Historically, how bad ARE things, in Perspective, in America?

From what I know:

Early 20th Century: Corporate Slavery, Privateers, Child Labor, Tenement housing, nationally sponsored racism, Syphillis trials on African Americans, etc..

Mid 20th Century: Japanese Interment camps (Huge, imo), McCarthy trials (REAL scary)

So what would you point a finger at right NOW, that parallels to these things (I'm sure I've missed a few)?

It seems that the "America" everyone wants back never really existed?

I think there is a lot of naivety on the subject...its almost like the left buys into it MORE than the flag-waving right...

Hard to reconcile, internally.

those who want the past you just mentioned. We started on the good road in the 60s and then the repugs put the brakes on, trying to take us back to Feudal Europe, or even further back.

the 90s :)

Americas Golden age, I guess :)

never existed but now they are trying to turn back decades of work we have achieved. This time we have the Patriot Act, the complete takeover of the media and worse of all the corporatism. These are indeed scarey times and if we sit back and let them it will get worse, much worse.

because, as you point out, it wasn't. But, at least until recently there seemed to be an assumption that it was possible to make it better, and that over time there would be a progression toward greater justice and equality. There was a concept that this was what America supposedly stood for. And beginning in the 50s with the start of the civil rights movement , eventually the political will developed, on a national level, to codify into law notions of economic, racial and gender equality. Though true equality still does not exist, there were some genuine advances. Sadly, the sense that things will continue to improve seems to have been lost. As long as the Bush Regime is in power, there is no chance that America's conceptual greatness will ever be realized. The reality of greatness never really existed, but for awhile we tried for it. And now we've lost even the possibility.

protecting themselves from the excesses of the powerful. Throughout history, democracy has always been an ongoing struggle.

However, the Bush Regime presents the biggest threat to democracy that this country has ever faced. Their consolidation of power is at or near the point of no return. If you doubt that statement, explain how anything can change if the Bush Regime controls all branches of government, including the courts, while they control the counting of the votes.

that gave working people the best deal they've ever had along with the social progress that was made during the 50s, 60s and early 70s.

What we DON'T want is another Robber Baron era combined with a rollback of all the progress to full civil rights for all Americans. Yet, that's exactly what the witless conservatives in both parties have given us.

The American woman is just beginning to know FREEDOM! Less than a century and today being turned around and headed back to being strapped to male obligatory orientation. When any rights fought for, for so long, are reversed for anyone it is abominable and solid cause for revolt!

sometimes it seems the manifestation of good and evil always was and always will be, and why should i care? The difference is this is my life, and the things occuring are not from other peoples memories but are the fabric of my existence. I have choices to either pay attention or ignore, and find it offensive to ignore suffering just because it isn't mine....yet.

However, it could get much, much worse in the next 50 years. Some of the trends are obvious, such as the looming possibility of an activist, 1870's-style court that would nullify legislation based on the rights of corporations, landowners, and other groups. Some are more open-ended, such as what's going to happen with our war on Muslims. Here another Arab-Israeli war, or even a Madrid-sized terrorist attack on the United STates, could really shuffle the deck.

Other trends can't be forseen easily. Who would have thought that the political discourse in America in the 20th Century would have been dominated, or at least co-dominated, by the Hoover-Nixon-Reagan red-baiting? I'd suggest that climate change might provide the fodder that the industrial sweatshops provided for the last century. Not a predictable effect, like the New Deal, but maybe an American backlash against world consensus. A "Green Scare" if you will.

It will take probably two or three unpredictable, or at least uncertain, external or irruptive events to truly get us to an historically bad position. American history is pretty young, and so if seen through the lens of 400 years of treating selected ethnic groups like crap, it will look progressive for some time to come. But outside the framework of treatment of ethnic minorities, it could get bad in relative terms.

past back. Our country has moved steadily along the way. Yes, there are bad things in the past. But we have continued our march toward equality for all and under this administration we have saeen steps taken in the wrong direction.

we want our country back... on track...if you will

When right-wing extremists dominated the federal government and ran roughshod over civil liberties, the constitution and everything else.

2004 in Ohio or 2000 in Florida, as bad as those situations were, are nothing compared to the crime conservatives committed against democracy during the admission of Kansas in the 1850s. Believe it or not, Bush has yet to work himself up to the level of treasonous trash that Pierce and Buchanan managed to pull off.

Check out the "Gag Rule" sometime, or the Fugitive Slave Act, or the Lecompton Constitution, or any of that other nonsense. As bad as the current situation is -- and it is bad -- America has been here before.

Fortunately the conservative agenda ended up getting wrecked by the Civil War and Reconstruction, and they had to start building from the ground up. They had pretty much got the game all rigged up again by the 1920s, as you suggest, but then the Great Depression and the New Deal wrecked their plans again and once more they had to start building from the ground up.

Now they've got the game all rigged up once more. Will they manage to pull it off this time, or will it be wrecked again? Peak oil, the crumbling American economy, and military overextension don't bode well for them. When societal crisis hits -- I mean a real trauma -- the people in power wind up being the people left holding the bag.

In fact the people who were responsible for the Civil War and the Depression got freakishly lucky: the Southern Slaveholders actually left the country, in a manner of speaking, while the Depression-era Republicans got Roosevelt and the war to step in and save the day before the pressure cooker was pushed to the bursting point. Their fellows in France and Russia didn't fare so well.

But a word of hope for you: "The America everyone wants back" has always been here. It was here during the Revolution, when it opposed both the bootlickers of the English king and the American men of property who saw only a way to avoid paying taxes while setting themselves up as the new aristocracy. It was here during the antebellum / civil war period when a committed and persistent minority insisted on and fought for the abolition of slavery. It was here during the early 20th century, when the labor movement kept getting its head busted but kept coming back to stand up for itself, and when farmers started hijacking milk trucks and holding up bank reposession vans at gunpoint. It was here during the 1960s when heroic and righteous people stood up and won real victories for civil rights.

It's never been the America in power. But when it asserts itself it does make itself heard. You better believe it.

is 'violence against their own people?'

That's what I read in your post and that's what I actually think. George Bush's repeated accusations against Saddam for brutality 'against his own people' is the exact same scenario that Bush is creating in the United States.

The result of 'conservatism' is domestic violence. That, with a bunch of nukes -- somewhere, sometime -- is our future.

Weighing a 'vision of America' against a great upheaval that will include great violence leaves me very, very sad.

which, in essence, means that those who are disenfranchised, poor, oppressed, and so forth, are going to remain disenfranchised, poor, oppressed, and so forth. I suspect most "small C" conservatives genuinely believe they stand for a world in which everyone can rise on their own merits and hard work, but the actual fact of the matter is that the status quo writes laws, hires cops, and builds courts and jails and banks in such a way to ensure that on the whole the only ones who get to rise are the ones who are already in the club.

More extreme forms of rightist thought involve the further enrichment or empowerment of oneself at the expense of others (you must lose your job so I can get my bonus and stock dividends. You must die so you don't offend me with your blasphemous offenses to my God).

In either case, some degree of violence or intimidation, for "social control" if nothing else, is necessary to achieve the desired goal. Throw protestors in jail, fire the whistleblower, bust the heads of the strikers, turn dogs and firehoses on the black kids at the white lunch counter, etc.

Societies can survive for a very long time on this system. But if things get too bad for too long, and if the status quo has rotted itself hollow with its own greed, corruption, and incompetence (as in France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 or banana republics throughout the world) it wakes up to find that it no longer has the strength to suppress popular discontent. It will, of course, attempt to suppress it, but lacking the sufficient power to do so will only breed further hatred and contempt for itself.

It's an ancient and oft-illustrated truth that grinding your boot in someone's face makes them hate you, and if you choose to play that game you then find yourself forced to grind your boot in their face for all time without respite. Slip one instant and their knife will be slashing your throat.

So, my long-winded response to your question is, yes. Conservatism begins by using violence to sustain itself, and ends by breeding extreme violence in opposition to itself.

If we compare ourselves to other countries in those time frames...

Right now we are as close to 'rock bottom' as an Empire can get.