In a parking lot in suburban Philadelphia, a mother buckles her child into the car seat. She puts the groceries in the back of the station wagon, and as she pulls the door down I see, on a piece of paper taped on the window the question “Is it fascism yet?” My brother calls and in the middle of the phone conversation says into the silence “I know how people felt in Germany in the 1930s.” It is not fascism yet. We are waiting, as winter comes, to see if the shadows lengthen and the light fails.

The neoconservatives brought to power in the administration of the lesser George Bush have brought us to this place in history’s shadow. They offer us a celebratory patriotism, full of flags and ribbons, where questions and dissent are silenced, to support our president, support the troops. They promise to deliver us from the decadence of artists and intellectuals. They argue for the return of moral standards to the public square and women to the kitchen. They offer a lighter, faster military, able to project power in lightning strikes, and move rapidly to the next target. They commit us to a war where the enemies are unnamed and ever-changing, and the prospects of peace distant and still receding. They console us for war-time deaths and the absent prospect of victory or peace with the claim that war increases “moral seriousness.” They offer a stronger executive, a more imperial president.

Traditional conservatives, especially libertarians, called on us to protect our liberties. Neoconservatives call on us to surrender them in the name of homeland security. Traditional conservatives distrusted democracy and praised stability. Neoconservatives make the expansion of democracy abroad the license to diminish democracy at home and argue that America should “make trouble in the world.” Traditional conservatives had a commitment to balanced budgets and small government. Neoconservatives seek to expand government, into airports, libraries and homes. Nothing expands a government like a war.

We were told, after other charges failed, that we went to Iraq to reshape the Middle East as a democratic region, with the Israeli democracy at its heart. We have made it a chaos. We injected more weapons and more training into an already unsettled and volatile land. We have opened old wounds and old enmities. We have placed women at risk; disadvantaged and disenfranchised the secular. Iran, its eyes on Iraq, has pushed its nuclear weapons program forward. We have made conditions of life – food, water, shelter, medical care – worse for virtually all Iraqis. We have not brought democracy.

America hasn’t done much for Iraq, but we’ve done a lot to ourselves. Now we are a nation that engages in pre-emptive war, what we once called, pejoratively, wars of aggression. We refuse to observe treaties and conventions on the treatment of prisoners. We have off-shore prisons that – like off-shore banks – avoid regulation. We hold prisoners without charges.

We have embarked on a campaign of imperial domination in the name of democracy. The troops we sent abroad have not come home. Soldiers subject to stop-loss orders serve tour after tour. We place the burdens of war disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor. We display many little ribbons saying “support the troops” but families of enlisted men live in poverty and the wives and children of national guardsmen have been evicted from their homes. We not only accept, we encourage, war profiteering. War is conducted not only by our national army seeking national security, but by private corporations seeking profits. “Private security contractors” make many times what a soldier doing the same work makes. When we were more honest, we called these people mercenaries.

Our soldiers have been ordered, to our shame, to engage in mass arrests. They, and the “civilian contractors” have employed “moderate physical pressure” and something more. They have leashed men like dogs, piled them in pyramids of flesh, beaten and tormented them in what even the slyest tongue must call torture. We deposed Saddam only to take his place. We have become the masters of Abu Ghraib.

No, it is not fascism yet. But the days grow shorter, the nights longer, and the shadows of history darken our way.

Anne Norton is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire.