Many of us here ay Kos feel the Republic, the country we learned about in school, the brilliant idea we came to love with our heads and our hearts, is slowly slipping away from us. I've been waiting for the backlash against the erosion, but it hasn't come. Why?
I've been pondering this question and woke this morning determined to tackle it. First, I came across this excellent piece by Robert Steinback on the Miami Herald, which crystallizes my anxiety.
http://www.miami.com/...
His op-ed is a call to action, which is warranted and needed, but still leaves open the question of why this has happened. I think it's a combination of several factors, and I'm afraid some of my thoughts are pessimistic, which disturbs me because like all of you here, I like to hang on to some hope.
First and foremost, the catalyst to the erosion, not surprisingly, is 9/11. Many other factors were in place, and I'll get to those, but the tipping point was that bright September day. It was a horrific crime, but what made it different from Pearl Harbor, which seemed to focus a nation against the dangers of militaristic fascism and in support of ideals of freedom and liberty? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, what made 9/11 different was that it was a horrible atrocity carried out against civilians that happened "here". In other words, for the first time in the history of European imperialism a major crime against masses of civilians was carried out by the subjects on the Empire's shores.
But there's even more to it than that. We've been able to work through major national traumas before and still retain the freest press in the world (at least on principle if not in practice) perhaps not due to some superiority in our "freedom genes", but due to our isolation. I'm referring to our isolation geographically as well as our history of heeding George Washington's warnings against foreign entanglements. Not to make light of nascent imperialist moves like the Monroe Doctrine, we see a significant ramping up of imperialist ambitions in the post WW2 period. The results, from the economic domination of transnationals to the executive use of the CIA are well known to most of us so I won't repeat them here.
But let's not ignore the separation of the US by an ocean from the major cataclysmic events of the 20th century, namely both world wars. My fear is that our belief in liberty has never really been tested before to the extent that most European democracies were, by the ravages of war and rampaging armies. On 9/11 our resolve faced a severe challenge, and it looks like we are blinking.
I have an intrinsic belief in the decency of common people, but I cannot blame the lack of a public outcry over Bush's crimes against Constitutional "check and balance" government, particularly wiretapping, on the failure of the media, which have now given them ample coverage. Fear must be a primary driver. But it has help.
For one thing, rampant militarism, whose out of control nature was so well documented by Chalmers Johnson in the "Sorrows of Empire", is leading us down a path towards military domination that is so intertwined with our political system, that breaking us free seems an almost insurmountable task. Couple this with a deteriorating educational system that is eroding the ability of the general populace to engage in critical thinking, the rising political power of a religious party that naturally puts paternalistic faith above evidence, and finally a culture of corporate dominance that would gladly replace humans with mindless consumer drones, and you face a Borgesian labyrinth with no seeming way out.
Are we better than this? Do we really have the courage of Patrick Henry to declare "give me liberty or give me death?" Not yet.