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[FDL is pleased to welcome Stirling Newberry and Joe Conason here today for a discussion of It Can Happen Here.  As with all Book Salon discussions, please be polite and keep this thread on topic.  Any off topic discussions should be taken to the prior thread.  -- CHS]

You do not need Joe Conason, or Norman Solomon or me or anyone to tell you that America has pased through a period of political and constitutional crisis, and that our liberties have been attacked, overtly and covertly, in broad daylight and in public, and in secret places that scarcely have names. 

However, if you read Joe Conason's newest book It Can Happen Here you will have a much better idea of the who, the how, and the where, and the why of what has happened.  In it he details the triangle of Republican Party apparatus acting through the executive branch, corporatocracy acting through the collusive power of money and deal making, and defended by a haze of theocratic populism. FDR famously declared that fascism's essence was "ownership of government by another power." Joe Conason details how an authoritarian movement has risen to control almost every lever of power in American society, and has worked relentlessly to insulate itself from accountability – legal, public or moral.

It is a sobering book, and a  timely one, because America has been very drunk.

The heart of Joe Conason's story is how "corporate money and church muscle" have been used to elevate George Bush from an undistinguished business hack, to governor of the third largest state in the Union, and thence to the Presidency. How this broad movement was combine with Nixonian tactics and ideology, often carried out by the same people who were in the Nixon administration, to create a neo-Nixonian Presidency, but one unrestrained by the political checks and balances of the early 1970's and which overturned or ignored the legal restraints enacted in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. Joe Conason writes, on page 167:

Living in bitter exile after his forced resignation, Richard Milhous Nixon could hardly have foreseen that someday another generation of Republican politicians would seek to vindicate his authoritarian vision of executive power – or that they would be led by men who had once worked on his staff and camapign. The pedigree of the Bush administration and its most ferrent ideological supporters leads directly back to Nixon's unlamented presidency – as do their pretexts for exapandng presidential power in the direction of dictatorship.

And what was that Nixonian vision?

According to the original Nixonian doctrine refurbished by Republican lawyer and propagandists, America's traditional checks and balances are no longer meaningful or useful. In the name of national security – precisely the same justification employed by Nixon – the president can do whatever he deems necessary, in secret, and neither the Congress nor the judiciary can hold him accountable. Now the theory has a name – "the unitary presidency" …

Crucial to this Nixonian government, is, and was, domestic spying on American citizens for expressly political purposes, more specifically, for expressly partisan political purposes. This domestic spying, when conducted by our enemies during the Cold War on their citizens was seen as proof of the inferiority, and impracticality, of their system of government. We even gave it a name "the police state". Conason details how computer technology, wire tapping and other forms of surveillance. This is not new, peace activists, civil rights leaders, public intellectuals and political figures opposed to the policies of a particular administration, or who ran afoul of the fiefdom of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, have been monitored for decades. The difference is that the Bush executive sought constitutional justifications. Not that we could spy, or even should spy, but that we must spy, it is our duty to spy. It is American to spy on other Americans for the purpose of advancing a particular partisan agenda.

But more alarming than a single president who used an incident to fatten his powers and over reach, an pattern which is not new to American history, is the danger that the pattern of executive power that Nixon invented and George W. Bush has staked his legacy on, might become the permanent shape of American government. That the "ultimate triumph" might be the approval, by a Bush appointed Supreme Court, of a philosophy of permanent war and presidential aggrandisement. In effect, the Supreme Court would elevate Bush, not just to the Presidency, but as the founding father of an America with a Presidency elevated to supreme power.

In this Joe Conason makes a telling point. He paints a picture of a conservative movement which is led by men of principles, however, that those principles are whatever principles are most convenient to their desires in the present. When out of power, they would reduce the Presidency to a cipher and rule by a legislature elected from rotten boroughs. When in command of the Presidency, they would elevate that office to unaccountable and unquestionable supremacy. When investigating Bill Clinton, nothing, not even his private life, was beyond questioning, under oath – when defending against investigation of Bush, they would place even the most necessary of questions about the conduct of public business out of bounds.

The defense against this downward spiral, towards an America where churches indoctrinate masses of angry and alienated people to an ideology of perpetual conflict, and where this rootless angst is then used to elevate and consecrate, not merely a corporate, but corporatacratic order, and the instrument of this order is a Republican Part which controls the executive by force and fraud, is not to be found anywhere but in our own ability to act. Conason warns that democracy is in danger, that those who have fought in previous struggles to preserve, and elevate, America another step forward towards that "more perfect union" that was promised so long ago and has still not been achieved – have left behind warnings of how usurpation of fundamental rights and liberties is always justified in the name of necessity, and under the sanctifying cloak of patriotism and piety.

Ironically, it was the Works Progess Administration that produced the original play by Sinclair Lewis, and the image, taken from government archives, is of a poster produced by an unknown WPA artist. In FDR's America, the government funded sharp critiques of the possibility of government over reach in time of crisis, rather than funding pseudo-news clips to be inserted without attribution.

While the history of the unitary executive, and the rise of a theocratic-corporatocratic party bent on imposing an authoritarian political culture is essential, the question I'd like to ask Joe Conason is about the future. Having written eloquently and accurate on how this triangle of church, corporation and party both act to thwart the democratic will of the public, and to crudely debase the rule of law when in power, what does he believe that we must do now in order to turn back this wave, which he so rightly labels as barbaric in its practices. How can we strike, to paraphrase Thoreau, at the roots of this poison tree, rather than merely swat at its twigs and branches?