How did America get into the mess it's in now?

TPM Cafe's M. J. Rosenberg provides a letter written by his nephew (Jeremy Gruenbaum) to explain it. The kid says "Blame it all on the baby boomers!" I think he gets a lot of the history right, and I lived through most of it myself.

The key point he makes is that the middle class in America suffered through the Depression, then fought through the most massive war the world has ever seen, and came out on the other side of all that into the 1950's. They felt they deserved the America of the 50's in which they quickly became the richest nation on earth. They knew things could get worse and didn't want to lose what they felt they had earned and go back to the massive struggles they had passed through to get there. Instead they wanted to preserve and pass the rewards they felt they had worked so hard for on to their children. The result was a growing conservative movement that objected to the changing American society and who wanted to return to the halcyon days of the 1950's. The result was the conservative movement that effectively took over the Baby Boom generation and won elections.

Gruenbaum makes a number of very good points. I strongly recommend that you go read the entire post. It is food for a great deal of thought. It also delights me that this is an explanation for the political disaster which has over taken America that does NOT blame the DFHs of the 60's and early 70's.

[Gruenbaum wrote his piece in partial response to an excellent piece by Noah Millman in The American Scene. It, too, is worth reading.]

The American right wing has lost all intellectual validity

If you have felt that the conservatives have lost all reason, you are in good company. Steve Benen explains how American Enterprise Institute conservative writer Steven F. Hayward, explains the extremes of the right wing intellectual collapse but misses a great deal of it.

America has become a Fascist nation

How bad is the shift in America towards a right-wing authoritarian government? Take a look at this definition of Fascism by Robert Paxton, read the papers or watch TV and you tell me. Fascism is:

"... a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Then he gives some details that I will present as a checklist:

"a form of political behavior marked by

• obsessive preoccupation with community decline,
• humiliation or victimhood and
• by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which
• a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
• abandons democratic liberties and
• pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
• goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Sara Robinson has presented all this and her analysis of how close we actually are to true Fascism. Her analysis is extremely disquieting, if not too surprising as we have watched the Bush/Cheney administration slide rather rapidly in this direction for the last eight years. She bases her analysis on Robert Paxton's five stages of Fascism. They are:
1. The initial creation of fascist movements.
2. Their rooting as parties in a political system.
3. The acquisition of power.
4. The exercise of power.
5. Radicalization or entropy.

Paxton explains what the stages are, and Sara shows how we have achieved each one. If you have time, start with Paxton's explanation. But Sara's analysis is the most focused on today's America which is suffering through the political illness.

Communism in America has always been extremely unlikely. The barriers here against Fascism, however, have always been much less robust. We are now on the very edge of the precipice.

The source of the fake "Kenyan" birth certificate has been located

If you have followed the rantings of the "Birthers" and the insane "lawyer" and Dentist Orly Taitz then you have heard of the fake birth certificate the birthers claim to have found that "proves" Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii. Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent has found the original document from Australia that some birther photo shopped into the so-called Kenyan birth certificate that "proves" their case.

Taitz is just another crazy Russian expatriate who has found a way to use the media to spread her madness. Who is behind her and using her to spread the message? Why are the Republicans in Congress supporting the entire birther insanity?

Is that and the tea bagger thugs all the Republicans have left to throw at American politics?

They appear sick and desperate. That's the current status of the conservative movement and the American Republican Party.

What planet are the "Birthers" and Lou Dobbs from?

The national Republicans are demonstrating their insanity, power-hungry natures and political desperation by embracing the "Birther" movement. But it's clear why they are doing that. They have been removed from power in the federal government for incompetence in governing together with widespread corruption. Not only have the despised Democrats taken over both Houses of Congress, to add insult to injury Bush was replaced by of all people a man whose father was an African. A man the conservatives call "Black" has become President of the United States. Such events are so unbelievable to the conservative Republicans that the conservatives are in shock and acting like their entire world has turned upside down. When a few crazies started publicizing the idea that Obama is not a native-born American citizen and thus not eligible to become President, many have grabbed onto the idea in desperation. But it is desperation, as Jon Stewart demonstrates.

Jon Stewart accurately and with his usual humor presents the case that the "Birthers" are attempting to make that Barack Obama is not a native born American citizen eligible to be elected President. Stewart's case is as even handed a description as any reasonable person could present, since the "case" is itself insane and irrational and it is being offered by self-centered crooks and whacked-out crazies.

So who are the crazies and crooks? The crazies consist largely of the shocked and frightened conservative voters who simply can't believe that the conservative world they thought they were creating here in America has collapsed. The crooks are the more sane among the career conservative politicians who have built political careers out of the conservative movement since Reagan was elected.If the conservative movement has collapsed, then their careers are in real jeopardy.

The conservative crazies include a large number of angry right-wingers who will vote for anyone who promises anything that might possibly be used to replace Barack Obama as President and to replace the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate with people more to their liking. Those politicians who would be more to their liking are racist right-wing fundamentalist evangelists like ex-Representative Tom Tancredo, as well as Sen. Sessions, Sen. Coburn, Sen. Ensign or Sen. Vitter. Individually the conservatives may not appear crazy, but they all belong to a culture that is irrational in nature. They all know what they hate about the current more liberal culture, and they simply want it changed. They are disinterested in the process necessary to bring about that change. Since they are interested in getting the results they want and find that no rational process gets there, they reject rationality and in many cases, even science. The result is that the conservative culture is tends to be anti-rational. Those politicians who are riding this electorate for personal advantage and are not themselves crazies are the conservative Crooks. Those are the crooks, a groups strongly represented among the elected politicians.

In the House the crazies include Minnesota's Michele Bachmann who is famous recently for trying to get people to illegally refuse to fill out the 2010 census among other insanities. Similarly, there is Katherine Harris who famously ramrodded the theft of the Florida election for George Bush in 2000 when she was Florida Secretary of State. She later represented the Florida 13^th Congressional District from January 3, 2003 – January 3, 2007, displaying all the sanity that we currently see from Michelle Bachman. Most of her problems became public when she ran for Senate in 2006. These are just samples of the Republican conservative caucus which is clearly filled with such kooks.

Many of the conservative politicians themselves are often not crazy like the voters who elect them are, but they cater to those voters so they can be elected to office. They have embedded themselves in that anti-rational conservative culture, generally because their family and/or friends belong to it. Then they have created political careers within that culture. Texas Senator Cornyn may be one of the more sane group who is capable of moving whatever direction the wind blows in order to protect his career and current seat in the Senate.

Generally, however, as the national Republicans have gained their reputation for being unable to government effectively - largely because of their demand that government not operate on rational scientific processes - the conservative politicians have found it harder to attract Independent voters. This has become true even as the voters identifying as Democrats have grown in numbers. Those identifying as Democrats have clearly rejected what the conservatives claim to offer, so they are not open to conservative arguments. So the only thing the Republican office holders can do to remain in office is to appeal to the more extreme crazies among the voters. The "Tea Parties are one example of this, as is the "Birther" movement. So is the greater use of right-wing extremism issues by leading Republican politicians as they are led by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the gaggle of right-wing shock-jocks on radio.

The "Birther" movement itself is run by a gaggle of incompetent "lawyers." Here are descriptions of those lawyers reported by The Washington Independent.

• "Phil Berg, the original “birther” lawyer, has been forced to pay out sanctions for legal malpractice." His arc of career failure continues as he pushes this idiotic "birther" case.
  


• Orly Taitz, a California lawyer featured in the Jon Stewart routine above,"...got her law degree from an online correspondence school." Jon Stewart provided additional information on her career. She has also claimed to be a Dentist and a real estate agent. One has to wonder how many careers she can fail in.


• "Charles Lincoln, who has been assisting Taitz — [he] provided judges with amended complaints in Keyes et al v. Obama et al last week and he showed up at the last hearing on the case— has been disbarred in California, as well as Florida and Texas." Since he has been disbarred in so many states, it would appear that he is practicing as a law clerk supervised by Orly Taitz who apparently still maintains a law license in California.
  

Apparently Lou Dobbs has bought the arguments made by Orly Taitz. Why he sticks with the story is unknown. He frames his "reporting" as presenting the conflict, but no one else with any sanity recognizes any valid conflict now, including the President of the CNN Network, Jon Klein. Is Dobbs so hard up for ratings that, like the conservative Republican incumbent politicians, he has to troll for viewers among the crazy right-wing extremists? Or perhaps he got suckered by Taitz and can't find a reasonable way to drop the subject. It is an unanswered puzzle why he is now trashing his own reputation as an on-air pundit to keep bringing the so-called story back up time and again.

In any case, that appears to be the current status of the major elements surrounding the "Birther" movement. That strange movement looks like a clear symptom of the total collapse of the conservative movement and the self-destruction of the national Republican Party. That the "Birther" issue is still making news as all demonstrates the collapse of the news industry and it's wide spread replacement by political advocacy media organs. But that's another story in itself.

Here's what we should be recognizing in the Iranian conflict

We have now seen over a week of spectacular newsworthy items come out of Iran since their election. The conflict is within Iran, but Americans are mostly interested because of America's on-going conflict with Iran. One of many questions is why the conflicts have been occurring at all. Here's what I think it happening.

The Iranian conflict demonstrates very clearly that conflicts between nations are almost always conflicts between the powerful and wealthy elites of those nations, not between the peoples of those nations. Conflicts within nations are similarly largely between the leaders of one group and the leaders of the opposing groups.

The leaders in some cases owe their power to a vocal minority of ideologues who they represent, so they cater to that minority. The leaders generally fear losing their social positions and wealth, so they demagogue the masses and point to powerful "enemies" in other countries or other groups or to powerless minorities to whom the leaders attribute great and sinister power. This conflict permits them to maintain their social position and the wealth that normally accompanies it.

Wealth and power are effectively synonymous. The wealthy generally select those in power, and the powerful individuals can use their position and power to gain wealth. The biggest difference between those two groups is their methods of manipulating society, one group by buying people to do what they want and the other by using the necessary hierarchy of government to enforce rules on others. Both are focused on protecting great wealth, either because they have it or because they have been selected to protect it. Here's how that wealth-protection works to select politicians in a democracy or industrialized nation.

The wealthy, very often people who have inherited their wealth, use money to provide a crucial element of support to politicians who support them and help protect their wealth. They also hire others to establish a philosophy that legitimizes the government. In America that is primarily political conservative ideology or the "Free Market" myth. The conservative ideology here is designed to protect wealth and redistribute it away from the middle and lower classes. That's the reason why repeal of the inheritance tax is such an issue with Republicans and conservatives, as are efforts to lower tax rates on the wealthy and allow them to avoid regulation or even disclosure. In Iran a militant and mutant form of Shiite Islam performs much the same function. The main purposes of the ideology are to motivate individuals to achieve the goals of protecting wealth and power and to differentiate between those group members are belong to one group or nation or another and thus are superior to their assigned opponents.

as an example, the Republican Party leaders are largely those who have the favor of wealthy donors, if they aren't wealthy themselves. We can see that from Norm Coleman's investigation for bribery in Minnesota and from the existence of "wingnut welfare" which protects the political careers of favored politicians when they are out of office. Over a long period of time, every politician hits rough patches, and that's when the money can really help. Those politicians who do not have wealth of their own or wealthy backers are forced out of political careers sooner or later because of the inherent uncertainty of such careers.

Internationally conflicts in the last century (at least) _ have all been based on the effects of international trade, primarily oil. These conflicts are primarily of interest to the wealthy in the various nations, particularly since the most reliable and lucrative businesses tend to be those where someone causes the government to give them customers. Government power gives the wealthy members of a powerful oligarchy the ability to redirect trade and profits to themselves. In the Middle East this has led to their oligarchs allying themselves to international oil companies and repressing their respective peoples to support their own incomes and local power.

The real key, though, is that the international conflicts come from the local powerful elites who disagree sharply with the powerful elites of other nations, and then demagogue their people to fight other national groups. We invaded Iraq because Saddam was unwilling to submit to the oil companies - and yet those oil companies (competing with each other and protecting their prior investments) kept him in power by giving him the money that belonged to Iraq. Here in the U.S. we have recently watched the way the Oil Companies and Business interests - through the Bush administration - demagogued Americans into an unnecessary war. (And much of our mass media, as usual, was very much involved in the demagoguery. It's the owners that do that, not the reporters. In fact, the editors have to cater to the owners to keep their careers.)

Powerful religious leaders are even more dependent on wealthy donors. To keep their positions, they also have to cater to protecting the wealth of the wealthy families. As an example, the American evangelicals in the American South in the early 1800's were largely anti-slavery. But the wealthy planters supported those Preachers who supported their wealth and taught that God, through the Bible said that African slaves were not fully human. That religious attitude lasted in the Southern Baptist Church until they finally apologized for teaching that the Bible supported slavery in the 1990's. Organized western religion is ideologically-based (they call it doctrine) and any Preacher who can argue that the Bible supports what the wealthy want the masses to believe will get a church, good donations and a long career as a Preacher. Every hierarchy is subject to such manipulation by the wealthy simply because wealth creates lives and careers.

The result of all this is that the wealthy families maintain their wealth by getting their nominees into positions of power, and those nominees owe their positions largely to those wealthy families. So together they make up the dominant groups of power brokers. To maintain that power, they create enemies, real or make believe, and demagogue the masses to fight them. It's best if the leaders can egg those enemies into attacking the nation because that mobilizes the followers to consolidate power in the hands of a few hardliners who can easily convince others that they are the only ones who can defend us all against those enemies. Not all intergroup or international conflicts are manipulated this way, but the tendency is always there.

Once in a while we get to see behind the charade of group dynamics and see the real people on the ground who have been demagogued. That's what we are currently seeing in Iran with the protests. But even that is an internal battle for power between elite groups in Iran.

Why are the Republican leaders so irrational?

What we are watching is a battle between conservative True Believers and social scientists. The True Believers trust great leaders who decide things in secret, then impose their decisions. The believers in the social sciences like us believe that the modern social sciences working openly and publicly, coupled with good historical research of the economy and with government experiments in social engineering is a better way to operate.

Why is government the center of the battle?

I contend that the U.S. Constitution is a blueprint for government by social scientists. One indicator that I am right is the way that the Bush administration has violated the Constitution and side-tracked the Rule of Law that works to enact the provisions of the Constitution.

So we all are asking why the Republican leadership is so clearly irrational and so obviously ignore clear indisputable facts. Let me offer a reason, one I consider likely.

Who are these irrational conservative leaders?

The Republican leaders are deeply committed conservatives. They believe in their very bones that the worldview pushed in conservative propaganda is TRUE.

I think they see the current economic downturn as normal and inevitable. It is a real bad patch for the holders of the conservative worldview because their worldview includes faith that there simply is nothing that can be done to prevent such downturns, and that in fact efforts to stop the economic downturn or even to alleviate its effects will be counterproductive.

Why do the conservatives think they should enforce their views on the rest of us?

The current conservative leaders see themselves as leaders who are right. They know they understand what is really happening better than the rest of us do. It's just that they are unpopular and being relegated to the wilderness. Since they are True Believers and know they are right, they are certain that if they stick to their faith, events will in the end justify them and they will return with more power than ever before. Because they are RIGHT and they know it.

What leads them to believe that this is an effective way of acting?

Traditionally, many Christian Saints achieved their sainthood for such clear unwavering strength of character to hold onto their faith.

It looks to me as though the current Republican leaders consist of both religious and secular strong believers with this view. They live in mostly self-isolated groups of their own kind and reinforce each other. Socially I would guess that the conservative movement resembles movements like that of the Catholic Franciscans or the Jesuits. [Both of those were externally financed, as are the modern conservatives.] [Historical analogies are always very imperfect, but they provide an explanatory narrative not otherwise easily obtained. Use with great care.]

So what's next? How do we react to the conservatives?

I don't think that we can expect rationality and fact-based thinking from the conservative leadership. They are the product of the conservative "mob" and they have to cater to that mob to continue in their leadership positions. That's as true of Limbaugh as it is of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R - OK) or Rep. John Boehner (R - OH).

Those conservative leaders see their role as leaders who hold the banner of their faith high as they trudge through the wilderness. They expect that the (uncontrollable) events will turn around and justify them. Then they will return to national leadership with greatly enhanced reputations for having suffered to expose The Truth. The secular conservative leaders look back to their myth of the way Winston Churchill was rehabilitated by the crisis of WW II. Their supporters want them to do exactly that.

So we have to convince the so-called Independents that they are simply wrong. Then we have to battle back against the True Believers who are trying to impress their views on all the rest of us. We aren't going to reach or convert the True Believers.

The True Believers are waiting for Obama to fail. They are convinced that Obama's failure is inevitable because he is attempting the impossible. They know that government cannot successfully prevent, ward off or shorten a Recession or Depression, and when the current one returns, so will they.

We better have an Army of Economists and researchers figuring out what really is happening. Knowledge, not Great Leaders, is the key to dealing with this. [Of course, Obama will be considered a Great Leader if he can orchestrate the knowledge and appropriate reactions to the current economic crisis.] History of the Great Depression is important. But so is modern economic model-making. Both must be accompanies with real, wide-open scientific discussion which is not hobbled by conservatives who refuse to listen to opposition.

Social Science better come through with some answers that work, or the True Believers will be back to enforce their ideologies on the rest of us.

Why are the conservative Republican leaders acting so irrationally?

They can't act any other way and have their conservative political base keep them in their leadership roles. If they act rationally and try to actually govern instead of trying to use government to impose Conservatism on America, then their base will replace them. And some of them have drunk the Kool Aid and actually believe this stuff. But it comes down to the fact that they simply are not being permitted to act rationally.

They are in the same position as the Republican Party was in the 1930's. And for the same reasons. That's why.

"Obama-hatred" has gotten off the a really fast start. It's caused by the failure of conservatism.

It was pretty clear to anyone who suffered through Bobby Jindal's rebuttal to Obama's speech the other night that Jindal did a horrible job. Even many commenters on FOX panned his efforts. Now, though, the right-wing talk shows who drive and lead the remaining conservative rump of the Republican party are defending him and excoriating any Republican who says Jindal did poorly, according to Digby at Hullabaloo.

Digby does make the point that Jindal was not speaking to the nation, though. His sole purpose for getting on TV in front of the nation was to speak to the conservative activists in the Republican Party who will select the Presidential candidate in 2012. Unfortunately, the Republican Party under conservative domination has become a wild-eyed cult and appears to be doomed to a permanent minority if it continues along this route of placing blind faith in ideology and failing to recognize reality when it slaps them in the face.

They've had a thirty year run of placing the conservative ideology and identity above the good of the nation, and it worked well enough to elect three Presidents and gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time since Eisenhower was elected in 1952. They've convinced themselves that their blind faith in their ideology gave them power, and now that it is being taken back away from them, they think that all they have to do to get the power back is to double and redouble their efforts and profess their blind unwavering faith under all circumstances in conservatism.

Naturally, they can't admit that it was that very conservatism put into practice that has created the current world-wide economic disaster which is now clearly growing worse and sees no indication of turning around. No, instead they are redoubling their support of conservatism once again, depending on it to return them to the power they crave. Admitting that conservatism failed would indicate that they did not have enough faith, and were not "worthy."

The result is a shrinking Republican Party dominated by the whims of unaccountable right-wing conservative talk shows (Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, etc) and similar conservative TV talking heads like Bill O'Reilly.

They see the return of their power as being dependent on the deepening Recession and Obama's failure to deal with it. That leads them to two sets of actions. They are already acting. They will obstruct every effort by Congress and Obama to alleviate the economic problems as much as they can, and they have to demonize Barack Obama.

Steve Benen points out that right-wing polemicist Bill Krystol from the Weekly Standard has published an unusually candid admission of the need to obstruct all efforts to alleviate the problems caused by the Recession. Eric Boehlert writes a good summary showing the effectively instantaneous development of right-wing media hatred of Barack Obama that has developed over the 30 days he has been President. Neither is illogical from the point of view of committed conservative ideologues who are convinced that they can regain power while retaining their group identity if they only display total, unwavering faith in "Conservatism."

It is that unwavering faith and their belief that they can only succeed in imposing it on everyone else if they return to power that is driving the right-wing media to the most extreme lengths.

Like the Great Depression did to similar right-wing economic ideologues in the 30's, they are going to fail. They have been exposed. Supply-side economics has proven to be an utter failure. Tax cuts to give more money to the rich does not create more middle-class jobs, just more mansions and yachts. Deregulated banks cannot be prevented from taking greater and greater risks until they take the entire system down. Unregulated mortgage brokers paid strictly on commission for the largest mortgages will lie and cheat both the customers and the banks supplying the mortgage funds, and the unregulated mortgage banks will sell the dreck the mortgage brokers provide in large bundles to investors who turn a blind eye as long as the money continues to roll in on schedule.

At the same time, other unscrupulous financial managers have been building ponzi schemes and often moving off-shore to facilitate separating the marks from their money. Unregulated food and drug producers are providing poisons instead of food, medicines and medical apparatus. So are unregulated toy manufacturers, especially overseas where they face even less vigilance from governments who want to increase exports and don't care what happens to consumers in other nations. Then retailers like WalMart buy the dreck from the lowest bidder because no one has any control of the poor quality control in production, quality control that was eliminated in an effort to lower costs and compete against better quality producers. Then WalMart markets its stuff to customers who are searching for a bargain because they have not had a real pay raise since 1970. And so on.

Meanwhile, the conservatives, who have made a fetish of obsessing about the glories available in their imaginary heaven created by unregulated markets in which government never interferes, turn a blind eye to the failures of that market as they each present themselves to their supporters as totally faithful believers in conservatism. They are collectively running for power based on their faith in the failed god of conservatism. That will only work as long at the voters will follow the lead of the right-wing extremist spokespersons in radio, TV and in print. The more they fail in the effort, these true-believers will become even more extreme in their efforts.

Thus the clear obstructionism in Congress and the ever-growing hatred of Barack Obama and everything they claim that he stands for.

Evaluating the Reagan era

It's been a while since St. Ronny was elected in 1980 and the conservatives used that opportunity to really begin what they called "the Reagan Revolution." It was revolutionary, and it has had a long run dominating American national politics, but the banking crisis last Fall led Forbes magazine to declare "R.I.P. the Reagan Revolution. The announcement that the Recession started in December 2006 was the final nail in the Reagan Revolution's coffin.

Now it is time to evaluate the effects of the Reagan Revolution. Sam Pizzigati at uture.org/blog-entry/2009010205/final-report-card-reagan-years">Campaign for America's Future has done a good job at doing that.

Go read it at the link.

California suffers the ravages of "no new taxes - small government."

California has two lessons to teach.

California has a constitution that requires a two-thirds vote to pass the budget. Roughly 40% of the legislature consists of conservatives who demand "No New Taxes!" under all circumstances.

The result? California posts 8.4% jobless rate, third highest in U.S.. The state is about to go into bankruptcy, and it is the direct result of the Reagan Revolution and Proposition 13.

Except for the very wealthy, good government provides a better way of life than the pure libertarian Free Market. That's the first lesson out of California.

And the second lesson? The Republican Party is good for nothing except obstructionism. They'd rather fight and obstruct others than work with them. This is true across the nation, but as usual in America, California is leading the way. Conservatives have given America the current Recession, the worst since the Depression - which was also caused by the same Libertarian conservative philosophy. The cause of the economic disaster is just clearest in California. The rest of the U.S. is going to follow California into the economic pit because of the Republican Party.

NRO objects to boycotts of businesses that supported repeal of Prop 8. Tough.

Mark Kleiman responds to NRO's Maggie Gallegher.

Galleger decided to write about the injustice of a boycott against a West Hollywood restaurant because its manager contributed to Proposition 8.

Gee. Who knew that just sending a $100 donation to a homophobic movement might rebound and effect the manager's job? I wonder how much angst Gallegher has for the highly qualified attorneys who applied for jobs at the Republican politicized Department of Justice and were turned down because they were "too liberal?"

"Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy is the true father of the modern Republican Party.

Neal Gabler explains that the true father of the modern Republican Party is Joe McCarthy, not the Libertarian government-hating ideologue Barry Goldwater. McCarthy was not an ideologue. He provided a populist technique for invoking public fears and anxieties to manipulate votes.

Goldwater's ideology never interested very many voters. It was the McCarthyite election tactics of demonizing the opponent that has built today's Republican Party.

Instead of running in a line through the conservatives, Goldwater to Reagan to G. W. Bush, with slight diversions to Nixon and G. H. W. Bush who governed as moderates, the true lineage of the modern Republican Party runs from Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon, to Reagan to George W. Bush with a diversion when Goldwater took control of the party in 1964 and broke the power of the northeastern moderate Republicans who had previously run the party. The McCarthy line also runs through Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, while Sarah Palin is clearly applying to join the tradition.

Bill Buckley strongly supported Joe McCarthy all his life, even writing both a defense of Joe McCarthy as well as a poorly written novelization of McCarthy's activities. Many other conservatives such as Ann Coulter are known to similarly support him. As Gabler says, McCarthy is now found in the core DNA or modern Republicans.

While Reagan and Goldwater are the public faces of modern Republicanism, Joe McCarthy is it's soul.

Go read Gabler's article in the Los Angeles Times if you want to understand modern American politics.

[ h/t to TPM. ]

And in two months the Reich-wing press will be doing - What?

Steve Benen predicts the fate of the right-wing GOP press:

"Kristol and the far-right media will be many things next year, but "cheerful" isn't one of them.

I'm guessing outlets like the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal will pick up where conservatives left off eight years ago, and begin every day with a straightforward maxim: What can we do to undermine Democrats today?

Indeed, the audience for this will probably be enormous. Rich Lowry told the Politico, "People get ginned up when the other side is in power," noting that the National Review's circulation increased to 280,000 during the first two years of the Clinton administration, up from 150,000.

I suspect all of the major conservative media outlets will see a similar trend. There's a sizable group of people out there who are saying, "Tell us why Obama's wrong." These folks need a cable network and print publications to answer the question, and there's a far-right establishment ready to meet the demand. What conservatives will lack in access they'll compensate for in partisan attacks."

Expect the kind of attacks on Obama that they also used on Clinton, only more so. The conservatives will not accept Obama as legitimate and will try to undermine him at every step. It doesn't matter how bad the economy gets or what threats America faces. The conservatives consider their own lack of power to be more important than dealing with those problems.

That's something we can count on.

Krugman sees it coming. Do you?

Paul Krugman is watching the insanity that is the McCain campaign (see McCain Goes After Michelle ..., Secret Service Steps In ..., George Wallace McCain, Just a Typo, They Say, How Low Can He Go, Take #9, Playing with fire, Cause and Effect, Crocodile Tears, and so on. That's just today.) and here is what Krugman sees coming:

The crisis isn’t the only scary thing going on. Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

The next few years are going to be very, very tough.

If the conservatives can't run the county themselves they will do everything they can to make America ungovernable.

Plan on it.

Thomas Frank shows where taxpayer taxes now flow - and they don't benefit of the taxpayers

Thomas Frank takes a short tour of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area to show where government power has moved. Power no longer resides in government buildings.

As you look at the palaces that Frank videos, remember that is our tax money going to build them. Most of the fortunes are not the result of contractors bidding for contracts. They result from contractors hiring lobbyists to bribe and cajole short term government employees to hand out no-bid contracts as they did to Halliburton and KBR. Then once the government employees hand the contracts out they move to jobs with the contractors at multiples of their government salary.

Is it any wonder that the Bush administration White House has presided over the most incompetent federal government since the 1920's?

Gee. Who could have known ....?

Condi's stock phrase could make an excellent title for the history of the idiotic conservative policies of the Bush administration and their almost universally disastrous results.

Why Obama won't push the Bush/conservative catastrophe of Katrina in this election

Digby explains it.

I'm seeing Katrina become the Abu Ghraib of 2008, and there's undeniably a racial component to that. We have a disaster that completely discredits conservative theories of governance, but because it disproportionately affected poor black people in New Orleans, our African-American nominee, who has to play by the Jackie Robinson Rules, would be presumed by a clueless media to be stirring up racial warfare, or "playing the race card," or whatever.
[Highligting added - Editor]

And so what? Go read Digby.

The conservative-created Predator State described

Jay K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State explains why the American economy is currently collapsing.

As I got to know the free-market, supply-side crowd, the hard money, low-tax, Wall Street Journal deregulate-and-privatize team, I came rather to like them. I never thought they were right. Far from it: on matters of economic policy they were in my view mostly nuts. But I did think - and do think - that they held their views in good faith. They were, by and large, willing to argue the merits of their ideas. And they had behind them the authority of a vast academic establishment, ranging from Friedrich von Hayek to Milton Friedman to such contemporaries as Gary Becker and Robert Mundell - all just as nutty in my view. (For those who would be amused by it, my 1990 debate with Friedman on his TV show, "Free to Choose" can be found here. )

The academic economics of the 1970s lined up behind the right-wing politics of the 1980s for a reason. Reaganomics had a logic. Each policy would aim at one problem. Tight money would cure inflation. Low taxes would stimulate saving and work effort. Small government and balanced budgets would 'crowd in' investment; free trade would make us efficient. Corporate executive pay should be tied to the stock market, as this would cure the "agency" problem and make the firm work for its owners; "market discipline" would instill a new competitiveness in the enterprise. Deregulation, above all, would substitute the invisible hand of the "efficient market" for the dead hand of bureaucracy.

This was a modern version of the economics of David Ricardo, of which Keynes wrote long ago:

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely... to do more harm than good, commended it to authority.

It was very interesting to me that some of the first to sense this loss of public purpose were the very conservatives who had swept in with Reagan. The nemeses of my youth, people like Bruce Bartlett, Paul Craig Roberts, the late Jude Wanniski, went over into hard opposition. This was compounded by their opposition to Bush's assaults on civil liberties and the war in Iraq, but at the core they felt that Bush had no conservative convictions. And so, at least as far as broad politics go, we were suddenly on the same side. As I put in on Marketplace on Thursday: "Had I gone crazy? Or had they gone sane?" Either way, there seemed to be a book in it and The Predator State is the result.

Reality soon barged in. Following the steep recession of 1981-82 and the victory of the congressional Democrats that year, economic policy became much more pragmatic. Monetarism was abandoned. Social Security was not privatized. The income tax cuts kicked in, and while they never stimulated saving or work effort, they did increase purchasing power in the usual Keynesian way. Later on, Congress took back quite a lot of the initial Reagan tax giveaways, and enacted a comprehensive tax reform. Reagan's trade policies were quite protectionist- notably on cars and steel -drawing stern protests from libertarians. And after the fiasco of the savings and loans, that industry was re-regulated while many perpetrators of financial fraud went to jail.

Still, though the free-marketeers lost many battles, their propaganda machine remained very strong. And historians have so far largely accepted their story. Global events helped: the fall of communism in Europe reinforced Milton Friedman's argument that capitalism meant freedom (something that many Chileans and Argentines in those years found hard to swallow).

But liberals and Democrats also abetted the triumph of the right. They mostly stopped arguing over theory. "The age of big government is over!" Bill Clinton declared. Liberals accepted the virtue of balanced budgets, of low tax rates, and of deregulation in many spheres, of leaving the fight against inflation solely in the hands of the Federal Reserve. In alliance with big business, Democratic presidents became aggressive advocates of what they called "free trade" - though it was really just the use of diplomacy for political payola. Democrats and liberals won some policy battles and some elections, and they presided over a prosperous moment. But they did it by selling themselves as Reagan-lite, by overselling small social advances, pilot projects and placebos, and by riding the crest of a credit boom that could not be sustained.

The judicial coup of December 2000 that installed Bush and Cheney brought back some of Reagan's men and his most extreme policies - tax cuts for the wealthy, big increases in military spending, aggressive deregulation. But it didn't bring back the ideas. Instead, it became clear that Bush and Cheney had no real ideas, no larger public justification. They cut taxes to enrich their supporters. For the same reason, they outsourced to Blackwater and Halliburton and pursued military pipe dreams like Missile Defense. They were willing to have the government spend like a drunken sailor in 2003/4 to boost the economy before the election. They placed lobbyists in charge of the regulators, representing, in every case, the most extreme anti-regulation perspective. (Not so long ago, Bush's financial regulators showed up at a press conference with a chainsaw.) Under Bush and Cheney, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States, and it does what they want. This is the predator state.

The blurb that accompanies the Barnes & Noble offering says

The real economy is not a free-market economy. It is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The real problems and challenges -- inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis, and the future of the dollar -- are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning, with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets.
[Highlighting added by Editor]

As a student of economics and of accounting, I very much agree with this statement. Government is critical to the effective operation of an economy.

But at the same time, the only semi-reliable measure of value is what is developed in a fair market between an independent and equally powerful buyer and seller. Markets are critical to setting value in the economy, although real markets are quite rare. But markets only record the current value. They do not have any predictive power beyond the best guess of the buyers and sellers. Markets reflect what the buyers and sellers can agree is fair value right now. Plans, economic infrastructure, research in progress, financial and governmental institutions and long term developments are not accounted for in markets except on a historical basis.

Here's more from Jay K. Galbraith:

I have never accepted that the United States fits the mold of a "free market economy." If we ever did, that model collapsed in the Great Depression. What was built in its place was a remarkable mix of public and private. There was, of course, plenty of room for enterprise. But it came in a framework, of a government that was, at its best, competently concerned with research, infrastructure, national security, the workplace and the environment, that provided Social Security and a large share of education, health care and housing. Part of the accidental genius of the system was that the public-private mix in those three areas, especially, created "soft budget constraints" that caused higher education, the medical sector and the mortgage market to grow very large - far larger than they ever could have, under either the free market taken alone or under socialism. While many notorious problems remained (especially our lack of universal health insurance), this enriched the middle class and was an immense source of growth.

The Bush-Cheney years should have taught us that today's right wing understands this very well. They are not interested (if they ever were) in reducing government. On the contrary, they are perfectly willing to expand it. But the goal, in every case, is to expand government in such a way as to benefit, first and foremost, political friends and supporters at the expense, mainly, of the middle class. And while a rich country can survive a fair amount of this, it cannot withstand the complete control of government by predators. For what happens then, is a population crash of the prey. This, as a result of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the systematic deregulation of securities and futures markets, we now confront in the financial crisis and the speculative commodities bubble. And if we do not reclaim and rebuild the capacity of our government to act, with purpose and on a large scale, we will eventually see far worse as the climate crisis unfolds.

Galbraith also explains what is going to be needed to survive the current set of crises that the Bush administration and the conservative movement have created. Suffice to say that it does not involve shrinking government, cutting taxes, or "starving the beast and drowning it in a bathtub." Neither the conservative nostrums nor the strange acquiescence by Clinton and Blue Dog Democrats will help America survive the increasingly disastrous economic problems the Reagan Revolution, conservative movement, and Bush administration have left us to suffer through.

The Predator State looks like it will be a very important book for government, politics and the economy in the near future.

Republicans - the party of the stupid

Paul Krugman gets it right - again.

Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

Krugman's immediate focus is on the idiotic campaign “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now!" which is widely known not to provide results anytime within the next decade and even then is not going to provide any significant lowering of fuel prices.

But as Krugman points out, this is not a new strategy for the Republicans.

Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.

Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade.

What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.

Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy.

The politics of stupidity (meaning refusal to think things through logically) is easier to use on people who depend on authority to do their thinking for them. That is what Dr. Bob Altemayer shows is demonstrated in the research on Authoritarians. John Dean also wrote about it in his book Conservatives Without Conscience.

It's not that Republicans themselves are in fact stupid. It's that they rely on stupid or simplistic arguments to win political elections. There may be an advantage to this if they want a lot of people to perform the same simple act of casting a vote for a Republican candidate. Simplistic arguments cannot be argued with in a simple way. The Sophists knew that 2500 years ago. That led to the modern use of the term "sophistry" to mean "a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone."

Why would intelligent people buy into simplistic arguments? Expressing the simplistic arguments become a badge of membership in the "club" rather than a way of proposing real government actions. The argument becomes a mantra of membership. It works great for getting a majority of the votes and getting elected.

Unfortunately, in a democracy it also commits the candidate to actually implement the simplistically described policy or be rejected for failure to support the "Club" mantra. So what we see in the modern conservative movement is large groups of people who have bought into simplistic statements of proposed government policy which they resist analyzing carefully because if they do, they are likely to be rejected by the group they want to belong too. Instead the conservatives defer to the conservative think tanks which work out plausible but simplistic ideas to use as membership mantras.

That gets the conservative politicians elected, and then instead of thinking through the probably results of the simplistic ideas, they implement them feeling sure they will lead to a conservative paradise. It is only when finally the long term effects of implementing poorly thought out plans leads to disaster that the flaws in the mantras become obvious.

At that time, many who committed themselves to the mantra suffer from Cognitive Dissonance, often resulting in Cognitive Dissonance. Since individuals have a basic need to reduce cognitive dissonance, they will generally either modify their beliefs or reject one of the two conflicting ideas. But modifying their beliefs means leaving "The Club" so conservatives are more likely to reject evidence that their mantra is wrong.

This leads to rejecting the clear facts that show tobacco smoking often leads to cancer or that human use of fossil fuel is leading to Global Warming. Conservatives really, really do not want to leave the group they belong to, so they will be the last to admit that the conservative mantras are wrong.

The bubble of the Presidency or of the Presidential nominee will accentuate this refusal to acknowledge the facts that show a conservative mantra is wrong. Ron Suskind describes the bubble that George Bush lives in as part of the opening of his new book.

Bush is a guy who needs to make things personal — it’s how he’s always organized a complex world — and he felt that he’d developed a bond with Putin. When CIA made its offer, [to bug Putin's hotel room] his response was that you don’t wiretap a friend. Condoleezza Rice said it was “too risky, it might be discovered.” CIA said that if it was, it would probably heighten Putin’s respect for Bush. Bush settled it — it was a gut decision. No dice.

This was an early sign of an extraordinary dilemma, one that would come to define America’s posture in the world: Bush’s powerful confidence in his instinct. It might be called a compensatory strength, making up for other areas of deficit. He’s not particularly reflective, doesn’t think in large strategic terms, and he’s never had much taste for the basic analytical rigors embraced by the modern professional class. What he does is size up people, swiftly — he trusts his eyes, his ears, his touch — and acts. While he has an affinity for stepping inside the shoes of others, his métier is often brutally transactional rather than investigatory or empathetic: he is looking for ways to get someone to do what he wants, and quickly. This headlong, impatient energy fueled his rise, as anyone knows after watching him strong-arm a big-money contributor, parse friend from foe, or toss a script and preach, heart to heart, to supporters in the Republican base. It’s how Bush — like many bullies who’ve risen to great heights — became the president. Once he landed in the Oval Office, however, he discovered that every relationship is altered, corrupted by the gravitational incongruities between the leader of the free world and everyone else. Everything you touch is velvety, deferential, and flattering. To fight this, presidents have been known to search furiously for the real, for the unfiltered, secretly eavesdropping on focus group sessions far from Washington, arranging Oval Office arguments between top aides — a Gerald Ford trick — or ordering policy advisers, as Nixon often did, to tell them something the advisers were sure they didn’t want to hear. These men, even with their overweening confidence, embraced a unique kind of humility, recognizing they were in a bubble and fearing they would make historic mistakes.

Bush, with his distaste for analysis and those who contradict him, didn’t go down those paths, and he seemed unconcerned, unlike other presidents, that isolation would prompt errors in judgment. Instead, he began taking policy advice from old cajoling friends whose relationships predated his ascendancy or from visiting pastors speaking frankly in their everyman voices of faith. A man who trusts only what he can touch placed in a realm where nothing he touches is authentic.

So here we see the interaction of simplistic ideas as serious policy proposals for government which are actually poorly thought out mantras used by conservative as badges of membership in the conservative club, together with the way using those mantras locks the conservative political leaders into having to actually implement those mantras to keep their power. Then finally, when the poorly thought out mantras inevitably fail as government policies, we see why the conservative political leaders face cognitive dissonance and have to choose to ignore the evidence of the failure of those policies if they wish to remain as conservative leaders.

It is a set of negative feedback loops which, after almost eight years of the most actively conservative President every, the failures in foreign policy, domestic policy and the economy are all becoming so obvious that they can no longer be ignored by individuals who are not strongly committed to belonging to the private club of Conservatives.

All of that does not mean that McCain will lose the race for President. But it certainly does lengthen the odds against him, especially as the economy goes deeper into the tank and as the occupation of Iraq becomes more and more difficult to maintain.

Anarcho-Libertarianism - the core idea of the Reagan Coalition and of movement conservatism

First, I consider Anarcho-Libertarianism to be a philosophy that combines the Anarchistic concept that rule by hierarchy is inherently illegitimate with the similar Libertarian concept that no hierarchy is legitimate unless it is established by a formal contract between the leader and his followers. Libertarians generally reject the theory that government is based on an implied contract between the people and government since that means accepting a decision made by others. Implied in Libertarianism is also the Free Market idea that government regulation of private enterprise is inherently illegitimate and inefficient. Both ideas reject compulsory obedience to authority and the right of government to enforce such authority though for slightly different reasons. They agree that government is inherently authoritarian and illegitimate.

This is not a nuanced description of Anarcho-Libertarianism. It extracts core principles, but the result is one that many Anarchists and Libertarians will take issue with. Still, the ideas are at the base of most conservative government and political policies. Those ideas are behind much of the set of philosophies that express movement conservatism, Goldwater conservatism, and the Reagan Revolution. The Bush administration has seen the most consistent application of the ideas that represent movement conservatism and the Reagan Revolution to modern American government. After eight years of this, the Bush administration has also been the most spectacularly failed Presidency in American history, and it is primarily through the effort to apply these ideas and force reality to bend to the ideology.

As the failed Bush administration ends, we can see where teh practitioners of these ideas are going next. Digby describes how the conservative oppositional Republican Party is preparing the political ground for the total Republican obstructionism and ongoing character assassination they will practice against President Obama beginning 12:01 pm January 20, 2009. It’s clear that the conservatives/Republicans cannot govern. But they are brilliantly organized and led to obstruct government. They don’t solve problems, they stop government efforts to identify and solve them. It’s what they do and they do it superbly. These are the ideas that have held the Reagan Coalition together for the last three decades.

The conservatives have built an institution of obstructionism. It is frequently called the right-wing noise machine, or sometimes “the right wing Wurlitzer.” The current project is to create the image of Obama as “a phony, messianic, presumptuous, vapid, anorexic starlet who ruthlessly plays the race card.”

These themes all work together to delegitimize their target, Democratic leader. The process works against the presumed legitimization that winning an election supposed to give to the winner.

The power of democracy is the legitimization that elections give to government by the winner and which allows the winner the presumption that their efforts to identify and solve large social problems. This is the great strength of a democracy. Government leaders who are legitimized by elections are in direct contrast to the older process of government leaders legitimized because of the presumed superiority of their social class.

But it seems unlikely that the practitioners of the politics of delegitimization want to substitute democratic government by a presumed legitimate social class for government by leaders legitimated by popular vote. More likely the Anarcho-Libertarianism of movement conservatives is an expression of the absolute rejection of government and hierarchy that is characteristic of both Anarchism and Libertarianism. It is this world view that motivates the efforts to totally obstruct government functions while making effective use of government almost a total impossibility when they get into control of it.

The philosophy of Anarcho-Libertarianism would explain conservative corruption in government. Since the conservative movement Anarcho-Libertarians do not consider government a legitimate function in the first place (except for the military, and for limited police functions to protect Natural Law Property Rights from burglary and such low-level theft) they consider that each individual has the Natural Right to possess any property they can get control of from any source whatsoever. They see nothing illegitimate or immoral about considering the (illegitimate) government to be nothing more than a giant ATM which their personal success at gaining access (getting government office) allows them to plunder at will.

The shared acceptance of an Anarcho-Libertarian world view would also provide a unifying theme between the major branches of the Reagan coalition. Big business and big banks reject as illegitimate any government regulation in their property-gathering activities, as do Libertarians of all stripes. The social conservatives agree with the free marketers and Libertarian efforts to delegitimize government, but they don’t accept the part that considers hierarchical government itself inherently illegitimate. They want secular government delegitimized because they to replace it with a government legitimized to enforce laws established by God.

This unifying theme of Anarcho-Libertarianism would explain one puzzling apparent inconsistency in conservatism. Why do members of the conservative movement reject government control by government hierarchy yet proudly support the identical authoritarian hierarchy operated within business organizations?

I think the difference is that conservatives consider the authoritarianism in business to be an expression of property rights which are (supposedly) based on individual negotiation as opposed to the kind of authoritarian hierarchy based on the legitimate functions of government. Both free marketers and Libertarians consider property rights to be at the level of an individual Natural Right and transfer of property rights to naturally occur in markets through negotiation.

Another element of movement conservative control of government that is clear in the Bush administration is their ability to ignore the Rule of Law. If movement conservatives consider government and its hierarchy illegitimate, then they also consider the government’s hierarchical function of enforcing laws illegitimate. That's why we see them simply ignoring the Rule of Law. Laws themselves are OK, but an illegitimate government has no Right to enforce them. Enforcement of laws should be conducted only on the basis of formal contracts between individuals. Social conservatives disagree here. Social conservatives simply reject laws based on democracy and popular sovereignty. They are happy to delegitimize secular government. But they want to replace it with a government that enforces laws which are based on the Word of God. [This may be a characteristic of all kinds of religious fundamentalists, regardless of religion.]

If these are the ideas at the core of the Reagan coalition, then why did the Reagan coalition fall apart in the effort to nominate a Presidential candidate in 2008?

It wasn't from lack of agreement on the illegitimacy of most government. It was based on the clear failure of all the candidates to express a theme that could lead to winning the Presidency in 2008 in the face of an economy that is going bad, a current President with unprecedented low approval ratings and the continuing failure to win the highly unpopular war in Iraq. The coalition failed to coalesce around a single Presidential candidate because none of the groups thought the candidates from the others were offering to apply the shared conservative principles in ways they could all agree with.

That collapse in the Republican Presidential Primary is summed up in the often heard claim "Conservatism hasn't failed. There is simply no candidate who is sufficiently conservative to make it work." The old policies of "No new Taxes. Small government. Strong military. Anti-Abortion. Anti government regulation." have each been shown to have failed according to a majority of the voters, and conservative politicians have not been able to field test new policies with similar power to attract voters.

The result is the McCain campaign for President. He goes around expressing all the old conservative polices in a disjointed and highly inconsistent way. The inconsistent presentation is not important to conservatives. Unfortunately McCain cannot find new and powerful messages he can use to rebuild the Reagan coalition. But the Republican Party is still trying to win the Presidency because without it they will suffer a severe setback in organizing when they lose the patronage powers of the White House. Much of the strength of the Bush administration has been based on those patronage power combined with strong enforcement of the conservative ideology.

So we are seeing the first post-Reagan Coalition Republican Presidential candidate, McCain, who has no effective strategy for winning other than painting Obama as "an illegitimate leader, unworthy of the presidency, a fluke, a phony (and a fascist."

So the Republicans expect to lose the Presidency in November. But they have a fall-back position, one that Digby points to. It is the strategy they used effectively against the Democrats beginning January 20, 1993. They are going to mau-mau Obama from day one as an illegitimate President who stole the election.

Who cares if the conservatives cannot organize and operate an effective government. They don't want one anyway, except as a source of political patronage and as a magical ATM machine that takes tax money from average Americans and hands it off to the most wealthy Americans. The conservatives will, once removed from the White House, revert to what they do best - they will obstruct every effort of Democrats to solve national problems and they will do their best to delegitimize Obama as President.

Why not? It worked against Clinton in the 1990's.