There may be no more certain sign of the incipient demise of the American empire than that it is featured on this week's cover of the Economist magazine.

It is, in fact, the subject of this edition's central exploration, which likely makes decline that much more inexorable.

The Economist's thesis is that George Bush' extremism is, far from reflecting the country's radical right fringe, in fact a reflection of a central current of American life and thought since ... America.

The magazine adopts deTocqueville's formulation and labels the Bush burgeon 'American Exceptionalism".

Exceptionalism in their parlance means that American believes itself exceptional. And also meant that the editors find American to be, in fact, exceptionally different from Europeans.

Taking off from a Pew Center survey published a few months ago (and discussed here earlier), the survey finds Americans to be uber (or sur, since the distinctions may be most strong vis a vis the French) -many things. Sur-religious. Sur-patriotic. Sur-individualistic -- as in, much more concerned about freedom than about insuring that others are not in need.

The sur-vey attempts politesse and doesn't use this word, but essentially says that America's unilateralism has roots.

My take? They couldn't be more incorrect.

The Economist correctly says that the partisan divide in America has never been greater.

The bulk of Americans do not favor Bush' extremist and naive view that the United States should retreat from the world except to the degree that it can protect with military power perceived threats.

Bush lost the general election by 500,000 votes. He is less popular today than at any time since elected. His votes were based on a sound-bite campaign of moderation. 9/11 terrorized the American populace, and he's leveraged that terror to promote his extremist agenda.

None of which means in any way that Bush extremism reflects America's basic values.

I understand why the Economist would prefer this formulation -- as journalists, they need a new angle of attack to provoke attention and readership.

And I can even understand why some in Europe would prefer the safer formulation that America's mad-hatter emperor is a mirror of the populace. Safer than the alternative that they're dealing with an out-of-control, immature, and unreflective zealot.

But nothing in their long argument convinces me that Bush' attack on liberties, the environment, and social justice at home, and his unilateral isolationism abroad, are rooted in more than the small manure pile of a narrow Beltway bunch.