What I mean is that the modern Republican Party (essentially what used to be known as the "New Right" or sometimes now called "movement conservatism," in institutional form), particularly the Republican Party run by Karl Rove, defines dissent or disagreement from its policy choices as "un-American." Sometimes this claim is subtle, sometimes it is explicit. But nevertheless, today's Republican Party in many cases defines views disagreeing within its agenda as being outside an acceptable definition of the American nation.
This, IMO, is a sinister development and reminds me of the kind of thinking of Communist Parties around the world, democratic and not - ie if you aren't a friend of the revolution, you are its enemy. Accordingly, you will play no role in a country governed by a Communist government, and in a non-democratic Communist take over, you either "get with the program," or go to jail. The same is true of many far right parties as well. And because Italy has a strong Fascist and Communist traditions which have effectively played out a kind of "cold civil war" even when the Christian Democratic Party was dominant, I make the analogy.
Ben P
However, in Italy's partitocracy, both post-fascists and communists were marginalised (the system wasn't just the Christian Democrats, but the Socialists too); and as far as I know, Italian communists were of a different tradition from what we had here in Central-Eastern Europe, not one aiming for non-democratic takeover. (Quite the contrary: Western intelligence services had a grand operation after WWII - e.g. Gladio et al - to prevent a democratic victory of the party, quite nasty tough less nasty than what went on in Greece.)
Meanwhile, what Rove does has a US tradition too, anti-Vietnam-war protesters and earlier those leftists witch-hunted by McCarthy and even earlier by the FBI (and the media and the public going along with authorities) had to feel it. Or, even further back, there is Rove's role model, that was a certain Mark Hanna, spinmeister for the founder of the US Empire, President McKinley (who rates higher than Bush on my personal list of worst US Presidents). Going yet again earlier, tough not fully relevant (no explicit "un-American" quote here), the following description of a Republican campaign when Gorver Cleveland was elected, from Cuban poet José Martí, is hauntingly familiar:
"It's brutal, and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. The white beards of the newspapers forget all about the decorum of old age. They dump buckets of mud on all our heads. They knowingly lie and exaggerate. They stab each other in the belly and the back. Any defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander proudly struts ... . A good faith observer has no idea how to analyze a battle in which everyone considers it legitimate to campaign in bad faith. ...The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions. Who had a chance to compete against them? Defeat them? -- if elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers?
...The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions. Who had a chance to compete against them? Defeat them? -- if elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers?
