Like testosterone-crazed teenage drivers locked in a game of chicken, Democrats and Republicans seem on course toward a collision that could do grave damage to our democracy’s distinctive blend of majority rule and minority protections.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last month to end (in California, at least) the incumbent-protection racket that is congressional and legislative redistricting, some Democrats accused him of a Texas-style power-grab for more Republican seats.

The air is thick with lies, deceptions, distortions, demagoguery, sleaze, and vicious rhetoric, uttered every day by President Bush, John Kerry, or their surrogates. Both candidates offer evasion and snake-oil non-remedies for dire national problems, ranging from the existential threat of nuclear terrorism, to the war in Iraq, to global warming, to the looming Social-Security-Medicare-deficit disaster. And each campaign is whipping its most partisan supporters into a frenzy of hatred for the opposing party.

Would you like to see the estate tax repealed so that more people will be so flush with family money that they will never need to work? How about spending $100 billion or more on an easily circumvented missile shield that would wreak havoc with arms control? Or securing major cutbacks in federal environmental laws? Or speeding up executions of accused murderers without bothering to give them fair trials? Or returning to huge budget deficits? Then you should be rooting both for George W. Bush and for solid Republican majorities in Congress.