t r u t h o u t - Jonathan Schell | The Fall of the One-Party Empire

CLICK TO READ: t r u t h o u t - Jonathan Schell | The Fall of the One-Party Empire - The Nation & Tom Dispatch

Jonathan Schell muses over the downfall of the Bush fantasy:

" The imperial dreams are in ruins. But the ruins, strangely, are not of things that were built and then collapsed; they are of fantasies. We are not dealing here with the decline of a new Rome. It is not that a great power has been brought down - although the casualties of the war, American and Iraqi, have been tragically real - but that a world of fancy and fraud has been exploded by facts.

And the one-party state at home? It was not the mirage that the empire was. The structure of the American state and, to a lesser extent, the economy, really has been deeply altered. Real hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the coffers of the GOP while real hundreds of billions poured into the pockets of the rich. Real laws were passed that tore gaping holes in the Bill of Rights. A real shift of the judiciary toward the radical right was set in motion. An unprecedented concentration of power - fusing government, corporations, the military, portions of the media, and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus - was created. And yet this structure, too, has been shaken by recent events."

Let we all thow our hands up in despair, Schell ends on an optimistic note:

"...The failed empire, in the shape of its failed war, has driven down the President's support to the point at which others, cowed until now, feel free to attack him. The institutions of government and the economy, drawn like iron filings into the magnetic field of power, failed at first to check the administration. But the public, represented by opinion polls, has stepped in, and the institutions are following. Not since the Soviet Union fell fourteen years ago have we witnessed a greater reversal of fortune."