John Dean: Broken Government
Dean, John. Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches (New York: Viking, 2007)
Broken Government is the final volume in what Dean refers to as an "unplanned trilogy" (p. xi) about GOP misrule of the federal government. (I reviewed the preceding volumes Worse Than Watergate and Conservatives without Conscience here and here, respectively.)
Dean focuses primarily on the process of governance, utilizing some of the same critical material used in my worst. president. ever. posts (ranging from Alan Wolfe's "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" from Washington Monthly to Sean Wilentz's Rolling Stone article "The Worst President in History?"). These two passages serve to summarize Dean's position:
If this book is hard on Republicans, it is because they have demonstrated during the past several decades a remarkable incapacity to govern at the national level and should accordingly be held responsible for the damage they have done to democracy. In fact, as currently constituted, I do not believe the Republican Party can be trusted with control of the national government, not because of its policies (many of which I confess to favoring) but rather because of its philosophical disposition toward the process of government, which they so easily abuse in their pursuit and exercise of power. Their thinking has proven ruinous. (pp. xvi-xvii, Preface)Congress under Republican rule has proven to be incapable of deliberation, timely annual appropriations, and necessary oversight of a Republican president, all fundamental constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch. Modern Republican presidents, in turn, believe that they must dominate the entire federal establishment, and in so doing override the fundamental safeguard of our system's checks and balances. Corrupting the independence and impartiality of the federal judiciary has been a priority of Republican presidents, who have devoted four decades to selecting primarily judges and justices with a radical conservative political philosophy. (p. 175)
The government is, of course, only broken from the perspective of a citizenry that expects adherence to the Constitutional preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
From the plutocratic perspective, which demands that its dollar contributions be rewarded and multiplied by legislative and judicial action (and inaction), the government is working exactly as planned. In this article from Harper's, based on her book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein states that:
Under George W. Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government--the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles--but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, campus stitch running shoes.
Klein's "actual work of governing," like Dean's, is based on our Constitution; Bush's "actual work" is little more than redistributing tax revenue upwards to his donors. Bushism is another example of socializing the costs and privatizing the profits, and the results are as ugly as they have ever been.
Dean has written another sobering account of GOP misrule: one hopes that conservatives cannot do enough additional damage in the next ten months to justify Dean making his trilogy into a quadrilogy.