Holiday break

I'm off to Montana for a five-day Thanksgiving visit. My Web access will be sketchy, so don't look for a lot (if anything) till I get back.

I am planning to put "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism" together into a single PDF file that will appear after I get back. In the meantime, here are links to all seven parts:

Part 1: The Morphing of the Conservative Movement

Part 2: The Architecture of Fascism

Part 3: The Pseudo-Fascist Campaign

Part 4: The Apocalyptic One-Party State

Part 5: Warfare By Other Means

Part 6: Breaking Down the Barriers

Part 7 [Conclusion]: It Can Happen Here

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The Dean draft

Joe Trippi, the old Howard Dean hand, posts the following at MSNBC:

Finally the Democratic Party seems to be in complete denial that it needs to reform itself from the bottom-up. Forget about putting anyone in the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee who is carrying water for any of the potential 2008 nominees. Forget about putting anyone in as Chair of the Party who is a figurehead, a symbol, or a placeholder. What the Party needs is someone who is committed to building a vibrant, energized party from the grassroots up to make gains in the House and Senate in 2006, and who will continue to build a party of ideas so that whoever wins the 2008 nomination is leading a modernized Party that can win the Presidency.

In other words -- stop the gamesmanship, and the politics as usual -- and put some outside the box thinking in place to build a new party from within.

The first and most critical step in reclaiming the Democratic Party is going to involve wresting it out of the hands of the clearly incompetent and out-of-step DLC folks and giving some fresh blood a chance -- and the first battle on that front is going to be naming a new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I think we all have a pretty good idea who Trippi has in mind for this role: his old boss.

And you know what? Trippi is right.

There are a number of non-DLC people who might make better DNC chairs than Dean from an administrative or even ideological standpoint. But none of them are capable of unseating the DLC figureheads. None of them have the proven ability to put together a grass-roots organization and voter base. And none of them would have the ability to create a new coalition that crosses ideological lines.

I liked Dean in the primaries even though I figured he would get steamrolled in the general. Among other things, he remains the only candidate among the Democrats who articulated a vision of revitalizing the party's rural roots and finding a way to speak to working-class people again.

More to the point, that fact suggests the extent to which Dean is inclined to reject the stale approach to politics that has made the Democratic Party is moribund as it now finds itself. He's clearly the best first step in changing that.

To that end, please spend the time to visit the Web site created by Driving Votes featuring an online petition to encourage Dean to step up to the plate.

There's also a Draft Howard Web site that provides the latest on the effort to enlist Dean's leadership.

Democrats need to start from the ground up. Dean's the guy to do it.

Intelligence on their designs

Science and fundamentalism are natural enemies, because they represent diametrically opposite models for understanding the world.

Fundamentalism begins with articles of faith, gleaned from Scripture, for which it then goes in search of evidence as support -- ignoring, along the way, all contravening evidence.

Science begins with the gathering of evidence and data, which are then assembled into an explanatory model through a combintation of hypothesis and further testing. This model must take into account all available facts, including contradictory evidence.

They are, in other words, 180 degrees removed from each other in how they affect our understanding of the world. One is based in logic, the other in faith. As methodologies go, they are simply irreconcilable.

Moreover, it's clear that the fundamentalists who are rapidly gaining complete control of the American government's reins of power fully recognize this natural emnity -- and intend to use their rising power to curtail the influence of science on society: in government, in the schools, and in the media.

To do this, they are resorting to a combination of logical fallacies and propaganda techniques.

The key piece of illogic is one that has especially lodged itself in the media in recent years: The notion that a demonstrably true fact can be properly countered by a demonstrably false one -- and that the two, placed side by side, represent a kind of "balance" in the national discourse. This is the Foxcist model of Newspeak, in which "fair and balanced" comes to mean its exact opposite.

[Linnaeus points out in comments that the logical fallacy at work here is the argumentum ad temperantiam: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."]

We've seen this dynamic play out constantly in the media over the past eight years or so: during the Clinton impeachment fiasco (when any kind of false rumor about Clinton got media play under these circumstances) to the 2000 election (from "Al Gore invented the Internet" to "machine counts are more accurate than hand counts") to the 9/11 commission hearings (notably Condoleezza Rice's testimony that the Aug. 11 Presidential Daily Briefing warning of pending Al Qaeda attacks contained just "historical information" and "did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks") to the 2004 election (especially the way the media depicted the fact-driven reports on George W. Bush's military record as the counterpart to the Swift Boat Veterans clearly specious claims').

Now this model of illogic is being applied to our education system. Specifically, it's being used to inject religion into our schools' science education curriculum.

The most recent example of this came last week when the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania decided to include so-called "intelligent design" programs in their schools' science curriculum.

The chief advocates for "intelligent design" in the schools is a Seattle-based outfit called the Discovery Institute, which had its origins in the 1990s as a conservative/skeptic science-oriented think tank, but which in recent years has transformed its stance from skeptical to a full-fledged embrace of creationism.

Natasha at Pacific Views has been blogging a lot the last week or so about Discovery, notably with this post, followed by this one. Some of this plays off my old friend Danny Westneat's column about Discovery and the way it is using the nation's schools as the battleground for their debate. Natasha notes:

Science is founded on asking questions, even about long-established ideas. Yet a truly 'tough' question is one that's based on evidence, and a question that's asked out of uninformed antagonism doesn't merit the respect of being described that way. So in this, they are certainly making progress in getting their message out, but that message doesn't contain a single "legitimate scientific criticism."

Evolution Blog recently offered a detailed explanation of this:

The great Columbia University genetecist Theodosious Dobzhansky famously said "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." What did he mean by that?

In a trivial sort of way there are many things in biology that make perfect sense even without evolution. The structure of DNA, the mechanics of the Krebs cycle, the skeletal structure of the water buffalo, all of these facts can be understood without any reference to Darwin or his theories.

But of course, the same could be said for any branch of science. Brute facts can be learned and understood without any reference to theory at all. Plainly, this is not what Dobzhansky had in mind.

What he intended was that evolution is what transforms biology from a chaotic menagerie of unrelated facts into an actual science. For example, the fossil record shows a clear pattern to life's history. We begin with the simplest sort of one-celled organisms around 3.5 billion years ago, and move gradually through more complex single-celled organisms, simple multicellular organisms, and on and on through fish, amphibians, reptiles and humans. Along the way we find numerous examples of transitional series in which, for example, the reptilian skull seems to transform itself gradually into the mammalian skull. Without evolution we must simply accept this history as a brute fact. Intelligent Design offers no explanation of it, and the Young-Earth Creationists offer an explanation (that the patterns in the fossil record represent the different abilities of animals to escape the rising waters of Noah's flood) so clearly at odds with the facts that it can't be taken seriously. Salvador, if you reject evolution, tell me how I am to understand the fossil record.

Wired also recently ran a piece about the Discovery Institute titled "The Crusade Against Evolution" that surveys the breadth of Discovery's successes elsewhere:

Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers "critically analyze" evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state's sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It's the biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. "Our opponents would say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board," says Meyer. "We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem now."

But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls "biology for the information age," they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core scientific principles -- laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician -- have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin's theories can account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable explanations.

As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't need the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena. Over the past decade, Discovery has gained ground in schools, op-ed pages, talk radio, and congressional resolutions as a "legitimate" alternative to evolution. ID is playing a central role in biology curricula and textbook controversies around the country. The institute and its supporters have taken the "teach the controversy" message to Alabama, Arizona, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Texas.

The key to Discovery's success is in twisting science's own precepts against it, imposing the same illogical pseudo-egalitarianism -- "all ideas are equal in value" -- so that it distorts the work of science by giving false facts an equal footing with true facts:

Of course Meyer happily acknowledges that Woese is an ardent evolutionist. The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his peers; it can simply co-opt the vocabulary of science -- "academic freedom," "scientific objectivity," "teach the controversy" -- and redirect it to a public trying to reconcile what appear to be two contradictory scientific views. By appealing to a sense of fairness, ID finds a place at the political table, and by merely entering the debate it can claim victory. "We don't need to win every argument to be a success," Meyer says. "We're trying to validate a discussion that's been long suppressed."

This is precisely what happened in Ohio. "I'm not a PhD in biology," says board member Michael Cochran. "But when I have X number of PhD experts telling me this, and X number telling me the opposite, the answer is probably somewhere between the two."

An exasperated Krauss claims that a truly representative debate would have had 10,000 pro-evolution scientists against two Discovery executives. "What these people want is for there to be a debate," says Krauss. "People in the audience say, Hey, these people sound reasonable. They argue, 'People have different opinions, we should present those opinions in school.' That is nonsense. Some people have opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but we don't teach that in history."

As with the media phenonmena of the past decade, this is what happens when you engage in this kind of false "balance": When falsehoods are given equal consideration with demonstrable facts as merely the "other side" in a debate, the falsehoods win, because they gain credibility they would otherwise never have.

Even the normally reserved National Geographic Society decided it was time to address the matter head-on last month with its lead article, "Was Darwin Wrong?" The answer, simply and resoundingly, is "no."

But science isn't really the question here. P.Z. Myers points out that the Discovery Institute is not engaged in science -- its purview is propaganda.

Specifically, it's a form of card stacking:

Propagandist uses this technique to make the best case possible for his side and the worst for the opposing viewpoint by carefully using only those facts that support his or her side of the argument while attempting to lead the audience into accepting the facts as a conclusion. In other words, the propagandist stacks the cards against the truth. Card stacking is the most difficult technique to detect because it does not provide all of the information necessary for the audience to make an informed decision. The audience must decide what is missing. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis suggests we ask ourselves the following question when confronted with this technique: Are facts being distorted or omitted? What other arguments exist to support these assertions? As with any other propaganda technique, the best defense against Card Stacking is to get as much information that is possible before making a decision.

There's another important aspect to propaganda as well: When it's being deployed, it is always in the service of a larger and often hidden agenda. In the case of the Discovery Institute and the "intelligent design" curriculum, it's just a matter of following the money.

One of the chief funders of Discovery (and the first entity on its Board of Directors) is a fellow named Howard Ahmanson. Ahmanson is a major figure in the Christian Reconstructionist movement, whose agenda is to convert American government to a theocratic system as a "Christian nation".

Ahmanson is nothing if not diverse. Among Ahmanson's other projects has been the directorship of the Rutherford Institute, which gained some notoriety as the providers of Paula Jones' legal team in her harassment suit against Bill Clinton; and his connection to the controversy over electronic voting systems by virtue of his ownership of a major touch-screen system provider.

But Discovery has been a major recipient of Ahmanson's funds, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer explained a couple of years ago:

Ahmanson, whose family made billions in the savings and loan business, was associated at times with Christian Reconstruction, a radical faction of the Religious Right that sought to replace American democracy with a theocracy based on biblical law and under the "dominion" of Christians. For years, the Orange County multimillionaire served on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, the movement's think tank.

Ahmanson gave Discovery $1.5 million to help start its Center for Science and Culture. Fieldstead & Co., which is owned by Ahmanson and his wife, Roberta, has pledged $2.8 million through 2003 to support the institute's work.

The prospect of slowing down this campaign appears dim -- especially considering that George Bush has a long history of pandering to the Reconstructionists.

For more information, be sure to also check out the work by P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, and by Chris Mooney, both of whom have been tracking the Discovery Institute closely.

The last Indian war

I have a new post up at The American Street on the latest right-wing plans to do away with Native American treaty rights. Enjoy.

Keyword: privacy

The near-complete conversion of the federal judiciary -- including the Supreme Court -- and the Justice Department into Federalist Society enclaves looms closer and more certainly on the horizon. It's time for progressives and Democrats to start thinking about what they're going to be dealing with as a result -- and figuring out how they're going to oppose it.

Judging from the Federalist Society's known agenda, abortion and reproductive rights are almost certainly first on the target list. Coming in a close second will be rights for gays and lesbians, including housing and employment discrimination.

There will be a whole host of others as well: broadening executive power in the now-endless "war on terror"; undermining international law; and gutting environmental law.

But the first two -- abortion and gay rights -- are at the heart of the current "culture war," and are almost certain to be the focus of the institutionalization of the "Bush mandate." And they share something: Both, in the end are about individual freedom.

Digby has been remarking on this, and the need for Democrats to make these kinds of freedoms the centerpiece of their appeal. As Digby notes, progressive bloggers from Oliver Willis to Atrios to Matt Yglesias have made similar arguments.

I think that their instincts are right, but I also think it will be important to frame this in a way that will directly undermine the campaign the right is prepared to wage against these freedoms. Because they will, as always, frame these as "moral" issues and indeed a matter of "freedom" (that is, the freedom to bash gays and attack abortion providers). Generically framing it as about "freedom" on our side may not be enough.

It needs to be about the foundations of the "individual freedoms" we're discussing here. And key to both of these is a phrase that ought to become a liberal mantra: the right to privacy.

I pointed out during the campaign that Bush's judiciary nominees were by nature almost certain to overturn Roe v. Wade because of their adherence to the Federalist Society dogma of "strict construction":

The "strict constructionists" who favor overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, do so on the basis of the argument that the right to privacy -- which forms the foundation of that ruling -- doesn't exist. You see, because this basic right is not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, even though it is woven into its very fabric, these judicial activists of the conservative stripe claim that it's not innate to the rights Americans enjoy.

Taking away the right to privacy, of course, has ramifications well beyond abortion. And so when George Bush tells Americans that he intends to appoint these "strict constructionists" to the bench, they need to ask in return whether George Bush believes in the right to privacy.

Because the judges he wants to appoint don't. For most Americans -- who cherish their right to privacy -- that is a paramount consideration.

Some of those ramifications include undermining basic reproductive rights -- including, for instance, the right to contraception. The "right to privacy" found in the "penumbrae" of the Bill of Rights by the Burger Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was actually predicated on a Warren Court precedent set eight years before in Connecticut v. Griswold -- which was, in fact, a case about a woman's right to obtain contraceptives.

The right to sexual privacy also is a significant cornerstone for gay and lesbian rights, as well, particularly in overturning anti-sodomy laws -- though much of the current right-wing attack seems more to zero in on basic 14th-amendment rights to equal protection under the law. As a secondary theme to champion as a counter the right-wing onslaught, progressives could do worse than this one; Americans are likely to respond to appeals to their sense of fair play, if it's framed the right way.

But the right to privacy -- in all its many ramifications -- is something most Americans like to think they innately have as a natural right, the kind protected in the Ninth Amendment.

And making clear that Bush and his judiciary intend to attack that right is something progressives need to begin doing now -- before the rulings start coming forth.

Feeding us the mandate

The way a lot of liberals respond to suggestions that devoting some energy to revitalizing the Democratic party's rural roots, you'd think that doing so required repudiating some of their most deeply cherished values -- rather than, in fact, simply living up to them.

The most significant of these involves confronting the problem presented by modern corporate agribusiness and its vertical and horizontal integration of the nation's farm production. Democrats -- who at one time championed the "little guy" and, before that, represented the Jeffersonian ideal of the "citizen farmer" -- have been too content for too many years to cozy up to the money and power that agribusiness represents, while the economic regime that resulted has gradually driven the family farm to near-extinction.

But if Democrats are cozy with these interests, they're models of probity compared to Republicans. There hasn't been a corporate agriculture initiative come down the pike that hasn't found a Republican sponsor. What's been especially noteworthy is the way the GOP has greased the skids for big business to belly up to the table traditionally set for family farmers, especially when it comes to such programs as land conservation setasides and crop subsidies. The 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" was the classic example of this.

Similarly, Republicans have at every turn provided the legislation that has opened the floodgates for market monopolies by agribusiness in seed supplies as well as distribution. They also enable the increasing monopolization of nearly all areas of agriculture, notably pork production.

These are policies that harm entire communities. Overturning and reforming them are natural issues for progressive Democrats. But so far, they have failed to pay anything approaching serious attention.

John McKay points us to this story about just such an opportunity:

Telling consumers where their meat, fruit and vegetables came from seemed such a good idea to U.S. ranchers and farmers in competition with imports that Congress two years ago ordered the food industry to do it. But meatpackers and food processors fought the law from the start, and newly emboldened Republicans now plan to repeal it before Thanksgiving.

As part of the 2002 farm bill, country-of-origin labeling was supposed to have gone into effect this fall. Congress last year postponed it until 2006. Now, House Republicans are trying to wipe it off the books as part of a spending bill they plan to finish this month.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he expected the Senate to agree to repealing the measure, whose main champion two years ago was Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

"I can't find any real opposition to doing exactly what we want to do here," Blunt said.

President Bush never supported mandatory labeling. Chances for repealing the law improved when Daschle, still his party's leader in the Senate, was defeated for re-election Nov. 2.

"For Republicans to deny Americans the opportunity to 'buy American' at the grocery store is anti-consumer, anti-farmer and anti-rancher," Daschle said Wednesday.

Obviously, Republicans are still gorged on their cotton-candy "mandate". This issue is one that pits them against both consumers and independent ranchers -- and aligns them, as always, with agribusiness:

The issue divides cattlemen and other livestock producers. Many of the bigger livestock and feedlot operations, as well as food processors, do not want mandatory labeling.

Producers in favor of mandatory labels believe consumers will prefer U.S.-grown food over foreign imports. The law requires companies to put country-of-origin labels on meat, vegetables and fruit.

"We really feel that country-of-origin labeling is one of the key things we need to keep ourselves competitive in that market. I understand the trade-offs," said Doran Junek, a rancher in Brewster, Kan. Junek also is executive director of the Kansas Cattlemen's Association, an affiliate of R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America.

Consumer groups say the issue is whether buyers have a right to know where their food came from.

At some point, of course, Republicans' hubris will lead them to overreach, and this could be one of those cases, if Democrats were astute enough to pick it up.

But then, the story includes this note:

Democrats acknowledged there was not much of an appetite to wage a battle over it.

Argh.

It's not as though Republicans don't hand Democrats a number of ways to peel off rural votes. The question, in the end, comes down to competence in the face of those kinds of opportunities.

Home is where the hate is

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!
-- Rodgers and Hammerstein

I like to take my 3-year-old daughter to a lot of different playgrounds around town. One of the things I like about doing this in Seattle is that she gets to meet a lot of different kinds of kids of all different colors; it is, for one thing, a real contrast to my own upbringing in lily-white Idaho Falls, where I can't remember ever seeing an African American until I was about 7 years old.

It's obvious, too, that race is meaningless to the innocent. Fiona plays with anyone who wants to have fun with her, and they do likewise. Their different features are no more meaningful than hair and eye color -- which is to say, not much at all. This is true not just in the playground but at her Montessori preschool too; her "best friends" there are two Asian girls and a very cute blonde boy, and a young African girl is part of their circle of chums.

Where do children learn to hate? Most of the time, it's from their parents.

They aren't learning it in the curriculum taught in schools. Most educators, both public and private, work hard to weed out prejudice and bigotry in their students, and modern curricula often include tolerance-oriented teaching. In some cases, the drive for tolerance reaches absurd PC heights -- but it certainly beats the alternative.

Especially since, by all indicators, racial and religious bigotry are still alive and well in America, even if they have been forced to retreat to the shadows. Take, for instance, recent problems in Grays Harbor County, Washington, where minority service members have been forced to relocate because of harassment, and minority children in the local schools have been forced to endure assaults and racial epithets. This county is, of course, also the setting for the events described in Death on the Fourth of July.

A number of the events in Grays Harbor involve young children who have clearly picked up racist beliefs in their upbringing. And the odds are high that those beliefs come from the home.

In some cases, there are parents who specifically cultivate such attitudes in their children. This can, of course, create real conflicts in schools where tolerance is being taught. Indeed, many of the parents who harbor these attitudes find themselves chafing under the public-school system and withdraw their children to home-school them.

Generally speaking, I think home schooling can be a terrific idea for certain families -- especially if the parents are diligent, well educated themselves, and cultivate education not as the union card it's often treated as within the system, but a lifelong process of self-advancement and cultivation. The results of sound home schooling speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, home schooling in America also has a distinct downside: It can act as a cover for abusive and hyper-controlling parents, particularly those with extremist political, religious and cultural agendas. The Andrea Yates case in Texas was really only the tip of this particularly iceberg.

The Akron Beacon-Journal recently reported on one of the more troubling aspects of home schooling's dirty little secret:

Racists can use home schools to train youths

The story opens with a horrifying anecdote that is familiar to many: The home-schooled child who refuses to participate with minority children. It goes on to explore the subset of white supremacists who populate home schooling's fringes:

... Home schooling has a strain of racism running through it that may reflect similar ideas held by others in the broader society. There are no studies or numbers to put racism and home schooling in perspective, but home-schooling laws that ensure that parents have the freedom to make socialization choices for their children also allow some families to completely withdraw from society.

In Texas, a librarian told the Beacon Journal that some home-schooling parents objected to the book selection on the shelves. They lobbied the library to bring back older editions -- books that depicted the United States in the 1950s, prior to the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation.

That idea is espoused on a number of racist Internet sites, where people who have a common hatred of minorities -- especially of African-Americans and Jews -- converse.

Stormfront, a white supremacist organization, has a Web site on "education and home schooling." The overriding theme is to home-school to avoid exposure to other cultures.

Among the discussions is one in which a member suggests stealing and destroying books from the public library -- a popular resource for home schoolers -- to eliminate material that portrays the United States as anything other than a white, Protestant culture.

The piece also features a sidebar [registration req'd] that describes some of the white supremacists who take the home schooling route.

It's important, of course, to keep in mind that these people are a minority:

Scott Somerville, an attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association, acknowledged that there are racists in the home-schooling community.

"They are not welcome here, and they know it," he said. "We're trying to build a strong, unified, intelligent and effective home-school movement so that the crazies feel very much marginalized."

He acknowledged that fringe elements of society -- such as unreconstructed Confederates and militia members -- home-school, but he said they are a small percentage of the overall movement.

"That's the challenge of trying to advance a vision of liberty where parents have the freedom to do what's good for their children," Somerville said.

Obviously, that same freedom allows people to brainwash their children, if that's what they want to do. That's not a right that should be taken away -- but it is, nonetheless, a real problem.

Clearly, a line needs to be drawn at preventing abusive situations, and authorities need to do a better job of monitoring this aspect of home schooling. But in the end, hate that is taught at the home can only be undone by society at large -- a functioning society that puts the lie to the dogma of racism and unteaches hate by enunciating clear ethical values and setting a clear example.

That work, as always, is incrementally slow, painful, and difficult. It is also, for a democratic society, imperative.

Healing the heartland

People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.

If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.

And the chances are that what you'll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you're really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.

That's what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.

If Democrats want to come to terms with what happened to them in the last election, they're going to have to confront this reality and its larger implications and ramifications. Chief among the implications is the hard truth that Democrats have largely abandoned rural America, and in so doing have ceded the field to right-wing propaganda and even extremism. Among the ramifications is the fact that at some point, Democrats are going to have to start fighting back on rural turf.

Doing so will not, as some have suggested, require them to compromise their core beliefs -- it will just require them to rethink their priorities and perhaps, in the process, rediscover their identity.

What the dominance of right-wing propaganda in talk radio has meant has been a relentless campaign of hatred and demonization directed at liberals, one specifically geared toward a rural audience. And it has worked, largely because Democrats have blithely done little or nothing to counter it.

The radio talkers, Limbaugh and Savage especially, feed their audiences a steady diet of venom and bile. Liberals look down on people in farm country, they are told, constantly. They don't share your values. They have nothing but contempt for you. As far as they're concerned, you all can just go extinct.

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

This line of scapegoating succeeds because it offers clear, simple, black-and-white answers for many rural Americans that intuitively resonates. It also provides them with an outlet for the feelings of resentment many harbor. If the prevalence of red counties in rural America wasn't evidence enough, the outpouring of contempt for the "blue states" after the 2004 election was just the most recent manifestation of how well right-wing propaganda has succeeded.

It is their strength. It is also their vulnerability, because it is cosmetic to cover a shallow record of negative achievement.

Karl Rove is famous for going after liberals' strengths; liberals should consider doing the same in return.

Unfortunately, the response of many blue-staters has not exactly been helpful. Somewhat unsurprisingly, they have in some cases returned the contempt with contempt. These have ranged from suggestions of blue-state secession and flights to Canada to rebuking the South in no uncertain terms. Some of this reaction is silly, and most of it is understandable catharsis, but liberals have to understand that it only fuels the dynamic at work here.

One of the keys to this dynamic is that both sides have been portraying the conflict in terms of broad stereotypes of urban, suburban and rural dwellers. When the red-state ideologues view the political landscape, they see pockets of godless, atheistic crypto-socialists populating the blue urban centers. For blue-state ideologues, the results of the 2004 election are proof that rural America is populated largely with gun-toting, Bible-thumping moralists who condone bigotry.

It's clear that conservatives have neither the incentive nor the intention of breaking this cycle; after all, they have benefited from it. It is indeed entirely by their design. If liberals are interested in breaking the cycle, they're going to have to discard their stereotypes.

It's essential to understand that rural America is not monolithic. There will probably always be a contingent of liberal-haters in farm country, and there's little anyone can hope to do overcome their hatred. What we don't need to be doing is ceding the field to them.

Especially because, while it's undeniable the stereotype is built out of real-life examples, the bulk of rural America does not fit this description. Most of them are sincere and well-meaning people of good will who will listen to reason. The problem is that they haven't been hearing or experiencing enough of it, particularly not from liberals.

Chris Clarke observed the other day that too much of the dialogue directed coming from urban dwellers is suffused with broad-brush stereotypes, complacency, and smug disdain:

When the red-staters talk about the elitism of people in the cities and on the coasts, at least SOME of them aren't using the word "elitism" as a cryptic Christian code-word for "smart." Somewhere between a third and half of the people in those red states voted with you in this last election. You're not going to win without them, ever. Getting the GOP out of power will require that you lower yourselves and talk to some of us... and I don't mean "hi, I'm Geoffrey, and I've come to Ohio from Ann Arbor to tell you how to vote next week." We know how to vote. What we'd like is to be taken seriously as allies.

I raised some eyebrows last week by arguing that the first step liberals need to take in defusing the cycle of demonization lies in, as the sociologist James Aho puts it, "relinquishing our claim to moral superiority." This was sometimes misconstrued as suggesting a kind of unilateral disarmament, and a capitulation to the demand for obseisance to right-wing "moral values."

One of my tougher critics was the always-astute serial catowner, who posted this response:

The odd thing about this post is that David has spent 90% of his effort describing a right-wing that very creatively makes their own "liberals" to bash. David then concludes by saying liberals have to break this impasse by being better.

Frankly, I've heard this before. Black people were supposed to "overcome" the stereotypes and prejudices used to bar them from equality.

... So, fine, talk about 'values' and how liberals need to be more sensitive, but remember there's a real world out there with real problems we created pushing us into a corner. We may need to hear some plain talking before we get out.

What I'm arguing, though, is not that liberals need to be better than conservatives -- in fact, that presumes a certain kind of moral superiority. This presumption is exactly what is wrong with the liberal approach to dealing with conservatives: it fuels the conservative characterization of liberals as elitists, and simultaneously gulls liberals into passivity and genteel, even timid notions about how to fight back. Plain talk is indeed what is needed.

It's not that liberals need to be better than the hate-mongers on the right; it's that they need not to become like them. This requires a kind of self-knowledge that helps us to more clearly understand the nature of our opposition as well. And that understanding is the key to defeating them.

In this regard, I especially think of something Bertrand Russell wrote back in 1951, discussing the twin evils of Nazism and Communism and their inclination to engage in torture:

I do not think that these evils can be cured by blind hatred of their perpetrators. This will only lead us to become like them. Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt ... to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realise that it is not by blind rage that evils are defeated. I do not say that to understand is to pardon; there are things which are for my part I find I cannot pardon. But I do say that to understand is absolutely necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented.

James Aho also discussed this in This Thing of Darkness:

By grasping the details of how we construct an enemy, we are positioned to see that many of our battles are gigantic jousts with our own illusions. This can be a painful realization, particularly when the costs in treasure and human lives are counted. But the pain may be seen as a necessary injection to inoculate us against a particularly virulent plague, political anthrax, carried by hate mongers -- a plague that respects no nation, race, or religion. Having said this, however, we should never forget that the enemy is a mysteriously paradoxical phenomenon. It has both a subjective and an objective face. While failing to acknowledge our own culpability in creating enemies puts us at risk of becoming executioners, being blind to the objective facticity of evil contains the danger of rendering us its victims. As Albert Camus said, our task as human beings is to be neither victims nor executioners. This requires the courage to renounce both the extreme of punctilious rectitude that perceives only those evils external to itself, and the extreme of romanticism that reduces evil to an internal and solely subjective event.

This path is a difficult one to tread, especially when violence enters into the equation. Then it becomes imperative that aggression be met head-on.

Even absent violence, there is no excuse for failing to respond to hate-mongers, because silence in the face of their lies and distortions amounts to acquiescence. This is true not just of facing down radical right-wing extremists like the Montana Freemen and the Aryan Nations, but the steady stream of hate that has been directed over the airwaves at liberals over the past decade and more.

Liberals need to punch back, hard. And they need to stop believing that being nicer about it is going to win the debate. Of course, civility is always called for when the discussion is civil; but there are times when the gloves of civility have to come off. The line, I think, has to be drawn when eliminationism and violence -- even intimations of them -- enter into the picture. The response needn't be ugly, but it needs to be sharp, hard, and unmistakable.

It would be tempting to think the best way to counter the propaganda stream demonizing liberals would be to erect a similar media network in rural America and begin broadcasting a counter-message, similarly tailored to agrarian sensibilities. Certainly, that's a pleasing thought, and it no doubt would have certain beneficial effects. However, it would take years of work and capital outlays to construct such a counter -- and its effects, in the end, would likely be more cosmetic than substantive. If someone were to attempt such an enterprise, I would certainly encourage it; but in the meantime, there are more effective ways of gaining ground.

The liberal response instead should be geared toward a reality that people in rural and urban areas alike respect: that actions speak louder than words.

If people in rural areas believe that urban liberals look down their noses at them, it's largely because they have little contact with them. They're buying into conservative distortions, of course; but liberals do nothing to counter the charges, either in the media or on the ground, in the way they affect rural dwellers' personal lives.

Urban liberals too need to look in the mirror in this regard. The prevailing attitude in reality is more one of benign ignorance, laced with the scent of moral superiority. The manifestations range from the indulgence in demeaning stereotypes of rural life to a presumption of liberals' own moral and intellectual superiority. These attitudes are conflated by conservatives into one of malevolent contempt toward rural life. As long as the Left condones these attitudes and even fosters them, the more it feeds the dynamic.

What is especially ironic and unfortunate about the way urban liberals relate to their rural brethren is that it has blinded them to the natural alliances, and the shared values, that have informed progressive politics for more than a century. In essence, it has cut them off from one of their historic constituencies, and in the end an essential component of their own identity.

While liberals' chief claim to moral superiority mainly rests on championing the rights and needs of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, one of the most significantly and consistently disenfranchised segments of the American economy of the past 20 years has been the rural sector. If rural dwellers who see their way of life under assault wonder why liberals do not seem to consider their cause a worthy one, they probably cannot be blamed for concluding that they simply live in the wrong place, lead the wrong kind of lifestyle, and are not the right color. It may not be the whole truth, but there is some truth to it.

More to the point, urban liberals should be concerned about what's happening to rural America, because it directly affects their lives as well. The corporatization of agriculture and the accompanying gutting of local rural economies first of all affects urban dwellers' food sources; even as genetically modified foods are being pushed into the food chain, the actual supply of traditional hybrid strains of crops and the genetic diversity they represented has been decreasing dramatically, since many of these resided within the purview of smaller family farms.

Moreover, corporate farms are rapidly becoming a major source of pollution, a problem that affects every locality. Unsurprisingly, the current administration relies on "voluntary compliance" when it comes to regulating this pollution.

The overarching theme that progressives should adopt regarding rural America is one aimed at reviving the family farm. In economic terms, this means adopting a Schumacheresque "small is beautiful" kind of capitalism that encourages an environment in which individual family farms can operate successfully on a smaller scale, one that allows them to grow crops organically and sustainably. In political terms, it means coming into direct opposition to corporate agribusiness -- stripping them of their oversized place at the federal trough, closing the huge tax loopholes that allow them to devour whole tracts of land, dismantling their horizontal and vertical integration of the agricultural economy. It also means confronting "the Wal-Mart economy," the spread of which has done so much to devastate rural small businesses.

Kevin Carson posted in one of my earlier threads on this subject some suggestions on encouraging family farms and saving rural towns:

1) stop enforcing patents on GM [genetically modified] crops. Many free market people, myself included, consider "intellectual property" to be an illegitimate state grant of monopoly privileges to big business. Without the ability to charge monopoly prices, most of the stuff Monsanto comes up with wouldn't even pay for itself in a free market.

2) do away with FDA labeling restrictions that prohibit identifying GM food, or specifying that organic food is grown without sewage sludge, etc. There would be a much greater market for genuinely organic food if people could see on labels what kind of crap they're buying. Agribusiness is rabidly in favor of legal restrictions against such free flow of information, so we know how sincere the GOP's commitment to "free enterprise" is. Monsanto is one of the most adamant supporters of "food libel laws" and restrictions on labeling.

3) Eliminate all other government subsidies to agribusiness. Environmental subsidies to hold land out of production go almost entirely to the big corporate farms, who have enough land they can afford to let it be idle.

Most crop subsidies are targeted to crops that are grown mainly by big agribusiness, and not family farmers.

And large-scale government irrigation projects, especially the dams, provide subsidized water far, far below cost to big agribusiness. If it weren't for such subsidies to plantation farms in areas with inadequate rainfall, and the full cost of providing the water were reflected in the cost of produce, it simply wouldn't pay to ship produce across the country. You'd see a lot more smaller-scale agriculture in high rain areas like Massachusetts growing food for local and regional consumption.

4) Ditto for transportation subsidies. They are really a subsidy for distribution costs, a way of underwriting the inefficiency costs of large-scale production, and encouraging the concentration of capital and centralization of production. This is true of spades for agribusiness. It's only profitable to truck food from plantation farms across the country, instead of growing it where we live, because the shipping costs are reflected in our tax bills instead of in the cost of food.

All these things are examples of how big business gets rich sucking on the taxpayer tit; and they are anathema to the core values of rural state people, if their attention could be drawn to how far Republican practice differs from Republican preaching.

These are excellent starting points. The larger picture should be to create a cogent and comprehensive rural-revitalization program that emphasizes the independent farmer and the economic and cultural health of rural towns. And then to make it a major focal point of Democrats' national agenda.

In more pragmatic political terms, Democrats need to get to work in revitalizing their own political networks in rural areas. Progressives, as Chris Clarke says, have always been part of the rural landscape -- but in pursuing an urban-centric political strategy that has focused on harvesting votes from locales with the largest numbers of voters, Democrats have over the past decade or more largely abandoned these people to their own devices.

The result is that, by failing to involve and empower their rural counterparts, urban liberals proceeded to pursue a series of environmental policy initiatives that, instead of obtaining a rural consensus, became edicts handed down from on high in the urban ivory towers.

Cecil Andrus, the longtime Idaho governor, former Interior Secretary and godfather of the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, tried to warn party leaders against pursuing this course in the 1990s. In 1994, he and a group of Western governors met with President Clinton and his advisers to discuss the party's approach to rural issues, particularly those in the West. Andrus bluntly warned Clinton that, if his administration didn't take rural people's concerns seriously, and continued to send signals of being out of touch with Western issues, they risked becoming a permanent minority party in the West. Democrats' insistence on representing an urban perspective was a real problem, he warned.

At the end of the meeting, Al Gore reportedly took Andrus aside and gave him a chewing-out, telling him: "We think you're the problem."

The 1994 results -- in which the GOP took control of the House and Senate, and swept to their now-entrenched dominant power role in western states -- of course proved Andrus right. And the myopic worldview of Clinton, Gore and the rest of the Democratic Leadership Council contingent has, through the missteps of 2000, 2002, and 2004, led us into our current quagmire.

It's time for that style of leadership to come to an end for Democrats. Instead of being the party of the blue states and hoping to nibble off enough moderate voters in suburban districts, Democrats need to see themselves once again as a national party that represents the interests of all the nation. And championing the cause of their disenfranchised rural brethren is one of the most direct and simple ways of achieving this.

Organizationally speaking, one of the most critical steps for doing this requires not a lot of real expense but a major shift in priorities: cultivating a vibrant and potent network of rural progressives. Democratic party officials need to begin cultivating young progressives in rural areas and empowering them, especially if they look politically promising. This requires not only a certain amount of fiscal support but logistical and rhetorical assistance as well.

It's hard to overstate the powerful effect a campaign appearance by John Kerry would have had in a place like Idaho -- where he owns a vacation home, but hardly seems to actually visit or have any contact with the residents. It says everything you need to know about the DLC approach to the 2004 campaign that, during one of Kerry's springtime visits to Sun Valley, the Blaine County Democratic Party held a major Kerry fundraiser in Ketchum, raising several hundred thousand dollars -- and Kerry couldn't be bothered to drop in and make even a brief appearance.

Of course, there's almost no chance that Kerry actually would have carried Idaho even if he had campaigned there. But an appearance, with a minimal amount of effort, would have been a powerful stimulant for the progressives who live there; it would have signaled that, at the very least, they would not be abandoned by the party this time around.

The signals that rural progressives have been getting from Democratic leadership for a decade have all been negative: We won't visit your state, or provide you with campaign funds, or support your initiatives, because you don't have enough votes. Young progressives interested in advancing in the party tend, under these circumstances, to move to urban locales, since it is clear they will never succeed by staying in places like Idaho.

If liberals hope to turn the tide, these signals have to end. And the converse message needs to become a party centerpiece.

Jeff Alworth at The American Street tackled this point last week:

Why does this matter? For decades, the GOP have created suspicion among rural Americans toward urban America. They've shifted the focus from class to culture, turning themselves from "them" into "us." Democrats stupidly play into the hand, regarding rural Americans as dimwitted crackers who are bent on cutting down all the forests and putting up Wal-Marts. Let me tell you something -- guys in the bar in Salmon, Idaho are never going to side with a bunch of liberal Portlanders who think they're crackers. So they vote for Bush, even though they know he's a bastard, because at least he's a bastard in a way that's comprehensible to them. The devil you know and all that.

Until Democrats recognize that my Dad is the heart of their constituency, until they start think of him as "us," they're always going to alienate rural America. FDR used the language of the "little guy" to find common ground. Jerry Falwell stole rural loyalties by using the language of religion to find common ground. If we're going to get back our bedrock constituency, we're going to have to go back to our roots, find ourselves, and embrace our rural brethren. That's where we will find common ground on the "moral values" question.

The larger point, of course, is to shift the focus from supposed cultural differences back to the vast common ground. Rural people, just like urban and suburban folk, value good schools, good jobs, sound infrastructure, social amenities, a vibrant and healthy culture. When we talk to rural Americans, those are kinds of things we should be talking about -- because, for many of them, these are things they have been losing, while the rest of the country seems to be gaining.

There will be inevitable differences. We won't always see eye to eye on some subjects, especially when they are products of differences in religious beliefs: abortion, gay rights, evolution. What has to change is how we react to these differences. Instead of dismissing people as hopeless ignoramuses for disagreeing on these matters, liberals need to operate from a basis of mutual respect for differing but sincerely held beliefs.

Of course, this respect will not always be reciprocated. This will be especially the case for the hard-core right wing that has an entrenched presence in rural America. Those are not the people whose minds can be changed. And in these kinds of cases, liberals should feel no compulsion to be "sensitive." Indeed, failing to stand up to them with appropriate strength is a recipe for getting bulldozed, as liberals have for the past decade.

But for the bulk of rural Americans, when liberals come up against these kinds of "moral values" friction points, there are two ways to effectively respond: 1) deflecting the conflict by emphasizing the common ground in real-life issues like saving farms and jobs; and 2) stressing their own deeply held moral values, including fairness and inclusiveness, as the basis of their positions -- thereby refuting the charges of amorality with which they are regularly accused by the right.

In the end, it is this inclusiveness that should inform and drive the liberal rural campaign. For too long, rural Americans have felt excluded -- left behind, as it were, while urban economies have benefited from the rise of new technologies and globalization. Conservatives have exploited this rift. Liberals will benefit from healing it.

Out, damned liberal

If you thought the gloating turned ugly in the immediate wake of the election, just wait. They've really only just gotten started.

Now, unsurprisingly, many liberals have felt they owed the rest of the world an apology for failing to stop Bush's re-election. This sentiment translated into the now well-known "Sorry Everybody" site that's shown up in everyone's e-mail inbox.

Even less surprisingly, this inspired from the Freeper contingent a crude and mean-spirited response site, featuring images and bridge-building thoughts like the one below:



Mind you, this pasty-faced doughboy looks more qualified to spank monkeys than to club baby liberals, but hey. You know how big, manly and brave everyone gets behind a keyboard.

More disturbing, really, are all the other photos at the site displaying ordnance in inordinate quantities. This is the face of the new majority? Yikes.

That face is showing the many deep folds of its soul-withering ugliness in other ways, too. Consider the fellow in San Diego who had the obviously unpatriotic bad taste to leave a pro-Kerry bumper sticker on his car after the election:

On Saturday, Gary Jimenez discovered two tires slashed on his Volvo station wagon with its four anti-Bush bumper stickers. Lest he miss the point, the vandals left a note on the windshield that said: "We voted . . . Now you can either move to another country (maybe France, Germany, Iran or Pakistan will take you) or stop your whiney belly aching. This country was founded by righteous God-fearing men of integrity like George W. Bush. Now, take off these bumper stickers. We don't want to see them again."

Jimenez's immediate reaction was to add two more pro-Kerry stickers, including: "Let's Kerry Bush out of the White House."

Then there was the fine fellow called the Elder at Fraters Libertas, who (in agreeing with Adam Yoshida's curb-stomping sentiments) offered the following exercise in bridge-building, inspired by our Vice President's pseudo-fascist example:

To the sneering punks who called Bush a smirking chimp, the conspiracy nutjobs who couldn't say four words without Halliburton dribbling out of their mouth, the goons who tried to shut down GOP campaign offices, the morons who think Bush is an idiot, the defeatists who encourage our enemies while demanding that we don't dare question their patriotism, the thugs who painted swastikas on Bush campaign signs, the sophists spouting "regime change begins at home", the historically challenged fools who compare Bush to Hitler, the "It's all about oil" idiots, the Fahrenheit 911 watching simpletons, the delusional paranoids who claim that fascism is now upon us, the self-important nobodies who fancy that their dissent is even worth crushing, and the disaffected expatriates who trash our president and country overseas to curry favor with their Euro buddies, I have a simple message using the straightforward words of Dick Cheney:

Go fuck yourselves.

That really was the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign slogan, wasn't it?

Border battles

The other day at The American Street, I discussed the passage of the anti-immigrant Proposition 200 in Arizona and its ramifications for the nation generally and Republicans specifically, especially in terms of its radicalization.

As I reported then, it was clear the Prop 200 victory was going to be a stepping-stone for similar if not identical campaigns in a number of other states. Now according to the Arizona Republic, as many as 30 such campaigns are now in the works:

Organizers here said the interest echoing across the country signifies a mounting movement fueled by widespread public infuriation with lax border enforcement. Anti-illegal immigration groups from Tennessee to Utah want to pull up the welcome mat, seal the southern borders and "take our country back."

"We're watching Arizona very closely, it's one of the vanguard states," said Jimmy Herchek, of metro Atlanta and a member of Georgians for Immigration Reduction. "People are very energized right now. They see the tide turning."

About 30 grass-roots groups at various degrees of organization are associated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the national anti-illegal immigration group funded much of the Proposition 200 campaign. FAIR uses these groups to mobilize its national agenda of opposition to amnesty or guest-worker programs, an end to or decrease in immigration and improved border security. With a membership of 70,000 nationally and 5,000 in Arizona, the groups intend to tell politicians the American appetite for illegal immigration is saturated.

The key battleground will be in California, as the Los Angeles Times reported. As in Arizona, don't look for Republicans to give it much official support:

The California initiative would block illegal immigrants from accessing local and state benefits and from getting driver's licenses. Citizens would also be able to sue state or local government who do not comply with the law.

Earlier this year, organizers of a similar measure failed to obtain enough signatures to place it on the California ballot. Some analysts say the latest initiative also could run into difficulties because it likely won't have support from many Republicans, who lost political clout because of their support for Proposition 187, which was perceived by many as anti-Hispanic.

"The Republican Party got badly burned," said Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican political consultant. "We're not thrilled that we do that battle again."

The anti-immigrant extremists, though, don't really care about that -- for now. They have a broader agenda in mind, which is to pull the party farther right:

Some analysts think the initiative stands a solid chance of getting on the ballot, especially if organizers are able to receive funding from groups outside the state. The Arizona initiative's main backer was the FAIR, a Washington D.C.-based group.

"I think it will pick up steam, but not because it will solve the immigration problem," said Rick Swartz, a longtime Washington political consultant on immigration policy. "They can't succeed in Congress, so they go to the states to generate a public backlash in order to have an angrier populace."

Unsurprisingly, if you give these folks an inch of legitimacy, they'll take it for a mile of unanticipated consequences. Already, Prop. 200 proponents in Arizona are pushing for a broader application of the proposition than was originally sold to Arizonans:

Less than a week after voter approval, the head of one of the groups pushing Proposition 200 said he will argue in court that it applies to more than just welfare.

Much more.

Like getting disability payments, housing assistance, a license to hunt, a permit to operate a taco stand and even a library card.

And maybe more.

Randy Pullen, chairman of the Yes on 200 Committee, said the initiative covers limiting to legal residents anything defined in federal law as a "state or local benefit." He said that the section was placed in Title 46, the state’s Welfare Code, is immaterial.

The most disturbing aspect of this agitation is that it's being orgainzed in states that are already showing signs of racial tensions because of demographic shifts involving Latinos. It may have the effect of setting off a spark in what is already a tinderbox.

This is already notably the case in California. Last week's outbreak of racial tensions among teenagers Ventura County was only the latest incident in what is already clearly a racially sensitive situation in many parts of California.

I'm sure that when it blows up, though, it will all be the fault of liberals somehow.

Eliminating the enemy

Good ol' Republicans. Give 'em an inch, and they'll take an eon. Give 'em a "mandate," and they'll take a monocracy.

There's no spectacle like the right gorged on its own power. (I'm from Idaho. I know all about this.) Eventually they become so stuffed with hubris that they explode like the "just one thin mint" man in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The question, of course, is just how much damage they can inflict upon the rest of us along the way.

It's looking like the answer is, "a lot."

As I've already noted, it didn't take long for the right's post-election mask of "civility" to come off. If President Bush's message wasn't clear enough, right-wing talkers around the dial have left no doubt that if there's any compromising to be done, it's liberals who will be doing it. Bipartisanship, indeed.

If conservatives are "building bridges," then they have a remarkable one-way orientation. In the meantime, it seems that, according to movement conservatives, the only "hate" we're dealing with is that emanating from the left. Right.

A consistent theme now running throughout the campaign that Bill Bennett calls "our long, national cultural renewal" is the notion that those on the right are engaged in a heroic enterprise. Contingent on any such enterprise is the naming of an Enemy.

In the past, the right focused its energies on external enemies -- particularly the specter of Global Communism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, though, and the demise of this Enemy, those energies have turned inward. For the conservative movement, the Enemy, now, has been named. It is any American who, for the movement, is Not One Of Us. Better known by the short handle, "liberal."

At the official level, this is only hinted at darkly. But the right's leading propagandists -- particularly the hatemongers of talk radio -- have been making this explicit.

The worst of these, as always, has been Michael Savage, to whom I've been tuning in the past few days. Savage has been unusually vicious in relegating liberalism to the ashbin of history.

On his Thursday show, Savage was reiterating the point made by Mark McKinnon to Ron Suskind, asking: "When are these people going to figure out that we don't like them?"

OK, Michael. Message received, I think.

On the same show, he went on to tell liberals to "crawl back in their holes," proclaiming, "You're done." The same eliminationist tone prevailed throughout the Thursday and Friday shows. It was, in fact, relentless, and as usual, replete with falsehoods and gross distortions. Among them: In the course of reading over news accounts of Bush's victory from the "liberal media," he even attacked MCNBC's Tom Curry as "liberal scum" -- a charge that should come as a bit of a shock to Curry, who has a well-established record as a conservative sympathetic to Republican issues.

None of this should surprise anyone. This is, after all, the author of The Enemy Within: Saving America From the Liberal Assault on Our Schools, Faith and Military, the preface to which lays out his thesis:

Analyzing both sides of this equation, you will come to see the right-wing supports God, country, family, the military, and has far higher moral standards than the Left. The Left operates specifically to undermine God, country, family, and the military. They use the courts to undermine the popular will. What they cannot gain through the ballot box they gain through the gavel. In California we recently saw how the ACLU with three leftist judges tried to stop an election to recall a failed, corrupt governor.

Analyzing recent Supreme Court decisions on sodomy and affirmative action, you will see the vast left-wing conspiracy as its worst, legitimizing the use of race as opposed to achievement and destabilizing family values. Left-wing operatives have come very far in their plans.

It is clear to me if God could vote, He would be a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. In fact, to the mad dog leftists in the ACLU, The National Lawyers Guild, and the Democratic party, God is the enemy.

In this sense then, this book is not so much about naming names as it is about defining terms. The extreme Left has attempted to redefine family and patriotism among other clearly evident concepts: to redefine marriage to conform to their own perverse worldview and to redefine patriotism to mean stabbing our troops in the back while they are under fire.

Savage's screed, in fact, is rife with fascist "mobilizing passions" and themes, ranging from the "Dolchstosslegende" to the descriptions to liberals as vicious animals and vermin, as well as obsessing on their "conspiracy."

Savage is an outlier, of course: He's often dismissed as a fringe lunatic. This would be more credible a dismissal if he did not have a national audience in the millions, estimated at No. 3 behind Rush Limbaugh and "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger.

But Savage is hardly alone. Earlier this week, Limbaugh too was sounding the same themes, referring to Democrats as "the enemy" and sounding the following notes of bridge-building:

And, of course, the Democrats have gotta get it through their heads that they lost. If there's going to be some people crossing party lines, it's going to have to be them -- and that's because the president laid out his agenda today, and I think perhaps the most important thing he said in this press conference was -- and before he said it there was an implied, "You're not listening to me." He said, "I meant what I said." I didn't come here to bide my time. I came here to get things done. I'm laying out my agenda.

And what to do with those liberals who decline to "cross party lines"? Well, just eliminate them.

That at least seems to be the final solution proposed by a fellow named Mike Thompson, who recently published an essay in Human Events titled "Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal: It's Time to Reconfigure the United States".

It lays out a plan for expelling the hard-core Blue states from the Union, but spends most of its time excoriating liberalism in vicious terms:

For many decades, conservative citizens and like-minded political leaders (starting with President Calvin Coolidge) have been denigrated by the vilest of lies and characterizations from hordes of liberals who now won't even admit that they are liberals--because the word connotes such moral stink and political silliness. As a class, liberals no longer are merely the vigorous opponents of the Right; they are spiteful enemies of civilization's core decency and traditions.

Defamation, never envisioned by our Founding Fathers as being protected by the First Amendment, flourishes and passes today for acceptable political discourse. Movies, magazines, newspapers, radio/TV programs, plays, concerts, public schools, colleges, and most other public vehicles openly traffic in slander and libel. Hollywood salivated over the idea of placing another golden Oscar into Michael Moore's fat hands, for his Fahrenheit 9/11 jeremiad, the most bogus, deceitful film documentary since Herr Hitler and Herr Goebbels gave propaganda a bad name.

When they tire of showering conservative victims with ideological mud, liberals promote the only other subjects with which they feel conversationally comfortable: Obscenity and sexual perversion. It's as if the genes of liberals have rendered them immune to all forms of filth.

... The truth is, America is not just broken -- it is becoming irreparable. If you believe that recent years of uncivil behavior are burdensome, imagine the likelihood of a future in which all bizarre acts are the norm, and a government-booted foot stands permanently on your face.

That is why the unthinkable must become thinkable. If the so-called "Red States" (those that voted for George W. Bush) cannot be respected or at least tolerated by the "Blue States" (those that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry), then the most disparate of them must live apart -- not by secession of the former (a majority), but by expulsion of the latter. Here is how to do it.

Thompson goes on to lay out a plan of expulsion. The 12 states that must go: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. (It's hard to say why he omits other Blue states, such as Washington, which after all now has not only voted for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1988, it maintains an all-Democratic Senate delegation, and five of its eight congressional seats are held by Democrats as well. Perhaps because if he excluded all the Blue states, including ours, the America he envisions would have no ports on the Pacific.)

Of course, by calling it a "modest proposal" he deflects criticism of its noxious contents, since it's intended as Swiftian "satire" -- which, of course, it is not. Indeed, Thompson says so at the essay's outset:

As an admitted "modest proposal" (a la Swift's satiric story of the same name), it is nevertheless serious in pointing out the cancer that continues to threaten our body politic.]

Thompson's claim to be offering "satire" is akin to the Limbaugh/Coulter claim that their vicious attacks on liberals are really just meant to be humorous entertainment, when in fact they are clearly right-wing propaganda whose purpose is to demonize the left. Every word of Swift's "Modest Proposal" clearly was lodged between his tongue and his cheek; but Thompson's screed, like his talk-radio cohorts' "jokes," is deadly serious. He means every word of it -- but really, he's just kidding. Not. [For those who have read "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism," the modus operandi here should be familiar.]

Naming the enemy, identifying him for purposes of elimination and purification, is the clear theme here, and it is one the religious right in particular has been sounding since the election as well. The Los Angeles Times earlier this week ran an op-ed from a "Christian radio" talk-show host named Frank Pastore that denounced liberalism as "evil" and demanded that the victorious right refuse to compromise:

Christians, in politics as in evangelism, are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology.

In the weeks and months to come, we will hear the voices of well-meaning people beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished. This would be a mistake. Conservatives must not compromise with the left. Good people holding false ideas are won over only if we defeat what is false with the truth.

Pastore's description of the left makes clear that, in the Christian right's conception of the world, they are truly seen as demonic, while their own self-image is one in which they are only defending themselves from what it sees is a sustained assault:

The left bewitches with its potions and elixirs, served daily in its strongholds of academe, Hollywood and old media. It vomits upon the morals, values and traditions we hold sacred: God, family and country. As we learned Tuesday, it is clear the left holds the majority of Americans, the majority of us, in contempt.

Simply, a majority of Americans have rejected John Kerry and John Edwards and the left because they are wrong. They are wrong because there are not two Americas. We are one nation under a God they reject. We remain indivisible despite their attempts to divide Americans through their relentless warfare against class, ethnic and religious unity.

This fear of national decay, an outright assault on their own core values at the hands of godless liberalism, is essential to the Christian right's worldview, and understanding it is essential to comprehending the outcome of last week's election. As Mrs. Robinson explains in one of my comments threads:

Karen Armstrong says that the fear of cultural annihilation is THE mortal dread that lies at the very root of all fundamentalisms. This is what I'm also hearing in several of the above posts. Thanks for bringing it up. I think it's critical to our understanding of the situation.

What matters most to fundies -- more than their own lives, or those of their children, even -- is that their sacred traditions and way of life survive. Whether it's Arab nomads on the desert, or American farmers on their family land, it's all about being free to live like Grandpa did -- and perhaps more importantly, to ensure the survival of Grandpa's God. As irrational as it sounds to secular ears, these folks are gripped by a mortal panic that transcends anything we can imagine. They see themselves as surrounded, trapped -- brave, doomed warriors in a battle that has raged, and will rage, for generations.

This is because (as Armstrong also points out) fundamentalism is, in essence, a reaction against modernity. Fundamentalist movements have been a near-constant within all three major Western religions ever since the Enlightenment sun dawned on the modern world. Not everybody welcomed industrialization, science, reason, objective truth, natural rights, and constitutional democracy. Many people -- Muslim, Jew, and Christian -- felt that this "liberation" dis-enchanted the world, and drained it of its sacred juice. (Many of us spent the 60s and 70s trying to find that juice, and put it back in.) Our modern fundies are still fighting a rear-guard action, hoping to repeal the whole modern edifice and undo 250 years of human progress. For them, it's the only way to restore God's kingdom on Earth.

These are the "powers and principalities" they believe they are struggling against. The "reality-based" world we live in is one that they have never accepted, and never will. They are willing to die -- or kill -- to see it ended.

So when Pat Robertson gets on TV and seriously insists that American Christians are "the worst persecuted minority in the history of the world," it's not hyperbole, at least not in his mind. The Holocaust is a small skirmish in the centuries-long war he thinks he's fighting -- and he's sure he's going to win, because God is on his side.

One of the best examinations of the mindset that relies on mythopoeic heroism can be found in sociologist James A. Aho's text, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy. Aho describes the symbiotic relationship between heroism and enemy-naming:

The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self-aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least unconsciously. By the same token, the radical Zionist locks himself in perverse symbiosis with his Palestinian "persecutors," the Communist with his "imperialistic capitalist running dogs," the capitalist with his Communist "subversives."

In naming our own enemies, we go through a process of reification, that is, "the way in which people come perceive their own creations, incorrectly or falsely, as things for which they have no responsibility, over which they have no power." This process takes place through a series of steps: naming, or labeling; legitimation, that is, getting the label to stick; mythmaking, or elevating the subject to the level of monstrous evil; sedimentation, which is the spread of the myth across societies and generations; and ritual, by which the enemy is expunged, "with secrecy, caution, cunning, and, if necessary, cruelty."

Aho goes on to describe how the enemy is constructed in detail:

[W]hether embodied in thing or in person, the enemy in essence represents putrefaction and death: either its instrumentality, its location (dirt, filth, garbage, excrement), its carriers (vermin, pests, bacilli), or all of these together. ...

The enemy typically is experienced as issuing from the "dregs" of society, from its lower parts, the "bowels of the underworld." It is sewage from the gutter, "trash" excreted as poison from society's affairs -- church, school, workplace, and family.

The enemy's visitation on our borders is tantamount to impending pestilence. ... The enemy's presence in our midst is a pathology of the social organism serious enough to require the most far-reaching remedies: quarantine, political excision, or, to use a particularly revealing, expression, liquidation and expulsion. As another American broadsheet says regarding the "cancer" of homosexuality: "already countless young boys have been "infected." What is therefore needed is "immediate and systematic cauterization." The "operation as projected" will not be complete until "the whole sordid situation is cleared up, and the premises thoroughly cleansed and disinfected. This is what we demand, and this is what we expect." [The paper in question, incidentally, is the Idaho Statesman in 1964, cited in John Gerassi's The Boys of Boise (New York: Macmillan, 1966). -- ed.]

What's noteworthy in all this is that This Thing of Darkness was an examination of right-wing extremism and the dynamic in the American body politic that creates it. Aho's previous work, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (1991), was the first (and as far as I know, still the only) serious sociological study of right-wing extremism that created a substantive database of information about the beliefs and backgrounds of followers of the Aryan Nations and related "Christian Patriot" groups. The later study, published in 1994, was an attempt to come to terms with the dynamics underlying such cases as the Weavers at Ruby Ridge and the murders of the Goldmark family.

What Aho describes is a dynamic latent in all sectors of American society but which finds a virulent expression in right-wing extremism. The dynamic he describes is one in which both sides -- the heroic exemplars the far right and their named "enemies," that is, Jews, civil-rights advocates and the government -- essentially exchange roles in their respective perceptions; the self is always heroic, the other always the enemy. Each sees the other as the demonic enemy, feeding the others' fears and paranoias in an increasingly threatening spiral that eventually breaks out in the form of real violence.

Ten years later, it's clear that the hero/enemy dynamic is in play not just on the far right but on the mainstream right. To the extent that we continue to hear this theme trumpeted more and more by movement conservatives, the more they continue on the track towards fascism.

Aho does, however, also argue for a way to escape this dynamic, to break the cycle. And it requires, on the part of those seeking to oppose this kind of extremism, a recognition of their own propensity toward naming the enemy and adopting the self-aggrandizing pose of the hero:

As Ernest Becker has convincingly shown, the call to heroism still resonates in modern hearts. However, we are in the habit of either equating heroism with celebrity ("TV Actress Tops List of Students' Heroes") or caricaturing the hero as a bluff-and-swagger patriot/soldier making the world safe for, say, Christian democracy. In these ways heroism is portrayed as a rather happy if not entirely risk-free venture that earns one public plaudits. Today we are asked to learn that, in the deepest and truest sense. Heroism is really none of these things, but a largely private vocation requiring stamina, discipline, responsibility, and above all courage. Not just the ascetic courage to cleanse our personal lives of what we have been taught is filth, or even less to cleanse society of the alleged carriers of this filth, but, as Jung displayed, the fortitude to release our claim on moral purity and perfection. At a personal and cultural level, I believe this is the only way to transcend the logic of enemies.

For all of its logic and love of science, modern liberalism is weighed down by its most consistent flaw: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority. (Not, of course, that conservatives are any better in this regard; factoring in the religious right and the "moral values" vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment and love of tolerance are maddeningly and disturbingly intolerant of the "ignorance" of their rural counterparts. It's not an omnipresent attitude, but it is pervasive enough that rural dwellers' perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There's a similar stigma attached to religious beliefs as well, especially among the more secular liberals, and that in turn has given birth to a predictable counter-reaction that is only partially misunderstanding.

If we want to look at all those red counties and come to terms with the reasons for them, it's important to come to terms with our own prejudices and willingness to treat our fellow Americans -- the ones who are not like us -- with contempt and disrespect.

If we want to know why we are being told, "We don't like you," that's a good place to start. Likewise the increasingly common expressions of utter hatred for all things liberal.

That's not to suggest that we respond to such provocations with touchy-feely attempts at "reaching out" to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Indeed, it's vital to fight back. But if progressives want to win, they need to break this dynamic; and to do that, some self-reflection will go a long way.

Respecting those from rural areas, those who hold deep religious beliefs, doesn't force progressives to compromise their own beliefs or standards. It simply means being part of a democracy, which is enriched by its diversity. Certainly traditional rural values should have a place among all that diversity that liberals are fond of celebrating.

Because until they learn to accord it that respect, they are doomed to remain trapped in the vicious cycle being fueled on both sides. Obviously, conservatives have no incentive to do so. For liberals, it may be a matter of survival -- especially if the rabid right's fantasies ever come to fruition.

[I'll have some more thoughts on how progressives can cultivate a real rural revival, and more on why they should, later this week.]