As a resident of Minnesota, I have watched with revulsion—and as a teacher, been directly affected in the college classroom—as "nice guy" Tim Pawlenty swept into office on a tax-hating agenda that disgraces our state's longstanding, liberal tradition of social legislation. Then he starts posing for the cameras. Then he send in the storm troops. My god. This is deeply terrifying.

Think about this. In the United Stated, the press and the even some courts are piping up regularly against the past eight years' accumulating police statism. Does that mean that we're safe from rightist takeovers like those that have devastated other countries over the past century? Hell, no. As long as the ACLU, Salon.com, MoveOn.org, and even fitful Supreme Court rulings can maintain the appearance that democratic and Constitutional protections still function, GOP governments will let them make harmless noises until the strategic moment arrives to arrest them. By then Dick Cheney will be Attorney General.

If municipal and state police in Minnesota can terrorize and arrest "hippies," search their houses without plausible cause (never mind that they somehow obtained a warrant, that's another story, probably a story of judicial abuse), and steal their belongings, what do you imagine will protect, say, Glenn Greenwald two years or twenty years from now? Choose from...

1. His higher public profile

2. The law

3. Nothing

And what about each reader here? What about each citizen whom the government wants to keep away from the Fox newsbite cameras? What will save you? Choose from...

3. Nothing

Should be possible to order it online from a European distributor, right?

Great review, BTW. Almost made me feel I was watching the film, and thereby made me want to be really watching it.

It'd be hard work, and it might not work, or it might work slowly. So what? It's the kind of work and risk that are worth it. For exactly the same reason, it's worth it for Dems to redevelop a genuinely liberal (non-centrist-Dem) constituency across the entire nation. It's where the heart of the Democratic party is. (That heart is therefore much healthier now than when it served to pump blood through Old Dixie.) Inducing voters in all regions to buy into high purpose is the most direct answer to everything the Republicans have come to stand for through the past few presidencies: national shame. If we don't relocate that liberal heart and get it beating in as many demographies and regions as possible, we won't deserve to win any of the elections that Clinton (x2) style compromise might win in its place.

It's called leadership, a thing that sometimes falls flat on its face but sometimes has transformative effects. It's called making history, in contrast to merely tagging along.

The basic difference between our two point-counterpoint writers is that Schaller seems to believe in letting discouraging stats—the electorate as we find it—preempt attempts to change voters, ideals, alliances, regions, nations, and worlds. The "try some leadership" idea I read in Moser seems to me to have just enough potential to be worth a concerted, patient try, not purely in terms of its prospects for winning a new series of elections (yes, a long shot) but in terms of the moral payoff if it even begins working. It's what politics at its best is for. Not just to win, but to lead, and hopefully as a result to deserve to win.

BTW, Mr. Schaller, please send your metaphors back to obedience school. Of course I love you like a son. But you wrote that if Mr.Moser were right, "working-class white Southerners would already be joined at the hip with working-class black Southerners as the backbone of the most Democratic region in America." Never mind that it's the same argument I already addressed, that we'd better have won in advance of working at it.

But really now, hip? backbone? Siamese twins with gumption? Try to imagine what your word image would look like in an x-ray. It's not very attractive under a simple bright light.

Oh, I am so clever I sometimes scare myself.