Opening yesterday's show, Rachel Maddow devoted a good deal of detailed argument to making the point that the Republican Party is deeply committed to the culture wars, even as it pretends to be all about the economy. Given how this conflicts with the existing conventional wisdom--and how much evidence there is to support it, it's an important argument to make. Here's the first part of her opening segment--before she calls on Michael Steele as her guest to discuss it. But I would take this argument even farther: I would argue that the way Republicans are approaching the economy is itself an extension of the culture wars. First, here's Rachel:
Now consider these facts about how Republicans have approached the economy:
(1) The GOP has abandoned the traditional bipartisan support for unemployment insurance, and now are arguing that unemployed workers are lazy and shiftless--the same sorts of attributions traditionally made toward minorities during times when white workers are near full employment, but not made during times of general recession and high unemployment are now being made about all workers during a time of extraordinarily high unemployment. (For example, in Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, Martin Gilens presented the results of a survey of photo-representations of the unemployed, and found that during recessions and the following periods of high unemployment there were far more white people pictured than otherwise.)
(3) As described in Tuesday's diary, "GOP: Obama won't be crazy enough on cutting spending in SOTU", current GOP attitudes, not only opposing Keyensian spending policies, but also Friedmanite monetary expansion, have roots in late 19th Century culture war politics valorizing the gold standard and treating paper money as a corrupting influence. From Mike Konczal, as quoted in that diary:
Paper money decreases the power of the husband over his wife and the father over his family, loosens the natural leadership that serves as the best protection against "effeminate" manners, and gives us a democracy without nobility.
Which is to say, if you are a person who tends to use a capital N "Natural" to describe your political ideology ("I believe in a Natural Order with a Natural Hierarchy, which I get from my engagement with Natural Rights as observed through Natural Law...."), as many conservatives do, then you are going to be likely to think that the dollar is a Natural Thing too. Like women wearing pants and voting, any attempt to disrupt the Natural Order is going to be dangerous. That the value of a dollar is a social creation, and that if there is excessive demand for money the government should provide extra supply for money, isn't going to be a convincing argument.
There are more examples, of course. But these indicative examples should suffice to show why you shouldn't expect any sort of rational debate on economic matters--thay've all been swallowed up and incorporated into the culture wars.
Note: There's a somewhat interesting pay-off in conclusions from the following, including more on Brad DeLong's desire for a explanation of why a return to pre-New Deal economic folly and ignorance. But it all starts with hard data.
And he shows that this is a relatively recent development:
He does all this hanging his hat on the following brief passage from a Ross Douthat op-ed that shows no other signs of sentient life:
This means that a culture war that's often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class -- pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.
The rest of Douthat's column is his typical blather. But if you focus instead on the fact of state-level divergences in income/voting patterns one thing it immediately brings to mind for me is the terribly perverse/typically hypocritical (take your pick) fact that wealthy states that pay more in taxes than they get back are overwhelmingly blue, while poorer states that pay less in taxes than they get back overwhelmingly red. I wrote about that earlier this year--just after April 15, in fact--in my diary,
"Red-State moochers: States' returns on federal taxes favor those who complain the most", which included the following three charts, showing the strikingly strong pattern through the last three pesidential elections:
In writing about the life and impact of Chalmers Johnson Sunday, Steve Clemons focused considerable attention on the work Johnson did before the Blowback trilogy, work that essentially prepared him for the final stage of his evolution as a thinker, without necessarily being apparent at the time. That work had at least two fundamental aspects to it: first a break with the static view of the US as the all-knowing elder in relationship with Japan--and by extension all the East Asian nations, and second, strong opposition to the incursion of rational choice theory into the study of East Asia, and area studies in general. Both these facets were a reflection of Johnson's empirically-based conception of the "developmental state", about which Wikipedia says:
Developmental state, or hard state, is a term used by international political economy scholars to refer to the phenomenon of state-led macroeconomic planning in East Asia in the late twentieth century. In this model of capitalism (sometimes referred to as state development capitalism), the state has more independent, or autonomous, political power, as well as more control over the economy. A developmental state is characterized by having strong state intervention, as well as extensive regulation and planning. The term has subsequently been used to describe countries outside East Asia which satisfy the criteria of a developmental state. Botswana, for example, has warranted the label since the early 1970s.[1] The developmental state is sometimes contrasted with a predatory state or weak state.[2]
The first person to seriously conceptualize the developmental state was Chalmers Johnson.[3] He wrote in his book "MITI and the Japanese Miracle":
In states that were late to industrialize, the state itself led the industrialization drive, that is, it took on developmental functions. These two differing orientations toward private economic activities, the regulatory orientation and the developmental orientation, produced two different kinds of business-government relationships. The United States is a good example of a state in which the regulatory orientation predominates, whereas Japan is a good example of a state in which the developmental orientation predominates.
A regulatory state governs the economy mainly through regulatory agencies that are empowered to enforce a variety of standards of behavior to protect the public against market failures of various sorts, including monopolistic pricing, predation, and other abuses of market power, and by providing collective goods (such as national defense or public education) that otherwise would be undersupplied by the market. In contrast, a developmental state intervenes more directly in the economy through a variety of means to promote the growth of new industries and to reduce the dislocations caused by shifts in investment and profits from old to new industries. In other words, developmental states can pursue industrial policies, while regulatory states generally can not.
We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Oct 06, 2007. Original HERE.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
In my 2007 diary series, "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", I argued that Republicans were as sophisticated in the realm of political manuevering as Democrats were in reality-based policy analysis, and that Democrats were as clueless in in political manuevering as Republicans were in the reality-based policy world.
A couple of things have popped up recently to make me think this analysis is not only still valid, but that it reveals itself in a new wrinkle: while the Democrats are focusing on the need for massive efforts to clean up the countless messes that conservative governance has made, conservatives are zeroing in on prospects for screwing up stuff on the political process level, "big time," as America's #2 War Criminal would say. While the attempted scuttling of the auto industry bailout is an obvious example, a few more recent examples are what made me think of this, such as:
#1: At Calitics, Robert in Monterey focuses attention on a multi-pronged ploy surfacing in the WSJ, in "Prop 8 Supporters Launch Attack on Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws". Conservatives are always about blocking transparency, and Robert's got some sharp things to say about how this is being rolled out and where it could lead.
#2: Also at Calitics, dday's pre-Christmas Diary, "Budget Hell - Grassroots Reinforcements" has an update that mentions "three issues: 'rollback of environmental review for construction projects, greater use of private investment and contractors, and deeper spending cuts.'"
For some time now, I've been writing about the Gramscian concept of "hegemony" and a "war of position"/"culture war" to control the cultural institutions that in turn shape our "common sense" understanding of things. It's my contention that for the 30-40 years, extreme cultural conservatives have been waging a one-sided culture war of precisely this sort-a culture war to control cultural institutions. And in response, moderates, liberals, even progrerssives have basically been asleep at the switch. I've also argued that while all the extreme conservatives' plans have produced impressive institutional successes, the realworld results have been utterly disasterous, which puts us on the cusp of a potentially historic realigning election.
A large part of my disappointment with Barack Obama stems from his unwillingness to confront the conservative establishment. But it's more than that: Obama is genuinely hostile to the notion of others engaging in such confrontation. He insists that the problem is partisanship per se-on both sides. This simply is not so. Logically, of course, it could be so, if the left had been fighting the same sort of well-coordinated culture war that the right is figthing. But historically, this simply did not happen.
Comes now the British newspaper, The Telegraph to provide dramatic truth that the culture war has been one-sided-and to remind us of why Obama dares not tell the truth about this. The Telegraph has produced a list of "the 50 most influential political pundits" who "help drive the national conversation and shape public opinion."
It is not a perfect list, by any means. Any number of influential people have been left off the list, while some who are on it seem rather over-rated, even from the perspective of simply having influence for whatever reason. Still, it seems generally accurate in terms of the distribution of influence across the political spectrum, and in that regard, it is quite telling. Here is the list, without the accompanying explanations:
1. Karl Rove
2. Chris Matthews
3. Sean Hannity
4. Rush Limbaugh
5. John Harris And Jim Vandehei
6. Matt Drudge
7. Tim Russert
8. Jon Stewart
9. David Brooks
10. Mark Halperin
11. Stephen Colbert
12. Bill O'Reilly
13. Keith Olbermann
14. Chuck Todd
15. Bill Maher
16. Glenn Beck
17. Andrew Sullivan
18. Frank Luntz
19. Donna Brazile
20. Joe Klein
21. David Gergen
22. Dick Morris
23. Mike Allen
24. Laura Ingraham
25. Michael Savage
26. Arianna Huffington
27. Pat Buchanan
28. James Carville
29. Ron Fournier
30. Peggy Noonan
31. Juan Williams
32. William Kristol
33. Roland Martin
34. Howard Kurtz
35. Joe Trippi
36. Newt Gingrich
37. Eugene Robinson
38. Michael Barone
39. Dee Dee Myers
40. Tony Snow
41. Mark Shields
42. Bill Bennett
43. Paul Begala
44. Jeffrey Toobin
45. Fred Barnes
46. Mark Levin
47. JC Watts
48. Paul Krugman
49. Mary Matalin
50. Rachel Maddow
It's worth noting that three of the top four voices from the left side of the spectrum are comedians. The fourth is a career sports commentator, whose show includes a fair amount of what can only be called "cultural fluff." Then again, perhaps that's all to the good, since the only other entries from the Democratic side of things in the top 20 are Donna Brazile and Joe Klein, taking up the last two slots. This is indicative of how thoroughly liberal and progressive voices are excluded from positions of media influence.
One reason the 2008 election is vitally important can be summed up in two words: Global warming. Another reason can also be summed up in two words: Supreme Court. I hope to write about global warming as well this weekend, but this diary is about Supreme Court.
Both, however, have the same underlying theme: while winning the 2008 is vitally important, it is necessary, but not sufficient. Indeed, neither global warming nor the Supreme Court should be the real focus of our attention, as they are but the most prominent outer manifestations of larger systemic struggles.
What is really needed is a much more sweeping and fundamental reshaping of our collective thinking--and that can only come about through a reshaping of our public institutions.
I now want to turn my attention to global warming, by way of revisitng a recent, diary from Joe Brewer, of the Rockridge Institute, Why We Are Losing the Global Warming Battle. In it, Joe argues:
Right now, things don't look very promising. It isn't just that we've reached the tipping point, as James Hansen suggests. (warning - large PDF file) It isn't just that the first-ever climate bill is about to arrive DOA on the Senate floor--maybe not such a bad thing since Lieberman-Warner is built on the wrong ideas. The real problem is in the way we think about the problem and, therefore, the solutions.
There are two problems with "the way we think"-the actual lack of a well-developed framework of ideas, and the lack of an institutional framework for propagating the ideas we do have. These are, ever and always, the two sides of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described as a "culture war" or "war of position"-a struggle to control the institutions that shape our culture, including not just the ideas we think, but the ideas we can think. In this case, I would argue that the later-the institutional framework- is much more of a problem than the framework ideas itself is.
For example, Joe goes on to say:
Consider this sampling of Big Ideas conservatives have pushed into public discourse:
* Nature is a resource to be exploited.
* Wealth is measured simply by money.
* The economy and environment are distinct and inevitably in conflict with one another.
* Polluting is a right, so companies should be compensated for the cost of clean-up.
* Markets are natural and naturally good.
* Government is distinct from markets and intrudes upon them.
These ideas are at the heart of the climate debate.
It is not hard to think of ideas counter to those. What is hard is to envision powerful organizations engaged in systematically refuting them with a vigour equal to that of conservatives pushing them.
One reason the 2008 election is vitally important can be summed up in two words: Global warming. Another reason can also be summed up in two words: Supreme Court. I hope to write about global warming as well this weekend, but this diary is about Supreme Court.
Both, however, have the same underlying theme: while winning the 2008 is vitally important, it is necessary, but not sufficient. Indeed, neither global warming nor the Supreme Court should be the real focus of our attention, as they are but the most prominent outer manifestations of larger systemic struggles.
What is really needed is a much more sweeping and fundamental reshaping of our collective thinking--and that can only come about through a reshaping of our public institutions.
A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jack Balkin wrote a very significant post on his Balkinization blog, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement-- An Exercise in Living Constitutionalism, which revolves around a couple of very significant points: (1) despite the rhetoric of "original intent" as revolt against the liberal approach of the "living constitution," what the conservatives were doing was creating their own version of the living constitution. (2) What's involved in doing this is very much an example of a Gramcian "culture war" or "war of position," (though Balkin doesn't call it that) which I have discussed on various previous occassions. This involves graning control of cultural institutions-either by takeover of existing instutions or creation of new ones-which in turn results in systematic and interlocking redefinitions of funamental assumptions. It means, quite simply, a struggle to redefine what is thinkable.
Teles's book is important in many respects; indeed, it is likely to become the standard history of the rise of legal conservatism. For me what is interesting is the light it sheds on how living constitutionalism actually works, in this case, living constitutionalism from the right.
That may sound strange given the familiar associations between conservatism and originalism, but in fact conservative legal thought is a major contributor to the living constitutionalism of the present generation. Originalism and a call for a return to origins was one of the tropes that conservatives, like many other social and political movements before them, used to persuade people to reform constitutional law.
Even in his time, the civil rights movement he championed did not cut perfectly along either partisan or ideological lines. Much of the Democratic party was still segregationist in the early 1960's, especially in the South, while many Republicans and conservative-minded independents strongly supported calls for integration and equal rights.
Except that this is entirely misleading. The Republicans who supported King were the liberal, Rockefeller Republicans, they of the "Party of Lincoln" who saw their party taken over by the "Party of Jefferson Davis" in 1964. The Democrats who opposed him are Republicans now, in fact they virtually own the Republican Party. And as for the independents who supported King-how does The Times pretend to know anything about their politics?
The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher.
(A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.
(B) Grmsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.
(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.
With this in mind, the NYT McCain story can be viewed as particularly involving:
(1) The expression of conservative identity politics, a binary worldview that involves the valorization of all things "conservative" and the demonization of "liberals" specifically, and anything generally that stands opposed to, or outside of self-defined "conservatism." I've written about this previously, back in 2006 in diaries at MyDD here, here, here, here and here.
(2) The narrative of "personal virtue" as the foundational concern of politics, which is a core conservative belief dating back at least to Hesiod's Works and Days, and heavily inscribed into the DNA of the Western Worlds in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. This narrative is strongly connected to cognitive developmental levels two and three in Robert Kegan's schema, which I've previously described here and here, for example.
(3) The rightwing war on fact-based (i.e. "liberal) journalism as a specific facet of their overall attack on modernity, empiricism, reason and critical thought. The NY Times, as the nation's leading daily newspaper has long been a prime target in this war, and has long been significantly compromised by their successes.
For a more detailed description of how this perspective affects our understanding of the NYT-McCain story and its repurcussions, join me on the flip....
Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.
As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out. Discussion begins on the flip.
Note: This is not a candidate diary. It is a critical article--one that engages in critical analysis. It uses a key narrative of the Obama campaign as a jumping-off point, but that is merely a point of departure for illuminating what none of the campaigns are really facing up to. I have not endorsed anyone. None seem to grasp what is really going on here. Obama simply provides the most promising opening to begin the discussion. He misunderstands it--or at least appears to--in the most deep and fundamental way.
It's the grand premise of the Obama campaign that he can bring us together, slay the dragon of partisan divisiveness and end the culture wars which he lays at the feet of the Baby Boom generation. It's a nice, appealing narrative, in a way, it all turns on the question of what you mean by "culture war." The commonsense meaning of "culture war" over the past few decades is a war over social mores between hierarchical "traditional values" and the post-1950s emergence of egalitarian values, especially with respect to race and gender, more closely aligned with the traditional values at the core of our Constitution.
But there's a deeper meaning, which is clearly understood by rightwing culture warriors, and virtually unknown to everyone else. This meaning comes, ironically, from a leading Marxist theorist, the highly independent Italian leader, Antonio Gramsci, who described culture war as a struggle for ideological control of the broad range of institutions in society. And in this deeper sense, Obama's analysis is completely upside-down--the problem is not that both sides are equally to blame, but that only the right is actually fighting a coordinated culture war as Gramsci defined it. It's not a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight, it's a case of brining a plastic yogurt spoon to a nuclear war.
Gramsci was grappling with the question of why Marxist predictions had not come to pass, why the rise of working class power had not lead to a communist revolution, or even the dominance of socialist political parties. The reason, he believed, was that workers aspired to become their class enemy--they wanted to join the bourgeoisie, not destroy it, and the reason for that was the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, expressed through a whole range of political institutions.
Gramsci's argument is based on an analysis that can clearly be transposed onto other forms of ideological struggle, such as the one that grips America today. Whether or not Gramsci was entirely right in his specific analysis (not being a communist, I obviously think he wasn't), he clearly was onto something, and America's post-1960s New Right has followed his prescription quite faithfully, even if they did not cite him specifically until Rush Limbaugh did so in the 1990s. By engaging in a Gramscian culture war, the right has positioned itself to define the terms of the "culture war" as commonly understood. While there may be hopes of diminishing, if not ending the "culture war" in the latter sense it is not clear how this is possible, except temporarily, without countering the rightwing's Gramscian culture war. And countering that culture war is not possible without first grasping the full nature and extent of it.
This diary represents a small beginning, a thumbnail sketch overview of what that would entail. I intend to follow it up with some diaries that look at how the right has moved in on various different cultural institutions-possible examples include think tanks, the media, K-12 and higher education, churches, state governments, the courts and civil society institutions such as the Boy Scouts. I have one about the intrusion of "homeland security" on academia that's ready to go. I plan to do one or two others this weekend or next. Two other forms of follow-up are planned-first, more scrutiny of Barack Obama in light of this analysis and his failure to grasp what's going on, and second, a step back to discuss what the two sides are all about. Broadly conceived, I will characterize them as hierarchy, authority and coercion on the right, versus equality, autonomy, and voluntary cooperation on the left. These encompass a wide range of specific forms and culture expressions on both sides that have their differences with one another, but that all express similar fundamentals.
Somehow or another a growing number of readers and commentators here at Open Left have gotten it into their heads that I'm in the game of supporting/endorsing candidates. Let me assure you unequivocally that this is not true.
After having seen Lyndon Johnson crush Barry Goldwater when I was a teenager, on the heels of passing the Civil Rights Act, then go on to pass the Voting Rights, and Medicare, but then pursue the Vietnam War like a man possessed-well, let me just say that it pretty much cured me of any latent tendencies I might have had to regard potential presidential figures as saviors.
What I am about is issues, values, ideology, strategic critical analysis, and trying to save our country, and our species from destruction. (The planet will do just fine, even if it does take 10-20,000 years to recover. That's an eye-blink in planetary time.)
I feel sort of silly having to say this. But I feel even sillier realizing I should have said it much sooner. I thought it was perfectly obvious that when I said "X," I meant "X." But, of course, I was the one who would go on and on about content and context and framing, but when people would misunderstand me, I treated like it was their problem. Well, of course, in one sense I was certainly right.
But I also say that "when one person fucks up, it can arguably be their fault, when a million people fuck up, it's definitely the system's fault." The "system" here is the presidential primary process, and although the Obama supporters have been the most obnoxious exemplars, long preceding my drift toward writing more about him, they are hardly unique. So I'm going to say this once, and hope (naively, blindly, stupidly, whatever) that it's enough, and link back to it when it's not:
I am not supporting any candidate!
But I am writing critically about Obama, far more than any other candidate, and I explain why on the flip.
In my series "The Political Duality of Rep And Dem" I developed the argument that Democrats and Republicans act similarly in different realms. In the policy realm, Republicans cling to antiquated notions in defiance of reality, while Democrats do the same in the realm of political struggle, scrupulously playing by rules that the GOP flaunts with giddy abandon.
Track Two:
Today, Glenn Greenwald wrote a diary, "The false Beltway script never changes", in which he looked back at some typical examples of Versailles Press warning the Democrats about anti-war extremism dooming their chances in the 2006, and noting how the exact same narratives were being floated today, even though they had been utterly refuted by the 2006 midterm elections.
Converge:
In the comments, I responded to Glenn by noting how the Versailles Press followed the same pattern as the Democrats. They were controlled by the social conventions of Versailles, and those conventions have absolutely nothing to do with reality-based news reporting. In itself, this is not a particularly new insight, but the framing of it is. On the flip I reprint my comment, and then expand on it.
In this diary, I want to begin the the analysis of why and how liberals are constrained in their political actions in a manner directly parallel to how conservatives are constrained in their policy analysis.
I'm going to do so by taking yet another pass at a historical review of how we got here. What can I say? I'm a historical junkie. It's my mission to help counteract cultural and historical amnesia, America's national disease.
First I'll present a materialist run-though of the major forces involved and that will set up the point of entry for talking about how big lie fantasy conservatism made the scene, and how difficult it has been for liberals and democrats to adjust to it.
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