“For long periods of time political alignments shift incrementally and slowly. But our politics also has a volatile history, not always placid, erupting suddenly and sharply through cataclysms, and often as a result of violence. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War and the civil rights revolution were earthquakes that abruptly overturned long-settled arrangements. When Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, his landslide victory was universally seen as the peak of Republican Party consolidation, the culmination of the party’s progress since the Civil War. Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964, his landslide was interpreted as the apotheosis of the New Deal. For two generations the Republicans have been running on the themes and infrastructure developed since the Democratic collapse in 1968. The scale of the Bush disaster is larger than any cataclysm since then. Whether or not there is a powerful geopolitical analogy between Iraq and Vietnam wars, as Bush first insistently denied, then vehemently argued, there is a pertinent domestic political analogy. Vietnam ended a Democratic era as definitively as Iraq is closing a Republican one.” (08/08/08)