Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

How the Democrats can Keep from being Arrested

…Defeat in Iraq will reveal the limits of American power. America will likely lose its superpower status. The dollar will lose much of its value overseas, raising the costs of imports, which seem to include most everything these days. The vaulted American consumer will finally retrench, slowing the economy significantly; unemployment, bankruptcies, and defaults will rise. The US won’t be able to afford its global military (over 700 bases in over 130 countries), and most of the troops will finally come home. Other power centers, particularly the EU, perhaps China, will achieve superpower status, and pursue their own (and not our) interests.

Call it the downsizing of America. When you throw in peak oil and global warming, it seems inevitable. Conventional wisdom has it that Americans do not want to hear that tough times are coming, and that somebody inevitable will be scapegoated for the loss of empire and easy motoring — the most likely scapegoats being those identified as liberals and lefties, including the Democrats, whether they like it or not. The ground has been prepared by a generation of demonization of liberals. Hence their terror.

The conventional wisdom is wrong. Most Americans are way ahead of the media pundits in their appreciation of the coming downsizing and decentralization, just as they were way ahead of them about the war. Americans know that it’s time to withdraw from the world stage, where the part we’ve lately played has been foolish, ugly, and immoral, and look to get our own house in order. Americans know that we’re living beyond our means ecologically and financially, that big business and big government are almost hopelessly corrupt, that we’ve screwed up our cities and polluted our lands, and that the American dreamm is mostly the American treadmill.

The conservatives and neocons are happy enough to escalate the worldwide War on Terror; they relish refighting the Vietnam War in Iraq and elsewhere with the prospect of winning rather than losing, deluded as they may be. They’ll override the Democratic Congress and public opinion and proclaim that we have no choice but to win, even if winning remains a kind of ever receeding mirage. We see it in Bush’s ’surge’ in Iraq. In the meantime, they will continue to usurp power and concentrate it in the president, to the point where a kind of coup may well occur, with civil liberties suspended, opposition leaders (Democrats) arrested, and so on.

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