As in many societies, the common culture of the United States is infused with a double dose of disincentive to recognize the abuse of power in high places. It’s a paradox that works to the advantage of abusers. On the one hand, deference to authority is equated with respect, implanting a strong suggestion: officials “must know more than we do,” they “must have good reasons” for their actions, it “isn’t our place” to question their motives, and the people who do so are “pursuing their own agenda, trying to tear government down.” This plays particularly well in settings of privilege, the type of school district, for instance, where it is possible to pull off presentations averring that “the policeman is your friend” without being laughed out of class.

On the other hand, especially in contexts where abuse is daily fare, the pervasive expectation develops that those who possess power over others will misuse it for their own benefit. What they do may be wrong, but it is to be expected, so why get all up in arms about it?

Sometimes both attitudes coexist in the same baffled mind, toggling it to a standstill like one of the those computers on the old “Star Trek” that repeats two conflicting directives until the whole mechanism melts down.

Caught between a crock and a scarred place, we stand by as leaders run rampant over the Constitution. Someone like George W. Bush benefits from our ingrained disbelief in both the extent of his disdain for civil liberties and our own capacity to do anything about it.

I’ve been thinking why recent revelations about Bush administration crimes against civil liberties have not instantly raised an outcry of epic proportions. As part of changing the guard at the Justice Department, following on President Obama’s call for greater transparency in government, nine Bush-era legal opinions were released this week to the press. The opinions attempt to legitimize appalling contraventions of the Constitution, such as using the military on domestic soil to carry out raids and seize property; supporting the suspension of First Amendment speech rights and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seize; and justifying “extraordinary rendition,” whereby prisoners are exported to nations allowing even greater ease of torture.

True, Representative John Conyers Jr., Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has called for a kind of truth commission to investigate Bush-era abuses justified in the name of the War on Terror. So has Senator Patrick Leahy; True Majority encourages you to support his call. A USA Today/Gallup Poll says that most people want some sort of inquiry.

But such calls originate with people who have seen the emperor’s nakedness all along, who may even to some extent feel vindicated by the recent revelations. I’m one of them: I signed petitions, wrote letters, published essays, gave speeches—and it all felt pretty futile until that first wash of relief when newly minted President Obama directed the closing of Guantanamo.

Being right, though, doesn’t mean one has escaped the cultural distortions that produced the problem. The aforementioned American Freedom Campaign, for instance, has displayed both a healthy respect for constitutional liberty and an unhealthy addiction to fear-induced adrenalin. Throughout the final year of the Bush administration, AFC kept warning of Bush administration plans for a coup: domestic use of the military, a state of emergency trumped up to postpone elections, the whole nine yards. This terrorized type of extremism turned people off, naturally—just as the will to reason leads us to give a wide berth to the man who walks city streets with a mad gleam in his eye, bearing a sign that reads, “The End is Near.”

The sealed-room character of AFC’s analysis is stifling. Once you get inside, there’s no exit: if I say they overreached with alarmist scenarios, they will deny it, asserting that it was only their warnings that stopped what could have happened from actually taking place. Now AFC has come out against a Truth Commission, saying we already know the truth. They want you to
send a message to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking for a full criminal investigation to be launched.

This externalizing of our national misdeeds is familiar and understandable: when we see ourselves as the frustrated good guys and others as the scot-free evil-doers, there is only one way for the red fog of anger to subside. Someone must be punished.

Maybe so. Certainly the mental image of President Bush taking responsibility for his crimes is appealing, a true vindication of conscience. But because prosecution is about distinguishing the guilty from the innocent, I don’t think it would do much to change the cultural attitudes that allowed him to run amok in the first place.

Consistent with his conciliatory outlook, President Obama opposes a major investigation. According to the Times, he prefers “to fix the policies and move on.” For instance, the Obama administration has urged a federal court to dismiss detainee Jose Padilla’s suit against John Yoo, author of many of the government’s torture-justifying memoranda.

But I wholeheartedly support a Truth Commission because it would give all of us—the compliant, the deniers, the accusers, the perpetrators—the opportunity to examine our own roles, bringing to awareness cultural attitudes that had been operating unconsciously. Self-awareness precedes any intentional cultural change. Without it, we are doomed to repeat: the next crime, the next accuser, the next firewall of disbelief, the next rude awakening. A Truth Commission would give us all the opportunity to break this chain, thereby changing the culture that produces it.

I’ve been writing for some time about growing proof of human susceptibility to behavior we find somehow unthinkable and the cognitive biases that keep us from accepting it. Hearing stories of torturers and exploiters, we think, “Not me: I’d never do that.” But the reality is that seeing our own moral core as incorruptible makes us even more vulnerable to situations like Abu Ghraib Prison, where a vortex of authority and custom sucks us in, normalizing sadistic behavior.

Almost all human cultures stress teaching people to be good as a way to protect against the abuse of power: clearly, moral instruction and imaginative empathy are essential ingredients of learning to be a decent person. But it is silly to think they suffice. Contrary to a great deal of experience, our default setting seems to be the expectation that people will behave as they are taught. Time and again, we are shocked at transgressions, making haste to isolate the few we identify as transgressors: just a handful of low-ranking individuals were held at all accountable for Abu Ghraib, for instance, with only one given a sentence exceeding a year and more receiving fines or discharges than prison time. The two officers cited were colonels charged with relatively minor offenses and reprimanded. Because our proclivity is to see those who held the leashes, directed the human pyramids and snapped the photos as isolated bad actors, the people at the top of the chain of command that set Abu Ghraib in motion have never been called to account.

In truth, what happened at Abu Ghraib was shaped by a distorted institutional culture and broken structures of authority more than individual wickedness. Psychological experiments like Philip Zimbardo’s and Stanley Milgram’s have shown us how easy it is to structure a situation that generates abuse by asserting authority and exploiting individuals’ conviction of their own rightness. Under such pressures, any of us might behave as badly as most of the subjects of these experiments or the abusive guards at Abu Ghraib. The challenge is not so much to perfect our goodness as to control those pressures.

We need to pay attention to this as we elect a new president. George W. Bush has expanded the unitary power of the U.S. presidency almost beyond imagining, reserving to himself through the signing statements that accompany legislation the right to disregard laws and regulations, exercising war powers without declaring war, instituting wireless wiretaps and other forms of domestic spying without congressional or judicial checks and balances, and much, much more. Each arrogation of power has led to an even more smug faith in his own right to absolute authority, and thus to even greater abuses.

It is tempting to say President Bush has created an opportunity to benefit from adversity: while Bush centralized power out of a distorted idea of his own virtue and the rightness of his worldview, President Obama could use those same tools for good. But saying this would be a huge mistake, because we can no more guarantee that the ethical nature or moral center of any individual who becomes president will ultimately determine how these new powers are used than that individual soldiers’ better natures would determine what went on inside the walls of Abu Ghraib.

The consolidation of power creates its own damaging dynamics, and almost no one is good enough and strong enough to be truly immune to the temptation to abuse it.

As the horror stories pile up, it’s easy to imagine that the worst abusers have always been that way, that there is something broken in their nature. But is this true? We are learning a lot of alarming things these days about the reign of terror in Zimbabwe. Did you know that forty-odd years ago Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Mugabe, was deservedly seen the world around as a hero of African liberation?

Mugabe grew up in the British colony of Rhodesia. He studied to be a teacher, eventually working at a secondary school in Ghana and returning to Rhodesia in 1960 to join the liberationist National Democratic Party. Rhodesia was ruled by Ian Smith, whose election platform was white supremacy; Smith vowed that the country’s African majority would not rule in his lifetime. In 1964, Mugabe was arrested for “subversive speech.” He served 10 years in prison, earning three advanced degrees while incarcerated, becoming increasingly bitter at each outrage he experienced (such as Smith denying him the right to attend the funeral of his own 3 year-old son).

To end a bloody war of liberation, the British held multi-party talks toward majority rule, eventually agreeing on a new constitution for the Republic of Zimbabwe. Mugabe was elected Zimbabwe’s first prime minister in 1980, ushering in land reforms and unprecedented health, education and welfare programs, making what were by all social indicators huge early gains.

Yet today Zimbabweans have the lowest life-expectancy at birth of any nation and Zimbabwe’s currency has the highest inflation rate in the world. Within a few years of attaining power, a man who had suffered greatly for his commitments to equality and freedom had used the military to crush opposition, abolish the office of prime minister and have himself created president, chancellor of the national university and pretty much everything but dogcatcher. The money that hasn’t been siphoned from investment in social well-being to finance a reign of terror was redirected to accommodate World Bank austerity requirements in the 1990s. It’s a long horrifying tale, but I’ll stop here: the most recent and repellent iterations of Mugabe’s rule you can learn in the daily news.

It is always possible to piece together an individual story that purports to explain such things: Mugabe grew so battle-hardened from the long liberation struggle and so embittered at his appalling treatment by the Smith regime that strengthening his own hand became his prime directive, regardless of the cost to others. The U.S. isn’t Zimbabwe; with stronger democratic institutions, George W. Bush’s excesses have been held in check far more than Mugabe’s, but Bush, too, has pursued the consolidation of power. Yet his personal story couldn’t be more different: a heritage of privilege and high expectation, family money cushioning him from early defeats and disappointments, an addictive personality vulnerable to influence by those who believe themselves part of an anointed elite.

But these stories don’t really explain anything. Whatever might provoke a person in authority to consolidate and abuse power, whatever explanations might be cobbled together from scraps of biography, once the project starts, it moves inexorably toward the motto of the Sun King: “L’etat c’est moi.”

How do we spot an enlightened leader? The proof of enlightenment is not confidence in one’s ability to resist evil—that’s just a delusion. The proof is in accepting that to be human is to be susceptible, in creating and supporting the structures and protections, the checks and balances, that keep us close to a moral center in the face of pressure or temptation few human beings can withstand unaided.

I was turning these thoughts in the back of my mind as I leafed through the paper this weekend, coming upon an extremely interesting story by Joe Nocera in Saturday’s New York Times: “On Day Care, Google Makes A Rare Fumble.”

Nocera describes how Google, famous for enlightened business practices including impressively generous and humane support services for employees such as healthy food, on-site laundry and high-quality daycare programs for children, has begun to practice supply-side economic policies to reduce costs, jacking the annual price of daycare to an estimated $57,000 for an employee with two kids. How Google got there is all very logical if you heed just the numbers: they instituted a blue-ribbon daycare program, lost money on it, raised the fee to cut losses and reduce the waiting list—and in the process converted what had been a symbol of caring into one of arrogant elitism. Nocera quotes Google co-founder and Russian emigre Sergey Brin’s dismissal of Google staffers’ as expressing a tiresome feeling of entitlement. Brin’s personal net worth is estimated at more than $18 billion, which evidently buys him sufficient entitlement to start seeing daycare as a business rather than a humane responsibility.

As it is with government and corporations, so it is with every human endeavor. When we start believing our own propaganda—believing in our own rightness and good instincts regardless of our acts or their impact on others—our vulnerability to expedient or exploitive behavior increases. Google’s stock has suffered setbacks lately, after what must have seemed like an eternity of rising profits. A slowing of the money supply is just the sort of circumstance a truly enlightened Sergey Brin would have prepared for, creating response and accountability structures in his organization as an antidote to the arrogance of power that can set in when what feels like one’s natural supremacy is threatened.

The more confidence we have in our own judgment and goodness—the greater our certainty in saying “If that was me, I’d never do what he did”— the less prepared we are to face situations that by their very nature pull us off course. In Washington, we need all the checks and balances provided by the Constitution plus an executive who willingly chooses transparency and explicit accountability to guard against the evasive actions in which Bush has specialized. President Obama’s first act should be to voluntarily return what George Bush has stolen from the practice of democracy. And an early act of anyone who assumes an executive role should be to empower a group of close advisors who stand to make no financial or other personal gain from that person’s decisions, “watchdogs” whose own stations in life and connections to the world don’t embody the privilege and entitlement that are the earmarks of too much unchecked power.

Being human, we just can’t count on our inner guides to keep us honest in every situation; often, the pressure or temptation is too great. Bush, Brin, Mugabe, Obama, you, me—the only difference is scale. Admit it, plan for it, monitor it, build in safeguards, and our opportunity for change will not be squandered.

Speaking last Wednesday at a ceremony commemorating African-American History Month, Mr. Bush said:

Our nation has come a long way toward building a more perfect union. Yet as past injustices have become distant memories, there’s a risk that our society may lose sight of the real suffering that took place. One symbol of that suffering is the noose. Recently, there have been a number of media reports about nooses being displayed. These disturbing reports have resulted in heightened racial tensions in many communities. They have revealed that some Americans do not understand why the sight of a noose causes such a visceral reaction among so many people.

For decades, the noose played a central part in a campaign of violence and fear against African Americans. Fathers were dragged from their homes in the dark of the night before the eyes of their terrified children. Summary executions were held by torchlight in front of hateful crowds. In many cases, law enforcement officers responsible for protecting the victims were complicit in their deeds [sic] and their deaths. For generations of African Americans, the noose was more than a tool of murder; it was a tool of intimidation that conveyed a sense of powerlessness to millions.

The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in American history. The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice. Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest. As a civil society, we must understand that noose displays and lynching jokes are deeply offensive. They are wrong. And they have no place in America today.

You can read the full text at the White House Web site.

If you could have seen us jumping up and down as the prospect of an Obama presidency came into ever-sharper focus, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes.

Many of us travel abroad for our work from time to time, and all of us collaborate with colleagues based in other countries. No matter how much we may have seen ourselves as exceptions to the excesses of our government, we’ve all had the experience of being mistaken for its representatives. I remember being introduced in Britain more than twenty years ago to a fellow activist-artist, extending my hand to shake, and receiving instead a coolly polite question: “Are you aware that what your government is doing in Nicaragua is really very bad?” When it comes to foreign policy, things have gone downhill from there. When I close my eyes and imagine President Obama as our national representative to the rest of the planet, my heart warms, my spirits rise, my lips curve into a semi-permanent smile. I want it so much I can taste it.

You’ve probably heard by now how key members of the Kennedy clan have come forward to invoke the spirit of JFK in endorsing Obama, a thrilling development. Let me introduce you to something you probably haven’t heard about, an opportunity to learn about the candidate’s art policy. (If you want a PDF of the policy, email me and I’ll send it to you as an attachment.) It was drafted with the advice of folks in Illinois who know Obama well, people whose integrity and commitment I absolutely trust.

I have a friend on the energy and environment team who is similarly knowledgeable and principled. This past weekend, when my colleagues and I got through exclaiming on the South Carolina victory, we asked each other to name the last time people we respected without reservation had committed themselves so completely to a candidate who might win, the last time we, ourselves, had felt so wholehearted and optimistic about a candidate for national office. Some of the younger people hadn’t even been born the last time many of us could proclaim such feelings without mental reservation.

Everyone I know would vote for a just about any animate object to start the process of healing from the epidemic of corruption and destruction George Bush has unleashed on this country—and to avoid licensing four more years of the same, no matter how expertly McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani pretend to distinguish themselves from Bush’s movement conservatism. But to have this rarest of rare opportunities, to vote for someone who (as Teddy Kennedy said today) “inspires me, who inspires all of us, who can lift our vision and summon our hopes and renew our belief that our country’s best days are still to come”—I don’t want to let that opportunity slip away.

The political rumor mill says that the Clinton machine will choose this week, before Super Tuesday, to scrape together any whispers, scraps of gossip and hints of scandal that can somehow be attached to the Obama campaign, and to dump it on the electorate. I fervently hope not, wanting to believe that people who have been so plagued by scandal and gossip as the Clintons will forbear to inflict it on others. But if they do, the persistence of supportable hope will depend on the rest of us paying it no mind and acting decisively to counter it.

In gematria, a sort of Jewish numerology, the number 18 has the same value as the word “chai,” which means life. That’s why some Jews make gifts in multiples of 18: in addition to the value of the sum itself, the gift confers a blessing for vibrant life. It is also taught that one of ways to attract prosperity when resources are slim is to give tzedakah, the Hebrew word that means “justice,” although it is sometimes translated as “charity.” Things are stretched pretty thin here, so both reasons for giving sound strong. While it can do the most good, please join me today in sending $18, $36, $54, $72, $90, $108…. to the Obama campaign. May this new feeling become more and more familiar each day!

What I wanted for my birthday this year was hope grounded in reality, which a friend delivered in the form of a podcast by economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman.

Krugman feels that the arc of “movement conservatism” (the massively organized movement that propelled Reagan into office, throwing its weight around Washington and many state capitals ever since) has peaked, and the wheel is turning toward liberal or progressive values. He characterizes this powerful right-wing force succinctly, as a “self-conscious movement” of well-funded people who wanted to undo the New Deal and social safety net in order to increase income inequality (with themselves on top, naturally), and who shrewdly promoted that program by lying and manipulating people’s baser emotions: racial and sexual fears and Red Scare-style panics, for instance.

In 2004, Bush runs on national security and moral values and all that, and then almost immediately after the election, the polls had barely closed and he says, “Now we’re going to privatize Social Security.” That was movement conservatism in action: You win elections by pressing people’s emotional buttons, but what you’re really interested in is fostering economic inequality. But he failed.

Krugman points out that our huge gap in financial inequality is a product not of economic forces but of politics: that despite global economic forces weighing on every nation, the only countries that experienced a yawning, growing income gap over the last thirty years were the U.S. and Thatcher’s Britain, where it was ideologically induced.

Krugman quotes Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, as saying the movement’s goal is to return the U.S. to the way it was “‘before Teddy Roosevelt and the socialists came in,’ not just before the New Deal, but before the progressive movement.” (Krugman doesn’t mention that Norquist also famously said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”)

Krugman thinks “It’s over, or very nearly over. I think movement conservatism and the things it’s done to America are in their last throes.” He perceives that race is losing its potency as a scare weapon for the right, because the electorate is steadily becoming more diverse, and because public opinion is less racist (for example, nearly 80 percent accept interracial marriage now, while just a few decades ago, the strong majority rejected it). Few people still believe the Republicans’ claims to national security expertise (Krugman says “they trashed the brand on that”). And the electorate, disenchanted with corporate rule, is poised to accept public interventions like a public healthcare system; all the Democratic candidates have similar (if flawed) plans, and whomever is elected will have the task of implementation, rather than crude persuasion. “I can see universal healthcare as a realistic possibility,” says Krugman.

A possibility isn’t a promise, especially when there’s a bloody campaign to be fought and so much corporate money in both parties’ coffers that silver is bound to cloud peoples’ vision. But when I look into my own heart and mind and think about the other progressives I know, I perceive the main obstacle to this imminent sea-change. The whole time I was listening to Krugman, a second audio channel was playing in my head, telling me to reject a merely liberal message as insufficiently radical, incapable of addressing root causes.

No one described thinking like mine better than Voltaire 250 years ago: the perfect is the enemy of the good. The plain truth is that all candidates are compromised. Politics is deal-making, and even under the best circumstances, our system involves horse-trading with people who are operating less on principle than raw political power. Many of my generation tend to be squeamish about power. We tend to prefer being right to winning. We tend to be more comfortable as part of the righteous opposition to wrongdoing, swaddled in the purity of our positions, than as part of a negotiated, compromised majority that creates incremental improvement.

Back when I was young and ignorant, I thought it didn’t make any difference who was elected president, they were all the same. Then Reagan took office. Now, nearly three decades later, we have seen how formidable movement conservatism can be in tearing down the shelter that generations built to defend us from the depredations of the marketplace: basic economic protection, civil liberties, decent housing, decent education, decent medical care. It’s time to resist the fastidious impulses that keep some of the most powerful thinkers and activists out of ground-level politics, to roll up our sleeves and dirty our hands in the type of compromise that leads to victory, not for the perfect, but for the better. Without a doubt, there are limits, but in the political trade-off between purity and progress, progress wins.