Some forty years ago, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and friends were being prosecuted for being part of a radical movement. Today's radicals like Pat Buchanon and Sarah Palin get elected into public office instead. What in Hell is going on?
I keep thinking about my middle school social studies teacher, Mr. Dufour. By way of introduction, he was that "interesting" teacher (there's one at every school). I remember more of his class than perhaps any other in that school for that reason. He also monitored study hall. Comic books were confiscated, but he considered Mad Magazine political and social satire, so it was allowed in his study hall. He would discipline by assigning silly essay titles like, The Morning That I Found an Elephant in My Birdbath. He taught us about propaganda with a set of flash cards that he would read an argument from and we would be asked to place it in one of a dozen or so categories like casual oversimplification, faulty analogy, wishful thinking, hasty generalization, appeals to ignorance, joining the bandwagon, etc. He got those of us that weren't too good about our homework to get excited in anticipation of reading books by reading a choice paragraph as if it were a movie trailer. We couldn't wait to read Upton Sinclair after he read us a paragraph accounting of the fate of 14 different job descriptions in a meat packing house that ended with, "Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor—for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare away any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!" Reading that book sounded way better than watching Dark Shadows after school.
My mother didn't like Mr. Dufour's liberal views much. She saw The Jungle as Marxist (or at least pro-union) because it spoke to oppression of the labor class, and his teaching of propaganda techniques as anti-administration. She definitely smelled a Democrat. Seeing that we lived in Massachusetts at the time, and Rose Kennedy had just about worn out her best black dress by then, the State did have a lot of symathetic lean in that direction. The Kennedys were Massachusetts' Royal Family, after all. The Kennedys were also Catholic and believed that abortion was a sin, so drowning that Kopechne bitch was probably the only solution that the Archbishop would approve.
All of this discussion about getting away with murder (if you have enough power) and Mr. Dufour's style of teaching brings me to why I have been thinking of that social studies class. We were also introduced to It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, a study of how easy it would be for a totalitarian regime to take over if we blindly follow our leader. We are becoming a totalitarian socialist country – except that we don't get any of the good socialist stuff like nationalized health care and nationalized higher education. The very same government that regulates the banking industry is now buying the mortgage to a whole bunch of our houses, though. There's a scary thought. We have also stood by while W defeated the Constitutional balance of power through the use of the signing statement, which was originally intended to be the President's opportunity to wax poetic about the virtues of a bill. W doesn't veto since he discovered the signing statement. Why risk an override when you can sign it and then unilaterally amend it through the signing statement with, "Oh yeah, I'm not going to abide by this. I don't have to." That's the totalitarian part.
Now we are looking at the possibility of a Vice President inheriting the office mid-term ("just a heartbeat away") who will push to overturn Roe v Wade, introduce mandatory Christian only prayer in public schools, and burn the books that she doesn't agree with. Maybe we shouldn't even mention Leviticus 20:13, it is sort of scary for some people, but I'm guessing that Castro Street will become a ghost town (or a death camp). That sounds like Theocracy to me. Can you say, "Taliban"?
What happened to conservatism? These recent radical nut-cases are the exact opposite of what we expect from a conservative. Once dubbed "America's Conservative", Barry Goldwater was an AZ Senator at the time of the Roe v Wade decision. He was a true conservative and adhered strictly to Constitutional law. I respect that. A deeply religious man, he was asked if he thought that Roe v Wade should be overturned. Rather than preaching his private personal opinion, he said that the government had absolutely no business making this very personal, moral, and spiritual decision. Too bad he voted against the Civil Rights Act, I might have liked him.
So if these Neo-conservatives are nothing like the Conservatives that we know, what are they? When the crazy radicals are no longer running from the law, but writing it instead, what happens next? It doesn't look good so far. Just remember Lewis Sinclair's lesson that Hitler was voted into office by a far more representative election process than we have. He was chosen by people who believed in his vision of a perfect Germany, even though he neglected to disclose what that vision was or how he would take them there. He was not elected by a lopsided Electoral College, and not by hanging chads, and not by faulty touch screens - Hitler was elected by the true popular vote. Are you starting to see how it really can happen here?