The Real Reason for Tea Parties

Lighting the political lamp (it may be on for a couple of weeks), let me begin with a disclaimer, for those of you who don't know me ... I despise all dogmatists, including those on the far-left. As a one-time keynoter for a Libertarian Party Convention, I have the bona fides of someone who has read and understood Adam Smith.  In fact, it is for that reason that I know which party the "First Liberal" would vote for, today, if he could. And it's not the one that touts his name the most.

Moreover, if communism was a principal threat to freedom, a generation ago, can there be any doubt that the madness and danger is coming from a different direction today?

=== TEA PARTY INSANITY ===

To see just how crazy it is out there, you really must read this.  Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty:

“It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond....”

Neither do the rest of us, Bob.  Apparently, the flabergasted Mr. Reasonableness who sits in the White House simply cannot pause - in his relentless attempts to negotiate - and parse out exactly what it going on.

So let me put it  simply.  The whole nation knows that the Republican Party was a festering nest of corruption and incompetence, since 1996 or so.  (I do not include the first year of the Newt Gingrich Revolution, during which actual conservative values were negotiated with the sitting president, and the parties, together, enacted both Welfare Reform and budget restraints -- a brif era of maturity for which Gingrich was resoundingly punished, by his own party, as it chose to plunge into lunacy.)

Under that party’s misrule, America experienced a steep plummet in nearly all unambiguous metrics of national health - from GDP to home values, from patent rates to small business startups, all the way even to military readiness!  The near-perfection of this national decline has never (for some strange reason) been laid out openly by the President or the democrats... probably for the same neurotic reasons that keep them from appointing a special prosecutor, to expose Bushite corruption and theft.  But the people clearly know that the Republican brand is soiled, almost beyond repair.

That left only one hope for the masters of that undead elephant... to market a populist rant that Democrats are even worse.  And since there is not a scintilla of real evidence for systematic Democratic wrongdoing or mismanagement (not a single Clintonite ex-official was ever covicted, even indicted, for malfeasance of official duties, and Clinton paid down the national debt), this populist rabble-rousing must take the form  of legerdermain and magic! Unproved or unprovable assertions, Beckian hornswaggle and Limbaughian incantaions of towering indignation.

The list of counter-points that the dems could use is astonishing... primarily in their total absence-of-use.  For example, picture a 60 second television spot describing what would have happened to Ma and Pa’s Social Security, if the GOP had been allowed to “privatize” it, back in 2004... and who the winners would have been.   Or the truth about which party does a better job beefing up the Border Patrol and actually limiting illegal (as opposed to legal) immigration? (Hint, it ain't the GOP, by a thousand miles.)

Or point out that Obama’s so called “socialist” health insurance bill was based on the Republicans’ own 1994 alternative plan. Sure that's well known to folks on the Sunday talk show circuit, but it would be devastating in a 60 second spot... purchased on Fox.

Let’s be clear about the poisonous nature of this campaign to win back Congress by painting the democrats as “even worse.”  In order for them to be worse than the Bushites, they must be portrayed as satanic beings... the very same way that the Southern press depicted northerners and Abraham Lincoln, in 1860.  The potential effectiveness of this populist campaign of lies is seen in the way a quarter of a million poor southern whites marched off to fight -- very bravely and well -- for the “cause” of protecting the interests of their local lords and cotton barons and slave-owning oligarchs.  Hey, don't under-rate it! The method worked for the Rupert Murdochs of past eras.  It's working for the Rupert Murdochs of today.

In fact, ok, it is that time again. Cyclically, regularly (and always) keep checking on the Fox News Boycott.  You have a right to make your purchasing judgements based on many criteria.  Including a list of those who advertise with Glenn Beck.

=== AND A POLITICAL MELANGE! ===

PROFILES IN COURAGE -- A group of 23 Communist Party elders in China has written a letter calling for an end to the country's restrictions on freedom of speech. I'll be commenting in detail about this, soon.

It can be fascinating to see how memes spread across the web, passed from peer to peer. But how can one tell what ideas are grass-roots and which are spread by political campaigns or corporations? Truthy, based at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing attempts to chart the diffusion of information & misinformation on Twitter – by tracking keywords and retweets.

Take a tour of “Richistan...” the America that Fox is so frantic to get average citizens to ignore.

"The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group of dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms — and staging recreations of their battles — has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby. "That Mr. Iott engaged in this pastime came to light on Friday, when Joshua Green of The Atlantic published photographs of him in an SS uniform beneath a headline asking, “Why is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?” Um... the SS?  Jumping Jehosephat, if a democrat had done anything remotely like that....

Here's a terrific take-off on WWII cautionary posters about "loose lips sink ships."

The respect-worthy Amitai Etzioni - who is no pantywaist - is pushing for a simple “take care of America first” withdrawal from Afghanistan.  (And if they become an enemy state again?  Heck, enemy states are FAR simpler to topple than it is to fight a grueling insurgency.  Think about it.)  Anyway, we could sure have used the three trillion dollars these wars have cost.  Spent on R&D, it would have left all our enemies -- and our trade rivals -- in clouds of our (by-now) nearly transhumanist dust! Ah, parallel worlds.

Finally, see a county by-county map of education levels... and how this affects disparities in income.  From this it seems self explanatory why - and how - the Fox distraction campaign, to aim the ire of the ill-educated against the well educated, is working so well.

Find the nearest close partisan race and contact the HQ of the candidate you prefer... and help get out the vote!

=====

For more of my articles on see: Politics for the 21st Century

A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war...

An article on Salon asks "Why Can't We Have Smarter Right Wingers?"

It's been my own stark plaint for a decade -- and not from any lefty reflex. Rather, as one who openly avows some libertarian and classic "conservative" views, sprinkled in a mostly-progressive goulash.

Shouldn't there be clear-headed voices, articulating the attractiveness of balanced budgets, national readiness, genuinely competitive free enterprise, and caution in international entanglements?  Isn't it good to have someone in the room demanding: "Prove that something really is broken, before using the the blunt instrument of the state to fix it"?  

I've long felt that the best minds of the right had useful things to contribute to a national conversation -- even if their overall habit of resistance to change proved wrongheaded, more often than right.  At least, some of them had the beneficial knack of targeting and criticizing the worst liberal mistakes, and often forcing needful re-drafting.

That is, some did, way back in when decent republicans and democrats shared one aim -- to negotiate better solutions for the republic.

=Does The New Right Even Have an Agenda Anymore?=

Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun -up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine.  Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.

It's the stupidity.  The vast and nearly uniform dumbitudinousness of ignoring what has happened to conservatism, a transformation of nearly all of the salient traits of Barry Goldwater from:

* prudence to recklessness
* accountability to secrecy
* fiscal discretion to spendthrift profligacy
* consistency to hypocrisy
* civility to nastiness
* international restraint to recklessness
* efficiency to no-tomorrow wastrelness
* personal rectitude to flagrant licentiousness
* cleanliness to filthy habits
* logic to unreason

...and more, reversing:

* from respect for science to incantatory voodoo
* from an almost pedantic love of history to near total ignorance of the past
* from individual-based deliberation to lockstep party-line voting
* from belief in federalism and states' rights to excusing monolithic presidential power
* from negotiated problem-solving to strawman-based politics
* from a bookish love of statistics to justification by anecdote
* from country-first patriotism to the flagwaving kind that can instantly turn into rants about secession, the killing of civil servants and praying for the president to fail, even if that means the country going down with him.

This is not about classic left-vs-right anymore. (As if that metaphor ever held cogent meaning.) Not when every measure of national health that conservatives ought to care about -- from budget balancing to small business startups, to military readiness, to States' Rights, to the economy, to individual liberty, to control over immigration at our borders -- does vastly and demonstrably better under democrats.  With nearly 100% perfection.

(Fact avoidance is even worse when you encompass ALL of history.  Ask today's conservatives which force destroyed more freedom and nearly every competitive market, across 5,000 years.  Which foe of liberty and enterprise did Adam Smith despise?  Hint: it wasn't "socialism" or "government bureaucrats.") 

No. Given their lack of any other tangible accomplishments across the last fifteen years, one must to conclude that the core agenda of Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch and their petroprince backers really is quite simple.

To find out just how far they can push "culture war" toward a repeat of 1861.

=Is the Agenda Civil War?=

Does that sound florid and paranoid?  Well, I do try to be entertaining! 

Anyway, bear with me a bit, because the parallels are eerie.  Not only on the geographical electoral map, but in the way that vast swathes of the South would only see or hear just one point of view (in uniformly pro-slavery newspapers, back in 1861, or via talk radio today), or propounded from every white pulpit -- an incessant drumbeat of regional, ethnic and partisan hatred.  With predictable results: the demolition of national discourse, along with the murder of census workers and the bubbling froth of a new wave of Timothy McVeighs.

Obviously, this is blatantly the agenda of Murdoch and Limbaugh and their foreign backers, since they do not even offer their own measures or agenda for deliberative negotiation with the party and president chosen by the American majority. They never even try to assert that any tangible improvements in national health occurred during their long tenure in power. Indeed, can you name any effective accomplishment -- consistently pursued and unambiguously achieved -- other than to push America toward Civil War?

Why they have been doing this is open to speculation. I have my theories.  You may have yours. 

But even without knowing their true motives, one can look ahead to outcomes.  And so, I have to ask these fellows one question --

Let's say that you succeed.  Suppose, driven by your potent and effective propaganda, America's "red" population rises up and Culture War finally goes all out... do you actually think that subsequent events will be to your liking?

=The  Mistake Made by All Our Enemies=

Step back for a minute and note an important piece of psychohistory -- that every generation of Americans faced adversaries who called us "decadent cowards and pleasure-seeking sybarites (wimps), devoid of any of the virtues of manhood."
 
Elsewhere, I mark out this pattern, showing how every hostile nation, leader or meme had to invest in this story, for a simple reason.  Because Americans were clearly happier, richer, smarter, more successful and far more free than anyone else.  Hence, either those darned Yanks must know a better way of living (unthinkable!)... or else they must have traded something for all those surface satisfactions. 

 Something precious.  Like their cojones.  Or their souls.  A devil's bargain.  And hence -- (our adversaries told themselves) -- those pathetic American will fold up, like pansies, as soon as you give them a good push.

 It is the one uniform trait shown by every* vicious, obstinate and troglodytic enemy of the American Experiment.  A wish fantasy that convinced Hitler and Stalin and the others that urbanized, comfortable New Yorkers and Californians and all the rest cannot possibly have any guts, not like real men.  A delusion shared by the King George, the plantation-owners, the Nazis, Soviets and so on, down to Saddam and Osama bin Laden.  A delusion that our ancestors disproved time and again, decisively -- though not without a lot of pain.

But let's get back to my question for Murdoch and Limbaugh and their puppetmasters.  All right, so you are pushing us toward another 1861, betting that we'll tear ourselves to shreds, and that the "red" portion will dominate whatever's left standing. 

But do you even remember what happened in 1862?  In 1863 and 1864 and 1865? 

(A side bet?  Ask any of the flag-waving jingo-patriots you know, "Have you ever fantasized about riding with Nathan Bedford Forrest?"  (Name's unfamiliar? Wiki him and read it all.)  My experience, asking that question? A shockingly high percentage of the loudest "patriots" have daydreamed about riding with that brilliant traitor, cutting down their fellow citizens -- both blue and black -- with a whoop and a holler, while screaming damnation at the United States of America.  Some patriots.)

=Have They Really Thought It Out?=

But all right, Rush and Rupert and Sean and Glenn and Tafik.  Go ahead.  Push hard enough to finally wake up the real United States -- the "Blue America" that seems all mushy because it always tries reason first. The citified sophisticates who have, for generations, sent vast net-flows of their taxes toward the red counties that then bit that generous hand with rants about the "decadent cities..." even though those cities have proved to be more moral, by far.  (Compare rates of divorce, domestic violence, teen sex, STDs and yes, even abortion!) 

Even though those cities are the front lines in the modern war on terror.  Even though it was city folk who proved their courage and resilience, standing up for their country on 9/11.

Remember what finally happened almost a century and a half ago, Rush.  Pushed too far, and as a last resort, those "decadent" Americans rose up.  They donned that color blue and wore it proudly to defend the Union -- and the dream -- with their very lives.

(And this isn't just regionalist bigotry, speaking.  In every state of the Confederacy -- except South Carolina -- regiments of volunteers  marched off to wear blue and fight for the country they had given sacred oaths to defend, showing even more courage than boys from Indiana or Maine.  Ultimately, it wasn't North vs South)

 So, Sean and Glenn.  Do you have any solid reason to believe things will go differently, this time? That we, the heirs of Fremont and Hancock, are made of lesser stuff?  Really?  You think so? 

Well, you seem determined to find out.  So keep pushing. The Union will awaken.  It always has.  We always will.

=Is it Useless To Say Any Of This?=

Folks, the truth is, these guys really haven't thought it out. 

It's never occurred to them, for example, to ponder the reason why liberals aren't even tepidly trying to pass Gun Control laws, anymore. Because, after eight years of power-grabbing, centralization and abuse by the Bushite Cabal, they came to realize that they might need protection and militia recourse, someday, after all.  Especially at a time when their red neighbors are packing away bullets so fast that the factories have to work overtime, while screeching about using violence against their own freely-elected government. 

No, Hannity & co haven't thought that out, so wedded are they to the Decadence Assumption.  The smugly satisfying but ultimately fatuous notion that wimpy cowardice is all you can expect from anyone with a post-graduate degree.  (Tell it to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.  Tell it to George Marshall.)

=Why Do All Fools Think They Are Wise?=

And so we have circled back to where we started -- the sad decline of American conservatism into cartoonish idiocy.  The puppeteers may be rich.  They may be talented provocateurs and con artists... but talent does not equate to brains.  Not when the GOP has driven off almost everybody in America who actually knows stuff, including nearly all the scientists, the skilled innovators, and most of the U.S. Officer Corps.

Alas. This is no longer even about "conservatism" anymore.  Barry Goldwater lived long enough to denounce what he saw happening to his beloved movement, and things have plummeted even father, since that great man died.

Nowadays, bottom-to-top -- and especially at the very top -- it is all about stupidity.

----------

* Oh. There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption.  Ho Chi Minh never underestimated America.  His avowed hero was George Washington and he remained in awe of the U.S., all his life.  He remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.

The Choices We Face...

"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow

* At last... the mass desertion by true conservatives appears to have begun. See this by Paul Craig Roberts, of all people, who was Ronal Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and contributing editor of National Review.

He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Like Paul O'Niel, Ben Nighthorse Campbell and a few others, these are not traitors to conservatism; they are angry over an ongoing betrayal of genuine conservatism by a cabal of extremists who have taken over the movement for their own purposes.

* Even more telling and devastating is the conversion of Kevin Phillips, whose book "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published as he began work for Nixon in 1969) first coined terms like the "sunbelt," forecasting the southern and rural GOP strategy that we now think of as "red state culture war." (That deserves a high score, whatever predictions "registry" you happen to be using.)

Like Newt Gingrich, Phillips foresaw the developing neoconservative movement not only as a march back to power, after catastrophic political defeat in 1964. During the subsequent long process of reappraisal and renewal, those who were reinventing conservatism envisioned a values-oriented return to decent American norms... sort of an immune reaction to - and correction of - purported anti-individualism excess by a fetishistically paternalistic Left.

According to this expectation, a broadly populist political uprising on the right would lead to fiscal responsibility, reduced debt, cautious restraint in foreign policy, efficient and limited government, elevated social discourse, electoral and legislative transparency, emphasis on professionalism and readiness, rising personal wealth for most Americans, a renaissance of entrepreneurial small business and the fostering of healthy civil society through a Tocquevillian process that devolves power from elites to the people.

Read that list of expectations over and over again, as many times as it may take for the irony to sink in. Did this fantastically successful American political revolution, seizing nearly all of a great nation's significant institutions of power, accomplish any of its worthy surface aspirations? Any at all?

That is, aspirations other than raw power? For those special few who in effect own the GOP, the active and profound reversal of all stated goals may not matter very much. (After all, power is power.) And other parts of the ruling neocon coalition - Straussian Platonist Mystics and religious fundamentalists - are easily satisfied with symbolic gestures, rather than tangible outcomes.

But for old-fashioned Goldwater Conservatives, who still make up a high fraction of grassroots Republican voters, the betrayal of every principle and desideratum must tear, grind and fester. Logically, this kind of cognitive dissonance should lead to agonized-but honest reevaluation, starting from the ground up. Well, it should. But, alas.

A deep flaw - perhaps the most tragic in human nature - makes delusional hallucinators of us all, blinding our eyes to any evidence that runs counter to our favorite dogmas. (This applies in all directions, to all dogmas, left as well as right.) Even more urgent is the need to find excuses for our side, our team, our tribe. In the face of this core human trait, it takes an awfully big person to admit that cherished, idealistic plans went awry... even diametrically opposite to every fervent hope.

IS CITIZENSHIP TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?

And yet, aren't we praying, right now, for just such a grim admission to emerge out of the festering pain of decent American conservatism? The honest and sincere conservatism of Barry Goldwater, that was based upon a straightforward dedication to rectitude and accountability, arising out of some combination of market forces, law, and a vibrantly empowered, democratically enlightened citizenry? The kind that proudly faced the best of liberalism, ready to negotiate how problems should be solved, not whether they should be ignored?

That notion of conservatism remains valid and continues to deserve a place at-table, even now, after the movement's tiller has been hijacked by monsters. Is there even a slim chance that it can be rescued, before its reputation is permanently ruined by association with monsters?

Imagine how it might help save conservatism - and the republic itself - if a critical mass of decent, conservative paragons were to see their public-spirited duty in time. A clear duty to emulate the Miracle of 1947.

That was when several thousand moderate American liberals - having learned the truth about Stalin's Soviet horror - gathered their courage and resolve, stood up, and admitted that "the radicals of our side can be mad." In a combination of patriotism, pragmatism and idealism, they resolved to separate themselves, from any association with Communism, even at the level of nostalgic sympathy!

Nothing less would have sufficed. A schism of the left was necessary, in order to save the American left as a dynamic force in our national life.

Not only was this move courageous, it proved spectacularly successful. What ensued was not a defeat of American liberalism, but rather its greatest era - that of Martin Luther King and Betty Friedan - when citizens were inspired to redouble every progressive effort, to pass bills, revise laws, change their communities, and above-all to repair deep character flaws of racism, sexism and the shortsighted abuse of our grandchildren's planet. These problems were not completely solved, of course. But few of us regret those strenuous exertions, or call them wasted. Nor could any of it have happened, if honest American reformers had not decisively separated liberalism from a far-left that was deeply sick.

CAN SUCH A MIRACLE HAPPEN AGAIN?

Can anyone doubt that matters are just as serious today, on the American right, as they were for the left in 1947? In much the same way that liberals felt torment over disowning the monsters on "their side," so we now see decent conservatives writhing and twisting, like pretzels, in order to make excuses for rapacious kleptocrats, incompetent thugs, moronic armchair warriors, cynical spin doctors, conniving feudalists and screeching fanatics.

Are they truly loyal to such monsters? Are they kept in rigid lockstep out of some misplaced fealty to a ridiculous "political axis" that was insipid even when the French invented it, in 1789? A left-right axis that offers no relevance or insight or utility for an agile and sophisticated Third Millennium? (Gather a dozen people and no two will even define it the same way!)

In frantic denial, these classic conservatives tell themselves that "at least Clinton was worse..." without ever explicitly showing how he was worse, by even a single rationally explicit metric of human governance!

Such is our human genius for self-delusion. The same deep character flaw that toppled every other great nation, even at its height of power. The character flaw that our pragmatic enlightenment was supposedly designed to overcome.

Will decent American conservatives see their duty in time, the same way that members of the ADA and AFL-CIO and NAACP saw theirs, way back in 1947? Or will we finally see how decisively different these two movements really are, when the chips are down? One with a record of openminded heroism and the other... displaying craven cowardice till the bitter end?

Alas, Newt Gingrich hasn't stepped forward yet. (An in-depth essay 'Should Democrats Issue a New Contract with America'? re-appraises Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, considering how this masterful piece of 20th Century political polemic might be used by the other side, in the 21st. Indeed, Gingrich might even approve... if his goal remained sincere.)

Nor have many other "decent conservatives" who should rise up and put true patriotism over dogma, declaring greater loyalty to our system than to a side in this contrived culture war. Alas, for the most part, top conservatives have either bought into the madness, or else grit their teeth and excuse it, by pointing to a strawman carricature of liberalism - a version that bears no resemblance to mainstream Democrats. It may be satisfying to yammer about terror-coddling, pornography-pandering, overspending, UN -surrendering, effete naifs, but the difference between the Democrats and the GOP is that the liberals' loony carricatures never had any chance of real power, and never will.

(And yet, George F. Will, like Cato, continues shrieking hysterically at anemic Carthage, while making wincing excuses for a homegrown tyranny.)

CAUSE FOR HOPE?

But let's look at the bright side. Look around for signs of hope. Glimmers like Kevin Phillips who recently came out with American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. A book that every one of us should go out and buy, for two reasons:

(1) in order to make it a best-seller, and

(2) in order to shove each copy into the hands of at least one honest, sincere and mentally-competent American conservative. (Well, perhaps as a test of mental competence.)

I won't go into the author's arguments here. Not in detail, although it certainly is refreshing to see a "conservative" concede the obvious - for example, that an ingrown, secretive, and historically selfish petro plutocracy is hardly the most credible cabal to trust with a great nation's energy policy, or its foreign policy, for that matter.

Phillips admits that he was shocked by the course that his revolution took, veering in directions that left all of the old goals of empowered citizenship and public rectitude abandoned, in the dust. He never expected the mass-populist neoconservative movement could be so easily -- almost trivially -- hijacked by elements that are anti-freedom, anti-future and anti-enlightenment, taking this route not only out of venial self-interest but also as a matter of fundamental personality.

According to Phillips, those elements include not only the petrocracy, but also religious fanatics, contemptuous media moguls and foreign elements that seek world power in the most efficient and straightforward way possible - by directly influencing American elites.

While focusing especially upon two of these elements - the new theocrats and the petrocracy - Phillips comes closer than anybody else to actually recognizing what's going on... a return to the consistent pattern that dominated nearly every other urban culture in human history. A power-sharing arrangement between resource controlling aristocrats and mystical clerics, who chant justifications for aristocratic rule.

Don't even try to deny that this was the freedom-suppressing formula in every culture, from Babylon to China to Rome... and all the way to the British Imperium that our founders finally rejected, in their daring gamble. A wager instead upon Periclean-Lockean notions of institutionalized reciprocal accountability. (Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the same formula dominated the old Confederate South, which Phillips now calls the ultimate winner of an ongoing Civil War.)

* Just to keep up my reputation of balance, let me point out that the Soviet Union followed this classic pattern in every detail, down to a mutually beneficial alliance where power-holders bent on ferociously enforced rule by an inherited nomenklatura, relied upon quasi-religious Marxian dogmatists to justify the elites' monopoly of power. Everything else - every bit of "egalitarian" Communist rhetoric - was hypocritical, Potemkin window-dressing. *

Far from being a matter of left versus right, what we are seeing today is a renewal of the same battle fought by Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, Marshall and every other great American hero. Every generation of American heroes. A battle pitting the new maturity of accountability, pragmatic self-improvement and rambunctious citizenship against the endlessly recycled power-rationalizations that served tyrants of every stripe. An age-old reflex that's the real enemy of freedom, still calling to us from Egypt and Ur. From the caves. From our genes.

WILL "DECENT CONSERVATIVES" BECOME AN OXYMORON?

Alas, though Phillips comes closer than anybody else, he still doesn't lay things out this clearly. Amid a somewhat murky morass of near-term details, he never crystallizes the Big Picture... that all ideologies tend to serve the interests of some freedom-stealing cabal. Especially if we let our favorite dogmas get hijacked by monsters.

Liberals (the smartest and best of them) were able to see this, when they performed a miracle in 1947, choosing to side with Franklin, Madison and Marshall. In a similar manner, decent conservatives may yet rescue us from a similarly dire crisis, in 2006, ending "culture war" by the simple expediency of saying "this is not conservatism. No, this is madness."

Will it happen, though?

Let's be clear about this. Patriots of all kinds will stand up and stop the monsters. As our parents and grandparents passed every test, we too will rise up and be counted, in defense of both our republic and civilization. America will be saved. That is not the real issue.

No, the issue is whether enough decent conservatives will rise up, joining this struggle, to save any hope for their movement during generations to come.

If Newt and his friends want a better version of conservatism to survive and thrive, with a reputation for anything other than spineless dogmatism, they will heed the call of history, and stand up. Now, when we need them most.

In doing so, they will make this not a matter of "culture war" between rural and urban America, but a much simpler matter, about ejecting a nasty gang of thieves, in order to let our nation get back to business. In doing so, they will save their own movement. But don't hold your breath.

So far, the pioneers in this conservative turnaround are so few that individual quirkiness dominates over any sense of momentum. From Kevin Phillips to David Brock to Paul O'Neil, the exceptions merely serve to attract Rovean spasms of character assassination, while raising false hopes, that this generation will be able to accomplish its historic mission - preserving the Great Experiment - with significant help from the right.

So far, despite those few exceptions, it seems unlikely.

If we can find any consolation, during this time of darkness, it is in a strange fact... or rather, a bit of inspiring truthiness... that the State of Arizona has started producing copious amounts of clean electricity from magnetic coils that surround the furious spinning in Barry Goldwater's grave.

===

See more: Politics for the 21st Century

Idealism vs. Pragmatism: The false dichotomy

Here comes a really long one. I was inspired by the article by Rik Perlman that one of you cited. (If anyone feels like letting Perlman know....)

Idealism vs. Pragmatism: The false dichotomy that has ruined both left and right

In tracing the long journey of neoconservative transformation, from the political wilderness of 1964 to controlling all the nation’s levers of power, journalist Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, describes a tense, decades-long process that gyrated between two alluring attractor states -- idealism and pragmatism - each of them offering both a bright and a dark side.

 “Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer, Richard Whalen, "Flexibility is the first principle of politics." The conservative movement has understood itself to be the people who unflaggingly answered back to Nixon: "Principle rises above politics." That's a quote from Alf Regnery, in a profile of him this fall in the Washington Post.”

Or, as expressed by conservative philosopher Russell Kirk, conservatism is anchored in: "belief in a transcendent moral order." In the certainty of core beliefs that are absolute and unchanging.

Of course, statements like this are meant to sound admirable, and especially to contrast against Nixon’s famed “realpolitik” flexibility, which was so protean and redefinable that it could range from the very worst dirty tricks all the way up to acts of geopolitical genius -- e.g. reaching out to China -- that redefined the world power balance at a single stroke. (Indeed, many on the right have not forgiven, even though the left conveniently forgets, that Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed a national Health Care bill more far-reaching than Hillary Clinton’s.)

Of course, the irony is greatest when you contemplate how similar this all seems, to quandaries faced by the left, where idealists also claim to base their indignant, uncompromising stand upon a bedrock of fundamental moral principles, while expressing contempt for compromisers, or those who would trade essential truth for practical power.

At both extremes -- the dogmatically principled left and the creed-grounded right -- you never hear anyone mention the most obvious and blatant lesson of human nature -- and human history. That we are relentless and marvelously creative self-deluders. And the most attractive, most voluptuous of our delusions are those incantations that just happen to make “our side” seem saintly and right.

(The truest and deepest cleft in our society must be between those who notice -- and smell something’s too convenient, too suspiciously tidy -- when we see only evidence that makes us feel superior... versus those who never catch or notice this irony. That the universe seems always to confirm just what we want it to. People on one side of this psychological divide are able to say the words that underlie all of science and democracy, as well as true-creativity. The words: I might be wrong. People on the other side -- even very learned and intelligent people -- could read this paragraph a hundred times, without ever truly grasping what it means.)

It may seem that I am bad-mouthing idealism. And yet, what else can one call the passion that a decent person calls upon, whenever we rise up, risking our lives to defend the finest notions -- those of tolerance, freedom, beauty and love? Idealism is as necessary as air. When people turn their backs on principle, you get the very worst side of pragmatism... a cynical pursuit of short-term gain at the expense of others. Contempt and amoral rationalization. Mere manipulative cleverness that has no guiding or trustworthy theme. Or, the thing that even conservatives of his day, like Barry Goldwater, despised most about Richard Nixon.

Cheating.

So, what am I saying? Are both idealism and pragmatism doomed to be scuzzy? One, a tendency toward druglike sanctimony and delusion? The other, a cesspit for the power-hungry?

Fortunately, there are more than enough counter-examples to show that this is not a bipolar situation at all. A better metaphor would portray four attractor states. There are pragmatists who understand a need for solid values. There are idealists grasp the concept of humility.

It is possible, in both cases, to say aloud those wise words from a Dirty Harry move... ”A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Or, as Barry Goldwater put it in Conscience of a Conservative: "we entrust the conduct of our affairs to men who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power they have been given." This concept goes back to the original American Cincinnatus, George Washington, whose example once had force and redolence in our lives. Before he faded into a cartoon figure with wooden teeth.

Indeed, the entire Enlightenment Experiment has been based upon the notion of taking the very best parts of both idealism and pragmatism and applying them to a steady project of improving society, improving ourselves. An idealism that assertively protects both human rights and individual opportunity clearly feeds into the practical fecundity of both market competition and social cooperation, making each of these tools more effective. The wealth and knowledge thus generated then nurtures further idealistic efforts to expand rights and opportunities.

This virtuous cycle, featuring mutual support between idealistic missions and pragmatic projects, once was the very thing that the word “liberal” originally stood for. And it has been outstandingly successful.

Alas, the problem with the Enlightenment Experiment is that these “mature” approaches to idealism and pragmatism do not nourish our older, darker natures. Look at 99% of past human cultures. Read history. You will see elites of both church and state performing two essential rites.

Glorifying and sanctifying their own worldview... and taking every practical measure to ensure a monopoly of power.

In other words, history shows that idealism and pragmatism have never been opposites or enemies! Instead, they served as partners for oppression, throughout our long, pre enlightenment past. From Plato to Machiavelli to Hegel, the rationalizations offered by bright “idealists” ultimately boiled down to “give power to my favored elites.” These habits run deep through our past; they cling tenaciously and they will die hard.

Hence -- bearing all of this in mind -- is it any wonder how the long struggle over the heart of conservatism finally turned out? In their naive oscillation between “purist” idealism and sell-out pragmatism, the final answer was a rationalized compromise that offered a way to have both.

At the University of Chicago, Professor Leo Strauss tutored future leaders of neoconservatism in platonic techniques for rationalizing pure and self-serving monopolies of power, creating a marvelously self-satisfying notion that lying is moral, patriotic and good -- so long as it is done by princely young philosopher kings. Turning Barry Goldwater’s wrenching call for self-restraint upon its head, the Straussians turned into a prescription to “take power, hold it tenaciously, and call it good.”

In replicating the behavior and rationalizations of every past kingdom, these transformed neoconservative thinkers saw no irony. Nor, while preaching that everybody should read Thucydides, do any of them look in the mirror and see a fellow by the name of Alcibiades.

Rik Perlstein, who knows nearly all of the modern conservative thinkers and philosophers, studied their behavior during that long journey from political exile to triumphant power. He offers a thesis that today’s Republicans “are less the party of Goldwater, and more the party of Watergate.”

Well, Perlman knows this topic much better than I do. Nevertheless, and with all due respect, let me suggest that the situation can be viewed a bit differently. Not as a swing between idealism and pragmatism. But rather as a choosing of the dark side of both.

Goldwater and Nixon are both viewed as martyrs by neoconservatism. Their defeats (in 64 and 73) fuel “never-again” zeal. But in a strange twist, both men are revered for their worst traits, their better parts abandoned. The Barry Goldwater who was a self-doubting idealist, whose solid values include a skeptical, Lockean awareness of human self-deception, is no longer part of the discussion. Nor is Richard Nixon perceived as the pragmatic negotiator, the gamesman who could offer a health care package and start the EPA, just before rocking Soviet momentum off course by rushing off to China. What remains is Goldwater the simplistic dogmatist, and the Nixon who would do anything for power.

(Indeed, some in Arizona recall how the elderly Goldwater proclaimed a fraternal liking of both Clintons and disdain for the recent crop of amoral, secretive neocons. They joke that the state might supply all its power from the spinning in Goldwater’s grave.)

Does this indictment of the right, for choosing the “dark side,”make the far left any better?

Not much. Certainly, they carry the same human impulses, inherited from the same oppressive, rationalizing ancestors. The crucial ability to say “I might be wrong” is every bit as much absent from dogmatic ideologues on that side, as it is on the right.

No, the difference between today’s far-left and far-right is very simple. Role models for the right pervade all of history. Alliances of practical kings and idealistic clergy are seen everywhere in the human past, and their pattern -- described by Machiavelli -- is engraved in human nature.

The left, on the other hand, envisions itself detached from history, and even from human nature. Their idealism appears to be about the New Man (as Lenin called him). They want power, desperately, but feel uncomfortable with the gritty methods that may be necessary to achieve it. They despise the approach of Locke and Franklin as too-American, too-modernist, too much the work of gritty engineers, artisans and bourgeois shopkeepers. And yet, they cannot bring themselves to organize for all out, streetfighting demagoguery, the way the neocons have tactically fomented “culture war,” because that might mean talking to the people. The people. Ew.

Liberals -- true liberals -- have got to face facts. They will not find anything useful or sensible on the left. Not even political streetfighters who are worth a damn. Nor will it do any good to try and copy the methodologies that brought the rightwing back from exile, to wield almost-ultimate power. They are scripted by feudal aristocracy and copying their techniques will do liberals no good at all.

There really is only one place for liberals... and for Barry Goldwater conservatives... to go.

Back to Locke and Franklin. To Truman and Ike. To the new style of cooperation between idealism and pragmatism. The idealism of openness and the pragmatism of accountability. The idealism of opportunity and the pragmatism of ambitious projects. The idealism of cooperation and the pragmatism of competitive markets. The bright and honest style of combining both human traits, though -- as the neocons have proved -- always the harder style to undertake.

The combination that defied our benighted feudal past, filling our world with wonders and offered billions hope.

Abandoning the nonsense of "left-vs-right," we must wage this fight as a battle between past and future. Between our fallible human natures and all the things we want ourselves to become.