Week of Sept. 3, 2007

Sept. 11 cracked the plaster on that master narrative of American prowess because it so exactly duplicated the terms of the early Indian wars, right down to the fecklessness of our leaders and the failures of our military strategies. Like its early American antecedents, the 9/11 attack was a homeland incursion against civilian targets by non-European, non-Christian combatants who fought under the flag of no recognized nation. Like the “different type of war” heralded by President Bush, the 17th and 18th century “troubles” — as one Puritan chronicler of Metacom’s Rebellion called them, refusing to grant them “the name of a war” — seemed to have no battlefield conventions, no constraints and no end.

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt imposed wage controls on American companies. Unable to lure workers with higher salaries, many employers began offering health insurance and other benefits. Then, in 1952, officials at the Internal Revenue Service ruled that these benefits wouldn’t count as taxable income.

And so, accidentally, the modern American health and pension system was born.

Surely we should not judge the merits of any political philosophy by the fluctuations in public support of the party most closely identified with it. Yet people do so all the time. When the Republican Party was in the ascendancy a few years ago, some conservatives took its rising power as a sign of a new conservative era and the validity of their own ideas. In America winners always think they're deserving. Now that the fortunes of the GOP have ebbed and Democrats seem to have the energy, the edge, and -- most surprising of all -- the lion's share of the money in the 2008 campaign, liberals may be tempted to imagine that those happy circumstances augur a new era for them and confirm that their ideas are true and just.

Which, as a liberal, I would certainly like to believe. But genuine historical watersheds are rare, and it is dangerous to make too much of the latest public mood. At the moment, Americans are mainly reacting against the failures of the Bush administration and the exhaustion of the conservative movement. It's unclear whether that negative verdict will turn into strong positive support for Democrats in general and liberals in particular.

It should surprise no one that England’s Special Branch — the police intelligence unit — was watching George Orwell during most of his adult life. It is certainly what Orwell, a student of political paranoia, would have expected.

IF THE past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote in his novel The Go-Between, it is evidently one of the most popular travel destinations.