As evinced by his article in the January 9 issue of The Nation, Jonathan Schell (like many other “Progressives”) seems to have forgotten that we have presidential elections every four years. In his view, Bush is more demonic than was Nixon [!]. What makes this claim especially amazing is that Schell didn’t learn about Watergate by reading books: he was there. Anyway, here’s what he has to say about Bush:

    Bush’s abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war . . . on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

    There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

    The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff has called a “cabal.” . . . As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were made.

    With Bush’s defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, “Yes, I am above the law—I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is—and if you don’t like it, I dare you to do something about it.”

At least Schell doesn’t predict that Bush will engineer a coup d’etat in January 2009 so he can stay in office. That’s what a would-be dictator would do.