How Far Conservatism Has Changed

All right, it is an important U.S. political season.  As a registered Republican and a frequent speaker at libertarian gatherings, I remain hopeful that this will be the year that several million temperamentally conservative-but-calmly-rational Americans will wake up to the way their movement and the GOP have been hijacked. And that only a shattering drubbing at the polls will send the American right back to the drawing boards -- learning to do politics again. Including negotiation about real problems. 

Oh, but it will be so hard! 

The oligarchs who have done the hijacking have ordered up so many narratives, from "birther" paranoia to climate denialism, from preaching "oligarchy is gooood for you" to utter lies about U.S. history. I will explicate the best and most hilariously most damning example below -- the George Soros Effect.  

But first -- In That's Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing, Professor Michael Austin examines dozens of books, articles, speeches, and radio broadcasts by such figures as Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Larry Schweikart, and David Barton to expose the deep historical flaws in their use of America's founding history. In contrast to their misleading method of citing proof texts to serve a narrow agenda, Austin allows the Founding Fathers to speak for themselves, situating all quotations in the proper historical context. 

What emerges is a true historical picture of men who often disagreed with one another on such crucial issues as federal power, judicial review, and the separation of church and state. 

As Austin -- whom I met last week, at Newman University, in Kansas -- shows, the real legacy of the Founding Fathers to us is a political process: a system of disagreement, debate, and compromise that has kept democracy vibrant in America for more than two hundred years, but that regularly comes under attack. How extreme has been the veer off any path of sane conservatism?  

== A Look Back to 1956 ==

A commenter on the New York Magazine site said: Nothing underscores the change in the Republican Party more than to read Dwight Eisenhower's 1956 Republican Platform:

PHILOSOPHY: "Our great President Eisenhower has counseled us further: "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. Government must have a heart as well as a head. "

LABOR: "Workers have benefited by the progress which has been made in carrying out the programs and principles set forth in the 1952 Republican platform. All workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 millions. "

EDUCATION: "Republican action created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the first new Federal department in 40 years, to raise the continuing consideration of these problems for the first time to the highest council of Government, the President's Cabinet."

FOREIGN POLICY: "We shall continue vigorously to support the United Nations."

SAFETY NET: The Federal minimum wage has been raised for more than 2 million workers. Social Security has been extended to an additional 10 million workers and the benefits raised for 6 1/2 million. The protection of unemployment insurance has been brought to 4 million additional workers.

ENVIRONMENT: "We recognize the need for maintaining isolated wilderness areas to provide opportunity for future generations to experience some of the wilderness living through which the traditional American spirit of hardihood was developed. Added more than 400,000 acres to our National Park system, and 90,000 acres to wildlife refuges."  

How did that Republican Party mutate into today's openly treasonous and insane New Confederacy? Openly and repeatedly declaring -- under the "Hastert Rule" -- that negotiating with their opponents, in any way and over anything, is absolutely forbidden?

Propaganda. Aimed at destroying politics as an American problem solving tool. And here's an example to show just how blatant it has become.

== On George Soros == 

All right. let's illustrate the mad-right's narrative machine, and how sadly incurious millions of our neighbors have become, nodding and swallowing anything that gets fed to them on Fox. 

Use this!  Ask your crazy uncle what he thinks of a man named... George Soros. 

Oh, any Fox-watcher will tell you about Soros! How he is a criminal mastermind with a huge media empire that has suckered millions of Blue Americans into raving socialist-communist frenzy. 

Never mind that Soros's wealth and media "empire" are minuscule compared to the triumvirate of Rupert Mudoch, the Koch boys and the Saudi royal family, all co-owners of Fox. Folks following the narrative call George Soros a "super-leftist" master-demon.

A special moment: they nod in terror when Glen Beck howls "Soros toppled EIGHT foreign governments!" 

In fact, that's true! For once, Beck ain't lying at all. George Soros did help to topple eight foreign governments! He is, indeed, a formidable fellow. Alas, in a sign of how far GOP intellect has plummeted since days of Goldwater and Buckley, not one audience member of the Beck or Limbaugh or Fox riefenstahl-rallies ever lifts his head to ask ... 

"Um... Glen? Rush? Sean? WHICH eight foreign governments do you credit Soros - the super leftist with toppling?"

 In ten years of daring these guys, none of the Fox-ites I've  confronted has ever been able to name even one of those toppled foreign governments. It just never occurred to them, to ask.

Are you ready to ask? Ready for the list? Here are those eight foreign governments Beck/Limbaugh/Fox credit George Soros with toppling.

The communist dictatorship of Hungary.

The communist dictatorship of Poland

The communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia

The communist dictatorship of Romania

The communist dictatorship of Bulgaria

The communist dictatorship of Estonia

The communist dictatorship of Latvia

The communist dictatorship of Lithuania

And mind you it isn't just uber-conservatives Beck and Limbaugh who credit Soros with this terrifying feat! The Heritage Foundation and AEI and most rightist pundit-castes have repeated it! Along with many GOP candidates. (Though sometimes the figure is nine since it rightfully should include East Germany.) Indeed, Soros's relentless efforts to undermine the USSR and communism made up his core life's work and even many sane political observers credit him substantially.

Let’s make this explicit. Glen Beck and all those other right wing mavens officially credit terrifying leftist George Soros with the toppling of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Warsaw Pact, the liberation of hundreds of millions and the victorious end of the Cold War. 

Huh. I thought it was that other liberal (compared to today’s GOP) Ronald Reagan. In fact, they both share equal credit with Michail Gorbachev and with the architect of our grand 1945-2000 plan -- George Marshall. (With Jimmy Carter deserving more of an assist cred than you’d believe.)

Look, the crux here is not who actually tore down the wall. Hey, let's credit the people of those nations, above all. 

No, the core point is this: why are the viewers of Fox and Beck/Limbaugh so cosmically stupid that they never — any of them — ask enough questions to notice the tsunami of ironies and contradictions and outright lies at their Nuremberg Rally? 

So... um... where does this ghastly example of looniness, incuriosity and knee jerk obedience to declared dogma leave the credibility of today's monster that has hijacked the once intellectually solid American conservative movement?

Oh, pity Barry Goldwater. spinning 6000 RPM in his grave.

== Make that 10,000 RPM... ==

I have long believed we should be dealing with crises with a multi-pronged approach. The far-left, in opposing even experiments in (say) ocean fertilization, is almost 10% as crazy as today’s entire US right. (Yes, that crazy!) 

Both sides poison pragmatism, which is portrayed on this page about ways to ameliorate the incredible harm that carbonate-driven acidification is doing to our oceans. But yes, there’s no doubt it is the Denialist Cult doing the worst harm.

Ocean acidification is the silver bullet, boys and girls. It is undeniable. It cannot be armwaved away with Fox-nuremberg-style sieg-incantations. It is pure fact, and caused by human generated CO2. And it threatens our children. 

Furthermore, those who would sneer us into doing nothing - refusing even to negotiate moderate improvements in energy efficiency that would save consumers billions - are complicit with murdering the future.

Do not let them get away with the tactic of yelling “Squirrel!” and pointing elsewhere to change the subject. Repeat it. “The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid. The oceans are going acid…. ".

..And if YOU guys keep this up, and the seas die, we will remember you. Yes you. Personally. By name.”

Looking for a Conservative Phoenix

I have long yearned to see a rising by old-style American Conservatives against the hijacking of their movement (even its zombification) by the cynical murdockian cabal, a process that Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Billy Graham all saw in early phases and denounced.

A process that none of us could have imagined would go as far as it has, with all of the GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee deliberately and vociferously proud to be anti-science.

Elsewhere, I describe the sort of thing that's called for.  Something akin to what liberals and democrats did in 1947, when they decisively cut themselves off from the mad-communist left, and thereby saved the relevance of their movement.  Alas, while millions of U.S. conservatives do express discomfort with the transformation of Buckley's intellectualism into a know-nothing mob, few on the American right have roused to do anything about this tragedy for the republic. (And let's be clear -- it is tragic if we're compelled to look only to one party for a semblance of sanity. I prefer a competitive marketplace.)

Some voices of protest have risen, now and then, e.g. on the pages of the American Conservative, decrying how Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Republican Party (assisted by the Koch brothers, radio shock-jocks and the Saudi Royal House) has systematically reversed dozens of hallmarks of the Goldwater-Buckley era, especially the notion that grownups engage in debate, not hysteria, with the aim of negotiating pragmatic solutions in a complicated world. That conservatism's natural skepticism vs "activist-meddling" should not mutate into rage against everything in the last lines of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

It has become clear that this rising of conservative adults won’t be happening soon, to any degree that actually matters.  Amidst Phase Three of the American Civil War, the side that stuffs ballot boxes and gerrymanders in order to stay in Congress will go down in flames, as did the Confederacy, and decent conservatives will then have their chance -- rebuilding from the ashes.

Still, there are such men and women out there, making sincere efforts to at least talk about the problem, offering hopeful manifestos for what the conservative phoenix might look like.  Take this one by Andrew Bacevich in the Imaginative Conservative. I highly recommend that you read it…

… especially if you are a liberal or progressive!  Because you, above all, need to begin parsing what a sane conservatism would look like. Because half of your fellow citizens do ascribe to a conservative worldview, and that is not going to change. You will achieve more by pointing them toward a more adult version than by ridiculing them in blanket terms. Let me reiterate that: I hope all of you liberals do read Bacevich's article.

Consider the following passage: “Conservatives, therefore, are skeptical of anything that smacks of utopianism. They resist seduction by charlatans peddling the latest Big Idea That Explains Everything.”

I believe that (putting aside the "charlatans" snark) he hits it on the head, here.  That conservatives will always – by personality and nature – be wary of externally imposed and frenetic “improvement campaigns.” And this trait will always make them inherent opponents of meddlesome, gotta-save-the-world liberalism. They will have this trait, even when Goldwater-sanity in restored. Moreover, in this reflex they will not always be wrong.

Progressives – driven by a manic need to solve this problem right now(!!!) … and that problem and that one(!) … naturally drive half their fellow citizens batty.  And liberals’ inability to recognize that visceral response is one reason the Koch-Murdochs have been able to nurse resentment into fierce political power.  In other words, liberals, Fox is partly your fault.

The crux: progressives see a world that needs saving and many things that desperately need improving.  They are correct about this… but often insane in their mania and inability to listen.  Their worst crime is often refusing to admit that many past progressive measures actually worked! Refusing ever to give the citizenry a pat on the back for past, partial victories against racism, sexism, prejudice, and environmental blindness. By emphasizing guilt trips and chiding … and only sanctimonious chiding… many progressives have been Sean Hannity's favorite people and the source of much of his power.

In contrast, conservatives react to nagging with hackles.  They find the constant hectoring to improve things aggressive and often rude.  They have a perfect right to feel that way. Meddlesome chiding (justified or not) truly is rude.  But that emotional response blinds them to the simple fact that liberals have been correct in nearly every improvement campaign that they’ve raised for 80 years.  The world does need saving and the proper role of conservatism is not to obstruct with volcanic fury.

It is to act as the voice of skeptical reason, demanding proof and reality checks and evidence. To insist, as Buckley and Goldwater did, that “solutions” always contain as much as possible of the element most in need of preservation from would-be meddlers -- a generous helping of old-fashioned free will. That is what conservative negotiators would be insisting upon right now... if conservatism still negotiated.  If it were still sane.

When you read Bacevich, you get the sense of a fellow who would take up that latter role, as Barry Goldwater did.  A role that would serve us all well… even when you deem it retro, overly recalcitrant or overly nostalgic.

Sure, when you read his essay, you will find much of it rather old-fogey. Tough. You must learn to converse with folks like this. Learn to talk Fox-watchers into veering away from the Hannity-Limbaugh hate fest  and listening instead to folks like Bacevich.

You will never make the conservative personality go away! (If you dream of that, then you are a would-be tyrant.) But you can try understanding it better, so you can ease your neighbors’ pain. The dread and fury that has transformed them from debate-worthy fellow citizens and estimable opponents into rage-drenched soldiers in the New Confederacy.

=== Can you hear the tumbrels? ===

Delta, United and American Airlines have all announced plans to upgrade their business-class seats for cross-country and transcontinental flights. Then there’s Emirates, which now sells first-class suites — complete with a shower — that go for a tidy $19,000 on the New York-Dubai route.  At the other end of the economic spectrum, low-cost airlines that re-create the thrill of traveling in steerage are thriving, too. The new business model, apparently, is to shrink the seats, charge extra for everything and offer nothing for free.  Elsewhere I have discussed what all this means (See Airline Deterioration and the new Elite).  When the rich abandon a mode of transport, or can truly divide castes of travel, that mode goes to hell.

What does it all mean? Harold Myerson of the Washington Post lays it out in A Hard Landing for the Middle Class:  "The upgrading of business and the downgrading of coach present a fairly faithful mirror of what’s happening in the larger economy: the disappearance of the middle class. As University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, between 2009 and 2011, the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families grew by 11.2 percent while those of the remaining 99 percent shrunk by 0.4 percent. Median household income has declined every year since 2008. Profits, meanwhile, have risen to their highest share of the nation’s economy since World War II, while wages have sunk to their lowest share."

I'll let Myerson have the last word: "The U.S. economy has not stagnated over the past four decades, but so much of its wealth has been claimed by the very top that most Americans have experienced it as a zero-sum game in which they’ve lost ground. As tax rules favored the wealthy, as employees lost the power to bargain for their wages, as globalization reduced the incomes of millions of workers, the rich grew richer at everyone else’s expense. That’s the reality that today’s air travel illustrates, as the comfortable standard seat that once was the norm goes the way of the dwindling middle class."

They truly haven't a clue what they are doing. History shows where this leads.  I even tried to warn them, in Existence.

=== High Speed Trading Redux ===

I've discussed elsewhere the problem of High Speed Trading or HST, which allows a cartel of "seated members" of stock exchanges to game the system, exponentially augmenting their already unfair advantage over other traders (like you and me.)  Now see how institutionalized this unfair practice has become, as the New York Attorney General reveals that Thomson Reuters would allow you access to the Consumer Confidence data a full two seconds earlier than the rest of its subscribers… if you pay them thousands per month.

There are three levels to this: (1) The insider trading aspects are intrinsic to human nature and all we can hope for  in transparency, wary regulators and whistle blowers. (2) This is made far, far worse by the cartel of seated exchange members.  Even if this generation does nothing about it, a future one will, so the brightest cartel members should start looking for ways to benefit from helping us.  (3) HST offers a potential for a true doomsday scenario.  One akin to TERMINATOR.  I mean nothing less.  See my article for reasons to fear.

=== Political Miscellany ==

As Congress braces for a possible government shutdown next month and the fresh danger of default before Thanksgiving, there is a surprising exodus of senior GOP staffers that has worried people in both parties.

The appalling poor taste of Rolling Stone - a journal I generally admire - in putting the face of the surviving Boston Bomber on their cover - had the Net roiling with anger.  My simple reaction? Refer folks to my Salon Magazine piece proposing a solution. That we  "re-name" people who are decisively proved guilty of heinous deeds.  It's called the "Herostratos Effect" and it has compelling logic.  We deserve the right to shun those who harm us grievously, denying them the attractive "immortal fame" that derives (in a sick mind) even from infamy.

Here's a link to the offensive cover, which has drawn hundreds of marriage proposals from deeply sick women who seriously ought to enter the Darwin Awards contest... as (thank heavens) The bomber clearly has.

Okay.  Got to include this: 35 Founding Father Quotes Conservative Christians Will Hate.

The Boehner-led Congress has been the least productive since record keeping began, in 1940.  And yes, that includes their stated goal of reducing government or repealing laws… they've done less of that than any democratic-led Congress.  

Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society. These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.

Lawrence Kotlikoff has been doing yeoman work drafting legislation for which he has now lined up significant bipartisan support in Congress. This bill would require congressional budgeting offices to actually state the long-term fiscal impact of current legislation on future generations. He also has support of 12 Nobel laureates and over 500 economists. I urge you to go to http://www.theinformact.org/ and sign up yourself and pass the word to your friends and associates.

=== Oh… the hypocrisy! ===

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz To Renounce Canadian Citizenship. Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, on Dec. 22, 1970. His mother was born in the U.S. and his father was a native of Cuba. And all of a sudden that's just fine for a fellow who's blatantly already running for president in 2016.

Um really?  Seriously?  All of the sudden having an American citizen mother is more than enough, even if you were born overseas?  Um…. birthers?  Does your hypocrisy know no bounds?

== The Deadly "smoking gun" memo? ==

If this is even ten percent true, then you have to conclude that the world's master connivers are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, since the only possible place for this to lead is tumbrels.  "The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of bankers." The less this mess is attributable to conspiracy, the more it has to be stupidity.

Funky memory lapses, flunky-flukes... and Fukuyama...

Re-lighting the political lamp....

==After Neoconservatism==

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve not dealt gently with Francis Fukuyama -- in some articles, for example, calling him a techno-luddite and a neoconservitive “Bush Administration court intellectual.” (See: The Real Culture War: Defining the Background.) A man of perception and ideas whose erudition has (alas) all-too often fallen short of its penetrating potential.

I wrote those words shortly before the 2004 election... even as Fukuyama was apparently commencing upon a process of soul-searching re-evaluation. A process that - rather than being a sign of deplorable wishy-washyness - should be respected and given due credit. Indeed, it is the opposite trait, obstinate devotion to dogmatic consistency, that most threatens our pragmatic enlightenment in an era of rapid change.

To see witness process in action - as Fukuyama wishes it to be seen - have a look at “After Neoconservatism” an article that appeared recently in the NY Times, wherein he worries about political and psychological effects of an Iraq intervention that has turned into a quagmire. Beyond the immediate costs, he sees the incompetent execution of an assertively “wilsonian” foreign policy (pursuing the utopian goals of “spreading democracy” and nation building) resulting in a revulsion, repudiation and rejection of wilsonian activism. Through their unnecessarily bellicose and divisive methodologies, the “idealistic” neoconservatives have undermined their very goals, creating an environment that has only encouraged both the left and right to drift backward, reverting to their more isolationist versions. He sees this as lamentable, at the very moment when a confident and assertive America may be key to making a better world.

While this conversion is welcome, indeed, a possible harbinger of the 1947-style mass-desertion by honest conservatives that I have long called for - a great awakening that could save a nation and civilization - I nevertheless despair when I see a bright fellow like this still clinging to straws. For example, his desperate need to claim that the debacle in Iraq is harming American assertive “wilsonian” confidence is clearly true. But to attribute this process of pain and discreditation to his former friends’ incompetence is - well - perhaps too reflexively forgiving.

I find it stunning how bifurcated the world seems to be, between those who reflexively seek conspiratorial explanations for strange events (e.g. Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassinations) and those “reasonable people” who reject conspiratorial explanations almost as a reflex. Yes, the former group includes a vast number of kooks and loonies. And parsimony demands that moderate and rational people (especially in a somewhat open society) adopt a first order attitude of “what you see is what you get.” I am especially caustic toward silly notions that FDR wanted us defeated at Pearl Harbor, and I find Lee Harvey Oswald totally credible as a lone gunman.

On the other hand, can “reasonable” men deny that history truly is rife with conspiracies? Moreover, when the parsimonious explanation of actual events is the conspiratorial one, should it be reflexively dismissed?

In the case of our recent behaviors in Iraq - where the sheer number of corrupt, inciting, and incompetent acts beggars the imagination - is it not at least worth contemplating that these events, that were authored by supposedly brilliant men, might actually have unfolded as planned?

Fukuyama complains that wilsonian-activist idealism is being discredited because it was poorly executed. But what if -- (please, just consider) -- what if that was the intention, all along?

Again and again, I keep urging that people ask this one question. “Who has benefitted from the recent sequence of events?” Is it possible that the beneficiaries of events might have intended to so benefit, all along? Is that not at least a simple hypothesis worth putting up alongside others?

There is too much in this, vastly too much, to comment upon further, right now. I must put this aside for later, when I’ll make a mini-essay out of it. Stay tuned for a more detailed discussion of such matters, using Francis Fukuyama as a centripetal focus.

For there are so many levels. Is there actually a chance that an intellect of the size and stature of Fukuyama’s might be weaned away from the blandishments and flattery of aristoklepts and the seduction of platonists, to find his home again among the likes of Franklin, Locke and Marshall? As I said, stay tuned.

==Memory Lapses==

Let’s see, in the last week, the president has denied knowing Abramoff, denied knowing that management of many of our seaports had been sold to gulf interests, denied knowing that his administration had cut sustainable energy research while he publicly called for more, denied knowing about rampant fraud in Katrina relief, and denied knowing about fraud in no-bid crony contracts that still haven’t lifted Iraq to pre-war levels of supply in electricity, gas, water and food. When Jimmy Carter said “I don’t know,” there was usually an implication -- “but I’ll find out.”

Well, alas. here are some other items.

In the past two years, the Union of Concerned Scientists has collected the signatures of more than 8,000 scientists -- including 49 Nobel laureates, 63 National Medal of Science recipients and 171 members of the National Academies - who accuse the Administration of an unprecedented level of political intrusion into their world.

Of course most of you already caught this, but really, just in case somebody didn’t. Attorney General Gonzales’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee last Monday offered the following gem: "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale." ...um... and I used the word... “morons” to excess?

Oh, here’s a puff moment! I thank Stefan for finding this out: “George Deutsch, the political appointee put in charge of NASA public relations, who after a short career telling scientists to shut up if they knew what was good for them, recently had to resign... (and) The grad student blogger who uncovered Deutsch's fudged credential has Contrary Brin on his blog roll.”

And just when I was about to say “this isn’t doing any good...”

Oh, thanks , for citing the article about Bill Clinton.

It is vital that we remember one fact as the lefties who gave us Ralph Nader and Cindy Sheehan continue preaching their philosophy that the Democratic Party will win by “returning to its roots”... a political philosophy of always giving Karl Rove every provocation needed in order to stoke “Culture War.” That, all by itself, does not bother me. But to always choose the stupid fight over the fight that can be won? Let us recall that Bill Clinton not only won every fight. He won huge. Anybody who yammers that we need a different approach may be right... but they bear a burden of proof.

Back to Modernism: Under Assault from All Sides (Part 11)

Departing from the spasmodic passion of political blogging (lest we despair over the blatant run-up toward unnecessary war with IRAN) let us now return to the serialized essay on modernism.

My detailed arguments about this administration's ideological and other motives can be found on two essay-sites: 

NeoConservatism, Islam and Ideology: The Real Culture War 

and 

War in the 21st Century: Maturity vs. Neocon Panic and the True Role of Pax Americana 


Modernism Part 11: Under Assault from All Sides

Last time, in Part 10: How Liberalism has betrayed Modernity I talked about the slow but steady alienation that has grown between two former allies, the liberal left and progressive modernism. This chasm is not as total and devastating (yet) as the one on the other side.

 The Democratic Party is still marginally led by modernist pragmatists. But the selection of Howard Dean as party chairman shows which way the wind is blowing. Soon, not a single national political institution will remain un-radicalized by one form or another of romanticism.

Of course we have seen extreme examples on the left, who at times make Jerry Falwell sound like a believer in tolerance and science! The latest poster boy for the "Romantic Che" complex is Ward Churchil, who compared denizens of the Twin Towers to Eichmann. The neocons love guys like this because they serve as wonderful strawmen-bogeymen, helping to consolidate their hypnotic hold over decent, conservative Americans who might otherwise notice their leaders' monstrous habits.

In my last posting, I spoke of how the growing romanticism of the left began banishing former allies - space, nuclear power, engineers, the military, the churches.

And then... "Liberalism began reflexively assuming that everything white, rural or suburban, bourgeois, American, or socially demure was automatically suspect, until people with those traits began responding with hostility of their own. The very word “liberal” became a weapon in the hands of its enemies. And when this happened, the movement’s elites only made things worse by diagnosing that the common citizens had been brainwashed by propaganda. Contempt for the masses, invigorating and satisfying, thereupon displayed its deadly side-effect -- political suicide."

Meanwhile, scientists were being driven off by conservatism. For that movement, too, had been taken over by dogmatists. By a triple alliance of groups who actively hate science and all that it represents.

  --By a clique of aristocratic kleptocrats who do not believe in economics.

  --By apocalyptic sects that reject geology and biology.

  --By neoconservative imperialists who repudiate climatology, ecology, chemistry, pharmacology and... ultimately... history.

Why has nobody commented on this? The Left has nothing but contempt for engineers, spurning can-do projects in favor of a single party line prescription for saving the world. Puritanical conservation. We must quickly abandon our cars and shiver in the dark. (Political suicide, but boy does it feel virtuous.)

Meanwhile, the Right - while willing to pay engineers for near-term guns and toys - will have no truck with ambitious research into technologies that might save a planet through assertive conservation -- vastly improved efficiency standards and sustainable energy supplies.

Neoconservatives smile and shrug at petitions signed by scores of Nobel Prize winners, since egghead boffins obviously cannot possess any common sense. The neocons’ oft-expressed contempt for objective reality -- as opposed to a subjective/ideological model of the world -- mimics that of the postmodernist left with eerie perfection. (Foucault or Leo Strauss? The common theme is a belief that elites can redefine reality however they like, as a matter of magical will.)

(As they have redefined "freedom." And now they are talking themselves into redefining IRAN….)


==Extremes of both Left and Right==

While rejecting science, both movements are infested with romantic nostalgia for a better past-that-never-was. The future cannot be a realm of promise and opportunity.

Oh, there are differences. The Left is certainly sincere in fretting about tomorrow’s dangers.

 But meanwhile, no one seems to notice how closely their dark forebodings of ecological collapse resemble the apocalyptic visions of right-wingers who confidently expect an imminent end to this world, amid a reckoning foretold in the Book of Revelation. (See my essay, Whose Rapture?)

These gloomy visions are not only eerily similar, they are chillingly compatible.

                                                                ***

... next in Part 12... Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood: fanaticism in fiction illustrates the alliance of romantics against science...

Or return to Part 1 of this series: The Radical Notion of Modernism: Is it relevant for the Twenty-first Century?

---

David Brin

Website: http://www.davidbrin.com

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