The illegal detentions in Guantanamo and the extraordinary renditions were rumors, and it was 2005 before the Times broke the story on the illegal wiretapping.
Still, the mosaic had been taking shape for years. The Republican administration was taking imperious measures in the name of public safety. They claimed these curtailments of common liberty were necessary, minor inconveniences, that enabled our rulers to protect our safety. We were to trade our liberty for their provision of security.
But the governing party seemed unable to question their own capability to govern. They were the administration that allowed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Who could have confidence in them?
Meanwhile, we knew poor peasants were being blown up, defenseless, in Afghanistan, while the Taliban forces, along with Osama bin Laden, escaped. And we knew in 2004 that Bush was driving in a convoy of black SUVs around America with military personnel who pointed guns out the windows at bystanders. We knew citizens were being evicted, arrested, harrassed and detained for wearing anti-war t-shirts and John Kerry lapel pins at Bush campaign events.
There was an inhumanity about the efficient invasion of Iraq that made me shiver in horror: shock and awe: blitzkreig. Cold and calculated killing, overwhelming force of destructive power unleashed against a poor and vulnerable, nearly defenseless country of families, houses, hospitals, highways, schools, roads, shops, mosques. We flooded the place with soldiers and weapons, impoverished, broke it.
Bushco preached terror and tax cuts while the country slowed--the society slowed--like a great long train struggling up a hill and then slowly, gradually, running out of momentum and power and coming to a stop before we reached the pinnacle.
And the 2004 election was that moment of the stop--that single, tiny, timeless moment before the intertia shifted and the whole mass of that train began to roll backwards, downhill. There was a pause when the upward mobility ended, before the downward mobility commenced. It was a moment of stillness when the great machine of progress reached the farmost point of its ascent. It was still. Then our rolling backward began.
In A Failed Revolution Krugman wrote, in today's Times
The collapse of the push to privatize Social Security recapitulated the failure of the Republican revolution as a whole. Once the administration was forced to get specific about the details, it became obvious that private accounts couldn’t produce something for nothing, and the public’s support vanished.
In the end, Republicans didn’t shrink the government. But they did degrade it. Baghdad and New Orleans are the arrival destinations of a movement based on deep contempt for governance.
1798
In 1798 the Federalist majority in Congress drafted the Alien Friends and the Sedition Acts in response to fear of war with France and what were perceived as calumnous attacks on the Administration of President John Adams. According to Geoffrey Stone,
Federalists believed that the governors were superior to the people and must not be subjected to censure that might diminish their authority. Republicans believed that governors were the servants of the people, who therefore had a right and a responsibility to question and criticize their judgments.
The Federalists, or Hamilitonians had the votes in Congress and succeeded in passing the Sedition Act, which said,
That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious wrting or writings agains the government of the United States,... with intent to defame, or to bring them contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them hatred of the good people of the United States,... then such person ... shall be punished....
Of course the argument against it was that the First Amendment forbade Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. So the Republicans, or Jeffersonians were correct in opposing the Act. Free expression is indispensable to the political process.
But as Krugman says,
bad policy ideas are like cockroaches: you can flush them down the toilet, but they keep coming back. Many of the ideas that failed in the Bush years had previously failed in the Reagan years. So there’s no reason to assume they’re gone for good.
Hence, the petering out of our political momentum under Bushco, and the accompanying reversal of our progress here in America and around the world.
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