The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime. Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.

THE other day, a major conservative magazine held a symposium that posed the question of whether it was time for conservatives of conscience to rescind their support for the American government and work for the overthrow of what it called the current "regime".

The editors of the symposium worried that the amorality of American legislation was turning the country into...well, you know:

America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.

Participants in the colloquium included Robert Bork, who fulminated against recent Supreme Court decisions protecting gay rights.

What can explain the Court majority's decision? Only the newly faddish approval of homosexual conduct among the elite classes from which the Justices come and to which most of them respond.

Russell Hittinger, a professor of Catholic Studies, wrote that "the option remaining to right reason is the one traditionally used against despotic rule: civil disobedience." Born-again Nixon conspirator Charles Colson wrote that it is "time for all believers to ask sobering questions about the moral legitimacy of the current political order and our allegiance to it." Princeton professor Robert George contributed an essay entitled "The Tyrant State".

The other day was November, 1996, when First Things printed an issue entitled "The End of Democracy?" The main target at the time, interestingly, was the Supreme Court, which the authors accused of usurping too much power. Mr Bork amusingly suggested that an amendment be added to the Constitution allowing a simple majority vote of Congress to override any judicial decision. Presumably Mr Bork no longer advocates such a measure; in recent years, as the court has shifted rightwards, conservative criticism of its overreach has become muted.

Today, it's the executive and legislative branches of government that right-wing extremists consider tyrannical and illegitimate. The recent John Perry piece in Newsmax fantasising about a "patriotic general" staging a military coup to resolve the "Obama problem" was a routine example of the genre. Glenn Beck is running saying "it is a totalitarian state that you're headed towards" and warning that "freedom will be restored". We've got Michael Savage saying, "We're going to have a revolution in this country if this keeps up. These people are pushing the wrong people around." We've got Michele Bachmann, an actual elected government official, telling Sean Hannity that America is "headed down the road of economic Marxism", saying Barack Obama is "enforcing tyranny", calling herself a "foreign correspondent" in Washington reporting on the "enemy", and adding: "At this point the American people—it's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution."

This is by now all pretty tedious and familiar stuff, and I don't have the space here to communicate just how voluminous it is. To get a sense of it, I strongly recommend reading the archives that Media Matters keeps on out-of-control rightist rhetoric denouncing the legitimacy of the current American government. But the point is that ever since the beginning of the Clinton administration, if not longer, a large segment of American movement conservatives have been working to convince each other, and their constituency, that any governing institution controlled by those who do not share their ideology is illegitimate and should be disobeyed or overthrown. One might shrug one's shoulders and figure that, since right-wing extremists haven't succeeded in destroying the American system of government yet, this is all just your typical PT Barnum grand American spectacle of looneyness. I'm not so sanguine, and I don't think the appropriate response to this stuff is to ignore it. I also think that the reluctance of institutions of authority, notably major media organs, to call out people like Ms Bachmann, in order to draw the lines of acceptable political rhetoric, represents a dereliction of responsibility.