Secrecy of the First Kind

Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The larger issue in the background -- the wisdom of the NATO destruction of the government of Libya which left an open field for anti-American militias -- will probably never be discussed; and within the bounds of the intervention policy, it is unlikely that a satisfying American culprit will emerge. The abuse of power by the IRS may be, in the long run, the most damaging of these cases for the Obama presidency, but its outlines are only beginning to emerge.

 

It is possible that IRS functionaries acted as they did without any systematic guidance from the top of the service; and possible, too, that over the many months of the harassment of anti-Obama groups, the executive branch never caught wind of the trouble and is as stunned as the rest of us. But the ugliest of the scandals has come from the revelation of the justice department's seizure of two months of phone calls by 100 Associated Press reporters.

Different as they are, the scandals all point to a single disorder that afflicts the Obama White House and the Holder justice department. The name of the disorder is paternalism, and its leading symptoms are suppression and secrecy. Paternalism is the ideology proper to a government that treats the governed as children. The duty of a parent toward a child is, above all, to protect him and assure his safety.

Similarly, the duty of the paternal state is to prolong the lives and secure the health and prosperity of the people. The happiness of children also depends on conditions that favor a long life with minimal risk. Children, of course, may want to know many things they are not yet ready to know; but the role of the parent, when an inappropriate question is asked, must be to inform the child that there is a kind of knowledge he is not yet capable of using well.

Of the national security state that we have come to know since 2001, the architect was Dick Cheney, but much of the building was put in place by Barack Obama. This initially puzzling truth has struck anyone who looks at the perpetuation of the offshore prison at Guantanamo, the serial prosecutions of government whistleblowers, the use of the state-secret exception in court cases, the president's secret "killing days" to order drone assassinations, along with other anti-constitutional abuses which the present administration both inherited and extended.

The continuity from 2001 to 2013 explains some other things. The extreme secrecy that prevails in and around the Obama White House was itself a secret until recently -- kept by a docile press that hoped for better treatment in the future. David Cay Johnston has said that when he made his first calls to the White House in 2009, seeking comments or enlightenment on simple matters, the phone was always answered by suspicious factors who, when he asked for their names, would reply "Why do you want to know?"   Read more: