I just listened to a podcast by Know Your Enemy about Bomb Power.

In Bomb Power, Garry Wills elegantly demonstrates how the imperatives of secretly conceiving, building, and deploying the nuclear bomb fundamentally changed American democracy—massively empowering the presidency, disempowering Congress, and setting the nation on a permanent war footing. At the same time, secrecy and deception metastasized through the American system, enabling the rise of extrajudicial assassinations, coup plotting, domestic surveillance, torture, and clandestine war. “Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission,” Wills writes. “Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began specializing in secret keeping.”

Which is to say, the joke of democratic accountability has been a joke for quite some time.