Conservatives recently gathered at a large conference to deliver a yearly report to one another on the state of the nation. Though the president was invited---and lauded---last year, they didn't see fit to invite the still decidedly conservative<fn> current president this year. It is more than mildly appalling to watch, however, as one commentator after another blithely acts as if conservatism had had nothing to with the ruling of the country for the last three decades or so. Though fiscal policy wasn't exactly liberal under Carter, Reagan really got the ball rolling with his purportedly conservative programs when elected for the first time in 1982. Though objectively difficult to characterize Reagan's policies as conservative---he doubled the national debt and ballooned deficits over his eight years in office---he is touted as an icon of the conservative movement. He did much to abolish more social-leaning programs and helped usher in a much more unfettered capitalism. Perhaps it is this ability for the already affluent to increase their wealth and power that so-called conservatives find so appealing, but they are most assuredly not paragons of self-reliant virtue. In almost every way, those at the top of the heap in America achieved their position through graft, lobbying, outright bribery, corruption or scandalous subsidy---often inventive combinations of many of these. Inconvenient laws were repealed, tax breaks were created, entire industries survived only on government largesse (the military, the nation's food infrastructure, the highways, the prison industry and others) and we ended up with the America we see before us today: one with far more people in prison, an enormous trade imbalance, a shattered economy, a uselessly extended military with an unsustainable budget, shriveled social programs that pale in comparison to anything available in countries of comparable stature and development, an education system in near ruin and a non-existent health care and social safety net for a truly staggeringly large proportion of the populace. And yet, it seems that there's always that last niggling bit of liberalism that is to blame. War and military occupation is championed as if there were no moral qualms about it, a financial crisis is reported as if it just "happened" rather than was perpetrated, and yet the media is considered to have a liberal bias. Welfare rolls are down by over 90% in dozens of states in the last several years---benefits that pay out all of $280 per month for three people---and yet it's those lazy poor people that are our undoing. The unions, whose rolls have steadily declined over the last 30 years and now comprise but 7% of the private workforce in America are to blame for the downfall of otherwise robust American industries (it couldn't possibly be idiotic ideas like outsourcing or a management that thinks only one fiscal quarter into the future). No matter how much power the conservative movement---usually represented by the Republicans, but also well-championed by the Democrats---acquired, they constantly portrayed themselves as the underdog, fighting against an overwhelmingly liberal establishment that would turn America into an SSR<fn> if it could. We've spent decades now watching them cherry-pick Adam Smith to enact policy that was to have global benefit as a side-effect of the extremely private benefit for themselves and their cronies that was the primary aim. We accepted decades of pablum about self-reliance while they got fat on no-bid, cost-plus contracts fueled by our taxes. They managed to keep the machine going well enough for enough people that we didn't complain that they always did at least 100 times better---because we were too comfortable to rise up against the injustice. Why bother when there's so much good stuff on TV? But their plan was always to bleed us dry; perhaps they believed their own bullshit, but an objective look at their policy could only come to the conclusion that it was an extremely short-sighted plan to transfer the massive wealth of a nation into individual pockets. How else does one explain an entire class of people voting to avoid regulating a part of the economy that had ballooned to 1/3 of the GDP when a single paragraph's explanation of how it worked sounds so blatantly criminal even an eight-year--old would get it? Whether it was stupidity or corruption or a healthy mix of both is not the point. The point is that those that call themselves conservative have had pretty much everything go their way for 30 years now and their experiment is grinding to a halt whose wreckage will encompass millions of innocents before it is over. We have enough data, in the parlance of science, in order to form a conclusion. The article, <a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/03/03/on-moderation/" source="Time Magazine" author="Joe Klein">On Moderation</a> puts it this way: <bq>We are at the end of a 30-year period of radical conservatism, a period so right-wing that many of those now considered "liberals"--like, say, Barack Obama--would be seen as moderate pantywaists in the great sweep of modern political history. The past 30 years have been such a violent departure from the norm, such a profound destruction of the basic functions of government, that a major rectification is called for now--in rebalancing the system of taxation toward progressivity, in rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, not just physically, but also socially and intellectually.</bq> The first half of that statement is clear to anyone even partially informed about American history, and Obama is extremly conservative on an absolute scale. Compared to most of the rest of Congress, he's not even very liberal. But, since he's a Democrat, this idiotic way of thinking that we've come to accept---you guessed it, in the last 30 years---is that he must be all pink<fn> under that black skin of his. The second half presupposes that we as a people don't like the direction in which the country is headed, that we don't like where we will most likely be in five years or so. That further presupposes that we believe the forecasts of those most schooled in making such predictions: scientists. There are still many Americans more-or-less untouched by the crisis thus far and they are being slowly---but easily---convinced that the current crisis is, in fact, a failure of liberalism, not conservatism.<fn> In fact, it is a failure to have applied conservative principles stringently enough because of an incipient liberalism that thwarted the conservative movement at every step of the way. The argumention is found in nearly every nook and cranny of American policy. For example, the war in Iraq is such a long and drawn-out affair because American liberals failed to believe strongly enough that it would result in a swift victory<fn> for America and that it is this negativity and general panty-waistedness that hampers America at every turn. Why is the economy sinking? Because Obama didn't include enough tax cuts in the bailout package <i>and that's the only reason</i>. Even near history no longer exists because even near history is unpleasantly unhelpful to conservatism. The memory hole<fn> is alive and well and eats everything; the blogging community may think that it has defeated the memory hole with their recording machine called the Internet, where nothing ever disappears, but they don't realize that <i>no one is reading their blogs</i>. Liberal screeds<fn> bounce around an echo chamber and utterly fail to influence real opinion because they are not bound into the only system that matters: the one ruled by dollars and cents. As the conservative plan rolled forward and came to its inevitable conclusion---the gloriously stable and healthy society you see before you today---it has had to become ever more aggressive with its control over the message, lest the sheep look up and notice that there is, perhaps, something amiss. Luckily, the plan ran long enough that most of the sheep ended up with a sub-standard education---especially in the areas of filtering, assimilating and evaluating media---and rely almost exclusively on a very small set of sources for their opinion. Coupled with a deeply instilled anti-intellectualism that encourages little thought about weighty issues and ridicule of those that attempt to do so, control over the few remaining media outlets suffices to retain control over public opinion. And so, we've arrived at the situation in America today, where the economy is falling apart faster than during the Great Depression, people's lives will change in utterly unforeseeable ways---for them, at least, because they're not interested in "foreseeing" anything---and not many people know enough to be able to say why and, most importantly, avoid making the same mistakes again. They will elect the exact same crooks<fn> for the exact same reasons again, believing the exact same lies. They are, after all, utterly unequipped for making any other decision. Even the most intelligent and rational of people will draw mind-bogglingly ludicrous conclusions when fed bad data for long enough. As we say in the world of software: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). The fact is that the America of 2009 is a decidedly conservative invention; just the degree to which is differs from the truly liberal societies of Europe is proof enough. The current administration is not socialist; they are not even left-wing. They are just less right-wing than the pseudo-fascism of the Bush administration. Even their proposed "solution" to the financial crisis is mostly conservative in nature; a liberal proposal would have included 0% tax cuts instead of 40%. There is nothing remotely socialist about giving public money to private corporations without obligation. That is robber-baron behavior, not creeping socialism. The poor will bear the brunt of this policy as well, all the more so once the programs the conservatives spent three decades starving are eliminated for good. The fortunes of the rich will have been drastically reduced but they will still be astronomically richer than the rest of us. Perhaps the revolution that will ensue when people finally have nothing left to sacrifice on the altar of conservatism will finally be some form of social change but, knowing the Idiocracy toward which America is hurtling, I wouldn't hold my breath. <hr> <ft>Yes, for the millionth time, his policies are, on the whole, conservative. Consider an alternate history where McCain was elected president: how would his policies have differed in handling the financial meltdown? How much do Obama's policies differ from those of Bush? They both gave out about a trillion bucks---can you really call one a conservative and the other a socialist without losing all of your credibility?</ft> <ft>Soviet Socialist Republic</ft> <ft>Which any doctor will tell you is true, but the allusion here is to his being a "pinko Commie rat" in the parlance of the Red Scare of the 50's, another shining beacon of conservatism in America's history. It is, in fact, arguable, that the U.S. has <i>never</i> had a liberal public policy, but that's an argument for another day and another article.</ft> <ft>Just today, in fact, the New York Times, that bastion of liberalism, has already dared to wonder aloud whether we've turned the corner on the financial crisis, exhibiting the same blindly idiotic optimism they did with Bush's war in Iraq.</ft> <ft>And that furthermore the definition of "victory" would also have resolved itself to be pleasing to all the important involved parties (Iraqis excluded, of course).</ft> <ft>For those unfamiliar with the book, <i>1984</i>: the memory hole was the incinerator down which unsavory and conflicting documentation was thrown.</ft> <ft>Like this one, granted.</ft> <ft>I wanted to say idiots, but they're more criminal than idiotic because, after all, their plan worked: they're on their third trophy wife with millions stashed away around the world. At this point, we can only hope for the complete collapse of the dollar out of spite.</ft>