Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (28 page)

Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that
Daily News
columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with “groping in the window at Macy’s.” In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.

It bears repeating that Giuliani believes the law should continue to bar gay people from marrying because of what he calls “the sanctity of marriage.” And the thrice-married individual—like Gingrich and Limbaugh—was perfectly acceptable to huge swaths of Republican voters who have adopted so-called traditional morality as a governing political view.

Although one wouldn’t know it from listening to pro-family groups and Republican politicians, there are actually other mandates of Christianity beyond prohibitions on homosexuality. Most of the divorces they are getting and the multiple “remarriages” they are enjoying are as sinful under Christianity as same-sex marriages are.

Moralizing is easy—and worthless—when the moralizer does not have to sacrifice anything or restrain himself. Thus, the Republican faithful and their media enablers approve of bans on same-sex marriage. It does not cost them anything. But they do want to divorce and find new spouses, often more than once. Consistent application of their claimed belief in traditional marriage would entail that our secular marriage laws must comport to Christian doctrine by excluding any marriages that are not biblical. Once they are married, they have to stay married, or at least are certainly barred from remarrying.

But the GOP will not be mounting a campaign for our marriage laws to reflect Christian norms regarding divorce and remarriage, because there is no sincerity to their moralistic movement. When it comes time to win elections, the Republican Party holds itself out as the vanguard of traditional morality, even as many of its leaders, as a matter of enduring lifestyle, engage in the sleaziest and most untraditional sexual and moral behavior. They advocate politically popular moralistic laws that restrain small minorities, while ensuring their own freedom to indulge a pathology of sexual excesses and marital infidelity that would make John Wayne proud, if not envious.

CHAPTER FIVE

Small-Government Tyrants

E
ver since Ronald Reagan famously declared in his 1980 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” Republicans have masqueraded as the party of limited government. Its leaders reflexively pledge to keep government off the backs of regular, hardworking Americans. Homage is paid to the wisdom and insight of the American people, which, Republicans endlessly insist, is far superior to the judgment of government officials. As Reagan proclaimed after delivering his famous line,

From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

This political battle cry is, in reality, grounded in a populist cultural argument—namely, that the Republican Party takes the side of ordinary Americans against the faceless, power-hungry, freedom-abridging Washington bureaucrat. In this rendition of America’s culture war, which pits normal folks against D.C. politicians, right-wing leaders are on our side, doing everything in their power to keep government out of our lives.

Throughout the 1990s, large swaths of the right-wing movement were motivated by extreme versions of this anti-government mythology. Right-wing leaders endlessly peddled the narrative that Bill Clinton and the rest of the Washington liberal establishment had targeted the core freedoms of the heartland. Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was one face of this federal tyranny, as she sent what they called “jackbooted thugs” into David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound and Elian Gonzales’s bedroom. Hillary Clinton was coming to take over health care. The Clintons wanted to control the lives of ordinary Americans, everything from our churches to our businesses to our schools. Liberty-defending weekend militias were the new symbols of the stalwart right-wing defense against invasive federal government power.

With Clinton gone from the political scene, the Bush administration ushered in truly unprecedented expansions of federal power—including virtually unlimited detention and surveillance powers aimed at American citizens even on U.S. soil. Yet all but a handful of right-wing Republican ideologues immediately shed their small-government pretenses as they cheered on almost every one of these power grabs, transforming themselves almost overnight from liberty-defending warriors to loyal authoritarian followers.

In light of this transformation, it is easy to forget how central were these small-government themes for decades in the right-wing movement, and how central they are certain to be once again in the 2008 election. Election time is when the right-wing movement dusts off its manipulative, plainly insincere ideals, and no ideal is more insincere than its alleged belief in individual liberty secured by limited federal power. Ever since the successful campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Republicans have claimed that their leaders would courageously protect regular Americans from the big, bad government in Washington.

Throughout the 1990s, conservatism was defined by its fear of expansive powers seized by the federal government—particularly domestic law-enforcement and surveillance powers. Conservatives vigorously opposed every proposal to expand the government’s investigative and surveillance authority on the grounds that such powers posed intolerable threats to our liberties. More than specific policies, the right-wing ideology was grounded in warnings against the dangers of unchecked government power. Illustrating this ideology was the speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in accepting his party’s nomination at the 1980 GOP Convention:

“Trust me” government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs—in the people.

Following this path, conservatives have endlessly claimed that they stand for limitations on government intrusion into the lives of Americans. One article in 2000 on the right-wing website Free Republic actually decried the dangerous loss of liberty and privacy as a result of what it alarmingly described as the Clinton administration’s use of a “secret court” (something called the “FISA court”) that actually enables the federal government to
eavesdrop on American citizens!
Worse, warned the article, the judicial approval that the government obtains for this eavesdropping is in secret, so we don’t even know who is being eavesdropped on! As Philip Colangelo insisted when Clinton was President in an article prominently posted on Free Republic,

The Secret FISA Court: Rubber Stamping Our Rights

Seven judges on a secret court have authorized all but one of over 7,500 requests to spy in the name of National Security. They meet in secret, with no published orders, opinions, or public record. Those spied on may never know of the intrusion. Now, Clinton has expanded the powers to include not only electronic, but physical searches.

The aftershock of the Oklahoma City bombing sent Congress scurrying to trade off civil liberties for an illusion of public safety. A good ten weeks before that terrible attack, however with a barely noticed pen stroke President Bill Clinton virtually killed off the Fourth Amendment when he approved a law to expand the already extraordinary powers of the strangest creation in the history of the federal judiciary….

With the FISA court now able to authorize physical searches as well as electronic surveillance simply by citing national security concerns the elite legal circle is nearly complete. The act is a triumph for our constitutional system of checks and balances, former Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh explained in the twilight of the Cold War. It establishes that the authority to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance in this country will be shared by all three branches of government.

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Democrats and Republicans are competing to come up with more ingenious ways to erode civil liberties…. Given the current political atmosphere, the Clinton administration’s past support for expanding the FISA court’s authority, as well as a long, sorry history of abuse, the elite legal posse will no longer need to strain very hard to pull the noose right around the Bill of Rights.

The conservative commenters at Free Republic—having been fed a steady diet of anti-government rhetoric for decades—predictably reacted to news of expanded eavesdropping powers under FISA with such liberty-minded sentiments as “This is beyond frightening” “This does not bode well for continued freedom” “Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us—it’s real.” One worried right-wing commentator wondered: “Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face.” Another pointed out—quite rationally—the severe dangers of allowing the government to exercise power in secret and with little oversight:

This is one of those ideas that has a valid purpose behind it, but is wide open to terrible abuse. And there’s no way to check to see if it is abused.

Like all things that don’t have the light of day shining on them, you can be sure that it is being twisted to suit the purposes of those who hold the power.

Conservatives thus used to claim that they considered things such as unchecked surveillance powers to be quite disturbing and bad—and the secret eavesdropping about which they were complaining back then was at least conducted with judicial oversight. But with a Republican president in office, all of the distrust conservatives claimed to have of the federal government evaporated. Because they trust in George W. Bush and he knows what’s best for us, he should have not just those powers but many more, and he should exercise all of them in secret, too, with no interference from the courts or Congress.

Few things are more striking than the gap between the actual power-expanding behavior of Republicans when in office and the manipulative limited-government rhetoric they spew when they want to win elections or attack Democrats. What Republicans claim to despise when they are out of power is exactly what they do when they are in power.

Indeed, if one goes back and actually reads the statements made by GOP leaders throughout the 1990s, the complete and total reversal of all their views upon taking over the government in 2001 is truly mind-boggling. Such a trip down memory lane shows how boisterously conservatives used to pretend that they believed in principles of limited government powers, the need for investigations into lawbreaking accusations, and the preference for individual liberty over increased security.

Let us begin with then-senator John Ashcroft, one of the architects of the wild expansions of secret federal surveillance powers in the early years of the Bush administration. Back in July 1997, Ashcroft was warning of the profound dangers posed by far less invasive government powers than the ones he would go on to implement.

Specifically, Ashcroft was sounding the alarm bells over the Clinton administration’s proposals for the federal government to overcome encryption technology in order to enable the government to monitor international computer communications—powers that were justified by the Clinton administration on the ground that terrorists use such communications. Ashcroft—who as Bush’s attorney general would go on to approve wholly unprecedented
warrantless
spying on Americans’ telephone calls and e-mails—wrote, in an article titled “Keep Feds’ Nose Out of the Net”:

J. Edgar Hoover would have loved this. The Clinton administration wants government to be able to read international computer communications—financial transactions, personal e-mail and proprietary information sent abroad—
all in the name of national security.

In a proposal that raises obvious concerns about Americans’ privacy, President Clinton wants to give agencies the keys for decoding all exported U.S. software and Internet communications….

Not only would Big Brother be looming over the shoulders of international cybersurfers,
he also threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.

Granted, the Internet could be used to commit crimes, and advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value….

Every medium by which people communicate can be exploited by those with illegal or immoral intentions. Nevertheless,
this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records or translate our international communications.