Republican crisis biggest in US since Second World War

WE NO LONGER live in the real world. We have all been forced to inhabit the semi-fictional world of the headline writer, in which every incremental nudge forward in humanity's progress is Epoch-Making, in which the banal setbacks of everyday life are Catastrophic Defeats.

This hyperbole addiction can impair our moral discernment, dim our sense of history, and render us insensitive to genuinely important events. In this world Amnesty International can, as it did this week, call Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our times".

Perhaps my own sense of history has already been impaired too much by life in the headline world but I seem to recall that the gulag was a Soviet slave labour camp system in which millions died simply because they were deemed in some way injurious to the communist project.

Guantanamo has hosted a thousand or so men, almost all of them captured in the middle of plotting acts of terror, and an unlucky few who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one has died. No one has suffered grievous injury. In the gulag system, the innocent were starved to death or mercifully executed while the West had a lively debate about the merits of communism. At Guantanamo someone might have flushed a few pages from the Koran down a lavatory and the civilised world is in uproar.

In this world, the French are about to vote this weekend on a question that will determine the Future of Europe, and by obvious extension, the Whole of Humanity. Protagonists on both sides agree, it is historic. It's either 1940 or 1968. If you throw in political turmoil in Germany, you get what some commentators detect as a “whiff of 1848” across the old continent.

1848? Why stop there? Why not suggest that this might be the most important moment since Romulus and Remus stumbled across that friendly wolf in the barren Latium countryside?

Chou En-lai once remarked that, 150 years on, it was too soon to tell what the consequences of the French Revolution were. Now we frequently declare without hesitation that yesterday's news marks the passing of civilisation as we know it.

Americans inhabit this world too. This week we have watched as similar human-history-altering events have unfolded before our credulous eyes. On Monday night a small group of senators reached an agreement that averted a nasty battle over some of President Bush's judicial nominations.

The Deal, as it is universally known, ensured that some of the President's conservative nominees to the bench will get through; others will not. It kicked the more difficult decisions, notably over an impending Supreme Court vacancy, into the long grass. The stuff of messy compromise, you might think, certainly displeasing to both sides, but probably necessary for a functioning legislature with rules.

But no. The Deal has variously been characterised as saving the Republic or ending the very principle of representative democracy.

If its significance in the history of the universe may have been overstated, it does provide some intriguing insights into the shape and future direction of American politics. It does not mark, as some on both Left and Right have averred, the end of the conservative ascendancy in American politics, but it sheds new light on the limits of that ascendancy.

When Republicans held the presidency and increased their majorities in Congress last November, it was greeted with the kind of hyperbole-soaked commentary we have come to expect. The Right hailed it as a new dawn. The Left saw only catastrophe for human freedom.

In reality, and the US government system being what it is, it was neither. Unlike in the British parliamentary system, having a majority in the legislature in the US does not guarantee quick implementation of a unified political agenda. The last president elected with a clear majority for his party in both houses of congress was Bill Clinton in 1992. Within two years the Democrats had been routed, their agenda roundly defeated.

Since their triumph in November almost everything has gone wrong for the Republicans. The President's plan for private retirements accounts is near-dead. Tom DeLay, the rebarbative Republican leader in the House, is tied in knots over allegations of impropriety. Conservatives badly mishandled the case of Terri Schiavo, who died after last-minute congressional attempts to reinsert her feeding tube were brushed aside by the courts.

Now, in the wake of such setbacks Republicans are squabbling. The Deal has raised the pitch of that quarrel to new levels of unpleasantness. John McCain, the Republican leader of the Senate compromisers, is especially pilloried. To be sure, this squabbling is in part the price of political ascendancy. But it also reflects an intensifying ideological debate among Republicans. The party has long been a broad and unstable coalition, but the fissures are widening, especially between religious conservatives who have pushed hard on the judges issue and the Schiavo case, and those on the party's centre and left, who, like Mr McCain, keep a weather eye on opinion polls.

To conclude from all of this that American conservatism is in crisis would be wrong. But the lines of cleavage in the party are starker than they have been in years and now pose a clear threat for the presidential contest in 2008. The party's most popular contenders nationally for the presidential nomination are, as it happens, Mr McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, the hero of 9/11, who is even more liberal than Mr McCain on domestic issues.

After this week's events it is hard to see either of these two winning much support from the conservative base. But they have enough broader appeal to cause one hell of a fight in the primaries. It will be tough for a party unable to heal its internal wounds to present a plausible presidential candidate to the electorate.

That would mean the inauguration of President Hillary Clinton. Surely we can all agree that would be The End of the World As We Know It?