According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It must be noted that the Declaration of Independence is in no sense a law binding upon the citizens of the United States of America. It was passed by the Continental Congress as a declaration of war against King George III of England many years prior to the drafting of the Constitution which established a foundation for our laws and our entire system of government. The Declaration of Independence was also not in any way subject to ratification by the people or legislatures of the original thirteen colonies whose representatives enacted said Declaration. It was, rather, an ordinary law enacted pursuant to an unwritten agreement between the colonies to engage in joint action with respect to this very issue: independence from England. At the time of the passage of the Declaration, war had already broken out, and English armed units were already taking various actions against the American colonies, so the Declaration wasn’t any real news but rather a statement of the obvious. Many of Jefferson’s ideas for the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms found their way into the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration also came more than a year prior to the writing of the Articles of Confederation, a document which was narrowly drafted to allow for the creation of a small central government to jointly handle the war with England and other external affairs for the original colonies. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence cannot even be claimed as an act of the legislative body created by those Articles.

The Constitution of the United States of America was rather deliberately drafted to not establish or privilege any particular set of religious beliefs as being in any way special for the citizens and government of the United States. After a substantial debate, the drafters of the Constitution did not even include language in the Preamble which claimed a descent of rights from any sort of a supreme being. As the individual states were formed by disparate religious groups with widely divergent ideas on matters of religion, it was felt that the best approach was to avoid, as much as possible, any debates over matters of religion in the foundation and operation of our government.

Now, the modern conservative movement is attempting to draft God into their right-wing conservative cause and to claim that the founders of our nation really did intend to establish a Christian theocracy even though the actual historical record can only be interpreted in exactly the opposite fashion. Well, Rush Limbaugh, as the propagandist-in-chief for these budding theocrats, remains a big fat idiot for thinking he can pull the wool over the eyes of American patriots on a matter of this importance! It is for the obvious purpose of regaining political power that the right wing attempts to claim that God is on their side. Mankind should always be wary when any political group makes any claim of that sort. After all, one important Nazi mottos was “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us). Ancient leaders, such as Egypt’s pharaohs, claimed to actually be God incarnate. Modern leaders cannot be that bold, but they can still claim to be God’s favorites and to ask for the votes of the people on that ground alone. This, obviously, has nothing at all to do with which group of politicians will actually do the best for the aid and comfort of the people.

Can anybody honestly believe that there isn’t going to be a good chunk of the $700 billion bailout going to help Paulson’s friends at Goldman Sachs? Even if it is just $7 billion of good taxpayer money going to Goldman Sachs, that is still a pretty good payoff for a $164 million “pre-bribe.” I rather strongly smell a rat, and I’m a long way from Washington DC!

greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

To say that the people who inhabit the real Wall Street ought to know better is to understate the obvious. But when you are playing with Other People’s Money (OPM), you are divorced from the risks, and yet you get to reap a substantial portion of the reward. The ultimate in OPM is, of course, federal bailout dollars. And as I write this short piece, our government is going through the motions of agreeing on just how many more federal bailout dollars will be made available to the rich dealmakers on Wall Street so that they will go back to making deals which seem to drive all that is left of the US economy these days.

Should the federal government be taking taxpayer dollars and putting them down on the table at the new Wall Street Casino? Given the reaction to the proposals of the Bush Administration to privatize the Social Security System, I would expect that the vast bulk of US citizens would vote “NO!” But of course, it is our alleged representatives, who get huge quantities of cash from the greedy inhabitants of the real Wall Street, who will actually vote to approve this ghastly mess. Is there much doubt that Congress will go along with this requested bail-out? Probably not, but one can hold out hope for at least a little while.

The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

In a fine above-the-fold article in USA Today, David Lynch notes that the seeds of the recent meltdown on Wall Street were sewn back in 1999 with the repeal of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

By the time of the 1990s boom, the financial services industry was campaigning to repeal Glass-Steagall, arguing that foreign rivals were hobbled by no similar restraints. In 1999, Congress assented.

“The pressure was so great that Congress really couldn’t resist it,” says economist Peter Bernstein. “Nothing really bad had happened since 1982, and those bad things that did happen were transitory.”

If important financial institutions failed, market participants and lawmakers alike felt that market forces could restore order on their own, with only minimal government aid.

Maybe they were wrong.

It isn’t just that they were wrong. This isn’t a case of bad judgment. This is a case of deliberate theft where these large financial institutions effectively socialized their risks while privatizing their profits, as many commentators have noted, among them Professor Nouriel Roubini in his recent blog post. Roubini is referenced in the Lynch article:

Former White House economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the current financial storm two years ago, has a harsher verdict. He says the USA is turning into “the United Socialist State Republic of America.”

Those may seem like harsh words to use on alleged “conservative” politicians. However, as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, there is actually very little overall difference between communism and fascism, so it isn’t surprising that a fascist Republican Party would act to socialize those business entities they feel they need to preserve in order to continue ruling the nation.

As I said in that previous blog post, written before the current meltdown on Wall Street:

I agree with John Duckitt who “suggests a link between authoritarianism and collectivism, asserting that both are in opposition to individualism. Duckitt writes that both authoritarianism and collectivism submerge individual rights and goals to group goals, expectations and conformities.” Collectivism is today is sometimes taken as a more-generic descriptive term for what was traditionally called Communism. In the old Soviet Union, for example, farm workers were assigned to “collectives” (or “communes,” if you are calling it “communism”) where they were expected to labor together for the group goal of raising agricultural products. During the early years of the Soviet Union, all labor was organized into “communes” or “collectives” of one sort or another, and individual economic initiative was suppressed. While fascism characterizes itself as strongly opposed to Communism, we can see from the Mussolini quote, above, that fascism too embraces the idea of collectivism. The difference between fascist and communist systems in this regard is totally with respect to how the government treats the ownership of business enterprises. In a communist system, private businesses (at least, the largest, wealthiest, and/or most visible businesses) are “nationalized” and placed under direct control of the State. In a fascist system, private business enterprises are maintained under private ownership by the wealthy, but all individuals and businesses are required to subordinate their individual wishes to any superseding commands issued by the State (”authority”). Thus, fascists put business under the direction of the State while communists absorb business ownership into the structure of the State government. In either case, however, the leader of the State has effective control over all individuals and business interests existing or operating within the State.

The US Federal Reserve has been tossing around eye-popping quantities of money without the benefit of much oversight from Congress or anybody else. Back in my July 20 blog post, I had this description of the last major meltdown:

The end result of the above process was the S&L crisis, referred to above. While it ultimately cost taxpayers only about $125 billion (see HERE), that was a large percentage (about 32%) of the $394 billion value of failed S&Ls that were taken over by the government and turned over to the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) for liquidation. That percentage clearly indicates that the money being lent out on bad loans wasn’t anywhere near limited to the risk capital of the institution, but the managers were taking large risks with the federally-guaranteed deposits of ordinary people in order to pad their own bank accounts with commissions and bonuses. What isn’t even tracked in these statistics is the large number of institutions which were sold to or merged into larger institutions because they were about to fall into the category of S&Ls that would be taken over by the RTC. News articles printed at the time the legislation creating the RTC was working its way through Congress indicated that the total size of the S&Ls that needed to be resolved, one way or another, was well over $1 trillion.

Now, its deja vu all over again, but with much bigger numbers than two decades ago. The fed has tossed out $800 billion in loan guarantees just to calm the markets down. Lehman Brothers was allowed to file for bankruptcy (we can wonder why), but the rest of Wall Street has so far been merged into bigger companies who were willing to grow even bigger, thus making themselves “too big to fail” to an even greater degree. For instance, Merrill Lynch runs to the shelter of the Bank of America (who has already taken over Countrywide Financial, one of the chief causes of the subprime mortgage crisis), making the Bank of America another institution which is “too big to fail.” No matter what is wrong on the books of the Bank of America, we can rest assured that the Bank of America doesn’t need to accumulate reserves to cover those potential losses as the Bank of America is clearly “too big to fail.” This is what is meant by “socializing risks and privatizing profits.” So long as the Bank of America can continue to report profits, the shareholders and executives of the Bank of America can continue to draw fat salaries, bonuses, and dividends. But they don’t need “adequate reserves” against hidden or unexpected loan losses since they are now “too big to fail.”

With this in mind, lets look again at what Professor Roubini had to say:

With the nationalisation of Fannie and Freddie, comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke started transforming the US into the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America).

This transformation of the US into a country where there is socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street (ie, where profits are privatised and losses are socialised) continues today with the nationalisation of AIG.

…

This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt-holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).

Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or found to be perverts, these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered Wild West laissez-faire jungle capitalism allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, and have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Notice from the above description by Professor Roubini (a former White House economic advisor) that it is the wealthy private individuals who make out like bandits from these “socialist” actions by the allegedly “conservative” Bush administration. Is this really socialism? Or, instead, is this actually fascism? I believe the latest round in this financial crisis has crossed the line I drew in my previous blog post:

Also, we have to consider the strong entanglement between the Republican Party and “big business.” We are still in the realm where “big business” largely controls the government, not the other way around. So, in that sense at least, we are not yet at the point where we can legitimately claim that the United States has “gone fascist.” But how much change will it take before the same folks from “big business,” placed into positions of power by the Republican Party, then take it upon themselves to begin issuing commands to their old business fiefdoms from their positions of power within the government?

Secretary Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, has now engineered the virtual nationalization of the home mortgage market and a huge chunk of the insurance market. These two finance areas impact on virtually all people (housing and insurance both) and businesses (insurance). A government takeover of those two industries now allows me to say that we have crossed the Rubicon and the US is now clearly under a fascist dictatorship. All we need to complete the revolution will be for John McCain to steal the election from Barack Obama. If that happens, you can rest assured that modern-day brownshirts will be looking after anybody who dares to dissent from the economic fascism we are already living in!

The United States has a very indirect form of kleptocracy. While in office, most politicians will only receive campaign contributions from the thieves who stand to gain from the government. However, once they are retired from political office, they will receive large advance payments for a book or books they intend to write and they will receive additional large payments for speaking at meetings of (largely) thieves and others who have benefitted from the policies followed by the former office holder. But of course, there are many ways around the usual restrictions. The boldest is to simply direct the payoff to a spouse or family member, usually through the grant of a job or participation in a “sweetheart deal” where the outcome is virtually guaranteed. Many current political campaigns have accusations of this sort buried somewhere within them. And this isn’t really new. Just research the television holdings of Lady Bird Johnson and ask yourself if being married to Lyndon Johnson had anything at all to do with her owning those lucrative franchises.

The so-called “Keating Five” scandal gives us another look at how high level politicians can be bought and paid for by high level crooks. Charles Keating used political contributions and the influence they purchased to shield his crooked bank dealings from investigation by federal bank regulators.

So, we can see that the real currency of the kleptocracy in one direction is the political favors that a politician can use to enrich third parties. The return is made to the politician and/or his family in numerous ways, including campaign financing, enrichment of family members, and post-office-holding compensation for the politician through organized exploitation of the fame they gained while in office.

But what is the true value of the political favors which are exchanged for millions of dollars in campaign contributions and other benefits to politicians? The answer isn’t at all clear, but it certainly is an amount which runs into the billions of dollars. Charles Keating contributed just over a million dollars to the Keating Five senators (mostly to Alan Cranston of California), and this amount appears to have bought Keating about two more years of operations before Lincoln Savings was finally shut down. During that two year period, the assets of Lincoln Savings grew by over $1.5 billion, and Keating was able to directly steal roughly $285 million by defrauding Lincoln depositors into accepting junk bonds from his construction company instead of actual certificates of deposit. When Lincoln Savings was finally wound down by the federal government, the losses excluding the junk bonds were roughly $3 billion.

The question which never gets asked is this one: if Charles Keating didn’t end up with any of those billions of dollars (as he claims), then just where did the money actually go? The answer is that it went to land speculators who would “buy low and sell high” regardless of any true market value. This can be called the “greater fool theory” of investment. Sooner or later, the price gets so far above what the market can bear that no “greater fool” can be found to purchase the property in question. Unfortunately, in cases like the Lincoln Savings scandal, it isn’t the buyer who is left holding the bag when the speculative bubble finally bursts. While the lender (in this case, Lincoln Savings) is the initial victim, in a huge organized systemic fraud like Keating ran, the federal insurance fund is the real victim. It paid out roughly $3 billion for losses in the Lincoln Savings case. That $3 billion went somewhere, and the “where” can only be described as “wealthy land speculators.”

And those “wealthy land speculators,” while unidentified in the scandal, and largely unpursued by the federal government for their ill-gotten gains, are the real beneficiaries of the scam, and are very likely to have been Republican co-contributors to the Keating Five senators, along with Keating himself.

So, what we see in microcosm in the Lincoln Savings scandal, most likely proves true for virtually the entire set of scandals and financial melt-downs we’ve seen in the United States since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. It starts with a political mantra by Republicans about how bad government regulation is. It then proceeds into a period of deregulation, which sets up the circumstances whereby crooks can suck vast quantities of wealth out of a federally-backed institution (or at least, an institution which the federal government dare not allow to fail). The actual enriched crooks always seem to be insulated enough from the scene of the crime to avoid both prosecution and disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains. Nonetheless, you can bet they are always riding the circuit of making campaign contributions and giving money to organizations to pay (ex-)politicians for speaking fees so as to gain influence for the front-men who appear to be running the scam for their personal gain.

The Republican kleptocrats did it once with the savings and loan deregulation in the 1980s. And they’ve just finished doing it again with the subprime mortgage crisis of the past decade. The full cost of that crisis is yet to be determined, but the bill is running up fast: $29 billion for Bear Stearns; $85 billion for AIG insurance; and uncounted losses for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and any number of failed and yet-to-fail banking institutions where additional taxpayer dollars will necessarily be used to cover the losses eaten up by crooks. Home loans are the biggest financial transactions most people will ever be involved with. It is logical, then, that home loans have the biggest opportunity for crooked dealing that most people will ever get near. The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

What makes the modern Republicans distinct from the fascists of old is that the fascists of old emphasized street violence to intimidate the body politic into granting them political power while the modern Republican fascists emphasize lies and propaganda in order to gain and retain political power. Another great distinction is that the fascists of old were truly interested in the success of the nation as a whole, while the modern Republican fascists are mostly interested in crookedly enriching the wealthy mob which provides the money to keep the Republican Party viable in American politics.

In his seminal book on conservativism, The Conscience of a Conservative (see the ad to the left), Barry Goldwater defined the essence of conservativism as an adherence to the principle of extremely limited government, particularly at the federal level. And the conservative philosophy, as defined by Goldwater, also contains a very strong streak of libertarianism. Today (2008), the libertarian conservatives, as represented by Bob Barr and Ron Paul, are largely abandoning the modern Republican Party precisely because the modern Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to individual liberty. True conservatives would be aghast at the huge databases of financial and personal information about every American that our government has accumulated as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” When I was part of the Republican movement myself back in the 1970s, personal privacy, particularly financial privacy, was a top concern. While true conservatives are strongly anti-crime, many were also quite upset at what the federal government was doing as part of the War on Drugs to control the health care options available to people. And, in the 1970s and 1980s, I largely agreed with the political and economic views expressed by the extreme conservative right wing as written in publications such as The Spotlight.

Where the Republican Party took a wrong turn is when it abandoned true conservativism and instead married the religious right. This was a pure power play, as true conservativism has never been a popular movement within politics. In fact, the individualism inherent in true conservativism is almost the antithesis of “a movement.” In other words, it is virtually oxymoronic to conceive of a mass political movement made up of truly conservative individuals.

To understand this, we need to first have a baseline for understanding the true philosophy of conservativism. In his book, Goldwater summed up conservative philosophy in five paragraphs (on pages 5 through 7 of the advertised edition linked at the top of this blog post):

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.

The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul — which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have learned much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

Secondly, the Conservative has learned that the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free, or even economically efficient, if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the State.

The Conservative realizes, thirdly, that man’s development, in both its spiritual and material aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings. If the Conservative is less anxious than his Liberal brethren to increase Social Security “benefits,” it is because he is more anxious than his Liberal brethren that people be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit.

So it is that Conservativism, throughout history, has regarded man neither as a potential pawn of other men, nor as a part of a general collectivity in which the sacredness and the separate identity of individual human beings are ignored. Throughout history, true Conservativism has been at war equally with autocrats and with “democratic” Jacobins. The true Conservative was sympathetic with the plight of the hapless peasant under the tyranny of the French monarchy. And he was equally revolted at the attempt to solve that problem by a mob tyranny that paraded under the banner of egalitarianism. The conscience of the Conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being. Today, therefore, he is at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race.

In 2008, the true Conservatives are represented by the likes of Bob Barr and Ron Paul because the modern Republican Party has been taken over by “gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race,” and I call those modern Republican collectivists “moderate fascists.” They have claimed God for the Republican Party, and are demanding that all Americans march to the beat of their particular drum. This is such a total antithesis of what Barry Goldwater stood for that Goldwater viewed himself as an outcast from the Republican Party in the years before his own death.

As the political contest between John McCain and Barack Obama descends into a mudslinging contest of epic proportions, we need to remember one thing: true conservatives don’t have a dog in this fight. Both McCain and Obama are advocating visions of a collectivist America. McCain wants to continue and enhance the fascist collectivism of the Reagan-Bush legacy while Obama wants to continue and enhance the socialist collectivism of the Roosevelt-Kennedy-Johnson legacy. Both parties are now strongly anti-individualism and anti-conservatism as they attempt to enlist people into their respective movements for “change.” One thing is certain: there will be change after the 2008 election. But no matter which party wins, liberty as an ideal is going to lose.

So, as usual, I’m stuck with holding my nose and voting for the lesser of two evils. This time around, it is Obama by a landslide. The Republican Party is so infested with liars and crooks that they deserve to be voted into oblivion. In fact, since Carl Rove (also known as “Bush’s Brain”) started managing the political campaigning of the Republican Party, lies and propaganda have become the vehicle of choice for victory. The lies and propaganda won in 2000 and 2004. It remains to be seen if the people of the United States are so dumb that they will fall for the same old scam once again.

Mussolini was himself a journalist, so he well understood how control over journalism could be used to wield propaganda as a weapon against any opposition. Accordingly, as Mussolini’s power grew within Italy in the 1920s, it became impossible for anyone to become a journalist without a certificate of approval issued by the fascist party. The United States of today is, of course, far larger and much more diverse than was Italy in the 1920s. While no single authority over journalists now exists, there are certainly spigots of control which do still exist. Among those are the great concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few media barons such as Rupert Murdoch and the fact that a single entity, the Associated Press (AP), distributes most news stories to most of the media outlets across the nation. The AP is controlled by its member media outlets, the majority of which are controlled by a small group of “media giants” (corporations which own vast empires of newspapers, radio stations, television stations, and other media outlets). While the level of control has not yet approached the veto power of the fascist party in Italy during the 1920s, there is now (in 2008) enough control to ensure that right-wing biased propaganda has wide distribution while left-wing biased propaganda is largely prevented from reaching most of the public.

And, of course, unlike Mussolini, John McCain himself is not in charge of this media propaganda machine. It isn’t even clear that there is a single individual who exercises effective control over this right-wing instrument of power. But it is blindingly obvious at this point in time that the media is widely engaged in promoting a victory by John McCain in spite of the fact that he ought to be on the losing end of the popular vote, probably by a 2-1 margin.

In some sense you can say that the modern fascists have learned not to concentrate so much power in the hands of one person, who will then most-likely go insane. And the modern fascists seem quite content to remain so far behind the scenes that most people would claim they don’t actually exist. But of course they do exist, and the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections for President of the United States clearly demonstrate their existence. There is just flatly no way that the Alfred E. Newman of Presidents (George W. Bush) could have been twice elected to the oval office without substantial help from the press. And there is no way that John Sidney McCain will be elected the next President of the United States without a strong stream of propaganda from the fascist-controlled media.

The motivations for this are obvious: to protect the wealth and power of the fascists themselves. Under the Republican Party, the wealth and power of the fascist elites are safe. Under the Democratic Party, there is some risk of loss. But only some risk, as most of the Democrats also answer to those same fascist masters given that so many fascists contribute large sums of money to both sides of the aisle in Congress.

The real danger to the fascists is the “people powered” campaign of Barack Obama. Obama owes nothing to the fascist elites, and they will lose both power and wealth if Obama becomes President. So, the fascists have set up a walking corpse, John McCain, as their candidate for President, and an easily manipulated woman governor, Sarah Palin, who is already a committed member of the right-wing fascist movement, to become President should McCain die in office.

All fascist regimes have been extraordinarily bad for the people previously subjugated to them. I have no reason at all to believe things will be different under this group of modern fascists. Accordingly, I’m voting for Obama, come Hell or high water!

I am asked repeatedly to explain why I no longer call myself a Republican even though my self-description of my political stance remains that “I am a Goldwater Republican.” This is all the more poignant today, in September of 2008, now that Goldwater’s successor in office (as Senator from Arizona), John McCain, is running for President of the United States after McCain swung his positions on most issues so far to the right that he would be considered to be acceptable to the neo-fascists who now run the Republican Party. As late as 2000 I still personally liked, respected, and would have voted for John McCain for President. But in view of his now extreme right-wing views, I can no longer stomach the man, and can only wish him less success than Goldwater had in his run to be President (in 1964, Goldwater carried 6 states and won 54 electoral votes).

The real difficulty for me today is that fascist-leaning elements have hijacked the Republican Party of my youth and what is now considered “mainstream Republicanism” is actually a sort of moderate fascism that in my day would have been (and sometimes was) justification for expulsion from, or at least shunning by, the organized Republican Party.

I recall one incident from the 1970s where most affected Republicans agreed, with the blessings of the California Republican Party, to vote for the Democrat instead of John G. Schmitz, who had managed to secure the Republican nomination with far less than a 50% vote among Republicans. Schmitz was known for, among other things, denying the holocaust, a stance which I now view as one possible marker of fascism. The fact that Schmitz is now viewed with honor by so many Orange County Republicans is itself an indicator of rampant fascism in the modern Republican Party.

As I intend this to be an intellectually-valid discussion, and not just “name calling” in order to start a highly-emotional and heated debate over whether or not Republicans are neo-fascists or not, this will require a considerably long discussion which leads up to my actually regretted conclusion: it is true that the modern Republican Party is actually now a moderate fascist party and that is a large part of why I, a Goldwater Republican, am now advocating for the election of most Democrats (but of course, not all; I still have principles). My hope is that sooner or later one of two things will happen. Either Republicans as a group will come to their senses and reject the fascist elements which have taken control of their party, or else enough non-fascist Republicans will leave the party, as I have, eventually consigning the Republican Party to the fate of its predecessor party, the Whigs. The third alternative, which is that the modern fascists continue to expand their power base through their continued use of the Republican Party is just flatly unthinkable to me.

Once upon a time (so you know this is a true story), the two main wings of the Republican Party were the conservative wing, led in 1964 by Barry Goldwater, and the liberal or “progressive” wing, led in 1964 by Nelson Rockefeller. It is rather sickening to me to realize that today neither of these men would be at all comfortable within the modern Republican Party. Rockefeller would be excluded due to his liberalism for certain. But even Goldwater would find it extremely uncomfortable to retain the Republican label if he were alive today, as Goldwater was on the “wrong side” (according to modern Republicans) of two major “litmus test” issues of today: abortion and gay rights. I also like to think that Goldwater, as a veteran of World War II, would have spoken out strongly against the fascist elements who have snatched control of the Republican Party. And I like to think that if he were still serving in the Senate today, he would make a principled decision to switch his party affiliation over to the Democrats. Above all else, Goldwater was a man of principle! And wouldn’t that be a shock to the body politic if Mr. Conservative (as Goldwater was known) would switch over to the Democrats! Well, by and large, that is what I have done, and I believe I have done it for exactly the same principles which Barry Goldwater held so dearly. In one of the last interviews he gave before he died, to the Washington Post, Goldwater had this to say about the radical religious right:

When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

And shortly after he died, one of his obituaries had this to say:

In 1996, Barry Goldwater sat in his Paradise Valley home with Bob Dole and joked about his strange new standing as a GOP outsider.

”We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater told Dole, who was then facing criticisms from hard-line conservatives in the presidential campaign.

”Can you imagine that?”

It was difficult to picture, but by the time he reached his mid-80s, Barry Goldwater had become something of an outcast in the political movement that he pioneered.

Though he continued his support of a strong national defense, Goldwater aggravated so many conservatives on other issues that some in Arizona once suggested stripping his name from party headquarters.

I felt outcast by the Republican conservative movement as early as 1982, by which time President Reagan had adopted his own version of Johnson’s “guns and butter” budgetary policies. What had angered me so much about Lyndon Johnson as a profligate spender also then angered me about Ronald Reagan. It took Goldwater himself until the mid-1990s before he felt the same sort of sense of abandonment by his beloved Republican Party, and at that point it was the beginning stirrings of the Republican fascist movement which alienated Goldwater.

True conservativism is focused primarily upon ensuring and/or enhancing individual liberty. What passes for conservatism today, in 2008, is focused primarily upon depriving individuals of personal liberties, and part of that focus is to weld as many people as possible into the prototypical fascist focus upon creating cults of unity, energy, and purity, and that is what I will discuss in the main part of the essay, below. But let it suffice to say here that fascism is the antithesis of true conservativism, and thus the modern Republican Party is now the enemy of true conservatives everywhere.

With that lengthy introduction out of the way, I turn now to my main thesis: that the Republican Party of 2008 is actually a moderate fascist party. It merits the adjective “moderate” only because it has not used violence to obtain its position of power in the United States. In the three primary countries where it is deemed to have once had political control, Italy (where the word “fascism” originated, under Mussolini), Germany (under Hitler), and Spain (under Franco), the fascist elements in all three gained power at least in part through the use of street violence or, in the case of Spain, actual war. The Republican Party has not found it necessary to employ the tactics of armed struggle as it has been quite willing to restrict itself to a propaganda war in order to build its power base. Propaganda is one of the key instruments of control for any political movement which is outside of the mainstream of human thought. Otherwise, the majority of the people would come to realize the truth of the matter and attempt to put an end to control by the fringe elements of their own political establishment.

Some modern thinkers attempt to constrain the definition of “fascism” to such a degree that it can only be legitimately applied to self-announced fascist states, such as Mussolini’s Italian fascism. I believe that definition is deliberately narrow so as to prevent people from legitimately using the word “fascist” to describe any modern political movement which refuses to acknowledge its fascist tendencies. This is, of course, largely a propaganda effort, as most people find fascism repugnant. This is what leads the very word, fascism, to be considered an extremely-insulting epithet.

Wikipedia has two lengthy articles attempting to clarify exactly what is legitimately called “fascist” and what is not. The first article is entitled “Definitions of fascism” and the second is entitled “Fascism and ideology.” Neither of these two articles is without ongoing controversy, largely because so many people holding so many similar ideological stances all wish to avoid having the label “fascist” applied to their own particular point of view. I want to look at a series of quotes taken from those two articles and discuss just how I feel that the modern Republican Party exactly fits the description of fascism for each of those definitions of fascism. Taken as a whole, then, this is my justification for why the modern Republican Party is legitimately labeled as “fascist.”

Fascism as a label was coined by Benito Mussolini, so his writings on the topic have substantial weight in determining what is a fascist ideology. Let us begin with the first quote of his from the article on Definitions of fascism:

Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right’, a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State.

Thus, the first key idea about what makes a regime “fascist” is that in a “fascist” regime, the individual is subservient to the State of which he is a citizen. This is a matter of degree, of course. At all times, all citizens and other residents of any State are necessarily subject to the laws of the State. But the key point which makes a regime “fascist” is the refusal to tolerate individual dissent. The more individual dissent is suppressed by “authority,” the more “fascist” the regime in power can be viewed as being. Fascist regimes thus tend towards authoritarianism.

I agree with John Duckitt who “suggests a link between authoritarianism and collectivism, asserting that both are in opposition to individualism. Duckitt writes that both authoritarianism and collectivism submerge individual rights and goals to group goals, expectations and conformities.” Collectivism is today is sometimes taken as a more-generic descriptive term for what was traditionally called Communism. In the old Soviet Union, for example, farm workers were assigned to “collectives” (or “communes,” if you are calling it “communism”) where they were expected to labor together for the group goal of raising agricultural products. During the early years of the Soviet Union, all labor was organized into “communes” or “collectives” of one sort or another, and individual economic initiative was suppressed. While fascism characterizes itself as strongly opposed to Communism, we can see from the Mussolini quote, above, that fascism too embraces the idea of collectivism. The difference between fascist and communist systems in this regard is totally with respect to how the government treats the ownership of business enterprises. In a communist system, private businesses (at least, the largest, wealthiest, and/or most visible businesses) are “nationalized” and placed under direct control of the State. In a fascist system, private business enterprises are maintained under private ownership by the wealthy, but all individuals and businesses are required to subordinate their individual wishes to any superseding commands issued by the State (”authority”). Thus, fascists put business under the direction of the State while communists absorb business ownership into the structure of the State government. In either case, however, the leader of the State has effective control over all individuals and business interests existing or operating within the State.

So, what makes the modern-day Republican Party at least moderately fascist under the above standard? There are several concurrent factors, the most important of which include a refusal to accept any dissent about an increasingly broad range of issues, such as a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, the rights of gays to marry their partners, and the war in Iraq (even going so far as to call dissenters “traitors,” or to at least imply that is the case). The word “fascist” is applied by many former Republicans (including myself) to the leadership of the Republican Party who refuses to allow any dissent from certain key party dogmas, such as those I’ve enumerated herein. Since Republican office holders, like Congressmen, are all products of this system which refuses to tolerate any dissent from accepted party dogma, it is not at all surprising that on such key controversial issues as abortion, you can pretty much count on most of the Republicans to vote the way that the party wants them to vote. The symbolism of unity among the constituent parts is a key element of fascism in and of itself (see the etymology of fascism). Of course, this is again all a matter of degree, as one would expect coordinated political action by members of a particular political party. The key point that makes it fascist is that dissent on a range of topics is not tolerated, and the failure to vote “correctly” can lead to removal from office at the next election, if not sooner by some other means.

Also, we have to consider the strong entanglement between the Republican Party and “big business.” We are still in the realm where “big business” largely controls the government, not the other way around. So, in that sense at least, we are not yet at the point where we can legitimately claim that the United States has “gone fascist.” But how much change will it take before the same folks from “big business,” placed into positions of power by the Republican Party, then take it upon themselves to begin issuing commands to their old business fiefdoms from their positions of power within the government? We have already seen some troubling cases of this type of interference in the natural course of the free market system by Republicans operating within the Bush/Cheney administration. One example would be the bail-out of Bear Sterns by the US Treasury. In a free market economy, Bear Sterns would have just been allowed to fail and the bankruptcy courts would have sorted out whatever was left over. But somehow, some official within the Treasury, for some still unknown reason, ordered J. P. Morgan-Chase to absorb Bear Sterns at fire-sale pricing (subsequently quintupled from $2 per share to $10 per share after Bear Sterns shareholders objected).

Let’s look at another quote from Mussolini about what fascism is:

The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.

This is where Goldwater’s quote about mixing religion and politics bears repeating: “When you say ‘radical right’ today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.” In my view, Goldwater was noting exactly the point I’m trying to make here: the modern Republican Party is developing into “a religious organization” and the religion which is being sold is the fascist “all-embracing” idea which holds that “outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” Again, many people who have voluntarily departed from, or who have been cast out by, the modern Republican Party appropriately label that party as “fascist” since it is attempting to enforce this exact sort of religious orthodoxy among at least Republican office holders.

What the “radical religious right” wishes is “totalitarian” in nature— “a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values” which “interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.” Thus, it is increasingly necessary for a “good Republican” to also be an evangelical Christian and to evangelize a wide range of values which have little or nothing at all to do with the Christian religion as that religion is normally understood. A troubling example of just this point is the fact that John McCain now claims to be a Southern Baptist when he was formerly listed as an Episcopalian. Was this change in religious affiliation made out of political necessity? Only John McCain himself knows the true answer to that question.

This leads naturally into the final quote from Mussolini contained within the Definitions of fascism article (as of the date I write this):

Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.

The Christian religion is naturally based upon an authoritarian model. God is in charge and gives the orders to His followers through the Holy Bible. The followers are expected to obey God and follow His orders. The fascist model of the State follows directly from this Christian conception. This explicitly illuminates just exactly why it is fascist to insist upon a Christian authority model for the Republican Party. If you go around the Internet, and if you check out the web sites of the various state party organizations which are part of the Republican Party, you will find a large percentage of them devoting a great portion of their state platforms and other web site content to the enforcement of what must be deemed to be religious concepts (anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage; anti-evolution; etc.). While I would not claim that the Republican Party is yet an exemplar of fascism, it is certainly well along the path towards getting there, as a careful consideration of these concepts should demonstrate.

And yet, it must be noted, this is a stirring departure from patterns set by past Republican Party stars. President William Howard Taft, a key member of an ongoing Ohio Republican political dynasty, was by no means “Christian” (he was a life-long Unitarian and explicitly denied the divinity of Christ). Historians debate at length the religious views of Abraham Lincoln, but few would label Lincoln as a faithful Christian. Somehow, over the past few decades, Christianity has become a requirement for any person who desires to be a leader within the Republican Party. This requirement is a direct result of the evolving Republican fascism.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had this to say about fascism (as quoted on the Definitions of fascism web page):

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

It is a common claim among Democrats that the Republican Party is owned and controlled by “big oil.” This has been a large part of the debate over the Iraq War and the rise of gasoline prices since the beginning of the Bush/Cheney administration, particularly in view of the reported profits of the big oil companies, such as Exxon-Mobile. Republicans have been viewed as the party of business since at least the late 1800s, in spite of occasional actions taken against the interests of big business (such as the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft). But when it becomes impossible for the political branch to take actions against the wishes of its main source of funding (”big business,” in the case of Republicans), that is the point where the external power “becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.” Again, we are not yet to that point in the United States, but we are a lot closer now than we have ever been in the past.

Ernst Nolte defined fascism as reactionary:

Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.

From at least the Eisenhower administration, the Republican Party has tried to cast itself as the worst enemy of Marxism. As Marxism was a philosophy based upon power asserted by the workers, and as the workers were largely associated with Democrats and unionism, this was a natural stance for the Republicans to adopt. And it led to a great deal of political success during the Cold War. However, it also led to fascist excesses such as McCarthyism. But many political scientists are forced to admit that there is a lot of commonality between fascism and communism, at least in “the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods” of controlling the people and business entities of the nation. But again, an overarching idea within fascism (and within some forms of communism as well) is the idea of “national self-assertion and autonomy,” which we naturally call nationalism.

The extreme form of nationalism popular within fascist regimes includes the concept that the nation can do no wrong. This runs parallel to the idea that dissent is at least unpatriotic, if not downright treasonous. Democracies tend to view bordering nations as equals, and thus democracies tend to try to be good neighbors. Nationalistic fascism, on the other hand, attempts to annex or otherwise control any and all neighboring nation-states because it is viewed that the leader of the particular nation has the right and duty to rule the rest of the world for the benefit of his or her nation. To me, this seems to lie at the core of the reason why fascist regimes seem to collapse in a relatively short period of time. They do so because they tend to involve themselves in more warfare than the nation can reasonably sustain. (Sound familiar yet? The realization of this idea here in America is part of my hope for avoiding fascism.) As the truly-fascist regime refuses to admit defeat early enough to exit its adventure before actually losing, it will generally fight on until actually defeated in combat. But again, there are exceptions to every rule, such as Spain under Francisco Franco declaring itself to be neutral during World War II. In at least this sense, Franco proved himself to be a heck of a lot smarter than any other major European fascist leader, as he survived to die peacefully in old age.

Let us now turn to the main page on fascism and look at two recent and widely accepted definitions of what fascism is. First:

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

In view of the prior discussions, above, here we see almost an epitome of what the modern-day Republican Party is all about. It is “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.” Anybody who listens to Rush Limbaugh preaching about how “liberals” are oppressing the “majority of the people” through “elitist” “left-wing” judges and how our entire nation is in decline, and if we don’t get active and replace these “liberal elites” only more decline awaits us, must see the core of fascism within those preachments. It is also easy to characterize the Republican Party as “nationalistic.” The “uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites” embodies the “uneasy but effective” alliance between the radical religious right, who provides a mass of foot soldiers for the Republican Party, and “big business” (the “traditional elites”), who provides huge quantities of money to keep the movement afloat.

What is most disturbing is this part, where a fascist movement “abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Once again we return to Guantanamo Bay, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War. The attempts to strip the Guantanamo Bay prisoners of all legal rights, the attempts to authorize the federal government to abandon all “ethical or legal restraints” in pursuing the War on Terror (which all recognize can never be “won” in any traditional sense), and the “external expansion” inherent in the Iraq War (which the Republicans refuse to commit to ending), all point to a fascist ideology at the core of the modern Republican Party. The only part really missing is “internal cleansing,” and the attempts to pursue even that goal are obvious in the right-wing mass media, led by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Neal Boortz, and a host of lesser celebrities. For decades now, the right-wing mass media has been mounting a propaganda campaign to “cleanse” America of all who dare to oppose the radical religious right and its adopted party, the Republicans. The political propaganda spewed by all these mass media sources is expressed in religious terms to appeal to and incite the Republican base to action.

Admittedly, we have not yet reached the point where armies of stooges attack dissenters in their homes and other places. But we have seen at least one documented incident of violence motivated by anger at “liberals” generated by the above mass media characters. This was a shooting at a Unitarian church in Knoxville, TN on July 27, 2008. The church was targeted precisely because it was a home to the hated “liberals,” and at least three books were found in the hands of the perpetrator, all authored by members of the right-wing mass media enumerated above. And the perpetrator explicitly stated to police that his motivation for the crime was “his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets.” This is exactly the hate-filled propaganda spread by those very same mass media celebrities! Thus, the real question is this: when will this sort of “cleansing” become “acceptable” within the American political scene? If that ever does happen, then we will have reached a state of fascist control comparable to Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, or Spain under Franco. At that point, the United States will be a fascist nation, and it sure as heck won’t be the Democrats who are in control! No, it will be the modern-day Republican fascists who will run all of our lives at that future point in time.

The trend in the direction of unity/purity cults can be clearly seen in several recent scandals of the George W. Bush administration. In one scandal, several US Attorneys were fired for what appears to be political reasons. In another scandal, a political appointee admitted using political considerations for the hiring of employees for non-poltical jobs (jobs where poltical considerations were not legally supposed to be used). In all such cases, the motivation would appear to be to maintain the unity and/or purity of the workforce. This is just an early step on the road to fascism.

And now let us return to the main page on fascism and look at the other recent and widely accepted definition of what fascism is:

[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.

We have already seen, above, how the modern Republican fascism characterizes itself as “anti-liberal.” In fact, the essence of the right-wing media propaganda campaign discussed above is to preach constantly about how “liberals” are leading the United States to “decadence,” in some way, shape, or form. What is not so obvious is how this is also “anti-conservative.” I consider myself to be the epitome of the type of traditional conservative which must necessarily oppose Republican fascism on principle. Traditional conservatives are pro-individualism and strongly in favor of individual rights (this is, after all, the primary concept upon which our nation was founded: the idea that individuals had rights to assert against any king or other ruler), and, as we have seen from the discussions above, fascism is anti-individualism. In some sense, fascism is reactionary, as it is a return to the kind of totalitarian authority which people lived under in the days of a monarchy.

In the modern right-wing mass media, as discussed above, we definitely see promises “to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism,” and promises “to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life.” Again, the core motivating idea “is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” This is a core element of fascism, and it is also a core promise of the modern Republican Party, which is the current proponent of fascism within the United States of America.

It is a goal for my remaining life to do everything within my personal power to prevent Republican fascism from coming to rule the United States which I love.

The Eastern Roman Empire, which is usually called the Byzantine Empire, continued on for many centuries, however. Its founding is sometimes taken as May 11, 330, when the Emperor Constantine, who ruled over both East and West, formally consecrated his new capitol as Nova Roma (New Rome). However, after his death, the city became known as Constantine’s City, or Constantinople. To distinguish this long-lasting empire from the older Roman Empire, the eastern empire is frequently referred to as the Byzantine Empire, a name which is taken from the name of Constantinople prior to Constintine’s extreme makeover. Before then, the small town which stood at that site was called Byzantium, a trading post town established in the 7th century BCE.

It is not Christianity which distinguishes West From East. Constantine is also known for formally adopting the Christian religion as the official religion throughout the old Roman Empire. But the West would come under the religious control of a central religious authority figure known as the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile, Christianity in the East retained its ancient apostolic traditions of having Christian Patriarchs as the heads of their own regional churches, with none recognized as superior to any other. In 1054 CE, when Pope Leo IX of Rome insisted that the Patriarch of Constantinople submit to his authority as the head of all Christians, the split between West and East became complete. The Great Schism resulted when the two sides each mutually excommunicated each other, leading to the ultimate in irreconcilable differences between the two principle branches of Christianity.

After the sack of Rome in 455, the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist for all practical purposes, although it was several decades before its chain of rulers was completely exterminated. This left the Pope in Rome in a somewhat untenable position, and for the next three-and-a-half centuries, the Pope frequently controlled little more than his personal estates, and it required considerable effort to keep control of those small scraps of land. However, by the end of the eighth century, the Pope had cut a deal with the Frankish Empire (known as Francia at the time) to provide protection in return for a religious blessing and recognition for its leadership of Western Civilization. The crowning moment, in a very literal sense, came in 800 CE when Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king, Charlemagne (or “Charles the Great” in English), as Holy Roman Emperor. This was the single act which tied the very different cultural traditions of Western Civilization back to the historical foundations of ancient Rome. Under Charlemagne the non-Christian portions of the Frankish Empire converted to Christianity, and by the time of his death, the identity of Western Civilization had been firmly established as quite distinct from whatever came out of the East.

Meanwhile, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire established its own cultural and religious traditions centered on Christian Orthodoxy (also known as Eastern Orthodox Christianity) and the Greek language and culture preserved out of the Eastern portion of the old Roman Empire. The Eastern Orthodox churches spread out throughout Eastern Europe, providing a completely different cultural heritage to the people living in that part of the world as compared with the cultural heritage of those who lived in the West.

While the Byzantine Empire ended on May 29, 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Islamic Ottoman Empire under Sultan Mehmed II, the Eastern Orthodox religion continued on to the present, and acted as a cultural transmission vehicle for the ancient Byzantine culture into modern times.

The inherent mistrust of the Russian people for any nation of the West is probably rooted in this ancient division between Western and Eastern civilizations. The two inheritors of the ancient Roman Empire took very different paths to greatness, and each established very different and distinct religious and cultural traditions. Western nations trace back to a unified domination by the Roman Catholic Church while Eastern nations trace back to domination by the diversity of Eastern Orthodox traditions. It is highly-probable that the ease of disintegration of the Soviet Union itself was set up in the pattern of religious diversity in Eastern Orthodox churches. In Eastern traditions, each nation had its own distinct culture, which was represented by its own distinct branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In Western traditions, the Western nations see themselves as largely unified with a common cultural and religious heritage, which traces back to the domination of Western thought by the doctrines and writings of the Roman Catholic Church. While the Protestant Reformation split Western Christianity into thousands of splinters, large and small, that overall unity of culture still remains at the core of thinking about what the phrase “The West” means to us all.

The end conclusion is this: it is a great error to believe that the differences between East and West are largely irrelevant now that the Cold War of the 20th century is over. Those differences go back nearly 2,000 years to the split-up of the Roman Empire in 285 CE, after which time Rome declined in importance until it resurrected itself through an alliance with the Frankish Empire. Such distinctions are not trivial at all, but run deeply to the core of what each member of society feels about themselves and the civilization which they are a part of. Animosities such as these are not easily healed. They are certainly no more easily healed than the still-ongoing Great Schism between Roman and Eastern religious traditions.

You see, Kansas didn’t used to be the reddest of red states. As Frank points out, over a century ago, Kansas was a hotbed of socialism and populism, as was most of the Midwest. In those days, the small farmers had power, and it was the power of the voting booth which eventually led to the sacrosanct agriculture subsidies provided by our modern federal government. Ever since the “free soil” Republicans wrested control of Kansas from the pro-slavery Democrats before the Civil War, the identity of Kansas was closely tied to Republicanism in politics. But even into the middle of the 20th century, the Kansas politicians who made a splash in national politics were almost universally from the moderate or progressive wing of the Republican Party. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senators Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum would have much more in common with the policies of progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt than with any part of the leaders of the modern Republican Party. The turning point for Republicans was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that law, he knew he was signing away political control of the south for at least the next several decades. And as people re-thought their political affiliations in the wake of that single act, the face of American politics was being changed for decades to come.

Senator Barry Goldwater, known as “Mr. Conservative” when he was in his heyday, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 not because he was in any way bigoted, but because he believed that the law went over the boundaries of what was allowed by the Constitution of the United States. But the political theatre that came out of that 1964 debate, with the party of Lincoln arguing against a new civil rights law while the party of slavery argued for it, effected a dramatic reversal in American politics. Blacks were once a reliable voting block for Republicans. And the white people who lived in the south voted only for Democrats. This partisan divide was the legacy of the Civil War and the political divisions which led up to that war. But the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt started a rift with the conservative old south. President Johnson himself first went to Washington as an aide to one of the Congressmen elected during Roosevelt’s landslide win in 1932. By 1948, the south was so at odds with the mainstream Democrat Party that it formed its own Dixiecrat Party and ran Strom Thurmond as its candidate for President. In 1964, as a direct consequence of the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Strom Thurmond switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. He was the first of the old segregationists to switch, but he wasn’t the last. In fact, large parts of the old south remain solidly Democrat in terms of party registration, but they vote solidly Republican for the same reasons that Strom Thurmond switched parties in 1964.

But the party alliances based upon economic interests have not changed. The Republicans are still the party of big business while the Democrats are still the party of organized labor. But while organized labor was very strong from the 1930s into the 1960s, it weakened dramatically as big business was able to take advantage of cheap overseas labor, initially in Japan, but now including many other low wage and pro-business countries around the world, most surprisingly including China. Organized labor remains strong now only in those industries where the jobs cannot be exported, primarily in construction (building trades, etc.). Still, even in those industries, in most areas of the United States, there is strong pressure from big business to use smaller “independent” contractors instead of larger unionized firms in order to force costs down and increase profits for the wealthy. These efforts are supported by the modern Republican Party and the laws it has been able to enact over the years.

The first Republican who was able to get large numbers of traditional Democrat voters to strongly support him was President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was also the model for the modern media-driven propaganda campaign that was largely perfected by Karl Rove for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign. The key driving force in any such campaign is propaganda. You get the people to vote against their own best interests by convincing them to cast their vote based upon some single point of distinction which sounds appealing to the particular block of voters you are targeting. If you can target enough blocks of these “single issue” voters, along with traditional party loyalists, you will win the election, even though the program you actually intend to implement will do damage to the vast majority of people who vote for your side. Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, clearly documents how this process has worked its way to conclusion in Kansas. The State of Kansas has one of the best climates for business, and one of the worst climates for workers, in the entire United States. It has this due to the success of the “single issue” political process and the constant propaganda being fed to them by business interests tied to the Republican Party. I first wrote about that unfairness in the radio medium over a year ago.

But the key take-away from Frank’s book is just how easy this has all been for the wealthy who now own most of America. Or at least, most of middle-America (which was always cheaper to buy than the coastal areas). And if you wish to assess just how difficult it is to oppose those wealthy companies and individuals, just take a look at the mess our political system has made of illegal immigration. I can’t believe that more than a small minority of Americans want to see our nation flooded with illegal immigrants. But big business uses illegal immigrant workers to drive down (or hold down) labor costs, so guess what: our nation is flooded with illegal immigrant workers and there isn’t anything that regular Americans can do to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. And yet, Americans keep voting for those same politicians who keep letting in illegal immigrants who take over our jobs. Isn’t that insanity on the part of the voting public? Well, that insanity is institutionalized in Kansas. The Republicans have succeeded in getting the voters to focus on all the wrong issues and to vote themselves continuing degradation in the work force and in all spheres of their personal economic lives, all to the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. It might be fair to ask if Kansas will ever come to its senses in time. I must certainly hope so, because if the answer to that question is “no,” then there is no hope for whatever is left of the United States of America.