The opening paragraph of The Republican Nemesis:
   
"When historians look back on the current era in American politics it will likely stand out as the period when Republican cunning & marketing savvy completely dominated the political landscape.  Obliging Democrats have thrown themselves into the fray with enthusiasm, armed with idealistic visions of civil “discourse”, only to be humbled repeatedly by their political masters.  Republican strategists have been able to blend their astute grasp of marketing principles, human nature, & social psychology into a formula that delivers almost guaranteed success at the polls.   While Democrats knock themselves out every election cycle trying to talk to Swing Voters about The Issues, Republicans have calmly focused their attention on winning The Image Campaign.  Quite simply: Democrats lose because they don’t understand what moves their target audience."

More at: www.taxwisdom.org/republican_nemesis.htm

Patriot Act. K Street Project. Placing radically conservative judges on federal benches with lifetime tenure. Rolling back enviromental laws with the resulting permanent destruction of ecosystems. Possibly 2-3 Supreme Court appointments. "Fox in the henhouse" oversight of EVERYTHING, including the very ballot casting & counting systems needed to stop the madness. Are Bush and his brethren intent on permanent recasting and control of the U.S.? Hmmmm, Google "bear, shit and woods" for the answer.

You left out foreign policy. Bush's actions look to define American foreign policy for the next few decades in much the same that Truman's containment strategy for the Soviet Union shaped the Cold War.

I think you might have to go as far back as the late 1790s to find a parallel. A party that was unpopular with large parts of the public nevertheless had control over all three branches of government, and there were serious dangers threatening from abroad. The party in power proceeded to demonize the opposition, and to pass repressive and abusive measures.  And the foreign power they demonized was, then as now, France.

Now, the Alien and Sedition Acts were worse than what we face today, and at least so far, editors of opposition newspapers have not been beaten by thugs sent by the government. On the other hand, the government then was far weaker than it is today by most measures.

In short, yes.  This political moment will stand on its own fairly well.  However, the "why" of it all can be traced back to the late 90's.

The 2000 election was the exception to the notion of the benign deceit.  I remember it as a time where politically engaged people on all sides had bought into the notion that the government and the economy would continue to run themselves (as if they ever really had).  "It doesn't really matter who the president is," seemed to be the general theme of the election.  We had reached the End of History after all.

I think there are at least three trends which have all come to a head at the same time:

(1) The complete conversion of the South from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state. Even during the eighties and early nineties, while the South was primarily dominate by Republican voting at the Presidential, there were still several Southern Democratic Senators and a few congressmen. This has sped the process of polarization. After the 2004 election, only four Senators from the extended South (The Old Confederacy plus KY, OK, and MO) are Democrats. The are only three Southern Democratic governors, two of whom spent huge chunks of their personal wealth to win elections. The Conservative Democratic Congressman is almost an extinct species (Bud Cramer is probably the last one). Combined with the demise of northeastern Republicans (except for the holdouts like Olymbia Snowe and Chris Shays), the organizational lines of Congress now match up with the ideological lines more than ever before.

(2) The rise in inequality of wealth. Poli Sci professor Keith Poole at the University of Houston persuasively arguesthat the driving factor in party alignment is not race, regionalism, or ideology, but wealth inequality in this talk. Income inequality has been on the rise steadily and is now approaching levels note seens since WWII.

(3) The return to partisan news outlets. For those like me who are too young to remember much about the history of media, it's easy to think that journalists always triumphed objectivity over all else and were better off at doing their jobs. But this is rather shortsighted. After all, in 1860, there were Lincoln Papers and there were Douglas Papers, and each said totally vitriolic things about the other. Likewise in the Progressive era I think there were papers that were into the Progressive movement and papers that ... weren't. Spinsanity's book All the President's Spin touches on this issue briefly. There's nothing inherently wrong with partisan news outlets, but the change takes time to occur and the illusion of objectivity, both for journalists and readers, takes a while to go away.

I am not a historian, but I imagine that if you looked back at the founding of the US, which Clinton says was the only other time where there was as much change in the world as there was today and as much polarization, or you looked at the run-up to the Depression, or the Civil War, you will see similar polarization.

If I had to rank periods of intense polarization, I would probably rank them like this:

(1) The Civil War
(2) The post-revoutionary period
(3) The late '60s/early '70s
(4) Today
[a very big gap]
(5) The pre-Depression Era
(6) The Populist movement

So, the current moment is probably the most polarized the country has been without having the country literally be torn apart by either war or rioting. Four periods of intense polarization for a country that is 200 years old works out to one every fifty years, and for anyone under 30 there has never been a moment that is even close to this polarized.

One big reason to support the idea that this is a "quantitatively different" moment in (at least recent) history is the ascendancy of the religious right. No recent Republican government has been as beholden to them, nor has any had enough consolidated power to even contemplate realizing their agenda. The common belief that we are living in the End Times is the cause of a palpable distrust of science and history which informs their policy positions on everything from Israel, to global warming, to running up the deficit, to the teaching of evolution, to the "war on terror."

And these are exactly the policies that are being pursued and enacted.

And we have a President whose view on this is: "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead."

And we are likely living through an era of American imperial decline, where we will define our place in the world for decades to come.

So yes, I'd argue that this is a particularly dangerous and different kind of historical moment.

First, a poem (drawn from Cornel West's highly recommended Democracy Matters -- much more interesting than the more famous Race Matters):

             Power unanointed may come --
    Dominion (unsought by the free)
          &nbsp
;  And the Iron Dome,
    Stronger for stress and strain,
    Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
    But the founders' dream shall flee.


       --HERMAN MELVILLE, "The Conflict of Convictions" (1860-61)

I have my disagreements with Melville (pay close attention to the 'stronger for stress and strain' line), and the emphasis on power unanointed, nb) but this poem is extremely topical.         &nb
sp;    

          &nbsp
;        ______
______

Now, as for sui generis.  Every era is to some extent both.  In W Bush, much of what is being said was said, with great justification, in the Reagan years.  And it is said now as the Republicans reach new heights of perversity and the press new levels of cravenness.  Speaking of memory holes, remember the media lockdown of Votergate 2004?  And the TWO elections?  That's new -- they don't even have to fool most people any more.

On the other hand, I hesitate to suggest sui generis because in another 20 years, unless there is an authentic progressive reversal of what is going on, W Bush would look like the milder version of what would then be sui generis.  For a dystopian image of what I believe the powers that pee have as their agenda, of leaving the world ecologically in ruins so that they may preside over the ruins, read Walt Whitman's poem "Respondez!   Respondez!"    And he's a straightforward egalitarian democrat -- no hidden catches as Melville.

    I wholeheartedly embrace Memekiller's statement that the United States is in essence an idea, and a nation based upon those ideas.  America would be the place where  -- even if full democracy and freedom were not possible where, as the saying goes, the 'devil' is the god 'of this world' (I'm a nonreligious agnostic myself) -- there would always be a collective striving for that ideal, and we would be together believing in and struggling to that end.  But the enemy, which has been from within many times before, is so now to a greater extent than at any time since before FDR, and possibly since before Lincoln.  So we have a mess.  And the one thing that MUST be done is that people must be willing to acknowledge and abolish rather than deny and justify the framework of underground repression that restricts free expression and organizing.  It is a complex system of repression, not a crude one, but it is extremely effective, one where 'glass walls', as impregnable as glass ceilings used to be, and sometimes still are, prevent authentic progressives from pursuing effective strategies, disfavored issues widely, or even wide discussion of some things, like discrimination on the basis of politics in the myriads of student run law journals for at least a quarter century after 1964.  Absolute poverty ("world hunger") is an example of an issue whose effective political pursuit is blocked more or less altogether, despite mass albeit not majority support.  But you don't need a majority to be effective.
And then there is the "PeaceAmerica" type mass organization I have been talking about, that would oppose the Iraq War and militarism, going door to door and organizing like Greenpeace for donations and members, but organizing the members like ACORN does.  Why isn't the strategy pursued?  The same reason as in the other instances -- the 'dark matter' or 'invisible hand' of underground repression.  And of course articulating that repression means shattering communication taboos.

      If authentic progressives were to gather in large numbers and do what I have suggested, instead of a sui generis political decline and miasma, at least we would have a sui generis political struggle.

     In history, it's not whether the era you are living in is sui generis.  It always is.  The question is what kind of sui generis?

I think this is not the same old song and dance. What makes BushCo different and much more dangerous:

- The policy of "pre-emptive strike" and the disdain of the U.N. and our allies have created enemies of our country

- Fixing global warming reports at a time when the actual and very real warming of the globe can produce disasterous results

- The condoning and routine use of torture has put our troops at greater risk

I know my Mother would say yes, rather enthusiastically.

Me, I'm not so sure it's THAT different, or that far beyond the pale.  I think what has happened, over time, is that people, particularly moderates on the left, have let a generalized characterization of the "other side" develop that painted the right wing as "extreme" in whatever context and made "conservative" a modifier distinctly different from "liberal."  (This is the nutshell of the "liberal media" argument, and while it's often applied incorrectly, to some extent it holds.)

This marginalizationhas had the effect of pushing otherwise moderate, but somewhat conservative tyoes out of the left, due to an increasing polarization that's probably natural over history and reverses naturally after a time. 

My point isn't that conservatives - or more to the point, Pres. Bush and his administration - are right, simply that they've ridden a wave to this point and probably it doesn't go much further.  Forces are already reigning in the extremes of language, the extremes of action, and the extremes of policy, and that will probably continue as a natural reaction. 

What we shouldn't undereatimate, though, is the anger that brought conservatives to this point.  I am always stunned by the level of vehemence in conservatives - and lately, the equal, opposite response of some liberals - about how they not only disagree with liberal policies, but carry a level of anger and hatred for people on the left that I just can't muster in return. 

If we are going to say this is a meaningful moment, that this administration was somehow worse than others to such a great degree, I would challenge those who make the assertion - how much of that is motivated by a deep, visceral dislike of people like Rove, Santorum, DeLay, et al... and how much is motivated by real policy shifts that cannot be comfortably reversed.  I think that as bad as things have gotten - and in some ways quite bad and much worse than, say, in the Regan years - I tend to think much of it is reversible or correctable.  It's a shame that some greater gains were not made, and that some people were caught in this moment and let down.  But to get into the same overheated rhetoric I hear from conservatives, I won't do it.  This is not the worst adminitstration ever simply because some sycophants on the right say the opposite.  They're simply wrong.

- weboy, the unregistered.

There are elements within the conservative movement who have a truly radical agenda--determined to roll back the New Deal, starve the federal government of revenue, tear down the separation of church and state, or free the Defense Department from ever having to temper its actions for the sake of diplomacy or international opinion.

I think it is false, however, to assume that these elements are the dominant power base in the Republican leadership, or even the driving force behind the uniquely brazen and heavy-handed governing style of the Bush Administration and the Congressional party bosses.

The real distinguishing charateristics of the current GOP leadership are as old as government itself: opportunism, graft, and cronyism.  Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are distinguished not by a revolutionary agenda, but by a narrow agenda dominated by the interests of their patrons and donors, and a radical unwillingness to admit error or tolerate dissent.  The continuing investigations into Abramoff, Scanlon, DeLay, and Ralph Reed shine light onto a political organization that bears less resemblance to a revolutionary ideological movement than it does to an old-fashioned political machine.  When they are finally relieved of power, their legacy will not be one of drastic changes to our structure of government, but rather one of pure old-fashioned corrupt malgovernance.

Their true, lasting changes to the American political system are being wrought not at the level of policy, but in the widening geographic divisions among Americans, and in the way political coalitions are mobilized and energized by misdirection, cultural tribalism, and deceptive marketing... rather than tangible appeals to economic interests.  In the long run, these changes  to the political landscape bode poorly for the future of progressive politics.

What is unique about this era is the elevation of the cultural over the political.  The main objectives of many on the right are unusual in that they really are far less about economics than they are about morality.  

In many respects, the right is behaving very similarly to the Communists after they took power in the Soviet Union, or the how Maoists behaved during the Cultural Revolution.  The Communists in each case put a premium on right thinking.  Each work of art was valued only to the extent that it advanced the interests of the working classes.  Purges were carried out in key professions to ensure that members had the correct ideological perspective.  Compare these examples with the attempt to purge liberals from the News Media (Fox News)  or the legal profession (see the Federalist Society).

During WWI we had the Palmer raids and ended up with over 10,000 people in prison for opposing the war and supporting labor organizing.

During WWII we had the Japanese internment and the persecution of people of German extraction.

During the 1950's we had McCarthy and all the associated red baiting. I don't have the numbers, but I would guess about 10,000 people were jailed, denounced, lost their jobs or otherwise mistreated.

During the entire period from the end of the Civil War to the 1960's we had southern governments acting in similar lawless manners. The mildest abuses were the voting rights manipulations and the worst lynchings. This lawlessness went on with, at least, the silence of the federal government.

During the first 200 years of European settlement we had an unending series of laws and other techniques to eliminate the native population.

I think what is new this time is that there is now an alternative voice (the blogosphere and internet) that can comment on events. Previously the press controlled most of the information the public received. 

During WWI, for example, the post office wouldn't deliver magazines put out by the Wobbies and other radical groups.

What is also different this time is that the government not only has the power to ruin a good deal of US society, but with a little more arrogance on issues like global warming, can actually ruin the PLANET.

Weboy, you're dreaming.

Return the presidency to its full power? The current president is already asserting that he, as commander-in-chief, is bound by no laws whatsoever. WTF are you talking about?

I think what we have now is a paradoxical mix of last ditch desperation and cool nihilism on the part of the American Right. My impression is that there is an attempt to keep it all looking purposeful, but the purpose is hollow.

As I see it, this society has historical periods of ~75 years, a lifetime, each of which is the growth and argument of an issue with conflict that settles it in the last 20 or so years. The first ended in disempowerment of the theocracy, e.g. Puritans. The second ended in termination of the Monarchy. The third ended in abolition of slavery. The fourth ended in enfranchisement of women and Indians and the poor. Each of these has its monument in the Constitution- in the First Amendment, in the Constitution proper and rest of the Bill of Rights, the Thirteenth Amendment, and Fifteenth or Nineteenth Amendments respectively.

The present political era begins roughly at Pearl Harbor and is defined by the arguments about black civil rights, womens' rights, gay rights, released felons' rights, etc. As Constitutional issues, it all roots in the Fourteenth Amendment civil rights guarantees and their enforcement. You can even read John Dean's description of Rehnquist's definition of "strict constructionist" and perceive that it's really mostly a Fourteenth Amendment doctrine.

What's at stake in this argument about the Fourteenth Amendment is not simply the rights of the oppressed, of the "underclasses" of the near-colonial social order that still exists. The relative privilege- lack of accountability, unwillingness to bear 'fair shares', etc- of the 'overlord' classes is similarly at stake.

The parts of the Right that are desperate are those that perceive that they cannot compete on equal footing with the rest of society. I think that is the particular quandry of the Religious Right in dealing with Modernity. The parts of the Right that are simply callous and exploitive and nihilistic are the colonial economic lords who are quite fortunate that American corporations, as an institution, are where all of the colonial social order- theocracy, monarchy, slavery, triumphalism, expansionism, inequality- has been protected and preserved. Of course, guess what "running the country like a company" means if this is the case.

We are presently seeing the residues of the colonial class system and its form of oppression being revived to the greatest degree possible, without inner restraint. And watching the pieces struggle with present realities, slowly getting ground down. It seems both bizarrely original and terribly banal at the same time.

The Bush administration is significantly different from all others because they are not "conservative" in the commonly-accepted sense of that term. They are only "conservatative" to the extent that the term has been allowed to be hijacked by far radical right revolutionaries.

This in fact is what they are. I hate to bring up the Nazis and the Fascists, but since these are the only two successful far right revolutionary movements to take state power in a major nation, they are in fact the historical standard that has to be understood in order to understand the people we are dealing with today.

As has been pointed out, the Bush gang looks for opportunities to polarize the public, looks for opportunities to polarize the political process with the goal of marginalizing the opposition, and seating their policy goals in place for the future. Witness their campaign against the independent judiciary - and how right after there was a bipartisan agreement among moderates last month over the issue of judicial confirmation, they immediately announced they would be sending 20 more nominees to the Senate, and would not be working with the Senate as had been hoped. This was an affirmatively-offensive act, planned to be offensive, with the goal of energizing the base.

Look at what their base is: theocrats who have no truck with a democratic state, and far right haters who want to eliminate the opposition - if you doubt that attitude, go to FreeRepublic and do a search on the musings of one "STM" - a very far rightie I have had serious run-ins with over the past three years (to the point I have had to turn him in to the FBI as a stalker) - he is a good example of the "eliminationists" who want to see those of us he considers "the enemy" killed or imprisoned. And look at the responses to his posts there. Those people are real, those people are serious.

These people are an enemy unlike any that has been confronted in this country since the Civil War, and they are far worse and far more dangerous than the Confederates, who only wanted to secede. These people want to impose a totalitarian state.

You can go ahead an laugh and say I am an alarmist, but go read the tenets of Dominionism, the "Christianist" heresy currently fueling the far religious right, and you will see that Sinclair Lewis was entirely right in his novel It Can't Happen Here, when he said "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."

This is who we are dealing with.

All these comments are thoughtful and articulate, but no one seems willing to use the F-word---fascism.  By Mussolini's own definition, we have a fascist government (one in which the corporatists write laws to benefit their corporations, usually at the expense of the public.)  But the overall impact of the Bush administration is to further a proto-fascist agenda with all the trimmings---militarization of general society, casting dissent as unpatriotic, saying that the opposition hates America, suppressing the truth, public lying on a grand scale, and all the other things we are now familiar with.
This is sui generis for America.  Even though we have had our share of home-grown fascists before, they have not been in control of the government until now.  Given the Bushies' arrogance, hubris and total lack of shame or decency, this turn of events is not terribly surprising, but it is terribly dangerous for the American Experiment.  It should be painfully obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the modern Republican party is trying to fundamentally alter the very nature of our country and our government, to create a semi-permanent "conservative" majority---allegiance to party rather than to country.  If that isn't fascism, then what is?   This is why they need to be stopped, more than any other reason.  As bad as their policies are, they can be changed.  But if they succeed in changing what kind of country America is, then we have lost all that matters.

It is not insignificant that G.W. Bush is our first MBA President.   Reformist Republicans of the 70s used to wax rhapsodic that government would be better if it were "run like a business."   Well, they got their wish, and the result isn't pretty.

This is not as specious an argument as it might first appear.   The administration has thoroughly absorbed the culture and ethics of the modern corporation, and are applying it robustly to its tasks as political leaders.

Use Every Tool at Your Disposal.    Once policy objectives are determined, they are pursued relentlessly, with virtually no constraints of ethics or tradition.  The political culture is almost entirely disconnected from the democratic ethos of discourse and rational persuasion--total market domination is sought. 

 Maximize Shareholder Value.   Increasing the stock price to stockholders is the central precept of modern corporate governance.   So, too, is the case with the Bush Aministration.  Although, in their case, the "shareholders" are those who already had a large stake in the existing order.    I think this is something primal:  the administration is deeply committed to increasing the wealth and power of those who they perceived as "America's stockholders."

Branding is Everything.  Coincident with the rise of the "megabrand"--the Nikes, and Cokes, and MTVs, the Republicans have made a similar--and singularly successful--branding effort.  Any read of public polling makes it clear that the Republican brand is ascendent.   Liberals feel constantly confounded by the split between the policies that America supports, and the party they identify as more dynamic, more committed, and more moral.  The "liberal" brand has been devastated in the marketplace, and the Republicans continue to carefully and consistently place maintaining and building their brand identity before other goals.

In the Market, Perceptions are Everything.   Just as WorldCom and Enron spent extraordinary efforts boosting the appearance of a healthy bottom line, the current Administration has placed next quarter's results before the long-term interests of the economy or the country.   Employing an ironically-Keynesian strategy of massive and unprescedented deficit spending, the coming economic crisis is deepened by being continually deferred.   From the very start, the Bush Administration has made economically huge commitments, with the benefits front-loaded, and the price back-loaded (think tax cuts, Medicare, estate tax, global warming, etc.)

"Business is Total War"   Current B-school teaching is that business is war, fought by any means within one's disposal.   The Bush administration has followed this precept through to it's inevitable conclusion.   In its conception of the president as the CEO of the nation, coupled with Bush's love of the ethos of "bold leadership," the very conception of the government has changed.   We are no longer constituents (i.e. "parts") of the government, but customers:  the roles have been reversed.  It is now the role of the government to sell its policies to us.

The scariest part of this whole transformation of government to me is that--by its very nature--business is conscienceless.  It exists only for one purpose--to make money.   That is not necessarily a condemnation;  only a recognition of the world for what it is.  

Once disconnected from promoting the general welfare, what is the purpose of government? 

Don't you think it's a bit unfair to tar the entire GOP, and even Bush administration, with far-out extremists like the Dominionists and other looney-tunes? Isn't a bit like the classic McCarthyite smear of tagging all liberals with the "Communist" label? I have no love for the Bush gang whatsoever, but to suggest that every conservative or every Republican is a mouith-breathing, knuckle-dragging groupie of Rushdonney is a bit over the top. And instead of hanging out at some far, far right website I would recommend a more mainstream place to become acquainted with the thinking of the GOP devotees. Try RedState.org. You'll disgaree with much there, but you'll find people you can respect in your differences, and maybe even hone your own thinking.