Now that this Democratic Presidential contest appears headed to a conclusion it is time to reflect back on all those contests. Of all the themes that emerged form various commentators none distressed me more than the contempt many held for the American people.

This has been one of the more unfortunate byproducts the Bush years. In the pronouncements of some on the left there lies a thinly-veiled contempt for the average American who does not read the right books, attend the right concerts, and send their children to the right schools. NASCAR, country music, flag decals, and support our troops stickers get all lumped together in some limousine liberal omelet that tastes of an old prejudice that has fermented over the entire life of this Republic: a belief the average American will fall for any scam of scheme, especially if a republican is behind it.

This belief will become stronger not weaker as November approaches, especially if the polls show john McCain in the lead. Then people will say, as they did about George Bush, “How can the American people be so stupid as to vote for such an idiot?” Although, this strain is an old one, its current manifestation worries me, for if we lose faith in the American people then we have lost faith in democracy. If we do not trust the people to govern, then who does deserve our trust?

One of the reasons I wrote The Strange Death of Liberal America was to show that democracy does not die because of some imagined quirk in the national character–whatever that is. It dies one day at a time as people make the little compromises they think they need to make to get by or allow immoral or illegal activity to occur. It also dies because the opposition fails to in its task of serving as an opposition.

As one whose grandfather was at the center of the anti-Nazi movement along with his close friend Willy Brandt, I always blow a gasket when someone blames the “German people.” On top of this, my recently departed uncle was a Berlin Jew who managed to escape the Shoah, but the visa he sent his mother arrived a day after she left on a train for Dachau.

Throughout the 1920s the rule of law slowly died in the Weimar Republic. Parties formed political street gangs recruited from jails and beer halls who just liked to beat up people. Their “job” was to disrupt political rallies of opposition parties and to personally harass anyone who openly supported an opposition party.

My family’s house was machine-gunned on successive days by the Nazis and the Communists, who had the most active street gangs. Both parties openly stated their purpose was to so disrupt normal democratic procedures that people would finally ask for a dictatorship to keep order (sound familiar).

The days around the infamous Reichstag Fire are instructive. The Nazis set the fire themselves then blamed it on the Communists. Many Germans at first figured the Nazis did it, but the Nazis ran into an incredible stroke of luck: a crazy anarchist apparently had the same idea on the same night and was found in the ruins of the building. He confessed. Later at Nuremberg the true story would emerge as that despicable act found a place in the volumes that detailed the atrocities of Josef Mengele and the engineering designs for the factories of genocide that would become the Shoah.

Literally days after the fire Hitler ordered martial law all over Germany. To make sure the people got the message, organized groups of storm troopers, police, soldiers and just plain thugs careened through the country in trucks, cars and any vehicle they could find intimidating people and randomly carrying out acts of violence just to show they could do it and get away with it. The reason no one stopped them has nothing to do with a flaw in the German character, it has to do with the simple fact they were outgunned.

Imagine yourself a simple shopkeeper. One morning when you open your shop you are confronted with a half dozen juvenile delinquents armed with whatever they could find who decide to stop by and check on your “loyalty.” Or maybe they already knew you voted SPD or worse yet you have an SPD sign in your window. Depending on how they feel, they sweep through your store smashing anything they can find, beating you senseless and threatening your family.

My aunt experienced something like that on her way home from school. As she walked past the town square she heard the sound of hammering and construction along with loud laughing and boasting. Then she saw it: a gallows was being built that had a sign with her father’s (my grandfather’s) name on it. They were going to hang him that afternoon for trumped-up charges without a trial.

People were powerless to stop this illegal execution. Its purpose was quite clear: to show that the Nazis could eliminate with impunity even the loudest, most forceful voices of the opposition. When my aunt arrived home she and my grandmother were greeted by a strange gentleman who told them to get in a car. The driver was an SPD party member who had been assigned to get them out of the country.

Others were not so lucky. In the Hamburg history museum there is a section devoted to those for whom “they came for first” who were arrested, sent to labor camps and then executed. Remember all this is taking place in 1933! One prominent German exile friend of my grandfather’s (I think it was Thomas Mann) said, democracy does not disappear all at once but by the nibbles of creatures we regard with the same contempt as rats, until we wake up one morning and the rats have chewed away the very foundations of democracy and it falls down on us like a rotten house.

What does this have to do with The Strange Death of Liberal America? The key value of Liberal America is the belief that government exists to keep the playing field level. One of the most troubling aspects of the Republican Counterrevolution has been the slow erosion of the rule of law in the name of tilting the playing field that has taken place during the Bush Administration, much of it with the willing collaboration of the Democratic Party.

The Patriot Act, one of the more scary pieces of legislation ever passed by this country had the approval of the Democrats who even went so far as to vote in favor of it not once but twice! The abuses of civil rights and liberties that have taken place under the guise of “fighting terrorism” are well-known to all of us thanks to an alert press and yes, also to bloggers who have uncovered some of the most serious misdeeds.

But the Democrats have been afraid to raise their voices for fear of seeming “unpatriotic.” In doing so they sacrifice principles for expediency. That the voters have seen though this has been lost on many.

There are a few serious transgressions that have not been well-publicized. The worst was the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot which I describe in Strange Death in which a carefully orchestrated “riot” by Republican operatives who physically intimidated vote counters in Miami-Dade shut down the recount in 2000. None of the people involved in this have ever been prosecuted. Some were even promoted.

So is all this due to some defect in the “American character? Is it due to the stupidity of the average American? Of course not. It is due to the fact that we have systematically permitted the Republican Party to undermine what I call the four cornerstones of Liberal America: economic and social justice, educational equity, media fairness and voting rights. The assaults have been carried out simultaneously, making them more difficult to oppose.

If you are marginally poor or, even worse homeless, so much of your energies are devoted to just staying alive when you aren’t busy filling out a pile of forms and dealing with the downright nasty people who administer programs designed to help you. As for social justice, this country is on the verge of stepping back into the nineteenth century.

We have anti-immigrant types harassing anyone who is a suspected illegal immigrant. We have vigilante types carrying out their own personal wars on terrorists, and we have concerted organized attacks on people of color whom the talk radio fascists speak of in code words not unlike those the Nazis used for the Jews. If you are gay, your very soul is threatened by those who in the Middle Ages might have burned you at the stake. It has been almost 100 years since women first received the right to vote and THIS YEAR will be THE FIRST TIME a woman has a chance to become President. If you are a Native American, all the above applies and more. It is no accident that the Abramoff scandal was this century’s equivalent of the Indian agent rip-offs of the Nineteenth Century.

Move on to education where No Child Left Behind has teachers teaching to irrelevant tests and the government threatening to close down schools and turn them over to private corporations as was done in New Orleans shortly before Katrina hit. Meanwhile education funding continues to be cut by both state and federal agencies. The Bush Administration even cut finds for Indian Education. Talk about no child left behind.

On to the media. A Ronald Reagan veto of the renewal of the Fairness Doctrine opened the door to the vitriol of the Era of Bad Feelings. This has allowed for the formation of the first overtly partisan television network in history: Fox News. On the radio, the voices of the Raucous Right have turned the airwaves into the equivalent of a dingy alley behind a bar in a bad part of town.

Last we come to voting. The Republicans systematically tried to dismantle one of the greatest pieces of the legislation from the last century, the Voting Rights Act. They almost succeeded. How many bloggers who were ranting away about Iraq devoted one word to this while the civil rights veteran John Lewis stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and with the righteous indignation of someone who has been deeply, morally wronged and the rhetorical skills honed from years of arguing with perverts and political gangsters told of his personal struggles to bring civil rights to this country–struggles that took place within the living memory of many Americans.

What I learned from my family is that preserving democracy is something you need to do consciously every day, for it is the little, everyday acts that help keep democracy alive. To witness discrimination and do nothing is to allow the rats to take yet another bite. To allow our schools to become Ayatollah Academies is to allow the rats to take another bite. To permit the airwaves–airwaves owned by the people–to spew hate and lies is to allow the rats to take another bite. To allow 18,000 votes to disappear in Sarasota County, Florida is to allow the rats to take another bite.

Responsibility and democracy and Liberal America are not abstractions, they are values and values are what make us human, holding our fragile bodies together as surely as sinew and bone by giving them a purpose to get up every day and face whatever must be faced with strength and courage.

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