Sandy Levinson:
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But enough of Bush bashing. After all, the President who seems determined not to hold any high-ranking member of that Administration accountable for disgracing the country and making us less safe to boot by adopting torture as a national policy is Barack Obama, to whose campaign I contributed and for whom I happily voted (and whose presidency, overall, still leaves me delighted). But surely we should recognize that the American version of "constitutional dictatorship" is built into our system and not simply a function of charcter. I confess I was much concerned by a conversation that I had last week with an old graduate school classmate, the most brilliant member of our cohort and a specialist on international and military relations (and, for what it is worth, a registered Republican to boot). He expressed great concern about the looming catastrophe facing the United States as the result of Presidentn Obama's ill-thought-out escalation of the war in Afghanistan. My friend noted that Kandahar was originally established by Alexander the Great, who was merely the first outsider who had delusionary visions of establishing a hegemony over Afghanistan. It's simply never been done, with the British and the Soviets being our most recent predecessors in such an effort. There is no reason to believe the U.S. will be more successful, and one possibility of our escalation in Afghanistan will be to exacerbate the situation in what is truly the world's most dangerous country, Pakistan.
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Brian Tamanaha (in comments):
Sandy,
You convinced me a long time ago about the constitutional dictatorship. Obama's conduct, although admittedly brief, suggests that the problem might indeed be structural rather than a matter of the proclivities of the person who happens to occupy the office. (And I must agree that his adventures in Afghanistan will undoubtedly come to grief, as anyone familiar with history and geography already knows.)
But maybe it's not the fault of the constitution, or indeed of any constitutional arrangement.
Is it conceivable that were are caught in a structural trap that is the inevitable fate of any mass society?
Whether it is the 60 million plus of England or the 300 million plus of the US, perhaps a true democracy (in the sense that people really have a say in big decisions like war or a bank bailout) is chimerical once a society and government surpass a certain BIG size. Genuine consultation beyond that point is perhaps impracticable if not impossible, and perhaps is not even useful or advisable.
If that's true--and I really don't know whether it is--then maybe we need to think about what kinds of "dictatorship" (or non-democracies) are better than others. Maybe the best we can hope for is having a reflective, intelligent dictator like Obama rather than one like Bush.
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