[A]nyone who was even remotely aware of American politics during the Clinton Administration remembers the paranoia: black helicopters were coming to take all conservatives away to prison camps; civil war was going to break out any moment; Clinton was going to declare himself President for Life; jack-booted government thugs from FEMA were running a secret government that would take away all your freedoms; everyone would be forced to have chips implanted in their brains; the United Nations was going to take over the United States and turn everyone into serfs; the Bible was going to be banned; all white women would be forced to marry black men; abortion was going to become mandatory.

I'm not making any of those up. I remember hearing, seeing, and reading every single one of those dire predictions, all advanced with total seriousness, on right-wing radio, in the Republican House, in right-wing publications and listservs all throughout the decade.

Of course, none of those things ever happened or came close to happening. None of them ever could have happened. None of them was ever even planned. These dystopian nightmares were never part of anyone's agenda. None of them ever existed, even as notions, except in the fevered minds of those who were "warning" everyone about them. The demonic Left that the American Right keeps talking about, the entity that wants to do all of these horrible things, simply does not exist. At no point in its entire history, in power or out of it, has the Democratic Party ever even suggested or hinted any of this stuff.

Everything Scoville says is quite true, and it would be natural to say to those on our side of the aisle who spin similarly paranoid fantasies about Bush declaring a state of emergency and refusing to leave office, establishment of a theocracy and so on, that they are just as mistaken in these beliefs as the right was in their beliefs during the Clinton years (and now, on the eve of a possible Democratic electoral victory) -- the problem being that the radical right-wing that now controls the Republican party and through it the Federal government, and to whom Bush plays constantly (because he needs them to maintain his position and influence) has made it quite clear that their commitment is not to democracy, but to an agenda the would indeed lead to a theocracy, and that they approve of authoritarian government -- as long as their guy is in charge.

The Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican party, having shown from Day One that they cannot be trusted to do the right thing, doesn't really deserve the benefit of our doubt, and yet I cannot help but think that the worst of the things we dread might happen will not actually come about. I suppose that means I believe that they still have a scrap of decency about them. Maybe, or perhaps I'm just a bit cynical about the most cynical take on Bush and company. I tend to see them as bad -- corrupt, incompetent, and ideologically misguided -- but not as evil.

It's not that I think that they will do the right thing as much as it is that I don't think they have it in them to do the worst thing, if only because they've never quite been that bad up until now -- although they've certainly been bad enough.

(I think nowadays, among Democrats, liberals and progressives, this viewpoint makes me something of an optimist, if not a cheerful one.)