Bush Regime in Trouble

Bush Regime in Trouble

Bush Regime: Under Siege and Lashing Back
Revolution #021, November 6, 2005, posted at revcom.us
The Bush Regime is in trouble. Big trouble.

And that makes this moment both extremely promising and extremely dangerous. We stand at a crossroads where the impact of what we do--or don’t do--is greatly magnified.
We are more powerful than he is

WILD AMBITIONS
We have to recognize that Bush came to power with a sweeping plan to transform American society--both its place in the world and its "social contract."

The people who brought Bush to power--and remember, they shamelessly and coercively stole an election to get him in--wanted a much more untrammeled domination of the planet by the U.S.

To help effect that and to keep the "home base" itself stable, they needed and wanted a fascist order at home, one propped up ideologically and socially by an extreme, know-nothing brand of Christianity.

The end of the Cold War, the tremendous changes brought by globalization, the differences in people’s thinking off of both the struggles of the ’60s and the socioeconomic transformations of the ’90s--all these, and many other things besides, had introduced a lot of uncertainty and instability, and the imperialists saw the need for an iron fist to bludgeon their way through.

This has led to a very radical restructuring in how U.S. imperialism enforces its domination, overseas and domestically. For example: this is not the first time that U.S. intelligence and military personnel have tortured prisoners. But it IS the first time that the president has openly proclaimed that he has the legal right to order such torture!

(It is also significant that those within the army who could not stomach the systematic and wide-ranging scope of the "new torture" regimen were forced out.) Nor is this the first time that religion has played a prominent role in U.S. public life.

But it IS the first time when Supreme Court nominees must be vetted and approved by religious fanatics and when the president’s "model justice" (Scalia) says that the legitimacy of the government is based on "God’s will," rather than the consent of the governed (even though the "consent of the governed" is itself a myth, the fact that a Supreme Court justice would not even claim it as the source of legitimacy is significant. . . and ominous).
And these are just a few examples of many.

Bush does all this not mainly out of perversity and ignorance, but because he represents a section of imperialists--the dominant section--that believes that these "new norms" must be enforced to maintain U.S. dominance abroad and hold U.S. society together while doing so. He and others are convinced that this and this alone can represent the interests of the system in a time of major and unpredictable changes.

He is not the whole of the system, nor is he all of what’s wrong; but he is its main representative and the changes he represents will be very bad for the people and their ability to struggle for a better future.