This Week’s Clue: Nixon’s Iron Triangle

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 13 of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. Enjoy.

The forces which have risen to power
in the United States during this decade are identical to those which held Latin
America in bondage for most of its history. (The picture is of the Simon Bolivar statue in Central Park, NY. Bolivar’s dream of a free, democratic, and united Latin America has been systematically ignored in the 200 years since he rode.)

Those forces represent an Iron Triangle that has strangled the continent. They are  Army, Church and Oligarchy.

For 200 years, Latin democracy has been a sometime thing, as military juntas held a veto on what governments could do. For 200 years the Roman Catholic church has controlled political forces dedicated to keeping the poor barefoot and pregnant in the name of an autocratic, all-male hierarchy. For 200 years economic oligarchs have held all those nations’ assets to themselves, preventing social mobility from raising the worthy or pushing down the unworthy.

Now this political model has been imported to the United States of America.

These forces were held out of power here for two centuries, not
just by a Constitution based on checks and balances, but by traditions begun by
our Founders and honored through the development of the Nixon Thesis, which has dominated this nation’s politics since 1968.

It was the Nixon
Thesis’ dependence on narrow majorities, and its need to be constantly renewed
through the creation of new enemies, that made the system uniquely vulnerable to
attack, and which could yet destroy it.

Nixon himself began the process,  ignoring Eisenhower’s warnings of a "military industrial complex" and using
military contractors as part of his funding base. Before this contractors funded
both parties. After Nixon they gave almost all their money to the GOP. Since
these contractors were among the main hiring hall for retired military officers,
those officers, too, became active Republicans.

Few remarked upon this
at the time because the Democratic Party had turned so sharply against the Vietnam
War that it was assumed these people had no choice. What should have been
startling was that, after Vietnam, these people retained their political
allegiance, even increased it. Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, was
reviled by the officer corps, while Ronald Reagan, who never served, was
beloved. Nixon and Reagan even brought contractors into the cabinet, such as George
Shultz, and created the "revolving door" between contracting and government
"service" which we still have today.

The Reagan Coalition didn’t just
troll for business support, it sought out the support of unethical businessmen.
Groups like the NFIB were a front for a host of sharpies who gave us the LBO
scandals and the Savings & Loan scandals of that era. Very few were caught,
even fewer jailed. Among the fish who got away was one Neil Bush.

It was
George H.W. Bush who completed the triangle by inviting the Christian Coalition
in to make policy. Reagan fed them rhetoric. Bush gave them real power. In doing this
he violated some of his own political principles, which were based on
libertarianism, a respect for womens’ rights and his Episcopal faith. Bush
literally sold his soul to the devil for power, first by changing his views on
choice to join the Reagan ticket, later by letting the American Taliban in to set policy from the bench. Today, churches are hopelessly corrupted with the money and power of the state. They have become the state and lost all claim to real faith. 

In this kind of atmosphere, in which everything was politics and
politics was war, the politicization of justice became an obsession. What began,
under Nixon, as an effort to "balance" liberal jurists became, in the end, a
far-right veto on all jurists. The Scalia and Thomas nominations got the
headlines, but beneath them lay hundreds, even thousands, of judicial
appointments on which ideologues like the "Chicago School" (which pretends 20th
century principles like antitrust have no place in the law) "Second Amendment"
zealots (who think the founders sanctioned mass ownership of AK-47s) and
"faith-based" morons (whose litmus tests amount to nothing more than a Christian
form of "sharia" law) are let on the bench, and everyone else can pound sand. Is it coincidence that the Supreme Court justices most united against choice — Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito — are all Roman Catholics? Not secular Catholics like John F. Kennedy but observant, obedient Catholics?   

When everything becomes politics, when politics becomes war, and when
justice is merely politics by other means, you have decisions like "Bush vs.
Gore," in which the plain wishes of the voters were ignored and 5 Republican
absolutists appointed the deserved loser of the 2000 election to the nation’s
highest office.

Why should George W. Bush have had any respect for his
oath, any respect for constitutional principle, indeed any sense of shame at
all, having been born into and nurtured by this poisonous political environment?
Financial oligarchs, religious absolutists and armchair generals were the only
people he ever knew. They forgave him every flaw – cocaine, alcohol, financial
idiocy, trading Sammy Sosa – in what became a symbiotic relationship of abuse,
against the world and against America.

In our guts, the vast majority of
Americans now know he’s nuts. What we don’t understand, yet, is that he is a man
of his time, the child of a Thesis, as powerful as that of FDR or Lincoln, that
will still hold millions of Americans in its thrall long after he has left
power.

Destroying this anti-democratic, not just Anti-Democratic, legacy
will be the great political task of the next generation. But no matter how
successful they may be, that legacy will continue to stain America, and stain
American history, for as long as that star spangled banner may wave, o’er the
land of the free and the home of the brave.