The C-Word is not ‘capitalism’ or ‘conservatism’… or ‘cancer’…

I elsewhere speak of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who are often portrayed as opposites. Only, the latter deeply respected the former, writing of Smith’s vital role in ‘bourgeois revolution’ - a necessary intermediate stage on the road from feudalism and monarchic despotism to final-stage worker paradise. 

Mind you, it’s a pity 99% of moderns know next to nothing about these two thinkers, beyond inaccurate clichés. (See: Adam Smith – Liberals must reclaim him.) Smith was brilliant, helping set in motion many of the positive sum processes I’ll speak of below.

Alas, though the younger Marx offered cogent insights into economics and historiography, he was an utter failure at predicting future events. Eventually, he became a quasi-religious figure, a tool of neo-feudal lords, who made him the iconic saint of a state religion, excusing murderous tyranny. 

But his biggest mistake was assuming that human beings are too stupid to read Karl Marx! And thereupon draw lessons, taking actions that render his scenarios obsolete.

That's exactly what FDR and others of the 30s thru 50s did, performing reforms that Marx never imagined possible, sharing significant power with the working classes and  luring them into a prosperous middle class. Indeed, for a while there, our Rooseveltean Reforms seemed to toss Old Karl into the dustbin… 

...till a new generation of oligarchist fools set to work obeying almost to the letter his predicted patterns of dimwitted, self-flattering greed, restoring vast disparities to French Revolution levels. Thus they have resurrected Marx, his books now fizzing again across all the world’s campuses and ghettos.

Elsewhere I talk about the worst of these would-be lords and their sycophant lackeys, the so-called neo-monarchists, who now openly call for a return to rule by ‘unitary executive” kings, claiming that “freedom and democracy are incompatible.”  

At all levels and in all ways, they are the very best friends the Marxists ever had.

But here I want to talk about the vast majority of those on the right. Not the neo-monarchist extrema, but a far larger number whose core hypocrisy – continuing to claim fealty to free-enterprise – is easily exposed as two-faced pretense.

== What is the ‘C-Word’? ==

What chafes me about 'capitalism' ravings from all sides - from far right to far left - is how almost no one ever defines the term or shows even a clue of understanding its meaning or implications. 

Worse, almost no one nowadays mentions the other c-word... competition. Even though – unlike ‘capitalism’ -- we can actually agree (a bit) what competition means!

For one thing, it’s blatantly obvious from both evolution and history that humans are deeply competitive creatures. 

We are at our most creative and productive when most of us have the freedom, confidence, fairness and wherewithal to compete in areas we choose, on a relatively even playing field. 

(Those of you who denounce me for saying this; aren't you thereby vigorously competing with me?)

All of that might make me sound like a right winger... 

...though the truth is diametric opposite! 

Across the last 50 years, every measure or action that has lessened effective competition in the U.S. has been perpetrated by hypocrites of a sellout Republican Party -- a cabal devoted to replacing flat-fair-open-creative competition with privileged oligarchy and monopoly.

In contrast, the Rooseveltean social contract - which Republicans strive to demolish - enhanced creative competition, including entrepreneurship, small business startups, inventiveness and the most vigorous era of new products and services, ever. 

(I invite cash wagers on all of those assertions, which are overwhelmingly proved.)

Liberals did all that (if imperfectly) by:

- Using regulations to limit the power of mighty corporations and oligarchs to quash upstart competitors.

- Using tax policies to keep wealth disparities low enough so that - while getting-rich remained an incentive-allure for creative enterprise - the rich could not tower outrageously above us all, like lords. Or gods. 

(Example: there was a time when you’d see a rich or famous person flying First Class, now and then. They mostly rode the same airplanes, sipping mimosas in seats only 2x as large as ours. Alas, no longer. And note that all modes of transportation decline when the rich abandon them.)

- Using tax laws to encourage R&D, productive capital and hiring workers, rather than Supply Side parasitism.

- Encouraging unions (who were vigorously anti-Leninist) so that the working class joined the middle class, a feat Karl Marx never expected and that tossed all his predictions into history's dustbin. For a while.

- Creating a vast ecosystem of community colleges and universities that allowed many children of field hands and factory workers to transform into professionals and entrepreneurs.

- Liberal social programs and justice reforms that reduced the nasty, unjustified, though all-too human practice of prejudice. And thus (only partially, so far) achieving Adam Smith's top recommendation to stop wasting talent! ...

...Because, as Friedrich Hayek said (before the mad right perverted his memory), any competitive system will function best when it involves the largest number of knowledgeable, empowered, confident and eager competitors, unencumbered by insipid bigotries.

All of those endeavors – which define liberalism at its core - had great effects at many levels: fighting injustice, improving lives, preserving freedom - but with an added benefit that (alas) no democratic politician or liberal philosopher has had the savvy to explain... 

…that all of those endeavors also enhanced flat-fair-creative competition! And hence our creative inventiveness. 

(I exclude mutant-liberalism - the so-called far-left - whose arrogant demands to equalize outcomes, rather than opportunities is almost as jibbering loony as the entire-right's devotion to restored feudalism.)

And that’s my capsule argument about the C-Word that is no longer spoken aloud by ‘conservative’ writers or pundits. 

== C-Words ... all words... merit scrutiny! ==

Alas, no liberal pundit or politician ever points to this hypocrisy, or that the Founders and the original Tea Party rebelled primarily against cheater oligarchy. 

Moreover, anyone who actually reads Adam Smith knows that - were he alive today – Smith would be a flaming Democrat.

That hypocrisy – betraying and almost never even mentioning the most important c-word – competition - spans the entirety of today’s conservatism, with that one exception that I describe elsewhere... 

...those neo-monarchists who thus have one virture... evading hypocrisy. They are totally open about their hatred of fair competition! They openly espouse completing the antipodal migration of conservatism, from once-upon-a-time extolling competition all the way to openly justifying its utter suppression. 

 From Adam Smith to Louis XIV.

Again, unlike every other kind of contemporary conservative, at least members of that extremum – while nauseatingly evil imbeciles – are no longer hypocrites! I'll grant them that.

----------

 See my posting: The Return of Neomonarchy.

Religious and polysyllabic justifications for treason

== He's at it again ==

The Worst Man in America - and among its most relentless traitors - is at it again, blaming the collapse of American conservatism on "vulgarians," rather than a 30 year campaign to hijack and lobotomize the entire movement -- financed by the very same oligarchs to whom George F. Will has given decades of devoted service. This gifted savanarola has concocted rationalizations for sapient Americans to remain loyal to a movement that long ago left them to become a cult, waging open warfare against every fact-using profession, starting with science, journalism, teaching, medicine -- but including now the entire civil service, law professionals, the FBI, the intelligence services and the United States Military Officer Corps... all of them dismissed as "deep state" conspirators against freedom.

Add them to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which barely survived an attempt on July 26 to slash its budget almost in half, abolishing the CBO's Budget Analysis Division,  in revenge for their effrontery -- actually crunching the numbers on GOP proposed legislation.

Throw in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the EPA, NOAA, The Centers for Disease Control and even the National Institutes on Health, on a growing alt-right Enemies List -- fated to join in extinction the long killed Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). All declared to be deep-state, partisan liars, because they dare - now and then - to let experts murmur "that's not really true" at fanatical-delusional manifestos of an American right that George F. Will helped to turn insane.

Oh but Mr. Will only points at the surface symptoms.
"Today, conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients. America needs a reminder of conservatism before vulgarians hijacked it, and a hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking."

A hint of how it became susceptible to hijacking? A hint, sir? I'll give you a "hint," you horrid little hypocrite, George F. Will!   You are the hijacker. The "vulgarians" are your creation. Monster.

Proto-feudalism fever tries periodically to destroy the American experiment. The common thread of his sickness... from 1778's southern tories to Calhoun in 1830, to Jeff Davis in 1861, to the Klan and robber barons, to the 1930s fascists, to today... is one thing. "Give power back to the feudal lords!" That's why they push the never-once-right-ever Laffer-incantations of Supply Side Voodoo which have had three effects, skyrocketing debt, slowed growth and vast enrichment of the aristocracy at our expense.

This round of the recurring cycle - this attempted oligarchic putsch - is a big 'un, guys. They are afroth and will destroy everything if we let them.

== Religious justifications for hate ==

Dominionists preach that those they define as non-Christian are "condemned," and that includes all but a few hundred thousand true-believers. These elect won't just get eternal bliss (while 99% of their neighbors and fellow citizens writhe in endless torment). The latest cult catechism is that in this world - soon - true believers will get everyone else’s stuff. Our homes and property, and cars and TVs and bank accounts. Yippee.

Let's be clear, since no one else seems willing to. Those who prefer the Book of Revelation - over the kind and generous actual words of Jesus - pray not only for their neighbors' damnation, but also for an end to all democracy, freedom, argument, ambition, science, independent human thought… and for an imminent end of the United States of America. 

Now read about the latest anti-Christ (literally) polemic from the mad right… that the poor deserve poverty, yes, including children. Dominionism is core to the GOP wing best represented by Vice President Mike Pence. That's one reason why -- please -- think twice before rushing to impeachment.

Fortunately we have allies. Such as those who can see the obvious... that the bearded, beaded, pacifist-socialist Nazarene would despise “camels” who are obsessed with taking other folks' stuff.  Camels who will never fit through a needle into heaven.

Another ally? Pope Francis, who is assertively taking a stand against Steve Bannon's ilk. This article signed by a Jesuit and a liberal Protestant together is in La Civiltà Cattolica - a very old Jesuit magazine - and it's obvious that the article expresses the views of the pope, criticizing the "Ecumenism of hate" -- the joining together fundamentalist evangelicals and integralist Catholics. There is a careful decryption of "Religion, political Manichaeism and a cult of the apocalypse", not to mention critique of the Dominionists' raving 'prosperity gospel.'

== Swerving to Healthcare and the "drained" swamp == 

From The Atlantic: "With Democrats accusing the administration of sabotaging the health law, two GOP committee chairmen urge the president to continue payments to insurers that could shore up the insurance market."  

Having failed to pass their own health care bills, despite having 7 years to prepare, now Trump and his allies are talking about "letting Obamacare explode." But with a problem that Obamacare is only exploding in red states.  It is only failing where the political caste has sabotaged it.

To be clear: (1) All Obamacare needs, in order to work fine, is an upping of the Individual Mandate penalty, encouraging young people to buy health insurance.  All of the insurance companies say that would work, almost overnight. It won't happen.

But the biggest hypocrisy is (2) the GOP won't admit that all major aspects of Obamacare were their OWN DAMN PLAN.  The GOP platform since 1995 and the model for Romneycare and Trump supported the heck out of it... till Dennis "friend to boys" Hastert made it Republican religion to never credit Obama or a democrat with anything, even making their own damn plan come true.

Want irony? All Trump has to do is swivel and declare victory! "We tricked the democrats into supporting our own plan!"  Then make it work and kill that as an issue for 2018. Judo.

For the record? Most dems never liked the ACA! A majority in the DP would prefer Canadian style health. The ACA was an attempt to lure the GOP into negotiating by giving them their own damn plan.  It didn't work. As soon as Obama touched it, their own damn plan suddenly had cooooooties.

== Miscellany ==

How the swamp is drained!  Attempting at first to keep it secret, theTrump White House granted more ethics waivers – letting lobbyists jump directly into regulating their own industries – than any three other administrations, combined.

When President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, he acted in concert with 22 Republican senators, who collectively receive $10,694,284 in contributions from the coal and oil industries.  

== Historical Perspective ==

What Churchill and Orwell had in common: Churchill & Orwell were both savagely critical of the gloom-sayers of their own parties: right and left. "At a time not unlike today — when people were wondering whether democracy was sustainable, when a lot of people thought you needed authoritarian rule, either from the right or the left — Orwell and Churchill, from their very different perspectives, come together on a key point: We don't have to have authoritarian government."

This author shows how the conservative Churchill was deeply critical of oligarchy and the leftist Orwell despised communist fanaticism. Another key point, he says, is that they were "both willing to say, 'No, my side is wrong on this.' "

Both believed - along with Adam Smith and the American Founders and Lincoln and FDR and so on, that moderate, negotiated reform and steady progress could overcome the crises precipitated by insatiable fools at all extremes. And history shows they were right.

Hence the propaganda by  insatiable fools at all extremes, aimed at demolishing moderate, fact-using professions and mature argument. NPR Reporter Steven Inskeep stands up against this campaign, and the 200 year: "agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it, and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter."

Regulated competition is the wellspring of our revolution

The hot new Evonomics site offers some of the best writing about fresh  economics perspectives around. I was one of their first writers and now they have published another piece on "The Fairness Divide" making a clear distinction between equality-of-opportunity vs. equality-of- outcomes.  I think it will set some familiar perplexities in a much clearer light.  

Along related lines, Lawrence Lessig has joined others in questioning one of our laziest assumptions: that capitalism is the same thing as corporate oligarchy, and that the secret to a healthy capitalism is zero regulation.  

Anyone who actually reads Adam Smith - or who knows a thing about the last 6000 years - knows that oligarchy is the worst enemy of flat-open-fair-competitive and creative market enterprise. 

Here's a passage from Lessig's recent review: 
“Theorists and principled souls on the Right are free-market advocates. They are convinced by Hayek and his followers that markets aggregate the will of the public better than governments do. This doesn’t mean that governments are unnecessary. 

"As Rajan and Zingales put it in their very strong pro-free-market book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, 'Markets cannot flourish without the very visible hand of the government, which is needed to set up and maintain the infrastructure that enables participants to trade freely and with confidence.' 

"But it does mean that a society should try to protect free markets, within that essential infrastructure, and ensure that those who would achieve their wealth by corrupting free markets don’t.”

"Rajan and Zingales further describe:

“Capitalism’s biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action.”

== Must markets be 'blind'? ==

Way back in the last century, I was pointing out that those proclaiming “Faith in Blind Markets” — or FIBM — mostly ignore those 60 centuries, when lack of market regulation simply meant “those who have, rule.” Across that era, laissez faire inevitably led to feudalism and stunningly stupid governance. The last 200 years have been an exception to that brutally nescient and incompetent span. This was Adam Smith’s foremost complaint.

Does this validate the opponents of FIBM? Those who proclaim Guided Allocation of Resources, or GAR? Surely the examples of Leninism, Maoism and Japan and China show that central control has severe limitations. Without any doubt, the FIBM guys have a point — that there’s such a thing as too much regulation. (Ironically, which U.S. political party actually de-regulates obsolete agencies and loosens regulation, as often as it tightens it? Democrats, by far.)

I go into the tradeoffs of GAR and FIBM elsewhere.  But the outlines are clear.  Both cults want control and allocation by elites. The FIBM crowd (who call themselves “libertarians” but in fact are not) differ only in which elite they would make all-powerful allocators — not bureaucrats, answerable to an electorate, but a secretively-incestuous CEO caste of 5,000 golf buddies.  

That’s not flat-open-fair-creative market competition, and it certainly isn't Hayek. That is hypocrisy. It’s the tired old way: feudalism.

But read the Lessig article.  He's an economist and has lately earned some real cred from us.

== More on Hayek ==

Others are weighing in on Hayek, and the rampant misinterpretation that he favored zero regulation. As economist David Sloan Wilson put it:  "Hayek had two way-ahead-of-his-time insights. First, that economic systems have a distributed intelligence that cannot be located in any individual. Second, that this intelligence evolved by cultural group selection. Contemporary science — complex systems and multilevel evolution — validate those claims. But Hayek fans are mistaken to believe that his insights mean markets should be unregulated."

Or as Evonomics pundit Jag Bhalla says: "Hayek’s right that no “central planner” can know what’s distributed among people in markets. But computer scientists have studied distributed processing’s limits. Many tasks can’t be efficiently distributed. Most still need central coordination. Aren’t market computations similarly limited?" ... and "Effective market regulation should heed biology’s regulatory lessons. Economies, like complex organisms, need distributed reflexes and a central nervous system. They need more than one price-like signal to prioritize and regulate for the whole, and to manage systemic risks. That doesn’t happen automatically."

== Libertarianism and conservatism, redux ==

Let's look at this same issue from another angle.

The real problem with today's versions of libertarianism and conservatism isn't "selfishness" per se. As Adam Smith showed. competitiveness is one wellspring of human creativity and leftists are fools to deny it. 

No, the problem is that conservatives and libertarians almost never mention the word "competition," anymore.  Because they know people sense a contradiction with the modern religion that has taken over libertarianism. Idolatry of unlimited personal property. 

At best, these two concepts - competition and propertarianism - are tense partners, with some genuine property rights necessary, in order to foster competitive drive. But they can become often diametric opposites, even enemies.

Yes, property rights are essential, but they become toxic when overly concentrated. (Just like any other good thing, e.g. water, oxygen and food.) Adam Smith knew this. To him, the true enemy of market enterprise  - across 99% of societies - was feudal owner aristocracy.  And it is true today. 

Let's stick this point: Idolatry of unlimited personal property is the same thing as declaring hatred of flat-open-fair competition.

See my classic essay on this, appealing to all -- especially libertarians -- to get over their voluptuously silly Ayn Rand solipsism kick and actually read Smith, a philosopher who understood so much more than slimplistic left or right credit him with, and who changed the world.

See this recent essay about Ayn Rand's cult of selfishness and the real world cases where it has been put into practice... Sears/KMart and Honduras, both of which were suddenly converted to Randian principles of cut-throat internal competition.

Both are now teetering on bankruptcy.

== A useful innovation that can sour ==

Let's try this from yet another perspective: George Friedman, founder of Stratfor the strategic analysis firm and now working with economist John Mauldin, discusses the modern, limited liability corporation:

“The very idea of a corporation is a political idea. That someone should be able to own part of a company but not be liable for all its debts is a very modern idea. It's also a very radical idea. Many people, including Adam Smith, did not trust the corporation. Smith argued that unless you were an owner of a corporation, you were not committed to its interests. ... It is the state setting liability. 

The notion that there can be limited liability doesn’t flow from the free market. It flows from the state, which says you can have this kind of corporation”

To be clear, Smith was not all-knowing.  The limited liability corporation has definitely had its uses and allowed more bold risk-taking in pursuit of economic dynamism.  But the moral hazards mount up over time.  Not only should LLCs be fundamentally limited to prevent monopoly and conniving duopoly etc, but there are good arguments for assigning them lifespans, so they will not become immortal and toxic.

== A plethora of angles on a problem ==

To be clear, something like a modern political economic system is a lot like the proverbial elephant, being groped by blind pundits, each proclaiming a single, linear metaphor to be THE thing itself. In fact, these perspectives -- like the hoary "left-right axis" - are only useful to the degree that users bear in mind: the map is not the territory.  And our metaphors can lobotomize.

So let's restate "left" and "right" not in obsolete terms from the French Revolution.  Instead, I think conservatism vs progressivism is all about the process of "horizon expansion" that I talk about here and here. Wherein the circle of inclusion in society keeps being pushed outward, a process that gained momentum in our Great Experiment gradually, for the last 250 years.

A process that the left has made their core religion! So much so that they despise and denounce anyone who disagrees even slightly about the pace of tolerance/inclusion expansion and openly question whether old loyalties are still pertinent.

The right, in turn, despises those who push hard on inclusion-expansion and hates to be nagged to do it.  They like their old loyalties.

LIBERALS are a third type, totally different than leftists. They tend to like the general process of inclusion expansion ... but they also like their old loyalties.  They are the only ones conceiving this as a positive sum, win-win process. Again, liberals are neither lefties nor righties. They want new kinds of citizens!  But they also don't mind keeping some older ways around.

You see the same thing when it comes to the concept underlying our great competitive ARENAS... markets, democracy, science, courts and sports ...All five innovative systems achieve positive sum cornucopias of output because they nurse vigorous competition... but regulated in order to minimize cheating and maximize opportunities for creative rivalry.

Leftists despise the word "competition" ignoring (1) that is is the source of fecund wealth we use then to help people and expand inclusion! Moreover - oh the irony - (2) they they are themselves being very very competitive!

Rightists are worse!  They claim to love the word "competition" but hate REGULATION... without which competitive processes are always always always and always ruined by cheaters.  (In fact, enabling cheaters is now the main purpose of the Republican Party.)

Again, liberals are the only ones who see no dichotomy.  Who see the combined word "regulated-competition" as the wellspring of our revolution and bold new way of doing things.

Which brings us full circle.  Sure, regulations - even well-meaning ones - can stifle enterprise. (And dems are better at eliminating those.) But without a regulated marketplace we fall back upon 6000 years of cheating - and FIBM soon becomes just another excuse for GAR.

It's complicated, and not very satisfying to those who want simple prescriptions.  Rather, our role as adults is to accept that it is complicated.  To embrace all this complexity! To keep fine-tuning a role for regulation in enhancing infrastructure and science, education, health etc -- things that increase the overall number of skilled and confident competitors!  But also to back away from those well-meaning regulations that try to impose nit-pickery outcomes.

Militantly moderate, ferociously reasonable, courageously contingent... it is the liberals who seem less passionate, but who have the closest thing to an adult perspective. One that might bring us to even greater heights.

Fear Trump? Loathe Cruz? Not as much as the GOP lords do.

== Deadly Memes, spread by hypocrites ==

The lords of the U.S. right - from the Murdoch-Saudi owners of Fox News all the way to the faux-intellects at National Review - have been desperately seeking magic bullets to bring down Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, so they can restore their till-now complete, top-down control over the GOP political caste. Hence a double barrel attack, with old guard pols, like Bob Dole, talking about Cruz’s “hateful personality.” 

As for Trump? While most of the world piles onto him as “fascist” (an accusation I tend not to believe), National Review and Fox are trying a new tactic: accusing the Donald of being “too moderate!”  

Of course that accusation would be poison to the populist volcano that the lords themselves deliberately fueled for 20+ years, exactly as the Junkers lords did in 1920s Germany, using populist, lowbrow bigotism as a weapon against leftists and liberals… till that frenzy exploded out of their control. 

Proudly ignorant of history, today’s GOP lords seem actually to believe the same hallucination -- that if they tar Trump with “too-liberal” — spreading more glue under the nostrils of their horse — that they can then tighten the reins and hold on a while longer.

It won’t work.  All they prove daily, by ignoring history, is their stupidity and unworthiness for the lordship that they seek over a re-feudalized West.  

Mind you, my own reading of Donald Trump is that, yes, if he gets the nomination he will then charge for the center as fast as he can. In which case he will need a strong ambassador to quash rebellion from the molten-hot confederacy. And that envoy would have to be Ted Cruz. ANY republican nominee will need Cruz for that role. A role - as VP running mate - that I have long asserted has always been Cruz’s one goal. 

His only goal, all along. 

== Ted Cruz: the Secret Plan ==

 I tell you this.  Actually winning the GOP nomination for president would be Ted Cruz’s second-worst nightmare! (The very worst -- of course -- is to be ignored.)

He knows that as ticket-leader he would be crushed in the general election and the confederacy left in smoldering ruins. For example, it does not bother the maddest right a bit that scientists, even Texas ones, have demolished his climate lies, time and again. But in a general election the crazy science-haters will not decide. As the GOP's presidential nominee he would drive off so many moderate voters who still care about facts that all of his dreams will collapse.

No. Ted Cruz wants caucus and primary victories, but only enough to solidify his blatantly obvious role. He has positioned himself — if trends continue — to demand the VP slot and to get it, from whoever wins the top position. (Including from the secret white-knight of the establishment: Paul Ryan. And be aware that playing a role of kingmaker, at the GOP convention, would suit Ted just fine.)

From that VP slot in 2016, win or lose in November, Cruz would confidently expect to become the Republican Party's heir apparent, either in 2020 or 2024, after four or eight years collecting political IOUs, exactly the pattern that his role model, Richard Nixon, pioneered - (with more than a touch of Joe McCarthy, whom Cruz physically resembles to an astonishing degree) - though determined that his own tools of power will be perfect, unlike Nixon's.) 

It is a cunning plan. Revealing genuine shrewdness and patience. This man is playing a long, long game.

== Rebels to save American Conservatism?

It is hilarious to read Rich Lowry, editor of the William F. Buckley's once-intellectually conservative National Review, try to explain why his magazine's "Against Trump" special edition - gathering anti-Donald rants from dozens of top republican figures - is not part of a grandly-orchestrated campaign by the GOP establishment to keep party control in their hands. The timing and uniformity are straight out of Roger Ailes's 20 year, winning playbook. Want proof what a standard Republican Mr. Lowry truly is? His repeatedly-expressed belief that shouting "No, I'm not!" is enough to make something untrue. 

Triumph of the will? Or lots of cold cash, changing hands? Do you hear that whirring sound of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater, spinning in their graves?  Tap that spin and we could reduce energy costs enough to fix climate change.

Are all conservative voices - other than Trump and Cruz and their beer hall fervids - controlled by the party lords? 

Well, there are some dissenters from what used to be the adult wing of the GOP. The Eisenhower family has shown some guts. And David Brooks is the conservative columnist who comes closest, from time to time, to doing what far more of them should right now, if they had cojones. That is, stand up and acknowledge that their movement has been hijacked by crazies and by foreign and domestic proto-feudalists. 

Only by rousing genuine anger at what’s been done to U.S. conservatism — denouncing those who transformed it into a know-nothing rabble waging war against science and every other caste of knowledge and skill in American life — might the once intellect-driven cause of Goldwater and Buckley and Eisenhower veer away from looming cliffs of insanity.

Alas, while Mr. Brooks tries for some stylishly militant flourishes, in calling for mainstream Republicans — state legislators and donors etc — to step up, in the end his proposal boils down to “let’s all rally behind Rubio and/or Bush.”  It lays no onus on the ruiners of the GOP who set up the current, Munich-style beer hall frenzy. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch and their Saudi co-owners of a media machine whose blatant efforts to stir lobotomized populist radicalism are now coming home to roost… as the Junkers lords got more than they bargained for, in 1932 Germany.  

Here's a much harsher assessment of Mr. Brooks's call for the GOP "donor class" to step in and rescue the party from a populism they themselves created. No longer even offering a figleaf pretense that it has ever been about anything but oligarchy. 

(Nor is this "donor class" anything more than the surface. Underneath the Kochs and Murdochs etc is a flood of laundered Macao gambling money flowing to Republican candidates, a poisonous foreign influence that the U.S. political process would be better off without. And I will leave you with three guesses why Macau casinos are the most profitable in the world. Unrealistically and impossibly "profitable." You've had enough hints... and that is all that I will say about the source of that profitability.)

No, it will take more than this, Mr. Brooks, though I’ll give you credit for at least being more open and much more of a man than George F. Will, who could have ended this madness years ago, but wimped out.

== Triumph of the Won't ... and Failure of the Will == 

Of all the hypocrites who have aided and knowingly abetted the hijacking of American conservatism, none is more culpable than George F. Will, a columnist whose intelligence and wit and secure income would have equipped him to lead a counter-revolution against the ruination of the American Right… but for his craven selling-out.  

Back in the late nineties, Mr. Will clearly recognized the plain fact that metrics of U.S. national health do vastly better across democratic administrations than GOP ones, especially for conservative desiderata that range from trends in the direction of change of federal deficits, to entrepreneurship, all the way to military readiness. And regarding illegal immigration rates, which go in directions that would surprise you.

Hence, Mr. Will might have influenced his own party to emphasize rivalry vs the Democrats in innovating methods of governance that deliver equal or better quality of service, according to testable and verifiable metrics, while encouraging healthy market competition. (This approach was once championed by Barry Goldwater.)

Alas, instead of admitting that Bill Clinton was delivering the goods, and boldly suggesting that republicans be competitive in that arena - in delivering actually measurable outcomes of governance - he waffled, then followed the Fox calliope — the hypnotic, siren song of “hate all government, all the time, in principle!”  With the underlying agenda of rationalizing any excuse to benefit oligarchy.

He did this, only dragging his feet slightly, knowing full well that the Greatest Generation - our parents who defeated the Depression and Hitler and Stalin and built the great American Middle Class - would have found the nostrum both absurd and noxious.

During the G.W. Bush era, Mr. Will occasionally showed that he could see right through the madness called Straussian “neoconservatism” — a monumental lunacy that threw our mostly strong-beneficent-marshallian Pax Americana into disastrously debilitating, romantic-imperial adventures that only served the interests of a single, extremely hostile foreign power. George Will hinted repeatedly that he could see all this, but did he lead a rebellion against those bona fide monsters?  

Hinting, always hinting… he lets savvy readers in on the secret, with nods and winks, that he knows “Obamacare” was the Republicans’ own-damn-plan all along, and that it basically works, and could have been improved by a Republican Party that negotiates.  Knowing full well that the never-negotiate “Hastert Rule” is tantamount to treason, he did not defend it, but instead encouraged the mythology and mantra repeated endlessly by the remaining Republican intelligencia… that “democrats are just as bad.” 

A pretty-darned pathetic slogan for continued loyalty -- even if it were true.

Above all, George Will might have led a counter-reformation against the Murdoch-Saudi-Macau financing of American Madrassas such as Fox News, making especially clear his demurral versus their outright War on Science, a campaign of venomous hatred-of-expertise that now extends to every single smartypants clade, from teachers to medical doctors to economists, civil servants, law professionals, professors... and Will’s own craft of journalism. 

All of them now reviled by the revived confederacy.

== Putin-Worship ==

Nothing makes the craven betrayal of this articulate, polysyllabic sell-out as vivid and stark as this recent essay attacking Donald Trump for exchanging admiring-longing looks with Vladimir Putin.  

Oh, hypocrisy-to-the-hypocrite-power! It is the Fox-plus savanarolas of our sickly hijacked confederate-right who have kvelled all over Putin, for years, erecting a cult of idolatry toward the Russian leader calling him (as Forbes repeatedly gushes) by far the “most powerful man in the world.” 

Endlessly simpering at barechested images of Putin, American Talibanistas like Sean Hannity  have crooned over how America needs such a caudillo-style comandante, proclaiming that the Russian President routinely runs circles around our own "feckless" leadership. And, from time to time, George F. Will has joined the refrain of adoration odes (punctuated by “of course he’s evil,” with shrugged asides.)

Now? To blame Donald Trump for passing around the same Koolaid? Sorry boys, you spent decades and billions re-igniting the American Civil War, so do not be surprised when the memes get away from you, as they did (I'll reiterate) when the Junkers and industrialists roused similar populist hate-festivals in 1930s Germany, thinking they could keep it all under control.

Oh, about Putin? He who nibbled back the Crimea… after losing Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence forever? Oh the Fox-hossanahs to "strongman" Putin -- and sneers at "feckless" Obama -- over Crimea, while never ever, ever mentioning the far larger western victory and Muscovian loss in Ukraine!

Any modern Russian will tell you that they do not view our current leadership as weak or impotent. Or "feckless." Vastly, vastly more important than Crimea or Syria, loss of Ukraine was a strategic debacle that they (including Putin) openly, publicly and loudly blame squarely on one guy. An aggressively potent Barack Obama.

 You know, the guy who killed Osama bin Laden and made Iran give up their bomb program and for the first time in 70 years is not giving the Saudis whatever they want. (Connect those two dots, will you?) The guy who took U.S. military readiness figures from zero percent of major Army and Marine units, at the end of the GW Bush administration, back to 100% today, as they were at the end of the Clinton Administration, while bringing death and casualty rates for U.S. service-folk back down to Clinton-era levels, as well, while supervising the most rapid technological transformation of Defense in history. That weakling?

Yeah, the "feckless" guy who (according to the Russians themselves) stole the Ukraine from them. Oh, and did I mention he killed Osama bin Laden? (Stop pretending you've forgotten that.) Yeah. That feckless one.

Mr. Will, you could have been historic. You might have helped lead a counter-reformation that saved American conservatism from such drooling insanity. Now? Sir, you will be utterly forgotten.