Go ahead, take a deep breath.

Let out a big sigh. You’ve earned it – even if you didn’t realize it.

November 7th, 2006 represents many things, but above all, history will regard it as the day that the American experiment in democracy, freedom, self-determination and even rational thought bought a new lease on life. This election produced many outcomes, but the most crucial of them was the return of basic human sanity to the body politic of the planetary superpower.

That may sound like hyperbolic excess – no doubt to American ears especially – but it is not. This country has crept far closer to the fascist model of internal repression and external oppression than most of us would care or dare to admit.

I say that with great reluctance. I really, really try to avoid using the f-word. It can be highly inflammatory, and highly destructive of the one’s credibility with ordinary Americans, who would mostly object that this country is today nowhere near fascist. There’s certainly a lot of truth to that, and you wouldn’t be reading this if there weren’t.

But authoritarian societies don’t necessarily happen overnight – they are more likely to develop incrementally, with forgotten independence following stolen liberty, following diminished freedom.

And this is precisely what we’ve witnessed these last years. The catalog of transgressions is as extensive as it is frightening and, well... ...un-American:

●  In George Bush’s America, the president says whether you go to jail or not, whether you’re ever entitled to know the accusations against you, and whether you may argue your most basic habeas corpus rights against false imprisonment before a magistrate.

●  In George Bush’s America, the president decides whose phones get tapped, and warrants have become a nuisance from some ancient time out of mind.

●  In George Bush’s America, protections against government torture are deemed “quaint” and “obsolete”.

●  In George Bush’s America, Congress is not unlike the Soviet Parliament – a great showpiece for when the democracy monitors are in town, but otherwise written out of real governance by nearly a thousand presidential signing statements.

●  In George Bush’s America, the media is an object of derision and intimidation, except when it becomes a vehicle for disinformation and smears on military heroes inconveniently in the way of power.

●  In George Bush’s America, those who don’t agree with the president are more interested in aiding the terrorists than in protecting our country.

We could go on and on here, but you get the point. In George Bush’s America, the emperor (why bother with ‘president’ at this point?) simply does whatever the emperor damn-well pleases. Provided, of course, the emperor is George Bush. Somehow I don’t see Dick Cheney celebrating the same massively expanded powers of the ‘unitary executive’ were Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. I don’t think he’d be so thrilled to rot away in Gitmo with nothing to look forward to but the next waterboarding session, just because she decided that he was a threat to national security (which he most assuredly is). And I doubt he’d still refer to such a “dunk in water” as a “no-brainer” if it were his own no-brains being submerged.

These and other scary developments of the last years have all the markings of fascism on the march. But if they still don’t provide sufficient evidence that the country is already well down a slippery slope on the way to something no longer free and no longer democratic, consider two historical counterfactuals – two ‘what ifs?’ – that could have changed everything.

What if another 9/11 had happened, say in the spring of 2004? At that moment, most American voters had not yet caught on to the Bush administration’s jaw-dropping penchant for ineptness. Most still wanted to believe in the Iraq adventure, and still saw Bushism as the best choice for providing all-important protection from (greatly, and highly successfully, hyped) external threats. Most thought national security was a job for which effete Democratic flip-floppers and their lily-livered appeasement-loving fellow travelers could never be trusted.

Where such a second attack today might (but also might not) produce public anger similar to that which followed Katrina and focused like a laser on a hopelessly incapable president blamed for failing to protect our children, in 2004 the same incident would assuredly have catapulted Bush’s mandate for consolidation of power (in this case, a real one) into the stratosphere. This sentimental journey would have been followed by an election later that same year ratifying those attitudes, and turning Washington into an all but Democrat-Free Zone. It’s scary to contemplate, but I have little doubt that a properly-timed second 9/11 would have driven a spike through the heart of the Founder’s little creation in Philadelphia (and, no, I don’t mean cheese-steaks).

But if that scenario isn’t chilling enough, try this one on for size. It’s saddening to consider, but I think there can be little doubt that what went wrong for Bush with the American public in Iraq was not the fact that he invaded a sovereign country without justification. Or that the justification offered was little short of a colossal Madison Avenue campaign designed to sell a product based on lies, the moral equivalent of marketing cigarettes as a health food (hey, tobacco’s ‘organic’, isn’t it?). Or even that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered and millions more crushed into a living death as a result of Bush’s Mess-Up in Mesopotamia.

What is really scary is that Bush’s real sin, as far as Americans are concerned, is simply that he didn’t win. Had the war actually turned out like he thought it had that day standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, this now-reviled poseur would have instead been a great hero in the public’s esteem, with immense gales of public support blowing in his sails. He would have been the tough, fearless leader who led us through our great national trauma, then vanquished our enemies not once, but twice, in Afghanistan and Iraq both. Who knew, we would have asked ourselves with bemused wonder, that such a screw-up could actually turn out to be one of the greatest of American presidents? But, alas, silly Rove forgot to fax the script over to those pesky evil-doers in Iraq. And Iran, and North Korea, and Lebanon, and...

Far worse, if things had gone swimmingly in Iraq, Bush would have been licensed to “bring it on” from there, taking down anybody on the block who refused to play ball with the bully from Washington. If this seems like idle hand-wringing or hyperactive speculative paranoia, just take a minute and transport yourself back to those heady days of neocon nirvana, when giants (thought they) walked the Earth. Remember? Back before reality intruded its stubborn and ugly little head into their neatly-packaged world of Straussian geo-strategic theory, the neoconservatives who sold this fool’s errand to the fool (and errand boy) in the Oval had a cute little saying they used to share amongst themselves, in between all the high-fiving and towel-snapping they were doing in celebration of ‘stomping’ (oops) the bad guys of Iraq: “Anybody can go to Baghdad”, they’d chortle. “Real men go to Tehran”.

Cute, eh? In a Wolfowitzian sort of way, at least. (Oh, and uh, where is ol’ Paulie these days, anyhow? I thought maybe I saw a news clip of him in Falluja, sporting khakis and an assault rifle, pitching in to help clean up the mess he made, but, um, er, it was someone else after all.) Anyhow, cute line, right? But oh, so 2003. Just three years later and it’s a haunting ‘joke’ if ever there was one, the very embodiment of hubris. Now, nearly 3,000 dead Americans later, we know that a more accurate version of this little ditty would be, “Real men go to Baghdad. Anybody can avoid Vietnam and send them there.”

But more to the point, what this little exercise in counterfactual history shows us is that a quick and dirty victory in Iraq of the sort that the neocons originally thought they held in their blood-stained hands would have massively further emboldened these predators already possessed of seemingly limitless boldness. I have no more doubt but that American forces would have next invaded Syria or Iran or Cuba or Venezuela than I do that the German blitz once rolled over Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium and France.

Which brings us to a strange but inescapable truism. Much as I suspect that I would neither like nor admire, were I to meet them, most of the local militants currently raining chaos down on Iraq (with the possible exception of those Iraqi patriots who are in it to oppose a foreign invader and its occupation of their country), the awful truth is that these forces arrayed against the US military have probably saved millions of other people in other lands from the same fate – namely, the business end of a would-be American emperor’s legions. Had Iraq gone better, the American military would surely have gone further. And if nearly 700,000 people have now been liquidated in Iraq, how many-fold more would have been annihilated in those other lands?

But it didn’t go that way, and what is instead clear is that American history in the 21st century could have turned out much, much worse (though let’s not kid ourselves, it still might). And therein lies the real significance of last week’s election. We had a junta of nihilists with a will to power only Nietzsche could admire running all three branches of the government and wielding raw intimidation to turn the so-called opposition party and the alleged free media into cowering weenies, afraid even to go potty without a hall-pass. Imagine if there had been another attack, and/or Iraq had been the cakewalk it was touted to be. It’s comforting to think American democracy (such as it is – but that is another column, or six) would have been robust enough to withstand such an assault. Comforting, but unfortunately, not realistic.

What did NOT happen last week is that Americans became a more sophisticated, profoundly wise and gentle people. Or that they rallied to the flag of the Democratic Party and its bold program for progressive change in America and abroad, assuming any such flag or program could ever be located (I’m afraid my own microscope is not that powerful). Or that they were overtaken with generosity and concern for the crushed peoples of the Middle East.

What did happen is that Americans (though far from all: there are still 31 percent of us – 31 percent! – who think Bush is doing a fine job as president) figured out what the rest of the world has known for six years, a world which has stood agawk in wonder at the communal leave-taking from our senses to which regrettably many of us have been party. Americans realized as they voted last week that George W. Bush and the movement of regressive conservatism he both represents and leads are massively incompetent, disgracefully embarrassing, and downright hazardous to their health. And that’s on a good day. On a bad day (read: most of ‘em), these Neanderthals are far worse than that, producing for the US and the world misery, predation, slaughter, impoverishment, destruction, hatred, deceit, vulnerability and shame.

What did happen last week is that Americans – for six years duped and terrified by their own government – voted to stop the madness. That is all.

It wasn’t much, really, as a mere casting of votes goes. But it was enough to bring us back into the human race.