Sidney Blumenthal (The Guardian): An American idea shatters

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Thursday May 18

An American idea shatters
The reawakening of a virulent nationalism is tearing apart Bush's conservative coalition
By Sidney Blumenthal

President Bush's nationally televised address on immigration on Monday night was intended as a grand gesture to revive his collapsing presidency, but instead he has plunged the Republicans into a political centrifuge, breaking the party down into its raw elements, whose collisions are triggering explosions of unexpected and ever greater magnitude.

The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community. The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate. The evangelical religious right is paralysed while the Catholic church is a mobilising force behind demonstrations by Hispanic immigrants. Every effort Bush makes to hold a nonexistent Republican centre generates an opposing effect within his party.

Bush's victory in 2004 depended on the management of highly volatile constituencies: the religious right was shepherded by referendums against gay marriage; the abortion issue was used to elevate Catholic conservatives and isolate progressive-minded bishops; nativists were captivated by hosts of enemies in the whirlwind of September 11.

Bush's political handlers were determined to suppress immigration as an issue. Hispanics made up 14% of the population in 2004, and Bush's ability to capture Catholic and Hispanic voters was one of the decisive factors in winning a second term. However, as Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism has filled the vacuum. Bush conflated the fears arising from September 11 with Iraq, but the fear of the other is now being directed at immigrants - a nativist tradition that goes back to the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan.

Read more.

[bemildred]

1. Hi Jack.

1.) It is characteristic of the two main political parties that they can govern only by doing nothing; anything of substance that they do will piss off some large fraction of their constituencies. Hence the fondness for arguing "cultural issues", for foreign entanglements, and for graft and manipulated elections.

2.) Emmanuel Todd, in "After the Empire", says that it was Russian nationialism that finally shredded the USSR. It is interesting to consider the current state of the American empire in light of that comment.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Hi, BE

Parallels of the present situation in America and the collapse of the Soviet Union are not lost on me. Both America and the Soviet Union were/are putatively egalitarian societies that in reality were brutal rigid class structures.

Leonid Brezhnev was an incompetent who thought more highly of himself than warranted. He wore a chest full of medals, most of which he awarded to himself. Corruption was rampant during his misrule of 18 years. A foreign policy blunder hastened the fall of Soviet society.

George W. Bush is an incompetent who thinks more highly of himself than warranted. Since American civilians don't wear medals on their business suits, the parallel of Brezhnev that applies to Bush in his idle boasts of popular support made after winning what might be called disputed elections. Corruption, both in the government and private industry, is rampant. A foreign policy blunder has laid bare some of the rifts between the myth and reality of America and the fissures between America's powerful elites and the common people.

America, like the Soviet Union, is an empire, both internally and externally. Internally, the Soviet Union was the successor of Czarist Russia, an empire that was made up of more than just Russia. It was patched together through centuries of wars and oppressions. America doesn't like to think of herself that way, but the fact is that the ground under my feet was appropriated through war with Mexico. Internally, both empires were/are made up of diverse peoples with their own cultural identities. Moreover, the inequalities of the internal empires of the nineteenth century (serfdom in Russia, slavery in America) laid the terrain for much of the history of those empires in the twentieth. The grandchildren of Russian serfs and American slaves and tenant farmers both migrated to industrial centers and benefited from massive twentieth century government welfare programs (five year plans in the Soviet union, the New Deal and the Great Society in the United States). The external empires were ruled in the twentieth century with iron fists, willfully installing dictators in client states and, on occasion, brutally removing independent elements that rose to power in client states such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia in one case and Nicaragua and Chile in the other.

Right wing demagogues exist and have always existed in both Russia and America. While once the demagogues inspired anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and lynchings of Blacks in America, the nativist sentiments of empire persist today through demagogues like Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia and Pat Buchanan in America.

When the Soviet Union collapsed after years of corruption and incompetency, it was natural for it shatter into several independent nations that always existed inside the Russian empire. It is difficult to see the United States imploding that way. What would be the parallel? Imploding into fifty small, independent nations? No one is contemplating that. Very few American states could exist as independent nations. Moreover, there are no regional political structures that would assume power over groups of states that might be more viable. While America's influence may wane, she will stay united.

[bemildred]

5. Well said.

The parallel with the disintegration of the USSR, however, would not be 50 independent states, but rather the various satrapies that we have had around the world (Latin American, the Middle East, Japan, Europe) slipping from our control. Which is what we see today.

[Demeter]

2. Yes, It's A Lovely Family Portait of the GOP, Isn't It?

I would like to think that an American ethos will prevail, but I'm over 50, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be anything like the 60's ever again. If half the country can't even recognize the Constitution and Bill of Rights as the law of the land and the foundation of our nation, then we are merely the dregs of a failed nation.


The GOP family, all related by greed and the lust of power to coerce others.

The Democratic family all related by what? Civil liberties and equality, rule of law, any others?

[Vogon_Glory]

3. So As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap, George! n/t