Republican Time Machine

It’s been quite a while since I last had a blog entry on politics. The 2004 election really deflated me, and it has taken me a while to conjure up enough energy to write something. Based on some editorials and books I have been reading lately, the energy has been coming back slowly but surely.

The other day I read an editorial by Paul Krugman, Losing Our Country, where he stated the following regarding the majority of domestic policies coming from the Bush Administration:

“… almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.”

While I certainly agree with the intent of his comment, in that most domestic policies coming from the White House are intended to grant practically unlimited power and wealth to the wealthiest of the wealthy, I believe that the Republican Party would never recover from the sort of backlash that would be inflicted on it for attempting to reinstitute child labor and working weekends, the elimination of the Sherman Act, the national park system, the FDA and so on. Instead the Republicans are attempting to bring the country back to a more recent period in American history: the 1950s.

Probably the most overt example of this is in the area of foreign policy. Following the end of World War II, American power was unchallenged until the explosion of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb in 1949, an event that solidified the Cold War that had begun shortly after the end of hostilities in 1945. While some people might be tempted to compare Bush’s imperialist tendancies with that of America at the turn of the 20th century, I think it’s more appropriate to compare it with America in the 1950s.

Following America’s brief stint as the world’s only reigning super power, America in the 1950s witnessed the Cold War’s darkest times. With deadlocks in Korea, Berlin and other geopolitical fault lines, the Cold War brought America nuclear air raid drills, bomb shelters, the Red Scare and more, resembling today’s color-coded terror alerts, ‘undisclosed locations’, attacks on people’s patriotism and today’s fault lines in Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea. Extremist Republicans of today, such as Dick Cheney and Tom Delay, echo back to that of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy of the early ’50s. And one could possibly argue that the domino theory of the Cold War could be compared to today’s policy of preemptive war.

Similar to the Cold War’s protracted stalemate, the Bush Administration is intent on bringing the United States into a period of perpetual and preemptive war to realize a fantasy of ‘winning’ the battle against terrorism, a conflict that has existed throughout history and still hasn’t been eradicated. With vice-president Dick Cheney saying that the war on terror is a “… war that will not end in our lifetime”, it would seem that the Administration intends on engaging in a series of conflicts, beginning first with Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly continuing on with Iran, Syria and/or North Korea. This would echo the Cold War’s series of conflicts throughout the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s in Korea, Vietnam and its stalesmates in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. If the War on Terror were to follow a similar time line as that of the Cold War, Americans would not witness the end of the War on Terror until the year 2046. And as with the Cold War, the military industrial complex only serves to benefit tremendously from such a protracted conflict.

In closing, the most extreme elements of the Republican Party seem intent on engaging in a political and social nihilism by destroying many pillars of today’s society in order to bring the country back in time. Whether it’s the attempted deconstruction of social security, medicare and other social programs or backward steps in civil and human rights or a devolution on cultural experience and values as well as the polticial regression described above, it’s difficult to know what will stop this recklessness in light of the fact that the general public does not seem interested in stopping this trend before it’s too late.

Perhaps 2006 or 2008 will give reason for hope.