The mounting threat of dictatorship has deep historical roots. The post-World War II period has seen repeated and sustained attacks on democratic rights, ranging from the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s to the CIA-FBI spying and "dirty tricks" that culminated in the Watergate crisis in the 1970s.
These earlier assaults on constitutional rights, however, encountered significant resistance within the political establishment. President Harry Truman, for example, used his veto in an attempt to kill the 1950 McCarran Act, the last time legislation was passed giving the government powers of indefinite detention without trial. Truman called the legislation "a long step toward totalitarianism" and a "mockery of the Bill of Rights."
What is perhaps most significant about the passage of the NDAA and its codification of indefinite detention is the lack of any significant opposition. The mass media and the political establishment passed over Obama's signing of the bill in virtual silence.
This shift is bound up with fundamental changes in the structure of US society--in particular, the unprecedented growth of social inequality. This gulf, dividing the billionaires and multi-millionaires that make up the top one percent from the great mass of working people, is incompatible with even the pretense of democracy.
With American and world capitalism confronting a historic breakdown, the ruling class, which controls both the Democratic and Republican parties, is prepared to employ whatever means are required--including those of police-state dictatorship--to defend its monopoly of wealth and power against a resurgence of class struggle. Similar developments are taking place throughout Europe and internationally under the impact of the global crisis.
The defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the fight to defend jobs and living standards and is impossible today without a direct assault on the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy.
Such a struggle can be mounted only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program for the reorganization of economic life on the basis of social need, rather than private profit.
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