Purging Lake Woebegone

George Soros got the attention of Forbes yesterday when he said that Fox News, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and Americans' ability to fantasize unrealistically about their political system raise the prospect of dictatorial democracy.

The Late Doug Payne and I in the late 1980s and early 1990s speculated about the same thing. With the global era of democratization occurring at that time, we saw trends of what we called authoritarian democracy in places like Colombia and Russia. That is you could have a formal democracy with the internal reality of a repressive authoritarian regime. This trend seems to have become more prevalent by the late 1990s and early 21st Century.

In the United States, we came very close in the last administration. Their embrace of the unitary theory of the executive had only been practiced in the Mexico of the PRI Party and Hitler's Germany. Also, the United States declared a state of national emergency that exists to this day. The effect of this has been the longest suspension of civil liberties in our history. Now these suspensions are being formalized in a series of court cases. All you have to do is read the Patriot Act and its follow-up to get a clear sense of the voluntary--bipartisan--abridgement of civil liberties. Then we have the record "looting of America" by the corporations and banks.

But the extreme right-wing reaction to the election of Barack Obama and ,to a lesser degree, the economic collapse of our system has unleashed more worrisome portents for our political future. They appear as small signs. The stomping of a protester by a Rand Paul campaign officer. The thuggery in the Joe Miller campaign. The fights against Harry Reid supporters by the Sharron Angle teabag supporters. You have the next Speaker of the House openly meeting with Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, a man who has incited the killings of doctors who practice abortion. Or watch the serial bullying of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrissie. And the list goes on and you can fill up the blanks better than I can.

Another sign is that Muhammed Ali Hasan, the founder of "Muslims for Bush" and the biggest Republican organizer among American Muslims, has openly switched parties because of the GOP's racism and bigotry about Muslims. We have already experienced a year of anti-hispanic actions, including the infamus Arizona law, which the GOP is trying to replicate around the country.


The scale of this trend can be found by yesterday's move by the Minnesota Republican party. They suspended former Senator Dave Durenberger and former Governor Arne Carlson for two years and prohibited them from going to the 2012 Convention. Both men had a record of decency and honorable political service. The ostensible reason was their refusal to support Republican Governor Bob Emmer. Republicans wanted Emmer to prolong the appeals process against Democrat Dayton so that Tim Pawlenty could remain as Governor in the interim and work with the Republican legislature to finally dismantle the progressive system of government Minnesota has built in a bipartisan way for more than a generation.

To the media, the Minnesota Republicans tried to brush aside their own actions as saying these men were no longer relevant to today's party and members were frustrated by their past actions. So like all small-d democratic parties you purge them. I've never heard of this happening to honest and decent people in either party. Crooks and felons I understand.

This past summer we saw the same thing happened to Maine's Republican Party. The Party of Margaret Chase Smith, who fought Joe McCarthy,was literally taken over by the teabaggers with a platform that made the John Birch Society seem mainstream. Now the governor-elect Tom LePage has already alienated the citizenry and he hasn't taken office yet by appointing the most radical right-wingers in the state, who also don't have any experience at all in government.

Remember first they came for Bob Bennett of Utah, then Bob Inglis of South Carolina, then Mike Castle of Delaware and now Dave Durenberger. They obviously have no shame.

It really might be good news that John Boehner and his cronies have hired industry lobbyists as chief of staffs rather than people known in the Republican party. In other times, I would be appalled but at least they are not that far down on the food chain.

Meanwhile Senator Bernie Sanders channelled Jewish prophets in his scorching jeremiad on the deliberate destruction of the American working and middle-class and Washington's "culture of vultures". In his 8 1/2 hour blast at the American economic system and how Washington enables it, Sanders gave the most detailed and accurate summary of our current economic problems. He scored #4 on Twitter world-wide and was the recipient of a spontaneous money bomb to his campaign. Watch this space, nothing is more tempting for a brownshirt than a Jewish Socialist. It should get vicious for him in Vermont in 2012.

But he missed that President Obama's compromise was probably the last time one could reach any accomodations with the New Republican Party. It might well be that President Obama's strategy was to co-opt the last Republicans standing that have any reality-based politics.

I hope George Soros isn't right. But it does look like the next two years will be very rocky. Look to the states for the real action. We are already seeing states under the new Republicans try to opt out of Medicare and federal programs that assist the poor. Governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and New Jersey has turned down--at a penalty of hundreds of millions of dollaers--over $1.5 billion in federal funds for fast trains. Despite three court rulings against State's challenging the healthcare reform bill, Republican attorney-generals are still shopping for the friendlist judges.