The Democratic Republic of Flugelstan

The 20th Century provides many examples of one-party states, but Americans don’t have to look abroad to see what such regimes are like. During most of our history, the southern states of our union have been effectively dominated by a combine of oligarchs who maintained a monopoly of power through demagogic appeals to racism and superstition. While the current administration has also borrowed a lot from the corrupt practices of Northern machine politics—there’s more than a slight scent of Tammany Hall about Carl Rove—the beau ideal of its political practice is Southern and the goal of the Republican revolution is to make the country into an enormous Alabama or Mississippi, poor, proud, stupid, and bellicose.