Since the start of the Iraq war it seemed to me that the Bush Jr. Republicans, by their sheer dedication to their crazy extremism at all costs, and their possession of absolute power (no one else to blame) would finally make Americans tire of their love affair with Reaganite right wing populism.

The right wing Reaganite revolutionaries finally got complete and total power, and ended up disgusting both their base AND the average American.

Here the revolutionaries have been promising how if they ever got real & total power, they'd really put things 'right'. And I know, from the intelligent and reasonable perspective, they have come awfully close to a counter-revolution against the original revolution of 1776.

But from the right wing revolutionaries' view, a lot more was supposed to happen once 'their' guys took power: Abortion was going to be over (not just chipped away); the Bible was going back into the schools (not just a half-hearted undermining of evolution); the IRS was going to be ended (not just tax breaks for the rich); and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, the average American seemed to identify with a lot of the crazy right wing populist revolutionary ideas: cut taxes to grow the economy; we should really march into one of 'those' countries and show 'em how tough we are; no more stopping the gov't investigators for 'technicalities'.

And I think the average American has watched the crazy Bush Jr. right attempt all of their crazy revolutionary ideas with no force in the nation to stop them, and, not surprisingly, didn't like the results.

Thank god for two things:

(1) The crazy idiocy of the Bush Jr. crew, without which a smarter and more disciplined fascist mindset might have screwed us even further and more rigidly.

and

(2) The good ol' fashioned trendiness of American pop culture. The Reaganite populist right wing revolutionary rhetoric had a good run, but it really got its absolute over-exposure these last 6 years, and hey, times are changing, that was yesterday's fad, time for something else.

I do believe that 6 years of absolute power by Reaganite right wing populist revolutionism ended it, in a way which no liberal political forces would have been able to do. I can now read analyses about US foreign policies on liberal and Democratic blogs which through the 1980s and 1990s were relegated mostly to the haunts of leftist magazines & alternative radio, as official Democrats seemed to shun anything so fundamentally challenging of the hawk perspective as 'extremist' or 'fringe' or 'leftist'.

(Some of the most significant of US leftists have even been met with something other than derision from mainstream liberalism -- on occasion even praised -- for their steadfast dedication to principle and against international barbarism for the past 40 years. It is a strange development indeed for me to see that many liberals are familiar with and even admiring of the work of, say, Amy Goodman, another crusader of honorable principle committed to real and challenging journalism and news media work.)

Now may be the first time in my lifetime that the US population and its political structure are both open to genuine liberal political moves.

I would expect, also, that the national Republican Party will similarly react to these changes: if, as Thomas Schaller argues, the crazy right wing populist Republican base becomes more isolated in the South (my home), it stands to reason that outside the South, the Republican Party is more likely to shift back to its older incarnation as the party of pro-business moderates, because at some point, conservatives in the Northeast, MidWest, West, and Pacific Northwest will tire of being run by crazy, and more importantly, losing extremists.

And if *that* is true, then not only might Southern Democrats tire of being told that to be elected they must run away from economic populism and be as right wing as possible, but many Southern Republicans even will get tired of losing control over Congressional committees that bring them the pork projects which they love and which provide them with their spectacular ability to corrupt local politics.

In addition, the foreign element of Latin America basically having moved to assert its independence from US domination in the last 8 - 10 years, and its largest nations rejecting the crazy and harmful right wing US agenda on their economies they were forced to follow, this also is going to change US politics. Now, it's not just the revolutionary leftists in Latin America arguing for following domestically sane policies: even your conservative businessmen in Latin America see the benefits of growing one's economy indigenously rather than following the insane advice of US economic ideologues.

When US maniacal right wing hawkish policies (followed by every single U.S. president) in Latin America can no longer be enforced upon those nations either by gun or by loan policies or trade agreement, eventually *someone* in the U.S. is going to have to come up with a different, and presumably better, approach. And if right wing extremist economic trade 'theory' no longer wins in foreign policy...

But then, we've managed to avoid taking advantage of other positive moments and alignments before, so to me this is only potential improvement, and everyone will keep having to fight against not only the last throes of revolutionary Reaganism, but a news media which faces the often invisible but oh so real pressure to always return to the interests of their owners, advertisers, and their peers among the nation's super-wealthy.

Maybe over time all this zeitgeist in the liberal blogs & local populist liberal organizing and the newer liberal radio shows can somehow keep learning to work together -- the nation's news media aren't just going to change & improve because it would be the nice and right thing to do.