You would think there would be some more tangible action Congress could take, given its constitutional mandate to provide oversight of the executive branch, but you would be wrong. In theory, they might repeal FISA, but it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen. We’ve been doing this dance for three congressional terms now and this is basically all that ever occurs.
It’s especially weird since the NSA’s charter is for foreign intelligence, so the answer to “how many Americans are you spying on?” should really be zero. But we all know that’s not true, thanks to documents leaked by a whistleblower who is unable to enter the country on pain of immediate lifetime imprisonment.
If the current election cycle in the US has proven anything to me, it’s that the American ‘democracy’ is fundamentally broken, down to its very core. How on earth can the NSA just refuse to answer these questions?
There is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed but claiming this is the end of democracy and there is nothing we can do is hyperbole. If it was as bad as the article claimed that letter couldn’t have been written or the congressman who signed it would be imprisoned or dead. Yes, we have to fight against the surveillance state, and we will have to continue to do that in this technological age but you have to put things in perspective.
abraxas,
I actually disagree, government non-transparency is a serious offense to democracy. Without transparency, there can be no democracy since the whole point of it is for government to be the will of the people.
It’s naive to think that there is a silver bullet that will end all surveillance or any bad thing for that matter. The idea that we just haven’t found the perfect democracy to prevent this is stupid in my opinion. Democracy is messy and isn’t perfect and never will be. In order for it to work you ALWAYS have to keep fighting against this stuff. If your definition of democracy is when you have eliminated all the bad things a government can do then a democracy will never exist.
abraxas,
Of course democracy isn’t “perfect”, that’s rather beside the point. The problem isn’t imperfection but rather that a government would take steps to hide it’s own activities and establish shadow agencies that are above the law. That’s fascism.
Clearly it’s not an all-or-nothing classification and there are many degrees of this, but the truth is that often people who claim to believe in democracy and going to war to “spread democracy” are actually fascists standing under the veil of democracy only. A good litmus test for this might be to consider that genuine democracy would praise whistle blowers for their role in promoting public debate and encouraging public oversight. On the other hand, concealing government activities and prosecuting whistle blowers are signs of what we might call empty or fake democracy.
Edited 2016-04-23 05:18 UTC
I never claimed that you asserted this directly but the article points to a flaw in the system and immediately claims democracy is broken. That is a poor argument. There are always problems that arise that need to be overcome. Only a perfect democracy (which doesn’t and will never exist) can avoid these issues. It’s a little early to be claiming democracy is broken.
I think you missed the point. Look at history. We have been in scarier times and extracted ourselves from that. My ultimate point is that claiming that American democracy is fundamentally broken is a huge overstatement.
Edited 2016-04-23 11:29 UTC
abraxas,
Indeed, world wars and nuclear cold wars could be scarier to our way of life. However those events have no barring on whether or not we continue to be a democratic society. Think about it this way, fascist elements scattered within our government today might well be more successful in corrupting democracy than the Nazis ever were. So the biggest risk to democracy could very well be from within.
Edited 2016-04-23 18:02 UTC
The biggest threat to a democracy is always from within, namely, its own citizenry. Nearly all democracies have fallen when the voting public gets fed up with some problem of their society’s own creation. This kind of corruption our founding fathers were well aware. They tried to make sure the populace understood the laws, were involved in the process of making those laws, and were educated enough for enlightened self interest in electing those that would make the laws.
If there is any fault to be had, it lays with the voting populace. Our democracy isn’t “fundamentally broken”. It’s working as intended. The problem is the society steering it is allowing internal corruption to creep into the system in the name of ill conceived notions of security. Since that’s how the voting populace is steering the system, the system turns that direction, all as intended by the framework provided. If you are going to blame someone, blame US society, not the system of governing.
Thom is most definitely wrong and is blaming the wrong thing. Which, surprise! So are most people in the US.
Edited 2016-04-24 05:14 UTC
In a properly working democracy, the voters are absolutely to blame, but when was the last time US held elections that were up to the standards for western democracy? Ambiguous voting slips, buggy and insecure voting machines, fishy vote counting, mismanagement of polling places and efforts to prevent undesirable/poor people from voting. These are democracy implementation failures US and third word countries with word democratic in their name have.
Verenkeitin,
You said that much more succinctly than I did! +1
stormcrow,
You are making a few assumptions here.
1. The voting itself is fair and representative.
The tallies might be inaccurate or corrupt for many reasons. The political parties in some jurisdictions can dictate elections via gerrymandering. Incumbents can make it difficult for a challenger to even appear on the ballot. We know there have been instances of anomalies with insecure voting machines, yet we have no idea to what extent this has affected elections. Even at the presidential level the US government accountability office found evidence of ballot manipulation. Manipulation in florida and then again in ohio may very well be responsible for president bush who may have actually lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote. The electoral college itself is responsible for unequal representation between voters of different states, giving disproportionate representation to rural states.
Vote manipulation can distort the final tallies and produce official outcomes that aren’t real.
2. Voters have sufficient candidates or choices on the ballot.
You can’t fault the voter for A or B when A and B are the only options and neither A nor B represent a voter. Unfortunately this is a very common problem in the US. For example both the political front runners (ump and hillary) are strongly for the military industrial complex, so there’s a strong possibility that voters against NSA will have no representation at all this election. In the event that sanders gets nominated, people will be torn between voting their mind on military issues OR heath care issues OR tax policy, etc. In other words, a vote for or against a candidate clearly does not imply an endorsement of all of the candidate’s policies.
3. The events you are blaming voters for needs to be something they actually voted on.
Illegal wiretaping caused outrage across party lines, but we never voted for it. Government implemented it behind closed doors, refused to disclose it’s existence and scope. Now they threaten anyone who goes to the public with information about these programs with terrorist charges. It’s illogical to blame voters for things that they don’t get to vote for or against. Another example is the bank bailouts, regardless of if we were for or against it, it’s illogical to blame voters when they didn’t have an opportunity to directly vote on it.
4. What we voted for needs to be carried out
Voters have little opportunity to influence government matters once politicians are elected. This should be self evident, but if a candidate ignores his promises or a policy change isn’t executed in good faith, then you can’t really blame the voters for what the politician ended up doing. It’s a problem because many politicians will say whatever we want to hear to get themselves elected, but switch tact once in office.
It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world, we do the best we can with the system we’ve got. My point is that things are a hell of a lot more complex than just blaming the voters for everything and no one else. We would have to overlook tons of details to make such a simple argument, and I’ve probably just scratched the surface here. I get that it’s convenient to use simplified arguments within our respective world views, but the truth probably lies somewhere in between. There are (bad) parts of government that citizens legitimately voted for, but there are also parts that came about without consent of the voters at all.
I’m hoping you can agree with this compromise
I wouldn’t say “some”. In fact, given the polls on this issue, at least half of all Americans support greater government snooping powers. And often they’re the ones banging on the most about freedom.
I wouldn’t say democracy is broken, or working. We have to remind ourselves that most elections in Anglo-democracies are often highly dependent on swing electorates because the rest of the countries are pretty much split down the middle on any issue. Any swing to either party wouldn’t be acceptable as statistically significant in any scientific study.
For every policy we voted because we believe it works, another person has voted for their policies because they believe theirs works. Just because one party wins doesn’t mean the other party is completely discredited and their voters silenced, but it seems voters for whatever reason thinks that how it works – that the country is a dictatorship that has elections once in a while.
I think it’s more to do with that we have the wrong system of democracy designed for a different world and people don’t even want to understand what it means to live in a plural society. It’s not even broken, to paraphrase.
kwan_e,
Actually, if you are independent, that’s exactly what happens! In the US where elections are winner takes all, your odds of having a say in presidential elections are statistically nil.
Also “For every policy we voted because we believe it works…” assumes that we actually get a vote on federal policy like mass NSA surveillance. To assert that every government policy we get is the will of voters is disingenuous when voter approval or disapproval hasn’t even been tallied.
I really like the way Verenkeitin said it: In a properly working democracy, the voters are absolutely to blame. If voters had voted for mass surveillance programs, then I would agree with you that we are getting what we deserve.
Legend goes that Hitler blamed the citizens on the fall of the events, days before the fall of Berlin. So near to the end, He believed his Government a democratic one.
I think in this case it is even worse: the intelligence apparatus has grown more powerful than the government and the latter has thus lost control over the former.
I wouldn’t see this as a failure of democracy as this can and has happend with other forms of government, e.g. intelligence and/or military apparatus growing more powerful than monarchs or second generation dictators.
However, I agree that the inherently required transparency for a working democracy would have had a better chance of avoiding that, so it is a more disheartening development today.
My guess on the cause is “extreme situations require extreme measures” thinking usually employed during war times, which tend to move decision making and oversight out of the government’s hands into “special purpose” bodies.
And the last century had plenty of those situations, some in magnitudes that pale anything in comparison.
We, the current voting population, are responsible for lots of bad things our government do “on behalf of us”, but out-of-control organistation is a many decades old problem.
It has just become painfully apparent in the last couple of years.
Do you realize that transparency, when made and absolute, turns the State highly predictable?
How could the State protect Us, -specially again organized crime- if completely laking ‘stealth-ness’?
Except without transparency the state is still predictable. Russia and China and North Korea are non-transparent. Non-translucent, even. Yet their own citizens still get around them, albeit with some work.
Who knows, maybe with greater transparency, people can actually help the government in tackling “organized crime” (which I’m assuming you’re including terrorism in there). And by help, I mean being able to point out where the government is fucking up and making things worse.
Stealth-ness is the capacity to be there, while believed absent. Also the capacity to not be there, while believed present.
Which side of this balance is your State depend a lot in the finitude of their resources.
…..
“maybe with greater transparency, people can [wish?] actually help the government in tackling “organized crime”. Just ignoring for a moment the principle of sovereignty, history has proved interminably this idea to be wrong.
…..
“And by help, I mean being able to point out where the government is fucking up…” So, We aren’t?
And I’m not trolling here.
If you’re not aware of it, you need to (re)read the Federalist Papers (I think the smoking gun is in FP-51, but it’s been a long time since last I’ve read them, so I could easily be mistaken).
For those who can’t be bothered, I’ll simply state that they were a series of articles destined to convince those who could vote to do so in favour of the then brand new US Constitution. They were written by Jay (only a handful), Hamilton and Madison and are considered a clear insight into the real intents of Founding Fathers when they wrote said constitution.
Going back to my point, in them Madison clearly states that the last political system they wanted was a Democracy. What they wished for was a Republic, specifically defined as different (and better) than a Democratic system.
So, no, the US democracy isn’t broken to its very core, it has never existed to begin with.
Before I’m drowned in a deluge of fire, I’ll add that there are mostly no Democracies in the world (with maybe the exception, to a degree, of Switzerland). All the regimes of the Western countries have been called such in a kind of sleight of hand ever since the French revolution (and the people who started the trend back then knew exactly what they were doing).
Trenien,
I agree with you, the US is a republic. It’s a different way of explaining why we don’t have democracy. Voters aren’t entirely in control of government policy, which is why blaming voters entirely for controversial government policies doesn’t add up.
Edited 2016-04-24 21:48 UTC
A Replu-cracy? With a very high component of Pluto-cracy?
The point here is that whatever We decide to call Their System…
It Works, for Them.
And as Nation, self-determination surely is axiomatic.
In other words, you don’t know what the terms “Republic” and “Democracy” actually mean. Hint: they’re not mutually exclusive.
If we’re going to get “technical,” the US is a Constitutional Democratic Federal Republic.
There’s a civilized fight -and every fight is noisy- to evolve from what used to be customary and compulsive towards what should be regulatory and measured.
The government is limited by the constitution only if the people believe in it and take their oath to uphold it seriously. Sadly many think the constitution is outdated and open to a very wide interpretation. This means the executive branch can basically do whatever it wants, as we have seen especially in the current administration. Who would stop it and how?
The answer is quite simple…. they just do it. Congress is too busy suing the president over the affordable health care act, and primping for television cameras to do any work.