Drifting along until overtaken by financial bankruptcy

More from Chalmers Johnson's NEMESIS:

The separation of powers that the Founders wrote into our Constitution as the main bulwark against dictatorship increasingly appears to be a dead letter, with the Congress no longer capable of asserting itself against presidential attempts to monopolize power. Corrupt and indifferent, the Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, is simply not up to the task of confronting a modern Julius Caesar. As former representative Bob Barr, a conservative from Georgia, concludes, "The American people are going to have to say, 'Enough of this business of justifying everything as necessary for the war on terror.' Either the Constitution and the laws of this country mean something, or they don't. It is truly frightening what is going on in this country."

If the legislative branch of our government is broken--and it is hard to imagine how it could repair itself, given the massive interests that feed off it--the judicial branch is hardly less limited today in terms of its ability to maintain the balance. Even the Supreme Court's most extraordinary power, its ability to nullify a law as unconstitutional, rests on precedent rather than constitutional stipulation, and lower courts, increasingly packed with right-wing judges, have little taste for going against the prevailing political winds ...

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The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches, having become so servile in the presence of the imperial presidency, have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner. Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and establish public financing of elections may be theoretically conceivable but is unlikely given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing our large and indifferent population.

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The likelihood is that the United States will maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, or simply for some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptionally compared to other nations. As Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, concludes, "U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable. ... The empire can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states are no longer reliable. ... The result is that the empire can no longer pay for enough of the professional troops it needs to fulfill its self-assumed imperial tasks."