Mechanization
Rove believed that a takeover of the US could be accomplished by purely "democratic" means, mostly by using guile to confuse the electorate into choosing the right people to control them. And though such a thing is possible, as Kurt Gödel is rumored to have whispered to his sponsor Albert Einstein while being lectured during his citizenship award ceremony on how the US Constitution makes such an eventuality impossible (Einstein is said to have pinched the logician to make him shut up), and though the media and many political operatives considered Rove some kind of bogeyman-genius, Rove is no Kurt Gödel. I doubt that a man of such modest intellectual accomplishments as Rove could understand any of Gödel's writing. The problem with the media is that, with few exceptions, it is filled with third-rate intellects. (I can, however, personally attest that Mike Keefe is a smart guy.) Of course, Rove was wrong, as usual.
Does governmental control by a single ideological group imply the end of democracy? Not necessarily, as Rove likely recognized. It can be effected through tyranny of the majority, a condition that Davies certainly included in his governance by cannibals. Clearly during the early years of the Bush regime, after 9/11, there was tyranny of a majority that later lost its faith. That is the fickleness of democracy.
In order for the conservatives to gain control of the US as they believe they must, they need to eliminate any uncertainty offered by fickle voters. And that can be accomplished within the framework of the US Constitution. Nor does it take a Gödel to figure out how to do it, though probably it is beyond the machinations of a Rove. Given the lack of imagination and penetrating insight of the conservatives, the takeover will be more heavy handed than subtle.
Any takeover has prerequisites. I doubt they are sufficient, since when time enters the equation the logic is not so direct and there are more unintended consequences. But one of the requisites is a set of scapegoats and enemies of the state. Hitler had communists and Jews and riffraff like gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah's witnesses. Conservatives have liberals, Muslims, illegal aliens and riffraff like the incorrigible poor.
Another requisite is a propaganda machine. The use of language to disguise the reality of action has become an art-form in the US through the advertising industry. Of course, television is the perfect venue, and the conservatives have their own propaganda machine, Fox News.
Perhaps the most important requisite is a crisis. Bush and Cheney had the perfect opportunity and blew it, even though they established powerful tools for whoever follows with a desire to take over. But there was another opportunity and that is likely why Bush the Younger regrets addressing the fiscal crisis of his administration's making.
Consider for a moment if Bush the Younger had done nothing about the fiscal crisis with the banks. It is no exaggeration that every major US bank and most of the major European banks were knee-deep in illiquid debt. So apply what some consider free-market mentality and let them fail like dominoes. Suddenly you cannot cash your paycheck, since there is no bank where it can be cashed and no financial institution will cash it, as the bank against which it is written is insolvent. Remember, banks cannot write themselves checks or loan themselves money. Only the government can loan itself money, the modern equivalent of printing money electronically.
Unless your company has stockpiled hordes of cash, an unlikely event given the proclivity to maintain assets in less liquid forms associated with the financial industry, they cannot pay you. Nor can the bank pay you what you have on deposit; it does not have your money, or your company's money. (If you think banks keep your money on hand, you are completely uneducated and need to let someone competent take over your finances. The reason the bank doesn't have your money is because it has loaned out all but a small percentage of the money, a reserve. That is how banks make money in capitalist society: fractional reserve banking. If the banks had to keep all your money on hand at all times, they would have to charge you exorbitant fees to make money and only the wealthiest would use them. Fractional reserve banking is how you and the other peons got a mortgage and a car loan and a credit card.) If the government honors the FDIC pledge and prints money to repay the limited amounts it covers, you will get some money from the bank, most likely all of the paltry sum you have on deposit if you are within statistical limits.
So you get what you had that is covered under deposit insurance, but after that all bets are off. After that run on the banks, they will be shuttered; perhaps National Guard troops will be called out to protect the physical structure. The US becomes a cash and carry society: without cash, no one sells to you (though suddenly cash is more valuable than ever before in your lifetime). No checks from anyone are accepted. No loans. Businesses that rely on loans to make it through pay cycles are out of business. You lose your job, as do most of your neighbors. You cannot pay your mortgage or your car note or any of your credit card or other revolving debt, you cannot sell your house or your car and the banks cannot collect on your debt. Your assets are worthless, and whether or not the holders of those titles are able to confiscate that collateral is anybody's guess. That would be the resulting fiscal crisis resulting from Bush the Younger's fiscal profligacy and would have been the result of his refusal to face reality. If you don't understand this, then you have no grasp of how the US economy actually functions. (Which brings us to the sad reality that the conservatives and the liberals I know share the same delusions vis à vis finance and the economy; only the attitudes differ.)
This could have been a perfect crisis, a time to say it was too dangerous to hand the nation over to an inexperienced liberal who would lead it into socialism. Whether such a move would have worked is also anyone's guess, but there would have been a massive outpouring of vocal conservative noise in its favor. The Supreme Court might have supported the move. Perhaps the real open question is whether the military would have supported such a move made in the name of freedom and liberty and preservation of rights as the nation spiraled into a deep depression, an emergency catalyzing a suspension of the US Constitution to save the US Constitution.
The use of words like liberty and freedom will be essential in a takeover of the US. The reason is that people here think those words mean something and that the US has a limitless quantity of it, whatever it is. It's one reason it will be impossible for the US to prosecute any war crimes it committed during the Bush regime, since the US, the bastion of liberty and justice for all, cannot (by internal definition) commit a war crime.
The concatenation of the symbols e-c-o-n-o-m-i-c and l-i-b-e-r-t-y are now frequently met in discourse and writing, though they have no objective signification. They are primarily the product of the ivory tower economists of the Austrian school. Most notable in popularity is Friedich von Hayek, who seems to be the source of the often espoused concatenation of letters "economic liberty." Usually the terms are tossed into discussion along with the title of his book The Road to Serfdom, part of which argues that Nazism was a form of socialism. (I would present exactly the same argument that Reaganomics was (and remains) a form of socialism.) Hayek was a purely academic thinker with no experience in a functioning economy, much like old Karl Marx, and for this reason had disagreements with Milton Friedman who did have practical experience to temper his utopian thought. But for me, the major point regarding Hayek is that, in an interview he gave, he praised Augusto Pinochet for bringing economic liberty to Chile even as Pinochet ran a brutal dictatorship, often described as fascist, obtained by overthrowing a stable democracy in a bloody coup. Hayek said that this was not significant. I find such a notion of liberty idiotic.
It is useful to pursue briefly the ideas of Hayek regarding liberty, since they are going to be a significant ideological aspect (and already are part of the ravings of the conservatives since the election of Obama) of the transition to permanent despotism (as opposed to the short-term despotism of Bush the Younger).
Here are the words of Hayek from an interview in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, April, 1981, (a government newspaper — there were no anti-government newspapers),as translated by L'Instut Hayek. "Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism."
That sums up the attitude of the conservative movement in the US. It is interesting to compare this idea with the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat. (Perhaps conservatives ought to espouse a dictatorship of the plutocrats.) In fact, many of the economic ideas of the conservatives are Marxist, not capitalist, especially their attitude towards how value is created in society. Examine their words and you find at root a distrust of market mechanisms even while worshiping some god they call The Market.
In the same interview, Hayek talked about Reagan's anti-Keysian policies even as Reagan printed money to pour into the US economy via "defense" spending as a fiscal stimulus, bringing about the greatest debtor status in US history. It is enlightening and prophetic and ironic to read his words about Reagan's coming tax cuts (remember the interview was in 1981, at the beginning of Reagan's time in office) even while admitting that without curbing the government spending Reagan was increasing, it would be necessary to print money. Which is, of course, exactly what Reagan did.
Hayek said in response to a question asking him to name a single significant cause of inflation, "Excess public spending by the state. Unable to raise enough money by taxes, a government pays part of its costs by creating money. And Reagan is right in saying that the huge burden of taxes is perhaps the hardest problem to resolve. It is very difficult, indeed, and very complicated to pare back the plethora of Government entities and services. Very difficult as a political problem, I mean."
The irony was that Reagan avoided the political problem by naming his fiscal stimulus program "defense spending" — paid for with freshly printed money that would balloon the national debt. Conservatives do not consider money disbursed for defense to be spending (note that Bush refused to acknowledge his war spending by leaving it out of the budget) and for conservatives military-industrial bureaucracy is not government. Then the spin that the small fraction of this freshly minted currency that returned was somehow the bounty of tax cuts in the face of creating the largest government bureaucracy since WWII has become an economic myth among not only conservatives but Republicans in general (excepting Republican libertarians). But here Hayek agreed with Friedman: Government spending to finance large government is done by printing money. The only alternative is to borrow, which is not possible on such a scale and is in the end as unpopular as taxes. However, the US has worked out a way for the Fed and the Treasury to cooperate through the "private sector" to create new money, albeit at an extra cost of a commission paid to the primary dealers to make it appear the government is borrowing from the public. Perhaps the proper word for this commission would be seigniorage.
The inability to see the blatant hypocrisy of the conservatives as they speak out of both sides of their mouths is a serious form of what is often termed confirmation bias. I call this asymmetrical logic, in which one applies an argument towards one's opponents but cannot recognize the same argument applied towards those one favors, especially the more applicable is the argument to one's own side. It is like allowing a counterexample to another's mathematical argument while refusing to see it when applied to your own mistaken argument.
The Hayekian argument that personal liberty is irrelevant so long as you can shop where you want to shop is worse than ridiculous (what it comes down to no matter his utopian spinning on his head). It is stupid. I will admit I have trouble reading Hayek since his logic is so sloppy, but the Hayek of this interview is as absurd as any of his writings. He was 82 years old and perhaps in his dotage he had become as delusional as Reagan. Perhaps this came with his stay in the US. But the man tiptoes on eggs in the same way as scholastic philosophers when arguing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. His ideology is the perfect fit for the militarist takeover of the US in the name of liberty, with its asymmetrical logic and the belief that limited democracy or even dictatorship is the best way to preserve liberty (the militarists already claim that a one-party system dominated by them is the best way to preserve democracy and save the Constitution; some of them apparently believe that 90% or more of the population agrees with their every opinion). Hayek seemed to believe that the only liberty is economic liberty; or perhaps that economic liberty is the sole sufficient condition for all other liberty. Again, the question is what the expression economic liberty might mean, given that the term "free market" has no objective significance whatsoever.
But read the interview yourself. It is as self-deluding a form of utopian nonsense as anything Marx ever dreamed up, and rivals Reagan's apology for the act he could not bring himself to recall.
