The Washington Post published a poll today indicating “broad support for Obama’s counterterrorism policies.”  According to the poll, even “the left wing of the Democratic Party” approves of drone attacks and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay.  The article almost immediately points out the irony of this:  voters chose Obama in part because he “campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values.”

This paragraph is worth highlighting:

“The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.”  (emphasis added).

Moreover, “fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones,” despite many resulting civilian casualties and its questionable legality.

It’s worth comparing the data to older polls.  Regarding Guantanamo, overall 70% of respondents agreed with President Obama on keeping Guantanamo open.  But in June 2009, more Americans favored closing the facility than keeping it open.  In 2006, only 57% of Americans supported using the Guantanamo detention center house accused terrorists.  Even in 2003, support was only at 65%.  Now, under the leadership of a President who campaigned with the promise to close the facility but reneged, support for the detention center may be at its highest level ever.

The Pew Research Center released a poll last year that demonstrated a similar shift of support by Democrats on the Patriot Act.  In 2006 under the Republican Bush, 25% of Democrats viewed the Act as a “necessary tool” and 53% thought it went too far.  Five years later under the Democrat Obama, 35% of Democrats said the Act was necessary, while only 40% thought it went too far.  Republicans, on the other hand, showed less support for the Act in 2011 than they did under Bush.

This is a very limited supply of information, ACED realizes, certainly not enough to draw firm conclusions.  However, the polling data suggests that a significant number of people who identify as belonging to a political party (a) change their values to conform to the policies of their party, and/or (b) change their values to oppose the leader of the other party.  Either is totally inconsistent with a citizen’s role in a democracy.

If you have real values, and if you hope to have any real impact with your vote; if you don’t want be a mere automaton predictably picking red or blue over and over again without regard to policy, you have to think for yourself and stand up for your values.

UPDATE:  Glenn Greenwald does a better job of covering this issue.  Similarities with his post are purely coincidental.

UPDATE 2:  Here is perhaps a more telling stat.  In February 2009, one month after Obama took office and when it was still believed he would close Guantanamo, 64% of Democrats supported its closure.

This relates to Andrew Sullivan’s defense last month of President Obama’s “long game.”  Leaving aside that Sullivan got facts wrong and presented others misleadingly to posit Obama has adopted and successfully implemented a long game strategy, his defense of Obama embraces secrecy and faith in the leader.  It is fundamentally undemocratic.

Sullivan’s theory precludes serious critique of Obama because it posits that Obama hides his true intentions.  Plus, it assumes that Obama knows best; he always has great intentions, but in the long game you have to “appear” as if you are breaking actual promises or betraying your values to hope to get close to achieving them.  Where does the long game begin?  I would guess from even before the election if I took Sullivan seriously.  And if that were true, then you the voter–the purported sovereign of the American Republic–may have voted for Obama because during his campaign because he said he would do X while in fact he always intended Y (Y = the realistic goal in the “long game”).  Obama was actually playing the “long game” during the campaign, because he knows what’s best for you.

In a democracy, the people should have a say in the policies of their country.  Secrecy and retrospective “long game” defenses do not allow that.

Take a look at this from OpenSecrets.org (h/t Zero Hedge):

These charts show the major contributors to Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush from the last three election cycles (including the current one).  As you can see, several contributors gave to both the Democrat-Obama-and one or both of the Republican candidates.  In 2008, John McCain received contributions from some of the same sources, too.  For instance, he received about $240,000 from Goldman-Sachs, and $343,000 from JP Morgan.

This is strategic giving for political gain.  No entity can predict with perfect accuracy the victor of an election, so these major donors spread money around to cover their bases.  But in 2008, Goldman and JP Morgan gave much more to Barack Obama, the heavy favorite to win after a hugely unpopular second term for the Republican George W. Bush.  The candidate who spends the most money wins the election over 90% of the time.  Candidates know this.  Wealthy contributors know it, too, and they use that fact to achieve their political goals.  If they strongly favor one of the two major candidates, s/he will probably win.  Wealthy contributors do not strongly favor candidates who will oppose them in office.  If an incumbent fails to coddle industry enough, you can be sure that major donors would flock to his opponent in the next election.  In short, the major donors shift their support, so candidates have to work for it (Think about that.  Politicians must please JP Morgan, Goldman-Sachs, and the like to win an election in the United States- sad but true if voters do nothing about it).  It comes down to accountability.

Unfortunately, this is bad for democracy because it has lead to a string of Presidents who have served their donors’ interests instead of the public interest.  And as a result, inequality is growing, more people are poor, the rich are richer. Although bad for most of us, it is rational behavior.  In that regard, citizens–whose power is in their vote (as opposed to their campaign contributions)–should learn from the rich.  That doesn’t mean they should support the Republican one election, then the Democrat the next.  It does mean that voters should not be blindly partisan.  It means they should hold politicians accountable.  Relentlessly voting for a party instead of political goals lets politicians know that they do not have to work for your vote.  Instead, they will pander to the rich who can help them buy ads that reach out to voters who might not be blind partisans and vote for them instead of the other guy.  Those voters and the donors get what they want from our political system.  The majority gets screwed.

Political accountability is the crux of a successful democracy.  Citizens hold officials accountable when they “cast their vote in favor of candidates and parties contingent upon their past political actions in elected office and their credible commitments to future actions after (re)election.”  Citizens can impose incentives and costs on politicians—and, crucially, political parties, as well—that make them responsive to citizens’ desires.  If citizens do not or cannot hold their leaders accountable, they lose their ability to influence political decision-making and democracy fails.

In the United States, political accountability has somewhat broken down.  But the United States’ democracy still works pretty well in the sense that the parties our responsive to voters.  It may be failing, though, in that many citizens send a message they do not intend with their votes, leading to unwanted policies.  Thus, accountability is deteriorating in the United States less because officials have betrayed the desires of the people, and more because people have not effectively used their vote to protect and promote their interests.

For example, the Democratic and Republican parties have both moved to the right on many issues since the late 1960’s-early 1970’s.  It may be that the movement to the right reflects the actual values of Americans.  But it is also true that the Democratic party has sought to capture more conservative voters by moving to the right.  By voting for the Democrats even as they become less progressive, voters on the left have, in fact, encouraged this rightward shift.

No politician more embodies this than President Obama.  President Bush was heavily criticized by the left for civil liberties abuses and war.  People reasonably expected better from Obama on those issues, but the President has not fulfilled those expectations.  Among other hopes dashed, the President also failed to bring more transparency to government, to protect whistleblowers, fight for labor unions, or meaningfully regulate Wall Street.  In sum, he has not brought the “Change” many voters wanted.

If some voters did not get what they expected from President Barack Obama during his first term, what should they do about it?  On the one hand, they can vote for him again if they still find him preferable to the Republican candidate – after all, the two major-party candidates are widely assumed to be the only ones with a chance to win.  In other words, disappointed voters could reason that Obama is the “lesser evil” and vote for him in spite of his policies that they personally disagree with.  That choice alone is understandable.  But the rationale is flawed because it fails to consider the long-term political effects of endorsing the President’s undesirable policies.  To put it another way, there is an election for the Office of the President every four years; thus, a voter should weigh how his or her vote will impact the next election(s), too, just as the candidates and parties do.

The most likely explanation of the President’s generous support of the very bankers who defrauded millions of regular Americans is that he was grateful for their massive campaign contributions, and wanted to ensure he received more for the 2012 campaign.  Check.  Likewise, his civil liberties and foreign policy is probably aimed at strengthening his conservative credentials – and he has succeeded in that regard.  They were done for political gain (as opposed to for the public good).

What the “lesser evil” strategy as described above fails to account for is that a vote for Obama signals to the Democratic party and its future candidates that it should continue to move to the “right” on economic and national security issues to capture more votes.  For a politician, the incentive to attract more voters is undeniable.  Barack Obama wants to win the next election, and the Democratic Party wants to remain in the ascendant.  Generally, there is a cost to going too far to the “right” only if voters on the “left” impose it by withdrawing their votes.  If voters on the left refuse to withhold votes, the only political cost is in not going far enough to the right, losing voters to the more conservative opponent.  When voters on the left continuously assent to a political strategy based on taking the right’s votes, they tell the party to move even further in that direction.  The voters’ guiding principle is “beat the Republican.”  The Democrats respond positively by trying to appease more conservative voters and increase their chances of winning.

That responsiveness is why our democracy is not completely broken.  It also leads to a second possible voting strategy for dissatisfied voters:  If voters on the left really care about certain issues that President Obama has opposed, vote for someone else, even if that candidate has “no chance” of winning.  It is true that such a strategy might make it more likely of a Republican winning the election, but even that is not clear.  In fact, Nader likely helped Gore by running in the 2000 election.

Even if you assume that the second strategy would lead to a Republican victory and so you would find the next four years worse than under President Obama, you should also expect the Democratic party to respond to the expressed desires of the electorate—just as it always has done—because its viability as a political party depends on it receiving votes.  Instead of telling Democrats to move to the right, the second strategy would tell them they have gone too far.  And instead of pandering almost completely to “centrists” and “moderates,” the next Democratic candidate might have to try to convince voters on the left to pick him/her for policy reasons and not just because the Republican is supposedly worse.

It may take more than one election cycle to accomplish, but votes are the ultimate political currency.  If people convince politicians to take them seriously, politicians will take them seriously.  The movement of the parties to the right shows that to be true.  If people are unhappy with the consequences of that movement, they should use their votes to say so.

Professor Turley points to the assassination of U.S. citizens, indefinite detention, arbitrary justice, warrantless searches, secret evidence, war crimes, secret courts, immunity from prosecution, extraordinary renditions, and the monitoring of citizens to show that our country may resemble more closely authoritarian regimes like China or Saudi Arabia than the free republic envisioned by its founders.  This leads to the “real question” that he presents:  Do we lie to ourselves by retaining the notion that we live in a free country?  If so, then we will never regain our lost freedoms.

To challenge the notion that United States is more like a free and democratic land of opportunity than an authoritarian plutocracy, one could also point to growing inequality of wealth.  Last year, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz likened the great disparity of wealth in the United States to Russia’s and Iran’s.  Or social mobility: The New York Times reported that the U.S. trails Canada and Western Europe in movement between economic classes – so if you are born poor, you are more likely to die poor.  The U.S. trails these developed nations, too, in making health care available to its citizens.  On the other hand, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, followed by Rwanda and Russia; and trails only China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen in the number of prisoners executed in 2010.  Finally, regarding democratic participation, the United States has one of the lowest turnout rates in the world, and in most races only two major candidates from which to choose.

Of course, none of these facts defines the United States or the overall quality of life here; but no honest understanding of our country can ignore them, either.  The truth is, the quality of American society and the functioning of its democracy go hand-in-hand.  The free and just nation we grew up believing in is not the country we live in.  And that is why openly challenging commonly held beliefs about our society and our government is critical for positive change – we have to shake ourselves out of a state of collective denial.

It would be tragically ironic if those values we cherish most as Americans—freedom, democracy, and equal economic opportunities—were most vulnerable to deterioration precisely because they matter so much to us.  We must not believe so strongly in the myth of America that we become blind to the reality of it.  The citizens of the United States are not inheritors of a just society, but its cultivators and safeguards.  Benjamin Franklin warned that we would lose our Republic if we-the-citizens relinquished that role.  We may be proving him right, but it is not too late to reclaim it.