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Edited on Fri Oct-05-07 06:25 PM by Bucky
...until finally a country gets so large that the people are simply unable to retain their liberties. We are not at that point. In fact, the United States remains the largest free and open republic in history. I walk the streets unaccosted by troops. I participate in democratic debates (note the small Ds and small Rs I'm using here--this is not a partisan discussion). I go to anti government protests and nothing worse happens to me than someone takes my picture. Even that shouldn't happen, but my liberties are not infringed.
And yet how can you look at secret spying, secret prisons, Total Information Awareness, CIA torture sites, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, wars for oil, phony terror alerts, dropping voting rates, and almost total Congressional compliance with all of the above... and not conclude that we're showing stress fractures along the seams of our democratic institutions? Our votes for members of Congress mean less and less, with special interest lobbyists able to swing votes and de-fang legislation that they don't like.
I'm scared.
We vote, we speak freely, we protest, we petition, and we win a few small battles here and there and do that great Washington thing that the Framers envisioned most critical to keeping rule by the people alive--we prevent the government from doing much of anything. The Madisonian mechanics of our 18th century Constitution functions very much like it was intended. We have enough media outlets to say our right to a free press is retained... and yet all this democracy seems not to add up to much.
We live in an age of limited options. This is shocking to the system, because in 1991 when the long standing geopolitical crisis that shaped our world came to an end, we lived in a world of almost unlimited possibilities. Today, what we choose to do as a nation, what measures, parties, and movements we give our common mandate to in the next two or three elections seems almost not to matter.
In 2008 a bunch of politicians will tell you "This is the most important election in a generation." But they always say that. Next year, it simply won't be true. I'll vote Democratic or I'll saw my arm off, but the voice I give in 2008 won't matter so much--not as much as 1992, not as much as 2000. The damage done to the country is so great, that anybody coming into federal office will be hamstrung by a country with damaged options, sullied reputation, inadequate assets, and damaged hope.
Whoever comes into office in 2009, and I'm certain it'll be a Democrat, won't be able to extract troops from Iraq. The reason our top three candidates couldn't give a guarantee of leaving in four years is that we don't know how more enmeshed we'll be, or where else we'll be enmeshed, in January 2009. Wherever they try to pull back, they'll almost certainly be confronted with human suffering that comes with any political power vacuum in a dangerous place. We will see on TV suffering that no human heart can bear to stand by and offer no help to. And our troops will be close by, waiting to evacuate. Pulling out of Iraq, starting in 15 months from now, will be a back and forth process, two steps out of the mess followed by one step back in to put out the little neighborhood humanitarian brushfires that our pull-out will certainly create.
What's more, we won't know how much further relations with Iran will have deteriorated in the next year. Bush and Cheney seem to be deliberately sabotaging all efforts to ease tensions. In this they enjoy the full alliance and cooperation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and sundry radical elements in Iran. Too many bastards stand to make too much money from keeping the shit stirred up--and these bastards seem to have all the access. Add to this mix the almost Onion-like absurdity of the G8 making Tony Blair its regional peace ambassador, and you can start to imagine how much more mischief and harm this cast of characters will concoct in the next 15 months. Whoever becomes president in 2009 will have about as many regional diplomatic options as a guy who gets promoted to fire captain in the middle of burning building.
There are other areas where democracy doesn't seem to matter. Global warming procedes apace despite the fact that even conservative politicians are finally waking up to the reality of it. For some reason, the pollution isn't pausing while we gather up a working sane majority to devise a plan. And this rate of accellerating ecological disaster is occurring before the world's two largest nations finish gearing up their economies with fossil fuel driven industrialization. How fast will the glaciers melt after China builds all its planned factories? How much control can the world exercise over China's pollution? The efforts to slow down a determined authoritarian regime like China will look a lot like trying to stop a barreling Mack truck Fred Flintstone-style. It'll take a lot of will power and a lot of consistency and create a lot of discomfort... and it will still take a long time to have any appreciable effect.
The fiscal mess created by three generations of reckless, militarist politicians helps create the perfect storm of impotent democracy. The deficit is huge, almost insurmountable. But it's only a fraction of our overall debt--the accumulation of sixty years' worth of deficits. Bush exacerbated the problem tremendously, but he didn't cause the problem. In my lifetime only two presidents have seriously addressed this issue (few people remember now that Jimmy Carter had a workable plan in place to balance the budget by 1984). But the size of the annual accumulated deficits under Bush dwarfs even the worst of the Reagan-era debt fests. And yet he's leaving us with commitments so vast and inescapable, from tattered infrastructure to unmet UN accounts to a frightening level of dependency on costly privatized government functions, from intelligence to military contractors to multi-year construction projects, that my daughter's grandchildren may not be able to finish off paying for this era of pork.
And on top of that, these demented hooligans want us to buy a contractor-driven return to the Moon. Hey, I've got a cheap plan for getting to the Moon... stack all our unpaid bills in one pile and then climb to the top--wallah, you're practically there!
Sorry--I can never go for more than eight paragraphs without writing something goofy. But I can't be goofy about what may be the signs of a diminished democracy. I'm not the sort of person who goes around tossing off the "fascism" label. Anyone who thinks America is a fascist country needs to spend a week passing out Falung Gong literature in Tibet. What we have is simple corruption, garden variety imperialism, creeping monarchism. Every time someone on our side decries Bush or one of his floozies horking loogies on the Bill of Rights, the Red State anti-sanity crowd will squawk, "But Clinton did it too" and then give some lame ass marginal example. But after I've finished scorning the Dittohead monkeys, I have to recognize that they have a point.
All our liberal saints have had their moments of coercive government illiberality. FDR locked up 3rd generation Americans for having 2nd Generation Japanese-American parents, Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal civil service and gave wink-nudge encouragement to the Klan, Teddy Roosevelt authorized brutal anti-insurgency pogroms in the Philippines that make Fallujah look like a parking violation. Our country has always done horrible things for which it had to atone later. The difference between then and now is that now our capacity to set it right seems beyond the scope of our assets and now the levers of our government seem beyond the grasp of our votes. Even if we can get the right people with big enough majorities in place to enact the right policies, the volume of sewage seems to significantly outmeasure the capacity of all our mops and pails.
Again, I repeat, I'll vote Democratic, come Hil or high water, for the rest of my days. If it's only a matter of should we clean up the mess with a Democratic mop or a Republican toothpick, I'll take the mop. Or, working outside this an already strained metaphor, I know there's a difference between the two corporate-controlled parties. Our corporate-controlled party can be lobbied and is willing to listen to, rather than just manipulate, the people. They believe in solving problems before problems get too big.
But regardless of which party is in power, the capacity of We the People to effect our mandates and thus affect our problems is limited. We have the forms of a full functioning republic, but the creeping expansion of the Executive Branch, the self-emasculation of a willfully irresponsible Legislature, which the Framers called the "First Branch"--and which they believed was the central expression of the people's sovereignty--is a sign that our country may be operating beyond its capacity. This, I fear, is the mechanism by which empires crumble. Our flexible Constitution is built to adapt to new exigencies. But the adaptation that has made the most sense since we entered the American Century has been a shifting away from democracy and a shifting toward an Executive with uncheckable power.
When Justices O'Conner and Kennedy first pushed the monkey through the White House bars, I was inclined to see the Bush administration and its rightwing choir of science-haters as aberrations in American history, a last hurrah of Billy Sunday hucksters before the Republicans returned to a McCain-Goldwater sort of benign neglectism. I remain uncertain of the truth, as any student of current history should. But I tend to think now that they are more culmination of self-destructive trends in our culture than bumps in the road toward an expanding American egality.
After a steamy summer full of politicking and compromise in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin toasted and warned his countrymen they had "a Republic, if you can keep it." And so I'm scared that after 220 years of intermittant progress, I live in the generation that finally drops the ball.
Maybe I'm just in shitty mood because I turned 44 yesterday and no one in the Lounge wished me happy birthday and one of my history students told me his brother, a Marine, was killed in Iraq last summer and still he plans to join up too. Maybe I'm missing some big countervailing trends and really the "republican simplicity" that George Washington prescribed 218 years ago is still flowering in a thousand decentralized locations in cyberspace. But from where I sit now, calculating how old Jeb will be in 2016, how old Chelsea will be in 2024, I have to wonder just how well we have kept faith, what kind of a country I am going to leave to my child.
I just thought I should share.
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