Initially, the Republican Revolution of 1995-1996 followed the standard trajectory: First was the Reign of Terror, under the Jacobin rule of the House’s “Freshman Congress,” led by Newt Gingrich playing the role of Robespierre. Then Thermidor, when, after a series of missteps beginning with the fatefully ill-conceived shutdown of the Federal Government, Gingrich, like his historical counterpart, was consumed by the revolution that he himself had begun.

But historical analogies are cheap, and if revolutions really were governed by a formula – or if Republican temper tantrums were truly “revolutionary” – the Republican Party would now be in the phase known as “The Directory,” during which a brief, tenuous French democracy preceded the usurpation of power by Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, no such phase of moderation has restrained the fanatical esprit de corps of the Republican Party. Instead, a figure vaguely reminiscent of the French dictator prematurely seized the executive and began waging a war upon democracy in the name of the Republic, and rather than swinging away from its radical excesses, the party has merely substituted for the original revolutionary program an agenda no less radical but entirely out of sorts with its founding orthodoxy.

Gingrich’s revolutionary manifesto, the Contract With America, was an unimaginative indictment of “Democratic” deficit spending, excessive government bureaucracy and onerous regulations and tax burdens, in other words, the standard Republican fare. Its only real innovation was its introduction of Congressional term limits as a major Republican policy objective, and most of the document’s originality lied in its novel use of uncontroversial values like “personal responsibility,” “accountability” and “opportunity” to spin ideas that were new and exciting when John Locke wrote about them in the seventeenth century. What was new was the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners approach that Republicans in the 104th Congress adopted in their effort to champion the platform. To achieve its objective of a wholesale annihilation of the New Deal welfare state in a single term, the party had to recast itself in the mold of a revolutionary vanguard: zealous, disciplined, chauvinistic. The inveterate intransigence of the Republican Party of 2004 owes much to these beginnings.

As a policy platform, the Contract With America by and large failed. No constitutional amendment to require a balanced Federal budget ever saw the light of day. President Clinton managed to steal the credit for a compromised version of “welfare reform.” The line item veto became law, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court two years later. Tort reform remains an unfulfilled item on the Republican wish list. After two aborted attempts at a Constitutional amendment, the term “Congressional term limits” found itself in the company of “the information superhighway” in the refuse bin of quaint lexicological curiosities from the nineties. Today, the legislative legacy of the Contract is little more than a host of modifications to the parliamentary rules of the House.

But in spite of its legislative failures, the spirit of the revolutionary vanguard remains a pervasive feature of the majority party almost ten years later, only now, the original call to arms has become counter-revolutionary, and its stubborn adherents in Congress are cast as regressive subversives unravelling the movement from within. Having seized the castle, the party has been stripped of a king to dethrone, but like so many post-revolutionary one party states, it clings to the rhetorical cause of the downtrodden masses while doing everything in its power to suppress it.

Party discipline requires fealty to party leaders, and as with all radical movements, the Republican Party has become an inhospitable place for political moderates and brokers of compromise. The Club For Growth, a supply-side, anti-tax lobbying group, runs a hit list of moderate Republicans whom it deems to be out of step with the party line. Earlier this year, the Club attempted, in vain, to purge Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican roster. Conservative Republicans openly call for the ouster of what they term “RINOs”: Republicans In Name Only. Chief among their targets are Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Senator John McCain of Arizona.

At the top of the heretical agenda of the RINO caucus is the caution it urges against excessive tax cuts that are not accompanied by decreases in government spending, that is, its preoccupation with balancing the Federal budget. Evidently, flying the banner of yesterday’s Republican Party is grounds for treason today. Last week, Democrats joined Republicans in both chambers of Congress to approve of Bush’s plan to extend middle-class tax cuts without offsetting the loss of government revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes. By their own admission, the Democrats’ about-face on the measure was based on political calculation alone: afraid of being branded tax hikers in an election year, they set aside for a moment their concerns about soaring deficits. In turn, the three Republican moderates in the Senate, including Chafee and Snowe, whose temporary alliance with the Democrats had, until last week, made possible the Congressional majority that was holding out for a more fiscally responsible plan, abandoned course. The tax cuts were extended for five years, corporate welfare survived unscathed, projected deficits increased. Bush Republicans patted themselves on the back for forcing through precisely the kind of deal that Gingrich Republicans ten years ago had sought to make unconstitutional.

The hypocricy does not stop at deficits and balanced budgets. If the Republican Party stood for any principles at all, it would be the President who would be branded a party member “in name only,” not his moderate detractors whose positions accord so closely with the philosophical convictions that the Bush Republicans still claim, ridiculously, to hold sacred. The Bush Administration has thrown caution to the wind in its military and foreign policy, overseen the most dramatic expansion of the Federal government bureaucracy in U.S. history, driven up staggering deficits with no exit strategy, and, in multiple arenas, has ordered the most intrusive government interference in the private lives of its citizens of any American presidency, ever. By comparison, the moderates that the Republican leadership made such convenient use of at the party's showcase convention in New York City are, in fact, the stalwarts of the Republicans' supposed commitment to fiscal conservatism and "small government," the Trotskyists to the Bush Politburo. In the spirit of Josef Stalin's loyal sycophants, Congressional Republicans still speak the language of the revolutionary fanatic, but their fiery exhortations are in the service of what they used to call “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. Priorities look quite a bit different from the vantage point of the seat of power, and as history has demonstrated on more than one occasion, those who continue to pay service to yesterday's cause can easily find their way onto the enemy list of today's Revolutionary Party.

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, when Stalin assumed control of the Comintern, his first priority was to purge the party of potential rivals. His most influential adversary, Leon Trotsky, exiled from the orbit of power in the Central Committee, watched while Stalin betrayed the cause of the Russian proletariat, along with any semblance of a principle transcending the raw dictates of political power. Reflecting on that experience, he surmised that “in inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” The party is a different one, but the apparatus is the same, and the present has a stubborn tendency to mimic the past.

The sentiment is derived, ostensibly, from the spirit of the original Olympics. In ancient Greece, each Olympiad was accompanied by a truce among all the warring city-states of the region, and for the duration of the games, the known world would limit the competition of nations to the confines of the athletic stadium. The Olympic flame, in the modern pictorial lexicon, is a symbol of our inheritance of what our nostalgia leads us to believe was that ancient spirit, bringing to our modern world the wisdom of antiquity.

As in those ancient times, one of the most defining characteristics of the modern human condition is a state of perpetual international conflict, and today it’s hard to imagine even contemplating anything like a ritual truce. Indeed, even the simulacrum is a challenge to maintain. In addition to serving as a showcase for the unity of mankind, the modern incarnation of the Olympics has become the largest soapbox in the world, easily exploited to advance the divisive nationalistic ideologies of both the most and the least powerful peoples on the planet. Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to espouse the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in an effort to secure the release of 200 Arab prisoners, and provoked a standoff with the German police that ended in a bloodbath. In 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States used the games to strike a calculated posture of indignation, leading an international boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The U.S.S.R. responded in kind in 1984, when the games were in Los Angeles. Though the Olympics are meant to celebrate the best of humanity, what is best is routinely outdone by what is worst. Between the cosmopolitan Olympic ideal and the parochial prerogatives of political actors, the contest is all but preordained.

This year has proven no exception. Thanks to the Bush administration, the United States has entered the global arena in Athens with as close to a pariah status as it has ever been accorded. As if to celebrate the honor, the Bush campaign has refused to concede to the demands of the U.S. Olympic Committee to pull off the air a political television advertisement that uses the games to tout the dubious record of the Administration’s intervention in Iraq. "Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise,” the Bush campaign ad’s announcer proclaims. “And this Olympics there will be two more free nations. And two fewer terrorist regimes." Flags of Iraq and Afghanistan wave in the distance.

The U.S. Olympic Commission is not alone in its disapproval of the campaign’s opportunism. The players for one of the two “free nations” are outraged, and the Iraqi soccer coach has wondered aloud, "The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?" The Bush administration’s invasion and continued occupation of Iraq stands among the most internationally divisive acts of world history. The campaign’s choice of the Olympic Games as a vehicle to sing the war’s praises says nothing about the solidarity of the community of “free nations” competing in Athens, but is another example, as if we needed it, of the Administration’s absolute indifference to the opinions of any other member of that community.

The cynical irony of the Bush campaign’s appropriation of the Olympic ideal of international solidarity to espouse an unapologetically unilateralist and militaristic foreign policy conforms to an almost formulaic pattern of Republican propaganda making. It is the same Alice in Wonderland algorithm that has produced such absurdities as a draft-dodging deserter casting doubt upon the credentials of a Vietnam War hero; a campaign commercial that morphs the face of a Vietnam vet triple amputee Democratic Senator with that of Osama bin Laden; and a public relations campaign that associates the heroism of first responders on September 11th with the foreign adventures of a trigger-happy administration, shortly before that same administration guts federal support for firefighters all over the country and slashes war veterans’ benefits.

One might be tempted to ask is nothing sacred, if not for the fact that the Olympics have never been spared such cheap political maneuvers. But as the strategic misfire of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has begun to show, while disinformation can well serve the purposes of distraction and obfuscation, you can’t build a viable campaign out of it. Nor can you make a fact out of the fiction of a “free Iraq” merely by pronouncing its name. The lie is simply too stark to be packaged as anything but a lie.

Nader’s much-maligned mantra in the 2000 presidential race was that the Democrats and the Republicans were virtually indistinguishable. Big business controlled both; each could be counted upon in almost equal measure to sell out labor, the environment and public health to a free trade agenda.

The Bush administration has rendered any such facile comparison untenable. Even Nader now acknowledges the breadth of the chasm that has come to divide the two parties since Bush’s inauguration. The Republicans’ quasi-fascist pivot under Bush’s leadership is invariably cited by those progressive-minded Americans who disparage Nader’s decision to run this time around as the sword of Damocles whose peril dwarfs the significance of any philosophical objection to the two-party system, no matter how legitimate.

But there is another, and perhaps better reason to reject the specious arguments Nader has offered in support of his candidacy: since the last election, the Democratic Party has changed at least as much as the Republican Party.

In 2000, when Nader galvanized the Left with his indictment of the Democratic Party’s betrayal of both its founding principles and its most steadfast traditional supporters, he was responding to the quite deliberate transformation of the party by President Clinton and his kingmakers at the Democratic Leadership Council. In the early nineties, in the United States as in Britain, the Left had spent the last twelve or so years vainly inveighing against the hegemony of conservative orthodoxy in national government. In the U.S., save for the brief and failed interlude of a single, one-term Democratic administration whose domestic economic policies largely followed a Republican deregulatory agenda, the Republicans had controlled the White House since before the end of the Vietnam War. Neither the old, social democratic, New Deal-type Democratic platform, nor the newer multicultural/feminist Great Society vision seemed capable any longer of doing much more than rallying party activists and intellectuals. They certainly were not winning national elections.

The Democratic Leadership Council offered a solution to the Democratic quandary. By jettisoning its commitment to the value of material egalitarianism and co-opting the Republican vision of a free market Utopia, the DLC, effectively in control of the Democratic National Committee, reinvented the party as the sympathetic alternative to the only game in town – free market capitalism with softer edges. The ploy worked: for the first time since the seventies, a Democrat was elected president, and then, for the first time since the sixties, a Democrat was re-elected president.

The success of the DLC’s tactic vindicated its vision of a “New” Democratic Party. There is a difference, however, between tactic and strategy, and while the party’s centrist feint was a brilliant exemplar of the former, the true believers of the DLC thought themselves to be in possession of the latter. The New Democrats saw in Bill Clinton the future of the Democratic Party, while in fact, the “Third Way,” as the Brits call it, was just a marketing tool, whose eight-year lifespan was only sustained for that long by the star-quality charisma of its leader. At least for the Democrats, it could not last; as a Marxist might observe, its "internal contradictions" were bound eventually to unravel the whole ball of yarn. The fantastic optimism of neoliberalism is predicated upon the non-existence of social classes in American society. That kind of denial is sustainable only for a party that represents the dominant class: while you can tell a roomful of capitalist oligarchs that there’s no such thing as “working people,” only entrepreneurs and their “team leaders” and "associates," and get a roomful of nodding heads, the same song falls flat on its face in a roomful of janitors, parking lot attendants and welfare recipients. The Republicans can celebrate the wonders of the free market into perpetuity. The Democrats cannot. Pretty soon, those at the receiving end of the instruments of "market discipline" are going to get tired of being told by their own party that the market has spoken, and it has deemed them unworthy.

In 2000, Nader was the only national figure ready and willing to stump for those who objected to the DLC’s narrow and cynical conception of the party’s future, and though he ran under the banner of the Green Party, his campaign was fueled primarily by the disaffection of a sizable swath of Democratic voters. The surprising breadth and vitality of the movement he rallied around him testified much more to the divisiveness of the New Democrats’ vision than to the power of Nader’s persona or the strength of his organization.

The groundswell of resistance to the DLC’s hegemony within the party only grew over the next three and a half years under the Bush administration, as the Democratic “opposition” in Congress played a role entirely unworthy of the name. Then, as much to the candidate’s surprise as to everyone else’s, Howard Dean found himself taking over for Nader as this year’s vehicle for the insurgency within the party ranks. Dean’s campaign slogan, “Take Back America,” was – probably consciously – a call to arms against not only the Bush administration, but against the New Democrats. If not for the need to maintain a modicum of party unity, the candidate of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (a phrase unabashedly ripped-off from the late Senator Wellstone) might as well have dispensed with the euphemism and called on his supporters to “Take Back Your Party.”

Of course, the Deaniacs did not succeed in taking back their party, as Iowa caucus-goers selected the very un-rebellious John Kerry as their choice for the Democratic presidential candidate. The unspoken condition, however, of the rest of the party base’s agreement to forget about Dean and go along with Iowa’s decision was that Kerry refrain from following the counsel of the DLC. For its part, the DLC had already effectively suffered a vote of no confidence, as it became increasingly clear that its candidate, Joe Lieberman, was to be refused even the honor of being considered viable by both the voters and the party apparatus itself, the disapproval of the latter most notably demonstrated by the person of former running mate (and former DLC hope) Al Gore. Kerry emerged as a compromise candidate between the faction supporting Dean and the faction sympathetic to the rhetoric of the New Democrats. To build and maintain a united front in the general election, the party needed a leader either so broadly inspirational or so blandly uncontroversial as to transcend or else to fly under the radar of the fissures in the party base. We got the latter.

Ralph Nader refuses, perhaps willfully, to recognize that the energy behind his 2000 campaign had little to do with third parties per se, and far more to do with the struggle over the fate of one of the two behemoths he disparaged as one and the same monster. For the time being, that struggle is resolved. In his fruitless search for new turncoats to form a support base for his pointless candidacy, Nader now wanders aimlessly in the lingering smoke that will eventually clear for him, as it has for everyone else, to reveal an empty battlefield whose fight has already been waged. The spurn he suffered at the Green Party convention and his acceptance of the Reform Party endorsement are testaments to the complete absence of support from those who championed his cause in the last election, and the sad desperation of an insurgent in search of an insurgency. Four years ago, Nader campaigned on the widespread opposition to the ideological proximity of the two parties. His supporters in the last election took his message to heart, and went on to reclaim the Democratic Party from those who would turn it into a watered down version of the Republican Party. He assisted substantially in that worthwhile purpose. Now his egoistic blindness threatens to derail its success.

Things have changed over the last 500 years or so. Today we believe in democracy, which means that our armies no longer go to war for national glory or territorial conquest, but solely for defensive purposes, and only as a last resort. Our leaders are not the inheritors of the stockpiled political power of family dynasties; they are chosen to rule by the people, and can take office only after a majority of citizens have selected them in a popular vote.

What's that? Oh, right. Whoops.

Well, two out of three isn't so bad, is it? At least our government officials still see themselves as secular spokespersons of the people, not of the church. At least they don't take their marching orders from the clergy, especially when church doctrine is at odds with prevailing public opinion, right?

That question, at least, we may answer with a firm, unambiguous, "Well, not yet, anyway." But the horizon is looking somewhat bleak.

Though in light of the present political culture it's difficult to recall, as recently as during the early days of the 2000 Republican primary campaign season, the mainstream of the Republican Party was still at least nominally committed to secular political values like the rule of law and the final authority of the U.S. Constitution in matters of public life. Thus, when the candidates for Republican presidential nominee were asked in a debate to name a political philosopher with whom they identified, Steve Forbes named John Locke, Alan Keyes mentioned the Founding Fathers, and John McCain chose the Founding Fathers and Theodore Roosevelt, all of them members in good standing of the American democratic pantheon, all quite appropriate selections for aspirants to the highest office of a mature democracy.

George W. Bush, the reader will recall, responded, "Christ, because he changed my heart." Asked to elaborate, Bush went on, "When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as a savior, it changes your life, and that's what happened to me."

If there was a single moment when Bush clinched the nomination, that was it. In that instant, Bush won over one of his most important constituencies: the Evangelical right wing of the Republican Party.

There was nothing inevitable about the close alliance that came to be forged between Bush and his Christian conservative loyalists; the Christian right had never been entirely comfortable with George Bush, Sr.'s moderate Episcopalian faith, and his prodigal son, the playboy-turned-neo-Puritan, was as yet an unknown quantity. Yet it is inconceivable that Bush, Jr. could have won (lost) the 2000 election without his Evangelical supporters. Indeed, Karl Rove attributes the slimness of the margin of Bush's -- er, Gore's -- victory in the last election to the lower-than-expected turnout of Evangelical voters, and is placing renewed emphasis this time around on that demographic. Had Bush not embraced this constituency with the authentic and audacious chauvinism of which his father could only muster a transparent pantomime, he may well have failed to win the Republican primary, to say nothing of the general election. But the almost smug confidence with which he pronounced his words at that debate, and his reference to such an intimately personal messiah, firmly established his born-again bona fides to the Christian right-wing, who duly delivered their hero to the White House.

Bush's loyalty, or pandering, or whatever you'd like to call it, to the Christian right is a more profound and disconcerting phenomenon than his captivity to other special interests like the gun lobby and the energy industry. However fanatic their ideology or shady their methods, these more run-of-the-mill interest groups at least accept the basic legitimacy of the democratic process and the authority of the written law. Indeed, the NRA's entire political platform rests on a fetishism of the Second Amendment of the Constitution that verges on idolatry.

Christian conservatives, on the other hand, tend to dismiss both the law and the democratic process as the imperfect creations of imperfect beings, which must, when necessary, take a backseat to the divine word of the Holy Scriptures. Thus, when an Alabama judge refused to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the state Supreme Court building last year, it mattered little if at all to his religious defenders that a Federal court had deemed its presence unconstitutional and had ordered its removal, and that by refusing to remove it, an official guardian of the rule of law was denying that his own personal religious convictions were bound by it. It mattered little to them because, indeed, they share his conviction that the laws of the land are subordinate to their own personal understanding of the Word of God, and that the former should be ignored, violated and resisted whenever it is in conflict with the latter. This same mentality, needless to say, informs the extremists of the Right to Life movement, and their patent disregard for the Roe v. Wade decision.

The existence of such fringe elements and the degree of their organizational capacity is distressing enough in itself. But when the President of the United States starts to invoke their rhetoric, and endorse, if only by his refusal to condemn, their open hostility to the sovereign authority of the law, the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum. Bush has repeatedly invoked God as the ultimate inspiration for his policies, sometimes specifically in order to contrast it with the mandates of statutory, regulatory and constitutional law. He has publicly proclaimed his intention to base his decisions of federal judicial appointments in part upon the degree of a candidate's faith. And in his initiation and execution of war, he has routinely disparaged international laws and treaties under the pretext pursuing aims mandated by God (or some thinly disguised proxy thereof). When the President himself, proudly and habitually, puts his religious convictions before his legal obligations, can we really continue to call ourselves a democracy, "a nation of laws, not men"? In a country that prides itself on its history of unwavering adherence to the sovereign authority of laws drafted by duly authorized representatives of We, the People, our president is a latter-day John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and his party is falling behind his anti-democratic zealotry in lockstep.

As if it were not enough, moreover, that the Republican Party has somehow managed to make it respectable for government officials to shun the law in the name of their God, its political operatives are attempting to impose their theocratic agenda upon the Democrats as well. The Republicans' latest tactic against John Kerry has been to attempt to compel the Catholic church to deny him Communion to punish him for his pro-choice position. At least one bishop has followed the logic to its conclusion, announcing his intention to refuse to administer Communion to any Catholic who votes for politicians who are pro-choice, pro-stem cell research, pro-euthanasia or pro-gay marriage, literally forcing them to decide between their political values and their salvation. Is this the kind of political culture the Republicans want for the U.S.? Do they wish to restore the authority of the church of pre-Reformation Europe, when the clergy had veto power over the decisions of the secular state? Is this what they call "democracy"?

Bush is, no doubt, familiar with Matthew 6:24: "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." The state, likewise, cannot pledge itself unreservedly to the ultimate authority of the Will of the People, on the one hand, and to the dictates of any church, on the other. A nation cannot be, at the same time, democratic and theocratic. If you don't believe me, ask an Israeli. Or brush up on your history of the English Civil War. Or look at the State Department's deliberations on democracy and Islam.

It is reasonable enough to argue that respect for faith, or even the degree of faith's prevalence, is a measure of a culture's health. But when faith comes at the expense of reverence for the authority of the law, when the law is seen as a disposable adversary of the commands of the church, the price of the bargain is lawlessness. Lawlessness can take two forms. The first is a state of chaos, in which each person acts solely according to his personal will, without restraint and without conformity to principle. The second is tyranny, in which the leader regards his own will to be, in essence, the law.

As the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has begun to reveal, the Bush administration has created conditions in at least one arm of the government that have incubated both tendencies. The Bush administration's cavalier dismissiveness toward international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, has set the tone for how power is to be exercised in the New American Century. Autocrats who consider their own discretion to be the penultimate authority of the state demonstrate by example to their subordinates that they, too, might regard the law as merely an obstacle to circumnavigate. Such is what seems to have occurred within the military under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld, the philistine's autocrat, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the thinking man's autocrat.

Invocation of God as one's guiding authority is no compensation for the dereliction of the law. For unless we are willing to forfeit our liberties and act as if God's commands really were the law of the land, as, for example, they were in Afghanistan under the Taliban, then we might hasten to consider Nietzsche's admonishment that the priest is the man who "calls his own will God." Precisely the same might be said of the pious country priest who calls himself the President.

"His phrasing is weird, it's offbeat. He's not pausing at the commas. Hear that? Wait a minute.... Dude, he's pausing at the big words."

--A girl watching Bush's press conference on the TV in the lobby of a hotel.

(From http://www.inpassing.org/)

At Wednesday's hearing before the Supreme Court, where the government squared off against lawyers for two American terrorist suspects who have spent the last two years incarcerated by the military with no formal charges brought against them, the administration's attorney, Paul D. Clement, arguing that the courts have no business overseeing the legality of extrajudicial detentions of alleged terrorists, characterized the military's screening process of terrorist suspects as "for all intents and purposes....a neutral decision maker." In response to a question from Justice Ginsburg about the suspects' inability to contest the allegations brought against them, Clement explained that "the interrogation process itself provides an opportunity for the individual to explain that this has all been a mistake," rendering a trial superfluous.

The timing of the argument could not have been worse. Within days of the hearing, images from army prisons in Iraq have surfaced that portray army reservists, allegedly following the directions of civilian and military intelligence officers and contractors, "set(ting) physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," in the euphemistic words of an internal army report. The photographs show the use of methods such as forcing detainees to simulate sexual acts with one another. Reports have since emerged of American soldiers sexually abusing an Iraqi prisoner with a broomstick, forcing detainees to masturbate in the presence of others, coercing them to have sex with each other, stacking them naked in a human pyramid, and mauling them with dogs, and of British soldiers beating a hooded prisoner with rifle butts, urinating on him, and putting the barrel of a gun in his mouth through the hood. Are the interrogators who ordered these actions what the government's attorney refers to as "neutral decision makers" to whom the individual can explain that "this has all been a mistake"? Are we expected simply to assume that the fact of U.S. citizenship will protect American detainees from such atrocities? Exactly how much does the interrogation process differ in a South Carolina brig from Cellblock 1A of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?

To anyone who has ever been questioned by the police -- or, for that matter, to anyone who has ever seen an episode of NYPD Blue -- the idea that a government interrogator might be able or willing to serve as a neutral judge of a suspect's culpability is as preposterous as it is disingenuous. As with agents of law enforcement, military interrogators proceed from an assumption of guilt by suspicion. Their job is not to balance the scales of justice, it's to extract useful intelligence. If a suspect is implicated in illicit activity, it doesn't really matter whether they actually committed the acts they're accused of committing. Whether or not they pulled a trigger, or conspired to pull it, they probably have information that might lead to those who plan to do so in the future. Once the detective/military interrogator is done extracting that information, it's up to a judge and jury to decide whether the accused is guilty of actually violating the letter of the law. If we allowed detectives to make that determination, we wouldn't be living in a democratic society, we'd be living in a police state. Exactly how does this differ in the case of the military?

The government's answer to this question was unimaginative and predictable: In times of war, extraordinary measures become necessary, and we must suspend our judgment as citizens and have faith in the capacity of the government and the military to make all the right decisions. "Where the government is on a war footing," argued Clement, "you have to trust the executive to make the kinds of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that."

As has been noted by many, the same argument was made in defense of the round-up and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. "We must credit the military with as much good faith as we would any other public official," wrote Justice William O. Douglas in 1943 in his concurring opinion in Hirabayashi v. U.S. "We cannot sit in judgment of the military requirements of that hour." In what few, in retrospect, deny was a complete failure of Constitutional justice, the Supreme Court refused at that time to block the executive order and compel the government to put an end to the incarceration. The Court's decision has yet to be reversed, because, happily, as noted by a Presidential Commission in 1980, "the country has not been so unfortunate that a repetition of the facts has occurred to give the Court that opportunity."

Writ smaller, but with equal legal significance, it looks like misfortune is upon us now, and the Court has its opportunity. Once again, the government is arguing, in essence, that extraordinary executive discretionary authority in wartime is a sacred and inviolable right; that the entire system of checks and balances, of the separation of government powers, should be tossed aside like so many hanging chads whenever the President says "national security"; that military agents, whose deliberations are held in secret, whose livelihoods depend upon delivering intelligence, however it is acquired, to their superiors at the Department of Defense, and whose decisions are not subject to any form of appeal, can render decisions as fair and unbiased as those generated by the intricate system of trials subject to appellate review so carefully crafted by the Founding Fathers. For the umpteenth time since Bush took office, Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave.

As Frank Dunham, arguing on behalf of one of the detained citizens, explained, "Mr. Clement is a worthy advocate and can stand up here and make the unreasonable sound reasonable. But when you take his argument at core, it is 'Trust us.' And who is saying trust us? The executive branch...."

Trust your government. Rather an odd case to be made by an administration that insists that the government cannot be trusted with even a penny of our tax dollars. And why in the world, Mr. President, should we trust your shadowy minions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Charleston, S.C. and Washington, D.C.? Wasn't the whole idea behind the separation of powers to set up a government that we wouldn't have to "trust," because we could rest assured that each branch was accountable to the others?

Even while blathering on and on about the evils of government bureaucracy, Bush has expanded the powers of the executive branch out of all proportion to what the drafters of the Constitution envisioned. With the Republicans in control of the legislature, the judiciary has been the primary target of his power grab. In exactly the same absolutist spirit in which his administration attempted to block the formation of the 9/11 Commission, and in which it continues to refuse to release records of Dick Cheney's consultations with energy industry executives while drafting the Bush Energy Bill, it refuses on principle to allow the Supreme Court, or any other court, to have a voice in the setting of rules around detaining American citizens in the name of the War on Terrorism. When Justice Kennedy remarked, "I'm taking away from the argument the impression, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you think there is a continuing role for the courts to examine the reasonableness of the period of detention," Clement answered, "Well, I wouldn't take that away, Justice Kennedy." An easier case could be made for indefinite detention, such as that with these particular suspects, the danger is so great as to warrant the measure. But the government has chosen to make the case that the judiciary has no right during wartime to question the judgment of the executive and the basis for its detaining any suspect, regardless of the gravity of the particular threat at hand.

The tactic speaks volumes about Bush's autocratic conception of governance. To put it plainly, the Bush administration believes that the only legitimate opinions are those that square with its agenda, and that those who use the power of their office or bench to restrain, preclude or reverse the administration's prerogatives are by definition engaging in an abuse of power. Thus, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court reached a legally sound, politically moderate decision on gay marriage with which the administration happened to disagree, not only did the President express his opposition to the decision, but went on to question the very basis of the court's right to issue it, denouncing the justices in his State of the Union address as "activist judges" who "insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people." This from a president whose administration habitually refuses to release records of closed-door policy meetings to Congress, a president who denies the court to whom he owes his election "victory" the right to review the constitutionality of his suspension of habeus corpus, a president who publicly proclaimed his intention to place on the federal bench "common sense judges who understand that our rights are derived from God" (read: "who believe that their decisions are accountable not to the Constitution, but to the particular religious and political sensibilities of the Evangelical right-wing").

The first definition of the word "arbitrary" in Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language is "subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion." Never mind pots and black kettles: "Arbitrary" is not merely an appropriate adjective to describe the way the Bush White House exercises power, it seems to be its guiding political aspiration.

From the beginning, the Bush administration was determined to fight this war on the cheap. The naivite of such thinking should have been a lesson learned from the last invasion. Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism advisor to the National Security Council whose recent book openly criticizes the administration's negligence in averting the attacks of September 11, 2001, recently told The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that the war in Afghanistan was fought with a force far too small to capture the leaders of Al Qaeda. One of the reasons, Clarke maintains, was that "Rumsfeld wanted to have a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with airpower, to win decisive battles."

Not only did Osama bin Laden manage to escape Afghanistan, but since then, the country has deteriorated into a lawless battleground ruled by warlords and heroin traffickers. The Bush administration has predictably failed to stabilize the country, partly because within only a few months of laying the groundwork for an interim Afghan government, it removed an already insufficient presence of U.S. military specialists in order to bolster its force in Iraq.

Rumsfeld took the rapid advance of U.S. forces into Bagdhad as incontrovertible vindication of his economical approach to warfare. But it wasn't the invasion itself that most of his critics were concerned about; it was the occupation to follow. The Bush administration reacted to such concerns with characteristic willful blindless. When Eric Shinseki -- who should know, having headed up the NATO effort in Bosnia -- told Congress in February of last year that the occupation of Iraq would require "several hundred thousand troops," Rumsfeld called the estimate "far off the mark." Paul Wolfowitz listed several reasons for disagreeing with the assessment. Among them was his conviction that the Iraqi people would welcome a U.S. occupying force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible." He also voiced his expectation that countries that had opposed the war would flock to Iraq to assist in its reconstruction.

Neither prediction has come anywhere close to fruition. And judging by recent remarks by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, it is equally unlikely that the administration's belated courtship of the United Nations will bear fruit. The Bush administration's foreign policy has been, and remains, set upon a foundation of little more than wishful thinking. The same can be said for its domestic economic policy.

The two are not unrelated. Bush's fixation upon cutting taxes for the rich has drained the government's coffers. His avowed justification for doing so -- job growth -- has long been shorn of all credibility. And yet, as Paul Krugman observed in today's New York Times, the President "used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations." Tax cuts and the ballooning deficit have made the war in Iraq a military fiasco that we cannot afford and yet must continue to pay for. If the political quagmire is the war's main plotline, the economic quagmire is its subtext.

There are many reasons why U.S. forces in Iraq are overwhelmed by the enormous -- one might say Utopian -- project before them of turning a hostile population ruined by war and riven with crime and civil unrest into a "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East. But one of them is that the Bush administration believes that it can do "nation-building" Republican-style, that is, by handing over as much of the task as possible to private profiteers, and relying on an underfunded, overburdened government agency to deal with the inevitable social fallout. But in this case, that government agency is composed of teenage reservists who never expected to be stationed abroad, let alone to fight, the social fallout is in the form of terrorism, and the burden can be fatal.

Sixty-four American soldiers killed in a single week. How much will tax relief for the wealthy end up costing the rest of us?

Bush the Father, Bush the Son. Gulf War I, Gulf War II. George H.W. Bush unelected in 1992, George W. Bush unelected in 2004.

Let's hope so.

When Marx wrote the above words, he was referring to Louis Bonaparte, the cheap sequel of Napoleon I. Napoleon I had turned a young French republic into a dictatorship in 1799. His nephew, Louis Bonaparte, in another coup d'etat, did it again fifty years later.

Different country, different century, same old story. George W. Bush, who lost the 2000 election and then used well-positioned political cronies to overturn the voters' decision, seize the Oval Office and establish a Bush dynasty in the Greatest Democracy on Earth, was an armed militia short of executing America's first ever coup d'etat.

The difference is that this time around, Episode 2 feels less like farce and more like the end of the world. Bush the Father, whatever else you might say about the man, was at least legitimately elected to office. And his brand of conservativism was moderate -- indeed, too moderate for the taste of the fanatical right-wing core of his party, which abandoned his reelection effort and then compensated for the loss of the White House by hoisting Newt Gingrich's freshman Republican gang to Congress in 1994.

Bush the Son must have been taking notes. During the Florida vote count debacle, the talking heads unanimously declared that whoever should win, he will be forced to close the political rift in the polity by governing from the center. Those of us who believed this nonsense (myself included) had made the mistake of assuming that the Bush team had a modicum of respect for public opinion.

Silly us. Bush spent his first hundred days in office putting together the most reactionary neo-conservative cabinet the country has ever seen. He then, among other things, torpedoed the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, announced his intention to allow oil companies to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Arctic Refuge, and, ridiculously, withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in order to resurrect the rotting carcass of a "Star Wars"-style missile defense shield straight out of 1983. (Now THERE we have the second time as farce. At least in the movie version, the sequel was better than the first one.) All of this before September 11, 2001.

Bush had revealed his true face, a much uglier one than his father's. It was only after 9/11, however, that we got the chance to see just how much uglier it could get. Now, two invasions and a $500 billion deficit later, the second time looks far more tragic than the first.

Let's just make sure it ends the same way.

Republican politicians, who have spent the last 25 years singing the same tired tune of ending "big government" (or, for that matter, government of virtually any size) have predictably found themselves in the awkward position of having finally to answer the obvious question: If government is useless, then what exactly do we need YOU for? After all, under the Clinton administration, the Democrats proved themselves as adept as any fiscal conservative at hatcheting social programs desperately needed by politically powerless people (remember "welfare reform"?), with the advantage of being able simultaneously to posture as the guardians of those that most voters weren't yet prepared to see dismembered. Thus, during the 2000 campaign, when the Republican cleavers finally hit bone as Bush's audacious proposal to end Social Security as we know it was greeted by Democrats, cloth-coat Republicans and swing voters alike with dead silence, Gore was standing at the ready, lock box in hand. All of a sudden, when the meaning of "government" shifted from the local welfare office to workers' post-retirement bank account balances, the faceless bureaucracy began to lose a bit of its menace. Having spent decades annihalating nearly every last vestige of the New Deal welfare state, the Republicans, who know no other battle cry, had declared war upon one of its last quivering holdouts, only to find that it had survived precisely because it was what was most dear about "big government" to the politically potent American middle class. There was nothing left of "big government" to subdue; government was, indeed, too puny. The absurd spectacle of politicians asking for us to give them government jobs for the purpose of destroying the government had at last come face-to-face with its own inanity.

As we all know, Bush went on to lose that election, and the U.S. Supreme Court went on to put him in the Oval Office anyhow. Bush's design on workers' financial security in old age continues to rear its ugly head from time to time in front of selected audiences, and will no doubt come roaring back to life if we have the misfortune of having to suffer through another four years of Republican ascendancy. But the Republicans' strategic misfire on Social Security was an object lesson in diminishing returns. Unlike the War on Terrorism, the War on Government had specific enemies, and as those enemies grew scarce, the Republicans found voters less impressed by the party's umpteenth Ronald Reagan impersonation. Faced with the problem of having to pretend to pay attention to the interests of the vast majority of Americans at least until November 2004, the Republicans needed to come up with a more popular raison d'etre than liberating workers from their own material livelihood.

Enter September 11, 2001. If ever the nation needed a reminder of the continued relevance of government, here it was. Granted, the Republicans never included the military under the umbrella pejorative of "big government," but the firefighters and police officers who sacrificed their lives in the rescue effort in Manhattan that morning received federal subsidies for their vehicles, uniforms and paychecks from the same U.S. Treasury that had once made the AFDC possible. For the next few weeks, Bush spoke proudly of these government employees, before going on to include massive cuts in federal grants to firefighters in his FY 2002 budget proposal to Congress. Like old growth forests and school lunch programs, first responders, apparently, belong to the "wasteful government spending" that stands in the way of making tax cuts for the incredibly wealthy permanent.

But then, Bush doesn't need firefighters, ambulance drivers or police officers to compensate for the deficit of purpose suffered by aspiring Republican government functionaries in the absence of a government to destroy. They're as expendable to the Republicans as clean air and water. He has something better: unending war. Massive military adventures overseas -- well there's a government spending program the whole family can agree on.

As the September 11 Commission has begun to reveal, the White House had designs on Iraq well before Al Qaeda murdered thousands in New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. Indeed, it is likely that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were plotting a sequel to the first Gulf War ever since Bush the Father failed to take Bagdhad, and that serious discussions of retaliation against an enemy that had absolutely no connection to Al Qaeda took place among top officials as early as the day after the September 11 attacks. What is absolutely certain is that the war was initiated before Al Qaeda was eliminated as a serious threat to United States citizens, and that in the absence of proven links (which looks now more like the proof of absent links) between that organization and Saddam Hussein, it was at the cost of diverting U.S. attention from the actual culprits of the 9/11 attacks, during which time they were able to regroup while the Taliban, meanwhile, began its resurgence in "liberated" Afghanistan. If the bombing in Madrid proves indeed to have been the work of Al Qaeda, we will have the Bush administration to blame for affording it the time and freedom of movement and communication necessary to plan and execute the attack while the Pentagon and the CIA were burying their heads in Iraqi sand.

The war against Iraq was, at best, an especially revolting example of political opportunism. But it was something else, something more portentous. Within the bounds of political possibility, the Republican Party has spent the last two-and-a-half decades destroying nearly every social good that government has historically been capable of delivering to its citizens. The Republican project of undoing the post-Progressive era advances of social policy and reducing the scope of government responsibility for the livelihoods of its citizens to the standards of the late nineteenth century has been largely completed. The Republicans' claim of the worthlessness of government has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; they have "proved" that government cannot solve your problems by systematically undermining its capacity to do so. But the Republicans' victory in this respect has been at the same time its quandary. Thanks to them, the wrecked apparatus of government is largely incapable of doing anything positive for anyone. So they can't promise to actually provide voters with anything, and now that they've run out of programs to liquidate, they can't even pretend to "help" voters by taking away from them what's already been provided. What can you campaign on when you can deliver nothing?

The answer, of course, is that you can campaign on fear. If government can do nothing else, it can protect you from the terrorists that are lurking around every corner, real or imagined. And the way it can do so is by ignoring the will of the rest of the world and invading whatever country it chooses, provided it doesn't appear to be strong enough to put up a real fight (as well as by spying on its citizens with impunity, and detaining them illegally and indefinitely). War, then, is no longer solely a matter of international relations; it emanates from the logic of our own domestic political competition. To the Bush administration, an invasion is mere fodder for beefing up polling numbers, like kissing babies and throwing opening pitches at baseball games. With no social programs remaining to promise to destroy, and with a party opposed on principle to creating them, "national security" is the only bait left on the fish hook. What's more, it's infinitely replenishable. When all the potholes have been filled, so to speak, it's hard to campaign on filling more potholes. But to get the electorate behind yet another invasion, all you have to do is conjure up a little more fear. The Bush administration has recast the role of the Federal Government into a massive banker of fear. The formula is simple: induce anxiety, then offer the public specious solutions that promise to allay it. Then induce more anxiety. There's really no other way to understand the function of "Terrorism Threat Level" alerts accompanied by no specific details and no advice of what to do about it than as an instrument whose sole purpose is to make people nervous enough to support the Administration in whatever measures it proposes to take in response, no matter how patently disingenuous, like drilling for oil in Alaska. Or declaring war on Iraq.

Even Clausewitz could not have dreamed of such a thing. "If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will," Clausewitz also wrote, "he will reach them in spite of all obstacles." If he was right in the first instance, he well could be so in this one. The Bush administration's ambition, audacity and strength of will are beyond question. It has proved that to be the case time and time again, in its economic policy, its foreign policy, and in its reflexive retaliation against anyone who dares to criticize it. On the other hand, its obstacles are immense. We intend to add to that immensity.

I'd like to add one more of Clausewitz's observations: "It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past." We have put together our organization largely with this intuition in mind. This election will be determined by an incredibly slim margin of the electorate, and among the many of us who recognize what is at stake, the work that we do over the next few weeks and months is likely to decide its outcome. The time of action has not yet passed.