What kind of country is the USA?

I've been reading a plethora of commentary on the election. And I was just in Germany last week at a scientific conference that had an unusual level of conversation about politics, terrorism, and the US government.

Katha Pollit writes in The Nation about mourning. But the paragraph that struck me the most in her piece is at the end:

"Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, "safety" through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President."

And perhaps this is the country of which I am a citizen.

[UPDATE: 2004-11-18] I should have said that I was feeling resigned by this kind of extreme statement. However, today Salon.com has a review of a piece on the wisdom of the american voter. The main point of the article is that many voters (and, presumably, non voters) are woefully uninformed about world, and do not really connect the dots when thinking about elected officials and government action or inaction in their world.

Again, at the risk of losing the context of the article I quote the last paragraph.

The depressing upshot of this is that Democrats can't make headway by configuring their policies. In the end, Hayes sees only two options: "either abandon 'issues' as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary -- of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues." In other words, find a demagogue or educate the country -- either way, Democrats have their work cut out for them.

Yes, indeed. There's hard work to be done.