Up w/ Chris Hayes panelists Colonel Jack Jacobs, MSNBC military analyst; Hina Shamsi from the ACLU's National Security Project; Jeremy Scahill of The Nation magazine; and Josh Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, discuss new revelations about the Obama administration's drone program, including a reported "kill list" overseen directly by President Obama.
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Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With "Twilight of the Elites," Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.
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Our lovely compartmentalized lives. How well is communication breaking down our global scale disease of narcissism? Ok so we have compartments for war. Pretty formidable fortifications there too- as Hayes touched a third rail last weekend. Anyway....
Even the more bloodthirsty groups who have decided to kill members of other groups were not without some empathy and so there has always been some agreed upon rules about how we kill each other, for example that the innocents (noncombatants) not be killed or used as pawns in such conflicts. It made war more compartmentalized, and therefore removed the barriers for engaging in it. Much of the discussion on Saturday had to do with other forms of compartmentalization.
Mutually assured mass destruction in nuclear war removed the water tight compartments, and wars at the Titanic scale became the kind of adventurous voyage very few citizens wanted to go on.
The more that individual citizens understood that their lives and the lives of their loved ones were at risk, the less there was mutual consent for the conflicts.
But where technology removed compartments, it made others possible. 21st century technology also means that we do not need mass conscription to wage effective wars without very many sons of voters getting killed.
Let's just imagine a world in which the leader of a foreign government was killing citizens of multiple countries using drones or small teams of soldiers in an undeclared war on terrorism without any definable end, and without any judicial or legislative oversight or check on that power to kill. Say a Russian drone killed a bunch of certified Chechen revolutionaries in El Salvador. Say a Chinese drone kills a bunch of Taiwanese in the Nigeria who are agitating against oil deals with Peking.
Think about it. Is your first question whether Peking or Moscow can prove those killed really did deserve it- that the killing was morally just or unjust? No. The ethical question misses the point because at the global geopolitical level it is irrelevant. Every side feels their cause just.
Our outrage needs to focus on the profound danger of the principle being exercised here, and it is as simple as it is ancient. It is that ability of such leaders to engage in raw exercises of power is a threat to world peace. There is an unproven theory that democracies are far less likely to threaten world peace because they have safeguards against Napoleons or Hitlers.
Where are the safeguards in the case of American democracy? The mention of the seemingly insignificant complaint from the Oregon congressman that the intelligence committee is being shut out of the process is at the core of this.
We don't see any flag waving nationalists or libertarians or "progressives" out beating their chest about how fundamentally un American and anti democracy this is to allow such unchecked executive power to make these determinations.