I can't believe I missed this opinion piece from Josh Marshall yesterday:
Okay, enough. The president fired US Attorneys to stymie investigations of Republicans and punish US Attorneys who didn't harass Democrats with bogus voter fraud prosecutions. In the former instance, the evidence remains circumstantial. But in the latter the evidence is clear, overwhelming and undeniable.
... Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.
This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.
It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown.
Nice to see the spectacled one picking up on something I've been trying to get people to see for years. The gradual emancipation of the ruling class from their mere countrymen is the goal of the present elite insurgency. It has nothing to do with parties or ideologies; the Democrats used to run the south in much the same way and ideologies have given way to gnawing need versus brazen theft.
When I say that the operative political dynamic in the USA is no longer liberal versus conservative (the words have been made moot), but instead elitist versus populist, the model for the elitists is Mexico, near as I can tell. After all, so many of today's Old Cold Warriors cut their political teeth in Latin American politics. The model for the populists? Um, that would be The Republic, but only dirty hippies care about that any more. Add the migration of Democrats accustomed to one-party rule into the Republican party, for racial reasons, and you've got one powerful cocktail of anti-democratic skullduggery.
The appealing thing about the Mexicanization of America is that the elites' standard of living remains high, although they may spend more time abroad for shopping and education. But crushing the middle class removes those pesky working people who want the wealthy to actually pull their weight in the country that made them rich and recognize the equal voice of those who have fewer toys, which is utterly counter-intuitive in a materialistic culture like ours.
The Mexicanization of America, therefore, is a win-win for the elites: no loss of status, elimination of political opposition. Emancipate the Best Sort of People by impoverishing your own country. Perfect.
It begins and ends with the reservation of the powers of law to the will of the elites and the removal of all means of recourse to non-elites, whose reactions outside the legal and political systems from which they've just been barred will quickly be used to justify the attack on democracy. Tort "reform," bankruptcy "reform," voting "reform," attacks on unions, media consolidation, and the manipulation of the Justice Department are each just a small part of the puzzle. At each point, the objective is to remove the avenues of redress available to mere citizens who might oppose maximal surplus extraction by their betters.
For the right, it is enough justification to claim, despite all evidence, that they are opposing the agenda of the left (even if they have to invent it) OR that they are just doing what the left has done (even if they aren't). It does not matter that this is self-refuting. What matters is that the elites are able to focus the hatred of their pet bloc on those who would maintain The Republic. For the left, increasingly joined by former Republicans, we recognize at each step that we are being made less and less citizens of anything, much less a Republic. We are increasingly subjects from whom anything can be taken away at any time. Any attempt on our part to resist will only be used to justify the attack.
This is where we are. This is who they are. You can see it anywhere in the third world, but today you see it in America. It has already happened here.
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