(11:15 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

More State of Exception Goodness

Even a year or two ago, as Agamben’s more far-out warnings began to seem plausible, it did look like we were heading for the apocalypse. But, of course, just when it looked as if the Bush Administration was leading us into never-ending worldwide war and internal repression, more curious things happened.

The first was the military catastrophe of the occupation of Iraq and the surprising, gross ineptitude of the Administration, despite the remarkable competence and initial successes of the armed forces. Originally, we had to anticipate a plan of continuous war against the “Axis of Evil,” and a wholesale attempt to reshape the world militarily; that is now sidelined, and the mismanagement of Iraq has helped to preserve the fragile American Republic. The second was that there was no large-scale crackdown, even covert, on the internal dissent against the War in Iraq before it occurred; such people just were ignored. An implication was that the members of the Bush Administration might not conceive of themselves as determinedly antidemocratic in the way they first appeared, when they put in place the initial structures that (as Agamben, via Arendt, reminded us) once had led to totalitarianism; rather, they might just have put antidemocratic institutions in place for immediate pragmatic reasons, power hunger, and greed. Indeed, so far it seems the rhetoric of democracy may still restrain them to just the degree necessary for the United States to survive a second Bush Administration. Third, government entities outside immediate executive oversight were not as hopeless as suspected. Though the Congress continues to be a disappointment—essentially turning into an adjunct for party and presidential politics, rather than asserting its genuine rivalry with and perhaps superiority to untrammeled presidential power—the professional political classes of the CIA, the intelligence community, and the ambassadorial service expressed useful doubts about Administration policy, and, in one of the most absolutely crucial events of the last four years, the same US Supreme Court that had unjustifiably intervened to hand Bush the 2000 election slowed down the possibility of denationalizing citizens as “enemy combatants” in the case of Yasser Hamdi (though not yet in the more egregious case of José Padilla, deferred on a problem of jurisdiction). And, fourth, a presidential election in 2004 forced the Democratic Party to reassert the national political divisions of a two-party system, critiquing the war at last, and offering a reminder that there is a choice of sorts for the population. Perhaps most important—though it’s not clear the message ever got across—Kerry, for all his defects, did not embrace the overall “security” or “terror” model put forward by the Bush administration (which would be essential to the totalitarianization of the United States) and followed, instead, an “anti-terrorist model” of more limited reach (for which he was pilloried, after expressing these ideas to the author of a New York Times Sunday magazine article). Bush’s reelection may be a disaster, but the moment of real danger, when it seemed a totalitarian consolidation might occur, may also have passed. We can be curiously relieved that Bush is distracted with destroying the social and economic fabric of the United States, through the dismantling of Social Security, retention of tax cuts, and enlargement of deficits, rather than developing his internal security apparatus.

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