This afternoon I logged on to Yahoo to check my e-mail. "Democratic Senators call for Gonzales to step down," read the headline in the news section. I remember thinking, "Wow! Has it gotten that far? I thought there was no chance of such a thing happening!"
A little later, sitting in the Starbucks reading Obama's new book, I came across a passage that irked me.
When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. ... (The conspiracy theories' purpose) is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes.
On one level, I agreed with him. This wasn't fascism. And I certainly was part of an agitated base. But at the same time, I felt Obama was too sucked into his "new politics" to think of how heartless the results of his easy optimism were. I mean, fact: People sitting in coffeehouses just like the one I was sitting in, albeit in Baghdad, were far more likely to be blown to bits before their next sip of frappucino. And children would be orphaned. And radical militants would be made. A policy with such results was as bad as any fascism I could imagine.
And I had long thought that Bushco had refined the jackbooted fascism that we recall from Hitler's Germany. I imagined Karl Rove with a lightbulb over his head, thinking, "Aha! Here is how we can gain absolute power without being stopped!
"The key is this:
We need not silence voices that oppose ours-- we need only marginalize them. If we ensure that the voices of the opposition are heard only on the sidelines, if they are called the background noise of fanatics, it will achieve the same end as censorship. No one will take seriously the ideas that really represent a danger to us. We need not subvert the First Amendment to have all the power we ever wanted. In fact, it's better for us. If the arguments are out there, we can call them foolish and marginalize them; if we tried to suppress them, sooner or later one would break through, and we would then be powerless to stop it."
And I had thought they'd succeeded, quite frankly. A part of me had to acknowledge the genius of such a plot. They'd managed to create an iron-fisted regime that would never be called as much to its face, not by the people who matter. And senators like Obama would point to just those discrepancies to argue
against the very idea that something was really, terribly, radically wrong. Rove had won.
But now then, if this new fascism were truly in place, could we have gotten to the point where Gonzales might actually feel pressure to resign?
That's their weak point, I realized. They think they can have their fascism despite that pesky First Amendment. But they underestimate its power.
It's been our pressure, our voices that have gotten us this far. It's been the power of freedom of speech, that nuisance they thought they could control with their psy-ops. We've gotten rid of Rumsfeld, of Libby, of the Republican control of the House (and to some extent the Senate). By talking. And writing. And blogging. And sometimes shouting. The First Amendment is more powerful than they realized.
They've always underestimated the importance of free speech-- just look at what Newt once said about it needing limits-- but they have also underestimated its power.And how I wish it had worked more quickly and more lives could have been saved. But I suppose that freedom is a less convenient, slower-moving beast than force. And that is, after all, the way we prefer it.
So keep talking.
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