Can you feel it? This, finally, is our moment.

We may not have spent forty years in the desert, but the twenty-five since Reagan the cardboard cowboy rode into town have been plenty long enough. And, anyway, the last five have been like five hundred for anybody with a brain or a heart.

But the good news is that today, without question, the movement of regressive politics in America (also known – wrongly – as conservatism) is crashing up against the shoals of its own inanity, and the American public is finally beginning to sober up after cutting loose on a quarter-century’s bender, fueled by the frightening fantasies of the right. Just the last two weeks alone feel like an attitudinal sea change in America.

Unfortunately, it probably took a war to achieve this effect. And, even more unfortunately, not just any war, but a losing war. And not just any losing war, but a losing war with significant American casualties. I’m delighted beyond words that reality is now catching up to the Bush administration, but the awful truth is that if America had invaded Iraq and actually won the war back when our dress-up-doll-would-be-fighter-jock president announced that we had, we’d all be cruising along, wallowing fat, dumb and happy in our private puddle of mud, and he would be a hero. Similarly, the American military could probably get away with decimating a hundred thousand Iraqis (and quite possibly already has) and the affair would still be seen as a success if few Americans were likewise consumed by the war.

So there is both more and less to George W. Bush’s current free-fall in popularity and public trust (his current job approval ratings are down to 34 percent and sinking). The ‘less’ part are these particular circumstances of the war, which have little to do with the moral revulsion the rest of the world feels about it. But the ‘more’ part goes to a much broader dissatisfaction with the policies and performance of the administration.

Silly Americans. What’s not to like about W? A war based on lies which has split the country, claimed over 2,000 American lives as well as those of 30,000-100,000 or more Iraqis, wounded 15,000 Americans, cost $300 billion and made the world hate us? Demolition derby fiscal policies which have now plunged the country into $8 trillion debt – more than $50,000 for every American taxpayer – plus interest, and exploding further every day, thus making Bush a bigger borrower than all his 42 predecessors combined? Tax policies which will have the effect of transferring massive revenue liabilities from the rich to the middle class, and from the present generation to the next? And, hey, what about all those jobs not created, as were promised to justify the tax cuts? Speaking of which, there are also the (non-)existing jobs being exported overseas in droves, with tax incentives for doing so, no less, making Bush the first president since the Great Depression to lose jobs on his watch (and more coming – witness the 30,000 GM layoffs announced this week). How ‘bout environmental destruction, including irreversible global warming, in exchange for quick profits to a handful of the already rich? A country deeply and angrily divided, intentionally, by the Great Uniter-Not-A-Divider and his Rasputin Rove?

Really, if Bush were actively trying to become the worst president in American history, he could hardly have amassed a more powerful case for himself. Hey, and there’s three more years yet to go!

Three more years, indeed. Mr. Bush’s fun has really only just begun. The economy feels tenuous at best. Get out of the way of the angry horde stampeding toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, tar and feathers in hand, should a serious recession hit. The war in Iraq has nowhere to go but down, and Bush faces stark choices – while he has choices at all – between failure or disaster there. As one American officer in-country recently put it, the US now has two options remaining. We can either lose the war in Iraq, or we can lose the war in Iraq and our army both. Not even Rove on his best days (that is to say his worst) – which seem to have departed him anyhow (and he hasn’t even been indicted yet) – can spin Bush out of that one. You can wrap-up a civil war, or an internationalized civil war, or a theocracy, or a Saddam-like government sans Saddam himself, or all of the above in pretty bows and call it a ‘victory’, but no one is going to believe it anymore. Bush’s credibility is about as tangible as Saddam’s WMD these days, and it ain’t ever coming back. Then there’s home heating oil costs, about to make some already angry Americans really furious this winter. And, as if that weren’t a bleak enough future for the Bush administration, there are about six scandals (and no doubt sixteen more that we don’t yet know about) headed in the direction of the White House, like a tsunami crossing the Atlantic. All told, George Bush the Lifelong Failure is about to reprise his one and only act, but this time with no billionaire Saudis to throw him a rope, or any other safety net there to save him. Instead of a victory lap, Bush’s second term is already turning into a prison sentence.

Yes, this is – finally – truly our moment. However, it is a moment to be seized, not to be passively received. For everything is at stake in how progressives handle the meltdown of the right.

What is crucial is that current developments not be recorded in the public consciousness as a failed presidency alone, but rather as a disastrously failed ideology. Progressives must make sure that what is now happening is understood – that is, framed – for what it in fact is, not for what a desperate right will try to spin it as, once they too have thrown the plummeting Bush overboard in a scramble to save their own skins. This is a once-only opportunity for us destroy the cancer of regressive conservatism in America for a generation or more, and we must not miss this train.

We must turn this ugly chapter in American history into something akin to how Germans view their grandparents’ embrace of fascism – that is, as an inexplicable and shameful turn to the Dark Side. It must also be understood to be all of a piece, and everything about it must be seen to have been wrong, foolish, immoral, dangerous, corrupt, arrogant and vile. It is not enough, by any stretch, for us to simply cripple or even destroy the Bush White House (or, more accurately, to stand by and watch as they do this to themselves). We must destroy this entire movement which has promised and delivered so much grief to America and the world.

Not only Bush and Cheney, but Congress, the increasingly conservative courts, and virtually every Republican in the land must be mutually repudiated. In fact, they must be tied together so tightly that they repudiate each other, and collectively drown each other as the public casts them over the side of the ship of state.

The contemporary Republican Party has shown enormous party discipline in recent years, and now, equally, it must be disciplined as a party. The so-called moderates of the GOP are currently jumping from a rapidly sinking ship (hell, even Rick Santorum is nowadays trying to distance himself from the president, talking about the mistakes Bush has made in the ‘war on terror’), but they were the same folks who made this nightmare possible. Anytime any progressive starts feeling any sympathy for a Colin Powell or a John McCain, we must remind ourselves of their crucial legitimizing and enabling performances, such as those at the UN or the Republican Convention, respectively, not to mention the votes cast for the war, the tax cuts and more.

I believe the potential exists – even in conservative, frightened, America – to eradicate this movement almost completely, along with most of what it stands for. It is its own worst enemy. All we have to do is to make sure it all hangs together as a singular piece. Americans now know the war was a lie, a tragedy, an open wound on the treasury and the military, and a national security debacle. They know that the fiscal program of the regressive movement has been disastrous, though they don’t yet entirely understand its real motivation as a vehicle for the transfer of wealth in America. They know that they disagree with the right on everything from reproductive choice to environmental policy to Social Security to managing Terri Schiavo’s medical care.

But, so far, these and the other failures of the Bush/DeLay/Scalia Axis of Evil have not been tied to each other in the public consciousness, and, more importantly, have not been tied to a central storyline which (accurately, as opposed to Republican frames) explains its motivation and aspirations to pillage the American middle class, dominate the world, and destroy American democracy and civil liberties.

We are at a critical turning point now, a moment of opportunity with huge potential. It seems extremely likely that George Bush is going to go down, and hard, in the coming months and years. And it is apparent that Cheney and DeLay and possibly Frist are on political death row, as well, with loads of their cronies in tow. That’s all well and good, and of course could hardly be more welcome or deserved.

What is crucial, though, is that this moment not be understood as the failure of one intelligence-challenged president, but rather as the failure of a movement and the party it captured, a movement which is purely evil in its intent – even, ironically, in a biblical sense. Americans must come to understand that their democracy and their personal fortunes have, by the grace of good luck, just survived a near-death experience. It must be understood that the conservative movement represents a completely rapacious, completely disingenuous, completely hypocritical, completely un-American predatory conspiracy which was launched against the United States and the world, and nearly succeeded in its intent.

And it must be understood that this movement was anything and everything but what it cleverly masked itself as. It wasn’t interested in guaranteeing American security – it now essentially ignores the guy whom it claims did 9/11. It couldn’t care less about WMD in Iraq – hell, it was supplying them for a profit at the time those weapons were actually being used. It couldn’t care less about creating democracy in the Middle East or anywhere else – just ask the Saudis, Egyptians or Pakistanis. And it couldn’t care less about a ‘war on terror’ either – that was always a ridiculous rubric (Are we at war with the IRA, ETA and FARC, then? And not with al Qaeda, should they adopt other methods?) except for purposes of justifying an invasion of Iraq and smashing the Palestinians.

This movement doesn’t give a damn about cutting the burden on American taxpayers – it only ever sought to shift that burden from the rich to the rest of us. It couldn’t possibly be bothered with jobs in America – it gave tax breaks to corporations for moving those jobs off-shore. It had to bite its own tongue to keep from laughing out loud as it sold the notion of saving Social Security – meanwhile, its patently obvious aspiration was to turn the public domain into something profitable for the rich, just as Rick Santorum recently tried to privatize national weather data, and corporations in Latin America are trying to own and sell water to peasants used to dipping their jug in a public stream. Now the Republican Congress is trying to pass legislation to actually protect wealthy tax-cheats from prosecution.

This movement never cared a whit about running an efficient and competent government – it was always more important to have proper dinner reservations in Baton Rouge. They never gave a damn about being good Christians – but they were delighted to fool people who thought that’s what they were into being the shock troops of their own plundering. They were never anything remotely like patriots – but they were glad to smear American war heros, even Republican American war heros, who got in their way, while none of them had gone to war themselves. They don’t really care a bit about abortion, or homosexuality, or stem cell research – they themselves do everything and anything they want in their personal lives, and simply use social issues like these to mobilize frightened and vulnerable masses who (are encouraged to) misinterpret the source of their problems in life and to demonize the so-called aberrant sexual behaviors of other people (and themselves, truth be told).

This list of false conservative politics is endless, and the very act of composing it alone demonstrates the immense power of framing. How could half of America have fallen for this crap? How could 30-40 percent still buy into it today? Are there really that many traders on Wall Street buying second and third yachts off this trash? Obviously not, so what in the world possessed the rest of America to unwittingly participate in their own looting? The simple answer to that question is framing, and it shows again just how critical this moment is, because now is a time in which the existing frames are dissolving, and the next generation’s worth are up for grabs.

At this ‘melting of all solids’ moment, it is crucial that progressives do two things.

The first is to (accurately) portray the regressive program as a dangerous and disastrous movement of predatory destruction, hidden behind a wall of lies and hypocrisy. Conservatism must be framed so as to become a one-word evocation of all these and sundry other obscenities, just as liberalism has in the recent past been morphed into a single-word aspersion that could alone win elections, with all its freighted associations to weakness, licentiousness, snobbery and government rip-offs. In just the same fashion, we must so repudiate the ideas of the modern conservative movement such that to be so labeled would constitute the kiss of death for any politician north of Waco. Just as Republican candidates are now uninviting the president to come stump for them and are even finding themselves very busy, um, licking envelopes, should he happen to be in-state anyhow (like Santorum, for example – now there’s a laugh – did you know that the poor fellow was really an anti-war liberal all along and has somehow been misperceived as a conservative?), so should the very label ‘conservative’ become an albatross that can be hung around the neck of deserving politicians, simultaneously and mutually repudiating beyond redemption both the politicians and the label itself.

Conservatism must become a synonym for corruption, disaster and stupidity, and, ultimately, a laughingstock as well. To use the word must be to evoke images in people’s minds ranging simultaneously from Darth Vader (soon to be replaced by Dick Cheney) to Dan Quayle (soon to be replaced by George W. Bush), mixed all together with associations like that still-frightening-but-now-somewhat-humorous memory from when you were nineteen, got really wasted and did something incredibly stupid, yet somehow miraculously survived. Think of, uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger gone national.

The so carefully crafted image of conservatism/Republicanism which is at the moment headed for an exit, stage-left, was one of toughness, optimism, regular-guy-friend-of-the-working-classism, patriotism and piousness. In a word, Reagan. But it was never any more real than was Reagan actually the Gipper, however much the difference between reality and B-rate movies was apparently lost on the man himself. The pre-packaged, off-the-shelf-ready-to-go, one-week-solid media extravaganza that was his funeral procession was only the most obvious effort in an elaborate movement to do the same thing to reality that Hollywood sound stages have been doing for a century. So now everyone thinks the guy actually imposed fiscal responsibility on a federal government run amok with liberal taxing, spending and deficits, that he looked after the regular joe, and that he won the Cold War. (Let me see if I have this last bit straight, now. We start spending a lot more on weapons procurement (driving ourselves deep into debt, mind you), and the Soviets (with their 20,000-plus strategic nuclear warheads fully intact) just throw in the towel, quit the global struggle after forty years, and explode their country into fifteen pieces? Hmmm... Interesting theory, that.)

It doesn’t matter that, not only was none of this true, but in fact the opposite of these images is far closer to the reality. This is the power of framing. Ask Americans today for their image of Reagan and you’re likely to get all sweetness and light, the avuncular savior of America and the free world, one of the greatest presidents, etc. Just as not a contrary word was spoken in the media during the all-saints week celebration of his funeral, no memory exists in the collective American mind of tax cuts for the rich, quadrupling of the national debt, the worst recession since the Great Depression, James Watt and his environmental destruction campaign, dead campesinos in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, dead Marines in Lebanon, or Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Progressives must seize the opportunity of the present moment in order to reframe conservatism and its apparatus, the Republican Party. Our job will be far easier than theirs has been, because we don’t have to sell a sow’s ear as a silk purse. We don’t have to tell people they’re happier when they’re poorer, we don’t have to say we’re winning a war we’re transparently losing, and we don’t have to make them believe that dismantling Social Security is a good thing for them. Truth is on our side, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue to fail from our own (or at least the Democratic Party’s) ineptitude. After all, we’ve become quite experienced at doing just that, and there’s no substitute for experience. But now we have a chance to eradicate this entire cancer on the American body politic, wholesale. George Bush and his gaggle of cronies and fellow-travelers are likely headed for an ugly rendezvous with destiny in the near future, but the potential still exists for other conservative pathogens to survive, and that is why it is so important to destroy the entire disease now, while such an opportunity exists.

That is the first order of business. The second thing that must be done is to frame a positive alternative. This is at once harder and a bit less crucial, but fully necessary for a swing in American politics back toward the progressive tradition of the 1930s and 1960s. Again, it is the conservative movement of the last several decades which, unfortunately and more unfortunately still, provides the model here. They have been expert at keying into a handful of succinct, powerful and emotionally-evocative images which attract voters where they actually live – in their guts – not in their heads.

Progressives and Democrats can do the same thing, with, again, the additional ease of having truth on their side, which is important because it means the leap is far shorter, or even non-existent. It’s the difference between selling dinner to someone ending a fast versus another person just finishing a Thanksgiving feast. That does not make the process easy, however – only easier. It will still require thoughtfulness, courage and discipline, three elements heretofore on near-permanent holiday in this generation’s Democratic Party.

But the potential payoff is about as big as it gets in national politics. We are talking here about the opportunity for a sea change, a tidal wave, a generational realignment. Indeed, depending on the degree of disaster produced by the war, and the scope and intensity of the Abramoff, Treasongate and as-yet-unnamed scandals, it is not inconceivable that the Republican Party – now powerfully ascendant over the entirety of American government – might actually implode into non-existence, just as the Whigs once did, creating the opportunity for Lincoln’s Republicans to rise up and become America’s second party.

In fact, through their jaw-dropping levels of arrogance, incompetence, hypocrisy and deceit, today’s Republicans are doing an excellent job at hanging themselves, even as we speak.

Still, it is not enough. We progressives – generous souls that we are – must do our part to make sure that they are adequately supplied with sufficient rope to do the job right.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.

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