Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government. She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals. She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice. And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush.

Holtzman's new book, coauthored with Cynthia Cooper, is called "Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and What We Can Do About It." Holtzman begins by recalling how widespread and mainstream was the speculation at the end of the Bush nightmare that Bush would pardon himself and his underlings. The debate was over exactly how he would do it. And then he didn't do it at all.

Holtzman ends her book by pointing out that legal accountability can come after many years, as in the case of various Nazis, or of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, or of the murderers of civil rights activists including Medgar Evers.

In between, for the bulk of the book, Holtzman, a former district attorney, lays out the prospects for a prosecution of Bush and others on charges of lying to Congress about the grounds for war, wiretapping Americans, and conspiring to torture. This is an excellent sampling of the many horrors on the list of Bush's abuses, and clearly the three areas in which Holtzman believes a prosecution would stand the best chance of success. Her analysis of the war lies parallels and builds on that of Elizabeth de la Vega, another former prosecutor who has written on the topic. Holtzman adds an analysis of the steps Bush took to protect himself from prosecution in this and each other area. She also examines his possible legal defenses, finding some of them strong and others easily overcome.

In each area Holtzman finds charges that would stick, if our laws were enforced. She also finds charges that would have stuck, had the statute of limitations not elapsed, and others for which a couple of years yet remain. Holtzman believes charges for conspiring to defraud the government with war lies could be brought until January 20, 2014. She also believes that charges for violation of FISA could be brought until that same date, pointing out that changes made to the law have not provided immunity for prior violations of what the law used to be, and that immunity has been granted from civil suits but not from criminal prosecution. Charges of torture, Holtzman concludes, could be brought at any time in the future.

Holtzman argues for lengthening the statutes of limitations for grave abuses of power, for creating a special prosecutor, restoring the War Crimes Act, reclaiming protection against unchecked surveillance, recovering missing records, pursuing civil cases, impeaching torture lawyer turned judge Jay Bybee, and looking abroad for hope and change. She sees some chance of the International Criminal Court pursuing charges of torture.

This book is an ideal guide for a prosecutor with nerve and decency, although we haven't found one in this country in the past several years. Other than Kurt Daims who is running for the office of Town Grand Juror in Brattleboro, Vermont, which voted to direct its police to indict Bush and Cheney four years ago, I'm not aware of any prosecutors in the United States with plans to pursue this kind of justice.

Glaringly absent from Holtzman's book, despite its 2012 publication date, is any significant mention of the approach that President Obama has taken. There's not one word about "looking forward, not backward," not even so much as one tangential reference to Obama's public instructions to Attorney General Eric Holder, no analysis of the intense effort that the Justice Department, State Department, and White House have pursued to protect Bush and Cheney from accountability, no mention of the ways in which Obama has continued a similar pattern of criminality -- a state of affairs which, of course, might explain his reluctance to allow the enforcement of laws against his predecessor. <> I don't think it's an unfair criticism to object that a book has left out a large but intimately related topic, one that apears to have been carefully avoided. Partisan prosecution of crimes and non-crimes by Republicans under President Clinton has been aggravated by Republican defensiveness and Democratic spinelessness under Bush. But it is the Democratic switch to defending all presidential wrongdoing since 2008 that has put the largest nails into the coffin of legitimate rule by law in this country. Bush's crimes have been legitimized. Obama has claimed the power to torture as he deems necessary, the power to imprison and rendition as he sees fit, the power to murder any human being including U.S. citizens and children as he and he alone declares necessary, and powers of state secrecy that Nixon and Cheney never dreamed of. While Bush lied the Congress into a war that a reasonably intelligent 8 year old could have seen through, Obama has made the launching of wars a matter for the president alone. And that's just fine with Democrats. Surely Holtzman is aware that this partisanship is a cancer, that it has ruined the power of impeachment and done away with truly independent special prosecutors, and that the purpose of accountability is to halt the ongoing acceptance of crime.

I have to quibble as well with Holtzman's lowballing of the Iraq war death count by two orders of magnitude. I know everybody does it, but I still find it grotesque.

I'd like to share a story, a personal story, a common story, an American story. For nearly two decades, I have carried the burden of a crushing student loan debt, well over six figures and impossible for me to fathom paying off in this lifetime. While I have written before about debt in a more generalized sense -- advocating for a "Jubilee" as the ultimate stimulus and a chance for all of us to start anew -- I've never connected it publicly to my own plight. The reasons are complex, but have to do with fear, fear of vulnerability, fear of judgment. I suspect that many people burdened by debt feel similarly and are often constrained to bear the pressures silently.<> My story is relatively straightforward. I attended a private college (majoring in physics and astronomy, which did not yield any obvious career potential for me) and then a private law school. After clerking for a federal judge for a year, I was hired in the fall of 1992 to work at a large corporate law firm in mid-town Manhattan, complete with the accoutrements of privilege and compensation. I seemingly "had it all," at least on the outside, and any rumblings of discontent -- after a lifetime of being a working-class person -- seemed somehow ungrateful.

Still, a series of events eventually forced that discontentment to the surface. Working for corporate polluters, white-collar criminals, militaristic multinationals, and the like can have its deleterious effects on one's psyche, no matter what it pays at the end of the month. I realized in fairly rapid fashion (about ten minutes, actually, even though it took me ten months to extricate myself from the firm) that I could not separate my ethics from my earnings or my morals from my meals. I wanted to work with people, not for (or even against) them, and likewise had a strong desire to try and make the world a better place rather than the worsening one experienced by the vast majority of people.

In the end, the expensive suits and loft apartment couldn't mask the fact that my soul was sick and my spirit dying. Yes, I could have worked at the high-powered firm for five to seven years (which sounds like a prison sentence, in retrospect) and likely paid off my debts, and then written my own ticket (financially speaking) after that -- but the implicit (and carefully concealed) violence I would have done to human and ecological systems in the process simply made the cost too high. Indeed, it is mainly the manner in which our lives are shielded from the true costs of our actions and choices that makes modern society even possible to endure, and it is the steady erosion of this thin veil of constructed ignorance that is beginning to alter the widespread "false consciousness" in ways that are simultaneously horrifying and promising.

One of the experiences that helped prompt me to walk out the door and never look back was the nascent friendship I had randomly struck up with a homeless man on the streets of the city. I didn't realize it fully at the time, but his impact on me was as great as any person's in my life, and he'll likely never know it. The emerging realization of this came to me one day when some colleagues from the firm saw me having lunch with my homeless friend, and afterwards commented to me how nice it was that I was trying to "save" him. I thought about this for a minute, and (in a moment of personal recognition) replied that "he's actually saving me."

A few weeks later, I had quit my high-paying job, sold most of my belongings, and had nothing but the unknown road ahead. I spent the next couple of years mostly car-camping, sleeping rough, staying with friends, eating potatoes, bartering, writing bad poetry, making music, getting healthier in my own skin, following signs (literal and figurative), and otherwise chasing rainbows. I also used the time to plant the seeds of the next chapter in my life, which serendipitously emerged in the opportunity to attend graduate school and pursue a doctorate in Justice Studies. While ambivalent about the institutional nature of this move, I realized that it had the potential to allow me to reclaim my core values while still participating more directly in the world at the same time.

The following years found me living on about $10,000 or less annually, riding a bike or skateboard to school, learning about justice in its fullest sense, and becoming an advocate and activist around issues of homelessness and poverty. My dissertation was completed in 2002 and spoke directly to these themes, and in 2008 a revised version appeared as the book Lost in Space. In 2001, I was hired as an instructor at Prescott College to teach Peace Studies, which doubled my salary but still left me at about one-fifth the level I was making in my law firm days. Despite this sense of apparent downward mobility, I realized that I had found a calling.

But then another sort of calling began in earnest: debt collectors calling me, repeatedly, at work and elsewhere. For about a decade I hadn't earned much more than $20,000 in any given year (and most years far less), but once I was hired as a faculty member (again increasing my salary but still leaving me way down on the scale for someone with two doctorates) the sharks started to sense blood and swarm around me. At first I felt paralyzed with a mix of remorse, shame, and fear, so I did nothing. Soon after, my wages were being garnished, which embarrassed me at my place of employment, and the fuller experience of the stress that comes with the realization of permanent impoverishment and lifelong indebtedness began to emerge. Despite having studied poverty issues and being well-versed in the social psychology attendant to them, I still felt the internalized stigma of societal "failure" at not having "made it" by the usual measures of success.

In 2008, I took a second full-time job (again nearly doubling my salary) as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, driven partly by my life's work as someone dedicated to the pursuit of peace and justice at all levels, and also partly by the fact that I now had two young children in the mix. At this juncture, I was able to finally work out some sort of agreement with the student loan collectors, lumping everything together to the tune of over $150,000 and making regular monthly payments that push myself and my family to the brink (past it, actually) of being able to make ends meet. But the recognition, in all likelihood, of never being able to get out from under this massive burden still weighs on me every day.

Just recently a reminder of that pervasive vulnerability -- the one that comes from a lifetime of being working-class, always one paycheck away from dispossession, and having no savings whatsoever to fall back on -- was delivered to my doorstep. Apparently, one relatively small student loan had been somehow omitted from the consolidation process, to the tune of about $5000, and the collection agency began calling random people at my place of employment in an attempt to shame me into calling them back and paying it off. This was quite likely illegal, in that they identified the company they were with to these colleagues, but it had the desired effect of making me feel, again, vulnerable and exposed. Now I have to pay them another $100 per month on top of the already-untenable figure being paid on the larger debt.

Two decades after walking out of a corporate house of mirrors in search of more useful and meaningful horizons, I remain tethered to that choice through years of compound interest, penalties, fees, and such. Yet I am grateful in some ways for that, since it serves to keep my life "real" on many levels and even perhaps ensures that I maintain a reflective process about who I am, what I am doing, and why. Still, it yields a great deal of perpetual stress, constrains my life choices in the world, and impinges upon my capacity to provide for my family. I suppose, at the end of the day, that the corporate masters get their money either way -- a pound of flesh or the equivalent in monthly payments. But they did not get my soul, and perhaps that makes all the difference...

I mention all of this here with a mix of fear and hope. While the experiences of my own life serve to inform my writing, I generally strive to keep the personal details and motivations in the background rather than the foreground. But why? In my daily life and activism, I hold firmly to the belief that personal choices are eminently political ones, and vice versa. I try to live simply, consume consciously, treat others how I would be treated, be of service to the world, and in general "walk the talk" as much as possible -- so why don't I feel safe writing about things in those terms? I surmise that the uncomfortable nature of personal vulnerability is also bound up with the collective (and perhaps ultimate) vulnerability of living in a time when the continuation of our human existence hangs in the balance by increasingly delicate threads. To some extent, this palpable sense of vulnerability has been individualized and privatized, much like the debts one accrues in pursuit of an education and the basic desire to be socially useful.

Will telling this tale change the paradigm? Unlikely. But maybe if we all begin to do so -- to connect the personal and political, to share the fear rather than bear it alone -- maybe things will at least improve enough in our own lives so that we become more empowered and learn to explore the bonds of authentic community in the process. If my personal financial burden is useful even a little bit in that regard, then it is, in the end, one that I must acknowledge as a debt of gratitude.
(c) 2012 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., teaches peace studies at Prescott College and serves as the executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Things are terrible here, as unemployment soars past 13 percent. Things are even worse in Greece, Ireland, and arguably in Spain, and Europe as a whole appears to be sliding back into recession.

Why has Europe become the sick man of the world economy? Everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, most of what people know isn't true - and false stories about European woes are warping our economic discourse.

Read an opinion piece about Europe - or, all too often, a supposedly factual news report - and you'll probably encounter one of two stories, which I think of as the Republican narrative and the German narrative. Neither story fits the facts.

The Republican story - it's one of the central themes of Mitt Romney's campaign - is that Europe is in trouble because it has done too much to help the poor and unlucky, that we're watching the death throes of the welfare state. This story is, by the way, a perennial right-wing favorite: back in 1991, when Sweden was suffering from a banking crisis brought on by deregulation (sound familiar?), the Cato Institute published a triumphant report on how this proved the failure of the whole welfare state model.

Did I mention that Sweden, which still has a very generous welfare state, is currently a star performer, with economic growth faster than that of any other wealthy nation?

But let's do this systematically. Look at the 15 European nations currently using the euro (leaving Malta and Cyprus aside), and rank them by the percentage of G.D.P. they spent on social programs before the crisis. Do the troubled GIPSI nations (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy) stand out for having unusually large welfare states? No, they don't; only Italy was in the top five, and even so its welfare state was smaller than Germany's.

So excessively large welfare states didn't cause the troubles.

Next up, the German story, which is that it's all about fiscal irresponsibility. This story seems to fit Greece, but nobody else. Italy ran deficits in the years before the crisis, but they were only slightly larger than Germany's (Italy's large debt is a legacy from irresponsible policies many years ago). Portugal's deficits were significantly smaller, while Spain and Ireland actually ran surpluses.

Oh, and countries that aren't on the euro seem able to run large deficits and carry large debts without facing any crises. Britain and the United States can borrow long-term at interest rates of around 2 percent; Japan, which is far more deeply in debt than any country in Europe, Greece included, pays only 1 percent.

In other words, the Hellenization of our economic discourse, in which we're all just a year or two of deficits from becoming another Greece, is completely off base.

So what does ail Europe? The truth is that the story is mostly monetary. By introducing a single currency without the institutions needed to make that currency work, Europe effectively reinvented the defects of the gold standard - defects that played a major role in causing and perpetuating the Great Depression.

More specifically, the creation of the euro fostered a false sense of security among private investors, unleashing huge, unsustainable flows of capital into nations all around Europe's periphery. As a consequence of these inflows, costs and prices rose, manufacturing became uncompetitive, and nations that had roughly balanced trade in 1999 began running large trade deficits instead. Then the music stopped.

If the peripheral nations still had their own currencies, they could and would use devaluation to quickly restore competitiveness. But they don't, which means that they are in for a long period of mass unemployment and slow, grinding deflation. Their debt crises are mainly a byproduct of this sad prospect, because depressed economies lead to budget deficits and deflation magnifies the burden of debt.

Now, understanding the nature of Europe's troubles offers only limited benefits to the Europeans themselves. The afflicted nations, in particular, have nothing but bad choices: either they suffer the pains of deflation or they take the drastic step of leaving the euro, which won't be politically feasible until or unless all else fails (a point Greece seems to be approaching). Germany could help by reversing its own austerity policies and accepting higher inflation, but it won't.

The course of action taken by the present day U.S. political class in addressing the era's rising tide of economic hardship and ecological peril has proven as helpful as tossing an anvil to a drowning man.

The following two, axiomatic headlines reveal much about the dovetailing mindsets manifested by members of both the drowning class and the moral compass-bereft captains of the ship of state:

Nike Foamposite Galaxy Shoe Spurs Frenzy At Malls (Associated Press, Saturday, February 25, 2012)

Mitt Romney: Wife Ann Drives ‘A Couple Of Cadillacs’ (The Washington Post, Friday, February 24, 2012)

By means of incessant, womb to tomb, commercial propaganda, the corporate class has promoted the idea that an individual's identity is based solely on the sum total of his worldly possessions. Yet, when young people, denied a decent education and stranded in circumstances where they have been deprived of a means to gain a sense of identity by acquiring the skills and the development of the talents necessary for the pursuit of their individual aspirations, have the temerity to reflect the societal values they have internalized -- for example, by acting in an aggressive manner in a mindless pursuit of material items that they have been conditioned to believe will bestow a sense of self worth -- then media elites and bamboozled bourgeois should not, as they can be counted on to do, react with consternation, carrying on as if these acts of desperation on the part of the young are wholly devoid of any cultural context.

A defining trait of declining civilizations: A yawning, unbridgeable chasm develops between the ability to connect cause and effect e.g., between the excesses of the privileged and powerful (apropos, a multi-millionaire, presidential candidate's braggadocio involving the multiple ownership of luxury automobiles) and the causative effect that evincing such an arrogant and self-serving worldview exerts on the actions of the so-called underclasses.

As a consequence, a demeaning view of the world--and of themselves--has been instilled within the young: According to the internalized cosmology of the consumer state, individuals, sans materialist signifiers, register as non entities.

When the one percent crash the global economy and loot national treasuries, this is termed the neoliberal economic model, but rowdy behavior, including the coveting of relentlessly hyped athletic shoes by a few of the least powerful denizens of the consumer state, evokes waves of condemnation. Existing in a culture that robs people of self-respect by countenancing the ongoing crime wave, perpetrated by the one percent, we should not be shocked when those born bereft of privilege, at times, conduct themselves in a less than polite fashion.

The emptiness of consumer state existence leaves many so wanting for purpose and identity that, in their confusion, they seek meaning at a mall...Lost in endlessly proffered distractions, swooning in the negative enchantment of the commercial hologram, it is no mystery why so many in the general population of the U.S. cannot approach, neither on an emotional nor intellectual level, the dire situation presented by, for example, feedback loops of escaping methane gas now active in the Arctic, Siberia, and the Gulf of Mexico, and the manner that this manmade phenomenon imperils their own survival.

In this regard, predictions of doom are not the stuff of dour old men, afflicted with Cassandra complexes, long, unkempt beards flapping, as they hector passersby with gloomy auguries of a rapidly arriving "time of reckoning" -- when what they mean is, their libido is waning, and it feels to them like the end of the world.

No, this is truly bad news. And if these effects of climate chaos are not mitigated and begin to be reversed -- and soon -- then there will come, in the not too distant future, mass suffering, in the form of a great die-off, on a scale almost impossible to envisage.

We're talking peer-reviewed scientific inquiry not crank-speak here. These are extraordinarily dangerous circumstances.

The cultural, social, and political arrangements that have created this approaching catastrophe must be radically confronted and changed. Accordingly, the times call for extraordinary action. Business as usual will constitute a death march.

Not being an advocate for the dreariness intrinsic to compulsive self-denial, I accept the need for almost all forms of human excess...with the exception of those actions and pursuits that are deliberately cruel, belligerently ignorant, and sadistically or mindlessly destructive. You can pursue excess to the point of collapse, as far as I'm concerned, just don't harm any innocent bystanders or leave others to cleanup your mess.

These forms of excess are anathema: the agendas of the corporate/consumer state that are reducing the spicy resonance of the global agora into a bland shopping mall food court, and demand excessive work hours and debt slavery to maintain the system; overfishing that has reduced the stocks of large fish in the world's oceans by ninety percent; the carbon footprint, created by excessive industrialization, that has become an iron boot on the neck of all living things; the commercial/entertainment/public relations/advertising complex, specializing in endless self-referential spectacle, that offers neither revelation nor cathartic release; the defining traits of our present economic system which are identical to the actions and attendant rationalizations of an addict on a death-besotted bender...desperate, joyless, and devoid of the shared sublime of a communal bacchanal.

The Road of Excess might lead to the Palace of Wisdom but one cannot arrive there by modern jet travel or by any interstate highway; conversely, one has to give oneself permission to get lost in a wilderness of inner states of being. Wander long enough, descend deep enough, take enough wrong turns, resist intransigent power creatively enough, and when the night becomes dark enough above the tangled tree-line you will find your lodestar.

Nowadays, one must cultivate a high tolerance for being lost. Because, in a doomed culture, in order to have a chance at gaining an original sensibility, one must wander far beyond the royal court of flatterers, uninspired fools, and scheming courtesans who are driven to spend their days truckling before a senile king nodding on his throne.

We find ourselves, currently, stranded in a crisis of selfhood, engendered by a system that demands that the untamable yearnings of the human heart be expressed almost exclusively within the limited lexicon of consumerism, that the path of self-expression be obstructed at the velvet rope-fortified domain of corporate state show biz types and elitist-approved artists, that the imagination is useless unless it generates vast monetary rewards for the one percent.

In short, because the known thoroughfares now dead-end into a wasteland.

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. ~~~ T.S. Eliot

The vehemence of the imagination motivates. It rages against oppression, as it, in equal measure, both protects and frees one's heart. It creates and endures. The heart, the alpha and omega point of the imagination, rebels against sensible centrism as it serves to transform demons of conformity into recalcitrant angels who are the sworn enemies of mindless power.

Moreover, the implications of this predicament extend far beyond the essential struggle for individual selfhood, for this situation is interwoven with a larger struggle for the survival of our species--a crisis that is rapidly reaching the ecological tipping point.

How we negotiate this perilous landscape will not depend on an ability to adapt to the prevailing madness of the present order. To the contrary, our chances of avoiding catastrophe will hinge on an ability to embrace novel understandings wrought by imaginative engagement with emergent realities.

This approach will also prove helpful in withstanding the inevitable conflicts that will arise with the defenders of the societal arrangements of the present whose reactionary tactics will grow ever more ruthless and brutal in direct proportion to their escalating level of panic, inevitably provoked by the collapsing certainties of the entrenched (but unsustainable) order with which they have aligned their fate.

Those are the types of fears that have kept us estranged from each other, atomized, alienated, mistrustful of the vitality of communal engagement, afraid of movement building...waiting for instructions from the powerful on how to proceed through life, as opposed to going about the business of making the world anew.

"It takes a worried man to sing a worried song...I'm worried now but I won't be worried long," so go the lyrics of the traditional folk song.

By what means do people who have experienced a lifetime of economic hardship and official oppression endure and continue to sing out in defiance?

Because they have learned this: the forces of repression might buffet your body, might zip-cuff your wrists, might lock you in jail -- but they cannot gain entrance into your mind, unless you allow them in. They cannot imprison your soul unless you let them.

"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country -- if the people lose their confidence in themselves -- and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance." ~~~ Walt Whitman

Whitman's admonition is known innately by some, by those whose spirit of defiance are helping us to remember our innate roughness: by Bradley Manning, by the people of Greece, of OWS, by those stopped and frisked, humiliated, harmed, and jailed on false charges daily on the streets of the U.S. police state, and by the spirit of defiance being displayed in ever increasing degree by oppress people the world over--by all of those souls who will no longer accept the dismal fate of being imprisoned by fear.

In truth, the one percent would not be capable of building a propaganda apparatus slick enough, nor be able to hire enough cops, nor assemble armies with enough troops, nor build prisons rapidly enough nor large enough to keep us enslaved--if only enough of us awoke to the reality of our common plight.

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he's been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? "They lost me," he says.

They're losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that's taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they're still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That's a problem for the nation.

The GOP's drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years - and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples' lives.

This was enough to stir right-wing evangelicals in the South, social conservatives in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and stop-at-nothing extremists in Washington and the media who hounded Bill Clinton for eight years, then stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.

They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as "tea partiers" and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years. Even formerly sensible senators like Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar are moving to the extreme right in order to keep their seats.

At this rate the GOP will end up on the dust heap of history. Young Americans are more tolerant, cosmopolitan, better educated, and more socially liberal than their parents. And relative to the typical middle-aged America, they are also more Hispanic and more shades of brown. Today's Republican Party is as relevant to what America is becoming as an ice pick in New Orleans.

In the meantime, though, we are in trouble. America is a winner-take-all election system in which a party needs only 51 percent (or, in a three-way race, a plurality) in order to gain control.

In parliamentary systems of government, small groups representing loony fringes can be absorbed relatively harmlessly into adult governing coalitions.

But here, as we're seeing, a loony fringe can take over an entire party - and that party will inevitably take over some part of our federal, state, and local governments.