Schell Shocked.

Jonathan Schell doesn't care for Republicans.  He cares even less for Republican majorities.  Like most of those of the left these days, not caring for something is not enough.  He wants to believe that Republicans are somehow illegitimate, that their very existence, let alone their possession of Congress, somehow violates the laws of nature and of nature's god.  Hence this, from the Nation:

For some time I have been suggesting here that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in GOP hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine--call it the budding one-party global empire--would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.

Consider that first sentence: it combines a platitude with a fantasy.  All political parties in the United States aim to "permanently run the United States," or at least some part of it, like Maryland or Baton Rouge.  "Suggesting" that the Republican Party is somehow sinister because it is in fact a political party is a sign of a mind permanently unable to come into focus. 

As for the second part of the first sentence, the idea that Republicans want to permanently extend American administration over foreign nations is so ludicrous that one is tempted to ask Schell what color the sky is.  Suppose the Iraq insurgency had never shown up, and the U.S. were at this moment, a year ahead of Congressional elections, withdrawing the last of its troops from a stable and modestly Democratic nation.  Could any fool imagine that the Republican administration would regard this as disappointing? 

As far as I can remember, Schell rose to fame back during the Reagan era as an advocate of a "nuclear freeze."  The idea was that if the U.S. simply stopped building or deploying nuclear weapons, then the Soviet Union would see that we were no threat and follow suit.  And anyway, better a Soviet dominated world than one in smoking ruins.  But Schell's rhetoric was new in so far as he worked altogether in impressionistic prose about how terrible nuclear war would be.  "A Republic of Grass and Insects," or something like that.  Here was a sign of the intellectual decline of the left.  No ideas remained.  Only cute slogans and poster captions.  He hasn't gotten any better since.