Our new war has illuminated a sad but I think unarguable fact that the American empire has fully replaced the old Constitutional Republic, and that a large majority support it.  The "freedom" that we still claim to have is an ever-shrinking list of permissions from the state, and we are thrown this bone only to keep us docile.  That we cheat on our taxes and grumble through security checkpoints is no threat to them, for they know we're too cowed to resist.  We are offered only candidates from the two imperial political parties, with the current emperor chosen by just 20% of Americans.  The best that tireless work through the political system can do is slow our loss of freedom.

The pro-freedom remnant out there casting pearls on the internet is, simply put, not important enough to silence.  So let's stop all this "the Constitution says this . . . the Constitution requires that" business, for in fact the constitution as anything but a relic died years ago.  America's new war, like America's old wars, is about maintaining and expanding the empire, and empires are never bound by law.

In modern "democratic" states, wars require a moral pretext by which the subjects are swayed to support the state with their money and lives in its time of need.  For our current war, the 911 attacks provided an unarguable pretext: self-defense.  Propaganda used to sell previous American wars include the impressment of American sailors (1812), saving the union (1861), making the world safe for democracy (1917), and a day of infamy (1941).  While the crimes were real in some cases (Pearl Harbor) and manufactured in others (Civil War, Viet Nam), an even superficial reading of history makes clear that empire building was at the root of each of these wars.

As Charles Adams explains in When in the Course of Human Events, the young United States which ratified its constitution of 1791 was a primarily agrarian confederation, dominated by rich southern states wary of the European model.  By the 1850s the newly industrial north was firmly set on a path of empire, for what else could "manifest destiny" have meant to the young country which stretched less than halfway across North America.  The new empire was funded by tariffs, which protected fledgling northern industries from stiff European competition, and made an agricultural colony of the south.  After the southern confederacy was born in 1860 to stem the northward flow of wealth, the US went to war to maintain its young empire.  The rest, as they say, is history.  With North America secure, successive wars were used to acquire the dying European empires of Spain, France and England, and finally Japan's Asian holdings.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, US hegemony was complete, but with much to protect.

All of our meddling in the Middle East, from the Shah if Iran (1953), to Saddam Hussein (1981), to support for the house of Saud and Israel, to the Gulf War, is for the maintenance of US imperial economic interests in the oil-rich Middle East.  Our new war is already expanding the empire as we set up permanent military outposts in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, with more to come.  Before long construction is likely to begin on a new Kazakh pipeline.  And now Columbia, our tenth largest supplier of oil, has "asked" for more US military aid to fight insurgents, as our old war on drugs melds with our new war on terrorism.

But as the empire looks outward, it must maintain control at home.  Its tendrils go deep into all aspects of American society, for the state, directly or through its willing puppets, dominates government, business, media and academia.  The state has no desire to control all aspects of our institutions.  It is sufficient that they control critical content and high-level personnel.

How does one fight such a beast?

Not through elections, for they only feed the state's fiction of legitimacy.  Americans consistently choose the "limited government" president, but all they get is a new emperor.  FDR campaigned on "sound money," small government and peace, but as soon as he had power he orchestrated a socialist coup d'état and later finagled us into WWII.  LBJ campaigned as the peace candidate against the "warmonger" Goldwater, but immediately gave us a new Asian war.  And Bush II promised an end to capricious use of the military, but has embarked on Operation Enduring Warfare.

Not through secession, for Adams suggests that even possessing every advantage but military superiority, the South was unable to free itself from the young American empire.  Slavery cannot have led the South to secede, for with the Dred Scott decision of 1857 they had already won that political battle.  For better or worse, by 1860 slavery was the law of the land.  Had they not provided Lincoln with a ready excuse for invasion by firing on Charleston's Fort Sumter, the South could have petitioned English and French support their plan for bypassing high American taxes by making a Confederate free port at Charleston.  Today there are no powers left to side with American secessionists.

Not through armed rebellion, for the state is supremely organized for propaganda and war.  The Afghan conflict shows how ineffective a small arms force is against the modern US military, and the American rebels would be isolated as racist terrorists by the state's pervasive propaganda machine.

Not through a personal "line in the sand" which federal power may not cross, for that's nothing but suicide by cop, as several American militia leaders and gun rights radicals learned just before they died.

Our only hope for freedom is through an unceasing, principled barrage on the legitimacy of the state, analogous to what Tom Paine accomplished long ago with "Common Sense."  Our own propaganda war must expose the true nature of the beast, and convince others that their well-being is in natural opposition to empire.  We'll know we're winning only when they try to silence us, but by then it may be too late.  If we're lucky, the collapse of the US empire may parallel that of the Soviets.

With their legitimacy undermined, other options become possible.  I believe it's too late to save the United States in its present form, and a country as large and diverse as ours can only be held together by the carrots and sticks of empire.  Instead, when the time is right, secession of smaller political entities will be possible, as wonderfully described by Diane Alden.

Until then we must continue to strike at the root of tyranny, knowing that the opposition offers only lies.