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“With every year that passes, George W does and says more and more to show me that he was never the man I thought he was. Not even close.

This is such a petty, cowardly thing to do, and so beneath the former presidents.”

I cannot disagree with a single word of that. Both have turned out to be incredible disappointments. But I had an expectation that Bush 43 was different than his country-club, elitist father...and he turned out to be just an acorn from the old oak, after all. It is extremely disappointing and, frankly, infuriating to find out how badly we as a nation were hoodwinked and played for the fools.

Jefferson was right - Democracy needs a revolution every 20 years or so. Not necessarily one with ropes over lamp posts, but at least one with the old order getting unceremoniously thrown out on its sorry ass. Of course, after 150 years of NO revolution, maybe it IS time for ropes hung from lamp posts....

We had this discussion on the Rush thread yesterday about W. We were all for him and his war and yet he never closed the borders and had our men killed all for nothing. We should have sent a nice nuke into the Middle East or did air bombing that’s it. I guess he fooled me.

Of course, after 150 years of NO revolution,

You are correct in dating the last violent revolution to the unsuccessful attempt of the Southern states to leave the union. However, there have been two nonviolent, but profound revolutions since that time. The first dates to the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The earlier Progressive Era set up the mechanism for Federal expansion, but New Deal legislation and the subsequent World War II established the massive welfare/warfare states that has grown since that time, with the only, partial interruption since 1933 being in Reagan's first term.

The second was the cultural revolution, that is, the rise of cultural Marxism, as epitomized by the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School. The groundwork for this takeover was laid around the turn of the last century by John Dewey and his "progressive" education and the "higher criticism" movement in mainline Protestantism, which was the de facto state religion of pre-World War II America. Then the Great Depression devastated the Yankee elite that had dominated the country since Appomattox. A vacuum was created that the replacement elite trained by the influences of Dewey, Marcuse, and others filled.

Thus, we have had a cultural shift away from Christian and traditional values unprecedented in our history. Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who decry the decay echo the GI and Silent Generations' complaints during the hippie/Vietnam era, and the Lost and Missionary Generations disgust with the 1940s and 1950s.

I don't know if Donald Trump can be the catalyst for reversing nearly a century of institutional and cultural decline. Hopefully so.