One of the reasons to write a journal is to clarify over time what you really think or feel about something. I started with nothing political in mind, but gradually became very tangled up with the Valerie Plame case. I hadn’t known much about it, but when the Judith Miller jailing came up, I started looking into things. It was very much like an event in my life, only I didn’t have to go to jail over protecting someone’s confidentiality. I started out on her side, but the more I read, the more horrified I became. She was no hero. That lead to "the Bush Doctrine." The more I read, the more horrified I felt. To be very honest, until I started journaling about these things, I was hopelessly naive. Over the last six months or so, reading the news and the political blogs daily, I find myself very, maybe even too, informed. Lately, I think I’ve got the opposite problem from the one I started with. Back then, anything I thought was fairly ignorant. Now, I’ve allowed myself to get so close to the day to day issues that I feel divorced from the bigger picture at times. Who really cares what Chris Matthews said last night, or what card Cheney is playing this week, or whether or not the Democrats reacted quickly enough to some event of the day?
If I step back, and ask, "What have I learned in these six or seven months that really matters?" After all, I never was a Bush supporter, or a Republican. I’m a genetic Liberal, I think. One of those people they can count on most of the time. I wouldn’t have given two cents for Bush before I ever read a word about him. Has becoming this enmeshed in things just been a sort of retired guy’s fad? or is there some point to it all? I think that I have learned something, something I wish weren’t there to learn. This Administration is not like any that has come before. It’s not a question of there being a Conservative Agenda, offsetting the Liberal Agenda that came before it. This Administration has an Agenda that is hidden from the general discourse. They want to change the process of American government in a very fundamental way. I now think that it’s more than just a reaction to 911, more than wartime powers to fight Terrorism, it’s a conscious, premeditated plan to alter the structure that’s been in place for the last 200+ years. Seven or Eight months ago, I might have said something like that, but I would have been referring to specifics – the Christian Agenda, messing with the Separation of Church and State. Or I might have said it about cutting social programs or giving tax breaks to the rich – the traditional Conservative/Republican story. But the way I think it now is very different from those specifics.
I now think that they believe our Constitution is anachronistic. They believe in a ‘Unitary Executive.’ That means that the Executive Branch of the government becomes the government itself, and the Judicial and Legislative Branches become more like … more like I don’t know exactly what, but certainly not coequal with the Executive. In our traditional way of talking about things, they want to ablate ‘Checks and Balances.’ Too much trouble? Gets in the way? They want to withdraw from the U.N. and make the United States the regulatory body of the world, operating in that capacity by force of military power. They see us as spreading our form of government throughout the world, but spreading it while controlling how it’s implemented. And their domestic policy? I’m not sure they have one other than this business of government being involved with social welfare has got to go.
The people in their camp who actually talk about traditional political philosophy, are openly contemptuous of Rousseau’s notion of ‘The Social Contract,’ an idea that was a strong influence on our government’s founders. In it’s simplest form, it states that government exists for the benefit of the governed. When government no longer does that, the contract is broken, and it’s time for a new government. Our founders attempted to insure that the contract between government and the people could not be broken, by institutionalizing a system of checks and balances, and by making the individual rights of people very clear and of central importance.
What has been hard for me, and for many people, is that this is so much a part of our thinking that it didn’t occur to us that Bush and the people he’s introduced into our government don’t see things that way. So things like torture, incarceration without legal recourse, a war of ‘conquest,’ invasion of privacy without probable cause, didn’t add up to what they are – a fundamental rejection of the form of government we’ve come to think of as a given. 
Theirs is the form of government discussed by Machiavelli in the 1500’s. The driving force in such a government is the State, not the contract with the people. It’s called fascism, though the events of the last century have given that term a more concrete connotation – Nazism – which is actually fascism in a brutal form. It means ‘rule of the powerful.’ I’ve come to believe that this is the political philosophy that is currently running our country. Instead of functioning as a government focused on the welfare of the people in our country, or the welfare of the people in the world at large, the focus is on the State [America] and it’s power ranking in the community of other States in the world.
I’m not going to go on about this anymore. I’m not trying to sell the idea. It’s just what I’ve come to think, the longer I immerse myself in the politics of this Administration. I would recommend this hypothesis to anyone who has been thinking about the Administration and wondering why they’ve done the strange things they’ve done. So stack up all the things about the Bush Administration that bother you, and see if they don’t fit into the box I’m suggesting. They are not Conservatives of a kind we’ve ever seen. To me, they are a fascist cabal who are dead set on changing America’s form of government – without ever coming clean about what they are doing. I don’t want to think this kind of thoughts. But even more than that, I don’t want them to get away with it. Fascism is a dead end street. It leads to an endless state of antagonism and war. And the sure fate of a fascist state is to ultimately fail. It’s not about ‘we the people.’ It’s about something else…
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