This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
I doubt you'll be shocked to discover that, in the years of the (first?) Trump era and the now distinctly crippled Biden one, the trust of Americans in our basic institutions and our government has taken a nosedive. According to Gallup's latest polling, confidence in the presidency has dropped by 15 percentage points and the Supreme Court by 11. When it comes to Congress, Americans with a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in that body have bottomed out at a barely perceptible 7%. It's hard to get much lower than that (although these days our politicians are putting significant effort into outdoing themselves). We're already talking about new lows for all three branches of government and, when it comes to that, it hardly matters whether you're a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent.
As this century began, only 5% of Americans claimed that our most important problem was government. In the Trump years, however, that figure rose to 32% and it's stayed high ever since. Similarly, according to the Pew Research Center, "public trust" in government has fallen to "near historic lows." And when you think about it, no wonder!
As TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg points out, it seems as if top government officials never pay for the disasters they bring on the world (the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance) or on Americans. The institutionalists of the American system, not to speak of the Trumpist outsiders who became insiders, have had a remarkably free ride during four presidencies, no matter what they did " and now, it seems, an ever more reactionary Supreme Court has joined the fray in an increasingly autocratic fashion. Greenberg asks one crucial question: Is there any hope that the January 6th hearings might help restore some confidence that those who do us dirty in the name of America could actually pay a price for that " a price in court no less?
Honestly, I wouldn't hold my breath, but we can always hope, can't we? Isn't it time that our top officials, including presidents, were held responsible for their criminal acts in our name, whether they were illegal invasions of other countries or sedition here at home? Tom
Can the System Be Saved?
Institutionalism vs. Democracy
Well before the House select committee's January 6th investigation began, trust in the classic American system of checks and balances as reliable protection against executive (or, more recently, Supreme Court) abuses of power had already fallen into a state of disgrace. A domestically shackled Biden presidency, a Congress unable to act, and a Supreme Court that seems ever more like an autocratic governing body has left American "democracy" looking grim indeed.
Now, those hearings are offering the country (and the Justice Department) what could be a last chance to begin restoring the kind of governance that once underlay a functioning democracy. There is, however, a deeply worrisome trend lurking just under this moment's attempt to garner accountability " namely, the way loyalty to institutional Washington (even outside the law) perpetuates a flight from accountability that's become a crucial part of American political life.
So far, the January 6th hearings have inspired a cascade of takeaways. With each televised session, new evidence about the acts of Donald Trump and crew have come to light, among them that the former president was all too tight with the far right and that he knew the crowd approaching the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was armed and dangerous. So, too, those watching have learned about witness tampering and also the lengths White House lawyers and others went to in trying to restrain the former president's engagement with the January 6th rioters. Overall, many Americans (though not so many Republicans) have learned that January 6th was part of a far larger Trumpian effort to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election, no matter the facts or the law.
Beyond chronicling what happened and assigning blame, something else in those hearings is worth noting: namely, they are exposing the ever-growing contradiction between Washington institutionalists, whose first loyalty is to the agencies and departments they served or are serving, and the supposed purpose or mission of those very institutions. And all of this will take the U.S. even further from the democracy it still claims to be, if those who have served in them and in the White House can't be held accountable for their abuses of power and violations of law.
Over the Cliff of False Institutionalism
For a long time now, the mechanisms of our democratic system of government meant to ensure accountability have been at the edge of collapse, if not obliteration. Who could forget how " something I've written about over the years at TomDispatch " the government officials who, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, led us into the Global War on Terror found myriad ways to evade or defang the checks and balances of the courts and Congress? In the process, they managed to escape all accountability for their crimes. To offer a striking example: the top officials in the administration of President George W. Bush lied about Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, which was their main excuse for their assault on his country in 2003.
According to the invaluable Costs of War Project, a year and a half after invading Afghanistan in 2001, the top officials of the Bush administration took this country into a war in Iraq that would cost the lives of more than 4,500 American service members and nearly as many U.S. military contractors. Almost 200 journalists and aid workers would also die in that conflict, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
The Costs of War Project estimates that the overall war on terror those officials launched will, in the end, have a price tag of nearly eight trillion dollars. Add to that the impossible-to-calculate costs of their acts to the rule of law, since they dismantled individual liberties and made a mockery of human rights. After all, the top officials of that administration oversaw the secret rewriting of the law to make torture at CIA "black sites" legal, while imprisoning individuals, including Americans, without access to lawyers, due process, or the courts at a prison they built in Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, a system distinctly offshore of what until then had been known as American justice.
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