When appropriate, we also must be open to the founding of new alliances and parties, as happened in the final years of the Bush Administration when liberals and progressives from the Democratic and Green Parties, and traditional conservatives and business executives and military brass from the Republican Party, united to set the Restoration in motion and to return to the checks-and-balances system of government established by our founders and which had worked so well for several hundred years.
PEEKING BEHIND POWER'S CURTAIN
BW: How do you explain why true conservatives and corporate leaders and military officers deserted their leader in such great numbers?
Tribe: The historical record shows that there were practical reasons for doing so: While a few huge companies reaped windfall profits from CheneyBush policies, the overall economy really couldn't return to real health with the debt-anchors dragging it down as a result of the trillions of dollars spent on unnecessary wars of choice. The troops were stretched so thin fighting all these wars of imperial aggression against native guerrillas that the military leaders rebelled in order to protect their troops and their services from more such adventuring abroad. The pre-eminent position that America had enjoyed for so long on the world stage began to deteriorate rapidly, with its negative impact on our exports, the health of the dollar, our economic stability, our lack of respect abroad, and the concomitant rise of other major countries such as China and India and the South Asia/Russia Alliance in general.
But the Restoration also can be explained this way: The powers that be in American society, those corporate and political forces that truly control the economy and parties, have freedom to carry out their agendas so powerfully because their goals and strategies are essentially hidden. But Bush and Cheney and their cronies, with their bumbling policies and their arrogant in-your-face tactics, tore away the veils and revealed all too clearly the faces of those powers-that-be and what was really going on: the corporate theft on a massive scale, the rapacious imperialism abroad, the manipulation of the mass-media in hiding the truth, the ignoring of the rule of law and the Constitution, etc. Therefore, it was to the advantage of the elites to dump this incompetent, reckless crew and replace them with the usual type of smarter, more malleable leaders.
OPPOSING POLITICAL THUGGERY
BW: Can you help us understand why it took so long for that momentum to build in the body politic?
Tribe: Part can be understood by the laws of inertia and entropy, part to how skillfully the CheneyBush Administration and the corporate mass-media that supported them bamboozled the public, part to how the citizenry accepted this misinformation for a long, long time, out of fear and confusion. But deeper than that, I think a key factor was that the opposition was incapable of dealing with the kind of smashmouth tactics practiced by Bush and Cheney and their politics-guru Karl Rove.
Throughout most of American political life, the various parties had fought each other long and hard but generally with a certain respect for the other side, and with a tendency to come together eventually somewhere in the middle in order to get things done. But the Roveians decided to play a different kind of politics, aimed at the utter destruction and marginalization of their opponents in order to establish permanent one-party rule from an extremist ideological position.
It was a kind of political thuggery that was more reminiscent of Stalinist Russia and Hitler's Germany: the Constitution was mangled, laws passed by the legislature were ignored, effective oversight of the leader was non-existent, the advice of military specialists was overridden, elections were manipulated, ideology ruled all.
Under the reign of Cheney and Bush, torture and secret prisons and "the disappearing" of perceived opponents were commonplace. Bush was given (or simply grabbed) near-dictatorial powers to rule as "commander-in-chief" in a permanent "wartime" setting, free to violate whatever laws were in force for everyone else. (This included ignoring the 600-year-old legal tradition of habeas corpus -- appearing before a judge to verify that arrests are legal.) In effect, the democratic presidency had become the feudal monarchy, and for a country that had established itself in opposition to a brutal king, this contradiction in American political life could not last forever.
Most Americans, coming from a long tradition of more genteel political battles, for the longest time didn't know how to confront this mendacious, authoritarian juggernaut that was rolling across the Constitution and distorting so many of the governmental institutions. Though the progressive blogosphere had agitated against the CheneyBush administration early on, it took a long while before the general public caught on (aided by the constant revelations of new and more reprehensible scandals) and the opposition built to critical mass. It was those new alliances that created the critical mass of opposition that led to the demise of not only the Bush Administration but the rapid decline of the ideological fanaticism and faction behind it.
The important thing I want to emphasize is that the United States under Bush and Cheney came mighty close to a totalitarian, fascist society. Had the Democrats, buoyed by public outrage, not stood up to the Bush Administration and confronted them time after time directly and with courage, there might well not have been a Restoration period in American history. Withdrawing funding for the Iraq War, and the initiation of impeachment proceedings, appear to have been the precipitating factors that fomented the essential momentum for the swift exit of Bush and Cheney from the scene. Without those moves, American democracry might well have been strangled, and even more destructive wars abroad might have been initiated.
"HARD IMPERIALISM" DAYS ARE OVER
BW: Finally, Professor Tribe, could you sum up what your historical research reveals for our own time?
Tribe: The forces of worldwide change were manifesting themselves before Bush and Cheney, to be sure, but their Administration hastened the slide of American power and dominance in the world by their lack of creativity in dealing with these changes. They relied on the long-discredited and ineffective "hard imperialism" that did little but reveal their technological might's inherent weakness in dealing with the many low-tech nationalist rebellions.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
In the 1930s something like 30% of the American public were socialists and communists.
In the 1960s we unleashed a great process of societal transformation.
Bush is the Restoration, he is destroying social security, destroying all vestiges of liberalism in the government, and has done all in his power to place government entirely in the service of the rich and privileged.
We don't need a restoration, we need a revolution.
We have shown the ability to conduct revolutions by peaceful means and thereby to achieve lasting results.
The left needs to reinvent itself as a revolutionary, non-violent movement dedicated to the radical change needed to achieve social justice in this country.
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 11:21:29 AM
I think you're too much of an optimist. You got it absolutely right about the implementing of a soviet-fascist government. If the corporatist's decide that the Chinese model for Capitalism is more advantageous for their ends they will attempt to install that model for the USA. This will happen before any restoration, for the sake of argument.
by
Swami Bogananda (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 38 comments)
on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 4:34:28 PM
