Jane Smiley has a long, excellent, and extraordinarily chilling article in the Huffington Post, in which she confronts a question that’s been nagging at a lot of us for a while now: is it possible that BushCo is not simply incompetent or sleazy but actually and in fact evil, intent not on moving the nation toward a “conservative” position but on assuming dictatorial power and destroying whatever and whoever gets in the way of deploying that power to enrich themselves and their friends.
Smiley lists ten actions that the administration has taken which have worked to disrupt peace, disempower citizens, waste the environment, and destroy democratic institutions; these are widely considered by mainstream media, even the “liberal” media, to be “mistakes”; Smiley asks us to consider that they might, in fact, be realized intentions. “It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be—it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again.”
How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownieâ€?, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake–that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them.
When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does.
Smiley points out that the common description of the American political spectrum as running in a single continuum from left to right may not be adequate to explain what’s happening now. In such a continuum, Smiley points out,
Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power.
The Democrats, in Smiley’s analysis, are in on the power grab; how else to explain their abject failure to stage a principled resistance to the war in Iraq or to fight vigorously to take back the elections that are stolen from them? How else to explain Hillary’s sudden embrace of flag-burning as a vital threat to our nation? Smiley is clear that the threat is, in fact, nothing less than the destruction of our democratic republic and its replacement by an unabashed dictatorship. And she’s also clear on what our response must be (although she is less clear on how we will stimulate that response):
What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous [Bush and his cronies] are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress–poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economyâ€? is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successesâ€?, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failuresâ€?, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems–by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.
This is an important article. The points that Smiley makes are points that others have hinted at or implied or worried about, with regard to this issue or that. Smiley compiles the whole catalog of misdeeds and demonstrates the intention that gives that catalog its theme, explains its logic, and reveals the cunning and ruthlessness of the plot behind it. She is lucid, well-armed with examples, and compelling. Read the article and consider these questions: which side are you on; what would it take to convince you that they are truly evil; how will you know when they’ve gone too far; what are you prepared to lose to save what you hold dear?
bill | 18-Dec-05 at 9:06 pm | Permalink
Richard,
Great post.
Smiley is on the right track. Interestingly, it is the continued growth of this sort of Government Inc. that made Al Gore unacceptable to me (and no, I didn’t vote for his main opponent either). We do best to elect governors and other outsiders to the White House. But George Bush isn’t really one of those. And I think that deep down, the American voters know this and were undecided between the two. Bush didn’t “stealâ€? anything from Gore. Gore just couldn’t win it. A 51% to 50% split makes both of them losers. But we elect far more than a team of two when we choose an executive team.
When we elect a president, we also elect their cronies—as you put it. And it is cronyism that our constitution is designed to balance. But we have allowed the two dominant political parties to define elections as a choice between the two of them and their respective platforms when the truth is much more complicated. There are many careers and fortunes riding on the outcome of a presidential election. Isn’t it interesting how many House speakers and whips have been in trouble these past few decades? Corruption and cronyism run deep in Washington but we ignore it while glibly rooting for our favorite party as if they were merely football teams struggling to carry a pigskin across some chalk line in the turf. And the professional press, the supposed watchdogs of democracy, are at once pawns and accomplices. The boneheads.
Am glad to see a journalist look past the same-old-same-old to see a bit of the truth. But nothing will improve until we voters turn out incumbents, willingly taking the hit on congressional pork, election after historical election until the bonds of cronyism are broken. I though we were going to get there in the mid 90s. But the only thing that changed was the predominant color on the electoral map.
bill