by Alan Wolfe

Did it finally happen here? I've always been a skeptic of Sinclair Lewis's sloppily written novel of 1935--and equally skeptical of all those left-wingers who predict, sometimes with barely repressed glee, a fascist takeover of the United States. But there is no doubting that something finally happened this week. It is not just that Congress is about to give the president the authority to collect anyone, including an American citizen, off the street to be indefinitely imprisoned as an enemy combatant. It is even more the speed with which this is being done, the lack of deliberation demanded by so radical a step, the sheer partisanship of the Republicans who are pushing for it, the public's relative indifference to what is taking place, the media's preference for soft news, the unwillingness of Democrats to consider even the faintest gestures toward a profile in courage moment, and the inexplicable cravenness of Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham. I had always thought that turning points in American history came dramatically, with great speeches from the floor of the Senate, impassioned words from editorialists, significant sermons from religious figures speaking to the matters of conscience and concern. There has been some of that: The New York Times editorials have been superb and the thoughts of legal scholars such as Jack Balkin, Marty Lederman, Bruce Ackerman, and this blog's own Sandy Levinson have been inspiring. Still, Lewis might have been on to something when he worried more about what Americans would do to each other than to what their external enemies would do to them. Once the president signs this bill into law, America will never be the same. Our country will not, once this is done, have turned itself into a dictatorship; we are very far from that. But we now know checks and balances do not work when there are no checks, and a political leadership determined to get what it wants can, if the conditions are right, get it, no matter how much what it wants spits in the face of the America we once had. It is a tragedy when a political system fails in a moment of crisis. It is more a farce when it fails without one. I never thought this could happen. Now that it is happening, I still cannot believe it is taking place. Am I living in a Philip Roth novel?