The “Politicization” of the DoJ

Today the Justice Department released a report concluding that Bush loyalists at the DoJ broke the law by allowing “politics” to influence their hiring decisions. The way this ongoing scandal has been reported has often been in the context of “politicization,” of how the administration sought to bring in like-minded yes-men in order to promote executive sovereignty. I think there are two problems with this: (1) I don’t think you can call what the administration did in regards to the DoJ to be “politicization,” properly so-called; and (2) the tacit assumption on behalf of most pundits has been that “politicization” is something that should be condemned.

It’s obvious that the administration’s intent in carrying out this policy has been to allow for them to push through controversial legislation as quickly as possible and with as little debate as possible. Moreover, the administration has used the pretext of an amorphous, all-encompassing threat vis-a-vis the “War on Terror” to legitimize their extra-legal maneuvering. By exploiting shock and then establishing its subsequent lacunae within the juridical order as the norm, the Bush administration has successfully strengthened the power of the executive branch to an unprecedented degree.

What they haven’t done is “politicization” proper. In fact, you could even say they did the opposite: they depoliticized the Justice Department by extricating it from the political domain. By placing it under the subordination of the executive branch, the Bush administration was able to ignore public opinion on issues such as domestic wiretapping, torture, and internment. They’ve justified their actions on the basis of the omnipresent threat of terrorism, which confronted them with a “crisis” that had to be met with “objective” measures. All of this was done under the visage of “security,” “neutrality,” and “objectivity,” just as neoliberalism attempts to paint its fundamentalist market-oriented view as a “science.”

Admittedly, Bush’s tactics have been highly partisan, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as “political.” Perhaps one of the reasons why the word “politicization” continues to be misused is because both parties have allied against it. For conservatives, depoliticization involves the hollowing out of government by replacing all public services with outsourced private sector alternatives, as well as the continued efforts to promote sovereignty over democracy. For liberals, depoliticization involves the discourse of human rights, the reduction of structural violence to atomized incidents, “tolerance” over class struggle and “green capitalism” over deep ecology. Hence, not only is the Bush administration’s so-called “politicization” of the Justice Department in fact depoliticizing, but the very acceptance of the common usage of “politicization” in reference to the incident is a depoliticizing political decision.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Hugo Chávez: Stalinist Totalitarian Part III

In another article on Hugo Chávez’s ongoing totalitarian attempts at unleashing a socialist-stranglehold on the people of Venezuela, the New York Times has this to say:

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

Aside from not providing many details on what constitutes the essence of these reforms, which the Times can hardly be faulted for since the drafting and passage of the law ominously took place behind closed doors, there is even less information on why, exactly, this law would prompt people to inform on one another.

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

As far as I can tell, “complying with requests” has hardly anything to do with prompting people to spy on one another as one might be legally compelled to answer questions asked by, say, either the FBI or CIA here in the United States. The problem with the analysis is that the laws that prompted mass-domestic-spying asked for their neighbors to spy on one another, to keep tabs on suspicious activity, whereas this law seems instead to make it a legal requirement to comply with an agency’s investigation.

But, to risk borrowing a kettle and returning it in less than proper fashion, I would not necessarily reject the notion of domestic spying. The problem is that, historically speaking, it has been carried out horribly in the past. An especially clear example can be found in Stalin’s Great Terror, when a majority of those sent to labor camps were reported on the basis of individual enmity and petty squabbles at the domestic level, thus triggering a massive web of cause and effect whose momentum overtook what began as a largely isolated phenomenon (keeping in mind, of course, that the Great Terror was, by and large, focused on Party members). Consequently, if Chávez plans on implementing something akin to this, he should find a way to do so that avoids this form of needless chaos. Moreover, perhaps this same strategy would be well-suited for Evo Morales’ Bolivia, which, in the face of ongoing reforms to, like in Chávez’s Venezuela, bring into the polity the poor and native populations who were traditionally excluded from politics, has faced challenges in the form of “autonomy votes” from its bourgeois regions.

This is essentially where I would, consequently, part ways with Chávez: whereas he seems to view his socialist struggle along populist (and, perhaps, Gramscian) lines, as a Venezuelan anti-colonialist struggle against an imperial power (the United States), he should not forget the internal antagonisms within the social substance. Hence, the ongoing political antagonisms within both Venezuela and Bolivia, in conjunction with the application of a more merciless form of domestic spying, should instead be relegated, though perhaps not entirely,¹ to the inherent antagonisms within society, as opposed to some reified external force (the United States). This division, I think, is more concrete, especially in terms of class, in Bolivia, hence my brief discussion of Morales. Nevertheless, I’m sure a more well-investigated, scientific analysis of class struggle in Venezuela would reveal similar tensions, the least of which might be the focus of a fourth part series.

1. This, of course, should in no way disregard the U.S.’s historic and present interventions in Latin America. But to make this the center of one’s political agenda is, I think, a mistake, and one that could end disastrously if it were to get out of hand or veer from the path that Chávez originally took when he was democratically elected thanks to his historic consolidation of the unrepresented within Venezuelan society. ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer