And the problem with a traumatised population is that their expectations just get lower and lower, and suddenly, in retrospect, Bush doesn't seem so bad after all - he didn't quite manage to start a world war...yet

Fixed.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

I guess what Redstar is saying is that despite what many on the wonkosphere suggest, 2008 is not analogous to the 1932 election that brought FDR and the New Deal, but 2012 may well be as long as McCain wins in 2008. If a Democrat wins in 2008 they will be like Carter to Reagan in 2012.

It'd be nice if the battle were only against the right wingers, not half of the left on top of that — François in Paris

always advance as we expect, but the key thing is to, when you get a window to move through, jump through it as far as you can for the inevitable steps backward.

I also firmly believe that this progress will not come from the US, but elsewhere, and we should help it along and do our best to bring it back to ourselves.

Most human progress in recorded time works this way and not by little baby steps, and we are, in the grand scheme of things, indeed moving forward, not backward, although sometimes this is hard to see given we seem to be in a bit of a backwards phase. It's pretty rare that such backwards phases take the homicidal turn you suggest - it happens, but it's pretty rare. But such great leaps forward rarely are peaceful, either. Usually, at the very least, a brick or two get thrown.

As regards America I see it more as an historical accident, that it becomes a hyperpower due to the implosion of the Soviet Union whose demise it helped along, without a single border to defend from agressor nations, a country whose people know neither the world nor, really, war. This has led the country to excesses which will like any other ideologically blinkered regime lead to its ultimate decay from within, not unlike the Soviet Union had it not reformed (and, in the case of the US, there really is no prospect of any Gorbachev on the horizon either, is there). I'm not exactly sanguine about what the American people will do when and if the logical decline starts to gradually improverish large swathes of the population, and note that among so-called "political independents" (the ones Obama and Clinton are so busy courting today) in America, those brown people from Latin America might well be already be to blame for the little pain currently being experienced:

For independents, the top issue underlying the discontent is `our borders' having been `left unprotected and illegal immigration' growing - cited by 40 percent, with no other issue a close second...

You get that? They're being raped by Wall Street, inflation is killing them at the pocketbook, education for their kids is more and more out of reach, access to healthcare more expensive by the year, their children are being sent to die in rich men's wars just like the 19th century, and who's to blame? Brown people. I'm sorry, but there's really no other way to put this: this will not get better until these people's idiocy has been beaten out of them.

There's unfortunatley really nothing to do in America's case but try as best to contain it as it's inexorable decline commences, and work to limit the ill effects of that decline on ourselves. Job one in this effort is to make pains to identify ourselves as different, and having different interests, different values, different morals even, then them, and the sooner we do this the better.

The good news is that there are cases in human history of places which simply implode more or less peacefully.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill