The Real War--On American Democracy

In the midst of news of foreign wars, Americans are beginning to wake up to the real war being waged here at home. It is, however, a confused awakening.

For example, Americans wonder why the Bush administration seems so intent on crippling local, state, and federal governments by starving them of funds and creating huge federal debt that our children will have to repay.

Many think it's just to fund tax cuts and subsidies for the rich, that the multimillionaire CEOs who've taken over virtually all senior posts in the Bush administration are just pigs at the trough, and this is a spectacular but ordinary form of self-serving corruption. It all seems so plausible, and there's even a grain of truth to it.

But juicy deals for Bush administration insiders are just a by-product of the real and deeper war against democracy. The neoconservatives are perfectly happy for us to think they're just opportunists skirting the edges of legality and morality, but this is far more dangerous than simple government corruption.

Indeed, the neo-conservatives claim to be anti-government. As a leading spokesman for the neo-con agenda, Grover Norquist, told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson in a May 25, 2001 Morning Edition interview, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Without a larger view, the issues of domestic spending, oil, neo-conservative power plays in both major parties, the loss of liberties, anti-government rhetoric, and war in the Middle East all seem like separate and unconnected events. They're not.

The "new conservatives" who've seized the Republican Party and, through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) are nipping at the heels of the Democratic Party, are not our parents' conservatives. Historic conservatives like Barry Goldwater, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower would be appalled. Although their philosophical roots go back to Alexander Hamilton, who openly argued during the Constitutional Convention that royalty was the best form of government, the neocons have always been kept to the fringe, nipping at the heels of democracy.

In past times those promoting what is now called the neo-conservative agenda went by different names.

The Founders of America knew that for 6000 years "civilized" humans had always been ruled by one of three groups: kings, theocrats, or feudal lords. Kings held power by threat of violence and continual warfare; theocrats and popes held power by the people's fear of a god or gods; and feudal lords held power by wealth and the power that comes from throwing average people into poverty.

The "new" idea of our Founders in 1776 was to throw off all three of these historic tyrannies and replace them with a fourth way - people being ruled by themselves. A government that derived its legitimacy and continuing existence solely from the approval of its citizens. Government of, by, and for "We, The People." They called it a republican democracy.

What we are seeing now in the neoconservative agenda is nothing less than an attempt to overthrow republican democracy and replace it with a worldwide feudal state.

The last time this happened, the feudalists took over a monarchy and then North America. In December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India company, ultimately leading to a corporate takeover of the Americas that the colonists ended with the Boston Tea Party and, three years later, the American Revolution. This corporate-state partnership went on to conquer India, but eventually faded out as the British Empire faded, and the British government, along with most of Western Europe, embraced Jeffersonian forms of democracy.

But it raised its head again in the 20th Century, revived by Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. The Italian dictator even used the word "corporatism" to describe it, and then later renamed it as "fascism" - a word that was defined in American dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company) in 1983 as "fas-cism (fash'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."