Life as a Spectator Sport

Reformed, reconstructed, Kingdom Now, Dominion Theologians—there are too darned many names for these people. I'm going to start calling them "theocrats." There are minor differences amongst them, but their intention to restructure the government of the United States around Old Testament Jewish law is something they all have in common.

Can they accomplish this in four years? Almost certainly not. Can they make enough changes to nullify an effective opposition? I believe so.

Here's how you undermine a representative democracy.

• Change the rules. From FoxNews.com

  But while Republicans have made gains in the Senate to a 55-44-1 majority, the president still is not past the 60-vote threshold Republicans need to avoid a filibuster of his candidates.
  
  "As it stands today [Democrats] can block [a nominee]," said C. Boyden Gray, former legal counsel to President George H.W. Bush. But I also believe that the president and majority leader may well decide to change the rules given the elections ... The president has a very strong political support, potential support, for asking for and getting this change."

  There have been bipartisan efforts in the past to fine-tune the filibuster rules, but to my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has suggested changing the rules in order to eliminate minority opposition.



• Intimidate moderate influences. While no one would call Arlen Specter [R-PA] moderate, he is openly pro-choice. From the same FoxNews.com article:

  Specter said the president would want to avoid nominating anyone who would oppose the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. "When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely," he said.

  Less than 24 hours later, Specter, who has been in line for the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, groveled publicly thus:

  Contrary to press accounts, I did not warn the president about anything and was very respectful of his constitutional authority on the appointment of federal judges," Specter said in a statement. "As the record shows, I have supported every one of President Bush's nominees in the Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor. I have never and would never apply any litmus test on the abortion issue and, as the record shows, I have voted to confirm Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor and Justice Kennedy and led the fight to confirm Justice Thomas.

  But Specter's post is in jeopardy no matter how much he debases himself. James Dobson, a strident member of the far religious right, has said he must go.

  "Senator Specter is a big-time problem for us," Dobson said on ABC's "This Week." He said Specter had made "one of the most foolish and ill-considered comments that a politician has made in a long time."
  
  [...]
  
  Dobson added, "There are many, many members of that committee that are more qualified and less of a problem than Senator Specter."
  
  [...]
  
  Dobson said of Specter, "He is a problem, and he must be derailed."

  Since when does a religious leader dictate to Congress? Since the election of 2004, evidently.



• Repress free speech. Annie, a blogger who uses LiveJournal, posted some uncomplimentary remarks about President Bush after the third debate. Next thing she knew, Secret Service agents were knocking on her mother's door. She wrote:

  What you say on the Internet can affect your real life. Due to what I said online, I now have an FBI file. And due to certain policies that a certain administration has instituted, I could now be placed on the government's "no-fly" list, could be subject to random searches of private property without my knowledge or permission, and could be subject to wiretapping surveillance. I doubt that any of these things will happen (except with the "no-fly" list – according to my attorney, that's a strong possibility and is something we are looking into), and I could just be being paranoid, but after the Secret Service showed up on my doorstep, I think I'm entitled to a little paranoia. Because shit, I never thought THAT would happen, either. So be aware.
  
  [...]
  
  Because of what happened to me, I will now have to make changes to the way I use my LJ. I have always been very open on LiveJournal. I have never locked posts unless they directly dealt with my RL, and I have never deleted comments that others have made in my LJ. However, in order to protect myself (and YOU) legally, I am going to have to start carefully monitoring comments made in my LJ. I do not think the FBI will continue to monitor this journal, but I refuse to take chances with my life. So consider this a word of warning: If you make a comment in my journal that could in any way be misconstrued as a threat against any high-ranking official, I will have to delete it. It's nothing personal. It's just self-protection.

  I don't blame Annie. And to her credit, she says this won't stop her from making political comments. But she may well not be allowed to board an airplane again because she dared to poke fun at President Bush. She probably has no chance of ever getting a job that requires a security clearance. Her FBI file will follow her around for the rest of her life—because she wasn't sufficiently respectful of the president of the United States.



• Foster hate and divisiveness. From Adam Yoshida, a blogger who describes himself as an ultra-conservative.

  Four More Years! AKA: Take That, You Sons of Bitches
  
  So, George W. Bush won. And he’s done so by a solid margin. The Democrats’ attempted coup managed to last all of eight hours. Not only is the President the first candidate to win a majority of the vote in a Presidential Election since 1988, but he also won more popular votes than any other candidate in history. The Democrats spent months telling us that high voter turnout would equal a win for them but, as it turns out, when 60% of the electorate showed up at the polls it translated into a Bush lead of nearly four million votes. In short: take that, you sons of bitches.
  
  The Democrats are now talking about how this is a signal that Bush should “bring the country together”. Translated into American, this means “now that you’ve won, you should surrender to us.” The hell with that. We’ve won. Winning means not having to say you’re sorry. Bush already brought a majority of Americans together: they voted for him. He doesn’t need to reach out to them: they need to reach out to him.
  
  If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.

  The religious right didn't cause Adam Yoshida to hate anyone who doesn't exactly share his worldview. But they fanned the ember of fanaticism that lives in many Americans' hearts, and they bear the responsibility for the flames. And what's truly and sadly ironic is that they would probably agree with me about that.



• Dry up the oppositions' funds. Grover Norquist, a long-time critic of welfare entitlement programs, says the best way to get rid of entitlements you don't like is to underfund them—to starve them out, so to speak. Norquist was quoted today in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel article about Bush's anticipated tax reforms:

  "In the last four years, there were four tax cuts," said Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform. "People looked at those and thought they were just catch as catch can. But every one of those tax cuts moved us toward a single-rate tax system that taxes income just one time."

  A national sales tax, in other words. Bush's tax people say 23 to 26 percent—others have estimated it would have to be as high as 50 percent. In the most commonly discussed scenario, most of this money would go back to the states to be used as state and local governments wished. Interestingly, diverting money (and therefore the power that goes along with it) back to local governments would produce exactly the kind of governmental structure envisioned by the theocrats, who see a system of local civil "godly" magistrates taking the place of a central federal government.

So you see, it really isn't very hard to turn a representative democracy into a theocracy. You just have to get the cooperation of a certain percentage of the voters, and then use that leverage to introduce changes that will prevent them from voting things back to the way they used to be.

I'm going to get one of those bumper stickers that says "51% is NOT a mandate."

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