ALLOW me to also respond to my colleague's post defending the
latest document-dump by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, in which he writes
Organisations
such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy
and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state
system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the
climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically
liberal democracy.
I
submit that this is true only if an "authentically liberal democracy"
is a post-political paradise unlike any form of communal association
ever seen in human history.
From its origins in the 17th century,
liberal political theory has been motivated in part by the impulse to
check the power of the state—for the sake of both individual freedom and
the common good. That's what makes liberalism a theory of limited
government. But from the beginning this impulse was itself limited in
scope. None of the early modern liberals would have considered it either
possible or desirable for the state to strive for complete transparency
in matters of foreign policy and diplomacy. To do so would be to ask
the state to cease abiding by the most elementary rules of human
relations—including the rule so clearly explicated by my other colleague
in a post far more critical of WikiLeaks:
It's
part of the nature of human communication that one doesn't always say
the same thing to every audience. There are perfectly good reasons why
you don't always tell the same story to your boss as you do to your
spouse. There are things Washington needs to tell Riyadh to explain what
it's just told Jerusalem and things Washington needs to tell Jerusalem
to explain what it's just told Riyadh, and these cables shouldn't be
crossed. There's nothing wrong with this. It's inevitable. And it
wouldn't make the world a better place if Washington were unable to say
anything to Jerusalem without its being heard by Riyadh, any more than
it would if you were unable to tell your spouse anything without its
being heard by your boss.
The one line in this
admirably lucid statement that I would revise is the one about how there
is "nothing wrong" with this average-everyday form of duplicity. On the
contrary, as a form of duplicity it is morally troubling. But sometimes
securing the common good requires morally troubling actions. That's a
basic fact of politics that some contemporary liberals and libertarians,
like many anti-liberal leftists, will not abide. In their view, liberal
checks on government—like oversight by our elected representatives—is
insufficient. We need far more than that. We need to eliminate duplicity
altogether.
That is what I take Mr Assange to be getting at in his predictably pretentious and self-righteous denunciation of the "authoritarian conspiracy" that runs the United States. As David Brooks argues today,
Mr Assange could be considered an anarchist. He's out to tear down all
existing liberal democratic institutions—and perhaps all political
institutions of any kind—because they fall short of his preciously
naïve, anti-political vision of moral purity.
American liberals
and libertarians need to be very careful to distinguish their own
laudable efforts to achieve greater institutional transparency from the
efforts of this unelected fanatic to topple those same institutions. The
former can justly be described as an "authentically liberal democratic"
vision of reform. The latter is next of kin to nihilism.
(For
more on the anti-political temptations of contemporary liberalism and
libertarianism, I recommend the work of French author Pierre Manent.
See, for example, these two books. Photo credit: AFP)
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