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Read other letters about this article
Revolutionary impulses and rhetoric.
There is no way for Adnoto or anyone else to adequately answer questions like "what would you do specifically? What would you recommend others do specifically?" Any response offered will not have enough specificity to satisfy the questioner. As we've already seen. It's a gambit. A game. Not meant to be either productive or serious. It's meant solely to quash the notion of an uprising -- that is to say, an uprising from the left.
Which I've said many times is not going to happen anyway. The opportunity for it passed quite some time ago, and it isn't coming around again for some time to come.
What we have now is a situation ripe for a Rightist rebellion -- which really shouldn't be characterized as a Revolution. The Revolutionary part of it has already been accomplished, thanks to Reagan, Bush the Old, Bush the Stupid, and yes, Clinton. You don't think it was a "peaceful Revolution?" Then you haven't been paying attention, or you have no way of recognizing what a Revolution truly is. An antique example might help: The Glorious Revolution of 1688 that drove James II off the Throne of England and put his daughter Mary in his place along with her husband William of Orange.
You think that wasn't a Revolution because there weren't marching troops in the streets, and barricades and acts of insurgency and pathetic heroism? You think it was a coup? OK. Fine. But it changed Britain and Britain's government fundamentally, forever after, and it had tremendous impact on the Colonies (establishing some of the foundations of the American Revolution). We'll leave aside what happened in Ireland as a consequence. It was a Revolution -- whether we call it that or not.
Just so, what Reagan and his cohorts set in motion when they went to Washington fundamentally changed the nature of government in this country, it is with us still, and much of the philosophy and rhetoric of Reaganism is so deeply ingrained into American consciousness today that people don't even recognize it as revolutionary.
The Autocracy Obama is inheriting (and seems to have no intention of changing) is a direct result of the revolutionary actions of the Reaganites and their sucessors when they took over the government. The government today is nothing like the government Reagan inherited, philosophically or operationally.
Such "incrementalism" as there has been since 1981 has almost all been in service to the direction set by the Reganites, which is not at all what they said it was: "liberty, freedom, smaller government," yadda, yadda. It has been toward a class-divided, corrupt, anti-American, anti-Constitutional, aristocratic, imperialist, corporatist and militarist government primarily serving the interests of a handful of families and their retainers.
That's what "incrementalism" gets you, even when well intentioned. Now we're at the point where most Americans don't have the ability to recognize what's happened or to do anything about it.
But there are some...
Rebellion is the natural state of the right wing foamers, and they had to tamp it down throughout the Bushevik Regime. After all "one of their own" had been selected to rule. So they put down their arms. For a while.
But how soon we forget what they were doing during the Clinton years, how many uprisings there were, how much domestic terrorism surfaced, how much right wing nuttiness was rampant on the land. Who wants to remember? It was insane. And it wasn't limited to Congressional misbehavior.
All that rebellious energy is still just beneath the surface, it hasn't dissipated at all. It's just waiting for a trigger, an excuse.
Which could come at any time, from any direction.
There is no such energy on the left. Certainly not among the pseudo-left of the blogosphere.
As for Libertarians, ha! They're too busy arguing to be bothered with revolting.
And the standard political parties are in fusion mode right now, more divorced from the People than they have ever been, intent on serving the corporatist/imperialist/militarist factions and letting the rest of us... well, not even acknowledging the "rest of us."
As for the People themselves, most are utterly passive about core issues, and frantic about marginalia. That is a direct result of Reaganism. Induced passivity, propaganda, ignorance, and distraction, all are fundamentals to the control of the masses. They work darned well, don't they?
A successful rebellion by rightists at this point would effectively install a Cheneyite dictatorship in DC with no trappings of wussy "democracy" at all. You will follow orders. Or else. At least the Obama Regime says it wants to maintain the pretense of democratic, Constitutional self-government.
But we'll see.
