Travel and my end-of-semester workload has prevented extensive blogging lately, but I wanted to point out a couple of recent articles that make some of the same points I have been making about the antidemocratic turn the country has taken since 2000, and the many lines that have been crossed by the current administration.

Paul Krugman's "Man on Horseback" notes that Shrub's aircraft carrier stunt breaks a a taboo, in place for centuries, against U.S. presidents appearing in military regalia. With their typical lack of respect or understanding for the political dimensions of the (small "l") liberal constitutional tradition, modern "conservatives" seem to think the president's Commander-in-Chief title demands the country's chief civilian magistrate be a military chieftain, rather than the country's chief military leader being a civilian politician, as the Constitution obviously intends. For all their chest-thumping about the superiority of American institutions and values, it does not seem to bother conservatives to have their president assaying a role, the president as soldier, more typically associated with dictatorships (like Saddam Hussein's) and monarchies than democracies. What was doubly sad, Krugman points out, was that the media and the erstwhile political opposition went along with this stunt, quietly in some cases, pantingly in others.

I also recommend "Inverted Totalitarianism" by Sheldon Wolin, a Princeton political theorist  whose book Politics and Vision I remember enjoying in college (though very little else about it). In a more sophisticated and eloquent way than I have, Wolin argues that a fundamental change in the U.S. form of government may be taking place under our noses. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former. The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. "Empire" and "superpower" both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms. "Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the American Empire" or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy" commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens. For their part, "empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry.

The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.

Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

The point about the"discrediting of constitutional limitations" seems particularly apt. This campaign has been going on in our popular and political culture for decades, but it wasn't until Shrub and Rumsfeld and Rove and Ashcroft that we got a set of leaders ambitious, heedless, and ignorant-or-cynical enough to take full advantage of just how weak the country's understanding of and commitment to its political traditions has become.