"Tom Kratman - A State of Disobedience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kratman Tom)

government: Executive, Legislative or Judicial, for without some political or quasi-political safe harbor,
some means of countering and stymieing the opposing party, every member of each party faced a similar
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fate. None were whole; none pure, and all knew it.

Yet, despite this mutual interest in maintaining the balance of power, the rewards of attaining control
were simply too great to be forgone. For the Democrats, control—could it but be achieved—would
make the revolution begun in the 1930s complete. Control of the economy, control of education, control
of the environment (difficult to understand now, with the then-common predictions of ecological disaster
proven wrong, but a powerful concern at the time); could all three branches be made to fall to the
Democracy, however briefly in theory, the Democrats could so arrange matters that no one and nothing
could ever remove them from power, or alter their vision of America's proper and just future.

For the Republicans, however, the Democratic dream was a nightmare: thought control through linguistic
control, micromanagement of the economy by those least suited to economic power, social engineering
under the aegis of the most doctrinaire of the social engineers, disarmament of the population and the
creation of a police state to rival that of Stalin or Hitler, at least in its scope if not by design in its evil.

Indeed, it could be said that it was precisely the seventy years of open and quasi war with first Hitler,
then Stalin, then with the heirs of Stalin that had put the United States in the position in which it found
itself at the beginning of the 21stCentury.

For, as a wise man of the times had once put it, "You should choose your enemies carefully, because
you are going to become just like them."

And so, subtly, too slowly to be perceived, the United States had become—if not "just," then certainly
much—like its erstwhile enemies.

Not that there had been great choice in the matter. Faced with totalitarian propaganda, the United States
had learned to twist truth in self-defense. Faced with planned economies, economies able to challenge the
west only through inflicting deprivations on the workers, the United States had been forced to greater and
greater economic control emanating from Washington. Faced with the possibility of armed invasion
(though we know now that was never a realistic concern) the central federal government was forced into
taking on more and more responsibility under the aegis of national self-defense.

From the national highway system (to move the military to the ports and defense materials to and from
the factories) to the school lunch program (to provide educable cannon fodder for the wars and
campaigns) to rates and levels of taxation we can today only marvel at (to pay for waging an often hidden
conflict by land, sea, air, in space and—through propaganda and strings-attached foreign aid—in the
hearts of the uncommitted); each and every spurt of growth in federal power, each Republican-detested
centralization of authority, the Republicans had themselves fought for, at a minimum acquiesced in, in the
interests of winning the seventy year war.

Yet, less than a generation after the successful closure of that interminable conflict the United States
found itself as thoroughly divided into two hostile camps as had been the world previously.