Ayn Rand, Objectivism and the Carceral State

Hola Everybody,
I’m always amazed when I listen to people cite Ayn Rand. I often wonder if such people have ever critically appraised her work. I have… and this I know: she has no business being quoted by those opposed to the racist criminal justice system.

Whose Freedom?

When I was growing up, reading Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zino’yevna) was a family tradition. It was required reading in the Rosario household. My father would often give each one of us something to read and then we would have to discuss it critically. He also made me read Walt Whitman and other American transcendentalists -- which was probably an antithesis of Rand’s “objectivism.” Looking back, I see he was trying to show me how to think critically -- how to hold two opposing ideas at once and come away with something of value and original.

I think Rand appeals to young people because it is a juvenile and self-contradictory philosophy. In fact, previous posts of mine have been a refutation of Rand’s “philosophy.”¹ Her epistemology has been taken apart by others (also here and here), no need to revisit that here. I mention Rand because a keynote speaker at awards dinner celebrating formerly incarcerated people and their struggle to dismantle the criminal justice system, liberally quoted Rand. I found this to be disturbing, as Rand’s ideas and philosophy actually contribute to the root causes of mass incarceration.

Ayn Rand was a racist and her philosophy of Objectivism has largely escaped critical analysis because Rand was a sloppy and clumsy thinker. Her most important doctrines were based on little more than a play on words, and even when her conclusions were correct, she was often right for the wrong reasons. As a result, there is quite a bit of truth to Objectivism, but it is so inextricably bound with falsehoods and errors that it is in many respects a compilation of half-truths.

In the following, I try to show why her philosophy has no place in the criminal justice reform/ abolition arena.

First, let point out that Rand was an unapologetic racist and champion of some of the foundational pillars of racialized social control: capitalism and white supremacy. I refuse to link to the essay, “Racism,” because it is only found on white supremacist sites, but here are some of Ayn Rand’s ideas on racism:

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

If I closed my eyes I would swear this was some hate-talk radio host disguising rightwing racism as an economic philosophy.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade.

Yeah, and it gave us shit like chattel slavery.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement.  There are only individual minds and individual achievements -- and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Well, she just said a big “fuck you” to the civil rights movement. Shut down that goddamned African American museum!

Last, but not least, here’s a good one that could’ve been lifted from news headlines about the right wing today:

This accumulation of contradictions, of short-sighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders... Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia's major cities, etc.

According to Ayn Rand, the demands by these blacks are the epitome of it all. Blacks in the Civil Rights movement who were fighting for equality and diversity in schools, they're not just like the worst racist totalitarian regimes, they're much much worse. Sounds like a sensible, totally not racist basis upon which to form a political philosophy, huh?

However, the way that Rand, and other like-minded thinkers, defined freedom was also dangerous.

Redefining Freedom

In the 1950s, both Rand and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek proposed a new vision of freedom. Their freedom was more a negative type freedom. They asserted that self-interest controlled all human behavior, and the only true measure of what was best for individuals were their belongings or what they were attempting to accumulate. This “market” of getting and hoarding, acted out simultaneously by millions of people in a society as complex and huge as the United States, for example, produced hundreds of millions of individual “decisions” every moment. Hayek suggested there existed a force of nature, the product and consequences of all these individual buying and selling behaviors, which he called the “free market.” At the same time, Ayn Rand’s hugely popular novels, the Fountainhead and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, championed a philosophy of an enlightened self-interest similar to von Hayek’s.

Freedom was being redefined.

Instead of being a collaborative effort, the result of society working together to provide for the basic needs of the individual, the family, and society, freedom was now being refashioned as the individual’s ability and right to act in his or her total freedom for selfish self-fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations). Freedom was a negative force in the worldview of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the Chicago School of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand’s objectivism. This freedom was more of a freedom “from” than a freedom “to”: freedom from social obligation, freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection (now perceived as “interference”); freedom to consider one’s needs and wants, because if each individual followed his selfish desires, the mass of individuals acting in concert in a “free market” would result in a utopia.

This vision claims to be the true vision of a free world. Rand and other thinkers like her claimed that a world where government limited nothing but violence and all markets were free -- market here meaning the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations) -- had never before been attempted. Their opponents, progressives and liberals, pointed out that their system had in fact been tried many times throughout history, and was the history of the most chaotic eras of every civilization. Lacking a true social contract and interdependence, these societies were characterized by physical and economic violence. In this social schematic, those most willing and able to plunder would rise to the top of the economic heap. In the past, they were rightfully called robber barons.

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, think tanks funded by wealthy individuals and multinational corporations joined forces with obedient politicians to win the “battle of ideas.” Greed, combined with a blind belief in free markets, was their dogma. This movement brought into power both the feeble-minded Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Reagan would oversee the greatest exchange of wealth and the destruction of Labor. Both Thatcher and Reagan would turn government into a force against labor, both busting powerful unions in their respective countries. Both “freed” markets by dropping tariffs and undoing regulations. In both instances, industry fled both countries, to wherever labor was cheapest, and the middle class was fucked without so much as a kiss.

This new economic religion would be used in Chile with disastrous results. Poverty and wealth gaps would increase dramatically and the privatization of the social security system threw even more people into abject poverty. Of course, a few bankers, industrialists, and politicians became wealthy.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, not satisfied with the failures their policies created in Chile, would apply this system with equally disastrous results in Russia. Undaunted and in need of a new country to experiment on, they found an ally with George W. Bush, whose entire cabinet was made up of people who shared the von Hayek/ Rand worldview. The result, as we all have seen, has been a failure of historic proportions. Well-paying jobs were replaced with jobs that demanded workers ask the question, “Do you want fries with that?” with social mobility dropping and wealth gaps increasing to levels not seen for over a hundred years.

This is where we are living today and there are people still demanding we continue on this road -- the road to neo-slavery.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Notes:

1. I’ll simply offer the following, as there is way too much fallacious thinking in Rand’s work to document in a short blog (or even a thick book):

Ayn Rand. She relies on absolute self-certainty where she should be relying on well-reasoned arguments. One problem here is doing this often resembles well-thought-out, consistent philosophy, but in terms of actual philosophy, it amounts to nothing more than polemics and screeds. From her writings, all that can be logically deduced are her opinions, yet I have no doubt that Rand dislikes Marxism, nor do I doubt her love of Capitalism. Another problem is that assuming the certainty of your conclusions is simply poorly-executed philosophy -- every philosopher must be willing to accept that they could be wrong about their conclusions, or else they are not doing philosophy. 

For, example, her well-documented ideological struggle against Marxism undermines her own argument. The Marxist dialectic underpins the Continental approach to philosophy. If we are to take Rand's conclusions seriously, which is to say that if we take her particular anti-Marxism to be the point she is making, then she is using the Marxist dialectic to completely disavow Marxism, thus ending the dialectic. There are two problems with this. First, her work would be little more than her bid to be the "the champion of all philosophical discourse", and second, there are still way too many questions left unanswered for us to stop doing philosophy.

So frankly, she has written nothing particularly philosophically interesting or compelling.

Ron Paul and the Downsizing of Freedom

Yesterday I received the great news that I have been offered the job I consider my “dream” job. It’s a welcome (if a little scary) departure from the direct services/ program development I’ve been involved with for the last fifteen years, but I am totally psyched. Truth be told, I’ve been burned out on the services side, it just takes too much out of you. Now, I’ll be able to concentrate on research and social policy advocacy that can have a systemic impact.

On another note, the offer couldn’t have come at a better time, as my financial situation had reached critical stage about a month ago… Yes!

* * *

We’re all Austrians now…

 -- Ron Paul, during post-Iowa Caucus speech

Much has been written about Ron Paul’s “honesty” and adherence to libertarian ideology since he has surged (somewhat) in the reality show/ clown care debacle also known as the Republican Primary. Paul is kookier than a Laoruche fan on crack, but that doesn’t mean shit these days. Two major influences on Paul are Ayn Rand, the cult figure, former Hollywood hack-turned-novelist, and Austrian economist, Frederick von Hayek. American libertarianism would be unthinkable without Ayn Rand’s influence. Even an establishment conservative like Rush Limbaugh has occasionally shown signs of having been influenced by Rand’s ideas, albeit indirectly, through second or third-hand sources. His attempt to defend the “greed” of the eighties borrows heavily from Rand. Before Rand, only a handful of iconoclasts and other eccentrics would have dared defend greed in public.

Rand’s followers, who often come off as cultists (as do Ron Paul fanatics) attempt to paint her philosophy as grounded in logic and reason, but nothing could be further from the truth. Her understanding of the mechanics of the human brain, or the role of emotions, for example, has nothing to do with modern science or empirical research.

When I was growing up, reading Alisa Zino’yevna (aka Ayn Rand) was almost a family tradition. It was necessary reading in our household. My father would often give each one of us something to read and then we would have to discuss it critically. He also encouraged me to read Walt Whitman and other American transcendentalists -- which was probably the antithesis of Rand’s “objectivism.” Looking back, I see he was trying to show me how to think critically -- how to hold two opposing ideas at once and come away with something of value and original.

I think Rand appeals to young people because it is a philosophy mired in the lower levels of moral reasoning. It appeals to young people because it addresses an immature, self-centered slice of life. In fact, previous posts of mine have been a refutation of Rand’s “philosophy.” Her epistemology has been taken apart by others, no need to revisit that here. I mention Rand today because she connects to the first part of my series on the history of humankind’s struggle to define freedom.

By the 1950s, both fascism and its antithesis, communism, had redefined freedom, but largely failed to deliver anything resembling freedom when implemented by the likes of Stalin and Mussolini. A ramped up Cold War with the Soviet Union was being waged and the biggest thing then was the Red Scare (communists were the Muslims in the 1950s) and the threat of nuclear war. Unbelievably, people were actually buying “bunkers” to protect themselves from radioactive fallout in those days. Today, we’re bombing innocent people in bunkers in far off lands.

In the 1950s, both Rand and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek proposed a new vision of freedom. Their freedom was more of a negative type freedom. They asserted that self-interest controlled all human behavior, and the only true measure of what was best for individuals were their belongings or what they were attempting to accumulate. This “market” of getting and hoarding, acted out simultaneously by millions of people in a society as complex and huge as the United States, for example, produced hundreds of millions of individual “decisions” every moment. Hayek suggested there existed a force of nature, the product and consequences of all these individual buying and selling behaviors, which he called the “free market.” At the same time, Ayn Rand’s hugely popular novels, the Fountainhead and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, championed a philosophy of greed and an enlightened self-interest similar to von Hayek’s.

Freedom was being redefined.

Instead of being a collaborative effort, the result of a society working together to provide for the basic needs of the individual, the family, and society, freedom was now being reconceptualized as the individual’s ability and right to act in his or her total freedom for selfish self-fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations). Freedom was a negative force in the worldview of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the Chicago School of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand’s objectivism. This freedom was more of a freedom “from” than a freedom “to”: freedom from social obligation, freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection (now perceived as “interference” or “serfdom”); freedom to consider one’s needs and wants, because if each individual followed his selfish desires, the mass of individuals acting in concert in a “free market” would result in a utopia.

Shades of Thomas Friedman! The world is flat, burn the fuckin’ olive tree and hock the goddamned Lexus!

This vision claims to be the true vision of a free world. Its creators claimed that a world where government limited nothing but violence and all markets were free -- market here meaning the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations) -- had never before been attempted. Their opponents, progressives and liberals, pointed out that their system had in fact been tried many times throughout history, and was the history of every civilization of the most chaotic eras (feudal times comes to mind). Lacking a true social contract and interdependence, these societies were characterized by physical and economic violence. In this social schematic, those most willing and able to plunder would rise to the top of the economic heap. In the past, they were rightfully called robber barons and today are diagnosed as sociopaths.

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, think tanks funded by wealthy individuals and multinational corporations joined forces with subservient politicians to win the “battle of ideas.” Greed, combined with a blind belief in free markets, was their dogma. This movement brought into power both the feeble-minded Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Reagan would oversee the greatest redistribution of wealth and the destruction of Labor. Both Thatcher and Reagan would turn government into a force against labor, both busting powerful unions in their respective countries. Both “freed” markets by dropping tariffs and undoing regulations. In both instances, industry fled both countries, to wherever labor was cheapest, and the middle class was rudely bent over and fucked without so much as a kiss.

This new economic religion would be put into operation in Chile with disastrous results. Poverty and wealth gaps would increase dramatically and the privatization of the social security system threw even more people into abject poverty. Of course, a few bankers, industrialists, and politicians became wealthy.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” not satisfied with the failures their policies created in Chile, would apply this system with equally disastrous results in Russia. Undaunted and in need of a new country to experiment on, they found a series of willing dupes starting with the inept Ronald Reagan on through to George W. Bush, whose entire cabinet was made up of people who shared the von Hayek/ Rand worldview. The result, as we all have seen, has been a failure of historic proportions. Well-paying jobs were replaced with jobs whose only requirement was that workers ask the question, “Do you want fries with that?”and with social mobility dropping and wealth gaps increasing to levels not seen for over a hundred years.

This is where we are living today and there are people still demanding we continue on this road to serfdom.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Looneytarians

Hola mi Gente…

Let’s be clear: the harsh, punitive “voter ID laws” being passed throughout mostly southern states are nothing but a blatant attempt at a new Jim Crow. The menace here is voter suppression, not voter fraud, which is almost nonexistent. In South Carolina alone, there are over 80,000 registered African Americans who would be disenfranchised by the voter laws passed there

* * *

 

[Several months ago, I wrote the following for an online magazine I am no longer affiliated with. It's about the underlying premises of conservative and libertarian thought. Essentially, people like Ron Paul don’t trust human nature and what is a democratic experiment if not the collective expression of human nature?]

If you listen -- really listen -- to the underlying beliefs of many people, you’re immediately confronted with common assumptions about human nature that in actuality have no grounding in reality (or are at least empirically baseless). This is far from an academic exercise; the basic assumptions drive our economic policies, for example, and are often used as rationales for zero-sum societies (winners take all), and, most of all, justification for austerity measures and brutal wars that impact, for the most part, innocent women and children.

This false portrait of humankind feeds both a dangerous reverence for dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of powerless in the face of holy market forces that must be obeyed no matter the cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe, or gross economic injustice.

Its roots lie in the gloomy conservative worldview of an essentially brutish human nature needing to be tamed. Conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and explain away the social destruction wreaked by unrestrained greed, simply invented whole-cloth concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem inevitable.

The irony in all this is that this authoritarian Kool-Aid is swallowed whole by so-called libertarians. You hear it all the time that human nature is selfish, war-like, brutal. Of course, the theory that we have a “selfish” gene is just that, a theory, founded upon absolutely no evidence. Yet it is propagated as if it is the gospel truth. As social scientist Riane Eisler, who in her seminal work, The Chalice and the Blade (1990) (and her later work) successfully dismantled this view, stated:

I don't want to lump every single sociobiologist into the same category, but the kind of sociobiological theories that tend to get popularized present what I call a dominator way of relating as the only human possibility. This is the model of human relations, as I describe in my work, in which males are ranked over females; violence and abuse are systemic and institutionalized; the social structure is hierarchic and authoritarian; and coercion is a major element in sexuality. And it's all supposed to be just human nature.

The ugly, empirically invalid portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses unemotional reason to reach pre-determined ends. This is the widely discredited but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another nuance, which some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those pre-determined ends are always selfish or self-interested. This myth is what is at the heart of so-called libertarian and conservative worldviews, popularized in economic terms by historical ignoramuses such as Ayn Rand and Hayek (and their progeny: Friedman, Greenspan et al.).

We are rats, these conservatives say.

As Eisler conclusively demonstrates, however, virtually every field within the human sciences has found that we are nothing like that. Cutting-edge neuropsychological investigations show that because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can (and do) act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not isolated, but interconnected in many ways. Yes, we are competitive, but we are also cooperative. Reason and emotion are intertwined. There’s no such thing as reason detached from emotion. We don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.

The notion that there is no such thing as altruism is based on the neo-Darwinian theory of kin selection. In other words, if you do something altruistic, you’re protecting your genes so you can pass them on. Well, what about the people in Nazi Germany who took in Jews, total strangers, knowing that not only they but their whole families would be killed if they were discovered? Where is the kin selection there? This notion just doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny.

Darwin also wrote a little book called Descent of Man, in which he very explicitly stated that natural selection, random selection, survival of the fittest, simply do not apply as the only factors, and certainly not as the primary factors, when it comes to human evolution. There is also the very important factor that he called “the moral sense.”

Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, the narrative of human nature as intrinsically evil is still the dominant prevailing religious and scientific narrative championing “original sin” and “selfish genes.” These also present male dominance as justified by either God or evolution (talk about irony), though scholars from many disciplines tell us a different story of our cultural origins.

From a scientific perspective, the invention of tools does not begin with the discovery that we can use bones, stones, or sticks to kill one another. It begins much earlier, with the use of sticks and stones to dig up roots (which chimpanzees still do) and continues with the fashioning of ways to carry food other than with bare hands (simple vegetable slings and baskets) and of mortars and other tools to soften foods.

In this story, the evolution of hominid, and then human, culture also follows more than one path. We have alternatives. We can organize relations in ways that reward violence and domination. But, as some of our earliest art suggests, we can also recognize our essential interconnection with one another and the rest of the living world.

In his recent book, The Fair Society (2011), biologist Peter Corning writes:

Contrary to the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where everybody’s basic needs are met… where there is a robust sense of ‘reciprocity’ -- a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.

Corning’s provocative challenge is this: what if we’re wrong simply to resign ourselves to the notion that human nature is essentially destructive and war-like? What if we have the power -- and more importantly, the duty (the moral obligation) -- to change society for the better?

As cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff (2008) have been advising us for some time, it is impossible to advance a progressive social vision using false frames of reference clothed as unbiased scholarship. Assumptions that, by the way, rule out a fair, progressive, and democratic society.

Lynn Stout demolishes the concept of human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards in her book, Cultivating Conscience (2010). She shows that the lonely, selfish, hyper-individualistic creature invented by conservative propagandists is actually a myth. That view, Stout correctly observes, “implies we are psychopaths.” I would add that the sociopath is the ideal of the conservative/ libertarian worldview.

Rather than depend on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout argues, we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Using empirical studies from culled from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues -- ideas about others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others -- play a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior.

It should come as no surprise that corporations and the financial elite have funded the decades-long effort to convince Americans our nature is intrinsically evil. Rational choice theory, a theory that postulates that people working separately to pursue their ego-centered needs creates the ideal society (a libertarian talking point, BTW), has held sway over economics and political science and has redefined the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity. It was also used to redefine “freedom” as a fundamental aspect of greed (George Lakoff, 2007). When applied to corporations, the theory exempts them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their shareholder. Today, that corporation is considered a legal (if fictitious) entity. Or, as Mitt Romney succinctly put it, “Corporations are people [too].”

As a former scam artist, I have to admit that this has been the greatest scam ever in the history of humankind. The wholesale acceptance of the idea that there is a moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large, is almost too ugly to countenance. But this ideology is what supports our current political system -- this false and destructive view of our own natures. In fact, this scam has succeeded to the point that many so-called libertarians, “independents,” progressives (many of whom like to make fun of the rest of us unwashed masses) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

This particular form of pathology can be found in so-called progressives who support the racist, feudalistic policies of Ron Paul. Libertarianism is nothing more than feudalism in that both depend on decentralization, rigid local hierarchies, a martial culture of honor, a strong religious caste system to keep everyone in their place, isolationist trade/ foreign policies, and the lack of a middle-class tax base that would demand social services and a representation in government affairs.

To paraphrase Einstein, the same consciousness that is part of the problem cannot be used as a solution. A society organized around the values generated by an evolved consciousness look radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves. But before that can happen, you have to disabuse yourself of the myths of human nature.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

References

Corning, P. A. (2011). The fair society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (click here)

Eisler, R. (1990). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. New York: HarperOne. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2007). Whose freedom?: The battle over America's most important idea. New York: Macmillan. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2008). The political mind: Why you can't understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain. New York: Penguin. (click here)

Stout, L. A. (2010). Cultivating conscience: How good laws make good people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (click here)

Cuckoos and Neocons

¡Hola! Everybody...
If you’re throwing stones at Ines Sainz (for having to experience sexual harassment), then perhaps you suffer from a rape mentality. I’m sorry, what a woman wears never excuses sexually predatory behavior. Besides, sexual harassment and rape are still against the law.

* * *

-=[ Of Cuckoos & Neocons ]=-

Facts are stupid things.

-- Ronald Reagan, 1988

The best analogy I’ve heard regarding the neoconservative movement is the one using the nesting habits of the cuckoo bird comparison. Cuckoos employ a rather interesting reproductive strategy involving what is known as “nest parasitism.” Briefly, the female cuckoo lays an egg in the nest of another species of bird (after first removing an egg from the host’s nest). Upon hatching, the baby cuckoo goes on to banish the remaining eggs and hatchlings of the host, at which point it becomes the sole focus of the host parent’s interest.

By now you’re probably asking why the host parents don’t push out the alien egg before the troubles begin, or at the very least abandon the parasitic baby cuckoo once it has grown to a size far larger than host parents themselves.

The problem, of course, is that birds lack the thinking skills necessary to recognize the parasite. They take note of the eggs, of the sight of a baby bird’s features and cries, and follow a “care for egg/hatchling in nest” instinctual pattern. It does not demand much of a masquerade on the part of the cuckoo to abuse the host’s instincts. All that is necessary is the initial neural imprinting by the parent host on the baby parasite’s signals.

One cannot help but be struck by the remarkable parallels between the nesting line of attack of the cuckoo and the infiltration of the conservative movement beginning in the 1970s by the neo-conservatives or “neocons.”

Just as the parasitical cuckoo bird ingratiates itself into the nest of an unsuspecting host, eventually driving out the rightful offspring, so did the neocons come to dominate, to the point of exclusion, what passes today for “conservatism” and “the right.”

Intelligent men and women assure me that there are reasonable conservatives capable of logic, so this will be the only point I will cede on their behalf. I’m told by good sources that republicans were once conservatives -- a political philosophy which literally encompasses the notion of conservation. Those Republicans wanted to conserve important things -- like the public infrastructure, the rule of law, public education, and even our environment. During the last 30 years, though, like my cuckoo birds, the GOP has systematically dumped these classic conservatives from office, replacing them with right-wing, laissez-faire parasites. The neoconservative movement, which bloomed during the Reagan years, is a warped mutation of true conservative ideals. Furthermore, neo-conservatism grew out of racist and classist ideology. Modern conservatism is characterized by a resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality; and some of the common psychological factors linked to it include fear and aggression, dogmatism, and an intolerance of ambiguity.

First, I have to begin with the Biggest Lie -- the myth of Ronald Reagan. I have had it up to here

::grabs testicles::

... with the constant idolization of what was in fact an incompetent (and very likely cognitively impaired) president. In the pantheon of the neocon iconography, Reagan is only slightly lower than the Baby Jesus.

Even Reagan disciples like David Stockman have long since admitted that no one was home at the Reagan White House, that then-Vice President George Bush the Elder was out of the loop, and who today in the right mind could deny that the “Trickle Down” approach to tax reform was a disaster? Today, the Randroids, starting with Greenspan, admit those policies were ineffective and destructive. Even Reagan shill Peggy Noonan admitted in her book “What I Saw at the Revolution,” that he didn’t “really hear very much,” and that his appearance of constant good humor was connected to his deafness. He missed much of what was not said directly to him, but he assumed it was good.

In other words, he was not all there -- nobody home!

Now, I don’t say this to poke fun at a very serious disease, Alzheimer’s. I know people struggle with this disease and I am aware of the suffering it entails. However, we had a president who was quite likely not all there and his adherents constantly attempt to paint him as something great when in actuality, he set in motion many of the dynamics that have contributed to the collapse we’re now experiencing. It didn’t start with Bush the Younger, it started with Reagan.

Hopefully, historians will prove less easily convinced, I dunno...

Love,

Eddie