Last week I attended the re-launch of the rabble.ca site in Toronto and was able to talk to many Canadians about the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

What has always struck me in these conversations are the number of progressive Canadians who believe, not totally without justification, that the United States is a nation on the verge of a total meltdown into fascism.

Well, I have the reputation for being something of a pessimist and I have certainly written apocalyptic columns in the recent past about my fears for my country.

But this column will be different.

In the past month or so I believe there has been a seismic shift amongst a majority of Americans. This shift, while it may revolve around the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama, is not necessarily about what Obama has done or will do as President. This is about what the American people are doing now.

And what they are doing is throwing off the political, social and cultural baggage of hate, fear, prejudice and greed of what I call the ‘bully culture’ of America typified most by the Mark Steyns, Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys of the world.

Certainly not everyone is doing this. But more people than I ever would have imagined are rising above the low expectations that the corporate and political class have had for them to do a very basic thing:

They are kicking the bully culture in the teeth.

Here are some examples:

First just look at the states that John McCain sees slipping away – the places Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin would call "the real America": Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota, Iowa and yes, even Ohio.

What’s gotten into these ‘real Americans’?

And the media, while certainly not anywhere near being an honest broker, has done one yeoman’s work exposing not only Palin’s rank unfitness for her office, but other GOP candidate’s prejudices and biases which used to get a pass.

Take Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, she suggested that not only was Obama quite possibly ‘anti-American’ but that the press should join the GOP’s rabid media circus on a witch hunt to ferret out every ‘anti-American’ in Congress.

Literally within hours, a progressive ‘coalition of the willing’ from all over the country buried her little known challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg in so much cash (over $1 million in a matter of days) that he probably needed the National Guard to extricate him from the money blizzard.

And even the garden-variety hate merchants are getting their public comeuppances in the most unlikely places.

We all saw GOP Candidate John McCain take the microphone away from a befuddled woman at a McCain event in Minnesota who still insists that Obama is an Arab. But in a McCain rally in Woodbridge, Virginia, a couple selling Obama bumper tickers festooned with Muslim crescents and Communist hammer and sickles were run off by some other McCain volunteers.

And just last week, in a show of how desperate some people have become, Fox News and other right-wing sites like the Drudge Report trumpeted the sad and sick case of 20-year-old Ashley Todd, a McCain volunteer, who claimed she was robbed and assaulted at a Pittsburgh area ATM by a ‘large black man’ who carved a ‘B’ into her cheek after he supposedly noticed she had a McCain sticker on her car.

The story was quickly proven to be a hoax and the backlash against the right-wing media, and by extension John McCain, was swift and effective.

John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News, had written on his blog, "If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."

And so it is.

Yes, after decades of exposure to the right-wing media hate machine, it does seem that the American people have finally had enough.

Yes, a man with African-American blood in him can become President of the United States regardless of our 300-year racial history.

Yes, no longer can you shout ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ at a candidate and get a Pavlovian response from a majority of Americans. In fact, the harms of unbridled capitalism are also causing people to see how the economy affects them in a new light.

Yes, the screaming Elmer Gantrys of the religious right in this country can no longer wave their particularly bloody cross at a majority of Americans and get them to vote against their own economic interests.

Yes, a majority of Americans will no longer flinch when they hear the siren call of ‘terrorism’ and run to seeming safety of an authoritarian candidate. Eight years of President George W. Bush’s fruitless wars and weak leadership have caused people to no longer take what their government tells them as gospel.

Can Americans really rise above all the brainwashing of the Reagan-Bush years and walk into the voting booth November 4 with the better angels of our nature perched on our shoulders?

Stunningly, incredibly and, to me, unbelievably:

Yes, we can.

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...