In 1929, Leon Trotsky explained
In 1929, Leon Trotsky explained that the rise of dictatorial tendencies in Europe reflected the breakdown of democratic forms of rule under conditions of heightened class tensions as well as sharpening conflicts among the imperialist powers.
“By analogy with electrical engineering,” he wrote, “democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours … Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.”
The CIA scandal represents the burnout of just such a democratic circuit breaker, under conditions of a toxic combination of militarism abroad, growing social inequality at home, and the rise of a criminal and unaccountable financial aristocracy.
Nearly 15 years have passed since the stolen election of 2000. That irrevocable break with constitutional procedures was followed by 9/11 and the declaration of the “war on terror”—a political fraud used to justify endless wars overseas and the destruction of democratic rights within the US.
The intervening years have seen the growth of unbridled state spying on the personal, political and social activities of the American people; the assassination of US citizens and thousands of “targeted killings;” rendition, torture and indefinite detention.
Now the entire political establishment acquiesces in the trampling of the Constitution by the government’s military-intelligence apparatus.
The disintegration of American democracy is a product of the intractable crisis of American and world capitalism. The ruling class can no longer accept the restraints imposed by its own laws.
It lives in mortal fear of the social implications of its own reactionary and rapacious policies.
The working class must halt the drive to dictatorship and defend its democratic and social rights by mobilizing itself as an independent political force in the struggle for socialism.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/07/14/pers-j14.html