“This means that any assertion that a president has the ability to steer a country away from democracy is a dubious one. Essentially, no matter how crazy Obama acts, there will be elections. If he acts especially crazy, he will lose much of the backing of congress. I think the lesson of 94 and 06 is that backing bad policy is political suicide. Most legislators went to enough college to understand that.”

Interesting thoughts, Urban. And they would give me great comfort, except for one pesky detail: we are now in completely UNCHARTED territory. If you can find precedence for the world’s only superpower (bristling with 300 million people) falling in a slow-motion collapse over a period of months, I’d be glad to see it 😉 My concern is that if our economic foundation collapses, it may be naive to expect that our political foundation can and will remain untouched. And so history may no longer serve as a reliable guide for what we are about to encounter.

Also, no one on this board believes (or should believe) that the president has the power to *steer* us anywhere. Only the invisible hands behind a president have that power. The question is: who are the hands that pull Obama’s strings, and what is their agenda? Make no mistake: any first term senator who can raise $800 million while millions of Americans lose their homes and struggle to put food on the table, garner the immediate and unwavering support of the media and defeat the 20-year old Clinton Machine has VERY powerful hands that are moving his.

And distressingly, I think we’ve already seen the lengths to which our Congress will go to in order to protect out freedoms: both parties blithely looked away as Bush pushed through the Patriot Act; they have repeatedly agreed to extensions of the Act; they have continued to fund a criminal war; and impeachment has been taken “off the table” for the only U.S. president in U.S. history who can be classified as a war criminal

So much for checks and balances.

The danger I see here is that people who have spent the past 232 years living — on an uninterrupted basis — in a democracy tend to take for granted what people living in Germany, Russia, Peru, Argentina and Iran do NOT. Democracy is not a given; it is a privilege that must be closely and meticulously guarded. Moving through our lives and making decisions about those who will lead us based on (a) the belief that the unique system we have always had will continue to exist without the need to defend it and (b) events in the past will always serve as a guide for the future, could be our fatal undoing.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Nassim Taleeb’s book. I worry that this could be a Black Swan moment. Much as the world was not expecting and could not have *foreseen* a global systemic collapse until it happened, we in the U.S. do not expect our democracy to ever be taken away from us and will doubtless be dumbfounded when it happens.

And at the rate events are unfolding, and given the opacity of Obama’s resume and agenda and Biden’s exceptionally creepy remarks, I have a nagging suspicion that we are going to be dumbfounded.