As evidence that it’s not just “a few bad apples” of the Bush Republican right-wing that are causing our system of democracy to rot, I would refer to Al Gore’s fabulous 2007 book, “The Assault of Reason”.
Throughout most of the book Gore does a superb job of chronicling and explaining the vast criminality, lies, fear-mongering, propaganda, and perversion of our democracy’s checks and balances that the Bush radical right-wing regime has accomplished in so short a time. Coincident with this criminal indictment Gore very accurately diagnoses the moneyed ‘core’ of a less visible corporatist power structure behind government which has secretly paid to literally ‘privatize’ government to its advantage and the disadvantage of any sense of ‘public good’. In fact, Gore makes as accurate and damning an analysis and indictment as I have ever seen of the uncontested advantages that a moneyed ‘faction’ of corporate power has in perverting democratic government and exposing its “absolute contempt for the very concept of any ‘public interest’”. [My only wish is that Gore had gone the extra step to define this alignment of corporatist power as more than simply a ‘faction’, but to call it by its more historically accurate name --- an Empire].
Gore continues on, in chapter eight, “Democracy in the Balance”, to suggest the key elements by which a healthy opposition party in our democracy could, and presumably would, block the non-democratic usurpation of government power; primarily through the dual checks and balances of oversight hearings and Congressional measures like filibuster. The reader can easily see from Gore’s reference to the November 2006 elections and change of power in the Congress that he wrote this portion of his book with the fond hope that the revived Democratic Party majority would use these techniques to effectively blunt the rule of such a dangerous corporate ‘faction’ (or empire).
Unfortunately, as we all know now, and as Gore did not at the time of his writing in early 2007, the Democratic Party majority utterly failed in any respect to blunt this corporatist ‘faction’ by any of the methods which Gore had hoped. In fact, any critically truthful assessment of the Democratic Party’s actions since assuming even a marginal majority in 2006, would have to conclude that instead of using any of the measures that Gore well understands from his Senate experience, and which he had hoped for from his party, the Democratic Party instead must be judged as either entirely gutless --- or actually complicit with the ’faction’ (corporate empire) that Gore has defined.
I had previously given the latest Democratic Congress the benefit of the doubt and hoped that they were ‘only’ gutless, but now I find that any serious assessment of 2007, particularly taking into account the Democrats appetite for K street corporate campaign cash, suggests strongly that a bipartisan number of those ‘bad apples’ in the barrel of our government are blue.
Unfortunately, it appears certain that the ‘few bad apple’ excuse about Republicans being the only ones caving to the corporatist ‘faction’/empire controlling our government is as inaccurate as the ‘few bad apple’ theory applied to Abu Ghraib. And while it might break Gore’s heart as a loyal Democrat, I strongly suspect that if he is as honest and sincere as he is now on all topics, he would have to admit that any serious fight against the very corporatist ‘faction’ of un-democratic power that he has himself defined in his book would have to be fought by people, and with levels of commitment, closer to those of Ralph Nader or Dennis Kucinich’s following, than by anything resembling the fully corporate-controlled, mainstream Democratic Party.
Fighting the global corporatist Empire that has already taken over our government, and is hiding behind the façade of this sham “Vichy America’, is going to have to be done by non-conventional political battle, and will not gain anything from either party’s barrel of rotten apples --- and I suspect that Mr. Gore knows that and would still jump at the chance to be part of a more serious and revolutionary solution.
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