Why is a full Brigade of troops being permanently stationed on American soil for the first time since 1878, and why is the American left worried about it?

Glenn Greenwald and others have drawn attention to this Army Times story. The National Defense Authorization Act presupposes a permanent base for the active brigade within the USA. This rescinds the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. President Bush, in a 'signing statement' (America is, apparently, back to Rex est Lex Loquens)has said that he will deploy the soldiers wherever he likes.

The President did not need this authority. In time of civil unrest, as in Detroit in 1966, or emergency, as after Katrina, or in time of insurrection, the president always had authority to deploy troops or federalise the National Guard or, in certain cases, to draft people.

So why the anticipation of civil unrest? I'm no conspiracy nut, I hope. But we have a long-predicted banking collapse, a 700 billion dollar power grab, a Brigade of troops on the ground, vast federal surveillance powers in place, the Guantanamo precedent, and Republicans wandering around justifying torture. One can also notice desperate attempts to bait the Russians, and the precipice of hyperinflation or forced deflation around the corner.

Greenwald, in his article, has drawn attention to some fine writing on the recent act. His piece does seem to have something of a flavour of Seven-Days-in-May fever about it though.

We talk of the American Right in Europe as a sort of alien coalition. Usually the term encompasses a sort of chattering-class Sinister Six of Christianists, Libertarians, Fascistic corporate types, the military, class-defined men, and neoconservatives disguised as journalists or academics.

I don't agree with the caricature. However, what the euro-left, and their fellow travellers in self-styled American elites often miss, is that there is a complement to such archetypes in the American left.

There are people whose elitism, combined with their desperate search for enemies of their enemies, has long caused them to see a praetorian in every young man or woman paying their way through college by serving in uniform.

Some have trawled the concurrent majority defence of slavery first erected by the likes of John Calhoun and seen in it the epitome of their politically correct view of how to achieve consensus. Others have looked to the myth of Posse Comitatus--in effect upheld by a Southern Populist tradition that wanted to keep the Feds away from the Klan--as a guarantor of Free America.

Still more, and I'm painting with a broad brush here, have condemned the premillenialist fervour of those who opposed drink on the plains, or who sought to preach a very dark Catholicism, and, since I write as a post-Vatican II catholic with a Massachussets beer by my side, I have to say I agree.

Those who reach for their mental barrel of censor's ink are not often characterised by their understanding of how bad the religion of the reactionary social work state was and is though. At least Christopher Lasch saw it coming .

Some of our renovated League of the Militant Godless, though, seem to live in a Titus Oates world where the other sides arabs, communists and anarchists have found a parallel in their cartoon-understanding of a catholic threat.

The exile has a nice piece on this today. A Catholic Supreme Court; a majority of Democrat Vice-presidential possibles catholic; a critical swing catholic vote, and what do Democrats or the left and ambitious catholic democrats do to reach out to social justice fellow communitarians? Worse than nothing.

But why deny that Woodrow Wilson was essentially a Presbyterian millenialist, or assert that the only people who suspect that Roe v Wade was wrongly decided are in some way religious shills or playing academic games?

There are a great many heads overheating in America at the minute, as the toxic tide of decades of debt and greed roll in. That is no excuse for indulging the self-styled left, or the right in the loss of reason.

Instead, why not turn the Dodd-Leahey proposal into a German- or Malaysian-style land bank initiative to gradually take the wind from the sails of high finance, and to ground the American economy in stable, properly valued farms and homes, rather than to set it abroad on inflated debt and foreign indulgence?