A Blight On Humanity

Paul Krugman has a short but withering post about the fraud that was American conservatism. Riffing off a link to Crooked Timber, which has Richard Posner becoming the latest conservative to jump the movement’s ship, Krugman writes:

And yet – why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

Why, indeed, would anyone pretend there is any shred of credibility in anyone who found the Gingrich and Bush eras credible? But Krugman gets to the real point in the next paragraph:

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back – and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.

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  1. . . . the conservative movement represents the psychopath within us all, and if we allow it merely lay dormant for a few years or retreat to lick its wounds, we’ll be dealing with people who make the Bushies look like the quaint old time of Eisenhower.

    That means we need prosecutions for torture, and lying us into a war. That means we need to conceivably have some hammers and some nails around for the coffin of the Republican Party, and be prepared to squash whatever emerges from its wreckage . . . . I’m not optimistic but I am pretty good with a hammer.

  2. raw unimpeded power, for a very long time now. It has no intellectual underpinnings. There’s not a single policy or prescription that I can think of in Movement Conservatism that isn’t about that underlying fact.

    • Edger on May 22, 2009 at 00:32

    But I’m afraid they’re working on morphing into their next incarnation.

    They’ll do anything, screw anyone, tell any lie, and pretend to be whatever it takes to remain in power, and they don’t care what people call them.

  3. Goldwater, for one.

    Nowadays people confuse the conservative movement with neo-cons.  Neo-cons control the modern-day Republican party.  Their philosophy is indistinguishable from fascism:

    Here are the 14 defining characteristics of fascism. Let’s see how many can be fairly said to apply to the Bush administration.

    1. Powerful and continuing nationalism. Check

    2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights. Check

    3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. Check

    4. Supremacy of the military. Check

    5. Rampant sexism. Not so much.

    6. Controlled mass media. Check

    7. Obsession with national security. Check

    8. Religion and government are intertwined. Check

    9. Corporate power is protected. Check

    10. Labor power is suppressed. Check

    11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. Check

    12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Check

    13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Check

    14. Fraudulent elections. Check

    Here’s a good slogan for the Republicans in 2010: ‘Hey, we’re not TECHNICALLY fascists, because we’re not sexist!’  

  4. As these heiroglyphics confirm . . .

      heiroglyphics Pictures, Images and Photos

    (Translation: “I, Cheops the Commander Guy and founder of the conservative golden age, am fighting the enemy over there so we don’t have to fight them here, because there’s an old saying in Luxor- I know it’s in Luxor, probably in Thebes – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.”)

    Cheops was the first conservative to run his economy into the ground, the first to invade other countries because Ra told him to, and the first to uphold family values by marrying his sister. Conservatism spread quickly throughout the ancient world. The writing of Project for the New Babylonian Century triggered the expansion of Babylon, until it was undermined by Babylonian liberals and became easy prey for a real conservative, the Commander Guy of the Hittites.  He was scornful of those girly men conservatives of Babylon, concluded that the Babylonian Empire collapsed because the Commander Guys of Babylon hadn’t been conservative enough, and conquered and exploited even more people than those pansy Babylonians did.    

    A few hundred Friedman Units came and went, slowly as they always do, and then Sargon of Akkad, who considered himself the most conservative conservative of them all and who was naturally scornful of those phony Hittite “conservatives”, wrote Project for the New Assyrian Century, which so impressed successive Assyrian Commander Guys that they decided to establish the best and most conservative empire ever.

    A few hundred Friedman Units later, the Commander Guy of Persia decided he’d better show those fake conservatives of Assyria what real conservatism looked like.  He gave a big speech at the Persian Enterprise Institute pointing out that the Assyrian Empire collapsed because the Commander Guys of Assyria hadn’t been conservative enough, and proceeded to conquer and exploit even more people.

    Then he launched Operation Greek Freedom, which didn’t turn out too well, and the golden era of conservatism came to an end.

  5. still take them seriously!

  6. They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and…………..

    Except for the last sentence:

    They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

    I do agree that there have been someconservatives who had some moral values (Goldwater), but they’ve long since either departed the party or died out.  

    The quicksand of greedy corruption has sucked-in the entire party.

    • Viet71 on May 22, 2009 at 01:36

    Is it Repubs vs. Dems?  Is that the deal?

    Is it conservatives vs. Liberals?  Is that the deal?

    I believe it’s us vs. the empowered class (MIC, congress, Wall Street, POTUS, Supreme Court).

    Just go to D.C. to get a feel for this.

    • TomP on May 22, 2009 at 02:37

    Liked it on dkos; love it here.

    Good work, turkana.  

  7. Well said!! Thank you. I plan on sending this one out, with attribution, of course.

    They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

    .

    • WSComn on May 22, 2009 at 04:31

    They don’t care about anyone but themselves.  They’re greedy, selfish, self-serving children with loaded guns.

    And with a special, homegrown form of terrorism, they foisted the insanity that was Reganomics on us all.  The following picture just rings so true:

    Photobucket

    Bunch of bastards.

  8. What is the likelihood that if Rush Limbaugh had been around fifty years ago, he would have given Eisenhower the time of day?  No doubt, Lmbaugh would have been best friends with Joe McCarthy.

    The Republican party has, since Lincoln, perhaps always been the party of the rich and the wealthy, however, the degree to which the party has shifted since even the Eisenhower era is truly astounding.

    Imagine a Republican today stating the following, all quotes by Dwight D. Eisenhower:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

    Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

    From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

    How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

    I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

    I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

    I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

    If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.

    In most communities it is illegal to cry “fire” in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

    In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

    May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

    No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.

    Only Americans can hurt America.

    There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

    War settles nothing.

    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

    Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

    When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

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