I must admit to finding The American Prospect, the political magazine I most often in agree with these days, just a little dull, in keeping with its Cantabridgian, Dukakisite origins. However, Harold Meyerson's recent cover story over there, "The Most Dangerous President Ever," says just about everything that needs to be said.

2004 is going to be a real gut check for American democracy. The forces of corporate oligarchy on are the march, and in the fear and disorientation produced by the terrorist attacks and the wars that followed, our would-be masters have been handed the most potent political weapon they ever could have imagined. The Republicans will work to ensure that the easiest way to feel safe and optimistic will be accepting the Bush administration's open lies: that war against any old Arab regime dislike will protect us from stateless terrorists, that new global commitments can be taken on and "no child left behind" while every government in the country is intentionally thrown into fiscal crisis, that a massive tax cut guaranteed to destroy many jobs is actually a "jobs and growth" package, etc. They are openly planning to turn 9/11/04 into a campaign kick-off event.

Most Americans don't actually support the Bush administration on any particular domestic issue, and in my view even the Iraq War was embraced more out of duty more than genuine enthusiasm. Yet really seeing to the bottom of this administration's enormities is far more upsetting than most people will tolerate. (The modern conservative movement is almost based on the psychological insight that angry rejection of upsetting truths is easier for most people than accepting some idea that might call an aspect of their lives or beliefs into question.)

Yet if a few more American voters don't start allowing themselves to get a little more upset and angry at someone besides the mythical liberals that run the country in the talk radio universe, the early years of the 21st-century are going to be remembered as the worst sort of turning point. Four more years of Shrub, and the New Deal social compact will have been beaten nearly to death and most of the public institutions built over the last century will have been shut down, fatally weakened, or (as in higher education) effectively made private and exclusive from replacing public funding with user fees (like tuition) and private donations.