The Economist reluctantly endorses John Kerry.

After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America's moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him, given a viable alternative. John Kerry, for all the doubts about him, would be in a better position to carry on with America's great tasks.

Saw someone reading this on the bus a few days ago:

which reminds me that reading Marx is still publicly reputable in a way, say, reading The National Socialist Reader or The Fascist Reader, if those books existed, wouldn't be. Not that I want such or any books banned: there is value, even if only negative, admonishing value, in reading them; what I would like is if people would read these things with more embarrassment, more of a sense of shame. There is an undeniable attractiveness in utopian visions of perfectible Justice, as there is in the Romantic notions of dialectical struggle between Good and Evil as the teleological motive of Historical Progress. But emanating from that golden, glowing, hue was the blackest, most blood-thirsty, most ruthless political movement in all history, besides whose toll of the death and misery the works of Fascism place a pale second.

Marx did himself a whole lot of good by dying before Communism gained political power in Russia and elsewhere. And so it is still possible for reputable people to defend Marx by making distinctions between his philosophy and the people who tried to put his philosophy into practice. But ideas must always be evaluated in the light of their consequences, and the consequence of Marx's ideas are hideous. That he was dead by the time the bloodlust started was a historical accident — if only Hitler or Stalin suffered a similar fate — and a convenient accident is excuse for no-one.

"The election and America's future", in this latest issue of The New York Review of Books, is not a pleasant read. By turns somber, angry, bitter, incredulous, and perhaps also with a measure of despair; there is not an optimistic note — the sunny "Hope is on the way!" sloganeering of Kerry & Edwards notwithstanding.

What is the worst that can happen, should Bush be re-elected? So the Iraq War drags on for another five or eight years, and the America takes another 10,000 deaths, would that be sufficient to irrevocably weaken the US? Vietnam was far more painful than Iraq will likely be, and the US, stun, defeated, was still strong enough to face down the Soviet Union. Will defeat in Iraq spell the end of the US as the greatest power in the world? No. Will defeat in Iraq mean less security here at home? Perhaps, but Islamic terrorism, no matter what Bush &c. wants the public to believe, is not remotely the existential threat to (Western) liberal democracy and security the Soviet Union was.

So the war costs and Bush's fiscal recklessness will become a heavy burden for future economic progress. But proportionally to the US economy as a whole, these burdens are not any heavier than the cost of Vietnam and of the Cold War in general. So instead of a quick return to the prosperity of late 1990s, the US experiences an additional decade of economic stagnation, high interest rates, possibly inflation. The stagflation of the 1970s did not reduce the US to a secondary economic power and a future episode of the same won't either.

So a re-elected Bush administration will entrench conservative judges, who may limit, or even overturn, Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, separation of Church and State, &c. But even judges with life-appointments are not immune to political & social pressures. The overturning of the Texas sodomy laws, possible in part by a change in opinion by Justice O'Connor, illustrates the fact judges are not hermetically sealed-off philosophical absolutists, but are embedded in the broader society and are influenced by emerging social consensus. The broad historical pattern of the American society has always been one of increasing tolerance and acceptance of ever more diverse liberties; that is unlikely to change whoever becomes the president.

Finally, America is after all, a democracy, and democracy is self-correcting, perhaps not this election, but next, or the next thereafter. The Soviet Union made colossal mistake after colossal mistake for 70 years, until it was buried by them. I doubt America will ever be so wrong for so long.