Congress in October of 2002 to get a resolution to go to war in Iraq, he wanted something that the Congress had never given before, which was a delegation of a power that he wouldn't have to go back to Congress to get war powers when he actually went to war. The Congress had never granted such a power. So, the Congress said, all right. We'll take the two -- we'll do this with conditions. The two conditions are -- really the premise that he had been arguing for war. So, when they granted the resolution, they said, we want a formal Presidential declaration from you that, one, there is no diplomatic way to resolve the problems of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the first condition. The second condition was that going to war in Iraq would be consistent with the war on terrorism, which was his second point, that there was an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Hussein, was the implicit rationale. Bush, in a secret deal with the House of Representatives, agreed to that. The resolution was written, passed and signed by the President. No one really paid any attention to this resolution, and the President in March of 2003 goes to war. 48 hours after, under the resolution, he had to report that he had done that, and he had to submit his formal declaration. His declaration is one of the most -- I can't really find the right word for it, Amy. It's just -- I use all of the modifiers I can think of in the book. It's a fraud. It is a deliberate, misleading resolution the President himself asked for. It's a violation of trust to the Congress who granted him very unusual powers. It's a violation of the trust of the American people. His declaration is phony. His determination, excuse me, is phony. It's actually bizarre. So I lay that out in the book to explain to people what he has done and how he did it, and how questionable it really is.
Going further, in another Democracy Now! interview, former US prosecutor Elizabeth De La Vega lays out the framework of the legal case against Bush and his administration for violation of specific statutes prohibiting fraud. Such an approach clearly grounds impeachment in a solid level 3 context--violation of a law that is more than 100 years old:
AMY GOODMAN: Elizabeth de la Vega's mock indictment appears in a new book entitled United States v. George W. Bush, et al.. De la Vega spent 20 years in the US Attorney's office. She was an Assistant US Attorney in Minneapolis, as well as a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California. She joins us here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Thanks for having me, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how did you come up with this? What made you decide to do this?
ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Well, I was an Assistant US Attorney up until 2004, so I was still working as an Assistant US Attorney when the President and his senior aides started their marketing campaign for the war. And at the same time, of course, the Enron case was happening, and I was observing the similarities between what the President was doing in order to deceive the public regarding the war and the same type of techniques that the Enron people used to defraud their investors. And, of course, in the case of the Enron fraud, the public was absolutely outraged, and rightly so. And they have been, in the main, held accountable.
But yet, the President, who has caused this fraud that has obviously been far graver in scope and the consequences have been horrific, has not been held accountable in any way. So, I wanted to explain to people in a very non-charged atmosphere, which is the atmosphere of a hypothetical grand jury, exactly how this fits into the elements of a crime, which is conspiracy to defraud the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: So, lay out your case. Lay out this indictment.
ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Okay. Well, first of all, in order to understand the case, you have to understand the law. And a conspiracy to defraud the United States is in Title 18, United States Code, Section 371. It's a statute that's been around for over a hundred years. It was charged against people in the Watergate era and also Iran-Contra. And what it means is basically taking concerted action to use deceit or what's called "trickery" to interfere with any branch of government or an agency. And, of course, Congress is a branch of government.
So, the case, as I lay out in the -- it's a hypothetical indictment, of course. But the case really starts with the actions of the administration right after 9/11 and proceeds with how they used the fear that was engendered by 9/11, and they actually aggravated that fear. And then they started off, as we all recall, with sort of generally false assertions that had no basis in fact, such as that Iraq was a grave and gathering danger, when at the time the National Intelligence Estimate said no such thing.
And when those types of generalized false statements were not persuasive by the summer of 2002, they started with the White House Iraq Group, and then they became more specific, and they used a combination of half-truths. We have the story of Vice President Cheney recurringly saying that we know that there are chemical weapons, because Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told us, while, in fact, that was a half-truth, because the other half of the story was that he also had told us that they were destroyed. We have Condoleezza Rice saying these aluminum tubes are only suitable for nuclear weapon centrifuges. Well, at that time, there are at least 14 reports available to the administration which showed that that was at least dubious and actually controverted by our nuclear experts.
We have Rumsfeld saying we know where the weapons of mass destruction are, north, south, east and west of Tikrit, somewhat. Well, that was what we would call in the law, and it's really kind of a common sense thing, a statement made with reckless disregard for the truth, because the law actually prohibits people who are in a position of authority, who are trying to persuade people either to do something, to buy something -- it applies to investment fraud or the executive branch -- from making statements without actually having any basis in fact. And I don't think people actually realized that. It's sort of an intuitive thing, but I don't think people realized that the law actually prohibits that, as well.
This is, of course, only one of many areas in which the Bush Administration has acted lawlessly. The same sort of thorough, methodical approach is called for in regard to all these other areas as well. While the objection was made that impeachment would mean that Congress would not get anything else done, time has shown what should have been obvious from the beginning: a lawless administration was not about to let Congress do anything meaningful in the first place--other than to give it even more power to act unaccountably.
On the other hand, impeachment proceedings that were intentionally restrained from the beginning would have placed enormous pressure on the White House to prove through its actions that it was above the level of conduct that the impeachment investigations would be revealing on a daily basis. If ever there was any chance of getting the Bush Administration to act responsibly, then this was it: subject its past transgressions to relentless scrutiny so that its only defense would be to act honorably, in order to ostensibly give the lie to what it had already done. I do not hold much hope that this would have happened. More likely Bush and Cheney would merely dig in their heels all the more. But without such pressure, there was no chance whatsoever of responsible action on their part. A slim chance is better than none.
Far more important than what BushCo would do is the question of what Democrats would stand for, what kind of marker they would lay down for the next election--and for beyond, for the possibility of a generational (and more) political realignment. By separating the process of impeachment from the ultimate power play of removing a President from power, and focusing it entirely on the morality, legality and legitimacy of an entire administration, Democrats would have created an ideal forum for clearly defining the stark differences between Republican lawlessness and Democratic respect for the rule of law.
Instead, they have allowed themselves to be tied into knots, with the end result that they have given their blessing to further lawlessness, thereby erasing the very distinction they should have been doing everything possible to stress. Every screw-up, every missed opportunity, every reactive attack on their own allies--such as MoveOn.org--directly flows from the Democrats failure to place the Bush Administration and the Republicans permanently on the defensive for what they have done to destroy our system of government.
After 6 years of lawless rule, our country desperately needed a time of reckoning. Impeachment on these terms--as a form of national truth-telling--is precisely the sort of principled breaking of level 3 rules that can be devastatingly effective in countering the lawless and arbitrary breaking of level 3 rules on which conservative power is built.
This is how liberals, progressive and Democrats should conduct themselves in breaking the rules of level 3 custom, re-creating the level 4 context in which our country was originally established. |
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