let me do a little schtick on bush, obama, and totalitarianism. i think that after 9.11, bush (cheney) took an opportunity to move the country in an authoritarian direction, featuring universal surveillance, detention centers, and a national military mobilization (every soldier as an american hero) combined with a romanticized nationalism and militarism well captured in the use of the term "homeland." that is, it was a crypto-fascist expansion of state power. now i think we are actually to be congratulated in that we didn't allow this to happen; the media in particular pierced the veil. and that a variety of other factors led to plummeting public support for the administration was fortunate: you'd need great popular support to actually go fascist. but even if we had, it seems likely that bush would have peacefully relinquished power, that relatively fair elections would continue to be held, and so on: these are fundamental to american self-image, and you can't actually be a nationalist here without doing more than nodding in that direction. but there could have been a continuous administration through elections, and a serious erosion of basic liberties in their defense etc.

on obama: no, he's not going to suddenly be mao, suspend the constitution, move without congress, and so on. but if the public and media adulation continues, the democracy can easily erode in the other direction: government spending and gdp could approach merger. very aggressive federal education/welfare-type programs could produce a pretty credulous and dependent population. obama could continue to emerge into superhuman amazingness, and power continue to consolidate under a single executive, even as military power continues to be exercised globally. indeed the "homeland," "every grunt a hero" flavor will be retained and redeployed: a semi-permanent feature of our culture.

we're dealing with a long-term increase in federal and executive power: continuous really since the founding but certainly since the new deal (left) and cold war (right). and there is no party or significant faction of a party that really resists this: ron paul is, like, the last politician in a major party. what we're getting is a squishy totalitarianism with some democratic elements, such as occasional elections.

one sees china, for example, approaching squishy totalitarianism from the other end: they slowly expand economic and other freedoms, while continuing to control the population through education and welfare programs, and turning the state into a juggernaut by merging it with a sortof capitalist economy.

but obama's particular contribution to this flow is certainly a cult of personality, which reduces scrutiny and dissent and increases state power, though not by a straight crackdown. also, if we participate, we deserve what we get. if bush has one particularly useful quality, it's that a cult of personality around him would be absurd: he's always puncturing his own pretensions, is extremely approachable. he does funny dances. he has no mystique.

this is not to say that one shouldn't admire obama. i think he's the smartest dude to assume the presidency in my lifetime. i like his public persona. that he's black constitutes a great moment in our history. he ran an extremely effective campaign. it's just that we need to realize that the basic posture had always better be: scepticism about the exercise, over us, of power. that's the only thing keeping us free, to the extent we are free.