The most surprising thing that’s happened in American politics these last years is something that actually didn’t happen.

And what didn’t happen is that a junta bent on dismantling American democracy and replacing it with some sort of autocracy, didn’t.

Hmmm. Very curious.

I suspect history will judge this as one of the great (non-)events of the American experience, and one of the great (non-)turning points of the last two centuries, equally significant, though far less prominent, than many actual events and actual turning points. What happened and why, is, therefore, a question of no small importance to ponder. Why did the Cheney/Rove juggernaut travel half-way down the road to American fascism, only to pull up short? Why, in short, did they flinch?

Let me say at the top that I have no idea what the answer is. There aren’t many things in this life I’d rather have than the opportunity to spend a few hours in the Bush White House, unnoticed and with a video camera in hand. I suspect ten minutes of candid footage from any given day over the last six years would bring an immediate end to this tragicomic farce we’ve all been enduring. But while even gay prostitute journalist imposters can get a pass to the White House if they are willing to lob this president a soft enough softball during a press conference, access for me has, alas, remained somehow rather more elusive.

So I’ll do the next best thing. I’ll speculate. Well, not even quite that, really. Since we really have just about zero evidence to go on, let’s simply consider the possibilities. Why did they flinch? I see several possible explanations.

The obvious first answer is that premise is wrong. I (or we) have simply misapprehended Bushism, which may be a lot of things, but is not (according to this explanation) ultimately authoritarian in nature. Perhaps, in fact, they are truly just patriots who have reacted with the best of intentions to a massive attack on American soil. And, while we might quibble with these patriots here and there (not to mention also there, and over here, and down there, and just to the right a bit there, and...), ultimately all people of good will recognize that in every society we’d want to live in there must be security and there must be liberty – we just happen to draw the balancing line in a different place than do George, Dick and Alberto. But honorable people can disagree honorably on such questions. Heck, even Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, right? Even FDR jailed Japanese-Americans, no? How bad can these guys be?

There are multiple problems with this explanation, however. One is that the Bush people were all about secrecy and unilateral executive power well before 9/11, after which it only got worse. Moreover, this isn’t a conventional war we’re in, with a normal arc to the story, and a finite ending. Instead, Bush and company have tried to sell us on an endless war against an all-purpose weapon (terrorism) – rather than an actual enemy – which means that our civil liberties, which are about as healthy nowadays as the political opponents of Vladimir Putin, are also about as likely to recover from their trauma as they have been.

Finally, even a cursory examination of the administration’s policies and tactics strongly suggests far less interest in national security than in the sheer amassing of power. Time and again, the Bush team has gone to the mat to avoid congressional and judicial oversight, when the likely result of cooperation with those branches would have been the same policy outcomes, anyhow. Or they have labored assiduously to overturn perfectly workable mechanisms for achieving necessary security protections (while, er, uh, still failing to secure American ports and nuclear and chemical facilities – but nobody’s perfect, eh?) in order to secure instead their vision of unbridled executive power.

The NSA spying scandal is only the most prominent example. Long-existing federal law allows law enforcement agencies to secretly obtain warrants for purposes of spying on anyone presumedly threatening to American security, and the special FISA court set up for this purpose quite literally almost never denies such warrant requests. Moreover, if these agencies are in hot pursuit of something urgent, they can even go ahead and run the intercepts for 72 hours and request the warrant post-facto, to be applied retroactively. No one from the administration has ever yet provided an explanation as to why this system was in any way ill-equipped to handle current security threats, and of course the enablers of the GOP Congress, for whom oversight was about as popular as leprosy, never got around to even asking. The Bushistas seem to feel offended that they should have to be subjected to such mundane trivialities as Congressional and judicial oversight, or those nuisance check and balance things (whose idea was that, anyway?). Like a rock star at airport security or the child of wealthy, famous and powerful parents (sound like anyone you know?), they expect to be treated differently than anybody else. Even when those anybodies have names like Washington, Jefferson or Roosevelt.

So, yeah, maybe they’re all just misunderstood. You know – just good people, out there trying hard, subjected to the endless criticisms of Monday-morning quarterbacks and whiney surrender-monkey liberals. Just the same, I don’t think so. By the time you get done spying illegally, torturing, spiking habeas corpus along with most of the rest of a millennium’s worth of hard-fought due process tradition, marginalizing Congress and the courts, jimmying elections, distracting the public with endless national security threats, and lying your way into a needless war which is responsible for the better part of a million deaths – by the time you’re done with that, I’d say your credentials are pretty clear. Bush himself may be a hapless Charlie McCarthy, but that glint in Dick Cheney’s eye ain’t for his grandchildren, that much I know.

A second possibility is that the administration is too deeply divided internally to agree on such a drastic step as conducting a coup against themselves and seizing permanent power. Evidence is now beginning to surface that points to the degree to which such divisions indeed exist. But while Rummy doesn’t bother returning Condi’s calls, and while Andrew Card ultimately did get rid of Rumsfeld – but only after Rummy first eighty-sixed Andy – these internal struggles haven’t seemed to mean much in the end, when it comes to the actual making of hard policy choices. We would be well advised to remember here that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell found out his country was going to war against Iraq only after Saudi Prince Bandar was informed by the president. All the back-benchers in the administration can whoop and holler the day long, but – up till now, at least – it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who had the president’s ear, and who got the policy choices they wanted. All the rest was just commentary, if not white noise.

Okay, so maybe what happened then is that they lost their nerve. Maybe they were willing to beat up on hapless Arab detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and destroy legions more in the uncontrolled violence they’ve unleashed across Iraq, but they didn’t have the stomach to do what would be necessary to seal the deal and permanently hijack American democracy. Given that what probably would have been required was another disaster on the scale of 9/11, perhaps this is true. But given, also, the ample evidence suggesting that the administration at least knew about the actual 9/11, even if they didn’t plan it (see David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor for a pretty solid, dispassionate, treatment of this question), perhaps it is too much of a leap to expect that they could go that far, but no further.

A fourth possibility is that they simply didn’t think they needed to. Remember, this is a president who hired a bunch of sycophants to gather ‘round and remind him what a great dude he is, and then proceeded to believe them when, stupor mundi, they gathered ‘round and reminded him what a great dude he is. This is a guy who thought in early 2005 (and likely far later, perhaps even still) that he had “earned political capital”, which was now his to spend. As if that weren’t delusional enough, it is now being reported that the great guru Karl Rove, whose ‘genius’ has always been far overrated (more on that in a later column) wasn’t just telling the media earlier this month that he expected the GOP to hold onto Congress in the election because he had to put on his game face rally the troops. Now we’re told that Rove actually believed what he was saying, and was telling the president so. If this is true, November 7th must have felt rather more like August 6th inside a certain oval-shaped office. Or perhaps August 6th, 1066!

Let’s be honest here. The only thing this administration has done better than deceit is arrogance. Maybe they were so deceitful and so arrogant that they actually fooled themselves into thinking they were going to keep cruising along with nary a check nor a wee balance anywhere in sight, and thus no need to overtly drop the guillotine on American democracy. After all, they actually had some reason to think so. They had been consistently ‘winning’ elections through deceit, fear and chicanery – why should 2006 be any different? And neither Congress, nor the courts, nor the press, nor the public had really laid a glove on them in six years, even before 9/11. Why not keep doing what they were doing? Why not continue to assume there would never be any serious obstacles?

That seems like a reasonably plausible explanation, as also does a fifth possibility: What if the same administration which brought us Iraq, Katrina, fiscal hemorrhaging and exacerbated global warming, and which stood by watching as the 9/11 attack mounted and North Korea built nukes and the missiles to carry them – what if these same bozos had every intention of turning America into some kind of gringo banana republic el norte, but simply lacked the competence to pull it off? Anybody who could create disasters on this scale surely could also screw-up a would-be Gulf of Tonkin or sinking of the Maine. After all, it’s been a long time since someone not on the payroll accused George Bush of knowing what the hell he was doing, and for good reason.

There are certainly other possibilities as well. Perhaps they lost the support of some crucial institutional client – Wall Street or the Joint Chiefs – who decided they’d finally had enough of these idiots. Perhaps they even did try to finish off what’s left of American democracy, but just couldn’t engineer the job adequately, a la the Bay of Pigs or the Bungling of Baghdad. Heck, perhaps they’re just bored with it all and waiting for it to be over so they can cash out as lobbyists. Sorry to tell you, though, George, even the Saudis won’t be hiring you by the time you’ve finished peeing in the Reflecting Pool for eight years. And I doubt Dick’s Halliburton cellmates will have much use for him in 2009, either.

Perhaps they did try, after all, and blew it, or they couldn’t be bothered. But one other explanation comes to mind as well, maybe the most persuasive one of all. Maybe they didn’t take overt steps to solidify their autocratic rule because they just don’t think they need to. Maybe they watched the election returns and couldn’t have cared less. Heck, maybe they didn’t even bother to watch them. Maybe they figured that if you can jimmy elections and then do whatever you damn-well please – provided you muster sufficient bravado – that you can also lose elections and do whatever please just as readily.

There seem to be some signs of this already. Nowadays, Bush is essentially back to January 2001, when all eyes were on him waiting to see what kind of president he was going to be. The same is nearly true now. He just had his clock cleaned in as clear a personal repudiation as is imaginable for a president. Even Lyndon Johnson was better liked in 1968. So what is he going to do? Is he going to move to the center and triangulate, like Clinton famously did following Bill’s own “thumpin’” in 1994? Is he going to find some new issues to emphasize, and try to pass himself off as, say, the ‘jobs president’?

It’s hard to tell, but from what we’ve seen in a short couple of weeks, it looks a lot like he’s going to do exactly the same thing he did six years ago. Then, he ran as a moderate, centrist, ‘compassionate conservative’, only to govern from the hard (and arrogant, and mean-spirited) right. Now he talks of ‘bipartisanship’, but is busy trying to ram through the most odious elements of the far right agenda, those gambits surest to alienate Democrats, such as the John Bolton ambassadorial appointment, more far-right and incompetent federal judges, and his spying bill. That’s about as bipartisan as Tom DeLay’s Christmas card list, but probably exactly what we should have expected from the self-billed ‘uniter’ (not a divider!). Oh yeah, we’ve seen that movie before.
I suppose he just thinks he’ll do whatever he wants and then steal the presidency for himself again in ‘08. I guess if W and Karl couldn’t see the freight train coming for them three weeks ago, maybe they haven’t even heard of that dang constitutional amendment limiting Bush to two terms as president. Or maybe they figure since both of the elections were stolen, neither one counts against the limit!

On the other hand, maybe they have other plans. Maybe that October Surprise we were all expecting just got delayed in the mail, somewhere over Tehran perhaps.

Maybe we’ll be getting a December Surprise this year – a little Christmas present for America – just in time to prevent congressional investigations into the marketing of Iraq, war profiteering, the Abramoff network, and much, much more.

Perish the thought. Meanwhile, all hail Emperor Bush.