Why the "Republican Revolution" is unique.

This is from Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest:

Elected Democrats and moderate Republicans keep letting far-Right conspirators off the hook, and failing to expose the true nature of their activities to the public. Perhaps this is because they honestly did not and do not recognize them for what they are. Some of Nixon's cronies went to jail -- none of Reagan/Bush I's. Worse, the Carter and Clinton administrations did not ask for a full accounting of the transgressions -- political and financial -- of the prior administrations. In a way, this signaled to the public to expect such activities as part of "business as usual." By allowing the Right to publicly get away with an "everybody does it" excuse, the legitimacy of our democratic form of government was eroded.

... I think it is hard now to avoid seeing the true nature of the group that has taken over the Republican Party. The record is certainly clear, their intentions are clear, their activities are clear, and it's time to take a stand. After seizing control of the country by the narrowest of margins in 2000 the Republicans have illegally excluded Democrats and the public from almost all aspects of management of the government. They have positioned ideological agents throughout the departments, agencies and the courts. In one of their first acts in power they allowed companies like Enron to "harvest" the people of California and Oregon, and appointed FERC members would not do their job to stop this. Their tax cuts, that went to only a few, have bankrupted the country and spent our Social Security retirement money. They have handed out our country's natural resources, and given the right to pollute our air and water for profit to a few rich cronies. They have launched aggressive war in an imperialistic scheme to bring the Middle East's oil supplies under their control.

... We have to realize that we are dealing with an organized revolutionary conspiracy to seize power, enrich the few, and subject us to an ideological/theocratic/imperialist dictatorship. They often describe THEMSELVES as being modeled on the old Communist Party and their methods for infiltrating and seizing power.

"You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate," he explains in The Art of Political War. "You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.'"This is an emergency and we must recognize it as such. These people will go to all costs to succeed, including fomenting civil war.With today's NSA spying in mind, this from written a year-and-a-half-ago:

Let's look at it this way for a minute. Suppose that the intentions of the Bush people are entirely on the up-and-up. But looking at the way they have eroded accountability, oversight, and constitutional protections, suppose some OTHER people, with less-than-honorable intentions, examine these openings and see this as an opportunity to step in and seize power. The mechanisms for this are all in place, including the mechanisms to squash opposition and dissent. The Patriot Act, for example, allows the government to spy on anyone the President designates as an "enemy." And new technologies enable comprehensive tracking of a person's every action. We already have a precedent of Congress looking the other way and avoiding their oversight responsibilities no matter how extreme the transgression. We already have the precedent of the Justice Department covering up instead of investigating crimes. We already have the precedent of the Courts overruling law in favor of ideology.

In my readings during the 60's and early 70's I quickly realized that nations which allowed the Communist Party to take part in government quickly found themselves becoming Communist dictatorships. It wasn't so much the Communist ideology as it was the utter disrespect Communists held for their opponents and for democratic methods of government. They don't negotiate with their opponents. They work to crush them.

We are seeing these same attitudes from the Bush administration and from a Republican Party rapidly moving to towards the authoritarian right. It isn't so much the ineffective methods they have taken towards fighting terrorism [Iraq is about long term administrative methods of control of the Middle East and the only thing that makes the ME important, its oil supplies, not about fighting Terrorism.]

The war in Iraq in the short term is a prop used by the Bush administration to excuse the fact that the Bush administration is placing ideological controllers throughout the federal government, expanding methods of controlling people and gathering information on them to enhance that control [Look at the no-Fly list. What criteria gets you on that list, and how do you get off of it if you are not Ted Kennedy?]

Look at the payoffs to corporations, beginning with the refusal to investigate the rape of the California electric power purchasers when it was clear that Enron was manipulating the market. If Enron had not self-destructed, the Bush administration was willing to let it go on for years. Look at the tax cuts for multimillionaires while cutting Medicaid to children and cutting food stamps.

The theory of the separation of powers in the government expects the Congress to perform oversight over the Executive Branch when the Executive fails to act as it should. But with this all sitting right in front of everyone, the Republican Congress refuses to perform any oversight functions over the Executive Branch. They haven't looked at teh FEMA response to Katrina yet, either. Why?

The fact that the Abramoff investigation will possibly pull in 20 or more Legislators for accepting bribes suggests why. Congress and Congressional (Republican)Leadership has been bought off, while the Democrats have been removed from any effective control of Congressional action.

I don't think the "Republican Revolution" can last. It eats its seed corn. America became a great nation by being a democratic nation sitting in the middle of the largest single free market [in terms of land area] in the world at the key moment that the Industrial Revolution was expanding out of Great Britain. But now the easy gains of early industrialism are over in America, just as international competition has gotten much stiffer. The fear of failure is leading the Republicans to tighten of administrative and bureaucratic control of teh economy and to the reduction of effective democracy.

The Republican-led desire of Americans to take greater control of the economy and the nation may well be a reaction to the loss of economic power America has experienced since about 1960. A lot of teh rest of the world has learned to productive power of industrialism and made them more competitive with America. Face it. Toyota will soon replace General Moters as the largest car manufacturer in the world.

The Republican reaction is to be afraid. Fear leads companies to merge and tighten administrative controls at the expense of letting markets work, and leads governments to tighten autocratic controls at the expense of democracy. The problem with this is that it centralizes decision-making in a few people who are separated from the problems they are trying to solve by numerous layers of bureaucracy. It also raises the stakes of most decisions, making it more risky to experiment. That is almost the textbook definition of "conservative." China, Russia and most of South America are experimenting with moving the opposite direction, towards more free markets and less autocratic government.

Eliminating effective democracy and giving economic power over to primarily large corporations while neutering the power of labor just as the rest of the world finds effective Industrial and post-industrial economics has already crippled American economic competitiveness. Our Universities are facing rapidly growing competition around the world. All we really have today internationally is military power and the world class financial markets in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

We can hope that America will wise up soon and reject greater administrative control of the economy (less centralization and more free markets) and reject fear-based autocratic government. The wider recognition of the excesses in spying on Americans and the recognition that we are fighting a war in Iraq merely to allay our own fears, without doing anything to the real enemies we need to fight, may be hints that we have started to move the correct direction.

I hope so.