I have been working on this diary, on and off, all weekend, writing and deleting, honing and  editing.  I've been trying to  keep it from sounding like the ravings of some drama queen alarmist or that guy wearing the filthy parka in the park in August preaching that the end of the world is nigh.  I've been worried about that because something came to me this week with something like the lunatic clarity of a prophetic vision and, given that, it was actually a relief to see that Josh  and Edsal over at Huffpo got there first. 

What hit me this week is that everything that I have been working for, hoping for, and, in my own slack way, fighting for over these last nineteen months no longer matters.  Health care, income inequality, reconciliation between black and white and red and blue, global warming, energy less-dependence, killing Bin Laden before he dies of old age, even ending the Iraq War--none of it matters anymore.   McCain's decision to ink his deal with the devil, cast aside every last vestige of his integrity and run a campaign brazenly predicated upon the outright denial of the existence of objective reality has turned this into an election that will determine whether democracy will continue to exist in this country in any meaningful way. 

The older I've gotten, the more I've come to disdain the use of hyperbolic superlatives in political discourse.  They are generally counterproductive rhetorical devices and  they can all too easily cause you to end up looking ridiculous in hindsight.  Superlatives like  "most important election ever" are driven by worst care scenarios that, historically speaking,  usually fail to materialize.  So when I hear people make melodramatic statements like "this campaign represents the climactic  battle of good versus evil that will decide the fate of the galaxy for ten thousand years to come!" I  am predisposed to roll my eyes and say, "yeah, right, spare me the drama 'cause in five years we won't even remember  why we thought this was a big deal."   So please understand that I myself find it a bit odd that I feel compelled to log on to the Internet and tell untold thousands of strangers that, with all that lunatic prophetic clarity I mentioned above, I believe this has become the most  important election since 1932, and that it may even be the most important  election since 1860. 

As of the first night of the Republican Convention, the stakes in this election have quite simply become whether democracy survive into 2009, or whether it will lurch along as a golem,  animated corpse.  The issue is whether we will have at least a chance of retaining a meaningful democracy or whether it becomes a Putinized sham retaining the forms of democracy as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a plutocracy that controls the outcome through partisan propaganda that is completely decoupled from objective reality. 

The process by which we have been brought to this juncture has been unfolding in plain sight for thirty years.  Over that time, they have progressively decertified the press--treated it not as something critical to the functioning of our society whose role is enshrined in the first amendment we made to our Constitution but, instead, as just another interest group to be satiated or ignored at whim.  They've accomplished this through the combination of their relentless assault on the so-called liberal bias of the media, the destruction of the FCC rules defining the "public interest" as serving the interests of the public rather than just spewing "content" into the air, and the steady relaxation of the rules restricting cross-ownership.  As they grew bigger and fatter, the media companies themselves willingly became complicit in their own demise as independent checks upon concentrated power.  At the same time, as a direct consequence of the Republican Party's long term media decertification project, the Republican base has become ever more willing, and mentally trained, to apply whatever doublethink is necessary to believe any lie told by their leaders, no matter how outrageous.  We've all seen it happening, we've all groused about the various parts of it, but we failed to see it as a whole and did not perceive the slow progression.  We, and our democracy, were  like the proverbial frog in the pot slowly brought to boil.  We kept adjusting to the "new normal" instead of noticing we were being boiled alive and jumping out. 

Now, at last, they have achieved their dream of a campaign based upon unabashed lies about themselves and their opponents, upon reason-free emotionalism, and, of course, upon fear and grievance.  McCain's campaign this year is the final distillation of the theory and practice of politics as developed by the Republicans over the last thirty years.   At last, in positively Orwellian fashion, they feel they've reached a point with all their various projects that they finally just say to the Press, and to the Democrats, "fuck you!  We can say anything we want, do anything we want, promise anything we want, slander anyone we want.  We can say black is white, love is hate, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and 2+2=5, and you can't stop us!  We can shit on the white working class and tell them its manna from heaven and they won't believe you when you tell them its not."   They think that the MSM and the Democrats have become so weak and so despised that they can sell empty cereal boxes based solely upon its packaging and a vicious campaign of libelling the competitor's cereal..  (Though, lest we dispair, let us not forget that they've got no choice but to try it this year because they got nothing else to offer.) 

And if they win this way, particularly if they win in the face of the kind of campaign premised upon ending precisely the kind of politics the Republicans have bet the farm on, you know, and I know, that the Democrats will throw away every last vestige of scruples and respond in kind in 2012.  And at that point, the Republic is well and truly screwed because there will be no brakes, no constraints on what either party can say or do to get and retain power. 

Can you imagine any good ending to that scenario?  All I can imagine are bad ones.  Scenarios in which two morally and intellectually bankrupt parties with no real objectives other than getting and keeping  power.  They'll fight even more bitterly as the stakes get smaller and the differences between them fade and then, eventually, just merge into an amorphous plutocracy that runs shadow puppet partisan elections to make the mob feel like their call is important.  Bread and circus--minimum wage jobs and war--naturally become the currency of power, the dissolution of the middle class becomes inevitable and, in all likelihood, environmental and societal collapse follow.  A government whose legitimacy rests entirely on glib promises of easy solutions to simple problems cannot solve global warming or curb a ballooning deficit. 

As he left Independence Hall on the last day of deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, an unknown lady asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”"  Franklin's answer--already cited here by someone else last week was this:

  “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Typical Franklin, both an answer to the question and an injunction to posterity--us, that is to say.  That's what's at stake here.  If we win this one, if we stand up and prove that objective reality does matter, that it is actually true that truth will out, then maybe, just maybe, the Republicans rise from the ashes of their defeat and say "hey, maybe deconstructionist nihilism isn't  tactically fruitful." Maybe then they reexamine themselves and become a party again rather than a metastatic tumor on the two party system.   If we win, we may be able to keep it.  If we lose . . .

That's what matters now.    Not health care, not stopping the war in Iraq, not jobs, not the price of gas.  Global warming doesn't matter now.  FISA doesn't matter now.  What happened to Hillary in the primaries, whether she gets a chance to run again in 2012 and unprovable beliefs that she would have been a better candidate don't matter anymore.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Lehman don't matter.  Indeed,  whether you love him or hate him, even Obama doesn't matter anymore either and neither does McCain.  The only issue that matters now is the nihilistic monstrosity that is McCain's campaign.  If it wins, this election is all too likely to be the place where future historians draw the line and say "this is where the American experiment in democracy ended." 

We simply don't have the luxury anymore of ironic detachment, or arguing about the past  or about tactics, or even about whether the MSM will wake up in time to the fact that if the McCain campaign wins, it means the end of journalism.  The reason we no longer have that luxary is not because we're a little behind in the polls, but because gambling addict John McCain  just went all in--his soul plus everything we hold dear, and he put it all on black.