the coup at home

There's another side to the wmtc category "US regression": the regression of democracy into fascism.

So many intelligent Americans who value democracy and hate what has happened to their country - that includes both liberals and conservatives - still cling to their supposed evidence that the US is not, in fact, a fascist state. They point out that there is free speech, and there are elections.

Well, you know my thoughts on US "elections". The last two presidential elections were stolen. What else you got?

Free speech, for the most part, continues. Published dissent that changes nothing is tolerated. (Although public dissent is often punished.).

These Americans hold up their mental image of fascism - tanks rolling through the streets, mass arrests, martial law, a shut-down of elections - and compare it to what they see around them, and conclude, no, things are bad, but we're still safe.

I wish they would think a little more creatively. Is an armed coup the only way a democracy can become a dictatorship? Is a Stalin or Hitler the only face of fascism? Perhaps those in power realize they don't need to go to such extremes to achieve their ends.

It's as if collective memory of the 20th Century's massive fascist states have clouded people's vision of the present.

What about a thin facade of democracy overlaid on an essentially fascist state? What about a society so deadened by consumerism and overtaxed by mere survival that the powerful needn't worry about revolution, or even effective, organized resistance?

To me it seems obvious: it's vastly more expeditious for the US government to allow the superficial appearance of democracy than to engage in what's currently happening in Pakistan. Look how those actions sound the alarm bells. Better to maintain the appearance of status quo while dismantling the system from within.

The absence of tanks in your streets does not equal the presence of democracy in your country. That sets the bar too low.

I've been saying this and writing about it for a long time, so whenever I find my ideas reflected in the mainstream media, I am grateful. Thank you, Frank Rich.

But there's another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we've propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We've become inured to democracy-lite. That's why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf's.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he's championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word "freedom" 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a "Celebration of Freedom" concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush's example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan's Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln's Civil War suspension of a prisoner's fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That's like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that "there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution."

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal. [Essay here.]