Digby sums up nicely what I’ve been saying about the long-term effects of the pro-authoritarian changes wrought by the Republicans. It won’t matter if the Democrats win in’08, because the underlying infrastructure has changed, and it’s unlikely that the Dems will have the political will to restore things to the status quo ante:
Constitutional hardball is a high stakes game of winner take all that utilizes all the levers of power and institutional advantages to further the goals of one political party and render the opposition weakened and impotent. The Republicans have been playing at it for a long time, culminating in the Bush II administration, which took office with the most audacious hardball play in American history — Bush vs. Gore — and then proceeded to use every bit of power at its disposal to embed its view of executive power into the government while establishing partisan Republican advantage throughout. We probably won’t know for quite some time just how deeply they have salted the civil service bureaucracy, the career justice department employees and the military with partisan actors but the effect on the judiciary is already obvious. It’s not hard to imagine. (And, needless to say, any attempt on the part of Democrats to dislodge them will be met with shrieking about how the president cannot just fire employees at his pleasure. They have no problem with intellectual inconsistency and the Democrats continue to be flummoxed by this fact.)
This is important because one of the most inexplicable aspects of the Republican onslaught is the fact that they seem so fearless of retribution. It may be because they have become addicted to the thrill or because they have (possibly correctly) assessed the opposition as being unlikely to ever challenge them on the same terms. But whatever the case, they have correctly understood this game to be a long one with many innings. Tushnet explains:
We might hope that political actors will realize that the worm will turn someday. That is, they might correctly believe that by playing constitutional hardball today they may be able to take control of all the levers of governing power, but they might realize that someday their opponents will seize the opportunity to play constitutional hardball in return, gain power, and shut them out of power. The problem here is with the time-horizon of political actors. They will not care if the worm turns after their politically active lives are over – after they die, retire, or assume the role of elder statesman or –woman. And, if history is a guide, the life span of a constitutional order is longer than the time-horizon of most active political actors. I would not want to be held to the following judgments, but consider the possibility that the Jeffersonian- Jacksonian order lasted from around 1801 to somewhere in the late 1840s or early 1850s, that the post-Reconstruction order lasted from around 1876 to somewhere in the 1930s, and that the New Deal-Great Society order lasted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s. At every point the remaining life span of each constitutional order is longer than the time horizon of almost every political actor
That’s depressing, isn’t it? In fact, it tracks with George W. Bush’s oft quoted belief that he will be redeemed after his death. Taking the long view of such things must be very comforting. It’s apparently what comes of having no fear that you will ever be called to account for your actions in your own time.
Future victorious American authoritarians will look back at Bush with the same fondness conservatives now look at Ronald Reagan. Bush was the guy who finally broke the country’s back. Read the whole post.
P.S. I needed to take a break from the heavy lifting involved in the more philosophy/theology oriented posts begun earlier this summer. I’ll return to those themes after next week.
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