Category Archives: big picture stuff

What We’re Up Against

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I found this paragraph in an Eleanor Clift column crushingly depressing:

A pro-choice Republican who spoke with NEWSWEEK but didn’t want her name used said she is more worried about Alito after hearing him testify, and wishes the Democrats would spend their time finding a candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries “or we’re going to get four more years of judges like this.” She thinks that to win the White House the Democrats need a more centrist candidate than Clinton. “The math is against her.” (That debate is raging within Democratic circles, but no candidate has yet surfaced who could plausibly overtake Clinton, given her rock-star hold on party activists and the esteem in which she and her husband are held by African-American voters, a core Democratic constituency.)

Go ahead and read the whole column — it’s interesting — but let’s look at these “party activists.” There are activists, and there are other activists.

Compare/contrast Clift’s paragraph with this MyDD post by Chris Bowers — “Why The Blogosphere and the Netroots Do Not Like Hillary Clinton.”

… Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the netroots. I can offer loads of anecdotal information to support this, but perhaps the most striking evidence is that despite her large lead in national telephone surveys, she polls around fifth or sixth in our presidential preference polls. The real question we face is to figure out why she is not very popular among this large segment of the progressive activist class.

People will offer lots of reasons for this. In the past, I have done so myself. However, when one understands who actually makes up the blogosphere, a rarely, if ever, discussed reason comes to the fore. Within the progressive activist class, there is also a very real class stratification. While the blogosphere and the netroots may not be “the people” within America or the Democratic party as a whole, within the world of progressive activists, they are definitely “the people,” “the masses,” “the rank and file,” and any other populist term you want to throw out there. I believe the main mark against Hillary Clinton within the blogs and the netroots is the degree to which she is perceived as the uber-representative of the upper, aristocratic classes of the progressive activist world.

I think that’s part of it. See also these December posts by Avedon and Leah at Corrente. It’s not just that she’s unelectable; it’s that we don’t trust her.

Stirling Newberry wrote last November,

Hillary Clinton as a disaster for progressives and ultimately for the Democratic Party.

You want hard reasons? Let me list why I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever support Hillary Clinton, because she cannot ever, ever, ever, ever be trusted not to stab progressives in the back on key issues. She isn’t with us, except long enough to get the checks.

Let me start by way of explanation, when Bill Clinton first ran in 1992, I liked Hillary more than Bill, and even joked that we might be voting for the wrong Clinton. I felt she was smarter and sharper than Bill. She is, but, tin plated candidate that she is, she has no heart.

And she doesn’t like liberals or progressives. That’s a statement reported from several sources. She looks at us the same way that DeLay’s team looks at religious right voters – as stupid cash cows.

Stirling goes on to list concrete reasons why Hillary Clinton is unacceptable to the netroots; the first is “Hillary still supports the war.” He concludes,

Hillary is not politically reliable: she is busy selling progressives out now for her presidential bid. Which means that when she doesn’t need us at all, say the moment she has taken the oath of office and need only get re-elected with no primaries the second time around, we will be worse off than against a Republican, because we will have to sit through at least one Republican president before getting a progressive in the White House. If you don’t want to see a progressive President in your life time, then, by all means, support pro-war, soft on choice, anti-progressive, old top down media politics Hillary Clinton.

I think both Stirling and Chris are right, in different ways. Bottom line, Hillary Clinton is not one of us. She doesn’t represent us. She doesn’t know what we think and has lost the capacity to learn. She’s worked so hard at marketing herself to a mythical “center” that whoever she used to be has been consumed by her packaging. She’s an empty pants suit. As an active netcitizen of the Left, I believe I speak for an enormous majority of us when I say we are just as enthusiastic about a Hillary candidacy as we are about turnips.

Yet here is Eleanor Clift, who’s not a bad sort, writing about Hillary’s “rock-star hold on party activists.” Maybe Clift needs to stop shrieking at Tony Blankley on the McLaughlin Group and get out more.

Chris Bowers continues,

Within the world of progressive activists, from the viewpoint of the working and middle class progressive activists, Hillary Clinton is seen as hopelessly aligned with the establishment activists, with the insider activists, with the wealthy activists, with the well-connected activists, and with every possible progressive activist “elite” you can possibly imagine. Is it thus in any way surprising that the activist base, which is largely on the outside looking in, generally does not harbor much positive feeling toward her? The progressive activist base considers the progressive activist elite to be the main culprit in progressives losing power around the country. We keep losing, and we blame them. Thus, why should it be a surprise to anyone that we dislike the person who is viewed as their primary representative? We literally hold her, and what she represents within the world of progressive activism, to be responsible for the massive progressive backslide that has taken place over the past twelve years.

My cruder evaluation is that the Clintons represent a strategy that won some elections in the 1980s and 1990s but which has exacted a terrible cost on the Democratic Party. Their strategy was to toss enough progressive policy overboard to stay afloat in the Republican-controlled media sea. Bill Clinton made it work for him partly through force of personality — the man can charm the scales off a snake — and partly through co-opting Brand Republican positions; for example, on welfare and the death penalty. In the wake of the Reagan Era, perhaps that was a smart strategy.

But the Clintons, and the Democrats through the 1980s and 1990s, mounted no serious challenge to the GOP’s control of the sea — the VRWC and the Republican Noise Machine. Today the top of the Democratic Party and their “expert” consultants stick to the Clinton strategy, but now the VRWC has learned how to nullify it. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has tossed away so much of itself it’s hard to know what it stands for any more. They don’t call ’em “Republican Lite” for nothing.

Yet time and time again we see that the Republicans have moved far to the right of the American public on many critical issues. The attempt to “reform” Social Security, the Terri Schiavo episode, and, increasingly, Iraq reveal the Republicans to be way out of touch with mainstream Americans (which makes the notion that the Dems need to find a “centrist” candidate rather amusing). I truly believe many not-politcally-active people are growing heartily sick of right-wing extremism. But when they turn on the television or the radio, they don’t see or hear much in the way of an alternative. And so the Republicans win elections, for reasons that have little to do with their accomplishments (which are … ?) or their policy positions.

Chris Bowers argues that the blogosphere is not “the people,” in the sense that bloggers and their readers tend to be more affluent and educated than the population as a whole. But we represent the heart and soul of progressive activism far more faithfully than does the Democratic Party. And I think we represent the Party’s only viable future. The path they are on now leads to irrelevancy — some will argue they’ve already arrived — and to dissolution.

Law, Democracy, and Liberalism

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Sometimes one finds two essays written by two different people on two different subjects that illuminate each other. I believe I found such a pair today.

The first is at Unclaimed Territory (and cross-posted to Hullabaloo) by Glenn Greenwald. He writes,

What we have in our Federal Government are not individual acts of law-breaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead, a culture and an ideology of lawlessness. It cannot be emphasized enough that since September 11, the Bush Administration has claimed the power to act without any constraints of law or checks from the Congress or the courts. Its view of its own power and governing philosophy is based upon, and perfectly encapsulated by, this single paragraph from the incomparably pernicious September 25, 2001 Memorandum, written by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo:

    1. In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President’s authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however,

can place any limits on the President’s determinations

    1. as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution,

are for the President alone to make

    .

Awhile back Mr. Greenwald challenged righties to explain “how there can be any limits at all on his power under the theories of Executive Power which they are advocating to argue that Bush had the right to violate Congressional law.” The answers he received can be boiled down to: There aren’t. It is entirely within the President’s discretion which laws he will or will not follow; therefore, there are no limits to his power.

As disturbing as Bush’s power-grab has become, the knee-jerk defense of unlimited executive power coming out of the Right — often from self-styled “libertarians” — is beyond creepy. In Rightieworld, the White House is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. What Bush wants trumps not just Congress, but also the courts.

Glenn Greenwald continues:

The NSA law-breaking scandal cannot be seen as some isolated act. It is merely the most flagrant symptom (thus far) of the fact that we have a President — with three full years left in office — who has claimed for himself the right to ignore Congressional law and who believes that virtually all decisions of any real significance in our country are his “alone to make.” FISA. The National Security Act of 1947. The McCain Amendment. These are all federal laws — laws — which the Administration is openly claiming it has the right to violate.

How could this possibly be defensible in the United States? Do “conservatives” have no principles at all?

Here we come to the second essay, written last June by Michael Bérubé. [Update: Michael Bérubé has corrected me; the post I am quoting was written by John McGowan.]

Republicans have launched a full-scale assault upon democracy at home. Setting aside (for the moment) the simple fact that this assault is about grabbing and using power, it also reflects an impoverished view of democracy, basically one that limits democracy to free elections. In this view, the people ratify a set of leaders–a government–in an election, and, in so doing, gives those leaders a blank check. …

… This understanding of democracy tends toward the plebiscite–and toward the establishment of a strong leader, usually one who promises to sweep aside the complexities, compromises, frustrations, and inefficiencies introduced by parliamentary janglings and an independent judiciary. From Napoleon III and Bismarck in the 19th century to the Governator in the late 20th century, the plebiscite has almost always favored right wing leaders impatient with legal and institutional impediments to forceful action.

There was an interview on tonight’s “Hardball” that illustrated this perfectly; I’ll try to remember to post the transcript tomorrow. Essentially, an apologist for the Bush Regime said that if the people don’t like warrantless searches, in 2008 they can vote for a candidate who promises to get warrants. Until then … tough.

Bérubé McGowan explains that “A free society is one in which there are various centers of power, various positions from which people have the ability to influence decisions.” I might add that the separation of powers written into the Constitution can not lawfully be suspended just because one political party controls all branches of government and finds the separation cumbersome. The Constitution gives powers and authorities to legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, not to whatever party wins the most elections.

Bérubé McGowan continues:

There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful–or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic–and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?)

I think this answers the question of why righties are so blind to their own radicalism, and why they can so casually toss the “rule of law” out the window when it gets in the way of their agenda.

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place–democracy in the people, liberalism in the law–and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity.

Liberalism can seem “unnatural,” Bérubé McGowan says, because “It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will.” Because liberalism values compromise, liberals can appear to have no strong convictions at all. But, IMO, one of the significant differences between Left and Right in America today is that liberals value the processes and procedures of democracy above any particular agenda, but conservatives place their agenda above the processes. For the sake of fleeting policy victories and an advantage in the next elections, “conservatives” (and I use the word loosely) are undermining the institutional structures of government that have sustained this country for more than two centuries. If those structures aren’t around to sustain future generations — who cares? We’ll all be dead.

What do we make of conservatives who don’t “conserve”? What we make of them is that the American Right has moved off the scale; it has become thoroughly radicalized. In truth, our present Right vs. Left conflict is really a conflict between radicals and moderates. I suspect a lot of Americans are beginning to sense this.

Update: See Lichtblau and Shant, New York Times: “Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted.”

Meme of Fours

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From Roy, to Kevin, to Digby, to Peter D., now to moi — doing this list meme made me realize I haven’t vacationed enough —

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Editor, production manager, reporter, mother

Four movies you could watch over and over: Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (counts as 1 or 3?), Amadeus

Four places you’ve lived: Flat River, Missouri, since renamed Park Hills; Cincinnati, Ohio; Bergenfield, New Jersey; current undisclosed location somewhere in New York

Four TV shows you love to watch: The Daily Show, Countdown, Animal Precinct, Law & Order

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Wales, Washington DC, San Francisco, various Ozark Mountain locations

Four websites you visit daily: Eschaton, The Sideshow, Whiskey Bar, Hullabaloo, many more

Four of your favorite foods: chocolate, cheese, scallops, pasta

Four places you’d rather be: Snowdonia (Wales), London, any good Italian restaurant, a pretty mountain cabin near a lake with good friends and lots of beer and snacks

Passing the ball to … my buddy Bob Geiger of Yellow Dog Blog!

Update: Bob posted here, then punted to Jane at firedoglake. Feel free to add your own lists to the comments!

Powers and Presidents

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Kevin Drum makes a good point here about presidential war powers. There is general agreement (accept maybe among hard-core libertarians) that in times of war and extreme emergency, presidents can take on expanded powers, à la Lincoln and FDR.

But the next question is, what is war? “War powers” have always been considered extraordinary, to be used only in case of emergency. But if you count “hot wars,” the U.S. has been at war for about 20 of the past 65 years. And if you count the Cold War, then we’ve been at war for 50 of the past 65 years. If we consider ourselves to be in a state of war nearly all the time, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. If we assume the president is allowed expanded powers for 50 out of 65 years, the checks and balances of the Constitution are effectively nullified.

Kevin writes,

Somehow we need to come to grips with this. There’s “wartime” and then there’s “wartime,” and not all armed conflicts vest the president with emergency powers. George Bush may have the best intentions in the world — and in this case he probably did have the best intentions in the world — but that still doesn’t mean he has the kind of plenary power Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised during their wars.

During a genuine emergency, the president’s powers are at their most expansive. The rest of the time they’re more restricted, whether he considers himself a wartime president or not. Right now, if George Bush needs or wants greater authority than he currently has, he should ask Congress to give it to him — after all, they approve black programs all the time and are fully capable of holding closed hearings to debate sensitive national security issues. It’s worth remembering that “regulation of the land and naval forces” is a power the constitution gives to Congress, and both Congress and the president ought to start taking that a little more seriously.

We need to be clear about whether global terrorism is an extraordinary threat that can be defeated, or whether it’s part of a new phase of human history in which war is not between nations but between sects. I strongly suspect the latter is true, and that the threat of global terrorism will hang over civilizations for generations. Even if the Islamic jihadists were to surrender their fight in our lifetime — highly unlikely, IMO — the world is full of other groups with different agendas who might very well resort to the same tactics.

Horrible though they were, “declared” wars like World Wars I and II had a certain clarity to them. The wars had a sharply defined beginning and end –e.g., the World War I cease fire on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Everybody understood who their enemies were. Soldiers wore uniforms and were (supposed to) operate within certain rules.

But the “war on terror” is so hazily defined that Americans disagree among themselves what it is, or exactly who our enemies are. Regarding Iraq (which may or may not be part of the war on terror, depending on who’s talking), the President only recently acknowledged that the people we are fighting aren’t all “terrorists,” even though he doesn’t seem to be able to get the word “insurgency” out of his mouth. Yet others tell us the al Qaeda affiliates make up less than 10 percent of the people we are fighting in Iraq.

I think the Iraq War is less about fighting al Qaeda, or reshaping the Middle East, or even oil, than it is about the Right’s collective emotional need for a conventional enemy. Iraq is a proxy war standing in for the old-fashioned “glorious little war” the righties desire. But glorious little wars no longer apply to geopolitical reality. Although certainly military actions will be part of the effort to combat terrorism, talk of “fronts” — as in “central front of the war on terror” — seems to me as anachronistic as mounted saber charges.

And the righties seem to think we are in a state of emergency, and have been continually since 9/11. If you’ve ever worked for someone who can’t set priorities, you may know what I’m talking about — when everything’s a priority, nothing is a priority. And when we’re always in a state of emergency, we’re never in a state of emergency. As a nation we need to take a deep breath and understand that we’ve got a lot of long, hard, and mostly not glorious work ahead of us to face the challenge of global terrorism. But we’ve got to understand this is how the world is going to be for the foreseeable future, probably the rest of our lives. And that means fighting terrorism is not an “emergency.” It’s the norm. And all constitutional restrictions apply.

Looking the Other Way

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Be sure to read Harold Bloom’s essay in The Guardian — “Reflections on an Evening Land.” Although in places it reminds me why I didn’t major in English lit, the essay makes vital points —

At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold the presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not sanguine, because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida (twice) and in Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the Supreme Court. The economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed that the Republicans dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress or the White House, because subsequent investigations could disclose dark matters indeed. Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers of our Iraq crusade are big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud), Halliburton (the vice-president), Bechtel (a nest of mighty Republicans) and so forth.

All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a president who shares their limitations.

This made me think of yesterday’s Risen-Lichtblau article in the New York Times:

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. “People just looked the other way because they didn’t want to know what was going on,” he said.

That’s pretty much our situation in a nutshell. We look the other way. We don’t want to know what’s going on.

This past week news media made a Big Bleeping Deal out of the fact that President Bush uttered the words “As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” as if this marked some new era of presidential candor. But look at the context — the paragraph in which the fleeting moment of candor appeared —

When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As President, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq — and I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that. At the same time, we must remember that an investigation after the war by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer found that Saddam was using the U.N. oil-for-food program to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting his weapons programs once the sanctions collapsed and the world looked the other way. Given Saddam’s history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat — and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power. (Applause.) We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.

— he’s still not admitting to a mistake. He’s still claiming he did the right thing. And he’s still pretending the world at large agreed with his decision, when it most definitely did not.

The fact that Bush could have (somehow) obtained a second term, even after it was obvious he had taken us into a costly and unnecessary war that could easily have been avoided, is an obscenity. It’s obscene that so many people in the media and in politics continue to cover his ass and treat him with respect. And it’s obscene that Americans accept him as president. I sincerely believe that earlier generations would have stormed the White House bearing buckets of hot tar and bags of feathers, never mind sit quietly by and watch him be inaugurated for another term.

Earlier Americans would have been outraged. Today’s Americans sit placidly and watch as their betrayal is televised.

And, constitutionally speaking, it is not the President’s responsibility to decide to invade another country. That’s Congress’s responsibility. But who reads the Constitution any more? That’s so, like, pre-9/11.

“What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a parody of the Roman empire?” Bloom asks. I think he’s giving us too much credit; we’re too prudish to parody the Roman empire. I think we’ve become only a parody of ourselves, which is far more pathetic. Just cruise around the Right Blogosphere and notice the imagery — fierce bald eagles, the Liberty Bell, minutemen — and then look at the opinions presented: The president was right to authorize wiretaps of citizens in secret. If you aren’t doing anything illegal you should have nothing to worry about.

How is it that a rich, spoiled, pampered frat boy with an affected Texas accent, who never worked a day in his life and used family connections to avoid service in Vietnam, became the heir to Andy Jackson? If that’s not parody, I don’t know what is.

Although we might yet go the way of the Romans. Historians tell us that as Rome fell, the Romans themselves scarcely noticed it was happening. Even as the barbarians were literally at the gates, individual Romans went ahead with their personal business with no concern that their way of life was about to end. They didn’t see it coming. And they didn’t see it because of end of Rome was unthinkable. Today the true believers in American exceptionalism cling to the idea that the virtues of our American republic are so unassailable as to justify any depravity done in America’s name. The notion that America could be in the wrong, much less fall from grace as The Land of the Free, is unthinkable.

Beware of what is unthinkable. Just because something is outside your imagination doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The exceptionalists are in power, and those of us who see the fall coming are dismissed as “looney lefties.” I sometimes feel as if I’m watching a train wreck that I’m powerless to stop.

“Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy,” Bloom writes. Today in the New York Times, Scott Shane writes that “A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration’s war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.” Does that make Bush our Julius Caesar? Ol’ Julius would be insulted, I believe.

Of course, in Caesar’s case, the Senate eventually took matters into their own hands and, um, deposed him. With extreme prejudice. I wouldn’t look to our current lot in Congress to be quite so principled. The question is, is it too late for a strong and unified opposition to Bush to arise? Is it too late for Congress to take back its proper authoritiy and demote the Emperor back to being a republican (small R) president? If not (even better) a citizen?

Also commenting on the Bloom essay, Stirling Newberry writes “I do not believe there is an American decline that is inevitable.” However,

I believe that catastrophe is inevitable, that is we will not change direction until checks bounce and people can’t get gasoline. But we are nearer to that than people know. I saw my first gas lines in America in 30 years recently, the shadow of shortage is held at bay by European recession and the strategic reserve. The rich and powerful are pumping oil as fast as they can, because they feel the noose tightening around them. They can feel that if there is an economic tumble now, then who knows where the rebellions will lead.

America has been very foolish indeed, and it has suffered in its arts and letters as it has suffered politically – for the same reason. We are corrupt, and everything is about being attached to the revenue stream. Being attached to the stream of money is the only sign of success we care about, because it is the only one that matters. Read any composer biography, it will be a list of “who cut the check” and how many checks have been cut. As if composers were whores, known for who they serviced.

This reality is passing, because of the many problems of a prostitute society, a certain emptiness that comes with the first light of day is among them. People who could be successful in the world of fighting to get to the teat have given up on it. Yes, I can understand those much older than I being disappointed, there was so much more possible than seems to have occured. It was that very fear of disaster which kept the older generation on the straight and narrow. It was the loss of that fear that allowed the Republicans to raid the savings accounts and produce a generation of fat falsity.

Yet “The whole modern world is running out of value,” Stirling continues, and there is no reason we can’t make a course correction and adjust to new realities.

Perhaps the Democratic Party is not yet ready to take power, but this weakness is a paradoxical strength: when a leader comes who is capable of taking the White House, and governing the nation, with a following to match his vision – the rest of the party will fall into rank and file, because there will be no other alternative. Parties, as Wilson reminded us in his first inaugural, are instruments of the greater purpose of the nation.

So it will be now, when America has finally lost hope in false promises, and finally reaches the moment where the river of oil and corruption can no longer provide enough affluence for enough Americans, we will change, and move in a new direction.

Personally, I think we’re tottering on the edge. Fall one way, and we’ll become a corrupt and bloated plutocracy of exploitation, limited opportunity, and abased civil liberties. Fall the other way, and maybe we’ll no longer be the World’s Only Superpower, or the Richest Sumbitches on the Planet, but we’ll still have the Constitution and civil liberties, and (eventually) our self-respect. Certainly we’re leaning toward the former, but I don’t think the latter is yet lost to us.