It’s been a long six years of George Bush…but it looks like all those folks who thought the old politics-as-usual were still preferable to "partisanship" and "divisiveness" are finally starting to get what they’re dealing with now.  This from Oliver Willis:

I can completely identify with Josh Marshall here and his portrayal of the bare-knuckle style of our politics nowadays.

With all those caveats though, there is a difference. And I think at some level or another, it’s one almost everyone in the center-left can relate to, at least at some level. For my part, I don’t feel my politics have changed much over the past half dozen years, if by that we mean my basic political orientation, policies I believe in and don’t, basic understanding of how the world works and so forth. Many people who read my site are much more to the left politically than I am. And occasionally, some issue will come up where that fact suddenly becomes evident, often to people’s surprise and sometimes anger.

I was going to start by saying that what’s changed for me is that the country I know and value is under attack. But that’s not quite it.

I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that’s fine. It’s their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country — call it movement conservatism in its late, degraded form — and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.

I’ve not really moved an inch on my positions on the important issues, but the insanity of the Bush presidency makes my center-left proclivities appear to be on the far, far, left (which, in a Democratic presidency will probably be the second biggest pain in my butt).

I dislike the two-dimensional political spectrum.  I seem liberal on some issues (censorship, victimless crime, minority rights, war, immigration, church-state separation, education) conservative on others (gun control, free trade, national defense) and moderate on still others (regulation of the economy, taxation, state’s rights, science and research).  I don’t see myself so much as liberal or conservative, as a social engineer.  A rule of law is social engineering.  A constitution is social engineering.  Societies either engineer themselves to work or they don’t.  Ask the children of Marx and Lenin, ask the shades that walk the fields of Gettysburg what happens to a society when its understanding of the human identity and society is profoundly wrong.  I am of the party of Whatever Actually Works.

But in these times anyone who isn’t with Bush is a liberal, so I reckon that’s what I am now too.  And it’s not because we’ve all actually become liberals. It’s because the Bush gang has deliberately, cynically, and with malice, sought to up-end politics-as-usual in America, destroy the American political consensus and, quite literally, destroy the democratic political process.  And they did it so they could seize power for themselves and hold onto it indefinitely.  Pat Buchanan saw it back when he was working for Nixon, and called it "positive polarization": divide the country, and they’d have the bigger half.  But the Bush gang has gone beyond that, into the destruction of the democratic process itself.  They are radicals, in the mold of the 1930s brownshirts, who reject not just social liberalism, but democracy itself, as decadent.

In an interview with  the London Guardian back in September 19, 2003, Paul Krugman spoke of when he saw it himself…ironically through the words of Henry Kissinger…

Even more confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman’s new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, Krugman describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it’s Henry Kissinger.

"The first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study – but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s – describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.

This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn’t comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger’s theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections – as opposed to, say, from God.

But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".

"My liberal friends said, ‘I’m not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say’," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There’s this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we’re facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being ‘shrill’, of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)

Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn’t have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."

Why anyone would be surprised to see all this in that open sewer that is the Bush base after the election of 2000 is beyond me, other then, as Krugman says, people just find it nearly impossible to take at face value what they’re seeing, when it comes to dealing with a group of anti democratic radicals who are actually in power.  Somehow, power is supposed to moderate the radical impulse.  But sometimes it just feeds it.

I came of political age during Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate.  Back then Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, in response to a reporter’s question about desegregation, said something that I have thought ever since should be engraved on every ballot presented to every voter in every election, in every polling place in America: "Watch what we do, not what we say."  I never thought I would see a president tell a bigger lie to the American people then Nixon’s "I am not a crook."  But George Bush has looked us all in the eye and said "I’m a uniter, not a divider", and now America is more divided then ever, and that was deliberate.  They knew they couldn’t govern from a majority consensus, but they figured they could have the biggest piece of a factionalized America.  So they waved the flag in our faces, while they were busy ripping the America it stood for apart, and now there is no more politics-as-usual.