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Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington
Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.
I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.
How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.
But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.
Bad Apples All Around
So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors' glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists' mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.
Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a "culture of corruption," a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology -- an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.
Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. "The White House belongs to you," its dust jacket told us. "So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a citizen of the United States." For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.
The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can't bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.
We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protégé and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the "bad apple" thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was "greed gone wild," asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He "went native," say others. Above all, he was "sui generis," a one-of-a-kind con man, "engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of."
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff's in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.
Misgovernment by Ideology
But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don't get the message.
It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story's worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities -- priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.
Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people -- Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years -- have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.
Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.
And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort -- a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.
The Wrecking Crew in Full Swing
One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us: the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his "health and safety" supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which "sees that [banks] are safe places for people to keep their money"; the dime gets paid in tax on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant, who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is "quarantined for ninety days" when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further explanation.
Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find, is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service, about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about profit -- about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.
Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen's taxes, and it leaves the U.S. Treasury in a payment to a company that has been hired to do work on the nation's ports. Back in 1945, the government would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn't know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker's salary, who incorporates it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers when their tire pressure is low.
So the trade association gives the dime to a Washington consultant who specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge after challenge to the studies that the agency is using in the tire-pressure matter. It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.
But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.
Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper's, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his website. He lives, of course, in Washington D.C. and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008).
From the book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank, Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Frank. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
66 Comments so far
Show AllI have shown Dems & Repubs from my home state (Iowa) along with other elected leaders throughout our Honorable government how VA officials have stolen/misspent/abused the system to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by Congress allowing changes to the system of "awards". One way is Retention allowances, 1998 the VA spent 68 thousand to "keep" some employee/s from leaving,BUT they had to show a Bona Fide job offer, Congress changed the criteria and removed the "BONA FIDE" job offer, the last figure I recieved was for 2005 and it was 42 MILLION to keep employees from leaving, in other words the Administrators of the VA jumped all over the NOT NEEDING to show another entity was going to hire them. Another waste is, remember Y2K problem, to solve that the government blanketed "ALL" computer people with extra special salary rates, 8 years later these employees are STILL receiving this extra money,WHY? There is alot of "hidden" money needlessly being given to governmental employees that is being wasted because of no oversite by our elected leaders. I believe it's into the Billions that ya'all have no idea about, and if you don't how it's titled, you can't even get this information. When I send a suggestion to look into these practices, well guess what, it has to go for revue in front of the VERY SAME employees who are getting (stealing) this money. I'm still trying but I'm only one voice.
canuckchuck - your right about the role of corporations. But plese don't forget, anyone can participate in buying the shares of a corporation should they choose to do so - including you.
As to the neocons - well let me educate the masses. They began to drift toward the republican party sometime in the late 60s early 70s when the dem party become soft on communism and the war in southeast asia. Yes, they were the remnants of the anti-communist wing of the dem party, men who would have felt more at home with Truman and Kennedy. After the 1968 and '72 elections they came aboard the rep party en-masse, and much to our discredit we let them in and gave them a warm welcome. The neocons proved to be staunch anti communists and pro intervention - almost internationalists in the Wilsonian vein. They could care less about small government, low taxes, social issues, regulation and shrinking government - the old conservative issues that great men such as Cal Coolidge trumpeted. Most interestingly, they sought to confront communism and later radical islam with a zeal that was un-natural to the America First crowd within our party. Soon acedemics such as francis fukeyama and opinion makers such as charles krauthammer and Bill Kristal were singing the virtues of intervention and american hegemony. I must say, the America First crowd, men like Charles Limberg, who kept the US out of the Second World War, are a dying breed. The old guard, men such as george Will and Pat Buchanan to name two are a dying breed. Our party is not as divided as you might think - rather the stamp of neoconservatism has solidified itself - the few men who remain in dissent are old and increasingly voiceless. The media has given us the moniker "paleo conservatives" which should demonstrate to you the contempt they have for us. Thats what I know and thats what i have read and that is what I have experienced. When GWB ran office he promised his base a return to a leaner military, a reduced military and a smaller footprint for america oversees, he failed to deliver on that pledge and becasue of that I have parted ways with him - and to an extent the rep party. I do not believe Mccain is any better - nor do I think there is a presidential candidate realisticly advocating this position. The last candiate who talked the talk and would have walked the walk was Pat Buchanan.
The FIRST and ONLY priority of a Corporation is to MAXIMIZE the profits of its shareholders....period.
Welcome to the Corporate States Of America...God hlep us all.
Thomas More: Send me an email at my handle at gmail dot com. I have some stuff I'd like to send you that you may find interesting.
wilmoor August 6th, 2008 1:59 pm
Thanks.
"Even with all that, I've seen that great divide between the parties as I mentioned above, and would love to learn how it came about."
My opinion is Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Karl Rove. It was intentional, thats for sure. The plan was Pearle, Wolfawitz and others, but the politics was this bunch of....what did George say? Evil Doers? Yep, that was it!
Thomas More
I totally agree with you that most republicans and conservatives aren't evil like those we're now dealing with. And knowing many of them personally, I can attest to the fact that 2/3 of the ones I know hated everything about the first four years of Bush, and several changed parties (to Independent).
I had even tried to convince some of them to vote Kerry just to get Bush out, and then they could work to get a decent conservative in later. Don't know that any of them did though.
Even with all that, I've seen that great divide between the parties as I mentioned above, and would love to learn how it came about.
ezeflyer @ 2:42 pm.
Very interesting reference, EZ, and I think it's the simplist, most economical explanation for the current state of the US.
wilmoor August 6th, 2008 10:00 am
Kivals and I have agreed that Bush/Cheney are the worst bunch we have ever had. They have betrayed just about everybody. They came with an agenda of meglomaniacs and used 9/11 to implement it.
Would you guys (and ladies)consider the possibility that the vitriolic divide between liberals and conservatives was manufactured by them to their benefit?
It wasn't this way before they got there, no where near as confrontational. That they demonized liberals to push their agenda.
I don't believe for a minute that many conservatives and Republicans are evil or even agree with the neocons. They simply have a different take on the way we should proceed. (I'm sure we can show them the error of their ways)
I'm suggesting that perhaps we should be looking for ways to get them to help us and to possibly get back to governing rather than spitting on each other.
They aren't geniuses and they're not "laughing their asses off all the way to the bank." They're very focused ideologues, with Abramoff as their poster boy, committed to overthrowing any semblance of democratic government by plundering it from within and disabling every facet of its social function. Thomas Frank is showing us how they've managed to do this. Mostly thru a concerted propaganda campaign that's gone on for decades with little resistance from the liberal left, until very recently and mainly in blogs like this one. The Dems have gone along with the far right's war on democracy probably because they've suspected there was something in it for them as well.
That's why it's been so hard to tell the difference between the parties. They've both been enabling the current fascist takeover of the government and the economy, and the people, clueless as usual, have become more and more powerless. Duh. The way we're going, those of us here can look forward to continuing this discussion in one of Blackwater's domestic prisons for political dissenters.
The conservatives hate government, and so took over the government to destroy it. From our perspective, they've become like some huge beast, and we sit here wondering how to destroy that beast. My thought - we must go to the belly of the beast to destroy it.
Siouxrose
Thank you for responding to my post. It's funny, that I've spent many years studying people and determining their zodiac sign by their characteristics and actions, yet in regard to politics, the thought never occured to me. I'm afraid my knowledge of astrology goes only as far as Linda Goodman's "Sun Signs" of the '70s, but I found your post very fascinating, and it makes perfect sense. The only possibility I've come up with in answer to the great divide between conservatives and liberals was the possibility of one being an alien race. (Maybe that idea isn't so far-fetched, come to think of it. The conservatives certainly are hell-bent on the total destruction of the earth.)
Thomas More,
I would agree that the Bush/Cheney gang of neocons and other miscreants is a more virulent strain of criminals than any this nation has endured before.
No surprises here. American voters got exactly what they wanted, and are poised to continue it. They have already proven too ignorant to initiate any meaningful change.
America is a fraud.
Hoa binh
hey prof
not enough vegetarians in this world - as butchers (there are no doubt a few) or anything else. bad analogy. a better one would be carnivorous cooks at a vegetarian banquet.
Having conservatives in government is like having vegetarians as your butchers. Conservatives philosophically don't believe in government and prove their point with their criminality as rulers. Unfortunately, Americans get the government they deserve.
Look. It is the current administration, all their crony hypocritical, pious BS'rs and the conservative right wing lying sickos who have corrupted the stupid flock into believing that Satan is alive and well. Anyone that doesn't understand that the Republicans sold out democracy to the ideology of demagogues while they robbed the store is ignorant, naive, dumb, and so forth.
The stupidity is odious and disgusting.
RE: "Blaming authoritarianism on Christianity makes as much sense as blaming terrorist suicide bombings on Islam or the totalitarian attrocities of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot on Marxism"
What I think Kane Jeeves meant was not on the philosophy of Chrisianity, but on the Christian 'religion', a completey separate capitalisic enterprise. Chrstianity (Islam, Buddahism, Judaism, etc) doesn't kill people. Indoctrinated adherents to perversions of the true ideology do.
I'll come back to post more on this exellent article & thread, but before I forget I will throw ths stat I heard today (with a small interpretation).
The uber-wealthy (and I'm not talking about the now poor 'shmoe' who only leaves his heirs a quarter or half million) will inherit $27 TRILLION in their will settlements.
This would amount to about every natural-born American citizen receiving about $100,000. We aren't just talking about insurance payments here, but land, businesses, cash, and other items. Are there two Americas? Definitely! One for the miniscule few of 'them', the other for the almost 300 million of the 'us'.Income disparity is a tough nut to crack, but for our survival as a national American culture we must challenge it in order to flourish.
greenerthanthou August 5th, 2008 3:04 pm
And you were doing beautifully up to here! Public employees should be finger printed. Nothing to do with guilt.
kivals August 5th, 2008 4:55 pm
True. But would you agree that this bunch of neocons has hijacked our government? Even many conservatives hate this bunch.
An epitath for the Bush administration:
'He told us that big government doesn't work. So we hired him... and he proved it to us'
If you don't believe in the good government can do, you are fundamentally ill-equipped to run it anyway but badly.
All governments have a left and right aspect.
The Left aspect deals with the citizens' needs: health, welfare, unemployment, retraining, etc.
The Right aspect of government deals with incarceration, the military, big business welfare and give-aways, manufactured culture wars and so on.
Thus a radical right government would direct most of the budget toward the above Right aspect of the state.
However, a government of the Right follows a deeper agenda: how to make its citizens work more hours for less money.
In order to pursue this goal, the Rightwing government must paralyze the critical thinking abilities of the average citizen with war, fear, racism, genderism and economic ponzi schemes/bubbles.
Can add much since I believe this is a non-problem and so there is no solution. What I WOULD like to add is that the article seems to defer to conservatives as the crux of all the problems. But what about the liberals? Pelosi? Reed? That mandated democratic new Congress? Conservative/Liberal? At least in the politically accepted framework these are essentially one and the same. Black and white labels are, more often than not, used for personal expedience, and foster fundamentalist viewpoints. And so, the question arises as it has throughout history: what can WE do? Well, WE can support people who claim they want to change things- like Obama has. And yet, every time the same thing happens. As the candidate ascends, he morphs into just another clone of those he/she opposes. Could be that Obama is being too responsive to his twit campaign staff (just like Kerry and Gore were). Or, it could be that he espoused views that he never genuinely believed in. Either way, we're seeing the same ol' story: what should have been a no-brainer for Gore and moreso for Kerry, became a dead heat situation. Perhaps the best thing is if McCain gets elected. Then we can continue our slide into oblivion in a more honest and clear manner. Were Obama to be elected, that might just fuel false hopes and allow us to believe that things are getting better. While it will mean the death and destruction of many millions of people and the death of much of our planet, perhaps it is best to let the disease run its course- in the hopes that the hosts will die and that the earth can begin to breathe again. Sorry for having nothing constructive to say here. And so, let me say the only constructive thing that I know: Love- love everyone and everything- not for how they behave, but because love is food for the universe, the earth and the soul. Hate cruel and selfish behavior, and demand accountability for it. But don't hate the purveyor of it. And act in accordance with your nature. If you feel it your nature to meditate and send out good energy, follow it. But, like some of 'us', if you feel it is your nature to be mad as hell and devise ways to fight those who want to crush the poor and suffering, then fight. If you fail in your quest, know that you succeeded in that you were true to your nature and your desire to love. To all of you...much love :)
this is a good article full of intriguing ideas about the state of the state
plus it was interesting to read - good writing
this piece adds to the ideas of the shock doctrine as well in reflecting the full court press that confronts us all
to me, the neocons (and many conservatives) are simply out of their minds, madmen in many instances
insulated from the rest of us by the huge amounts of money as noted in the article
as it is with global warming, there seems to be a critical mass of awareness around many of the issues affecting our lives and the prospects for the planet
bushco have revved up the reality check and they have done so in an "in your face" kind of way, emboldened as they are by a public all too willing to be subservient - not to the government - but to business
let's all remember how happy the public was with the "war" in iraq as it unfolded. the public is frustrated with the ongoing situation but was more than willing to get this "war" started
alas we now know how ugly the whole escapade was - from lying us into it to mismanaging the peace after the occupation began
shock doctrine tells us and this article confirms this mad state of nihilism that seems so attractive to these bald overweight ugly white guys who seem to make up the bulk of this group is the objective of the exercise, not some kind of screw up of an otherwise solid policy
let's not forget l paul bremmer who was for a time the grand poobah of the occupation - what hole did he crawl out of - the conservative underworld as described in this article - where has he gone - back into the fold - the job well done
or bush himself- awarded the presidency by the right wing supreme court
how about the much vaunted idiot ronald reagan
he fell asleep at cabinet meetings and was senile while in office
have you noticed that the head of the sec always comes from the cia - and always returns when the term is up
chalmers johnson has described the cia as the president's private army
they are the biggest terrorist organization in the world
the biggest drug smugglers
if the dow wasn't mostly supported by laundered drug money it would have crashed 30 years ago
when the taliban was in power in afghanistan they shut down the poppy crops by 97% - this reduction in heroin (and subsequent drug money) took the dow from ten thousand basis points to seven thousand
now that the us guards the heroin drug kings and the heroin crops are at an all time we see the dow has regained those basis points
ouch!
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
DaveEriqat: "Maybe the problem is government itself"
KaneJeeves: "Old Testament Christianity"
jlocke123: "the lack of independent media and most of all a working opposition"
billjv: "the influence of secret societies, the fraternal system, the good ole boy networks"
kvals: "an outmoded and inefficient model... gamed and warped"
Grousefeather: "capitalism!"
Siouxrose: "The authoritarian mindset"
Poet: "This country's sexist, racist, blood-lust for war ethic"
GKL: "Milton Freidman's ideas of marketplace economy"
david.peace2002: "the US has gotten too big"
kahalab: "it's the sociopaths and psychopaths"
Well, let's frame the problem in a way that makes it extremely obvious what the people can do about it: The problem in the USA is the people continue submitting to oppression by elites.
This article, poignant as it is, says nothing of the role of the media in 1) acting the puppet to those in power and 2) filling up the negative space with mindless television such that we, as a people, do not see the problem and/or are so caught up in irrelevant social dramas that we don't care about what truly matters. I think it would be naive to suggest that this is not all to some degree a deliberate manipulation. In the past I believe actions such as these would have sparked outrage throughout the country. Now we sit complacent, waiting for a savior. How do we fix the situation? Are we so brainwashed as to believe that we as individuals are too insignificant to make a change? Should we continue to fall for that old adage of "power corrupts" so that all good people avoid it and all those who are corrupt effortlessly rise to the top? It is right to point out faults, it is better to suggest solutions, and it is best to stand up and do it yourself. So where can we start?
WILMOOR: My apologies to any who find me redundant, but I believe the Zodiac arrangement of PLANNED human archetypes, 12 to be exact, corelates with Jesus specifically choosing that number of disciples, also the number of tribes allegedly founded by Abraham.
Among these 12 is a persona that is much like the dour god that holds the hourglass, Cronus (Chronos). Richard Nixon was that embodiment, and it can lean towards paranoia. To offset fear, that energy seeks to control everything and everyone around it. Hence this personality type does very well with rules and tends to be conservative. Not every Capricorn manifests these traits, but it does represent the template for that sign.
So the Saturn-Chronos persona acts as that personality that will hold onto traditions at all costs, and it's leveraged against its antithesis Uranus (which rules Aquarius) and is the Zodiac's rule breaker. Reagan was Aquarius by sign, but acted far more like a Capricorn, although he WAS open to astrology, something that many Aquarians recognize constitutes a meta-logic system. Jupiter is the principle that can be easily linked to the New Testament and very concepts of faith, and positive thinking... particularly when it bears prosperous results.
These are 3 chief outer planets, each mandated to project specific energies which on some level link with our own birth blueprints, or inner coding. Women are clocked to the moon, the menstrual cycle is usually 29 days as is the lunar cycle. We age in relation to the earth's orbit around the sun. Anyone can argue that these forces have no bearing on them, but in my view that's like arguing against gravity. How much free will we have versus how much our lives are predestined is something that can only be debated.
I think of fate and free will as polar forces that give rise to a 3rd element by virtue of the ongoing dance represented between them. This reminds me of the way Jesus spoke of the Holy spirit or trinity. Some might call that tertiary force change, chance, mutation or grace; but just as mutation occurs in evolution, and permutation in math, not every variable can be consigned to fate OR free will. There is the mystery, and that's why even in this forum when all the data (so often so mortifyingly negative) is before us, we must realize that there is always that THIRD force. (Hmm... not a bad name for a sci-fi novel.)
GUS: I do not agree that Bush/Cheney are geniuses. If you don't give a rat's ass about another human being, a pesky thing like morals get in the way of that abject climb to the top of the rubble. There was a wish list of sorts among Republican/conservatives, and when they HAD the congress, the press, and the Supreme Court, all it took was claiming the election. Then they were free to institute through all those "brilliant" (loyal sycophants) lawyers a trumped up version of a unitary executive "theory," (= king) along with torture being called OTHER and by many loyal followers, taken as thus. In other words, like a Broadway Stage play, the SET was ready, all it took was two calamitously callous players to implement a plot long devised and being orchestrated by LOTS of monied players.
Bu$h the inferior and Shotgun Dick are stupid in that they have assembled the worst administration ever. They will be infamous and hated by most of the world for the rest of their lives. Chaney is said to be paranoid about security. He fears being attacked, good, he deserves it, he has worked hard to be this evil. Throughout the rest of recorded history these guys will be remembered as scum if they are remembered at all.
These are extraordinarily rich people who could have done anything they pleased. They chose to do this!
Now that is stupid and incompetent, but not in a way these guys understand.
It's not the corporations, it's the sociopaths and psychopaths that own the corporations and the governments of the world. They would push the world back to feudalism if they could making all of us serfs without any rights and themselves kings and queens with absolute power.
talk talk talk - where are the thugs hanging from every tree and lamp post. talk talk talk as you die as you are intended to by the thugs for their profit
For over fifteen years I've studied the people of the two political parties, noted such a difference in everything about them. There's the conservatives, all dressed in clothes that fit just right, and always hang perfectly, never rumpling, regardless of how long the day is. Their hair always in place, looking like they just got out of the hair dresser's chair, and they never smile or look flustered.
Then the democrats - just the opposite. Suits (except those of the long-timers) look rumpled, stick up behind the shoulders, or just don't fit: hair every-which-way; looking frazzled at day's end, and subject to goofey grins. Of course the suits could be a sign of no back bone.
And then there's a whole lot who aren't like either of these groups.
I recently re-read the books SARUM and LONDON by Edward Rutherfurd, and I swore I could see conservatives and liberals in the earliest citizens in England. I'm wondering if the Roman league brought the conservatism.
I've wished I could do a real study on conservatism and liberalism. Since I'm too old and half blind, it's beyond me. But I sure would like to see someone do it.
And I don't believe all the education or reasoning would change anyone in either party, unless they weren't really of that persuasion to begin with.
Grousefeather August 5th, 2008 3:21 pm wrote:
YES, to free enterprize!
NO, to capitalism!
------
This sounds interesting. Does this system where free (non-military?) enterprise is rewarded by government have a name?
when does the hanging start?
When do we start loading our guns?\and when do the poor and middle class
realize the smokescreen of moral positioning has set the stage for massive robbery of our treasury and our childrens future
THE COMMON GOOD---sounds like liberation theology to me, and what about the revolution of 76,,,1776 all for naught???? WAKE UP ---The British are coming, and came and went, and took the true revolution with them and left the corporations that Hamilton and Jefferson warned us about
Could part of the problem be that the US has gotten too big? We have military bases all over the world and in every community here. Yet for some reason, that government that We, the People, elect time after time, keeps telling us that we aren't safe. We are told by us, the government, that various substances are harmful and yet we, the People, through those same elected representatives that we send back every time, even when we know they're corrupt, give the corporations that produce these substances money to continue producing them. We know that the world has some very serious problems and we know how to solve them. But we won't, because, come November, we will send the same lunatics back to lap of luxury that is paid, elected office who will pretend to argue and bicker amongst themselves in public and get nothing done, ever. Behind closed doors they must laughing their asses off at the incredible stupidity of the American people because we simple refuse to learn. Gullibility can only be used as an excuse for so long until it must be obvious that we can't be gullible, we must, instead, be rather dumb. Why else can't we seem to get real change, improvement, in our daily lives despite supposedly having the freest society on the planet? So the solution may be that we have become too big. Does that mean that instead of one big, dumb society it would be better to have a lot of small dumb societies? I think so, at least it would be easier for the smarter societies, governments, those that actually respond to the will of their people to successfully rattle our cage and smack some sense into us.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
That's what we need. Smaller groups.
kivals (4:55 pm ) - No argument from me on that! ;)
Conservatism and Libertarianism has latched on to Milton Freidman's ideas of marketplace economy. If the sole mission of corporations is to earn profits for shareholders, then conscience and fair play are meaningless. Corruption and bribery becomes a value in itself. Money becomes God. Bush/Cheney are products of corporate ethics.
Milton Freidman is dead. We don't have to listen to him anymore.
There seems to be quite a flux of powerful ideologies and controlling interests each seeking their own bottom lines in an intricate worldwide web of transactions that no one really understands.
We do know though that the tragedy of the commons is being repeated on larger and larger scales even though this result is not even in the long term interests of many of the same primary actors and current benefactors on the world stage.
How can we isolate and deter the forces that profit from the overall degradation of our space ship home?
The Home of the Brave
the eagle empire is on the skids
the eagle evil empire is up for bids
the war payola plundering puppets know no bounds
like back room banker predator power pomp driven hounds
with chutzpah to the power of ten
are moving up the dooms day clock again
with a little help from faithful big (Bear bankie) Ben
Sure they may throw us some bones as we loose our homes
while they buy summer Mc mansions with some shady loans
oh the chutzpah oh the chutzpah of this corporate banker brass
who wipe their ass with us servile ants
while the land of milk and honey becomes
the land bilk and baloney
the warrior whipped wussy class
have mortgaged the nation to the hilt
and are tilting windmills like a Vanderbuilt
while the levers on the levers won't be able to check
the long drawn out impending financial wreck
but heck
we soon may be able to breath a sigh of relief
while the eagle empire looses it's teeth
scottstlouis wrote:
"I've argued for a few years that Bush has been quite sucessful at accomplishing everything he & Cheney set out to accomplish."
Absolutely correct. Anyone calling these guys dumbasses are a dumbass themselves. Bush, Cheney, and their puppeteers are laughing their asses off. Look what they've accomplished:
1. Engineered a tax cut that redirected $1.3 TRILLION to the upper 2% of income earners in the US. In one stroke, they wipe out lower- and middle-class Democrat consitutuencies.
2. Disrupted oil markets that put TRILLIONS more $$ in the pocket of their oil buddy contributors and the Saudis.
3. Sold off our government to the highest bidders, leading to a dismantling of regulatory protections such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Bush and Cheney are geniuses, and will escape untouched. The American people and their "representatives" are the ignorant fools in this equation.
Dave makes it sound as though the government is some magical entity from another dimension. "It" is us. We are It. The government is made up of American citizens of all walks of life, who get their hands on money and power and go wack-o. It doesn't take much. If Bush were to impose martial law, it wouldn't be the "government," that entity from Mars, pointing its guns at us, it would be...our sons and brothers and fathers and husbands, good American citizens, aiming at us.
If there is corruption at the highest levels, it also exists at the lowest. And nothing will change until we recognize that and do the hard work to change it.
RichM,
When the US government is acting in many other countries, particularly weak and vulnerable countries, it appears to be accountable to no one. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and when there is no accountability, there is a form of absolute power. The US government becomes just another gang of armed thugs when it is accountable to no one, and we can see the results.
greenerthanthou said: And don't forget the widespread practice of fingerprinting, background checks and urine drug tests just to get a job in the "land of the free".
They're proposing to do this now in our local school district, even though we don't have major problems with drugs (alcohol, on the other hand, is an issue). One supporter even mentioned that the kids should get used to it because many jobs require random drug testing, anyway.
Government has virtually always been a tool of American Empire---from its proud policies of Native extermination onward. As if capitalism weren't bad enough---the proven enemy of human community everywhere. The BushCo years were a deliberate attempt to undo the last New Deal parts of it, to make government so intolerably stupid, incompetent and corrupt that people (they hoped) would start crying for the simplicities of a dictator. There seems to be no limit to the criminal charges that should be filed against Bush/Cheney and the rest of them. And why isn't Karl Rove in jail? Ask Barf Spritzer or CNN!
My answer to most of Dave Eriquat's questions (1:59 pm) would be not "government" per se, but rather the US government in particular. And of course, to a lesser extent (& considering only the developed countries), governments that are closest to the US government ideologically -- most notably the British, Australian & Israeli governments. The Scandinavian governments, by contrast, aren't guilty of remotely the same degree of violence, crimes against humanity, tasering citizens, jailing & spying on citizens, creating financial bubbles, etc. Canada, Switzerland & Holland are also nowhere near the US, in terms of overall government viciousness.
Sure, sure, one can say that it's easier for a government to be a well-behaved global citizen if it doesn't have that much power. Denmark (for example) couldn't really push other countries around too ferociously, even if it wanted to. And no one claims that the Danish model of governance is flawless. // On the other hand, it's very hard to miss the basic pattern: the more a country seeks to dominate either the whole world, like the US, or its region (like Israel), the worse its behavior. And the more closely a country ties its fortunes to serving the leading global predator (like the UK or Australia), the worse its behavior.
Kane Jeeves sez:
"Excellent article, but doesn't take the last step. As John Dean has shown us, Conservatism is at its root all about authoritariansim and domination."
*****************
The book Conservatives Without Conscience" makes no such claims for all conservatives or conservatism--It does document the corrupting influence that coming to power in
Washington has had on a particular strain of conservatives--we'll call them the Bushies for short.
Kane Jeeves continues:
"What institution does *that* mindset spring from? Come on, it's that elephant of all elephants in the room…Old Testament Christianity. Until we address the root of the problem conservatism will continue to rear its ugly head."
***********************
Blaming authoritarianism on Christianity makes as much sense as blaming terrorist suicide bombings on Islam or the totalitarian attrocities of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot on Marxism. There are authoritarian, totalitarian, corrupt, domineering bullies of every stripe --including Liberal (LBJ, Jim Wright, Tony Coehelo, Richard Daley to name just a few).
*****************
My own take on this book excerpt is that Frank attempts to show that Conservatism by its nature is as inimcal to any kind of ethical or good governance as pornography is to sexual restraint.
This actually raises the even more intriguing question of why the American people would continue to elect people to govern them who despise the very idea of public service and worship at the altar of self-enrichment. (This was the original question posed in Frank's "What's the Matter
With Kansas?")
For Liberal-Progressives this next step is fraught with the painful realization that the main reason the country would elect an amiable dunce like Ronald Reagan whose mantra was "Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem" was that the excesses of Liberal/progressives in the Congress, Senate, and the White House for the previous 40 years made such nonsense plausible and believable.
That is a place we progressives are not willing to go because we have not had that many new ideas on governance since LBJ's Great Society which was dismantled by the Vietnam war. This country's sexist, racist, blood-lust for war ethic has made such ideas as are prominent in Scandanavian countries and Venezuela practically impossible to introduce in the US at this time.
I'm a firm believer in free enterprise, but not capitalism. Free enterprise exists when everybody who works hard has an equal chance for business success, and success and enterprise is promoted and rewarded by government. Capitalism, is when the free enterprize system is subverted through the accumulation of vast amounts of capital and competition is eventually snuffed out. Capitalism is a system with one basic rule: the big fish eat the little fish. However, Democracy is a system of government which was invented to keep the big fish out of the pond.
YES, to free enterprize!
NO, to capitalism!
DaveEriqat,
I think people have tried living with no government in charge before, including in Afghanistan and various places in Africa in the last few decades. It appears that without governments people inevitably come to be ruled by armed gangs of thugs.
Democratic government is designed to give the majority of people control over the society, authorizing one armed gang (the government), with the people's assent, power to inflict violence. The people not only are, theoretically, in charge of enforcing the rules, but are also in charge of making them, presumably for the common good. Though any society develops an elite and any set of rules at least to some extent serves the elites of a society, many rules in a democratic system are actually intended to, and do, serve the common good.
No implementation of a democratic system is ideal, and the US governmental system, as an early experiment in democratic government, is a bit of a dinosaur, an outmoded and inefficient model. And after decades of domination by elite business interests, it has been gamed and warped to the point it bears little resemblance to what was intended. However, almost any implementation would likely beat the alternative of rule by competing armed gangs that leads to a Hobbesian world where life is "... nasty, brutish, and short."
Eliminating government does not appear to be a very good answer. Doing what is necessary to ensure that a government serves the public and the common good to a greater extent than before makes much more sense.
And don't forget the widespread practice of fingerprinting, background checks and urine drug tests just to get a job in the "land of the free". (Always said without a trace of irony).
Will the practice of treating each person as a potential criminal, guilty until proven innocent, be stopped?
I agree with scottslouis. This "incompetence" meme, pushed by the "left", just as the "bad apple" meme is pushed by the corporate media, is wrong.
They aren't incompetent. They've taken over the government and used it to loot the US treasury, turn over America's natural riches to the greedy and dominate the world militarily. And to turn New Orleans richer and whiter. The difference with the Bush junta is that they dispensed with all pretense of democracy or forms of avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest.
DaveE is right. The looting may be more hidden under a Obama regime, but the oppression will continue. Will the Patriot Act, the Military commissions Act, the passport requirement to travel, the Real ID Act be repealed? Do you hear any corporate candidate even mentioning these very real oppressive Acts?
We need government for the same reason that we need toilets. So nobody will shit in our living rooms. We know with some certainty that sombody will in fact crap in our living room given the slightest opportunity.
One thing not mentioned in this article is the influence of secret societies, the fraternal system, and the good ole boy networks, which serve to feed this beast with individuals who are completely sworn in and sold out to this ideology. This is the ultimate insider's club. Nepotism, family histories, and positioning for favor with the richest people in the world all play a huge part in this.
One other aspect that is touched upon but not expounded on is Religion. While the vast majority of these people put up fronts of being "Good Christians" they do not actually believe any of it - they realize it's a way to excuse anything they might do, while also holding (as mentioned above in another comment) an authoritarian hammer on the populace. I remember so clearly when Tom DeLay was sentenced in court - he made some comment as to how "The Lord had forgiven him and he was re-dedicating his life to Christ". I'm sorry, but that has to be the biggest crock of shit to ever hit the air. The saddest part is that other good people who have been duped into the Christian/Right-wing mindset sincerely believe him. Funny how Christ must be selective - it didn't help that death row woman from Texas when Bush was Governor there.
Fortunately, Dave, I didn't answer most of your questions with the simplism "government", and haven't for quite some time. I've met enough righteous anarchists in my lifetime to make me puke all the way from California to Kennebunkport, and find them no less dogmatic then most of the communists or libertarians, or for that matter, party line democrats they spend most of their time arguing with.
You may well be the exception to the rule, and if so, that's all good. But I believe the litany of problems you cited are complex, and will require much more of you, I, and all of our peoples then will be found in any frozen set of ideas. If we could abolish the state in a country as racist and classist as this one is tomorrow, we'd spend decades just trying to keep the white supremists and property junkies from ruling the roost, which would require some sort of armed defense, which, whether anarchists like to admit it or not, is a form of the state.
So can we sober up here?
Change in the Conservative Personality Equals Change in the Offender with a Resultant Reduction in Recidivism
by Michael D. Parsons and Jennifer G. Parsons
Abstract
Offenders have many of the characteristics of the conservative personality as defined by Adorno, Collins, Wilson, and Boshier. The characteristics of the conservative personality limit change necessary for rehabilitation. Until that personality is modified, it is very difficult to reduce recidivism. Modification of the conservative personality through education and environment can lead to change in the offender's behavior.
Is it possible to reduce violence by the criminal offender during incarceration? This paper presents the basis for a model which deals with certain offenders through an educational effort to modify some of their negative characteristics which include violence. The model in this paper is based on the concept of a conservative/authoritarian personality as it is found in offenders. The concept of the authoritarian personality remains important today as evidenced by coverage in current introductory psychology textbooks (Crooks & Stein, 1991; Dworetzky, 1991; Gleitman, 1991). "It appears that conservatism has pathological dimensions manifested in violence and distorted psycho-sexual development" (Boshier, 1983, p. 159). This is supported by a study conducted by Walker, Rowe, and Quincey (1993) in which there was a direct correlation between authoritarianism and sexually aggressive behavior. An investigation done by Muehlenhard (1988) revealed that rape justification and aggression toward subordinate individuals was much higher in traditional (conservative personality) than non-traditional personalities. It is postulated in this paper that the offender has a conservative personality and, therefore, manifests that violence.
http://www.doc.state.ok.us/offenders/ocjrc/95/950725C.HTM
ZeroPointField: "However, there is a flip side to every coin. In this case it is the politicians who abuse their power over the government, and make it serve only their vested interest"
We get this everywhere, not just the US. The difference I think is that in functioning democracies, the government wrongdoing is often brought to the attention of the opposition and the media. Decent civil servants have self-respect and don't like criminality any more than you or I. Appreciate them before their jobs are all outsourced to Halliburton. Where it falls down in the US is the lack of independent media and most of all a working opposition.
Normally the press should be eager for stories of colossal government illegality, not so in America. The lack of a healthy opposition is essential as well. Why doesn't the new york times ask the Greens what they think about what the Government is doing. I'm sure they have something to say.
The systems of Laws and Regulations is NOT the problem.
They were created to keep most of the crooks out. But it seems to serves only those who are borderline crooks.
Some of the folks in the penetentiaries are real threats to society. Governement does keep some criminals in place. And by government, we should also mean the thousands of people who are simply doing the job the government was created for - keep on helping the people.
However, there is a flip side to every coin. In this case it is the politicians who abuse their power over the government, and make it serve only their vested interest.
KaneJeeves
This article is an excerpt from a Book. It is only the first step with about 400 more to go. And you are adding the last step?
Good posts.
KANE JEEVES: Glad you mentioned that point. Christ really did bring liberating teachings, that your neighbor is an extension of yourself, and it MATTERS how you treat others. But the war-loving Romans had no interest in changing the way they did business or ran an empire, so they continued all the OLD ways and just added Jesus' name as endorsement.
Because so many take religion on the basis of "faith," the subtext of the arguments allegedly attributable to 'god' are seldom analyzed. When the church (it WAS throughout Europe the Church-state for enough centuries to do a thorough job of programming people to see THAT arrangement as all that was possible, THE supposed singular prototype of "shared reality") pushes for a model that is by its own nature hierarchical, creating divisions on the basis of gender, nationality, religious beliefs, etc it sets up the ultimate rationale FOR war. And any religion that furthers the ends of war, blasphems its own intended purpose.
The authoritarian mindset does well with systems of uniformity, rules for everyone. These presume one size fits all and are anathema to a diverse society or any notion of democracy. This is why to authoritarians like Harriet Miers, the president "deserves" to be the unitary executive. They are souls in search of a strict father, an American fuhrer to rein in their own potentials to trespass against a stern law & order society. And God help anyone who strays from THEIR view of what those laws and order should be!
as the republic must be taxed to pay for the expansion of the empire, which secures the wealth of the ruling class, we might thank conservatism for so arrogantly tipping its hand.
As a follow-up to my earlier comment, here's more food for thought.
* Who is responsible for most of the violence in the world?
* Who is committing the most heinous acts of inhumanity?
* Who is stealing your wealth through monetary inflation with greater efficiency and stealth than any bank robber?
* Who is forcibly indoctrinating your children with beliefs you may not agree with?
* Who is depriving people of desperately needed pain relief while forcibly injecting schoolchildren with pharmaceutical drugs?
* Who is imprisoning citizens by the millions for victimless "crimes"?
* Who is tasering citizens for sadistic pleasure, strip searching them, spying on their communications, and confiscating their laptop computers?
* Who is imposing burdensome – no, crushing – regulations on our small businesses, the very engines of our economy?
* Who encouraged and fueled the housing bubble which is now deflating so spectacularly?
* Who is spraying our skies with chemtrails and won't tell us what these substances are or why they are being sprayed?
If "government" is your answer to every single one of the questions above then maybe the question "progressive" web sites such as this should be asking is, "Do we really need government?" (By the way, other governments around the world are guilty of these offenses as well.)
And another thing. I hear so many people talking about Obama as some sort of savior. Does anybody seriously believe he'll be one iota different from the current decider? That government or politics will improve in the slightest? That our nation's policies will improve? Please! We fell for that ruse in the 2006 election when Democrats swept the House, the Senate, state governorships and legislatures. Did anything change? At all?
Is Obama going to rescind the Patriot Act, dismantle the DHS, terminate the government's surveillance of us? No, these things will endure and new, odious ones, such as mandatory health insurance, will be added to the fray.
Dave
I've argued for a few years that Bush has been quite sucessful at accomplishing everything he & Cheney set out to accomplish.
Government is the problem only because the U.S. Congress is the stooge for corporate capitalists
The Fortune 500 Corporations only employ ten percent of working class America, is this not the tail waging the dog?
U.S. Citizens need to awaken to the massive injustices of corporate capitalism and the lies contained within The Official State Religion of America, the idolatry of capitalism, worshiping individual material success over all human rights and obliterating all human values.
Rise up America, you have been duped for too long.
DaveEriqat: "Maybe the problem is government itself"
"government itself"? As opposed to what, the jungle? Governments around the world work fine. Democratic governments work great. There is always some corruption but it is kept in check, except in Italy and America, to name two outliers.
I agree with the article in so much as government didn't fail in the US, it was demolished purposefully. The departments were privatized, downsized and outsourced. Taxes were diverted to no-bid wasteful kickback schemes. Legislation was outsourced to K street. The army was outsourced to Blackwater. Voting was outsourced to Diebold. Debates were outsourced to the Commission on Presidential Debates.
If you take a gander at any of the working democratic models around the world, you will find some experimentation along the same lines but not to the same degree. What you have in America is a bunch of ideologues trying to prove that government doesn't work. They have only succeeded in proving that they are unworthy of their posts.
Excellent article, but doesn't take the last step. As John Dean has shown us, Conservatism is at its root all about authoritariansim and domination. What institution does *that* mindset spring from? Come on, it's that elephant of all elephants in the room...Old Testament Christianity. Until we address the root of the problem conservatism will continue to rear its ugly head.
or hoards of locust, which are the believers
Now we know why God sends the flood.
Maybe the problem is government itself. It seems all governments eventually become bloated, corrupt and tyrannical. I don't think ours is so "special" that it can avoid the same fate.
Why do we need government at all? Ask yourself not what government does for you, but what it does to you!
Dave