I wrote in the Huffington Post in January of this year about the President's transparent plans to establish himself and his conservative minority in the Democratic Party as the "responsible" alternative on the right to the Tea Party. Having long ago lost touch with his base among progressives and liberals, Obama started canting to Wall Street, the medical establishment, Big Oil, and the military-industrial complex in his first year in office. He has listed further to the right with each new crisis, using it as an opportunity to differentiate his team from the Tea Party -- but not on the left, as so many hoped for and expected when they elected him, but on the right.
The Tea Party has played well the role of the SA, the "Brown Shirts" in the Nazis' rise to power in post-Weimar Germany. It provided the muscle, the numbers, the outrage, even the imagery needed to throw our national politics into disarray. But also like the SA, it overplayed its hand. Dedicating themselves to their principles, they were even willing to throw under the bus the nation's economy ... and that would have hurt America's moneyed interests, intensely!
So now it's time to bring in (figuratively) our own SS, a right-wing Blue Dog elite who are so much more elegant in their cut-throatery and so much better prepared intellectually and emotionally to administer the machinery of inequality and repression. In Germany, this resulted in the much-admired (by the corporacracy) "Night of the Long Knives," when the SA leaders were physically "removed" one by one, leaving their millions of hapless devotees without a guiding light. Without much resistance, they dutifully became fans of the SS. Those that did not were consigned to the death camps along with their former victims, the Jews, Socialists, Communists, gypsies, and other symbols of non-Naziism.
Is this happening now, in a much more gentile but no less ruthless American fashion? Bertram Gross warned about "Friendly Fascism" as our native inclination to champion authoritarianism so long as it comes with a smile: "Support the Troops" (i.e., the wars), "Protect Doctor-Patient Relationships" (i.e., defeat universal healthcare), and now, "Secure the National Economy" (i.e., kill the unions, eliminate entitlements, and break the will of the American people). Our "professorial" President, a melange of racial types and political ideologies, seems ideally suited to the task. The Tea Party's warning that Obama is the anti-Christ was ridiculously shrill and as Bill Maher would say, "religulous!" but as an anti-democrat in Democrat's clothing, he is definitely the Man.
It's unclear what path the oppositional forces should or indeed can in this situation. We want to play "within the system," but what happens if the system is revealed as the means for destroying America as a free and democratic nation? One thing's for sure, the next year of politicking and electioneering should be closely watched for signs that a de facto coup d'etat is taking place. Obama is becoming a symbol for political expediency, but shrewd expediency, expediency that furthers the ends of the powerful, in contrast with the random, erratic opposition for its own sake of the Tea Party. The Kochs' days as playmakers may be over, not because they wish them to be, but because they and their minions no longer serve the interests of the real powers who are so much better organized than the Kochs could even pretend to be. They don't want more chaos; they want order, their order, the slicker the better.
The election of 2012, combined with the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court and now the reining in of the independent Congress by the imposition of a "Super Congress," could be the final nail in the coffin of American liberty. Not because Obama loses and the Democrats are routed, but because he wins and they are coopted in the terminal mangling of our Constitution.