Republic or Empire: If We Don't Fight, Who Will?

In addition to my earlier reflections on the President's State of the Union address, I was also struck by the spectacle of a third or more of our elected representatives sitting on their hands throughout the speech, refusing to applaud even the most nonpartisan points of the speech, or indeed even to acknowledge the President's courteous and sometimes humorous attempts to reach out to them.

I heard the TV commenters point out at the beginning of the event that the Republicans had been strictly charged by their party leaders aforehand that there were to be no Joe Wilson outbursts on this dignified (well, dignified for U.S. politics) occasion.  Well and good.  Even so, as the camera panned across row after row after row of silent but accusatory faces with gleaming eyes, it was hard to evade the thought of a wolf pack held momentarily at bay.  Silent, disdainful - and hungry for blood.  Hardened warriors ready for battle, eager to storm the ramparts.

A chilling scene at the heart of our republic.  And those faces were nearly all white, and nearly all male.  The kind that were the big jocks in school.  There were noticeably more women and more people of color on the Democrat side of the aisle.

The juvenile, assinine quibbling over which justice or general applauded or screwed up his face during the address is not worth commenting on, and misses the much more important point of a government brought nearly to a standstill by a reactionary minority party, convinced beyond a shadow of self-doubt of its own divine mandate, not merely to rule but to conquer.  Sullivan reflects further on Obama's character, and the looming peril facing the nation at this critical juncture in its history:

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance. I do not believe that in the Bush administration, the United States was effectively governed by its Constitution. The forms were still there, but the reality wasn't. Beneath it all, the desire for despotism ran, fueled by the despot's greatest ally, fear. Fear of foreigners, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of immigrants, fear of the inevitable uncertainties of real reform.

It was entrenched by the military's own embrace of the role of imperial adventure, by the CIA's embrace of torture, by the president's assertion of total, extra-legal power in a never-ending war that now encompassed the US as well as abroad and citizens alongside non-citizens, and by a resurgent, right-wing partisan media that saw its job as fomenting propaganda rather than seeking any kind of truth, and liberal mainstream media so afraid of its own shadow and so intimidated by accusations of elitism that it became the equivalent of Harry Reid. . . .

So this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses - or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it. My faith in this country - so strong in the past - is not as strong as Obama's now.

But I sure as hell believe in fighting for it, and for him, against the forces at home and abroad that would truly end this experiment in self-government while pretending, of course, that everything is exactly the same. I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe - because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force, but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.

Those, in my view, are the stakes. Are you ready to get back into the arena and fight? And if you don't, who will?

Sullivan also responds to this inane remark:

"Umm, what was that Abu Ghraib scandal all about? It started out as misconduct between men and women and then it steadily deteriorated into abuse of prisoners. The common denominator is lack of discipline. Once you break down discipline, good order and discipline and morale, everything that’s required for unit cohesion, you undermine the culture and the strength of the armed forces," - Elaine Donnelly, in an "argument" against gays in the military.

At this point, you realize that they really do live in an alternate reality, immune to evidence, hostile to reason. The Abu Ghraib scandal was about the torture and abuse techniques authorized by Bush and Cheney and supported by the vast majority of Republicans actually being photographed and documented. It was an example of what happens when a president unleashes torture in wartime as a legitimate tool. That it could be used to argue against allowing many servicemembers to serve their country without being persecuted for it is simply gob-smacking.