01/20/14 – Peter Ludlow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, good.
So, next up is Peter Ludlow.
He's a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.
And you can read him often at TomDispatch.com.
This one is in the New York Times' 50 States of Fear.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Pretty good.
Good to be back.
Good, good to have you on.
So, yeah, the fear.
Let me ask you, did you ever think in 2000 and whenever it was that, I don't know if you saw through this nonsense all along or it took you a little while to break out of it or what, but whenever that was, did you ever think that it could go as far as it's gone now, this terror war at home and abroad?
No, I didn't think it was going to go on and on and on like this.
I mean, I thought we'd get over it.
I mean, I remember like 9-11, I was sitting around with some friends and nothing good is going to come of this because it was going to be an event that was, people would use it for their own agenda.
But I thought, you know, we'll snap out of it after a decade or something.
But that doesn't seem to be happening.
Yeah.
Well, I think there's a little bit of snapping out of it going on, you know, or at least the perspective has changed just because you can't help it, right?
The earth keeps spinning around and all of that and so it's already the future now, 2014 and so, you know, it's been a few years since the Orange Alert and if you think back to 2002, 2003, I mean, I was one of these who was against every bit of it from the very beginning, of course, all along, but I wonder, you know, whether other people like me, when they think back on how cynically that Orange Alert was used all the time to imply that they had information that some of y'all might die this week, although we couldn't tell you where, like they did, and always whenever any news came out debunking their case for war with Iraq or any kind of pressure against war with Iraq would rise up, they would come out with another Orange Alert.
And I just wonder whether, I mean, it seems only natural that people would, looking back at how cynical that was, the way they were manipulated, that they would then hate the government for doing that to them.
You know, I resented it at the time really bad.
I mean, aren't they making libertarians out of Americans just by way of their authoritarianism?
Or people are just bending right over?
Well, not as fast as you think.
I mean, the thing that's interesting about that color-coded thing were, you know, if I remember, the only colors I ever saw were orange and red.
I never saw it, like, dialed down to yellow.
But the point is that, you know, they got rid of that, but, you know, the whole TSA security theater stuff that's going on, all those people standing around and humiliating us at airports and so forth, they aren't there to make us feel safe, right?
They're there to make us feel afraid.
And I think that they are doing what the color-coded terror threat thing did in effect, you know?
Anytime they sort of, you know, they have a conniption fit because you forgot, you know, you had some bottle of water somewhere or something like that, they're there to make you afraid.
They're not there to make you feel safe.
So I don't know that the situation's different.
I think it's more subtle now.
But fundamentally, I think the mechanism is just, let's make people afraid because, you know, once they're afraid, then we can do whatever we want.
Right.
Yeah, and then they'll believe anything.
You know, I remember I rode on the tram to the parking lot at LAX and I rode on the tram with a TSA guy.
But so, you know, he was off duty and he's an old black guy, you know, much, much older than the TSA.
So he's, you know, lived some other life out there somewhere besides doing TSA duty.
He must know something about this world other than standing around being a pretend security guard at LAX.
But anyway, I'm riding with this guy and I'm asking him about this.
And how can you really in good conscience play this role?
I mean, come on, what are you doing?
You know, and his he thought really, you know, legit answer to me was anyone could be a terrorist.
You could be a terrorist.
You know, come on, man.
Again, back to like you said, even that day, no good's going to come of this.
Yeah, because they didn't even declare war on Al-Qaeda.
They declared war on terror, which is the receding on the receding end of something bad happening.
I mean, what the hell kind of open ended declaration of war is that?
That's like Gulf of Tonkin times a million.
It's yes, it's absolutely ridiculous.
It's sort of like because terrorism is a tactic.
It's not a doctrine.
It's like saying I'm going to declare war on Navy or I'm going to declare war at armies or something.
It's like you can't declare war on a tactic because it doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, I guess he wouldn't have been able to tell me with a straight face that, well, anyone could be Al-Qaeda.
Because no, I mean, that's just not true, man.
Really, you know, nobody would believe that.
Yeah, right.
That's right.
Too narrow a definition there.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
That would not make any sense.
Right.
So yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't I wouldn't want to be like this guy.
I would give this guy a pass because it's his job.
And so, you know, you you get a job and you convince yourself that it's important.
I mean, we all do that.
Yeah, he was a nice old guy.
I'm not mad at him, really.
But the policy makers who sort of decide we're going to spend seven million dollars on this security theater.
And we're going to like hire whatever it is, 58,000 people, 58,000 people doing what this guy does.
Wow.
I mean, what?
That's just incredible.
And just a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece in, I guess, Business Insider, something like that, where there was a new poll out where I think it was a super majority of Americans want the TSA to carry guns.
No, are not satisfied that they're unarmed at this point, I guess, is the other way to put it.
That is such a bad idea.
Can you imagine that?
I mean, here again, I'm fantasizing that people are snapping out of it and resenting it by now.
But no, you're right.
They have.
Yeah.
And then now, OK, again, I'm talking with Peter Ludlow.
He's writing The New York Times here about the 50 states of fear.
And now you point out that and this just gets me.
I'm sorry for laughing through the punch line here, but I always do that.
Ruin every joke.
The authoritarian state has gotten so far out of control that they have spooked the founder of Blackwater.
Are you kidding me?
Really?
Right.
If you're scared, he's he's not enough.
He doesn't like you.
Right.
If he says, look, I don't want to live in a state where you've like made it impossible for for any terrorist anywhere, for some lone wolf terrorist to do something, then then you live in North Korea.
That's what you end up with if you're that afraid of terrorists.
And so, yeah, yeah.
Like, yeah, the founder of Blackwater even lost him on this.
Yeah.
And that's really bad.
And I guess the funny thing is, he's not the boss of it anymore.
So when it comes time for the National Guard to use Blackwater as auxiliary stormtroopers, he won't be there to restrain them with his folksy Bill of Rights, the old ways that he used to have, you know.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, he's selling a book now, too.
Well, yeah.
So you got to appeal to the right wing.
And when the Democrats are in power, right wingers like to pretend they believe in liberty for a minute.
So until Jeb comes again.
Now, speaking of ruining punchlines, I was actually meant to start the show, this interview with, oh, my God, this just in from Peter Ludlow.
The West Virginia chemical spill was an Al Qaeda terrorist attack because you asked the question in your article as bad as that was.
And whatever reaction there has been to it, what if that had been on purpose?
And what if it had been a Muslim who had deliberately spilled that tank full of chemicals?
Talk a little bit more about that.
Sure.
My understanding is that after that spill happened, which you had with 300,000 people in West Virginia had their water poisoned.
Not one Sunday TV talk show picked up that topic.
I mean, they had to talk about Chris Christie and all kinds of other political things.
Didn't mention it.
Now, what if that had been a terrorist attack?
You know, then it would be all over the news.
We would be freaking out about it.
Yeah.
Talk about a red alert.
That would have been the biggest thing since.
That would be people would be freaking out and we'd all be worried about chemical containers everywhere.
And we'd be worried about all kinds of stuff.
But it doesn't matter.
It's not like the chemicals are worse if a terrorist does it, you know, it's just as bad.
And so the question is, you know, we're ignoring all these dangers that we encounter on a day to day basis.
You know, explosions, in fact, like fertilizer plant was another example that I gave, which was just an enormous explosion.
Well, it's not a terrorist attack, so who cares?
I mean, that's the basic attitude.
And, you know, the end result is that all these little disasters are happening all the time and we're letting them happen.
And we're not doing anything to prevent them from happening.
And so it's sort of like we're we're we're ignoring the greater damage, the greater danger for lesser danger.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We're going to take this dang break.
And then we'll be back with Peter Ludlow, the United States of Fear in The New York Times.
One of the 50 states of fear.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Peter Ludlow, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.
And he's writing here in The New York Times, 50 states of fear.
And so let's see, man, I was going to say some smart just now, but I forgot what it was.
Oh, I know what it was.
You write in this article, the core of your argument really isn't just, you know, kind of the the very current argument about how far can we roll back the NSA a little bit or something like that, but the very nature of the state and mankind.
And you say and I more or less by your premise that American democracy over this past 200 something years proves that Hobbes was wrong, that we don't need a bunch of lawless dictators in order to provide the greater good for the little man or whatever.
That actually we get by more or less in a state of nature without that.
And I just wonder how far you're willing to go, because, you know, I was a limited government, limited constitutional republic type until I found out that actually there's a bunch of scholarship about private security forces on the free market where you wouldn't even really need even enough state to keep another one from replacing it.
So, great.
I don't need a government at all.
And I wonder whether you're an anarchist, too.
Well, I wasn't making a case for no government when I said that.
I think I was more trying to make the point that you didn't need someone who's outside the law to impose order.
And so what I said there allowed lots of ranges of freedom, like so it might be a democratically elected government or, you know, you might go for some very lean libertarian type government.
All of that is consistent with what I said there.
And I think what drove Hobbes, you know, so I was talking about this philosopher Hobbes, who basically made this case for a king, right?
And the case was that, well, if you leave people on their own, they're just terrible, awful people, and they'll do terrible things to each other.
And we're all afraid of that.
So we make somebody king and we put that person above the law.
And, you know, for 250 years, we've been like beating back on this idea.
And we say, no, it doesn't have to be like that.
We can trust each other.
People are not inherently evil.
And now what's happening, it's like we're returning to this attitude that, well, maybe we need to go back to something that's like a king, you know, someone who's above the law, who's going to protect us, etc., because people are evil, people are dangerous, the other is among us, and so forth.
And so whether you want to be a libertarian or if you believe in genuine democracy, or even, you know, a liberal welfare state, the idea is that in some sense you trust other people.
And the idea of being pushed on us now is that, no, no, no, people are not trustworthy.
You need a strong leader who's going to tell you what to do and keep you safe.
Yeah, now, so by the libertarian definition, on that same premise, you don't really need a state at all.
But I see where you're coming from, from just a Democrat perspective.
Yeah, I'm not, you know, I'm talking to a libertarian here, but I'm just saying, you don't have to be a libertarian to be on board with what I'm saying, but you're welcome, you know.
That's, you know, it's consistent with what I'm saying.
Well, yeah, I mean, there are shades of gray in here.
I mean, in essence, the libertarian argument is that to have a state at all is to legalize crime for certain people, whether they're democratically elected or not.
They get to commit acts of aggression that other people don't commit, aren't allowed to commit.
And so that's our problem with it.
Now, not everybody's willing to go along with that, but I'm trying to agree with you here, actually, Peter, that then there's a whole other line crossed when George Bush gets busted for torturing people.
And he says, yeah, what are you going to do about it?
And everybody says, nothing.
And then, so that's it.
And in fact, then half the country decides, actually, in the Johnson family, we're all pro-torture too.
And just the entire society turns into half pro-torturers.
Over, and there was no, you know, there's no, or, you know, just very natural part of Western civilization that automatically checks and balances and kicks in and stops that.
It has to be stopped by people, and they didn't.
I mean, that was a major test.
The John Yoo principle, like, I mean, at least they weren't punished for it.
They're not necessarily quite that lawless at this point, but it hadn't been rolled back much, right?
I mean, John Yoo in jail?
I mean, there were all these people committing torture and we did nothing about it.
And I think you're right.
I mean, I think you raise a really good point.
The government sanctions it for itself.
We all, in a way, become complicit in it.
We're sitting there saying, oh, well, oh, we're letting our government torture people.
And we have to convince ourselves internally.
I mean, we have to live with that.
So we have to convince ourselves that, oh, well, I guess it's not so bad.
And so that's the problem.
When your government starts doing stuff like that, it, as it were, trickles down into the population.
And we either have to decide that they were right to do it or we're going to have some serious cognitive dissonance to, like, deal with.
And, you know, it's right.
They poisoned the attitude of the whole country by doing that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I grew up knowing that Ronald Reagan was having people tortured down there in Latin America.
I didn't know where El Salvador was, but I knew he was blowing it up and the School of the Americas or whatever.
I'm from Austin, so you learn about these kind of things.
It's just kind of out there in the ether anyway.
It was.
But at least they didn't, as far as I knew, the American state did not openly embrace torturing people as a policy and argue to defend it.
And that's a pretty severe line to be crossed.
And then I think, again, like you're saying, if John Yoo and them are not in the dock for this and there never was accountability for it, then it's really not over yet.
In fact, we talked with Jeff K about Appendix M and how this stuff continues under a little bit lighter shades, even under Obama.
It's absolutely true.
It's a real problem that we sort of turn a blind eye on this.
Because by not resolving it, I mean, it's not like it goes away.
We all know it happened.
We all know that we're, as citizens, we're complicit in that somehow.
So it's like this secret evil thing we as a country did, and we're just trying to stuff it.
And it doesn't make for a country with good mental health, if you will.
Because it's hard to convince yourself that you're a good country when you know that you're doing barbarous, inhumane things like torture.
Right.
And you know, I'm no utopian, and I don't think you're arguing for any kind of perfection in society.
But we're supposed to aim high and mean that, right?
And try to be good.
And not just give up on trying to be good, you know?
Come on!
No, I think that's a good way to put it.
We just gave up on trying to be good.
And there's a point that's made in there, which is in the article.
Which is that it's like the whole country has had to come to see itself as above the law in a way.
Which is, we've decided that we're the sovereign, because the world is a dangerous place.
As the NSA recruitment ad begins, the world is a dangerous place.
And we've convinced ourselves that, yes, the world is a dangerous place.
And it's the responsibility of the United States to police it.
And therefore, we must be above the law worldwide.
So whatever we do, we have to do it because we have to bring order to the world.
And that's sick.
I mean, it's really...
I just feel sick for my country that we've got into this headspace now.
Where we think that that's our role.
To be above the law in order to make the world, quote unquote, safe.
And it makes for...
It's not a good headspace for a nation to be in.
Well, and this is the part I could never really figure out, too.
I mean, this whole American exceptionalism, if you look at it beyond just the surge work kind of a slogan, doesn't make any sense.
Because at least I was raised to believe that what was exceptional about America was precisely that the government was bound by the rule of law.
It had no mystical claim of sovereign authority from God or anything like that.
The people together were sovereign and allowed it to exist to be their security force, like it says in the Declaration of Independence.
And all their authority comes from that constitution as amended.
And checks and balances.
And if you want to change it, you can change it.
But you have to do it within the rules.
And that was what made us great.
It wasn't that there was something magic about being from between Canada and Mexico that meant you had a license to murder people.
Where the hell did that even come from?
I mean, it was the opposite of that, I thought.
You know, when I was a kid, why is Ronald Reagan testifying before the Congress?
Isn't he the president?
Yeah, but he's just the president.
That's all.
The chief executive of the departments that Congress created.
That's it.
That's all he is, is a president.
I think, yeah.
Well, I agree totally.
When I'm in high school or whatever, Nixon got in trouble.
And we all learned, oh, see, no one's above the law in this country.
That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
And I agree totally.
I used to believe that the reason the United States was exceptional is because, well, it was governed by its people.
People were in control of the situation.
We were the good guys.
We didn't go and attack people.
And now I don't know what's happened over the last 40 some odd years.
It's like I don't understand the thinking anymore.
Because what makes us exceptional now is we just go out there and beat up on whoever we think needs beating up on.
And we're all supposed to march in step with that.
And you're supposed to get on board and cheer this sort of exceptional intervention in world affairs.
To me, it's like the whole country, that attitude is a 180 degree turn around from what I remember as the country as a kid and the way it was supposed to be exceptional back then.
Right.
Yeah, you know, I was really glad that you brought up the Boston lockdown in your piece too, Peter.
Because I was so shocked, not just at the lockdown, but when Ron Paul dared to say, what is this with the lockdown here?
They attacked him in such a way where, you know, just the assumption was, are you kidding me, Ron Paul?
That you're against?
You know how that Ron Paul is.
Like really, he was the one with the problem.
And they were so sure of it.
That there was everything right about what they did there.
You know?
Yeah.
And just crazy old Uncle Ron again.
Like really, the lockdown of the whole city for a kid with no gun?
What?
Look, yeah, I'm not a Ron Paul guy, but I give him props for that.
He hung in there and said the right thing.
Well, yeah, I mean, and the real lesson is about the media and what they heard when they heard him say that.
How it sounded to them and, you know, where we still are with this.
Anyway, thank you very much, Peter.
I really appreciate it.
50 States of Fear in the New York Times, Peter Ludlow.
Appreciate it.
All right, see you Scott.
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