... [T]here's a political story that runs through much of what has happened to this country lately - the story of the rise and growing dominance of a radical political movement, right here in the U.S.A.
I'm talking, of course, about America's radical right - a movement that now effectively controls the White House, Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media. The dominance of that movement changes everything: old rules about politics and policy no longer apply...
A political sea change
Most people have been slow to realize just how awesome a sea change has taken place in the domestic political scene.
During the 2000 election, many people thought that nothing much was at stake; during the first two years of the Bush administration, many pundits insisted that the radically conservative bent of that administration was only a temporary maneuver, that Bush would tack back to the center after solidifing his base. And the public still has little sense of how radical our leading politicians really are (bold mine - Petoffen). A striking example: in the fall of 2001, when focus groups were asked to react to Republican proposals for a retroactive corporate tax cut... members of the focus groups literally refused to believe the group leaders' descrioption of the policy.
To take the most straightforward example: In 2001, even many liberals thought that one shouldn't make too much fuss about Bush's fiscal irresponsibility. The tax cut isn't a good idea, they said, but it isn't all that important. But by 2003, we saw the unprecedented spectacle of an administration proposing huge additional tax cuts not just in the face of record deficits, but in the middle of a war. ("Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes," delcared House majority leader Tom DeLay.)
Another example: those who suggested the Republicans would exploit September 11 for political advantage were quickly denounced for undermining national unity. Yet they did - indeed, during the 2002 election campaign Republican supported ran ads linking Democratic senator Tom Daschle with Saddam Hussein...
It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement... as a revolutionary power... That is, a movement who leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.
Am I overstating the case? In fact, there's ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist - and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.
Consider, for example, the welfare state as we know it - New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, Great Society programs like Medicare. If you read the literature eminating from the Heritage Foundation, which drives the bush administration's economic ideology, you discover a very radical agenda: Heritage doesn't just want to scale back New Deal and Great Society programs, it regards the very existence of those programs as a violation of basic principles.
Or consider foreign policy. Since World War II the United States has built its foreign policy around international institutions, and has tried to make it clear that it is not an old-fashioned imperialist power, which uses military force as it sees fit. But if you follow the foreign policy views of the neo-conservative intellectuals who fomented the war with Iraq, you learn that they have contempt for all that - Richard Perle, [former] chairman of a key Pentagon advisory board, dismissed the "liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions." They aren't hesitant about the use of force; one prominent thinker close to the administration, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that "we are a warlike people and we love war." The idea that the war in Iraq is just a pilot project for a series of splendid little wars seemed, at first, a leftist fantasy - but many people close to the administration have made it clear that they regard this war as only a beginning...
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