From Civics to History

I cross-posted my recent review of Morris Berman's book "Dark Ages America" (see below) at Beliefnet, and got the following response:

all who pledge fealty to me now will be protected when the Empire falls and the Dark Ages come

Ridicule of Berman's contention that the U.S. has now entered a new dark age is typical, but since refutation is a little more difficult, I asked this poster what process of inverted logic or ingrained habit might cause him to think the dark ages aren't already here?

Sometimes I'm amazed by the conversations at B-Net/U.S. Politics and on the blogs (even the liberal ones), and by what appear to be people's assumptions that political life in the U.S. today is just a normal, if somewhat warped continuation of the past. Many seem to assume that the current regime is only a temporary aberration, and that we can get back to the way things should be, the way they used to be, if we just elect the right people.

There seems to be little awareness that since Y2K we really have become a different country.

Present policies, as Berman points out, may have grown out of past practices, but since the new millenium arrived we've turned a very ominous corner, and our government today is not the same kind of animal it was during the administration of, say, Harry Truman. The republic is gone, and it ain't comin' back.

Consider:

* The coup which ended the old republic and established this regime and the new, dark age was a judicial autogolpe. It installed a dynastic absolute ruler, the guy Chalmers Johnson calls "the boy emperor."

* The new regime has pursued an unprecedented policy of fiscal recklessness, resulting in an eight-and-a-half trillion dollar national debt.

* The wealth and power gap between the rich and the rest of us has accelerated tenfold with the regime's blessing.

* The U.S. is now a country which has declared its right to unilaterally make war on any country it deems a threat, to use medieval forms of torture, open-ended detention of uncharged detainees in secret dungeons, and weapons of mass destruction to achieve its aims, and is answerable to no one.

* The Constitution has been scrapped and replaced by executive fiat.

Considering all this, I'm very skeptical when I see posters here clinging to the weak and feeble protests of the Democratic Party to try to gain some measure of hope.

"We the People" lost our country some time ago when we allowed corporate CFO's to buy the political process out from under us. Now that the kind of government they worked to achieve is in place, they're not about to surrender the machinery of the process back to us, Russ Feingold notwithstanding.

Still, Congress sits and debates, and the Supreme Court follows the time-honored procedures. Like the Roman Empire of the early dark ages, the forms of the old government remain, but their substance has been hollowed out and discarded. The proper study of the American Republic is now in history class, not civics.