Everyone: Please read this. Several times. Rick Perlstein knows about as much as any lefty about how the Republicans’ newspeak has undone the Grand Coalition that kept this country reality-based [a few Repub presidents aside] from FDR to round about 9/11.

He thesis is simple: by “Kerrying” ourselves and wrapping our core values around the axle of overdetermined policy arguments and special interests, we allow the other side to walk across the goal line.

The Republicans understand us better than we understand ourselves. When we are not credible defenders of the economic interests of ordinary Americans, we amount to little. When we are, we’re a nuclear bomb to the heart of their coalition.

And:

Here’s Bill Kristol, in a famous 1993 memo I’m sure you’re all familiar with: “Health care is not, in fact, just another Democratic initiative . . . the plan should not be amended; it should be erased. . . . It will revive the reputation of the . . . Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests.”

I’d say this memo is the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics, if it didn’t make me yawn. There’s nothing here that’s unfamiliar to historians who’ve read Republican secrets going back 25, 35, even 70 years. You can sum them up in 10 words: “If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we’re screwed.”

And:

It doesn’t take much to demobilize a machine voter: Just install some doubt that people who claim to be their champions are not really their champions. If the Democrats had been united against the bankruptcy bill, we could even have demobilized some of these Freepers.

That’s the way they did it with us. The stuff about the Democrats being “cultural elitists” spread a nagging doubt. People stopped looking to the call board. Even some of the activists.

The time is ripe to do it to them. A Pentecostal friend of mine just returned from a mission to El Salvador with his childhood church from rural Louisiana. He used to regale me with tales of annual July 4 Pentecostal retreats that were like Nuremberg rallies in praise of the Great Leader. That’s over now. The straw that broke the camel’s back, he tells me, was people not being able to afford to go to the dentist. They also have vanishingly low faith in Bush’s foreign policy, and in the Iraq war.