"The Failings Of Our Democracy"

by Andrew

Scott Hinderaker believes that democracy fails when it tries to keep its executive branch from violating the rule of law by authorizing the brutal torture and abuse of thousands of prisoners, many innocent. Let that sink in. It is part of the failure of democracy, in Hinderaker's view, that it doesn't empower the government to do anything it wants to do in the name of national security.

To put it bluntly, this is the classic fascist critique of liberal democracy. Fascists have always criticized democratic restraints on executive war-power, even when that war power is specifically designed to include citizens and to apply across the territory of the homeland as well as anywhere on the globe. As for the torture techniques previously used by the Gestapo, the Communist Chinese, the Soviet Gulag, and the Vietnamese, Hinderaker believes these were all "reasonably humane." What was done to John McCain, in Hinderaker's view, was humane, and certainly not torture; and what McCain was forced to confess was as reliable as the tortured confessions we now see on Iranian television.

Understanding the current right's embrace of total state power against the individual takes time to absorb. But liberal democracy has no more dangerous enemies than these.