Eugene Jarecki's new book has spurred a good discussion this week. We all seem to agree that the country's economic crisis is part of a larger political crisis. And that real change must come from the bottom up, as Naomi Wolf argues. This will be particularly important as the next administration makes its budget decisions. Cutting entitlement spending could increase the suffering of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens and make our economic woes worse. Cutting some of the 100 percent increase the military budget has enjoyed over the past eight years makes more sense, but will trigger major political resistance.

It is unlikely that Eugene and Andrew Bacevich's suggestion of Barney Frank as the next defense secretary will take, but shaking up the bureaucracy is the right idea. Secretary Gates did a good job with the mess that Rumsfeld made during his six-year tenure. However, Gates and other Bush Administration possible holdovers are not the answer, even if Obama wins in a close, contested race. There needs to a fundamental shift from the Cold War policies of the past, especially in the area of defense spending and nuclear weapons policy. As president of the Ploughshares Fund, I have dedicated my life to making this change.

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I want to take a bit of a different angle in talking about the issues Eugene has raised, and others, more competent than I, have begun discussing. I also want to refer to my own teaching over the past three years, teaching that has attempted to illuminate the ongoing titanic struggle present in the U.S. since 1947 between our soul and our security. It is a struggle in which security is increasingly winning--for numerous reasons other than the fact that Americans collectively want to feel safe. Call it the battle of our traditional political and cultural values--bluntly encompassed by Patrick Henry's saying, "Give me liberty or give me death"--against the compromises with, and attacks on, those very same values by the demands of the national security state. Today, the cry from across the country is almost the antithesis of Henry's: "Protect my life at any cost."

The repercussions of "any cost" have been rather stupendous.

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Greg, thanks. Your analysis makes sense to me but still -- and I am sorry to be the one continually beating this drum -- I am still stuck on what I am hearing every day on the road from people who have no hope of ever participating in a discussion about policy at a level where they think they can be heard. Even if everything you hope for and propose does happen, I am not sure it will address the increasingly severe malaise, indeed crisis I see out there. Ordinary Americans of both parties and third parties feel that this chess game is happening with little regard for them; that the game players are beholden to interests they can never budge or only slightly affect; and that it is a closed political and media-elite economy.

Especially now that we are seeing reports surface -- and they are still under-investigated and under-developed -- of extraordinary insider dealing with the bailout billions -- now that we have seen that even Obama caves on FISA, talks most recently in his long ad about `liberty' in terms of military engagement and not the shredded Constitution. As long as there are no indictments being prepared for the many crimes of officials at high levels in this administration, and those in the opposition who colluded with them (notably in terms of being `looped in on torture), many of the American people will continue to feel that whoever is in power, it is all happening under a bell jar.

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So many valuable ideas have been advanced in response to my initial post that it's hard to choose which to address. But I do want to say that Andrew Bacevich's whimsical suggestion of a Pentagon run by Barney Frank is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

This past week, Frank advocated a 25% cut in defense spending, which as Joe Cirincione points out can be achieved without any decrease in our national security. Frank is often the father of some of the smartest and most counter-intuitive arguments ever to come out of Washington. For example, noting that many people who are pro-life also oppose social assistance programs for the living, Franks once joked that for such people it might appear that life begins at conception and ends at birth.

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Greg Mitchell says that a big Obama win will bring a marked shift to the left. That is common sense. But there will be no sea change in US foreign policy. Obama's advisers and words indicate that he is a typical liberal internationalist, one who agrees with Madeline Albright and Robert Kagan that ours is an indispensable nation. (I think what Charles De Gaulle said about indispensable men applies to nations). What we're probably in for is a kinder, gentler hegemony, as Andrew Bacevich points out.

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In following the discussion here of the drastic reforms needed under the next president, I really ought to add a "whoa" before continuing. Like others, I anticipate that any major changes (good or bad) would only come with an Obama presidency and, probably like others, I predict that he will, indeed, win on Tuesday.

However, I don't take this as a given and I believe that the mood for change will vary significantly based on the size of his victory (if indeed he wins at all).

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I may differ from Joe regarding the importance of how the next president chooses to fill his inner circle. Obama and McCain both vow to "change the way Washington works." We'll get the first inkling of what exactly that means (if anything) when the winner of next Tuesday's election begins to announce his appointments to top level positions. The idea du jour is that a President Obama would do well to keep Secretary Gates on the job at the Pentagon. I admire Secretary Gates. To say that he is an improvement over his disastrous predecessor is a vast understatement. Yet Gates is very much a conventional thinker -- as his position on nuclear weapons affirms. He is a prudent guardian of the status quo. Were Obama, if elected, to persuade Gates to stay on, Obama would elicit plenty of applause. But he'd also be giving an indication of exactly how modest will be the change that is to come.

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Let me join this interesting discussion by picking up on Andrew Bacevich's point from Tuesday. I am not convinced we face a constitutional crisis, but I know we are in a political and economic crisis. A major contributor is a defense budget hyper-inflated during the Bush years (a subject dear to Eugene's heart), from $280 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $542 billion in 2009, plus $860 billion spent thus far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the wars will cost us $2.4 trillion before they are over.

The budgets are justified by an expansionist foreign policy and approved by a Congress more concerned with defending their political positions than with sound policy. We need a dramatic change in course. But the next president, as Andrew points out, will face formidable resistance. There will be a struggle between the "transformationalists" and the "incrementalists." A case in point is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' speech just yesterday defending the Cold War nuclear policies of the administration--with a few tweaks.

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I respectfully disagree with Ben Friedman. Our liberties are by no means safe and our status as a real constitutional Republic is beyond fragile. On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division -- three to four thousand battle-hardened warriors -- to...somewhere in the United States. Their original stated mission according to Army Times was 'crowd control' and 'subduing unruly individuals.' They have lethal and nonlethal technologies and tanks. After some questions were raised -- not, I note, by anyone in the mainstream media, which has bizarrely ignored this massive subversion of 200 years of our having been protected by the 1807 Insurrection Act and by 1879's Posse Comitatus from being policed at home by military forces -- the Northcom PR people changed the stated goal of the mission to 'protecting communities affected by weapons of mass destruction.' Still, I would have thought, a story -- and so thank the hundreds of citizens who are contacting me trying to find out more. For those commentators who do not yet think our liberties are at risk, I would direct their attention to the use of military forces as a source of intimidation of voters in a closely held election that is characteristic of closing societies around the world.

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If we are talking about militarism -- an overgrown military establishment, a proclivity for war, and runaway executive power, all justified by exaggerated security concerns -- then I agree that we have a problem. But the problem results not because we can't sustain this posture but because we can.

We are still rich as hell, despite our current trouble, which is not a result of military spending or war in any case. Despite George Bush's assaults on our civil liberties, our freedoms are essentially intact; we vote and speak as we like. And the vast majority of us are safe and secure. The danger of war does not touch us.

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I largely agree with Eugene Jarecki's assessment of the problem - a badly abused Constitution, a political system that is fiscally irresponsible and fundamentally corrupt, a reckless overemphasis on military power. The list goes on.

Yet it is not as if these tendencies have evolved when no one was looking. They have flourished in broad daylight - with the majority of the American people either tacitly or explicitly (through their own political behavior) buying in.

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Perhaps before we get to proposing serious reforms and re-ordering priorities in this space, we should consider the inevitable role of the media in how Americans will judge any such movement. This happens to be something I know a little about - both from my current job and recent books but also from personal history, protesting the Vietnam war and starting my journalism career in the era of Nixon and Watergate.

Naturally I wonder what others in this forum, and readers, think.Has everything, or an awful lot, changed in the web/blogosphere era? Has the liberal dominance online shifted the balance forever, away from the longtime tilt of right-wing talk radio, Fox News and timid mainstream reporting?

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There's a vast gulf between what the Framers intended when they founded this country and where we now find ourselves - such a gulf that it's fair to say the proverbial "they'd be rolling in their graves" if they saw us right now. Looking into this abyss, we as citizens must focus with urgency and precision on the need for "change" not as a campaign slogan belonging to either candidate (both now claim it), but as a far deeper national challenge that can only be met by the people of this country, as opposed to its leaders. Unless we see ourselves - individually and collectively -- as the engine for real societal reform - no matter how hard that may be to imagine given our developed habits of disengagement -- our vote on election day is wasted.

In my new book The American Way of War, I try to put today's constitutional crisis (let's call it what it is) in an historical perspective. The Framers intended a government of the people, in which the separated powers of equal and opposing branches of government would exert checks and balances over each other and thus prevent any individual or faction from steamrolling the remainder of the society. Fast-forward two hundred years and we today see a very different picture - a government unleashed, its arrogant executive branch aided by Congress and the courts as it tramples over the separation of powers, shows contempt for the checks and balances, and guides the country to long-term ruin in its effort to seize its own short-term gains.

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