The New Deal-style liberalism that Buckley started railing against in the late 40's was closely tied to modernism and early 20th century ideas of progress. It was based on the belief that human beings were blank slates and you could engineer society into any shape you chose. It was generally well-meaning but all too often ruthless and top-down and out of touch with ordinary human needs and the wisdom of long-established social institutions.

That flavor of liberalism was still around in the 60's. It was behind the assumption that you could implement school desegregation through massive busing and that neighborhood schools were of no importance -- that neighborhoods themselves, with their deep family ties and cultural roots, were of no importance.

But that sort of liberalism no longer exists. It got hammered from all sides -- by the critiques of Buckley-style conservatives on the right, by grassroots community organizers on the left, and by a general cultural sea-change down the middle.

The conservative writer quoted in the OP still thinks it exists. He says, "The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level, in particular over the meaning and nature of progress," and goes on to decry "the left's belief in political solutions for everything."

But he's fighting ghosts -- thinking that if the right went back to its arguments of 40 years ago, the liberal targets of 40 years ago would still be there to hit. This is why even the teabaggers have to rant about socialism and government takeovers. They're living in a dream of the last glory days of conservatism and not in present-day realities

It may also be one reason why they show such a virulent hatred for ACORN and for community organizes in general. These bottom-up anti-poverty groups are the absolute antithesis of old-fashioned liberalism, and the right has no intellectual basis for arguing against them, so all it can do is try to destroy them.

At the same time, it's becoming clear that the corporations have all the socially destructive impact that even a conservative should hate. They destroy long-established communities by pulling out industries those communities are dependent upon. They weaken families by destroying leisure. They pervert venerable institutions into sources of profit.

But today's right-wing doesn't seem to care about any of that -- to a degree where it's probably an insult to conservatism to continue to call them conservatives. They don't actually seem to want to conserve anything, except for "traditional" (which is to say, 19th century) forms of marriage. For the rest, they're perfectly happy living rootlessly in the land of trailer parks and fast food, with no sense of community and no cultural memory.

When I was in high school in the early 60's, we were taught about Karl Marx's labor theory of value -- and were also taught that it was considered basic economic doctrine, apart from whatever opinion you might have of Marx's advocacy of communism.

The labor theory of value, as I recall it, states that value is created by the people who put actual effort into making things -- the labor that turns raw materials into finished product, the creative effort that produces books and movies and music that never existed before.

According to Marx, capitalists and middlemen get their share only by exploiting the workers -- by making sure that workers are paid less than the true value of what they produce and taking the difference for themselves.

I don't think I completely buy that -- there are other things besides the labor involved that add to or detract from the value of a product. But it seems undeniable that the major portion of the value of anything comes from the work that went into it and that neither the people who do the physical labor nor those who supply the creative ideas ever get their fair share.

When I was learning about this stuff as a kid, though, nobody doubted that exploitation was a fact -- and the debates were about how things like the role of unions in enabling workers to obtain a bigger piece of the pie.

But since then -- and specifically since the Reagan presidency -- the entire grounds of the discussion have shifted. Not only does nobody talk any longer about exploitation, the entire labor theory of value has vanished from the public sphere.

Instead, we have been given the noxious term "wealth creation." We have been told that it is the investor class that "creates wealth." And we have had tax cut after tax cut sold to us on the grounds that letting rich people become even richer means they will be free to create even more "wealth" and everyone will live happily ever after.

Wealth, of course, isn't value. It's just money -- and much of it not even real money but on-paper profits that vanish as soon as you look inside the box and see there's nothing there.

Meanwhile, the idea of value has gotten lost. Thanks to productivity gains, workers are creating more value while being paid less. And the environment (among other things) is being degraded because we have a system that sees no problem in destroying things of real value in order to generate the phantom of wealth.

Marx's answer to all this, of course, was communism -- giving the workers complete ownership of the fruits of their own labor. That hasn't ever proved possible to put into practice, and I think there are good reasons why not -- perhaps starting with the fact that in a society of assembly line workers and paper pushers, there simply isn't the personal investment in one's labor to make most people eager to "own" whatever it is they do for a living.

But setting aside communism as an answer, we're still left with the basic problem -- which is one of value, exploitation, and where a society needs to invest its resources and attention in order to create more value (and less on-paper wealth) and to distribute the fruits of that value-creation more equally.

As a result of looking into Bush family history and related matters, I've come to several conclusions:

1) Support for fascism -- or at least for a kind of Americanized fascism-lite -- was extremely widespread among American business leaders in the 1930's. Some actively endorsed Nazi racial ideology or funded domestic fascist groups. Some merely looked to Germany for a model of a government that would overturn the New Deal and destroy the unions.

2) When the US entered World War II, a deal was struck with these near-traitorous corporations. They would help in the war effort and all would be forgiven. Then, following the war, there was a massive re-writing of history to conceal the inconvenient facts of what had gone before. In this sense, Orwell's 1984 wasn't prediction -- it was a straightforward description of what was happening as he wrote in 1948.

In this rewritten version of history, the Republicans' only fault in the 1930's had been excess devotion to Hooverian economics. They and the corporate elite had never been disloyal, never turned against democracy, never looked approvingly at Hitler. The nation had always been unified where it counted and had responded seamlessly during World War II.

3) Until about 1953, there were still plenty of people who knew what was what and weren't afraid to call a spade a spade. But after Eisenhower was elected and Dulles became head of the CIA, this rewritten history was ruthlessly imposed. Much of Operation Mockingbird had to do with cementing it into place. At the same time, it became unacceptable to call extremist forces in the United States "fascist." You could decry McCarthyism or the hijinks of right-wing oil millionaires, but expressing the idea that the f-word might apply to Americans was considered almost a form of libel.

At its mildest, this was a kind of deal between the right and left -- we won't call you communists if you won't call us fascists. At its worst, it was more like a threat -- of course we're not fascists, and only a dirty commie would suggest we were.

4) There have been cracks in the we-were-never-fascists myth from time to time. The explicit reliance of the John Birch Society on fascist conspiracy theories. The willingness of movement conservatives in the US to associate with outright fascists in Latin America in the 1970s and 80's. But those have never gotten any traction. The power of the myth is too strong.

But the history of the Family lays the whole thing out too clearly to ignore -- from its fascist-lite origins in 1935 to its wartime re-imagining of itself as a patriotic organization bent on bipartisan religious uplift to its maintenance of clearly fascist doctrines for its elite inner circle. I still have no hope that the MSM will ever acknowledge this, but it's time for us to start putting the real nature of the extreme right in context.

This pattern of right-wingers in the US supporting and cooperating with ultra-right-wingers in Latin America is painfully reminiscent of the situation during the Carter administration, when fascist regimes were being supported by groups like WACL and CIS, by right-wing politicians like Jesse Helms, and by rogue elements of the CIA.

After working behind Carter's back -- and in some cases actively undermining him -- those groups went on in the early Reagan years to carry out much of the administration's illegal Latin American strategy. They supported the Contras, they cheered on death squad leaders, and they harassed and terrorized US opponents of the Latin American fascist regimes.

Many of the same people and groups are still around, on both the US and Latin American sides. Dan Burton -- mentioned in the OP -- was closely associated with Helms back in the 80's. Dana Rohrabacher is another name out of that period.

Two groups funded with taxpayer money through the National Endowment for Democracy -- the International Republican Institute and the Center for International Private Enterprise -- appear to be in close contact with the ultra-conservative Venezuelan group CEDICE. Those groups (and others on the more liberal end of the spectrum) were founded in 1983 to do openly what the CIA had been doing illegally in the way of meddling in other countries' elections. Their activities have generally been more-or-less in alignment with US foreign policy -- but now I'm getting a strong sense that they may be preparing to go rogue and start actively sabotaging Obama's policies.

Anti-communism was one of the strongest organizing principles for the Republican Party over many decades, helping bring together business interests, libertarians, and other groups that might not otherwise have had anything in common. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the GOP has been reduced to its essentially non-existent domestic agenda and as a result has become increasingly fragmented. They'd love nothing more than to get that sort of consensus back.

In a lot of what's been going on lately, I can see seeds of an attempt to turn "anti-socialism" into a new organizing principle that applies to both foreign governments that challenge the dominance of US corporations and progressive or pro-labor policies at home. Support for the Honduran coup may not have much traction as an issue right now -- but if it helps them get their messages and their mailing lists together, it could be a harbinger of things to come.

This nation was created on the basis of a beguiling myth which grew out of social contract theory. The social contract argument was that people voluntarily surrendered some of their autonomy to a strong central government because the advantages it provided in the way of security and coordination of activity outweighed the loss of personal freedom. And the founding myth of the United States is that it's possible to find a sweet spot, where government has enough power to protect us but not enough to tyrannize over us.

It hasn't worked out that way.

I have very mixed feelings about the extent to which government is necessary at all. It's obvious that we do need some kind of universally-accepted institutions to set and enforce basic ground rules, to mediate disputes between individuals and groups, to counterbalance the extent to which the powerful tend to exploit the weak, and to look after certain aspects of the common good which can otherwise get lost in the thicket of personal self-interest.

We're accustomed to having government do most of those things -- but that doesn't mean either that they are necessary functions of government or that they make government itself necessary. At best, they account for perhaps 10% of what government actually does -- while the other 90% mainly goes into protecting the property and privileges of the elite.

What passes for government these days most closely resembles a system that existed only during major crises in earlier and simpler times. Just as the single cells of slime molds come together to form a quasi-organism in times of crisis, so the human community pulls together and seeks strong leaders when under assault. War-chiefs in times of conflict. Charismatic prophets when famine makes it necessary to pull up stakes and migrate to greener pastures. But after the crisis passes, that degree of centralized power is no longer necessary.

Except that for some reason, we've been living in permanent crisis mode for the last 5000 years -- since the rise of the centralized state at the start of civilization.

It isn't clear just what happened then. Disparities in grave goods show that class distinctions had increased sharply over the previous thousand years or so -- but around 3000 BC there is a sudden phase-shift, from local aristocracies to centralized monarchies in which the ruler has nearly godlike status. The most likely guess is that the climate took a turn for the worse and there were a couple of centuries marked by threats of famine and border attacks by nomadic tribes. But whatever the crisis was, it ended -- and the centralization of power never did.

Naomi Klein talks about the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism -- but that's merely an acute form of what we've been living with as a chronic condition for 5000 years. The overthrowing of an occasional tyrant wrings some of the worst abuses out of the system, but only to return it to that same chronic level.

Even the American Revolution did nothing to change the basic fact that government functions to protect the wealth and power of the privileged. There have been gestures from time to time at rebalancing the equation, but none of them have been effective in the long run. And at present, we are in the worst shape we have been in for a century, with the facade of democratic elections increasingly unable to disguise the fact that Washington is run by a permanent and often hereditary governing class for the benefit of lobbyists and corporate interests.

But that's the nature of government. It was designed that way to serve that specific function, and thinking it could be anything different is a sucker's game. Government is programmed to serve its original masters, and that programming will always win out no matter how many override codes you try to apply.

So instead of applauding our deeply-flawed and ultimately inadequate American system of government on this Day-After-Independence Day, we ought to be taking a step back and thinking about what alternative system would actually achieve the ends that government of any kind appears unable to attain.

The Declaration of Independence asserts, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

That's half true as can be and half deeply distorted by the social contract myth. Our founding fathers recognized the abuses of all known forms of government, but they also believed that the true original purpose of government was to secure the rights of the governed, and that if one system of government fell down on the job you just had to abolish it and start over in slightly different form.

It's time to recognize instead that government of any kind is a con game that picks our pockets while it promises to secure our rights. If after more than two centuries of experimentation with liberal democracy, *all* forms of government are still "destructive of those ends," we may need to shake loose of the permanent crisis mentality, abolish government itself, and start over from first principles -- to create something that actually serves our needs instead of screwing us over and spitting in our faces.

There are some good points in this piece -- but it seems to have the fatal defect of confusing free markets with capitalism.

Markets can be an excellent mechanism for allocating supply and demand -- but it is all too easy to rig the game. Corporations can artificially limit supply to increases prices or pump up demand to sell useless products. Monopolies can control sales and prices with even less effort.

Corporations also have a hundred other tricks to get out from under the imperatives of the market. They exploit workers, cheat consumers, blackmail local communities, and despoil the environment -- constantly taking without giving back. They have their fingers in everything from the media to the courts to make sure that they will never be held accountable and will always be able to continue to rig the system.

The real issue of socialism, as far as I can tell, is not whether you want to have the federal government run your local corner grocery but how to break the power of the corporations. I'm not convinced socialism is the best way to do that -- government is a good regulator, but it's not an ideal provider of goods and services -- but it's a good starting point for thinking about the problem.

Fundamentally, I think we have to break the power of capital itself -- to have a society in which there are certain things money cannot buy (elections, for starters) and in which the lack of money cannot be a barrier to either fulfilling essential human needs or participating in the political process.

Once we decide what our objectives are, we can then start to design a method for getting to that end point.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the standard argument for the free market is that natural market efficiencies will solve all our problems. If oil becomes scarce, its price will go up and both investors and consumers will turn to alternative technologies.

The problem here, though, is that coal is very cheap -- but also very dirty. So in this case, the free market is not going to save us from pollution and global warming.

As someone mentioned upthread, that leaves us with three solutions:

1. The government simply imposes restrictions on carbon emissions. Simple and direct but it doesn't actually do anything to solve the problem. It would be likely to drive up energy costs without providing any alternatives.

2. The government promotes the development of alternative technologies through financial incentives. This has the advantage of addressing possible solutions but it doesn't do anything to rein in the current problem.

3. Create a cockamamie artificial "free market" in cap-and-trade derivatives, which does little to address the problem and nothing to provide solutions.


The free market types, of course, hate #1 and love #3. They're also willing to accept #2 to a degree, since it would mean government seed money going to private companies -- but they're really not thrilled about the potential for backyard generation of solar or wind power, which would cut the major energy firms out of the picture. They're much more enthusiastic about the idea of "carbon sequestration," which would not only keep the coal companies in business but would add another layer of expensive technology to current methods of power generation, thus perpetuating a heavily centralized and capital-dependent system.

But the real dirty secret here is that this argument isn't actually about energy or pollution or global warming. It's about the fact that the free market has failed to solve the most pressing problem of our time, thus invalidating its central claim to be the ultimate answer to everything -- and making the brutality and injustice that it creates along the way a lot more suspect.

Sure, this silly cap-and-trade system has the potential for helping a small number of wealthy people to become even richer, while screwing over everybody else and doing nothing to address the actual problem. But that's just a side benefit. Its real purpose is to continue propping up the rotting structure of capitalism for another generation.

And I use the word "rotting" quite deliberately -- not in the sense that a 1930s socialist might have thrown it out as an insult, but in the sense that capitalism itself has now become a shambling zombie, or perhaps an immortal vampire. It has less and less connection to the provision of actual things that people need but is merely a disintegrating remnant of what it once was, maintaining its artifical existence by feeding on the blood and brains of the living. And cap-and-trade is just one more sign of that ongoing decay.

For example, suggesting that there are too many people on the planet because there aren't enough jobs for all of them seems to mean that "jobs" are the real inhabitants of Earth and "people" exist to serve them.

But it really starts with people. It always has.

The first question has to do with the carrying capacity of the Earth -- how many people can it feed and clothe without being degraded. You start from there.

The second question is how many of those people it takes to provide for all the rest. In hunter-gatherer times, everybody had to be out there hunting and gathering. Agriculture mean that 95% worked their asses off to support a small leisure and creative class. Now it takes only 5% to raise food for everyone else -- and pretty soon the rest of the maintenance chores aren't going to demand much more.

But that doesn't mean you need to beat the population down to 300 million -- all of whom will somehow find work producing the food, clothing, and housing that would be need by six billion. It means that you have to radically rethink the nature of human life.

There are a lot of delicate philosophic issues there -- but the most immediate question is a practical one. We've used "jobs" as a rough and ready distribution mechanism for getting food and shelter and such from the people who produce them to the people who consume them. You work, you earn money, you buy stuff, that gives work to other people, and so on.

This is a pretty crude system -- which is why it creates endlessly unsolvable problems with unemployment, welfare, and so forth. But we've not only accepted it as being the system we're stuck with for the moment but have tended to exalt it as both inevitable and morally freighted. If you don't work, you're a bad person -- and even such traditional demands as charity to the poor come to be looked on with suspicion.

That's what we've got to get out from under -- but it isn't going to be easy. Marx's simple dictum of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" has been demonized as it is -- but we're not only going to have to go with that, but with a hyper-version of it.

At the same time, we're going to have to recognize that the "from each" part doesn't just mean sweat-of-the-brow stuff. It also means everything from folk crafts to emotional support to loving parenting in a world where greater longevity plus population controls may mean a lot more "parents" dedicated to nurturing other people's children.

In short, it will be something we can't even imagine at this point -- but despite that, we've got to get from here to there, and do it virtually overnight.

Looks like fun.

He says, "The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail? It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard."

What Rich isn't getting is that news is information -- not entertainment. It doesn't depend on special effects or surround sound. If all the major tv and print news media suddenly followed the Wall Street Journal and went print-only, there would still be people who'd instantly copy stories onto blogs and message boards. There'd be people who would more legitimately post brief quotes and summaries at places like DU. And the Net being what it is, within an hour the stories would be everywhere -- which isn't much inducement for the public in general to pay for the originals.

That's not even mentioning all the local newspapers and such that pay for wire service stories and freely post them online. For Rich's idea to work would mean placing a kind of lockdown on *all* news sources, from the New York Times down to the Podunk Gazette, and establishing an RIAA-style crusade to track down, fine, and even jail illegal reprinters. Oh -- and you'd also have to keep Americans from accessing any foreign news sources. Lots of luck with that.

Rich's basic error is that once a story is online in *any* form, it's too late to stop it from getting out -- and thus too late to try to force readers to pay for it. On the other hand, it's also clear that advertising is no longer going to be able to subsidize the news the way it once did -- and government subsidies are also a non-starter.

I feel really stupid saying this, but the most plausible answer I can see is for news gathering to become even *more* politicized and partisan than it has been. One thing we know people are willing to pay for is to get their own political positions more widely disseminated. So what the hell -- why not go all the way and have the 527's and think-tanks do the heavy lifting? Add in an array of bloggers with well-honed skills at detecting bullshit and propaganda to act as middlemen. And then turn the whole thing loose on the Net and let the chips fall as they may.

Traditional reporters who have been raised on a credo of objectivity won't approve of it -- but it's not as if most of them have ever really been objective themselves. And it might actually be the best long-term solution.

I don't know if I'm just weird -- but there has been more than one period over the years when I've spent a considerable amount of time asking myself how I would react if this country ever went full-on totalitarian and the price for simply speaking out included the possibility of arrest, torture, even death. Would I continue to speak up and take that risk? Or would I duck and hide?

It's one of those questions I pull out every decade or so, chew over for a while, and then tuck away again -- because I've never come up with a definitive answer. I guess nobody really knows how they'd act in that sort of situation unless it actually happens.

But the one thing I have concluded for sure is that the very existence of torture is incompatible with a free and open society. Whether it's 17th century freethinkers expressing their most heretical insights only in code for fear of the Inquisition, or 19th century Italian patriots cheering operas that were thinly veiled allegories of their oppression by the Austrian Empire, torture forces authentic thought and feeling underground at best -- or makes them unutterable at worst.

That is why torture becomes the defining issue. In its absence, all other issues are on the table and can be freely debated and resolved. In its presence, all other issues become taboo.

But for the Peggy Noonans and George Wills of this world, that isn't the case. In their privileged enclaves they -- or their historical equivalents -- have always been able to speak freely among their fellows without fear of reprisal. In effect, the greatest perk of the kind of stratified society which tends to be created and sustained by torture is the right to act and speak as though torture does not exist.

And that, quite simply, is why Will and Noonan have no clue as to what is at stake here -- and no right to speak in the name of the people of this country.

The PC controversy may have started with attempts to remove ethnic slurs from public use and then proceeded to jokes about replacing "short" with "vertically challenged," but at least on college campuses it rapidly escalated to the thought police level.

When my older son was in college 10 years ago, he was constantly having run-ins with the extreme PC crowd, not over language but over general attitude, mainly with regard to what could loosely be considered gender issues.

For example, he was involved with an alternative campus publication whose policy was to publish anything that any student wanted to submit -- which stirred up recurring controversies in itself. But the episode that really got him riled was when the publication put up posters showing a dominatrix-type figure with a whip saying "You will submit to the (name of publication)" and somebody who considered this sexist went around campus ripping them all down.

At another point, there had been an attempted rape at a different college in the area, and frightened students at his campus hastily pushed through a number of provisions in response, such as requiring dormitory doors to be kept locked at all times -- which meant a student couldn't visit a friend in another dorm without phoning ahead to have someone meet them at the front door and let them in.

When my son stood up at a student meeting to say there was no sign of any need for these regulations, no indication they would prevent a rape attempt like the one at the other college (which had been in a secluded outdoor area, not a dorm), and significant impediments to ordinary campus social life if they were enacted, he was met by a barrage of counter-arguments which essentially amounted to "You have no sensitivity to my feelings."

My younger son graduated from college 5 years ago, and he ran into the same attitudes -- though he avoided direct run-ins, being less confrontational by nature.

The one thing that does seem to have changed in the last 10 years is that you now get these arguments not just from the left, over racial or gender issues, but also from the right over conservative cultural issues. Even here at DU, it's not possible to say "religion is a myth" without somebody telling you that you're insulting believers, or to say "the South is a center of regressive social and economic attitudes" without being told you're an anti-Southern bigot.

It seems as though we're stuck in a linguistic tangle, where the original attempt to set forth norms of public behavior that would prevent outright hate speech has been co-opted to censor any criticism of a particular group's beliefs and attitudes.

To me, the distinction seems pretty clear. On one side is language that tends to perpetuate current power structures by demeaning and isolating anyone whose positions or even mere existence challenges those power structures. On the other is the use of socially subversive language by the excluded as a way of undermining the power structures that hold them down.

Things only becomes problematic when that distinction is blurred. For example, a group that is an excluded minority in the larger society may have sufficient numbers and influence at a liberal college to start acting like a dominant majority and throwing its weight around -- which was my son's objection -- perhaps without even realizing it.

Conversely, groups that no outside observer would doubt are part of the dominant power structure -- like Christians or white males -- may attempt to cast themselves as oppressed minorities, with the right to use socially subversive language themselves while being protected from having it used against them.

(These two situations are connected, of course, since the right has been very good at picking up incidents of excessive PC-ness on college campuses to either argue against all PC-ness or cast itself as the new oppressed.)

There's no simplistic answer to this tangle -- the only solution I see is to raise everybody's awareness of power relationships in our society and how they mediate all social, economic, and legal interactions, without exception.

In fact, that sort of consciousness-raising would be a good thing in general, since unacknowledged power relationships affect almost every current issue, from the Employee Free Choice Act to copyright and file-sharing to the war on drugs. But it's not something that can be accomplished overnight.

The GOP conservatives in the 1950's weren't exactly a "rump group" or "burrowing from within." There had always been a strong faction within the Republican Party that was deeply resentful of the East Coast/Wall Street establishment. In the late 40's and 1950's, it was identified with Robert Taft and was rooted among conservative Midwestern manufacturers. In the early 60's, the West Coast Birch Society types and Goldwaterites became more influential, and that was the background that movement conservatism came out of in the late 60's.

There was a rough balance those two factions within the Republican Party for a considerable period -- but it broke down when Nixon started trying to woo disaffected Southern Democrats.. The movement conservatives jumped on the bandwagon and by the early 70's they were making common cause with the Wallacites and the Birchers, even though they often privately mocked them as ignorant yahoos. The domination of the Republican Party by the Reaganites came out of that alliance by the end of the decade, as did the close coordination between the movement conservatives and the religious right.

The movement conservatives never did warm to George H.W. Bush, who they saw as a figure of the East Coast establishment, but they threw their full support behind George W. Bush in 1999 when Grover Norquist told them he was the candidate of their dreams. And that same mixture of anti-government ideologues and the religious right is the group that has control of the Republican Party today.

Along the way, what used to be called Rockefeller Republicans have been squeezed out -- in part, I think, because more educated and suburban voters who had rejected the Democratic Party as long as it was identified with Southern racists and big-city political machines are now rejecting the Republicans out of the same kind of distaste.

There's an element of snobbism there, perhaps, but I suspect it has to do more with the inclinations of a group that votes on issues rather than on the basis of tribalism. There's a definite class division at work -- but it isn't the upper class/middle class economic division that most of us are sensitive to. Instead, it's a cultural class division -- educated vs. low information, urban vs. rural, cosmopolitan vs. parochial, secular vs. religious.

That division is the one that's uppermost in the minds of people who love Sarah Palin. They know perfectly well that they're being squeezed out of the mainstream of society and they're very resentful about it. Of course, it's history that's squeezing them out, not any kind of elite conspiracy -- our society is becoming better educated, more tolerant, and more global-minded simply because the planet is becoming complexly interdependent in ways that require that sort of mindset. But the people who are on the losing end of the shift are never going to be able to see it that way, precisely because the vantage point from which they're observing makes it impossible.

What's likely to happen, though, is that the GOP will be increasingly defined by litmus tests. If you're not ideologically or tribally identifiable as "one of them," you'll be demonized and excluded. And though it might be possible for an "RLC" to successfully field moderate Republican candidates in certain areas, as long as the intolerant minority has control of the national GOP message machine and fund-raising mechanisms, they're not going to get very far.

A massive infusion of corporate cash is one thing I could see recapturing the Republican Party from the ideologues and the tribalists -- but given how discredited the corporations themselves are at the moment, I can't see that translating into broad-based popular appeal either.

The libertarians are the other independent force on the right at the moment -- and given Ron Paul's wide appeal, they might have more of a future than either would-be GOP moderates or corporate fronts. The movement conservatives pretty much blackballed the libertarians back in the late 60's, because they saw them as a bunch of long-haired, pot-smoking hippies -- and though there was a certain degree of reconciliation in the 80's and 90's, when the GOP was at it's peak of success and hoping to become a majority party, that's now fallen apart again.

Not that the libertarians are going to have much interest in pulling the movement conservatives out of the quicksand they've gotten themselves into, either -- but they might be effective as an insurgent movement to take over a crippled GOP.

I was thinking about some of last night's threads, and it struck me that political definitions in this country come down to one very simple distinction:

- Leftists believe that the primary duty of government is to help the least among us -- to empower the poor, give voice to the disenfranchised, and work to enforce social justice. They believe that if these things are accomplished, society as a whole will prosper and will work more fairly and effectively for all its members.

- Rightists believe that the primary duty of government is to preserve and increase the wealth and power of those who are already wealthy and powerful -- to be strong on police power at home and military intervention abroad (to promote business interests) and weak when it comes to regulation and taxation.

- Centrists believe that the primary duty of government is to look after the middle class, on the grounds that this serves the majority of the population. Some are true middle class populists, but many have an upward bias -- they believe that it is important to support businesses which provide middle class jobs but that the poor can best be handled by encouraging them to rise to the middle class if they are capable and otherwise largely ignoring them.

The refusal of Americans in general to admit that we have a deeply entrenched class system means this simple distinction is rarely acknowledged. Instead, the media tend to label people as liberals, conservatives, and moderates -- as though it was a matter of personal temperament which could be measured in terms of such qualities as fiscal prudence or cultural attitudes.

But in fact, it's all about class -- and especially once you strip away distractions like abortion and gay marriage, it becomes starkly clear that the real issues we're arguing about in this country today all have to do with the single question of whose interests society should put first.

For most of human history, everybody was basically equal. Some might acquire more strength or knowledge or personal charisma, but there was nobody who was defined from birth as innately superior or inferior.

All that changed with the rise of civilization between about 4500 and 3000 BC. For reasons that must have seemed valid at the time, the human race divided itself into aristocrats and peasants, patricians and plebeians -- where the former had all the power and wealth and the latter got to grovel and do the scut work.

That division probably made it possible for the human race to exploit itself in order to produce surpluses, which in turn made possible the rise of a leisure class that could cultivate strange new arts like writing and metallurgy and more complex forms of social organization.

However, in order to create and perpetuate this division, it was necessary to radically distort most people's understanding of their own nature and their relationship to the cosmos. For example, societies in which anyone could seek guidance from the spirits through a vision quest gave way to societies in which the gods would speak only to kings and high priests -- and where temples took the form of vast courtyards where the masses shuffled their feet while their superiors consulted their deities within a tiny and veiled-off inner sanctum.

That extreme degree of division crashed out in many places at the end of the Bronze Age, and the societies which followed -- like that of Classical Greece -- often enjoyed a greater degree of equality, democracy, and (in the form of mystery cults) access to initiatory wisdom. However, the basic division between aristocrats and peasants hadn't vanished -- people just weren't having their noses rubbed in it as strongly.

But even that degree of change was threatening enough to the old aristocratic order that Plato and his successors were led to conceive of a new method of social control, one in which the rulers were to be instructed in the true nature of things while the masses were to be kept in a state of ignorance and superstition.

Fast forward through the next two thousand years and we witness an ongoing tug of war between the Platonic system of control and an emerging egalitarian ideal of universal enlightenment. Christianity, for example, was thoroughly populist until it got co-opted by the Roman empire and ended up in the same old arrangement, where priests got to do the interesting stuff in a specially fenced-off area while the masses stood and watched.

But then that system began to break down. The Protestant Reformation. Guns and printing presses. The rise of science. The decline of the old feudal order based on hereditary ownership of land and the rise of a money-based economy in its place. By the time of the American and French Revolutions, ordinary people no longer believed that kings and nobles were in any way superior -- and they also had the necessary tools to educate themselves and fight off royal armies.

In the wake of those two revolutions, though, there was a profound conservative reaction. If there could no longer be lords and peasants, there could at least be haves and have-nots -- and the invention of the modern, eternal corporation once again made it as easy to pass along inherited wealth as it had been in the days of feudalism.

That old Platonic scheme of keeping the masses ignorant and superstitious also enjoyed a great resurgence. In the early 1800's, upper class folk were boldly speculating among themselves that the old religions might not be literally true, that even the rationalized religion of the Enlightenment might be susceptible to radical challenge -- but at the same time, they were making sure to keep these dangerous notions out of the hoi polloi, even going to far as to arrest and imprison booksellers who attempted to spread unsettling notions about too freely.

The standard lowest-common-denominator religion of the early 1800's was given to sentimentality and conventional piety. By the end of the 1800's, with fresh challenges from Darwin and other areas of science, fundamentalism had to be devised as an even stronger barrier against radical thought. But the basic method is no different -- and even today the dirty secret of the Neocon followers of Leo Strauss is that they still believe there should be a special form of privileged knowledge for themselves (though in their case, it is more a form of cynical nihilism than Plato's original mysticism) and carefully cultivated ignorance for everyone else.

This is what we have to contend with. Americans, in particular, are ignorant by design -- ignorant of their own history, tied to some of the stupidest possible modes of religion, told that their ignorance is a good and natural thing and that anybody who aspires to something better is a dangerous "elitist" to be feared and shunned.

Meanwhile, the genuine elites are laughing and looking down at those they so easily dominate.

More than anything else, the history of the 20th century is the history of a battle by the wealthy and powerful to retain the idea of hereditary privilege. The Nazis supported that idea, which is why they and their racist ideology were acceptable to the American elite. The Communists threatened it, which is why the second half of the last century was one extended paroxysm of fanatical anti-communism, whose final aftershocks have not yet died out.

Before we can do anything else, we have to throw off those mental chains of self-satisfied mediocrity which have been imposed on us over the last 200 years. In particular, we have to reject the perverted, faux-democratic myth of the late 20th century, that we're all ordinary slobs -- you, your neighbor, and the rich guy up the hill, who may have scads more money but is otherwise just like you and me -- and reclaim our birthright of universal aristocracy.

Because that is what we have lost. Fifty thousand years ago, we all enjoyed the same access to whatever power and wealth and knowledge and freedom our society offered. These days, only the richest among us actually enjoy those things. But they have trained the rest of us not to think in those terms, not to aspire to anything better, and above all not to look behind the curtain and find out that the world is run very differently than we have been led to imagine.

Risk-takers are valuable to a society. They're the people who are willing to gamble on starting new businesses, pulling up stakes and moving out to the frontier, doing things a little differently without any assurance it will work.

But not all of us are risk-takers. Most people would be happy to live in the same place throughout their lives, work at the same job, and enjoy the company of family and friends without ever cutting loose. And having extra risk piled on them willy-nilly doesn't turn them into daring entrepreneurs. It just makes their lives miserable.

The Republicans act as though a high-risk society is a more creative and innovative society, but it isn't. Even the natural risk-takers may hesitate, if leaving a job to launch their own business means losing health insurance or running up credit card debts that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy if the business fails. The kinds of risks that have been added to our society act as negative incentives, causing people to sit tight and stay with what they've got instead of taking chances on something new.

Since it goes against their own professed goals of encouraging innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit, we have to ask why the Republicans would be so in favor of loading us all up with risk to the current devastating extent. And the answer -- as suggested by the OP -- is that it removes those risks from the corporations and transfers them to ordinary citizens.

Perhaps the Republican Party is a lost cause, as many here seem to believe. But if there is any chance of redeeming the remaining sane Republicans and fiscal moderates, it may lie in pointing out that there is a vast chasm between encouraging individual enterprise and supporting the interests of the corporations -- and that they can't do both at once. I know the GOP as an institution has become accustomed to winning elections by rolling in corporate cash and is never likely to change its ways, but disaffected GOP voters might just be susceptible to a different message.