America as a One-Party State

http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/2/kuttner-r.html

Today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.
In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars.

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with the ability to think is scared to death that this is exactly what will happen. Probably if the Democrats don't win this election, the USA as we know it will no longer exist.

the fascist imperium of america.

makes it so sensible to so many speculations, that no one feels comfortable with even considering it


The other thing its that people that care about politics forget that the most compromising aspect of a political group is their philosophy. Yes, the often dismissed as irrelevant philosophy, is what actually has the key to understand where a group is heading for.

I will re-read the fundamental proposition of the PNAC (http://www.newamericancentury.org/)

"The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world "


That proposition alone contains inside itself the essence of absolute conviction in cultural superiority, which is inherent to nazism ideology

Anyone needs more evidence?

The numbness and preoccupation and blindness(some willful) of a very large segment of the population can make it happen. We used to say that a terrorist only has to succeed once. the same is true of tyranny in all its sorry, bloody useless, wasteful, degrading manifestations throughout history. Only early in our country did the blinders come off so that the ordinary person could see useless kings as the petty tyrants they were.

And then we went back about our business and never looked in a mirror.

(I take it this is not a belated revelation or I would be very disappointed in the Prospect)

So the question is "What are you going to do about it?"
And before we can think the prefab answer snarls back "Nuthin' You can't do nothing!"

How true, grammatically speaking.

election in Novemeber, as many are speculating that he will, kiss the country goodbye.

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It's becoming clearer and clearer.....power and killing by the dominant factions.....peace is not normal!

Can it?