The New Domestic Order: What Has Changed, Why It Changed, and How It Matters

The America that we have known for many generations is quickly disappearing. Yet many do not yet recognize the full extent of what is taking place. People may hear about immigrants being secretly detained, or of a plan to give the Pentagon access to the financial, health and credit card information of every citizen. They may have a sense that the "checks and balances" of government are not working, and that the rule of law is increasingly being replaced by the rule of men - men with an extreme new agenda. They may sense that behind the campaign of "security" and "public safety" this extreme agenda is being implemented. The full picture remains obscure, but many people are deeply troubled.

Vice President Cheney has spoken of a "new normalcy" for America in the context of a war that may last for generations. What are the full dimensions of this, what are the implications, and where is it headed?

September 11 Unleashes the Flood: While democratic rights were under assault before "9/11," the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon produced a dramatic and qualitative change. There have been drastic changes in the law. There has been an assault on immigrants' rights and a manufactured climate of xenophobia (i.e. hatred and fear of foreigners). There has been a restriction of dissent, both of organized protest and the speaking out by public figures. There has been the widespread utilization of new surveillance technology and the promotion of a culture of complicity and snitching. And there has been a radical restructuring of government itself, giving much more power to the executive branch. Let's look at each of these.

Drastic changes in the law: The Patriot Act, for instance, gives the government vast new surveillance powers, allows the virtual unlimited detention of immigrants without charges, permits "roving wiretaps," and imposes gag rules to prevent persons served with warrants from revealing it. It expands the power of the government to obtain secret search warrants from secret courts to obtain any personal information, from our library checkouts to our personal medical records.

Assault on immigrants: Immediately after 9/11 federal agents spread out across the country, rounding up immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries (the "Ashcroft Raids"). People simply disappeared into government custody without charges or due process.

Hearings by immigration courts were suddenly closed to the public. Lawyers were often unable to even find out where their clients were being held. (Not a single one of these detainees has been charged with a crime relating to September 11.) Racial and ethnic profiling was back with a vengeance. Tens of thousands of immigrants were ordered to report and register with the government, and 13,000 who did now face deportation.

Restriction of dissent: On February 15 in New York, police refused to allow antiwar protesters to march anywhere in the city, blocked off streets to prevent people from gathering, attacked people from horseback, and confined those who did make it to the mobilization site to fenced-off "protest pens." Police repression of dissenting politics went still further in Oakland in April, when rubber bullets were shot at peaceful protesters. It was later revealed that firing on these protesters was the result of recommendations from a state police agency on counter-terrorism.

Meanwhile, artists like Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover and scores of others came under fire for speaking out against either the impending war on Iraq or the attacks on civil liberties. Bill Maher lost his TV show Politically Incorrect . Dixie Chicks' CDs were destroyed in rallies that seemed to come out of news clips from Germany 1933-after singer Natalie Maines dared to criticize the president on stage at a concert. The antiwar Phil Donahue lost his talk show in the increasingly prowar atmosphere of the media, despite the fact that he was the highest rated MSNBC host. Major antiwar organizations and leaders were red-baited and attacked as treasonous - with ties to everyone from al-Qaida to the Cuban government being insinuated.

This chill came from the highest offices of the land. Ari Fleischer, speaking to the Bill Maher incident, warned the American people to "watch what they say." And Attorney General Ashcroft, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted any criticism of the Patriot Act: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends." This language echoed the legal definition of treason and was directed at some of the Democratic Senators present.

Stepped-up surveillance and a culture of snitching: The Department of Defense rolled out its Total Information Awareness program (now renamed Terrorist Information Awareness), a computer network that would allow the military to cross-check both government and private commercial databases, to quickly turn up credit card, travel, and other personal information on anyone. The new Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II (CAPPSII) will rate the "security risk" of every airline passenger, based on government or corporate databases. Those who don't pass are put on a secret "no fly" list.

Along with this have come widespread appeals to "report anything suspicious." The government attempted to set up the TIPS program, which called on everyone from teachers to UPS deliverymen to report on the people they came in contact with. It was defeated this time, but the effort to instill an ethos of informing has not diminished.

Restructuring government: A major reorganization of the government is well under way. In a break with 225 years of precedent, the army is now routinely deployed on our streets in a domestic policing role. The Department of Homeland Security-a ministry of internal security-has been created. The Attorney General announced that the function of the Department of Justice was now "prevention and disruption," not law enforcement. Government agents were authorized to monitor conversations between lawyers and their clients. Decisions by Immigration Court judges to release detainees were simply overturned on executive order. At least two native-born U.S. citizens have been transferred to military custody by executive order and denied access to lawyers or the courts.

One stunning and important example of the fading role of "checks and balances" was the passage of the USA Patriot Act. On September 17, 2001, Ashcroft demanded that the Congress pass within one week a collection of new laws that they had not even seen yet. The House Judiciary Committee balked at some of Ashcroft's more outrageous demands and unanimously approved its own watered-down version. But the next week, when the bill came up for a vote in the House of Representatives, members found that a new bill had been substituted overnight. There was no time to even read it. In an atmosphere of coercion and panic the Congress quickly voted through the "anti-terrorism" Patriot Act by a vote of 98-1 in the Senate and 357-66 in the House.

The rapid-fire events since 9/11 are more than a series of isolated incidents or a motley collection of wrong-headed policies. It is not just a further step in already existing trends to criminalize immigrants, demonize people of color, and eviscerate our legal and political rights. It has elements of all of these, but taken together these developments amount to a watershed. We now face both the new repressive measures outlined above and the distinct possibility of a new social order qualitatively more ominous and draconian than anything we have known.

This is excerpted for space. The entire article can be read at: Revolutionary Worker #1206, July 6, 2003, posted at rwor.org