by Chalmers Johnson
Truthdig
May 15, 2008
Review of Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin
It is not news that the United States is in great trouble. The pre-emptive war it launched against Iraq more than five years ago was and is a mistake of monumental proportions — one that most Americans still fail to acknowledge. Instead they are arguing about whether we should push on to “victory” when even our own generals tell us that a military victory is today inconceivable. Our economy has been hollowed out by excessive military spending over many decades while our competitors have devoted themselves to investments in lucrative new industries that serve civilian needs. Our political system of checks and balances has been virtually destroyed by rampant cronyism and corruption in Washington, D.C., and by a two-term president who goes around crowing “I am the decider,” a concept fundamentally hostile to our constitutional system. We have allowed our elections, the one nonnegotiable institution in a democracy, to be debased and hijacked — as was the 2000 presidential election in Florida — with scarcely any protest from the public or the self-proclaimed press guardians of the “Fourth Estate.” We now engage in torture of defenseless prisoners although it defames and demoralizes our armed forces and intelligence agencies.
The problem is that there are too many things going wrong at the same time for anyone to have a broad understanding of the disaster that has overcome us and what, if anything, can be done to return our country to constitutional government and at least a degree of democracy. By now, there are hundreds of books on particular aspects of our situation — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bloated and unsupervised “defense” budgets, the imperial presidency and its contempt for our civil liberties, the widespread privatization of traditional governmental functions, and a political system in which no leader dares even to utter the words imperialism and militarism in public.
There are, however, a few attempts at more complex analyses of how we arrived at this sorry state. They include Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, on how “private” economic power now is almost coequal with legitimate political power; John W. Dean, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, on the perversion of our main defenses against dictatorship and tyranny; Arianna Huffington, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, on the manipulation of fear in our political life and the primary role played by the media; and Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, on Ten Steps to Fascism and where we currently stand on this staircase. My own book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, on militarism as an inescapable accompaniment of imperialism, also belongs to this genre.
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From the archives:
Dandelion Salad 
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Five years on, this superb review has become chapter and verse for us globally, as we now face the precise context it addresses so coherently.
Anyone with an intelligent moral compass to hand, could have divined the scale of difficulties the US was running into, but now just like our inboard sat-nav systems that speak to us with pin-point certainty, the message rings clear “you have arrived.”
The dilemma for the world’s poor is to determine whatever practical ecological means remain to survive through resourceful resistance, until guided self-determination & self-sufficiency can be realized and creative social equity attained. For the rich and the consumer class, it remains an ownership, management & continuity problem ~ how to secure your ongoing pillage.
However, it is one thing to award yourself a comfortable fiefdom however modest or extreme, & quite another to maintain it “sustainably.” So, for the swarming remainder, the rest of “us,” it’s likely to remain default business ~ not as usual ~ but simply, as best as we can.
Being the change rings a bit hollow these days, since life is nothing but change ~ especially from chrysalis to butterfly as Elisabet Sahtouris has already made clear, if that is in your epigenetic program.
No, I think the real message to all and sundry right now should be plain and simple: “boycott the bullshit!” ~ but please read the small-print on that label correctly, folks… just be the truth ~ as you live it, how you live, the way you work.
Get local and ~ be vocal…!!
It really is, David. Thanks for your commentary, too.
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As individuals we need to change ourselves!
From another post’s comment section:
Here’s the video: What the Bleep Do We Know? + Quantum Pt 1 (videos)
Here’s another interesting post by Dr. Joe Vitale on Kingsley Dennis’ blog: Healing from Within
And anther post by Kingsley Dennis: Co-Creating the Future: a new age of chivalry
Good question. There are lots of answers:
Start a garden; pay off all debts; stop spending $ on junk; pray; live simply; be peaceful; work on local campaigns (local and state). That’s a start anyway.
Hmm, hmm, hmm, wada we do now boss ?