CONNECT / Eddie Holt: 'These guys are the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary," John Kerry told a rally in Chicago this week. "These guys" are Bush Republicans and Kerry's remark indicates just how antagonistic this year's US presidential election will be. It may be that the legacy of the American civil war of the 1860s, always simmering anyway, has reached a new political showdown.
Times and issues have changed, of course. The American civil war was five or six generations ago and in a country where a decade is often considered an epoch, that's practically antediluvian. However, because after a civil war the descendants of combatants live together in the same country, energies easily drained from international wars remain vibrant.
Put bluntly, John Kerry will represent the north and George Bush the south. (It's true that Abraham Lincoln, president of the victorious Union, was, like Bush, a Republican but he was elected by northern votes.) Anyway, it's not just geography or historical party allegiance that the still seething sediments of the American civil war describe. It's ment++ality.
Both Kerry and Bush will proclaim - and believe - that the United States is the greatest country on Earth. Other countries, Ireland among them, will broadly agree, albeit with growing reservations. Yet others - the Muslim world, central America, parts of southeast Asia - will feel the ideology that made the US so powerful has often exploited them ruthlessly.
In Europe, the politics of most countries, unlike those of Ireland, still cleave along a notional left/right axis. The marked shift right of the entire body politic in the last two decades means the axis too has shifted in that direction. So, we see the likes of Tony Blair's "Tory-ised" New Labour which renders even the hitherto moderate left marooned as the "unelectable" far left.
In the US, the Democrats and Republicans seem, like Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael here, excessively similar on too many issues. Differences are minimal, matters of degree rather than sort. In a huge and powerful country this seems undeveloped.
But the US has always been able to use the lure of money to maintain a version of community, the historic aim of the left.
Yet, despite their striking similarities, there is a fundamental difference of mentality between Democrats and Republicans.
Mostly, it's got to do with relating to the wider world, even the wider America. You could not reasonably describe the Democrats, historically the party of immigrants - Irish, Italians, Jews and more recently blacks - as lefties.
Even rabid Republicans baulk at that. But they do use, often with conspicuous contempt, another "L-word". That word is "liberal". In sections of the US, it carries a comparable charge to the term "Provo" here. As Britain's Tories (before they imploded) used to do, US Republicans wave the flag, assume a franchise on patriotism and present a picture of, to them, an Edenic America.
Historically, Republicans used Vietnam to say Democrats were soft on "commies". This time that's a problem because, in Kerry, the Democrats have a US war hero while they have a national guardsman who went missing. Still, in this year's campaign Bush has already used television images of firefighters and a flag-draped coffin against a backdrop of the destroyed World Trade Centre.
The "firefighters" however were actors and the attempted appropriation of patriotism has backfired badly. Real firefighters and victims' families have condemned Bush and his pals for attempting to reap political gain from their suffering. It's all shaping up to be a filthy campaign and one which, very likely, will disgrace the idea of democracy it's supposed to exemplify.
Regardless of election outcome, US culture will change. It will either atrophy or develop. The responses of Bush or Kerry to the wider world will ensure that. Bush, with the Confederate mentality, will continue to sell an Edenic notion of an inward-looking, suitably hierarchical US. Kerry will attack this for its unavoidably belligerent, sentimental and less democratic outlook.
It's ironic that Bush - the champion of "free trade" for pals in big business - is accusing Kerry of "wanting to isolate America from the rest of the world". In a narrow economic sense, he has a point but it's difficult not to think that, with such a charge, Bush is really accusing his opponent of his own deeper agenda. Mind you, in pure ideological terms, the gap between them is not huge.
In US terms, however - and because the US is so powerful, this means, albeit less so, world terms too - the gap is vast and potentially defining. Mentalities maintained since the civil war will clash throughout the campaign as tricksters, spinners and media manipulators will, as ever, intervene. Already, Republicans are pushing the line: "If Bush loses, Osama wins".
Democrats can counter: "If Bush wins, Osama wins". It's all guff. Superficial rhetoric may grow more degraded as it becomes frustrated at being less able than usual to prevent deeper casts of mind deciding America's future. The civil war echoed when marchers demanded civil rights, when the Kennedys were shot, when race riots erupted. Deep issues have it rumbling again.