"Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself," Peter Berkowitz writes in The Insanity of Bush Hatred, for the Wall Street Journal (11/14/07). Yes, Berkowitz is right, but hating the president this much is brand new. For the first time ever, a Gallup survey recently found that more than 50 percent of Americans "strongly disapprove" of the president. Even Nixon had fared better during Watergate in 1973, when 48 percent of Americans strongly disapproved.

Berkowitz satirizes the liberal cocktail crowd for whom hatred of Bush has becomes a "mark of good moral hygiene." Bush, however, did not reach the 50 percent disapproval mark by earning the wrath of the intellectuals on the coasts. He betrayed the people in the heartland, the "fly-over people," by grinding them between the twin millstones of economic and cultural regression. Real incomes are down. And the cultural decency crusade (which many Americans supported a few years ago) has now been exposed as agitprop for wide-stanced Republicans.

In fact, if Berkowitz really wants to hear a critique of Pres. Bush he should come to Texas. The libertarians and populists here, traditionally from the right side of the spectrum, have forgotten about the 2000 election and other items on the laundry list of liberal complaints. And here, grievances against Bush are not for the cocktail crowd: the martial law preparations with Presidential Directive #51, which abrogate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878; the termination of habeas corpus (even for Americans) with the Military Commissions Act of 2006; the widespread incarceration of non-violent and petty offenders in a corporate, prison-industrial complex; the outsourcing of elections to companies pushing paperless virtual voting; the development of a mass surveillance society based upon Orwellian principles; and unprecedented state-sponsored propaganda and fake news. Ordinary Americans do not mind being led by elites, so long as they are civic minded, in the tradition of noblesse oblige. But as many Americans have now sniffed out, the present economic and political ruling class is parasitical and predatory.

Unbelievably, Berkowitz cannot seem to let go of the 2000 election, so one point must be made about it. The outcome cannot be blamed on Bush (or his attorneys) but rather on the Supreme Court, which exposed itself as a naked political force. For conservative justices to side with Bush over Gore, they had to abandon their cherished concept of states' rights (employed for decades to prevent African-Americans from making advances). The court basically told the Florida Supreme Court, which would have ordered a recount and not declared a winner as Berkowitz implied, to bugger off: Bush would be president, not Gore.

Conveniently, Berkowitz did not mention the 2004 election. That's because the systematic and intentional voter suppression of African Americans is well documented in the Conyers Report. The 2004 outcome is virtually impossible to defend.

Berkowitz's greatest failing is his attempt to psychologically profile people who hate Bush so vehemently. Do they really seek to be morally superior? (Does not Berkowitz feel superior to those who feel superior to Bush?) Perhaps some of the liberals do feel virtuous in condemning Bush, but there must be something else at work. How hard is it, after all, to feel morally superior to a person who claimed that Texas had the right to execute mentally retarded inmates on death row? Bush is too easy of a target for that.

The millions of Americans who "strongly disapprove" of President Bush (many who voted for him) suspect that there is something entirely new here, and something much uglier than the traditional mudslinging between conservatives and liberals. How disappointing, ultimately, to hear a seasoned political scientist fall into the false right-left paradigm, when, in fact, the construction of tyranny depends upon an alternation between right and left, between authoritarianism or neo-fascism on the one hand (the neo-cons) and nanny-state socialism on the other (the neo-libs).

It makes more sense to conceive of American politics today as a contest between liberty and tyranny, and not between left and right. Perhaps the degree of hatred towards Bush is an indication that -- ever so slowly -- Americans are drawing new battle lines.