There's a thread downstream [1] featuring one of the oldest, and to me most tedious, tropes of American discourse: the fashionably cynical argument that there's no real difference between the two major parties where average folks are concerned. In normal times, this could be dismissed as a modish affectation, the kind that produces the pleasing feeling of being somehow smarter, more in tune with the Zeitgeist, so desired by those who'd like to keep at bay the tedium of making public choices; but these are not normal times. You're just not paying attention, and your argument is akin to doubting the existence of sharks because you haven't been eaten by one yet.
To put it in very stark terms: the foundations of the Republic are under attack. Simply put, while we may have seen precedents for this or that action taken by the former ruling party, we have never, in two hundred and thirty years, seen a systemic assault, on so many fronts at once, on the basic principles of American governance and the civilizational bedrock that underlies them. Once again: among people paying attention, in the academy, legislatures, the bar, business, even the church, this is not a controversial assessment; you, my friend, just haven't been paying attention. And I get impatient with it, because yours is fundamentally a lazy, solipsistic argument.
Underlying our civilization is the principle of empiricism. The republican party seeks to replace that principle, that observable reality is the proper yardstick for decision-making, with the concept that ideology and religion are in fact the arbiters. This is manifest in such little-known endeavors as, say, budgetary policy, which they base on the unproven (but fervently willed) trickle-down theory; in climate policy, the official policy of the republican party is that global warming does not exist; in trade policy, in educational policy, foreign policy, defense policy, the republicans adhere to a fundamentally ideological view of the world. For the first time in American history, one of the two major parties is expressly, fundamentally, intrinsically ideological. That's never happened before – ever.
Underlying, even founding, our government is the concept of the rule of law, the idea that the same rules apply to all, and that nobody is above or below the embrace of the law. The republicans have made at least two sustained attacks on that fundamental principle, which itself predates even the Common Law: one, the legislative action taken by Congress on Terri Schiavo, which established the ominous precedent that Congress could pass a law applying to only one person (the same logic which, incidentally, underpinned Bush v. Gore, the first Supreme Court decision to expressly abjure precedent, and a revolution in its own right); two, the principle established by republicans, for the duration of what they call 'The Long War', that any President at his (or her) discretion and pleasure, without any oversight, can declare any American citizen an enemy combatant, removing such a citizen from any protection of the law. That's earth-shattering in terms of constitutional import, and entirely without precedent.
Then, there's the thorny question of the separation of church and state, where once again the lines are clear: Democrats support it, republicans, as a matter of doctrine and policy, do not. Read their party platform [2] every once in a while. Again, this is bedrock, and it's not about silly frippery such as school prayer; it's about the precedent and principle of whether the state can legislate private belief, and whether private belief may be free of the compulsions of the state. If that's an irrelevant distinction to some people, then I consider that view to be shallow and scarcely worthy of debate, because this is the stuff which produced centuries of wars. Read your history. For that matter, read Theocracy Watch [3].
Or consider a small, theoretical argument known to an obscure clique of political scientists as 'the separation of powers'. It is official policy of the republican party that one of these branches, the executive, is supreme over the other two, the legislative and the judicative. For example, republicans hold that 'signing statements' can be attached by a President to Acts of Congress, determining what they mean. That this usuros the powers of the legislature is the intent of this view. In the same vein, the republicans have attempted to pass legislation removing certain subjects - school prayer, abortion and flag burning - from judicial review. What does this mean in the aggregate? It means that republicans are setting up a government that is unaccountable to anyone. And now tell me that this doesn't matter, or that Democrats are doing the same.
It's very easy to get caught up in the details of the Bush administration's assault on America. So they read our mail, Nixon did that, too. Same thing with tapping phones. So they intern people without due process, FDR did, too. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus for a while, when it seemed that an enemy army was about to take the capital. So they invade foreign countries – ever heard of McKinley? So they legislate against evolution, global warming, sex education, equal rights, who cares, that's what republicans do, right?
The difference this time around is that it's all happening at the same time, is being precipitated by the same actors, and flows from a coherent ideology, one that has some distance to go before it concludes. Where will that conclusion be? If it's not stopped, in a totalitarian, Christianist state.
Here's what matters, and why the small-bore argument of 'they're all crooks' ultimately fails: the aggregate of the republican assault on America is such that it's a new thing entirely. It's unprecedented, in breadth and scope, by anything that has happened in the centuries of our national journey. If you fail to see that, you simply don't know what you're talking about. In short, you're wrong, and dangerously so.
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