<nettime> Stirling Newberry: The Rise of Rove's Republic

[nettime's_roving_reporter <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

< http://scoop.agonist.org/story/2005/2/24/174858/333 >

   The Rise of Rove's Republic
   Stirling Newberry | February 24

   [54]The Agonist - Most people in the outside world do not explicitly
   believe we are passing through a period of constitutional crisis. That
   an impeachment was run over a blow job didn't clue them in. That a
   president was installed by judicial fiat did not clue them in. That a
   war was launched which is, and was, essentially a giant looting
   expedition on the Treasury has not clued them in.

   So what is going on? What is the thread that unifies Iraq and Social
   Security, the election crisis of 2000?

   The process of American Constitutional change, and according to that
   process, the greatest dangers lie ahead, not behind us.

   [For those want further background to The Rise of Rove's Republic here
   is the first chapter of [55]The Fourth Republic, the book the analysis
   is based on.]

   -
   By [56]Stirling Newberry in [57]USA: Liberty Watch 
     on Thu Feb 24th, 2005 at 06:05:44 PM PDT


   I. Mandate. Meaning. Money.

   A constitutional order has three parts: mandate - what the government
   should do - and meaning - how the public views the role of its duties,
   rights and options in relationship to the government. These are tied
   together by mechanism - how the government functions. In American
   history, and to no small extent world history, the most important
   mechanism is money. Not in the sense of who gets money - but in the
   sense of how money works. Each of these three parts of government are
   often written about, but how they interact is usually handled poorly -
   because generally an author knows one well, details it quite clearly,
   and then tries to apply the thesis of one to the others. The situation
   is more complex - each interacts with the others, and the process of
   bringing all of them into harmony is not immediate, it does not lend
   it self to nice clear lines of demarcation.

   But a new constitutional order must get all three in sync - people
   must expect of a government what it can accomplish through handling
   mechanisms, and through motivating meaning.

   Money is the key lens of an American constitutional order, because it
   is the one part of that order that must work every single day. Money
   is the constitution that you carry with you, the government backs its
   functioning. How money works creates the range of incentives that
   people have, and the range of opportunities. But it also, as
   importantly, protects certain ways of piling up wealth - that is rent.
   Rent is an advantage in time or space economically. If you are here
   first, you claim the land, even if you have to kill or run off some
   people to do it. Others must buy it from you, because they recognize
   that claim.

   Money itself buys both change, and protection from change - and this
   is a basic, and larger, conflict in money itself. Over the course of
   the lifetime of a Republic, wealth moves upward - and more and more of
   the economic activity of the government is spent, not creating new
   wealth, but protecting old wealth. The final crisis starts when the
   amount of money required to protect old wealth is more than the
   society can produce as a surplus from all of its labors.

   This produces a change in the constitutional order, but the whole
   process takes time, roughly 20 years - even though it is marked by a
   dramatic moment in the middle, that divides the old from the new.

   II. The process of crisis

   The idea of constitutional orders in American history was created by
   Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale, in his landmark two volume set
   [58]"We the People". According to Ackerman, the move from one
   constitutional order to another hinges on a political working out of
   constitutional change - where the very rules of what is required to
   change the constitution are fluid, and factions make moves designed to
   force their particular constitutional vision. Finally there is a
   constitutional moment where, regardless of what the formal rules say,
   the matter is in electoral play, those who are competition for control
   of the mechanisms of power recognize that the constitutional moment
   has arrived, and a line is about to be drawn.

   For Ackerman, who has a must read peace on the constitutional changes
   going on [59]in the London Review of Books, the key moments were the
   means by which the Constitution of 1787, and yes he uses that term,
   was enacted; the means by which the 14th amendment was established;
   and the decision to grant congress sweeping powers under the commerce
   clause. These, for Ackerman, establish three constitutional orders.
   Three different res publica.

   And I would argue, three different Republics.

   But the path to constitutional crisis runs through financial crisis.
   Before one can have political upheaval, the three pillars of a
   constitutional order - of a republic - must crumble. As each one
   weakens, it pushes more of the burden on to the others. As people
   disagree more and more on the mandate of government, they both fight
   more and more over the meaning of government - the rhetoric grows
   harsher and more hostile - and they also attempt to game the monetary
   system to accomplish by stealth what they could never have gotten
   agreement to.

   The crisis then begins on the day where there is the last great
   compromise - in 1782 when the Articles of Confederation are created,
   in 1850 with the compromise of 1850, and in 1921, when the new
   Republican conservative administration agreed not to repeal, but would
   not extend, the half finished architecture of the
   Roosevelt-Taft-Wilson progressive-liberal era of government. And make
   no mistake, while Taft was not as much of a progressive as either of
   the men to either side of him, he was one.

   And, in 1990, when the pay go rules were put into place, as part of a
   series of revenue increases to pay off the ballooning budget deficit -
   and to bail out the bankrupt savings and loan system.

   The 1780's, 1850's, 1920's and 1990's were consumed with efforts to
   prop up the old monetary order. But all of them failed, because none
   of them addressed the basic problem. Instead matters get worse,
   because every time a solution is converged on, a large minority that
   will have its interests gutted or reduced in importance has every
   reason not to cooperate. The reason Clinton was impeached was to
   prevent what needed to be done, from being done.

   Then comes the moment when the bottom falls out.

   III. The end of the old order

   This moment is dramatic - whether the inflationary run of the 1780's,
   the financial panics that ripped the late 1850's, the Crash of 1929,
   or the bursting of the tech bubble - all result in a vast financial
   hole that requires breaking the monetary system to avoid intense
   economic pain. But the first response isn't to either get serious or
   reärchitect - the first response is the reactionary response: borrow
   like there is no tomorrow.

   In our own moment, this is the first Bush term - an orgy of spending
   combined with a complete abnegation of any intent to pay for any of
   it. Often it is covered with some kind of assertion that this is to
   restrain government from doing evil - very often. Calls for small
   government are, by definition, calls for big something else. And it
   isn't the little guy, whatever foolishness he might think, who is
   meant by these calls. Everyone realizes that the borrowing flood must
   stop, and everyone is afraid that it will be their property used to
   pay for it.

   But this is not the moment of greatest danger. That comes when the
   realization that borrowing won't work, and instead the vision of a
   reactionary constitutional order - one that locks down by force the
   failed response. The belief of the reactionaries is that if only they
   were given complete control of the resources of government, they could
   ride out the storm and force others to accept the results.

   The most famous example is, of course, the Dred Scott case, which
   reneged on the Compromise of 1820, and opened the Great Plains to
   slavery. In our own moment, Bush's social security borrowing plan is
   the same thing - he wants to, in effect, borrow every sent for the
   next generation and hand it to his friends to control.

   Now there are many who would scoff at this idea, saying that big
   things don't happen. It is the strong version of the Copernican thesis
   - where ever you are is, by definition, unimportant. As far as I can
   tell there is exactly one person who has agreed with the reverse of
   that thesis all along, that instead we are at an important moment, and
   has methodically pursued the chance for the Republican Party to be the
   one that determines the shape of the new constitutional order.

   His name is Karl Rove, perhaps you've heard of him.

   IV. The architecture of "Rove's Republic"

   A new Republic is born in debt, and dies in debt, but the two are very
   different.

   In the beginning, the new government draws a connection - it takes on
   the debt of the old order, but it also creates a different kind of
   money, one which can grow fast enough and far enough to pay down that
   debt without crushing taxes and economic deprivation. The agreement to
   assume revolutionary war debt, the civil war - which was effectively
   the cost of buying the slaves - and the bank bail out of 1933 are the
   first. The second - creation of a new kind of money - comes from the
   Bank of the United States and the Coinage Act; the National Banking
   system and the gold standard; and, of course, the combination of
   Federal Reserve, SEC, Deposit insurance and asset based money.

   Rove knows that to force the reactionary order, Bush must borrow. He
   must place a millstone around the necks of the next generation of
   government, and then make it so that to make those payments, the
   Republicans must be in charge. If the Democrats take the presidency by
   accident, the Republican Congress will merely stop doing the behind
   the scenes financial juggling - of budget borrowing, shuffling of
   money between accounts, raising the debt ceiling, passing huge
   unfunded mandates - that keep the economy alive. There will, in such a
   case, be a massive recession, and the Republicans will take power
   again. The government will become a massive protection racket, with
   the public held hostage.

   It was originally thought in Republican circles that the war on
   terrorism would be enough - that the invasion of Iraq and the GWOT
   would provide a powerful enough mandate for government that a new
   meaning, a police state meaning, would be established. "Everything is
   different now". How many people do you know have 911 on the brain.
   Very few, and most of them are like Spouting Thomas - people who think
   they are liberals but want to be friends with the conservatives.

   With the failure of Iraq to produce the flood of oil that would have
   been the chain around every future Democrat's neck - a fact implicitly
   recognized by Kerry's repeated assertions that he would do the job in
   Iraq  - it is absolutely essential for the Republicans to create a
   bigger, nastier, weight. The revenue reductions of 2001 don't do it,
   because there is no reason they can't be repealed, they are creating
   next to no economic activity.

   Think about it, the government is borrowing more than a million
   dollars a minute - in order to produce hiring growth which is just
   keeping even with population growth. It's the Red Queen's Race. The
   Republicans are now building bridges to Europe, because it is Europe
   that will allow them to keep this up for a little while longer. And
   European leaders will be the biggest fools on the planet if they think
   that going along with Bush ends anywhere but their own ruin. The US
   played patsy to Europe in the 1920's - lending to fill the hole that
   Versailles and a foolish attempt at restoring the gold standard left.
   It meant the US was dragged down with Europe when the collapse finally
   hit.

   The basis of Rove's Republic will be the massive debt, which can only
   be financed by back door agreements with Japan, China, Europe and
   Saudi Arabia. Since the money system won't actually work - merely
   present the illusion of working, as the real market will be what parts
   of America's future is being sold off this year in order to keep the
   money flowing from abroad.

   V. The Forest and the Trees

   People on Kos can see the trees of this crisis - bonddad and London
   yank have been following the currency crisis, for example - but the
   larger picture is missing. The crisis isn't in the fall of the dollar,
   the jobless recovery, the budget deficit, voting irregularities,
   corruption in the media and congress - or even Iraq and Social
   Security.

   It is in how these parts fit together to create one pervasive
   reactionary order. No one of them can be solved alone. One cannot fix
   the voting system, and not fix what people are voting for. One cannot
   shake up the corrupt rotten borough system of electoral districts,
   without changing the nature of parties. One cannot fix the jobs and
   debt crisis - without changing the politicians who are doing the
   deciding. And so on.

   So what is the structure? It involves three parts: Bash, Break, and
   Borrow.

   Bash

   Bashing is the process of identifying your enemies with ideas, or
   groups, that mainstream Americans are repelled by. The Republicans
   under Rove have become very good at identifying the left with very far
   from acceptable groups

   The Bash part is the one that people who follow media consolidation
   and reporting failure, voting irregularities, the loss of civil
   rights, the "torturization" of the Justice Department, the
   demonization of gays, the freeping of the Democratic Party - or anyone
   else that stands in Bush's way - are following. Bash is the strategy
   of making discourse more vicious, more polarized and more partisan. It
   is also a key part of the popularity of Governor, now DNC Chair,
   [60]Howard Dean. He was the first major politician to stand up on the
   Democratic side and state, bluntly and honestly, that the Bash
   strategy was working and that the Democratic Party could not simply
   act like an abused spouse. It is why he is now the most visible
   politician in the Democratic Party, because the Bash strategy is the
   most visible political effect. It alters every constitutional
   arrangement - from making impeachment in the eye of the beholder, to
   how budgets are passed.

   This means that for any one who is liberal, progressive or even merely
   just a democrat, bashing is the part they feel every day and very
   directly. This is because it is most directly aimed at bombarding
   people into silence.

   So the first part is for the Republicans to relentlessly Bash, but
   Bashing would not work if there were not people in fear for their
   being able to hold on economically. Which brings us to

   Break

   Breaking is destroying the way by which decisions are made. It is
   undermining the idea that getting the numbers and facts right matters.
   It is about undermining the connection between public statements and
   the evidence to back them. The WMD claims about Iraq, and the joining
   of Sadam and Osama are the best examples of breaking.

   The break part is the part that riles the attention of people like
   Paul Krugman - it is the disintegration of the way of doing business
   of the old liberal order. Are you worried about the budget deficit?
   The disintegration of the dollar? The politicization of government
   agencies? The intelligent design movement? The bizarre economic
   projections used to rationalize tax breaks and social security
   abolition? Then congratulations, you are worried about how the
   Republicans are breaking the economy and the social order that keeps
   the economy running.

   But why is breaking so important? Because the old order ran without
   specific patronage. The way to power, as Machiavelli told people 500
   years ago, is to make sure that no one has anything that you didn't
   give them, and you can't take away from them. If the old
   entrepreneurial order dies, if the metropolitan engines of job
   creation are broken, if there is no longer a transparent budget system
   - then the entire edifice can only be held together by back room
   deals. We get a constitution of conspiracy - where the dollar rests,
   not on the strength of the American economy, but on the deals cut with
   other big nations.

   It means that proposals and policy become worthless, because we don't
   even have the data to make policy projections.

   In short, it means that the entire system holds afloat because on the
   Republican Party can...

   Borrow

   ... and squander. The intent of the Republican Party is to make it so
   that the only ways that money enters the economy is through them. The
   genius of the Liberal Democracy is that money was created by land
   value. As people did things, at the ground level, that made houses and
   buildings and factories worth more - that allowed banks to lend more,
   and that created more money. While the Federal Reserve had the foot on
   the break, and the Congress the foot on the gas pedal - in a very real
   sense the money system of the liberal democracy was the most
   democratic that has ever existed, because everyone could, if they
   could figure out how, get some of what economists call "seinurage" -
   profit from creating money. As cities and towns had better
   communities, more people wanted to live in them. This increased
   housing prices, and that meant more lending, which meant more money.

   But the flip side of every virtuous circle is a vicious circle. This
   entire system rested on manufacturing. Because, ultimately, it is
   manufacturing which allows exporting, or reduction of importing - and
   ultimately creates the "basic industry" which brings monetary base
   into a community to do all this magic with.

   The drive is to break American manufacturing - and instead make it so
   that all new middle class hiring comes from either the security
   industry - which means only good republicans get hired, rather than
   the kind of people who worked the dot com boom - or the securties
   industry, which is dependent on the federal reserves interest rate
   policies, and on the retirement industry - pensions, 401ks, and, they
   hope, social security borrowing.

   If people must be in line with the political ends of the Republicans
   to earn a good living, the nation will, because it must, become more
   like the Republicans. Those who do not want to play along must be
   poor, be careful, or be moving along to other nations.

   In Rove's Republic, Reagan is the reactionary Woodrow Wilson - the
   individual who put certain pieces in place, which while not enough to
   end the old order, make the end of the old order inevitable if they
   are accepted. In the case of Reagan, a nation that moved from pay as
   you go, to a credit based nation. Once Americans were no longer
   willing to pay for what they wanted, the end of Liberalism - which
   despite its willingness to borrow, run deficits, was a system in
   equilibrium: the government collected as much, or more, in interest as
   it paid out up until Reagan's time in office.

   So Bashing creates polarization, Breaking destroys people's ability to
   resist that polarization, Borrowing means that ultimately people must
   fall into line behind where the money is.

   Many believe the elite have almost absolute power over the lives of
   little people. It isn't true now, but they have a coherent plan to
   force little people into line.

   VI. The response

   Everything the Republicans do is part of this three tier attack:
   everything advances bashing, breaking or borrowing. Each requires a
   different, but linked, response.

   In response to bashing we must bash back, as hard, and with the same
   tactic - connect the Republicans to ideas, actions or stances that are
   unacceptable to mainstream American. The Democratic Party and the left
   cannot effectively bash by using counter-culture, but instead by
   proving, that, in fact, the Republicans are the anti-culture.

   In response to breaking we must take the completely different tack: we
   must take the intellectual high road, and argue that the Republicans
   are bashing, but we and only we are being reasonable.

   In response to borrowing we must take the moral not intellectual high
   road. We must impress on Americans that it is not right to sell your
   children to Saudi Arabia, in order to drive a bigger car to day. We
   must impress on Americans the dangers of debt, and the perils of a
   nation that does not create as much value as it consumes.

   These three responses - bash back, build rather than break, and save
   not borrow. Must form the core of the response, but it is vital to
   select the correct one for the circumstances. One cannot merely bash
   in to stop borrowing, because when people want to borrow they will
   find an excuse. We cannot be intellectual in response to borrowing
   demands either - since the need to borrow is not intellectual, but
   driven by primal fear of unemployment and market crash.

   A fear that the Republicans will exploit when the current growing
   downturn hits in the last quarter of this year or the first half of
   next year.

   VII. The state of kings

   Now the idea of constitutional crisis is not as far from the public
   mind as the media's willingness to bury it might think. For example, I
   am told that Prof. Ackerman was an advisor to Kerry in the
   presidential campaign - and if you read between the lines of [61]Paul
   Krugman's sounding the alarm about the budget crisis, and calling this
   "your grandfather's recession", you realize that the corollary is that
   the mechanisms put in place to stop such events have been broken or
   bent.

   Clinton, in fact, attempted to put in place the three pieces of what
   would have been a different constitutional order - the beginning of
   national health care, campaign finance reform of a real kind, and a
   carbon tax. The first would have been the new boundary program, the
   second the change in constitutional mechanism, and the third would
   have changed the basis of money away from the current energy basis.
   However, the sense of crisis was not enough, and Clinton did not have
   the party discipline that FDR had to work with. He failed, and spent
   the rest of his Presidency holding in place.

   That we are talking about constitutional change can be seen by the
   nature of the Social Security Debate: the very move to talk about
   public policy in 75 year time frames means that, whether Americans
   know it or not, they are talking about the new republic. 75 years is
   roughly the length of an American governmental order - and this is why
   Social Security is the object of debate.

   It is the debt that the Liberal Democracy used to keep everyone -
   liberal and conservative - in line. It bars any policy that will break
   the system. Some, like Ross Perot, warned of unfunded mandates in the
   trillions - without realizing what it meant. These mandates were not
   troublesome to meet - so long as everyone stayed restrained within a
   band of policy. But they were the sword of Damocles for anyone seeking
   more radical change - either to the left or the right.

   It was a stumbling block in the way of national health care for
   example - one which while solvable, was never solved. It was also,
   however, the road block against any attempt to dismantle the Liberal
   Democracy, since no more reactionary economic order could afford that
   level of retirement payments to workers.

   And, of course, many here have known for a long time that the current
   political crisis is a constitutional one, that runs down to the
   bedrock of our democracy - it is an assumption, in one way or another,
   behind many of the posts here every day: that fundamental protections
   and mechanisms are being attacked and destroyed: the media no longer
   being watchdog, government departments as arms of the Republican
   National Committee, the attack on voting rights are all examples of
   constitutional, not merely political, crisis.

   The irony is that the right tried this same plan in England, and got
   it wrong: they bashed socialism, they broke state run industries and
   the national pension system. But they could not create a borrowing
   stream to sustain the economy. John Major, by blundering away this
   piece of the puzzle, opened the door for Blair to take power, and
   create a borrowing stream based on housing. This borrowing stream is
   in danger, and the nature of the Thatcherite order forced Blair to
   move to the right of center on Iraq - since the money supply of
   Britain rests on oil - but it also prevented much of the rest of the
   social conservative agenda from going through in Britain, and has left
   the Tories in a seemingly permanently minority status.

   VII. The Crisis Circus

   The economy is chugging for either [62]a hard landing, or, more likely
   in my view,  a full blown recession. When that down turn arrives the
   Republicans are going to have to exploit it for full effect to push
   through their changes. They need the money, there is no other source.
   Bush is going hat in hand to Europe to buy another year, no more, so
   that he can be in position to try again when the down turn arrives.
   When it does he will blame Democratic obstructionism, smear key
   opponents, and then by the slenderest of party line votes get what he
   wants. It is what was done with Iraq, using 911 and the crash of 2002
   as the crisis circus to go to Iraq.

   It must be made forcefully clear that the debt crisis, the jobless
   recovery, the war in Iraq, the attack on social security, and the
   inability to provide medical insurance to all - are part of the same
   problem. Our money is paper oil - greased with the blood of centuries
   of conflicts over the middle east and current repression. Until we end
   this addiction to oil, we will never be free, but live, instead, on a
   sentence of slavery, which will be redeemed some day, and someday
   soon. We cannot borrow every cent from the rest of the world to fund
   an economy that is not growing - where every cent of profit must go
   into corporate earnings, because that is the only way to keep the
   borrowed money coming.

   The key change in the economy that has pushed the rise of the
   Republican party since 1969 is a change of the money system away from
   being based on assets - which is under the control of the people in
   their day to day economic, community and social activity, a truly
   grass roots money system in that the basic supply of money is governed
   by the value that people create - to one being based on oil. Oil is
   not something that people can create. Nor does conservation at the
   grass roots level help - because someone else will simply use the oil
   or energy you save to compete against you. Oil comes from a few
   places, and the money system is then under control of those places.
   The President became, in effect, the minister of oil.

   And to keep the oil coming we had to borrow back the money we paid for
   the oil with. It went out, and came back. With each trip back it meant
   that financial sector had to eat a bit more of American life - because
   the dividends from the financial sector are what paid those who lent
   us the money. And with each round of paying more to the rich abroad,
   we had to lower the taxes on the rich here, so that they could stay
   even with the rich of other nations. It has been a vicious circle,
   this oil and money addiction, that has lasted for 30 years, and has
   now reached the every accelerating point from which there is no
   turning back.

   And once an economic system is not about general activity, but about
   the control of some particularly scarce resource, it must become
   conservative, since economics is, on any given small time scale, zero
   sum. Economic growth can only occur at the very slow rate that
   resource increases, or is more efficiently used. The "neo-classical"
   economy is really the Friedman-Mundell economy.

   Social Security is one of the last barriers to making all money come
   from above, and not below. It is one of the last barriers to forging a
   chain around the neck of every American.

   The Democrats must assert that energy is not merely the shackle around
   the United States, but the root cause of global instability -
   terrorism, dictatorships in the Middle East, Russia's moves away from
   Democracy, the instabilities which force China to rigid mercantilism,
   and which stop the economic growth of our allies in Europe and Japan,
   while forcing the exploitation of the labor resources of other
   nations.

   They must set this as a war between two fundamentally different views
   of the future, casting aside the last scraps of the old "bipartisan"
   constitutional order - since the forces that kept that order in place
   are gone - and fight to make it clear to Americans that Bush wants to
   mortgage the future to Saudi Arabia and China - since these are the
   only places where he can borrow enough money to pull off his social
   security plan.

   A the heart of this is something very simple: they must attack that
   the Republicans are acting in good faith for America, as Republicans
   have consistently attacked the good faith of Democrats. They must
   attack the patriotism, and accept economic populism - but not crass
   economic populism. Instead it is the purpose of the Democratic party
   to reassert an economic order where the basic stuff of economic life
   does comes out of the work of Americans, and not out of the sands of
   Iraq.

   The era of bashing and partisanship will come to an end only when
   there is a sword of Damocles hanging over the government, when
   everyone in it agrees what the "third rail" of American politics is,
   and what dangers are so great that pursuit of partisan advantage is no
   longer worth it. The Republican Party, because of what can be called
   the "End of History" thesis, enunciated by Fukayama, does not believe
   there are any such limits. Attempts to use 911 to impose a false limit
   have failed. Which is why the Republican Party must - not can, may or
   wants, but must - break social security with borrowing, because the
   weight of that borrowing will be the limit under which everyone else
   must labor afterwards.

   In short, since Rove has set the rules as Bash, Break and Borrow - the
   Democrats must first prevent the Republicans from creating the
   borrowing stream, and they must Bash back. Ultimately we must mend
   what has been broken, in order to restore economic freedom to
   Americans, but that can only happen if Americans understand that the
   mandate of government is not to protect the oil jugular, but to expand
   the level of economic activity across the country, and in a way not
   dependent on the largess of the Defense Department and Department of
   Homeland Security.

   VIII We have not chosen this moment, it has chosen us

   We must tell Americans that the Republicans are trying to create a
   top-down economy, and that the social security schemes that Bush is
   pushing are the crucial step. We must tell Americans that the
   nastiness and bashing come from the Republicans, and are the result of
   America not having a national project, a great vision to pursue. And
   we must tell Americans that history and circumstances have forced us
   to make great decisions which will determine the course of the next
   two generations, and that such moments are not to be backed into, nor
   decided by default.

   It is this moment that will set the course, and it is therefore this
   moment which must awaken to its responsibility, and assume among its
   place in history. To decide not with an eye to gains that are
   temporary, but for a future which belongs to our posterity.

   Because there are only two ways to pay off this debt. One is to sell
   everything in America - the national parks, government lands, the
   airwaves, the profits of our labor, the fruits of our agriculture, the
   mortgages that we pay on our houses - to foreigners so they will keep
   our economy lubricated with money and oil - or it will be to create
   new forms of industry and commerce will create more wealth and dwarf
   what was borrowed. The first is the Republican way - to strip the
   country bare to pay for present consumption. The second must become
   the proposal of the Democratic Party.

   The old Liberal Democratic order, as great as it was, as filled with
   magisterial decision, and now deep tradition - is gone. Gone with it
   are the means by which it channeled partisan anger, personal ambition,
   and political conflict into decisions wiser than any one individual
   making them. We are living in a new era, in a new Republic, and as
   with any moment which brings forth a new order, we must admit of our
   weaknesses and limitations, but not be hobbled by them, or by any
   false sense of modesty. We did not chose this moment, it has chosen
   us. It has chosen us to make choices for others - both here and around
   the globe, because America is still the mightiest nation on earth. And
   how we make those choices will yield the words be carved on stones,
   and perhaps crosses, here and around the world.

   Let it not be "He died for a dream that was dead."

References

  54. http://agonist.org/story/2005/2/24/174858/333
  55. http://www.bopnews.com/archives/Fourth_Republic.pdf
  56. http://scoop.agonist.org/user/Stirling%20Newberry
  57. http://scoop.agonist.org/section/US_Liberty_Watch
  58. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ACKWE2.html
  59. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n04/acke01_.html
  60. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/22/10645/1297
  61. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/22/24011/3261
  62. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050222/economic_outlook_5.html
  

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