On confidential material and American democracy.
Will we look back on the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago as the beginning of the end of American democracy, or worse? I ask the question from an entirely unsympathetic position to Donald Trump, Trumpism, and most of the Trumpian political movement members. But the question could just as easily be asked introspectively by a member of that movement, or at least someone adjacent to and sympathetic to its aims and progress. Someone of that persuasion may ask the question with a genuine belief that the 2020 election had been stolen from President Trump and that the FBI raid on his residence in Florida is proof that the tools of state are being used aggressively to perpetrate harm upon the former president.
However, my immediate concern, and reason for asking the question is, actually born from the concerns of the Trumpian right, not that they are substantially correct, but rather their convictions will lead to a dramatic escalation in anti-democratic and destructive behavior.
The early signs of a country in decay came immediately after Trump self-reported the raid on his southern residence. Rather than preaching caution and appropriate levels of concern, Republican lawmakers and commentators immediately jumped to the most extreme conclusions of the Justice Department approved raid. Calls to violence and declarations of civil war rang across the airwaves of Fox News and dribbled out of the online accounts of sitting congress-folk. The effects of the news were near immediate. In Ohio, a man attempted to break into an FBI office leading to an armed standoff which ended with the man dead. Several days later a man drove his vehicle into a concrete barrier outside the US capitol, exited the car, fired several shots into the air and killed himself.
If historical examples are any indication, these sorts of attempted attacks at American institutions will be just the beginning. The fear in prosecuting former elected officials is that it can set a precedent for attacking your political rivals. This is doubly concerning when a political movement has already shown a willingness to use criminal prosecution for political aim (see 2016 and the “lock her up” chants). Even if institutions hold, and politically oriented prosecutions don’t occur, they can still lead supporters of the prosecuted to feel that the system is broken or illegitimate. The latter is what I fear may cause the Mar-a-Lago raid to be viewed eventually as so damaging.
The raid itself seems entirely justified. Attorney General Merrick Garland shortly after the raid released a short video explaining the reason why the raid had been approved and specifically acknowledged that it had been approved by his office before being sent to the district Judge in Florida who ultimately approved the warrant. Garland even took a step further and asked for the warrant to be unsealed as to hopefully quell the claims of the raid being nothing more than political retribution. The warrant clarified that the raid was ordered to recoup a host of secret and top-secret documents which had been inappropriately taken from the White house in January 2021 and subsequently not returned in a transfer that took place a year later in January 2022. Some outlets reported that some of the documents the raid was executed to return included highly confidential information pertaining to America’s nuclear arsenal.
Obviously the justice department weighed the situation and decided that the political concerns could not preempt the national security concerns raised by having such important documents outside the bounds of standard government operating procedure. We can’t, from the outside, judge the decision making because we simply don’t know the security value of the documents Trump held onto or the nature of the documents themselves. It could be that concerns greater than purely national security were at stake; America’s nuclear arsenal is enough to destroy society on earth in a meaningful way 50 times over. There is a certain possibility that the information hoarded at Mar-a-Lago was of such great import and security threat that no level of political concerns could surpass the need to regain control over that material. But even if we are being charitable, the ramifications of the decision, no matter how right they may be, could still have global and societal ramifications.
America is more than just a state like any other, they are and continue to be the global hegemon. A state which other democracies look to for guidance and example, a state which autocracies demonize for fear that their citizens will yearn for all that it is to be an American. America is a state which all others turn to for financial support and backing. Behind the structural, political, and cultural power that America yields is the clear fact that it is all by design. America is the most important country in the world because it chose to be as much. The global order was crafted from rubble of the second world war when two seemingly viable options survived the destruction of empires and peoples. The United States and the Soviet Union project two seemingly equal and ideologically opposite examples for the rest of the world to emulate. As the Soviet Union collapsed, there was but one viable option left: America.
Americans rarely recognize our role in the global order. Americans have absorbed the message of American exceptionalism but few know much of anything about the rest of the world. Conversely, the rest of the world thinks a lot about America, not because they necessarily want to, but because American power is so totalizing. To be indifferent to the developments in America would be similar to indifference towards an approaching hurricane. Americans, enjoying our position as always dead center in the eye of the storm, have the luxury of not paying attention. America’s power insulates its citizens from considering anything other than their immediate situation.
What happens if America, as the global hegemon, decays into a dysfunctional state? The implications for America and Americans would obviously be the most devastating. A dysfunctional state fails to provide necessary services for citizens, leaves markets without the security of enforcement and can lead to extreme degradation in the quality of life of ordinary folks and rapid increases in crime. But America as a dysfunctional state would also cause great harm to the rest of the world. As pleasant as it may be to believe we’d enter a truly multi-polar world, the reality is that Chinese economic power would place the second largest country in the driver seat for all sorts of economic and political decisions. Chinese hegemony in the world would almost certainly be a net negative considering the Chinese state’s abysmal record on human rights in their own country and their caustic attitude towards civil liberties and the dignity of individuals and groups.
The European Union could be a potential successor to the liberal democratic mantle established by the United States but there are few scenarios where the multivariate member states and nations could build a cohesive sense of identity and internal enforcement mechanisms necessary to project power and values on the global stage. A hegemonic China would also probably mean the return of Russian acceptance in the global order and possibly even the successful annexation of Ukraine. Perhaps the most frightening scenario is one in which the American state decays into dysfunction but still maintains its place as the global hegemon, or worse, uses its power in more coercive and devastating ways towards less powerful states and regions.
The possibility of America slipping into dysfunction via democratic decay and backsliding are very real following the raid on Mar-a-Lago. But so too is the possibility that the information improperly stored at the former southern White House had the even more dramatic ability to unilaterally reshape or even decimate the world. Imagine if sensitive information on nuclear technology had found its way into the hands of foreign belligerent states or terrorist organizations. Information about the computer systems that operate and secure the American nuclear arsenal in the hands of the Russian state could lead to deliberate sabotage made to look like internal systems failures. The ability to create rudimentary nuclear devices in the hands of an extremist organization like ISIS or in the hands of a rogue state like the Taliban could potentially lead to unmitigated destruction as the worst outcome with acquiescence to either group as the least bad outcome.
Merrick Garland, in allowing the raid to commence, must have weighed the political dangers present in letting the FBI raid the former president’s personal residence. In some ways this makes the raid even more frightening. Considering Garland’s seeming disposition towards deference, this raid, and all the potentially dangerous political ramifications, should be a cause of deep concern for anyone interested in the continued health of American democracy but also anyone concerned about national and global security. The information stored at Mar-a-Lago must have been of great enough importance to justify the potential destabilization of American democracy.
Could the raid on Mar-a-Lago be the beginning of the end of American democracy? Potentially yes, but what is even more concerning is the decision by the justice department, which surely considered that possibility, to greenlight the raid anyway. Just what had Trump withheld that was so important as to outweigh the potentially devastating consequences on American democracy and possibly American hegemony? If we are lucky, the republic will survive long enough for us to one day know then answer.
