one of the scariest lessons of the Bush administration...

[mike_c]

...and to a lesser extent, the events during the Clinton years that presaged the Bush years, is the ease with which a relatively small cabal of neo-conservative extremists subverted the balance of powers built into the American experiment with republican democracy. The framers of the Constitution probably had no idea how easily a radical group, protected by partisanship in the legislative and judicial branches and by an adoring and fawning press, could pursue their agenda and overturn generations of domestic and foreign policy consensus within mere months of taking office.

The groundwork was laid during the Clinton administration by Republican Party extremists like Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay who helped to organize the republicans into a partisan force that is absolutely blind to the domestic and international context within which U.S. policy has operated since WWII. Their's has been not only a triumph of neo-conservative ideology over practical reality, but also a thorough trashing of the most important core ideologies underlying America's moral authority abroad and it's self image at home.

But the most important lesson, IMO, is not what they did, or will do if they remain in power, but rather the ease with which partisan politics allowed them to unravel the fabric of American political philosophy. Replacing them in November, and during the course of the next several congressional elections, is only the first part of the job. The bigger part is ensuring that such subversion of American government under the umbrella of partisan protection can never happen again.

This will require fundamental changes in the way we govern America. IMO, it will also require sweeping changes in the relationship between the press and government, and that in turn requires changing the nature of corporate media.

I don't have any immediate solutions to propose-- just my shock in realizing how easily the neo-cons undermined the supposed checks and balances of tripartite government and a "free press."

on edit: I see uncomfortable echos of this same blind partisanship in the Democratic party-- now that the genie is out of the bottle, are we doomed to swing back and forth between ever more polarized partisan extremes until we begin to destroy ourselves from within?

[tabasco]

1. Excellent post!

I believe that quality education is important too. There is a reason repugs fight against good free education for our children. They want easily manipulated voters and workers.
Of course, quality education will result in long-term benefits. Your suggestions for short-term fixes are vital!

[senseandsensibility]

3. As a teacher

I agree, and see examples of this everyday.

[mike_c]

4. agreed-- I'm an educator too...

...and I believe that the dark side feeds on ignorance above all else. Still, there are an awful lot of well educated conservatives.

[DBoon]

6. Make that well-educated WEALTHY conservatives

They are self-consciously supporting their self interest.

Education, by right wing views, is for those who can afford it, those who are "good enough" by family and breeding to "benefit" from it.

Education is for the rulers to better rule. Their subjects have no need of it.

[mike_c]

9. conceded-- good point!

eom

[Poiuyt]

2. RW Republicans view politics as all-out war

There is no "good old boys club" or compromising as far as they are concerned. They will do whatever it takes to further their agenda. Look at how they disrupted the recount vote in Florida. Those thugs were aids to congressmen from OUTSIDE Florida.

You might be interested in the book, "Banana Republican," by John C. Stauber. It talks about what you are describing and what can be done about it.

[mike_c]

7. thanks....

I'll look for a copy soon.

[keithyboy]

5. The "ease" is better known as "racism"

eom

[mike_c]

8. I agree that there is a strong underlying racism in republican...

...politics, and especially the neo-con hatred for arabs and muslims in general, but I think "racism" is too simplistic an explanation for the ease with which they chucked out so much of the foundations of domestic and foreign policy. Certainly they exploited fear of the great swarthy menace in the east for all it was worth, but that's a tool for achieving their own policy objectives. They began wielding it in earnest after they had already used blind partisanship to cover their tracks.

[FizzFuzz]

17. I'd like to add classism to that analysis

classism supported by a "new" old style of business:monopolies.

Also, the death of print media in favor of TV, creating an entirely different way of cognition dependent upon the superficial, immediate, titillating and easily exploited by forces pandering to mass appeal and anchored in our lowest natures, basest instincts. Analytic thought and the memory of past experience are weakened, minds become easily swayed and more reactive. Public discourse becomes fragmented, capable only of discussing the latest, immediate shock, as visually packaged for public consumption. Read "Amusing Ourselves to Death; Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness" Neil Postman. 198-something, I think.
When I read this book last year or so, it made so much sense as to how, due to what seems to me a confluence of the worst possible events and cultural evolutions, things have come to where they are now.

[cliss]

10. Really nice editorial, M.

I agree with you -- was our democracy really that vulnerable, that a small band of termites could bore their way in, with hardly a cry of protest? I've been scratching my head over that one for months, as well.

I often think about the Founding Fathers, how they crafted their blueprint for a living democracy, written within a framework that would allow for blows to be received by outside forces, but it would be strong enough that it could recover and the freedoms inherent in it would still remain.

How could they have foreseen that this obviously fragile plant (more fragile than we realized, apparently!) would be taken over and ruined, within just a few years.

They went to great lengths to keep certain functions separate, so they could not be subverted into a single aim, lest the entire framework be hijacked and turned into a juggernaut which no one could stop. Looks like it happened anyway.

The thing that blows me away is that this juggernaut is in the hands of SO FEW people. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and just a handful of others are running the whole show.

You can tell because it's so lopsided, so incredibly inept. This tells me that there is no teamwork, no discussion sessions to come up with the right answers. And they never divulge anything, either. It's all shrouded in secrety; we have to pry the information from them, and even then they lie and double-talk.

Our entire fate rests with a tiny handful of people.

[Wwagsthedog]

11. Don't forget the fundie factor

This administration is too often given a pass on their misdeeds because they are led by a "good and moral" man. School isn't the only place our populace receives "education" about "values" and how to practice "democracy". Our collective awaredness seems to be no deeper than 15 second flash animation sequences and diminishes on a regular basis. What we need is a one hour "timeout" every day to read and think about concepts to which most of us can now only give lip service.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

12. The Executive Branch run amok.

While the Judiciary and Congress have their thumbs up their collective asses.

Aka "cult of personality" and "oligarchy."

[mike_c]

16. I think cliss is right on....

The creators of American goverment likely never envisioned such profound subversion from within. If everyone works toward a common good-- even if the nature of that good is debated-- then the checks and balances work to prevent an individual or small group from gaining too much power. And remember that the cohort involved in this process at the time was very different from the wider representive democracy we're trying to practice today.

But the role of partisanship has been to protect the ascendency of a small neo-con oligarchy. That's the part that absolutely blows me away-- and I fear that this will now become SOP in American politics.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

19. The other unmentioned aspect is the media.

1770= pamphlets, flyers and speeches.

2004= brainwash.

[mike_c]

20. see #17....

This raises the larger question: is public discourse capable of identifying threats to democracy at all, or is it simply a matter of too many people just waiting to be told what to believe?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

21. Can't disagree with that. (#17)

As to your larger question, of course it is capable. I might point to some of the social democracies in Europe, as an example. It's fragmentalization by design. Survey after survey shows that the vast majority of Americans hold basically similar ideals. If those ideals were enacted in policy the oligarchs would lose a measure of their power. It's 10,000 people suppressing the will of 280 million (Apartheid Americanus). Enter said oligarchs. Create issues where there are none. Highlight differences, ignore commonality. Pander to emotion, etc.

The day of reckoning is coming. It's just a matter of when. Probably after a catastrophe, like the stock market crash. Nothing wakes up the sheeple like a catastrophe.

[mike_c]

24. I should have been more specific....

I meant public discourse in the U.S. right now-- in the context of corporate media guiding much of the public discourse. Truthfully, I believe that open discourse is the absolute best defense of democracy. But I believe that it is being actively stifled in America. In that context, can it work to identify threats to democracy, or does it simply become another tool of the oligarchs?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

26. In it's present context? No/Yes.

The oligarchs control roughly 80% of the message. If we let them do a little more consolidating and they get their grimy paws on the internet(I have little doubt that this post is subject to review, even if not actively), it's over. Short of catastrophe.

The fact that we're having this conversation adds to the Yes side of the ledger. The good news is that 3/4 of the country is wired. The bad news is that it's a pen stroke away from being irrelevant.


Edit for clarity: "No" means that there has to be enough of a voice to effect change. "Yes" means that we can still talk, therefore it can. Wishy-washy but the best I can do.

[Jeebo]

13. A few suggestions off the top of my head...

1) Reinstate the fairness doctrine.

2) A constitutional amendment making gerrymandering impossible by defining inflexible and unambiguous mathematical formulae guiding the drawing of congressional districts.

3) Changing rules, or adding new ones, in the House and Senate to prevent finding marginally legal ways to subvert the letter or the spirit of the rules. Three examples: Every senator and congressperson shall be entitled to a reasonable minimum amount of time to study the text of proposed legislation before committee votes and floor votes are held. Every roll call vote is FINAL when everybody has voted; no more holding the vote artifically "open" to enable the arm-twisting of fence-sitters. And every bill and nominee that doesn't make it out of committee after a certain time period -- let's say, by two weeks before the close of the congressional session -- automatically gets a full up or down floor vote. This is a way that Republicans were able to cheat during the Clinton administration to get to make judicial nominees that Clinton rightly should have made: by stalling in the Senate until there was a Republican in the White House. Now Democrats have been doing the same sorts of things to hold up Bush's nominees, and rightfully so, I think, not only because those judicial nominees are extremists, but also because many of those judicial openings are there because Republicans wouldn't let Clinton fill them. I think the Senate rules should be changed to make it IMPOSSIBLE for EITHER party to do this. (I do think the filibuster should remain, however, as a last-gasp measure to stop extremists.)

4) How do you REQUIRE an elected official to enforce the law? There are some laws on the books right now that are just simply not being enforced, or ignored completely. Thom Hartmann talks on his radio show, for example, about the Sherman antitrust law, which is still on the books, but starting with Reagan, nobody has been enforcing it. A law is worthless if EVERYBODY is just going to let it sit there, and nobody is going to follow it or go after people who violate it. What can be done about this? Any suggestions, DUers?

Ron

[JohnOneillsMemory]

14. Sadly, the US gov't was designed in error, the FoundingFather's knew it.

The debate over how Congress should be set-up was resolved by tragically ceding to the smaller states that the Senate would have two reps per state regardless of population.

Thus representative government was impossible from the start. Ben Franklin was ancient when the US Constitution was ratified and warned that it was imperfect and tyranny would be back and hell would descend on the generation that suffered its return. That's us.

Read Richard Rosenfeld's article in the May 2004 issue of Harpers Magazine entitled 'What Democracy?: The Case For Abolishing the United States Senate.'

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance of the laws of our country."- Thomas Jefferson 1816

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

[K-W]

15. There is no fundemental conservative philosophy other than winning.

That is the problem. The republican party is made up of interest groups with terribly small focuses and politicians who only care about winning and have no fundemental motivating principles.

[mike_c]

18. agreed, but will we now have to stoop...

...to their methods in order to protect America from them, or can we strengthen the fabric of government to inherently resist such blatant, narrow partisan self-interest?

[arendt]

22. The CIA had lots of practice on our nickel before they tried it here

Every technique used by the neocons had been field tested
by the CIA for fifty years.

The CIA has been planting stories in newpapers (cf. The Mighty
Wurlitzer), funding phony grassroots groups, smearing people,
causing people to have "accidents", and generally learning how
to disrupt an open, democratic society by using its very openness
and democracy against it.

What we really need to do is abolish the CIA. Break it up. Rebuild
it from the ground up with a bunch of agencies that all spy on each
other, the way the Nazis and Communists did it. The only way to
catch a spy is to set a spy. Maybe we need a "term limits" policy
for intelligence personnel. We definiitely need a way to root out
the self-funding "proprietary companies" that use drug and arms
smuggling and bank fraud to finance themselves. One of these
companies (variously named Southern Air Transport or "the
Enterprise") was behind the Contra War and was deeply entangled
with Bush Sr. The privatization of the Iraq War is the next logical
step as the proprietaries continue to take over our government.

The intelligence world is the antithesis of the world of democracy.
To be a good democrat, tell the truth. To be a good spy, lie. And
so forth. America started its descent into hell the day Harry Truman
signed the National Security Act of 1947 and turned our foreign
policy over to the Dulles brothers and their rich boys' club, the CIA.

arendt

[Q]

23. Maybe the Framers DID have an idea of what was possible?

"Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and individuals and their families selected for the trust. Whether our Constitution has hit on the exact degree of control necessary, is yet under experiment." --Thomas Jefferson to M. van der Kemp, 1812. ME 13:136

"I sincerely wish... we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237

"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." --Thomas Jefferson

[mike_c]

25. Jefferson reminds us once again that he was...

...one of the most perceptive judges of human nature as well as one of the greatest architects of government in western history. Thanks for posting those quotes.