Update: I added a couple of the title ideas plus a meta tag.
Update 2: the title was too long, so I sort of put it back
It was a perfect plan.
Five Thousand Years of recorded history told them that it should work, they should be in complete control. They followed the plan to the letter, and, for many years, scarcely anyone noticed what was going on.
They had all their bases covered. No matter what happened, the nation would be theirs for the forseeable future. They were right on the verge of total, uncontested, dominance...
and they failed.
The big question is, Why?
I've had this diary boiling in my head, wasn't sure of exactly how to word it. But recent posts breaking Godwin's Law (Cue the Fuhrer Pootie) have forced my hand.
It's really an open secret that the GOP, with many many accomplices, have been moving America toward Authoritarianism (see, I can avoid mentioning Fascism or Nazis...er, oopsie). The program they used to make a Police State Play in Peoria (please tell me you got that joke) was really ingenious and is likely based on a lot of research into history, especially the history of de-democratizing movements.
They set up everything that was required, right down to centralization of economic and media power into the hands of their supporters. They had the vanguard for their revolution ready to pounce on their every command. Empire should have been assured.
You all should be asking yourselves, as I'm sure the Rethugs are, why they failed. 2006 should have been the death knell for what remained of American democracy, it should have been all over but the singin'.
The reason they failed, on many levels, is right in front of you. All of you probably understand that the blogosphere played a key role in the thumpin' we gave to the GOP last November, but the reason that we defeated them in that battle goes much deeper than you may realize.
The bulk of the last 5 millenia of history, especially in the West, has been a history of Hierarchical Power. Hierarchies rely on centralization of authority to grow, and tend to move toward centralization as their power grows.
Two interesting things that you probably won't read about in a history book though are particularly enlightening:
- As Empires decline, their elites continue to centralize power and wealth, leading in every historical case to a latter day stage of absolute authoritarianism culminating in a violent detruction and loss of all capacity to create a state.
- Also in every known case, the major advances of humanity all occured when elites were at their weakest relative point.
By those principles, and by the historical experience of several loyal Bush supporters, America should have been a dictatorship by now. So, what is different now?
The blogosphere is not Hierarchical. This great combination of crossed photons and servers is the prime example of what would be called a Hetrarchy. In a Hetrarchy, while there are rules, there is no leadership per se.
This lies at the core of why the Bush plan has failed thus far and also why the Republicans did not win a filibusterproof majority in the Senate last year with G. Felix Macaca as their '08 dictator...I mean, uh, presidential candidate. Being so heavily trained in how Hierarchies are run, they cannot deal with the actions of a non-centrally controlled mass.
Think of how DKos is characterized by the RWNM(tm) and the VRWC(tm). They paint this blog as the personal fiefdom of one Mr. Zuniga, or on their more gransiose moments, as a lackey operation for George Soros, not only to give the Fox Noise audience a new Bugbear to scream about, but, on a deeper level, they literally cannot perceive of something as powerful as the Reality-Based Blogosphere without someone or something pulling the strings. Watch BillO and his suggestively-shaped Left-Wing Conspiracy charts and graphs (if you can hold back the gagging reflex long enough) with this in mind and you'll see why Fox Noise is in meltdown now.
In short, this community is more than just a bunch of activists, lurkers, and trolls and I think that we really should start a serious discussion about what the rise of the blogosphere really means.