The ends of freedom

This is frightening. Anyone who has the least belief in "freedom" should refuse to vote for anyone who does not answer Crane's question "absolutely not". That these men are not smart enough to understand the question or understand it but are willing to make any reply than "absolutely not" should scare Americans, and the rest of us, because where America goes, Australia follows.

Our freedom -- our physical liberty -- begins with habeas corpus. It is absolutely nonnegotiable. We should never empower our representatives to abridge it: that way lies disappearances, dictatorship, the dissolution of freedom.

I am frightened. There are a million surveillance cameras in my homeland, and a government that knows best on every score, but as we've discussed, ignores the facts when it's knowing best. We have governments that believe violence is the answer to almost everything; violence, coercion, repression. We have rightists who enable them, and in the UK, we have chickenhawks like Cohen and Aaronovitch who are attempting to shift the left sharply rightwards, urging support for warmongering and antimulticulturalism (which is all too often plain racism in a coat of reasonableness).

We now bear a striking resemblance to the final days of the Roman republic. Radicals on the left have simply faded away (in Rome, they were undercut by rightist populism, just as they were in the West: Reagan and Thatcher pushed a heavily corporate, antimiddle-class agenda while propagandising it as popular and bourgeois; like Rome, they appealed directly to greed, by offering small sops to the masses). The political scene is a contest for power between different factions of the business parties. Most people probably don't know that Julius Caesar posed as a populist of the left while being supported by Crassus, the richest man in Rome. None of the people involved had any true political alignment except to their own ambition, with a few exceptions, such as the scalding Cato, who gives the impression of not quite being clued in to what was going on.

Of course, dictatorship and empire were good for the Roman masses. When a man like Sulla liquidated his enemies, he was mostly killing aristocrats and businessmen. He did not murder the headcount. (His proscriptions had two functions: to eliminate political opposition and to raise funds with which to reward his supporters; the citizenry did not pose a political threat to him because he represented the popular faction and had the sense to pay them off, and they did not have enough money for him to think them worth killing for it.) The masses gained materially and somewhat in status and politically. They were entirely disempowered but the Roman economy thrived for a time (although the inflation after a successful conquest must have been painful) and the Romans used successful methods to keep them quiescent: food doles and state-supplied entertainments.

Justice, then as now, depended on the fatness of your wallet. The idea that a business should have any other end than making gobs of money would have struck a Roman as quite odd, as it does Americans today.

A major difference between then and now is that some of the aristocracy fought against the end of the republic, while some facilitated it. It may even be too cynical to suggest that those who fought for it only did so because they believed it to be the best structure to preserve their interests. Now, of course, no one in the elites has much problem with the extension of executive power. They expect to be wielding that power themselves some time soon, after all. If America elects Hillary Clinton, I would not expect her to be quick to roll back Bush's assertions of executive power; and David Cameron will probably only add to Blair's. One great disappointment with Blair himself was that he did not repeal any of Thatcher's repressive legislation. He just quietly let it lie, and in time built on it. If anything, Blair has been more authoritarian than even Thatcher, his party even keener to worship the market and his military quicker to become involved in expressions of power overseas. He has been able to pass himself off as a centrist because Britain's Overton window was so radically shifted by Thatcher's extremism. There is no one on the left who has the balls or energy to shift it back, and no one in politics who has the desire. Increases in power, it seems to me, are bound to appeal to those who contest for power. They are not going to fight to have less!

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:04 am