Beth Arnold Seems Excited About The Obama Revolution

I'm talking about a 21st Century American Revolution that we are witnessing with our own eyes. It is the electricity that is burning through our air and the fresh words and ideas that are spilling into our ears. It is freedom itself we're beginning to smell again and a chance for a new beginning we've truly never had. Americans have been starving, and a healing future is tempting us to the table for an essential feast.

The notion that Americans can come together -- people of every generation and color -- to rebuild our country is a tonic that Barack Obama is offering us. The image of the United States again standing tall in the world after the last seven years we've suffered is a magnificent relief.

This revolution that has burst open in the baby (sic) days of 2008 is the opposite of The Civil War. This is the Civilizing War to make us one and whole again. It is a revolution of hope and faith that Senator Obama has inspired by his belief in himself and in us. It is a fire that is sweeping through our land and leaping across oceans to light up the peoples of other nations to give them hope and confidence in us again.

(Beth, it has become a habit for all Americans, except maybe the Quakers, to always use the word, "war," even when one has just said that it isn't a war (civil or otherwise). Beth, there is no such thing as a civilizing war. We all know that there have been non-bloody revolutions, but never a civilizing war. It really is amazing how we have all been herded into the "war on everything" mindset.")

It is the first real chance in several generations -- since JFK's presidency and the revolutions of the 60's and 70's -- for Americans to sense the power behind such social and cultural movements and to feel the magnetic pull to participate. My God, this is good! It is injecting energy that will continue to push us forward light years ahead of where we have been in the Dark Ages of George Bush. As a middle child and natural born rebel as well as a child of the 70's, I am thrilled by this. I believe it strengthens our people and country. It will tide us over until the next revolution is needed.

I first felt this gigantic shift on the night of the Iowa caucuses. Watching Obama and his supporters gave me goose bumps, while the Clintons seemed passé and stale. Of course, Obama's win gave his campaign a tremendous lift and proved what I suspect he and his true believers knew the whole time: He has the vision. He has what it takes to cross the imaginary lines his critics try to mark in his and our sand. More than that, at that crucial point for his campaign, he showed the country and world that he could defeat the massive Clinton Old Guard -- even while they threw their machine's atomic arsenal at him. What was becoming clear to voters was that Obama was their man. He could even co-opt a cache of Republican voters and beat the GOP candidate in November, when Hillary and the Clinton baggage would be stuck in their own mud.

In the middle of October, I'd felt that we were already in or were going to be part of a revolution of a different sort. I'd mentioned this to a Wall Street Journal journalist who was visiting Paris. That if people didn't wake up to the fact that if Hillary was chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate, the Republican contender -- whoever it was -- would make quick work of her and, voila, we would be in for more of the Republican agenda that has been strapped on our backs since 9/11. I had been afraid that the revolution that would be a sign of our times was going to be the slow and excruciating digging out of the massive assault that hit us after the Twin Towers were attacked, the one that came from our own president and his unethical administration -- which sank this country into an abyss of fear and quickly dispensed with American democratic values. The one that meant that our country went from being a beacon to the world to the one our enemies want the world to think of us -- that we are a white racist imperialist nation, which doesn't deserve its respect. I was afraid the revolution we were going to be immersed in was going to be about learning the lessons of humility and struggle on an even deeper scale, before the light would come again.

Instead, during the past week I read Caroline Kennedy's moving letter that knighted Senator Obama with her father's legacy. The next day I watched as Ted Kennedy delivered his brilliant speech extolling Obama's experience, spirit, and character (and in fact, most dutifully and beautifully slammed the door on the knocking Clintons) and crowned this glimmering presidential candidate as the Kennedy prince. I was blown away. The Clintons must have been hissing and calling in every marker they ever had. (To the critics of the Kennedy blessing: Who are you to impugn them in any way? This was Caroline's father. It was her right. It was her mantle to give. Your sour grapes about Hillary, at the least, are colored green with envy.)

One of the most compelling stories I've been told about the power of Obama's bringing Americans together comes from a man I met in Paris:

My wife and I have seven children and twelve grandchildren. Of the seven children, six are married. Number of voters: 16, including our oldest grandchild. We represent the full the political spectrum: a non-voter, a greener, a couple of independents, and the rest are split pretty evenly between Democrats and Republicans. (One of the Republican couples is fundamentalist and home-schools their seven children!) My wife and I have always voted Democratic. In 1992 and 1996, we voted for Bill Clinton, but we couldn't discuss politics with half our family because they were adamantly anti-Clinton. We faithfully supported Al Gore in 2000, but again, discussing politics with half our family was off-limits because of the Clinton legacy... Dean brought us out of our political shell -- he's the first political candidate who got us active and "out on the streets." ...Half our family thought we were nuts, but we had some really good discussions with our Republican faction. At least we were talking again! We held our noses and voted for Kerry, but our hearts weren't in it. And now there's Obama. Oh, my. We're having really positive discussions with our entire family -- even with the fundamentalists. And there's been a sea change. Two of our Republican couples have declared for Obama. One of our Republican sons has even gone so far as to register as a DEMOCRAT so that he can vote for Obama in his state's Democratic Party primary. This is the sort of shift in thinking that Barack represents. If our family is remotely representative - and short of a ton of Republican dirty tricks - Barack should win the general election in a landslide because his appeal to Independents and, if I can coin a phrase, "Obama Republicans" is so strong. But that'll happen only if Obama wins the nomination. All our crossover voters have declared that they'll NEVER vote for Hillary. And we're not sure that we can, either.

Democrats must learn to connect to their base again, and this is a lesson John Edwards has been teaching us. Al Gore has taught us that doing the right thing brings lasting results. The younger generations have taught us the power of the new media. These are all important revolutionary tools.

A friend recently said to me, "I have this horrible feeling that once again the Dems will snatch defeat out of the hands of victory..." Our Democratic Congress is still practicing this every day.

Another friend commented, "It is so sad that they (the Clintons) are sacrificing their reputations on this campaign..." There was more to that point, but you get the drift.

The good news is this: It is as if the ghost of Paul Revere climbed onto his horse in order to shout this news to the American conscious and unconscious, "Obama is coming! Obama is coming! Get ready for change, because it and he are already here."


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

REVOLUTION....NOW

It will take a revolution like no other.

By Chris Floyd

Put your hand on my head, baby;
Do I have a temperature?
I see people who ought to know better
Standing around like furniture.
There's a wall between you
And what you want -- you got to leap it.
Tonight you got the power to take it;
Tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it.
-- Bob Dylan

I.

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

The war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

It is well-nigh impossible to imagine a force in American public life today rising up to thwart the Administration's will on any element of its militarist and corporatist agenda, including the arbitrary launch of an attack on Iran. What's more, even if some institution had the will -- and made the effort -- to balk Bush, it wouldn't matter. As the New York Times noted a couple of weeks ago:

…Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

Thus the Administration's own spokesmen are now saying openly, in plain English, what they once only insinuated beneath layers of legal jargon: that the president of the United States does not have to obey the law of the land. He does not have to obey acts passed by Congress. He is free to act arbitrarily, to do anything whatsoever that he claims is necessary to "defend national security," in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There is literally nothing anyone can do – not Congress, not the courts – to stop him.

That is Bush's claim -- and it has been accepted. The American Establishment has surrendered to an authoritarian takeover of the American state. If this was not the case, then Bush and Cheney would have been impeached long ago (or least months ago) for their treason against the Constitution, their coup d'etat against the Republic. At the very least, they would have been mocked, scorned, censured and shunned for their ludicrous and dangerous pretensions to royal power. All manner of institutional, legal and political fetters would have been put upon them, as happened in the last days of Richard Nixon's presidency.

Instead, Bush's power has only grown with each new outrageous claim of unchallengeable presidential authority. It is too little understood how vital -- and how fatal -- Congress' acquiescence in all of this has been. By continuing to treat the Bush Administration as a legitimate government, to carry on with business as usual instead of initiating impeachments or refusing to cooperate with a gang of usurpers, Congress instead confirms the New Order day after day. Some Democrats may grumble, whine or bluster -- but they DO nothing, and their very participation in the sinister farce ensures its continuance.

Again, look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he's got them. Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it. He wants to declare people "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely; he does it. Bush's spokesmen openly claim that the laws passed by the people's representatives are "just advisory" and "the president can still do whatever he wants to do," and there is no outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of the Constitution.

Who could look at this reality and declare that the United States is still a republic, in any genuine form? Who could see this and deny that the nation is now an authoritarian state under an "elected" dictator?

Those who insist on seeing the current situation as "politics as usual" (even if an extreme version of it) will point to peripheral elements that still retain some of the flavor of the old order: such as the Justice Department scandal, with its forced resignations and Congressional probes, or the occasional criminal trial of Bush Regime minions like Scooter Libby. Some will say such things are proof that we don't really live under tyranny, that deep down, the "system works."

But all of this is indeed "politics as usual" -- the kind of politics that occurs under every system of rule. Even the Caesars were subject to such pressures, forced to remove (and sometimes execute) officials who had become too controversial due to scandal, crime, corruption or factional opposition, or even unpopularity with "the rabble." Sometimes the Caesars themselves were removed for such causes -- but the tyrannical system went on. Likewise, the kings and queens of England in their autocratic heyday were forced to give up ministers -- even court favorites -- due to similar pressures. And so too the Russian czars, the Chinese emperors, the Persian monarchs, the Muslim Caliphs, the Egyptian pharaohs, etc. Even Hitler was sometimes thwarted or hampered in his polices by factional strife or public displeasure. "Politics" does not disappear in undemocratic regimes. It is a function of human relations, and carries on regardless of the political system imposed on a society.

Yet the belief persists that if there are not tanks in the streets or leather-jacketed commissars breaking down doors, then Americans are still living in a free country. I wrote about this situation almost six years ago -- six years ago:

It won't come with jackboots and book burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won't come with "black helicopters" or tanks on the street. It won't come like a storm – but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place.

As in Rome, all the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns – plenty of bread and circuses for the folks. But the "consent of the governed" will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small group of nobles who rule largely for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.

To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized – usually by "the people" themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.

The rulers will often act in secret; for reasons of "national security," the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of "enemies" selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new "security structures" targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem "normal," as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone."

This was written less than two months after 9/11. I was no prophet, no shaman; I had no inside knowledge or special expertise. I was just an ordinary American citizen reading news reports, articles, essays and books easily available to the general public. But even then it was crystal clear what was happening, and where it would lead if left unchecked. As we now know, it was not only left unchecked, it was exacerbated and accelerated and countenanced at every turn, by virtually every element and institution in American public life.


II.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. – Thoreau

Now from all this, what follows?

The time has passed for ordinary political opposition, "within the system." The system itself has been perverted and converted into something else; it is now impossible to "work within the system" in the old understanding of that term, because that old system is gone. To work within the current system is to collaborate with evil, to give it legitimacy.

Thoreau's answer should be taken up by every person in public life, beginning with the Senators and Representatives in Congress, and radiating outward to all other elected officials in the 50 states, and to civil servants and other government employees, law enforcement agencies, judges, universities, contractors, banks, and on and on, throughout the vast, intricate web that binds the lives of so many people directly to the federal government. There should be non-compliance, non-recognition of this illegitimate authority, disassociation from taking part in its workings.

But we must also recognize that the kind of civil disobedience that Thoreau preached – and practiced – is immensely more difficult today, because the power of the state is so much greater, far more pervasive, more invasive…and much more implacable, more inhuman. No one would have dared put Thoreau in "indefinite detention" without charges, or torture him, or delegate some underling in intelligence apparatus (which didn't exist then) to kill him as a "suspected terrorist." Of course there were many egregious suspensions of Constitutional liberties and draconian measures during the Civil War; but these occasioned fierce fights in Congress, investigations, lawsuits, and outraged protests on the streets – the worst, by far, in American history, dwarfing the urban riots and war protests of the Sixties. But only the most ignorant fool – or devious liar – could compare these short-lived, ad hoc, inconsistently applied, frequently reversed and much-disputed depredations, carried out in the midst of a massive insurrection by fully-fledged armies on American soil, with today's thorough-going, systematic creation of an authoritarian state, on the basis of a zealous ideology of an unrestricted "unitary executive," operating in a nebulous, self-declared "state of war" that we are told will last for generations.

Neither Thoreau – nor any Northern opponent of the Civil War – confronted anything like this. (In fact, neither did the insurrectionists of the South, who were treated as lawful prisoners-of-war when captured – or often simply allowed to return to their homes on parole, in exchange for a simple statement that they would fight no more. No Southerner was ever subjected to indefinite detention, none were tortured, none were liquidated by secret agents.) The technology available to the government today amplifies the scope of repression immeasurably, both in the pinpoint, surreptitious targeting of individuals and in larger-scale operations.

In a land crawling with armed – and armored – SWAT teams, with operatives from innumerable federal agencies packing heat and happy to use it, a land where more than 2 million people languish in prison (many of them captives of an endless "war on drugs" that has done nothing to curb substance abuse but has greatly augmented the power of the state and the criminal gangs whose laundered money enriches Establishment elites), a land where almost every transaction is wired up to some national grid, where national ID cards are now being imposed – a land where you literally cannot exist without placing your liberty, your privacy, your very life at the mercy of a government apparatus besotted with violence, coercion and intrusion, there is no place left for the kind of action that Thoreau advocated. His way – and that of Gandhi and King, who took so much from him – envisions a state opponent which one could hope to shame into honorable action by the superior moral force of principled civil disobedience. But the very hallmark of the present regime is its shamelessness, its utter lack of any sense of honor or principle, its bestial addiction to raw power.

It is pointless – and counterproductive – to simply throw yourself under the wheels of such a monstrous machine in futile spasms of rage and despair. The machine doesn't care. It will gladly chew up your life and move on. For the action of the ordinary individual to have an effect, it must be amplified by a larger social movement. And it is difficult to imagine such a movement arising in America today, in a society atomized by the engines of profiteering, its communities gutted or abandoned by elites seeking greener pastures – and cheaper labor – elsewhere, its citizens isolated from one another, locked in their own bubbles of electronic diversion, and their own struggles to keep their jobs (unprotected by unions, subject to the arbitrary whim of local bosses, or faceless corporate masters, or predatory hedge funds, etc.), hang on to their health insurance (if they've got it), and stay out of the hell created by the bipartisan Bankruptcy Bill for the benefit of the credit card companies.

And despite the deep unpopularity of the regime, there is still a widespread reluctance to recognize its true nature, and what it will require to restore our constitutional republic. And truth to tell, there are a great many people uninterested in doing so. As long as the diversions keep pouring through the latest gadgetry, the monthly paycheck manages to cover the bills, and their own bodies are not subjected to the tyrant's evil, many people are happy to accept the authoritarian system. (This is not unique to Americans, of course; it is a constant in human history.) But even where there is an interest in discerning the reality of our times, and a yearning for change, again there is no broader movement to leverage an individual's dissent into a form large enough to thwart the tyrannical machine. And there is no American Sakharov on the horizon, someone to arise from the very center of the machine to denounce its workings and call for genuine liberty, genuine democracy, genuine economic and social justice.

So whatever we can do, we must do it ourselves. If we have no power or influence, if we cannot take large actions, then we must take small ones. Every word or action raised against the overthrow of the Republic will find an echo somewhere, from one person to another to another to the next -- each isolated, individual voice slowly finding its way into a swelling chorus of dissent.

It might be too late. It might not work. But failure – and much more horror -- is guaranteed if we don't even try.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote – in a context that is growing less dissimilar all the time: -- it is impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you.

"What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret." –Thoreau.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

If We Do Not Act NOW.............

...We are Doomed


Tomgram: Fraser, Did the Political World Change in November?

Have you already been swamped by 2008 presidential madness -- by Hillary, and her swiftboaters, and Obama(mania), and Edwards, and McCain hawking his wares in Iowa, and Hagel, and a gaggle (or maybe a gagel) of lesser presidential candidates, wannabes, and thought-abouts haggling over their prospects, and the latest definitively meaningless polls on the candidates, and whether various giant states are going to beat out smaller states in the race to be first in the primaries, and which of the candidates are ahead in the mad dash to the various moneybags who finance both parties? It's a miracle that the initial votes for president aren't being pushed forward to the spring of 2007. If this is the electoral "horse race," the nags are going to be dead by summer.


Why this wild media rush to next year's election?

You won't find out from reading your morning paper or catching the nightly news on TV. Sometimes a dash of history, a bit of historical context, not to speak of a little informed speculation is just what the media rush to the polls is lacking. Fortunately, here at Tomdispatch we have the antidote to the already headlong race to 2008. Steve Fraser, co-editor of the American Empire Project book series and author of Every Man a Speculator, a cultural history of Wall Street that the Boston Globe described as "the Iliad set on Wall Street, its literary gravity pulling you along with the sweep of its narrative," considers just what might be made of last year's November midterm elections and the upcoming one in the great sweep of American history. Tom


Was 2006 a Turning-Point Election?On the Road to 2008

By Steve Fraser


All media eyes have turned toward the presidential election of 2008. Like the headlights of an onrushing train, it mesmerizes. Every news bulletin about the latest bloodbath in Iraq, each ominous forewarning of a face-off with Iran, the endless dirge of abandonment and despair issuing from New Orleans, the daily register of those cut loose from any semblance of a social safety net, public or private, each new official confirmation that the Earth is reaching a boiling point compels us to anticipate the 2008 election with fear and trembling, and with the greatest expectations. Something momentous might happen then. Haven't we already seen the first signs of that in the extraordinary electoral outcome of November 2006?

All elections are, in some sense, turning points. They register, however murkily, shifts in popular sentiment. But this recent off-year election has excited more than the normal number of pregnant speculations and, of course, put one question in particular in boldface type: Did it signal the end -- or at least the beginning of the end -- of the conservative counter-revolution that first gained traction with Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980?

A turning-point election is something special indeed. Everything about the country's political chemistry changes as its geopolitical make-up is reshuffled, as cities, towns, and whole regions start voting in a new way. Suddenly, the normal fault lines in political demography no longer apply as ethnic, racial, gender, and socio-economic groups simply stop voting the way everyone expects them to.

Turning-point elections can inaugurate new distributions of wealth and power. Social classes and elites accustomed to rule find themselves struggling to hold on to, or compelled to share power, they once felt entitled to wield unilaterally. The whole political economy becomes subject to serious reordering. With so much at stake, such elections can ultimately be the occasions for revolutions in the country's moral tone, its basic cultural and ideological orientation.
Upheavals of this magnitude make up part of our relatively recent history. Here are a few examples: Pittsburgh and the state of Pennsylvania were fiefdoms of the Republican Party, and of the industrial elite which controlled that Party, from the end of the Civil War through the stock-market crash of 1929; nor did the GOP electorate there consist solely of industrialists and the middle classes. Hundreds of thousands of industrial workers -- Italians, Slavs, and other immigrants working the steel mills, coke ovens, and coal mines -- belonged to that cohort of Republican loyalists as well. Then, in four short years, between 1932 and 1936, both city and state became bastions of the New Deal Democratic Party.

At just this same time, Afro-Americans, who since Emancipation had been steadfast supporters of the party of Lincoln, began voting (where they could) in overwhelming numbers for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and have remained steadfast Democrats ever since. Meanwhile, the South, which had emerged as a one-party region after the Civil War, stayed loyal to the Democratic Party for a century until, in the election of 1968, it began its mass defection to the Republicans.
As late as the 1929 crash and Great Depression, free market ideology, social Darwinian morality, and the political and social preeminence of the country's business elite made up the legitimate foundations of the Republic. Within the historical blinking of an eye, however, that legitimacy vaporized in the presidential election of 1932 -- replaced by the regulatory and social-welfare state of the New Deal with its ethos of social obligation, economic security, and industrial democracy.

Turning-point elections that register -- and help usher in -- such remarkable transformations are rare in American history. Arguably, there have only been three: 1860, 1932, and 1980. The elections of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan -- each in its own way -- opened the door to fundamental reform. Clearly the abolition of slavery, the overthrow of industrial autocracy, and the triumphant counter-revolution against the New Deal with which these three elections are associated qualify as turning points in the grand sense.

Why Does the Ancien Régime Die?

Rare as they are, one might ask why turning-point elections happen at all. Marking as they do the emergence of a new political order, they are, it seems, brought on by a general crisis in the old order, an impasse or breakdown so severe it can no longer be addressed by the conventional wisdom of the political status quo. The secession of the southern states in 1860 was, of course, such a crisis. So was the Great Depression. So, too, was the convergence of imperial defeat in Vietnam, the overthrow of the racial order of the ancien régime, and the de-industrialization of the American heartland. Secession, depression, defeat, these have been the "big bangs" ushering in new political universes.

System-wide crises prove fatal, first of all, because they exhaust the repertoire of political solutions available (or imaginable) to the ruling circles of the old order. Elites become increasingly defensive and inflexible, so much so that their actions aggravate rather than alleviate the crisis at hand. In the early years of the Great Depression, for example, Andrew Mellon, President Herbert Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, suggested that the way out of the cataclysm was to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." In doing so, he was falling back on the orthodoxy of his robber-baron ancestors and exposing not only the callousness of the old regime, but its incapacity to do anything constructive about the national calamity.

An exhausted political order does not, however, fall apart and exit the scene simply by virtue of its own downward momentum and social stupidity. Alternatives, embryonic but visible, usually gestate within the old political organism even before its weaknesses become disabling. Before one of the two major political parties emerges to represent a new political dispensation -- we are, after all, talking about the United States where generally everything happens within the claustrophobic confines of the two-party system -- battles rage internally for the soul of the party.

So it was that the pre-New Deal Democrats were still run by John Jacob Raskob of the DuPont-General Motors interests and kindred laissez-faire circles among the country's business elite in the North (together with the Bourbon landlords and new industrialists of the South). But even before the Depression hit, reform-minded elements in the business community and the labor movement were challenging the Party's old guard, coalescing around a program of government regulation, industrial democracy, and the development of a mass-consumption economy underwritten by Keynesian-inspired fiscal policy.

Likewise, several years before President Lyndon Baines Johnson abdicated the presidency in 1968 and long before Ronald Reagan's 1980 triumph, the Barry Goldwater right-wing of the Republican Party overthrew, at least temporarily, the Rockefeller moderates who had made their peace with New Deal liberalism and controlled the party since the end of World War II. Goldwater's vitriolic victory and presidential nomination at the 1964 Republican Party convention made clear that this was far more than an intramural squabble. It pre-figured the end of the New Deal order and signaled that a minority within the Grand Old Party was already prepared to wage an uncompromising struggle against apostates from the conservative credo.
Turning-point elections then are not natural events like hurricanes or tsunamis, occurring in the course of some impersonal cycle of political evolution. Old political orders are supplanted by a willingness to risk party disunity in order to achieve some higher purpose.
When Does the Bell Toll -- and for Whom?

Turning-point elections have invariably been presidential elections. (Two others are often included on the short list by scholars -- Andrew Jackson's victory in 1828 and William McKinley's in 1896.) This is commonsensical enough. A vote for a president is, after all, a more straightforward national referendum than voting for hundreds of congressional representatives and senators.

Of course, in everyday life, things seldom prove quite so straightforward. While it is convenient to bookmark change according to the year in which a new president takes office, some of the most decisive changes in political demography and geography, in public policy, in the balance of power, or in the moral-ideological profile of the new order have come in subsequent elections, both presidential and off-year.

This is more than an academic point at the moment, because 2006 was, of course, a midterm election. Does this automatically disqualify it as a turning point one or can a Congressional election measure up too? The short answer is: sometimes.

Arguably, to take one example still in memory, 1966 might be seen that way. Although President Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats had won a staggeringly overwhelming victory in 1964, the subsequent off-year vote for Congress demonstrated a significant shift to the Republicans in the South, and parts of the West, regions that were absolutely critical to the dominance of the old political order.

Southern disaffection with the Democrats had, in fact, already been apparent in the 1964 presidential primary campaign of Alabama's notorious segregationist governor, George Wallace. It would make itself felt decisively in the presidential election of 1968 when the combined votes for Republican candidate Richard Nixon and Wallace, running on a third party, states-rights ticket, would account for 57% of the popular vote, sending Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic Party to an unexpected defeat. (Indeed, historians might have landmarked 1968 as a turning-point election except for one thing -- Watergate -- which functioned as a kind of 7-year political coitus interruptus.)

Sometimes, however, off-year elections that looked significant at the time -- for example, the Republican capture of both houses of Congress in 1946 -- end up leaving the political fundamentals in tact. In that case, the New Deal order would remain hegemonic for another quarter-century or more.

So too, a mere shift in presidential party affiliation need augur little. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided for two terms in the 1950s, but never thought to challenge the fundamentals of the New Deal. Indeed, it was an Eisenhower era bon mot that Social Security constitutes the "third rail" of American politics, that tampering with it would be an act of political suicide.

Similarly, Democratic President Bill Clinton served twice but accepted the basics of Reagan-era conservatism, memorialized in his boast (which was also a confession) that the "era of big government is over with." Eisenhower was a Republocrat, Clinton a Democratan. If anything, their administrations indicated just how firmly entrenched the political order of the moment remained, so solidly it could be entrusted to the putative opposition.

What, then, about 2006? At first blush (and lacking a crystal ball), it would certainly be safer to conclude that it wasn't a turning-point election. The Democratic Congressional victory was a slim one, particularly in the Senate; but even in the House, the present thirty-one seat margin conceals a remarkable number of extremely close individual races that were, in the end, Democratic victories. Moreover, the media, before and after the election, has made much of the fact that a significant number of Democratic winners in both houses belonged to the "Blue Dog" wing of the party; that they were recruited by the Party's leadership and won exactly because they were social conservatives, Republican-lite candidates, only make-believe Democrats.

Nor did the victorious Democrats display a coherent programmatic alternative, however much they emphasized their opposition to Bush administration foreign and domestic policies and the atmosphere of sleaze that surrounded the White House. Differences within the Democratic Party on many issues were visible for all to see.

It would, however, be a gross exaggeration to see in those tensions an embryonic Goldwater-style civil war pitting one form of political economy and world view -- say that of the Democratic Leadership Council -- against an insurgency ready to break with the past. There was no Goldwater-like faction armed with its own ideological vision and itching for a fight. You would have to throw into this mix the open question of whether the prevailing political order -- the one presaged by Goldwater and inaugurated by Ronald Reagan -- actually verges on a more general crisis of legitimacy, the sort of system-wide breakdown that has, in the past, opened the door to something truly new.

The Beginning of the End?

Despite serious doubts about the deeper significance of the 2006 election, there is, in fact, a good case to be made that it may turn out to be one of those rare turning points, or at least a signal that one is looming on the near horizon.

To begin with, polls indicate that the election represented an explicit repudiation of the Republican Party as a party; at least, as explicit as one could possibly expect in a midterm election. Try as they did to argue beforehand that all elections are local, Republican leaders knew that not to be the case, not this time; indeed, that's precisely why they traipsed around the country vociferously denying what they deeply feared was true.

Under normal circumstances and by its very nature, in the American electoral system -- monopolized by two amorphously constituted parties of little distinct ideological or programmatic identity, and with its multiple disincentives to any kind of independent party representation -- it is usually excruciatingly hard to register voter sentiment on behalf of a party rather than a candidate. But the election of 2006 was not normal in this regard. There are indications that significant numbers of Americans voted against the Republican Party and, with less enthusiasm to be sure, for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps most tellingly, in numerous races moderate Republicans, who remained quite popular with their constituents and had enjoyed long tenure in office -- the best known case is Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island -- succumbed to Democrats who were often no more to the "left" than they were. Notwithstanding the inherent fuzziness of what either of the parties stands for, voters seemed ready to conclude that the Republican Party and the administration of George Bush could be fairly associated with the disaster in Iraq, the shameful incompetence and callousness of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the rank and systemic corruption associated with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the crony capitalism of the oil companies and Halliburton. Voting for the Democratic Party was a way of repudiating all that, even if any particular Republican candidate might be blameless.

Then, there is the matter of the "Blue Dogs."

It turns out that rumors of their ascendancy were not so much exaggerated as mischaracterized. True enough Senate candidates like William Casey in Pennsylvania or James Webb in Virginia were well-known supporters of such social conservative causes as gun ownership or the "right to life." But these were hardly the issues they ran on. On the contrary, the campaigns of Webb and Casey, not to mention Sherrod Brown's Senate campaign in Ohio and those of many fellow "Blue Dogs" running for House seats, stressed opposition to the war in Iraq and anger directed at big pharma, big oil, tax breaks for the rich, and free-trade globalization agreements like NAFTA.


Far more often than not, economic populism, not social conservatism, is what lent the Democrats, and in particular the Blue Dogs, an edge. This same sentiment could be felt, both before and immediately after the election, in the overwhelming support for a quick Congressional move to raise the minimum wage and to empower Medicare to lower prescription drug prices by bargaining with the big pharmaceuticals. Even more remarkable, given the perilous state of the labor movement, is the emergence of a House majority in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for millions of workers to join unions, a development critical to shifting the balance of political and economic power.

It would be premature to speak of a fully formed populist/New Deal-like alternative within the Democratic Party or to suggest that people were voting for such a possibility in 2006. Nonetheless, when the Democratic leadership anointed its opening agenda as the new governing party in Congress with the resonant phrase "the first 100 hours," echoing FDR's first 100 days, there was nothing accidental about it.

So, too, certain demographic and geopolitical trends that showed up in 2006 are suggestive of changes to come. The Latino vote, which in the 2004 presidential election was relatively evenly divided between George Bush and John Kerry, went a whopping 70% for the Democrats this time. And that wasn't even the biggest percentage shift in voting behavior from the 2004 election in favor of the Democrats. That took place among white, non-college-educated working people who, for some time, have made up the core of the conservative populist constituency of the Reagan counter-revolution. Although all the numbers are not yet in, estimates suggest that about one-half of the shift toward the Democrats came from white working-class voters.
Regionally, the Democratic Party made significant gains in the Rocky Mountain West, while clearing away the remnant outposts of Republicanism in much of the Northeast and driving Republicans from Rustbelt outposts in Ohio and Missouri. The logic of that trend -- which doesn't, of course, mean that it will be realized -- is to regionalize the Republican Party in the South. In this way, the southernization of national politics, which was the great accomplishment of the Reagan political order, might be replaced by the southernization of the Republican Party.
Even the early talk about presidential candidates seems portentous. On the Democratic side there is no one to the right of Hillary Clinton, certainly a sign of a shift in the Party's center of gravity. But odder than that is the candidacy of Barack Obama. It seems to signal a thirst for a messiah. Such a quest can be symptomatic of many things, some bad, some not as bad.
Obamaism is a real mystery. Others have already noted that messiahs don't normally come from the middle as he most emphatically does. Moreover, the charisma that surrounds the prince of banality from Illinois is even harder to decipher, attached as it is to nothing tangible or providential as was Robert Kennedy's lightning 1968 ascension before his assassination, his candidacy held aloft, rightly or wrongly, by the energies of the antiwar and civil rights upheavals.

Something -- though it's hard to tell what -- may be blowin' in the wind.

Breakdown and Paralysis

Perhaps the better question, then, is: Will the presidential election of 2008 turn out to be a turning-point election of historic proportions. The greatest unknown is whether or not the status quo is headed for a breakdown crisis severe enough to clear the ground for such a transformative moment.

Signs certainly point in that direction. The convergence of imperial defeat, economic insecurity, and rampant corporate malfeasance might be enough all by themselves. But the sudden change in the political status of global warming -- once the dim, background hum of some far distant disturbance, now more like the heart-stopping premonitory theme music from the soundtrack of Jaws -- magnifies the crisis of the whole global order, at home and abroad. Anatole Lieven has called it global capitalism's "existential challenge." Life as we've known it may be beginning to end. Congress is already holding hearings about the natural apocalypse to come, and all but the most ostrich-like politicians acknowledge global warming as an urgent reality; a fact-on-the-ground, so to speak, no longer a debatable theory.

The Bush administration -- and so the old order -- has staked a lot on Iraq, not just its geopolitical and global economic ambitions. Its already severely diminished status as a moral exemplar of democracy and civil liberties won't survive this latest plunge into military mayhem. Moreover, the President's "surge" plan is a mortal threat to the secret source of the regime's strength at home. The politics of fear and imperial bravado, which once won it legions of followers, may, in the aftermath of the surge, reach its own turning point as those voters abandon ship as fast as they once climbed aboard. Can the administration or the old order survive a fiasco of such proportions?

Iraq is also the equivalent of a budgetary bunker-busting nuclear device. It exacerbates an already aggravated economic dilemma. Despite a Noah's flood of statistics that seem to support a Pollyana-ish view that we live today in the best of economic good times, millions of Americans experience the opposite -- a yawning gulf of insecurity affecting their health, retirement, and employment prospects. They share a gloomy sense of moving backwards, of decline.

Once upon a time, poverty was associated with the super-exploitation of those who toiled for meager reward. Then, in mid-twentieth century America, poverty came to be associated with the lack of work, with those so marginalized they were shut-out of the main avenues of modern commerce and industry. Nowadays, we are rushing back to the nineteenth century. Today, 30 million people in the United States work long and hard and still live in poverty.

Insecurity even more pervasive than this once supplied the energy responsible for supplanting laissez-faire capitalism with the New Deal. Might we be approaching something of that scale and scope today? Though there can be no definitive answer to this, there also can be no question that a general crisis of economic insecurity confronts the old order. All of its self-serving and adventitious rhetoric about the heroics of risk fall on increasingly deaf ears.

Not incidentally, since we live in the age of the global sweatshop, that older order is now global in scope; and the international financial mechanisms that so far have kept the global system humming for the U.S. are themselves under great and increasing strain. The system is, at present, being kept aloft by the needs of China, Japan, and other major economic powers. One day soon they may find the burden of swallowing gargantuan amounts of U.S. debt insupportable.

Are we heading toward a breakdown like the one which, in the early 1970s, forced the Nixon administration to scrap the Bretton Woods financial system, the defining economic institution of the post-war Pax Americana? Together with defeat in Vietnam, the devaluation of the dollar, and the end of fixed exchange rates for international currencies exacerbated the general impasse in which the New Deal order then found itself.

When it comes to the social reputation of our corporate elite, is it necessary to say anything more than Enron? The litany of shameless profiteering, felonious behavior, cronyism, and corruption at the apex of the private economy has arguably called into question the "right to rule" of those presiding over the country's key economic institutions. Even at the regime's hubristic height following Bush's presidential victory in 2004, he discovered he'd crossed a bridge too far in his attempt to turn over the Social Security System to Wall Street. Trust in the corporate elite has only grown frailer since then. Cynicism mixed with rage is a potentially explosive brew that fuels the economic populism even someone as "establishment" as James Webb articulated in his alternate State of the Union Address.

What may make these converging dilemmas over-ripe for change is the response of the old order itself. One sign that some decisive crisis has arrived is the growing incapacity of those in charge to adapt -- as if the dire nature of what's happening dries up the springs of their political imaginations, forcing them to fall back on brittle orthodoxies. Andrew Mellon's notion of liquidating everything in sight as a way out of the Great Depression was one case of mental paralysis, a retreat to what had once "worked"; after all, the periodic busts endemic to the laissez-faire capitalist life-cycle had, in the past, always cured themselves, even if the "cure" included a great deal of what we would today call "collateral damage."

The Bush administration is similarly falling back on its own orthodoxies, each move only betraying just how out of touch its top officials are with the new political and social realities forming around them.

Take its reaction to the stunning electoral defeat it suffered last November. The President's new "surge" plan, the self-destructive decision to forge ahead in Iraq without a scintilla of reasonable hope of success, even from the standpoint of the most cynical imperialist, is such a reaction: instinctive, unreflective, inflexible, and probably deeply believed in. In other words, there is a resort to the ideological fixations which have long-driven this regime -- and the larger political order from which it rose – but which only become ever more rigidified as reality bites back.

So, for another example, the administration's response to the crisis of economic insecurity has amounted to an ideological provocation shoved right in the teeth of its own electoral repudiation. Bush proposed a massive cut in Medicare and Medicaid and, even more in-your-face than that, a tax on the health insurance of those dwindling remnants of the New Deal order who still enjoy some decent level of employer-funded health care.

Everything the old regime can imagine to defend itself ends up making things worse. With some poetic license, one is reminded of an inversion of that old Marxist axiom in which the capitalists, not the proletariat, become the gravediggers of capitalism.

The Open Door

Of course, that is a gross exaggeration. The question of the moment is not: Will 2008 be a turning-point election, but rather can it be one? Here, everything depends not on what the old order does on its own behalf, no matter how bone-headed, but on how the gathering forces of opposition respond to the system's crisis. Is there a willingness to build a clear, programmatic alternative inside the Democratic Party? It is, after all, an institution deeply infected with free market/free trade ideology and most of the imperial presumptions of the conservative counter-revolution.

Is there a readiness to mobilize around non-market solutions to the general crisis: To fight openly for the re-regulation of the economy and its planned re-industrialization; for its re-unionization; for redistributive policies to supplant the idée fixe of economic growth; for the dismantling of the petro-industrial complex and its replacement by a new, non-fossil-fuel system of energy production; for a global assault on the global sweatshop?

Will there be a new era of polarization rather than centrism, partisanship rather than bi-partisanship, a head-on confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council, like the guerilla wars once waged against the John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith elite of the pre-New Deal Democratic Party or the one waged by the Goldwater legions against the silk-stocking Rockefeller Republicans? Once upon a time, someone as mild-mannered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it within himself to "welcome the hatred" of those he labeled "economic royalists." Might there be someone equally unafraid waiting in the wings today?

Is there a new order being born, ready to challenge the old one where it is both weakest and also strongest: namely, in the imperial arena? Not only has global aggression proved deadly to all, depraved in its moral consequences, and life-threatening to basic democratic principles and institutions at home, but it has also been the most fruitful, life-giving incubator of the conservative cultural populism which the old order has relied on for a generation. Anti-World War I intellectual Randolph Bourne's prophetic aperçu -- "War is the health of the State" -- needs to be made even more embracing: War has become the health of a whole political culture, not to mention the vast, hard-wired military-industrial apparatus with which it lives in symbiotic bliss. Is there a will to take on that system of cherished phobias, delusional consolations, and implacable interests?

Finally, there is the X factor, most unknowable of all, but also most critical in converting a mere election into something more transformative. Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life? Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration's barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008.

Steve Fraser is co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.