The Fall of the One-Party Empire ...The imperial dreams are in ruins.

[ProSense]

(December 12, 2005 issue )
The Fall of the One-Party Empire
Jonathan Schell


For some time I have been suggesting here that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in GOP hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine--call it the budding one-party global empire--would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.

The choice was and remains: empire or republic? Just a few years ago the "sole superpower," the new Rome, master of the "unipolar" world, seemed to many to be bestriding the globe. Some, like columnist Charles Krauthammer, were reveling in the triumph of "the American hegemon." "History has given you an empire, if you will keep it," he said, traducing Benjamin Franklin, who had said at the Constitutional Convention that the United States was a republic if you can keep it.


snip...

The imperial dreams are in ruins. But the ruins, strangely, are not of things that were built and then collapsed; they are of fantasies. We are not dealing here with the decline of a new Rome. It is not that a great power has been brought down--although the casualties of the war, American and Iraqi, have been tragically real--but that a world of fancy and fraud has been exploded by facts.

And the one-party state at home? It was not the mirage that the empire was. The structure of the American state, and to a lesser extent the economy, really has been deeply altered. Real hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the coffers of the GOP while real hundreds of billions poured into the pockets of the rich. Real laws were passed that tore gaping holes in the Bill of Rights. A real shift of the judiciary toward the radical right was set in motion. An unprecedented concentration of power--fusing government, corporations, the military, portions of the media and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus--was created. And yet this structure, too, has been shaken by recent events.


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/schell

[rzemanfl]

1. The country is in ruins too. n/t

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Shaken, but not necessarily toppled

I'm pessimistic.

What about the voting machines, the vote counting, the voter disqualifications, the compliant media? In short, what about elections?

In 2006, will we again see cases where a Democrat is comfortably ahead in all the polls but loses anyway? If that happens in enough cases to ensure that the GOP stays in control, then we'll know that we have no chance in 2008 or 2010 or . . .

In other words, the one-party state will endure for years, decades, perhaps generations. The world-dominating empire may not happen, but the GOP will probably learn to be content with an empire limited in scope to the USA.

[bryant69]

4. I'm not that pessimistic

We'll have to see, but no sense in assuming failure. Rather we need to take what steps we can to strengthen the electoral system.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[ProSense]

5. Part of what is bring them down

is more people are seeing them for what they are. A new awareness on the part of voters coupled with election reform will ensure that they don't get a permanent grip on the country.

[Hardrada]

6. O and "Democrats" like Joe LIEberman

and the Nelsons busily enabling the GOP.

[roseBudd]

11. Stolen Election Ohio 2004 required many complicit individuals who

suppressed, who padded tabulations, who diverted absentee ballots and purged voter registrations, who sent voters to the wrong precinct in a multi-precinct polling location, who distributed misleading flyers to discourage voting, or incorrectly told felons who had served their time they could not vote.

If the GOP turns out to be the quintessential bankrupt idea that serves no one's best interest other than the minuscule number of people who fall under the category of the ultra rich, then the army of complicit individuals will dry up.

[enigma000]

3. So will all 50 states become independant?

Or do you think some might join Canada and Mexico?

Who gets to keep the nukes? Who is governor of North Dakota? Does he have authority to use nukes?

[Mme. Defarge]

7. Jonathan Schell

"Not since the Soviet Union fell fourteen years ago have we witnessed a greater reversal of fortune."

May it be so. Not long after the election of Ronald Reagan, I read Jonathan Schell's "The Fate of the Earth," which was first published as a three-part series in The New Yorker. I can't begin to describe the impact it had on my entire world view. One Saturday morning not long after that, a woman knocked on my door carrying a clipboard. I assumed she was selling something and almost didn't open the door. For some reason, I changed my mind. Turns out, she was campaigning for the Democratic candidate for governer and happened to have voter registration cards. Right then and there I changed my voter registration from Republican to Democrat.

I still have those three issues of The New Yorker. Figured someday they'd be collector's items.

[ProSense]

9. That's a great story. n/t.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

8. Kick...VERY important article for those that have not yet recognized....

...the true nature of the NeoCon beast.

[cosmicone]

10. Don't forget the Iraqi freedom fighters

who are bringing down the megalomania of an empire daily.

Their sacrifice is helping the US maintain its democracy as well and they should be celebrated as heroes at some point.

[enigma000]

12. Perhaps they will come here too

Their help here could be of assisstance. Lord knows, we could stand to lose a few Walmarts....

[ProSense]

13. The world already knows this

More Americans need to wake up to the Republican smear, spin, steal method of gaining more and more power.