America's Coup d'Etat

With the end of the Cold War in 1989 the United States became the strongest country in the world. Since 2000, the United States has boldly and swiftly been taken over by a military coup d’etat. These two facts, that the U.S. is the mightiest state power on the planet, and that it has become a de facto military dictatorship, must become the basis of all reasoning about American culture and politics. The two facts are especially salient to all progressive thinking in particular.

To be sure, the USA retains many trappings of its traditional democratic legitimacy. We still hold elections. We still pretend, at least, that we retain the freedoms of speech, of assembly, of conscience and religion, and the rights to a speedy and fair trial by our peers, to know and face our accusers, to hold silent as a witness rather than incriminate ourselves, to protect our families and property against violence and fraud whether from other individuals or from government itself.

But let us not delude ourselves about the current state of affairs. The America we are taught to love—and it is, admittedly, a lovable place, worthy of admiration and awe—is only an idea, a utopia of the mind, existing no place except as an ideal, a dream to be aspired to and worked toward.

We might usefully distinguish between America and the United States, the one the aspired-to myth of freedom, justice, equality and prosperity (however one defines these lofty but generic ideals), the other being the reality “on the ground,” the vast geographic expanse and complex network of political systems, the military industrial complex, the globalizing capitalist economy, the diverse population of rich and poor, black, white, brown, red, yellow, Native, Euro, and Asian, labor and management, educated elite and the illiterate marginalized, and everybody in between.

America, as the shining ideal it has always been, is still sound, still worth the striving, still an inspiration to the world, able to inspire greatness and draw shudders and tears of respect, envy, and admirable pride.

The United States, on the other hand, has become a global military-capitalist tyrant, a cynical machine bent on vindictive strikes and acquisitive conquest and, indeed, the suppression of everything good, noble, and true that America is, has sometimes been, and should always stand for.

The United States is destroying America. That is what must be understood clearly. That is what demands our sharp focus. It ought to become our rallying cry.

What is worse, the United States is cynically manipulating the spiritual, intellectual, and moral strengths of America in order to accomplish its destructive ends. To further its imperial ambitions the United States is cloaking itself in the proud mantle of America. To satisfy its thirst for power, geopolitical sway, and unfettered access to limited world resources, the United States is depleting America of its precious youth, its good will and spiritual optimism, its charitable benevolence, its eager willingness to reach out and help others less fortunate, its vital reserves of ingenuity and technical know-how.

In more concrete terms, the military regime now running the United States is literally bankrupting America’s future, funneling all its hard-earned public funds—the tax being the economic coin of the social contract whose only legitimacy is to serve the common good—into foolish, ill-planned wars of aggression and greed, while taking care on the domestic front only of those who already have much, turning a cynical and cruel blind-eye to the “middle class” and all the millions of others whose incomes increasingly fall short of their monthly bills.

The United States has lost, thrown away, its legitimacy. Nevertheless, America still longs for the protection of public institutions run by publicly elected good men and women for the benefit not of the select few but of one and all. America deserves such public institutions. In fact, America requires them. America is ill-served by the United States military dictatorship, and for America to survive it must oust the current rulers and transform the United States into a machine geared toward its ideals.

Of course, this is easier said than done. The military power elite have done their job well. Their coup d’etat has been remarkably successful. They have brilliantly manipulated all the resources available to create the military dictatorship without the many noticing it happening and without much ado. They have done so, in fact, with widespread popular support, fanfare, and praise. Large swaths of America have, alas, strongly embraced the military dictatorship vision of the United States. For much of this time they have relied on a complacent and complicit media machine to deliver faithfully its propaganda and spin.

But they do have weaknesses, and these are becoming more transparent day by day. First of all, their arrogance is getting harder to mask with jocular fake populism and gung-ho patriotism. The cronyism and greed at the heart of the regime’s machine is, somewhat surprisingly, becoming a media byword. The media, thankfully, has begun to wake up and smell the odor of corruption. Arrests, indictments, and investigations at high levels (David Safavian, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Bill Frist) are actually making the front pages of the print news magazines like Newsweek, where millions of otherwise news-clueless TV-drone Americans are getting their first lessons in the “cronyism” revolution that has taken over the United States.

These are some of the thoughts I’ve been thinking lately. I could—and probably should—go on, but I am going to post this as is. Meantime, I caught sight of a good looking book over at zFacts.com, conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. I’m checking it out at Amazon, and will probably pick it up soon. They parse the neocon coup d’etat in non-minced terms, stating their conclusion from the get-go:

“the neo-conservatives have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour, veering away from the balanced, consensus-building, and resource husbanding approach that has characterized traditional Republican internationalism—exemplified by Secretary of State Colin Powell—and acted more as a special interest focused on its particular agenda.”

This is just the beginning. It gets way better (or rather, worse). These two conservatives seem to agree wholeheartedly—if reluctantly—with everything I’ve written above. They try to remain optimistic, but it is clear they see the neoconservative regime as a threat to America and world order:

“Providing that the normal democratic checks and balances remain effective and providing that the American people in general and mainstream conservatives in particular see neo-conservatives for the aberration they are and demand a restoration of balance to the nation’s affairs, the neo-conservative influence will gradually dwindle.”

But these, to me, seem like BIG “providing thats.” I’m optimistic too, by nature. But not naïve or rosy-eyed about the fights that will have to be fought to get that influence to “dwindle.”