I have been trying to work out for myself where the roots of Authoritarianism lie. I thought, for a long time, that it arose simply from fear, but I think that it really only a part of the issue. I don't know what all goes into it, frankly, but its effects are devastating.

It produces not only the kinds of aberrations which I hoped the US would never produce (1% Doctrine, Abu Ghraib, etc.), but it also suborns that which it purports to solve. That is, in an attempt to control everything to a desired end, it stops being about that end, and only about the control itself. One obvious outcome is the refusal to sit down and work, diplomatically, to get what you want, and instead the saber rattling that goes on to exert control. And that is precisely why I don't think it is purely fear driven. It seems to me that even a purely fear-driven response would not result so predictably, nor so repeatedly, in real, true, irony.

I have not yet read The Authoritarians...but I clearly should.

Anyway, even if it is just political gamesmanship from Major, good on him, what he's saying is still true and right.

Something tells me this crowd is going to see the perils of an all powerful Government sometime around late November.

In today's LA Times there is an article about one of the recent Obama smears. Included is this thought-provoking quote:

NBC Political Director Chuck Todd called Obama's rumor-thwarting website a "sea change" in campaign history. "I think we are going to come to the point where we owe it to the viewers to tell them what is not true," Todd said. "It used to be we just used to have to tell them what was true."

Pathetic. Sort of reminds me of what the politician in The Front Page said when told about a reform candidate:

"Reform? This city ain't ready for reform!"

I guess today's journalism just isn't corrupt enough yet.

An excellent post.

Thanks for illustrating just how extremely radical the US right wing has become in contrast to attitudes overseas.

Predictably, it should be noted by the Obama campaign that McMaverick and Bush (and by extension, McCain's pet weasels Graham and Lieberman) have issued nearly identical responses with respect to this decision.

This underscores what is really at stake in this election cycle as it will take an Obama in office just to maintain status quo in the Supreme Court in the next couple of years.

I suppose we can expect the shrill cry about the 'activist judiciary' in the coming days from the RWNM.

To be fair to Major, he played an heroic and under-recognized role in bringing the Troubles to an end

Not quite.

Major was brought kicking and screaming into the negotiations - the first significant breakthrough was when Clinton granted Adams and McGuiness visas to visit America, something Major was implacably against. But as progress was gradually being made, it is fair to say Major played a constructive role in the process which led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998, less than a year into Blair's premiership.

Major was partly constrained by the fact the Tories did not hold a parliamentary majority (they relied on SDLP - Ulster Unionists - votes to pass legislation), so probably he couldn't have fully engaged the peace process even if he had wanted to.

But I agree with your overall point that the Tories are not exactly reliable defenders of civil liberties, even if they do have strong-willed individuals like Davies to fight this cause.

The Lib Dems have been consistently fighting the authoritarian trends of the Blair and Brown years, the Tories as a whole have been a little slow to arrive, but I'm grateful their leadership finally has.

CP:

You watch. Scalia's dissent will become (has already become) the motor for further congressional/Autocracy collaboration in the interest of Saving Us All from the Terrorists. Habeus? Quaint. "An Old Law desperately in need of Updating."

It is also his gift to the younger members of his party. A sort of blueprint for success. On the previous thread WT wrote:

Elect McCain, and you elect a corpse. It's not his age, it's his decayed nature, which shriveled long before it ever had a chance to mature. His whole party is like that, from the Reagans and Doles to Cheney and the wastrel Bush, not to mention that whole panoply of lesser weasels who've fastened themselves irrevocably to what they perceive as the main chance. Should they cling successfully to their bliss for another four years, the United States will continue on into history as sclerotic, unprincipled, and ultimately as unsuccessful as Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

I think the decayed and shriveled husk the the Republican party has become covers up some very ambitious worms. And Scalia is attempting to provide them with a better diet.

Major: "If we are seen to defend our own values in a manner that does violence to them, then we run the risk of losing those values."

Amen. Bush says they hate us for our freedoms. But how can he justify giving away these freedoms?

If the evil-doers wanted to change our way of life more to their liking, they couldn't have done better than 9/11.

I and most people wouldn't want to live in a country run by these jackals. The question is, can they install their authoritarian agenda before the majority of the saner members of the citizenry wake up and smell the rotting corpses.

'It' can happen everywhere. Especially in countries that pride themselves on their attention to 'democracy' and their 'good deeds' around the world.

Today's 'conservative' (neo-fascist libertarian more like) has no true definition of what 'democracy' and 'freedom' really mean. Their heads are full of sewage and emotion and bravado. 'Bring it on', 'freedom fries', 'better dead than red', 'If you hate it so much, move to France', 'lock and load', 'let's roll', 'sand niggers', 'rag heads', 'Swift boat', 'FISA failure', 'mushroom clouds', fear, fear, fear. All fascist fantasies sold by the Rove & Co. mystique machine to cover over the monumental crimes done to this country.

They did learn from the past. If you shout a lie loud enough and from enough different angles, people believe it. I think the brown shirts and the German Nazi party had that down well.

Who says that Bush, et al, didn't learn anything from history. They learned enough... History may be kind to Mr. Bush and his minions. After all, they did 'it'. They successfully converted the United States of America into a soulless fascist despotic sewer. And all in under 8 years...