We have been stupefied: How Republicans subvert democracy, and the Democrats’ sorry dereliction
The American republic didn’t end this week because conservative Republicans captured the Senate. Conservative Republicans captured the Senate because the republic has been ending, as liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans surf four predatory new asymmetries in our national life – in security, in speech, in investment and in consumer marketing. These immense imbalances of power are submerging the elections, delegitimizing the liberal capitalist republic that promised to give security, speech, investment and marketing deeply different meanings and consequences than the ones they’ve acquired.
Nothing less than a transformation of American citizenship worthy of Nathan Hale, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. (who learned a lot from Gandhi), Vaclav Havel and, yes, Edward Snowden can free us from yet another spectacle of politicians who look like pinheads dancing on pins’ heads.
Security: When American civilian planes brought low the American superpower in 2001, they shook the dollar-driven premise that a massive, militarized national-security establishment can protect an open society. Yet instead of rethinking its premises and policies the “military-industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower warned against has recovered from the shock of 9/11 to become a global search-and-destroy directorate, nearly independent of democratic governance, that is making American society less conducive to the voluntary civic discipline, candor and trust that alone sustain a republic.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/05/we_have_been_stupefied_how_republicans_subvert_democracy_and_the_democrats_sorry_dereliction/