The following are some random thoughts (as if my thoughts are ever otherwise) about the Election ’04 endgame:

It’s not Bush personally I dislike, at least not anymore. He was a schmoozer and dealmaker, a forger of connections with friends in high places, who slowly burnt out at the task of CIC and who proved ultimately ineffective as a head-O-state spokesmodel. He placed too much trust to Cheney, Rove, and their neoconservative mentors. He shut himself up within the “bubble” of inner-circle advisors, reluctant to even read newspaper articles that weren’t pre-screened by his staff.

It’s not even the men and women behind Bush I dislike. Some of them sincerely thought they creating something good for the world. Others were seduced by that most tempting, most self-destructive of all drugs, power.

But sometimes you have to “cut your losses” from a relationship with an addict, to avoid being pulled into that fantasy realm yourself. You care, you hope, you pray the addict will take his/her own steps out from the vicious circle; but you can’t do it for them.

Nixon and his inner circle suffered from a similarly terminal lust for power. But theirs was a personalized craze for individual power. The Bush fils regime is Nixonism Version 2.0, or maybe Version 6.0. Its neocon ideological purity sought to forge a collective power, a “New American Century,” an indisputable rule forged of equal parts military discipline, nationalistic fervor, religious obedience, employee-motivation positivism, and old-time money-greasing.

Unlike some lefties, I’ve been quasi-hesitant about using the “F word” to describe the neocons’ one-party federal regime. Fascism, as defined forever from the first half of the twentieth century, is a classically European cultural-political phenomenon. As with so many other Euro institutions past and present, it has no real U.S. counterpart.

No, this has been an all-American brand of authoritarianism, celebrated not with a goose-step but with a Texas two-step. It’s an elitism that claims to be anti-elitist, a disempowerment that claims to be empowering. It invokes the name of “We, The People” to divert more power and wealth to the few. It invokes such terms as “moral character” to excuse lying, cheating, and wholesale graft.

It’s a junk-food version of faux-populism, a briefly exhilarating sugar rush that leads to a bloated unease and the need for another “hit.”

So the talk-radio bullies, the cable-TV pundits, and the Regnery Press authors keep cranking out the “Two-Minutes Hate” 24/7. The rightward websites compete with one another to generate the most hateful/racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic bile. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz map out new dreams of military conquest. Ashcroft charts further steps toward suppressing democracy in the name of defending it. Michael Powell plots to keep Americans safe from the sight of Janet Jackson’s teat, whilst clearing the proverbial channel for one-sided “news.” Rove consults his playbook of dirty tricks to keep the young, the poor, and the black away from the ballot box.

But what happens when it’s all over? What happens when all the hate in the world hasn’t made people love you?

What I’d like to happen: The more adamant righties will keep a-rantin’ away, to ever-decreasing audiences. The churchgoers turn from the politics of pious hypocrisy toward a politics of stewardship and true Christlike values. Parties and factions that still disagree about all the big and little things of governance, but who try to figure out the best possible plan for the most possible people.

I seek the end of neoconservatism, the rebirth of sanity. I long for a politics like that of Canada, where the kid gloves rarely stay on but the parties seem to grudgingly get along with one another.

This election saw the rebirth of the Democratic Party. We now need the rebirth of the Republican Party. I’d love to see the GOP rank-n’-file awaken in the coming weeks, realize the neocons’ dark dreams should be done for, and get to work rebuilding. The rural and exurban voters need a party that will speak on their behalf, not cynically exploit their fears. And a sane Republican Party will force the mainstream Dems to move further left; closer to my own convicitons.

Previously, I mentioned two friends who claimed to be Bush loyalists in spite of everything.

My southern lady acquaintance said she had to stick with Bush, not because he talked and behaved as a convert to Southern-ism, but because he needed more time to accomplish his goals.

My answer to her: No, four years in office is plenty of time to get one’s political agenda accomplished. And Bush accomplished a lot of things, almost all of them bad. A theatrical producer doesn’t have to hear every auditioner sing a complete song.

My dear friend Doug, who calls himself a “lifelong Scoop Jackson Democrat,” believes the whole of the American ideal is threatened, and we have to keep the GOP in power to make sure that threat’s effectively answered.

My answer to him: Yes, I believe in America the polyglot, America the mongrel, America the free. Yes, my America is threatened. It’s threatened by forces who wish to replace Constitutional democracy with rigid theocractic rule. Osama bin Laden is the figurehead for one such force. George W. Bush is the figurehead for another such force, a much more direct threat to the nation I love.

But I’m convinced, based on the “tracking polls” and my own semi-reliable hunches, that the threat will soon be behind us.

Of course, there’s a lot of work still to do. We’ve got an economy to fix, a health-care system to heal, an Iraq transition to get back on track. Even more importantly, we’ve gotta rise above the false “red states”/”blue states” dichotomy, and work together to create a more Purple America.

America, welcome back to reality.