The state of American democracy

Fr. Charles Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s

I watched and heard at least a couple of hours of the Congressional hearings Tuesday with Erik Prince, the Republican/Christian fundamentalist head of the Blackwater mercenary firm. Between Prince the Christianist acting surly and all but sneering his contempt for the Democrats on the Committee and several of the Committee Republicans bitching about MoveOn.org and whining that the Democrats support The Enemy and who criticizing Blackwater mercenaries was equivalent to blaspheming our Saviour-General Petraeus, we got a good glimpse at the thuggish side of today's authoritarian Republicans.

It gave extra resonance to some very recent blog posts, like Angry, hateful liberal bloggers by Glenn Greenwald Salon 10/02/07, Oprah the Nazi by Dave Neiwert Orcinus blog 10/02/07 and Stealing Fascism by Sara Robinson, Orcinus blog 10/01/07, all of which talk about manifestations of fanaticism that are becoming more and more "mainstream" in today's Republican Party. I'm surprised that none of the Democrats called out one or two of the Republicans on the Committee on their cracks, especially one of them who went on at some length about how the Democrats are supporting the Other Side.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt to put the Republicans on the spot over Rush Limbaugh's trashy comment about soldiers who are critical of the Cheney-Bush war policies being "phony soldiers" didn't work out so well, it seems. As of Tim Grieve's post MoveOn, Limbaugh and how the game is played this morning, "Not a single Republican has signed Harry Reid's letter condemning Rush Limbaugh."

This new fad of having Congress pronounce official judgment on the propriety of statements by partisans in the course of normal political debate highlights one of the problems of democratic parties confronting a part that is becoming increasingly authoritarian, as today's Republican Party is. As disciplined as the often are, especially on supporting Cheney's foreign policies, the Republicans aren't quite a totally Leader-driven Party yet. As Ezra Klein points out in Immigration Issues: After Failure The American Prospect 09/24/07, the recent immigration reform bill was defeated by Republicans despite the President's support of the bill: "The legislation activated a large anti-immigrant bloc, whose primal scream, amplified into a Senate-shaking roar by conservative talk radio, doomed the bill". The aspirants to head the Party are carefully aligning themselves with their white nativist base on the issue, however.

Congressional declarations of what should be considered acceptable political speech is disturbing on a couple of levels. For one thing, it's embarrassing that one of the oldest democratically-elected legislative bodies in the world is reduced to such silly gestures. It's also an implied threat of legislative action, even though the resolution against MoveOn had no legal force.

Here the goals of the two parties are not mirror images of each other. On some issues, that's the case. On the Cheney-Bush torture policy, for instance, the Republicans with rare exceptions support it, while the Democrats oppose it. That's a difficult issue to craft a compromise over. Are they going to agree to only carry out mock executions by simulated drowning on Tuesdays and Fridays?

But in terms of regulating political speech, the goal of Republican authoritarians is to suppress pro-Democratic speech. Not (so far) by explicit bans but by stigma and quasi-legal means such as "free speech zones". As the late Molly Ivins put it, I thought the whole United States was a free speech zone. Also, it looks like the word "provocateur" is now a current part of our political vocabulary again. Anyone familiar with the Nixon administration's measures to suppress dissent could have guessed that some of this was going on. Cheney, after all, has sought to recreate the police-state features of the Nixon administration and take them much further. But this is the first concrete reference I recall coming across about the actual use of provocateurs against legal, peaceful protesters (though I obviously haven't been paying close enough attention), from The Mean Streets of the Homeland Security State-let by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com 09/30/07. Turse writes:

In 2005, the Times' Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert surveillance… of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of "a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

The Democrats, on the other hand, stand (I hope!) for a genuinely "liberal" notion of free speech.

That's why I have a lot of sympathy for Jane Hamsher's comment when she writes:

Rush [Limbaugh] may be [a] drug gobbling bloviator with a giant 4-F pustule on his butt, but his comments were well in line with what is considered free speech in this country, and that actually isn't any of the Senate’s business.

On the other hand, she says in the same post:

I really don’t know which is more exasperating — that our Senators think it is their job to tell people at large how they should exercise their right to free speech, or that they fire back at Limbaugh in such a weak and meaningless way. I suppose they have to do something or we will be treated to and endless parade of Cornyn bills where the Village Elders tell us all how displeased they are at our “uncivilized” rhetoric via fiat, and the failure of Republicans to sign on after voting to condemn MoveOn will serve up some campaign fodder. Would that their gesture was something more effective than watching them stomp their feet and shout “I know you are, but what am I?”

As long as Democrats are willing to sit at a Congressional hearing and listen to Republican blowhards call them traitors and claim they hate American soldiers and not at least respond that they are a bunch of lying sleazebags to say something like that, they aren't going to be able to respond to any of these attacks in a fully adequate way.

There is an attitude problem on the Democrats' part. And a big part of that problem is that they still find it hard to accept that today's Republican Party is an increasingly authoritarian institution that doesn't intend to play by either the formal or informal rules of democracy any more than they have to.

Wesley Clark's campaign to Dump Rush off Armed Forces Radio does make a lot of sense. Limbaugh not only trashes on-duty soldiers who don't agree with him. He regularly promotes bigotry directed not only against minorities and immigrants but against The Liberals. Not to mention that his relationship to factual accuracy is inconsistent, to put it nicely. Having a hate preacher like Limbaugh on Armed Forces Radio provides a kind of official endorsement he should not enjoy. Digby states the case for this move succinctly in Killing the King 10/02/07.

But this kind of dilemma will pop up more and more. And it is a real dilemma. When an authoritarian party dedicated to suppressing dissent against its policies is facing off against a party dedicated to a liberal democratic position on political speech, the pro-democracy party doesn't have the option of simply directing the same suppression tactics against the authoritarian party.

Complicating all this is the projection dynamic, in which affluent Republican white guys manage to define themselves as victims targeted by The Liberals to be suppressed. It seems bizarre for most people to imagine that Christians are being persecuted for their religion in the United States. But for white fundamentalists, that has been a standard assumption for years if not decades. Republican fundis are convinced that The Liberals and The Hollywood Crowd (i.e., "The Jews") are actively persecuting them in the United States. It's part of the craziness that comes with authoritarian fanaticism.

I've posted about this phenomenon several times in connection with the anti-Semitic "war on Christmas" nonsense that the FOXists have taken to promoting every year during the holiday season:

Whining by the "defenders" of Christmas 12/28/04
The (Christmas) war fraud 11/24/05
The fine old conflict over Christmas 12/08/05
Analyzing the phony "war on Christmas" 12/15/05
More on the bah-humbug war against the (nonexistent) "war on Christmas" 12/23/05

And as Digby points out, our Beltway press and pundits are heavily invested in not recognizing the evolution of the Republican Party and the American party system more generally (Village Parties 10/02/07):

... this fetish for bipartisanship is a [Washington Beltway] Village construct. They all live together. They want everyone to get along, like back in the good old days when Tip and Bob would fight it out on the floor and then head out and get shitfaced with Wilbur Mills and John Tower. In those days the parties were not aligned ideologically and there was great political utility in having an open line of communication.

We are in a different time, in which the parties have realigned along some old traditional lines. We are also dealing with the fact that one party was hijacked by a radical political movement that sought to take the country back to a 19th century economic system, an 18th century social system and a 1st century Imperial system. Many Americans disagree with that plan and are trying to bring the nation back to the present.

Tags: anti-semitism, authoritarianism, bipartisanship, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, republican party, rush limbaugh, war on christmas