THE PRIMARY PROBLEM—Their lack of feistiness is not the only problem. Democratic legislators must contend with one of the few innovations in the American political system since 1789: the electoral primaries. The original idea behind primaries was to take politics out of the smoke-filled rooms of the party bosses, where as Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed once said, "I don't care who does the electin', so long as I do the nominatin'." Apart from anti-smoking laws, all that has happened since is that check writers have taken over for ward heelers.

The primaries are now responsible for much of the evil in modern American politics, from apathy and lackluster political platforms to the power of money. We now take it for granted, almost as constitutional, in fact, that the race is much more likely to go to the richest than the worthiest. To gain access to party funding, a candidate has to first win a primary, and to do so needs to raise money as an individual. As we can see, this not only gives a head start to the Mike Bloombergs of this world, it also means that candidates begin their political life in hock to business interests.

Europeans are never sure whether to be amused or horrified at the role of campaign contributions, in the U.S., in buying legislation. In most other countries this would be considered criminal corruption and outright bribery, but the American convention is to assume that as long as the bribes are spent on political expenses rather than going into the candidates' pockets, all is well.

Primaries are flawed in principle as well as in effect, but Americans are so used to them that even the most radical tend to overlook just how bizarre and essentially undemocratic they are. In few other democracies are a party's candidates chosen by non-party members. In a sense, it makes a mockery of the secret ballot for voters to declare their party allegiances on the electoral registers, and in many countries it would be regarded as a shocking intrusion to have citizens' political opinions recorded publicly in this way.

While they are anomalous enough in the states where voters at least have to declare which party they support in order to participate, primaries reach the level of outright insanity in states with "open primaries," where supporters of one party can actually choose another's candidates. We saw the results of that recently when Cynthia McKinney was defeated in an open primary in Georgia by a combination of cross voting from Republicans and out-of-state money. When she was able to present herself in a later, general election, she won handsomely, demonstrating presumably how ineffective the primaries are at representing the intentions of the electorate as a whole.

In other democratic countries, the candidates are picked by party members who have paid dues and declared support for the party's principles. Of course, the association of party and principle seems a contradiction in terms to many disgruntled Americans, but maybe the primaries have had something to do with that as well.

Another direct consequence of this is that as far as the public is concerned, the Democrats will be leaderless until the primaries. There is no leader of the opposition, loyal or otherwise, in the American political system. In more developed parliamentary systems, the scores are settled right after an election. The losing party decides whether the leader of that party is worth another try, or whether to pick someone else quickly to lead the opposition back to power.

But in the U.S., the Democrats will be rudderless for most of the presidential term until at the end, for a long and tedious year the contending candidates will exhaust their wealth and the patience of potential supporters in trashing each other, so that the one with the most money and least mire sticking to him emerges as the winning candidate, to be adopted at the content-free circus that passes for a party convention. If half the energy that went into opposing each other in the primaries went into the task of opposing the incumbent over his term of office, it would be a big step forward.

FACING THE FACTS—Americans often take some convincing that there is much wrong with their system, apart from the wrong people being elected. While the European monarchies were evolving, the American Republic became fossilized in its eighteenth-century form. The United States could benefit from a constitutional monarchy that no one cares very much about, and an established church that no one believes in; but sadly the Bush dynasty, beginning pre-Katrina, has shown many signs of developing into an unconstitutional de facto monarchy, with the White House controlling the legislators and the judges and the military every bit as firmly as George III ever did. And the U.S., for all the talk of separation of church and state is increasingly intolerant in its religion. However, while you could live with an attenuated monarchy inherited and adapted, no rational person save Karl Rove would try to implement one from a standing start.

So, is there an easy way to bring the American political system into the twenty-first century? Sadly, probably not. Even the primaries, enshrined as they are in so many state legislatures, would take a long time to disentangle. However, the Plamegate affair does offer an unrivaled opportunity for the Democrats to stake out a position for the loyal opposition, and to establish the question of to what, or whom, loyalty is due. All too often, the Democrats have acted as if in their hearts they secretly believed that the Republicans were indeed the natural governing party of the United States in some metaphysical way.

Loyalty to the nation and its people now demands an exposure of the disloyalty of the governing party. Its preparedness to lie and invent facts in order to procure a war that it has yet to explain adequately; its willingness to compromise national security to protect its lies; its confusion of loyalty to the Bush family and to its cronies with loyalty to the country, all capped with a willingness to retaliate at once against any liberals who speak out.

In fact, it demands the application of European standards of political conduct, which, even if they are more often honored in the breach than the observance, would pay dividends for a revived American democracy that currently shows signs of ignoring decent standards altogether.