The Homecoming 

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Lyndon Johnson didn't face such thorough polarization or such a sense of impending calamity in 1968, when Vietnam demoralized him so much that he declined to run for reelection. LBJ, for all his faults, was one tough Texan worth about 400 of George Bush -- so why does it seem unthinkable that Bush would resign? Johnson stood down, Nixon resigned. But they weren't advised by Karl Rove, whose counsel to a modern president is "Never apologize, never admit error, never betray doubt. Deny everything. Attack."

Is Rove right about the electorate, that there's at least a working majority who can be fooled every time, who can be inflamed by any transparent lie or slander, who will stare at a naked emperor and swear that he's resplendent in ermine and silk? This is the election that will test Rove's dark science. If he wins, the Republicans not only fail to establish democracy in Iraq, they pretty much extinguish it in the United States as well.

It looks to be about even money, this election. And thereby lies a great mystery. In all my life as a non-affiliated voter and a non-affiliated vendor of political opinion -- a chronic dissenter and contrarian by most measures -- I've never had to deal with so many people who agree with me. It's disconcerting. My family, nearly everyone I know or meet, everyone whose opinion I've ever respected seems to deplore this war and despise the president who created it. I wrote an anguished sort of essay after the Abu Ghraib prison scandals last spring and it's still circulating in cyberspace, still eliciting response. I've received some 800 letters from all over the world, and countless e-mails, and so far only five, I swear, have disagreed with me.Thanks to George Bush, I feel like a member of a tribe at last, a vast extended family that I never imagined. But the great mystery is, who are The Others -- the 45 percent or more who manage to believe in this man and his war?

"There must be something wrong with us if we believe it," says the exasperated billionaire George Soros, who has spent nearly $20 million trying to retire George Bush. "I want to shout from the rooftops: "Wake up, America. Don't you realize we're being misled?'"

"Misled," with the full force of both its meanings, must be the word of the hour, and Soros's frustration is contagious. But what sort of country is so easily misled? When you add up neocon imperialists, assault-gun psychos, shallow-closet segregationists, fat-wallet whores who coddle fascists for the sake of deeper tax cuts, fundamentalists for whom pro-choice is pro-Satan and the Book of Revelation is the literal word of God -- this loose federation of unsavory cults and cliques that make up the modern Republican Party -- you know they don't add up to anything close to an electoral majority. And many traditional conservatives -- ones like William F. Buckley, John McCain and Pat Buchanan, who on occasion put principle ahead of partisan bloodlust -- are now questioning the war and condemning Bush's furious sack of the US Treasury.

"From almost anywhere outside the United States," writes the British scholar Alan Ryan, from Oxford, "it is impossible to understand how Mr. Bush has even a remote chance of reelection." Where, then, are the rest of the true believers, the Bush bedrock at which an underdog John Kerry tries to chip away? In a new book called What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank offers a depressing portrait of a desolate, impoverished Kansas county that gave George Bush 80 percent of its vote in 2000 and promises to do so again, even as its miseries multiply and its prayers go unanswered.

"People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about," writes Frank, echoing a song I've been singing in North Carolina for 30 years. He describes "a panorama of madness and delusion...of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of working-class guys delivering up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life and transform their region into a "rustbelt'..."

Last week, far from Kansas, I experienced my own vision of the logic-defying, self-devouring faithful who have anchored a Republican revolution. Early one Saturday evening, after my aunt's funeral, I drove south from Rochester, NY, into the Allegheny foothills. In late September twilight I drove 90 miles, almost to Pennsylvania, before I found a motel or any substantial sign of life. The dozen towns I drove through were ghost towns, with empty streets, empty storefronts and scarcely 20 functioning businesses that I could count -- and 15 of those sold pizza. It was like a medieval countryside emptied by the plague.