The woman sued the company years later, after she discovered the DVD’s existence. Even with the delay, it should be an open and shut case. The woman did not consent to the illegal act of public nudity or the assault of being touched non-consensually.

But in Bizarro-world, the justice system works a bit differently.

A St. Louis jury ruled 11-1 in favor of “Girls Gone Wild,” the foreman saying: “Through her actions, she gave implied consent. She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.” WTF?

Let’s be clear: This was sexual assault. Worse, this was sexual assault for profit.

If I lift your skirt or pull down your shirt without your consent, it’s sexual assault. If I do it in front of a camera, and the cameraman does anything but turn the footage over to the authorities, he’s a scumbag and criminal, too. If the cameraman turns it over to a production company who releases the footage for profit, then all involved are accessories to felony assault.

It doesn’t matter that the woman didn’t leave when the camera got there, and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t press charges at the time. It doesn’t matter that she only sued year later, when she found out about the DVD. She has a moral and legal right to object to any or all of what happened to her.

Let me see if I can explain it to the slow ones: My body does not belong to you. You have no right to view it or profit from it without my permission. You have no right to touch my body or clothing without my permission. I don’t surrender those rights when a camera enters the room. I don’t surrender those rights when I drink a beer, and I don’t surrender them when I dance. I own myself.

If you violate these rights, I have rights of legal redress. If I fail to report this violation as a crime, I still retain the right to seek civil redress. And if a troglodyte jury dredges up some “asking for it” bullshit, it doesn’t mean shit. You should hope Jane Doe takes this all the way to the Supreme Court, for all of our sakes. Unless you want to be exploited next.

The two sides in these disputes often seem like they are speaking two languages that use the same words. Freedom, Democracy, Respect, and Authority seem to beckon from both sides of the disputes over slavery, civil rights, or the environment. Like Shaw said of Britain and America, we seem to be “two countries separated by a common language.” The most important factor in the insolubility of these fights seems to be the impression, on both sides, that the other side lack respect for the most basic values. The orthodox factions are accused of lacking reverence for the undeniable fact, to Heterodoxists, that we are all part of an indivisible system of living systems. There can be no separation of my interests and yours or of us and them. Zero Sum games are impossible.

The Role of Authority in American Political Thought

To the Orthodox, this is a dangerous illusion. There is a range of sources of Orthodox ideas from the frankly irreligious to the most committed fundamentalist scriptural literalists. The common thread is the recognition of the necessity of power and authority. To the Orthodox, rigid authority is necessary for the most basic social functions. Orthodox thinkers are influenced by Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature as the war of all against all. Human societies are prone to the most violent upheavals and bloody atrocities. Humans are disloyal, untrustworthy, and riven with uncontrolled drives that render them functionally insane. Only the constant threat of force keeps ordinary people in line.

The more tightly bound a community is by commonalities in ethnicity, religion, class, and profession, the more likely it is to survive these upheavals. From this view, the civil rights revolution was at best missing the point and at worst represented nothing less than a deliberate assault on the cohesion of American society. By threatening that sense of reverence other ethnic groups were supposed to feel for the WASP core of American society, the Movement fragmented society and destroyed the cohesion necessary to survive in a hostile and unforgiving world. This is why the Right has consistently refused to believe that the leaders of the Movement were not witting or unwitting agents of Moscow.

Reverence, awe and fear are the cohesive forces in society. By maintaining fear of the State, wealth, men, or Whites, the continual strife of human life can be contained. Maintaining this state of fear sometimes requires force, but the alternative is the Hobbesian state of nature where meaningful human life is impossible, so virtually any sacrifice is justified.

External Reverence

In more settled times, reverence for external authority figures becomes an indispensable tool for social cohesion. Ultimately, God, Jehovah, or Allah would be the object of reverence for religiously-committed orthodoxists. For their more secular counterparts, the object of external reverence might be a (conservative) President, the Constitution, American power in the world, or in extreme forms, force itself. Regardless of the specifics, the source of authority must be external to the rest of society. It cannot be embodied within the people, collectively or singly. In the Orthodox view, all people are orthodoxists at heart and share their view that only the overwhelming power of an external force can capture the allegiance of the community. All other claims to legitimacy are invalid on their face.

In this paradigm, the use of power is a virtue regardless of its end. Limits upon power threaten the vitality of civilization. Private or public power may be revered depending on the interests of the individual apologist, but concentrated power is a common value of the Right, even if it comes wrapped in Libertarian language.

Movements that usurp centralized spiritual, political, or economic power in favor of decentralized power as seen as dangerous and beside the point. By placing power out of reach of the vast majority of Americans, Orthodoxists can preserve social order in a number of ways. By minimizing the footprint of power, the pace of social change can be limited. By moving power out of sight, it can be a nebulous ideal that promotes obedience and deference rather than functioning as an engine of conflict. By removing power from the community, its imperfections can be masked. By hiding the petty disputes and insecurities at the heart of conflicts over power, external authority can be portrayed as impersonal and godlike, thus preserving its legitimacy. Decentralizing movements are therefore a threat to social cohesion and are tantamount to treason. This helps explain why civil rights and labor movements have been attacked as Communist regardless of the political orientation of their leadership.

External Reverence and Power

In contemporary America, the most common objects of external reverence are an imperial President, God, or a powerful and wealthy CEO. God is an archetype of power who may serve as a template for other holders of unlimited puissance. Churches are protected from external interference in any number of ways, and the most entrepreneurial and evangelical among them are the most likely to preach submission to god-like power as a socio-cultural ideal. In recent decades, churches that promote this view have been far more successful than those that focus on the ethical obligation of the believer to the physical and emotional well-being of other humans. This helps to explain the consistent policy successes of orthodoxists, regardless of changes in party power.

In this mindset, ethics diminished in importance. The perceptible consequences of human action are ignored in favor of the overwhelming importance of submission to external authority. In modern American history, the focus has been on sexual morality. Flouting of God’s plan to marry and reproduce in favor of fleeting pleasure is seen as ultimate insult to ultimate authority. The preference for the trivial over the monumental is a threat to the cohesion of society and to the Kingdom. The most egregious form of offense, of course, is homosexuality, but orthodoxists have defended the remnants of laws that prohibit non-reproductive sexual acts regardless of sexual orientation.

In political matters, the ultimate value is submission to the practically unlimited power of an Imperial President. The political Right, consistent allies of orthodoxy, has its own mythology about the meaning of the Constitution that persists in its appeal despite the paucity of support in the text. Regardless of copious evidence that the document was intended to limit concentrations of power in favor of competing centers, conservatives insist that the phrase “commander in chief” embodies limitless executive power in all matters except domestic social programs, which are mostly opposed. The fact that limits on executive power are not considered dangerous during Democratic presidents is not evidence of inconsistency. Democrats are seen as outside the cult of power, filled with naive and dangerous ideas of interdependence and the solubility of conflict that, in conservative minds, threaten the foundation of social order and render them unfit for political office.

The appeal of the Imperial Presidency is inextricably linked to the attachment to force as the ultimate political value. The role of the State is the preparation for and prosecution of war. The promulgation of threats is either a reason or excuse for the rush to war, but in either case, war is seen as having a value of its own. By promoting the values of the cult of power and the danger of external threats, continual war increases the cohesion of society and negates the appeal of heterodoxic values. Adversity in war serves this function, but defeat is unthinkable as it would threaten to discredit the values that motivate it. Therefore, the actual threat and power of the enemy places the function of war at jeopardy. This impetus draws the State into war with a series of weak states and non-state actors. These wars with tribal forces generate their own cycles of vengeance and counter-vengeance which explain much of the violence and disorder that characterize much of the last decade. Orthodoxists value these wars precisely for their tribal nature, knowing that despite their use of ideological and historicist language to promote these conflicts, the effect they have on American society is to tribalize those classes that comprise or sympathise with the warriors. By removing any stance between support for Us and for Them, these meaningless tribal conflicts promote the power totemism of orthodoxy and prevent the reemergence of heterodox values in mainstream thought.

The remaining form of revered power is the power of the modern Corporation. Large corporations employ many Americans, particularly in the politically vital suburbs. They dominate the American economy and culture. They supply most of the money for research and development and they make and sell the products and services which form the texture of modern life.

Most important for our purposes, however, is the role that corporations play as the primary contemporary practitioners of the art of Propaganda. American business has been using Psychology to convince Americans to buy things they don’t need since soon after the First World War. Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, pioneered the use of subconscious appeals to tie specific products to primal drives. In doing so, he was applying techniques he helped to develop while serving in the Office of Public Information during the First World War.

Before these developments, advertising was focused on the promotion of necessities by their functional virtues. This placed sharp limits on sales and on growth. Besides being a threat to the profits of corporations and the wealth of their shareholders, this was touted as a threat to the social order. By limiting economic growth, this focus on necessities tended to decentralize power and posed the danger of individual and community independence at a time that America was becoming a world power. By helping to nationalize the economy and channel economic and cultural energies toward consumption, an economy based on the manufacture of desire would enforce political conformity and permit the gradual identification of political and economic power.

Commercial propaganda increased in power as the means used to disseminate it became more evocative and less social. Newspaper chains began the process, followed by movies, radio, television, and the Internet. Each technological innovation has produced a leap in immediacy and versatility, giving the practitioners of propaganda more tools to manipulate the emotions of consumers, convincing them that this or that consumer product will fulfill some primal drive, be it sex or belonging or even love. Without these tools, and the economic growth they make possible, the corporate-state order would collapse. Our currency, financial markets, and socio-economic hierarchy are structured to rely on year-on-year growth and large profits that a necessity-based economy can not provide.

Of course, the content that media companies have created to sell these advertisements to consumers have become important components of economic growth in their own right. Movies and television in particular create a vivid cultural space where the primacy of desire and pleasure are promulgated and celebrated. While some products may seem to corrode social cohesion and order, the overall effect is to reinforce the habit of passively accepting the judgements of others and standardizing aesthetics and ethics. By distracting Americans with fictional worlds and manufactured values, mass media serve an important function in diverting individual energy to the ends of economic and political interests allied with the orthodoxy.

Conflicts and Contradictions Within Orthodoxy

Modern American orthodoxy and its institutional allies form a vast complex of interconnected systems that defies easy explanation. There are many mechanisms, however, that tend to support common purpose. By sharing values of power and order, the Orthodoxy ensures that conflicts about legitimacy do not threaten the prevailing order.

The most obvious contradiction within the Orthodox ranks is the alliance of the movement with Libertarian political thinkers. Modern American Libertarianism is, however, a bizarrely specific creed. Only public power is seen as a threat to political liberties, and prominent Libertarians and Quasi-Libertarians seem chiefly concerned with those measures which threaten corporate control over the economy, wasting little time examining such trivial phenomena as the enormous National Security state. In this way, Libertarianism has been effectively harnessed to the broader objectives of the Orthodox bloc even if individual Libertarians may object more to the characterization than the reality.

The hedonistic message of corporate mass media would seem to conflict with Orthodox political and spiritual values, but again this is deceptive. By channeling individualistic impulses into conformist channels, a repeat of the upheavals of the late sixties can be averted. Identity is diverted from action to belongings and appearance. Dissent is thus defanged, proceeding no further than the Billboard charts. The permissive message of media provides a handy fundraising tool for Orthodox political and religious organizations while the pro-corporate values embedded in the heart of the movement ensure that media power is never effectively challenged. The result is a neat symbiosis that provides a steady flow of power to elites.

In all, the cohesion of the Orthodox bloc is the most remarkable achievement in modern politics. There can be little doubt that this cohesion is largely engineered by the corporate elites who have funded the various arms of the movement and who have benefitted so remarkably from its ascent to power over the last 40 years.

Next, we will examine the opposition.

If you’re running in, say, the New Hampshire Primary, and a story leaks about something you said seventeen years ago in jest at a party, and the media and opposition whip it up into a referendum on your character, the functional human response is to tell the voters: “If you’re that stupid, you can go screw yourselves. I’m going fishing in Montana.” Anybody who puts up with that is a masochist or a megalomaniac. And that’s the pool from which we pick our presidents.

Politics is an incredibly complex profession with its own lore, nomenclature, and rules, but unlike other such professions, like law, engineering, or medicine, every angry stockbroker or machinist thinks she knows how to do the job. Try complaining about your cancer treatment being dominated by “career oncologists” and see how silly you sound. We suffer severe cognitive dissonance about our political life, dismissing all candidates for office as crooks and deviants, but expecting them to make us opulent and immortal. We can call Congressman Jones an alcoholic reprobate pedophile in one breath while in the next cursing him for not getting our cat out of a tree. Despite that, we think we’re insiders if we choose a screaming heads show with our meatloaf instead of professional wrestling, as if there were any salient difference.

A career in politics tends to alienate one from the concerns of the public because there is NOTHING more distracting than the political process. The endless rush of compromises and deal making on the Hill, and the relentless drive to raise more money and get more press to stay in the job, combine to make one forget the effects that power has on every living thing on this planet. The labyrinthine process of legislation and the public dance of pundits and polls couldn’t have less to do with one another.

Despite these conditions and against all odds, there are people in office who belong there. They can come through the sewer of modern politics clean enough to eat off, always remembering why they are there and who they are there to serve. They can’t always be honest about that because the people they serve just don’t vote in large numbers, but those of us who watch the process know who they are. They are more precious than gold, because the system really would collapse without them and because the system is specifically designed to shuck them off.

I (sorta) know Kendrick Meek, and everything I’ve seen has convinced me he is one of those people. One of the few safe-seat members to show real statewide savvy, he is a skilled and personable retail politician of the old school. Not only does he vote in ways that make sense given the knowledge he has at the time, he has run his campaign in a way specifically designed to obligate himself to rank-and-file Democrats while still courting the big donors he needs to win in a state with 10 Designated Media Markets. His campaign has kept its cool under chaotic conditions, with three major shifts in the race’s outlook. I really don’t know how he could have run a smarter race. I will never agree with everything any politician does or says, but Congressman Meek is as sure a bet as I can find.

So, just when events shift to permit an African-American Progressive Populist to win a Senate seat in a state frightened by all three things, a wrinkle conveniently appears.

A few years ago, a merely very rich man became impressively wealthy by betting big against American homeowners at just the right time. He likes celebrities, fancy parties, and luxury travel. He married an actress and enjoys his privacy. He made a vanity run for Congress as a Republican in California in 1982, in the wake of the millionaire-pleasing Reagan Revolution. He’s pretty much another innocuous, vanilla billionaire in a country where they’re not that rare.

But, for some reason this man woke up one morning and said to himself, “You know what? Not only am I suddenly a public intellectual, I’m also a committed Progressive Democrat! I’m going to run for the open Senate seat. You know, the one in the state I have lived in for three years.”

Now, I don’t know when this internal monologue took place, but giving him the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume this was more than a year ago. So, instead of forming an official exploratory committee and building a base within the party, he waits a year or more and ambushes Meek in a Primary just when the race changes shape with Crist’s jump, a tactic that cost him several million dollars to plug a name-recognition hole that would not have existed had he taken a more conventional approach. There’s a reason many Democratic activists think he’s a spoiler.

So, this man indelibly associated with Credit Default Swaps in the wake of an economic catastrophe indelibly linked in the public’s mind with the proliferation of exactly those instruments knows he has a political problem. How to solve it? Like an only child who has just broken the cookie jar, he runs the other way and blames the dog. (apologies to Kendrick) Jeff Greene is now an anti-poverty crusader whose base is in Liberty City! Now, that’s political dexterity. I mean, I’ve changed parties a couple of times, but Holy Crap! That’s like Pat Buchanan turning into Noam Chomsky! Arianna Huffington, take notes.

So, he spends enough to start a community redevelopment fund, launches into Kendrick Meek, blames him for the economic crisis, pulls some anti-Fannie Mae rants out of his Republican “past,” criticizes him for not creating enough jobs, drags his mother into the race to swear what a good boy Jeff is, and in general sounds like he’s running against Kendrick Meek for the job of chief economic planner rather than freshman Senator. Now, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a class of Democratic Primary voter who is not supposed to be insulted by this reasoning and I can’t come up with one.

Greene is using the old line about rich businessmen knowing more about how to create jobs than “career politicians.” This is a strange argument given that he made his money by exploiting exactly the informational asymmetries that have distorted the economy so badly in the first place. His language comes right out of the Rick Scott playbook, and Democrats can be forgiven for expecting him to be just as Progressive as Mr. Scott. He launches into an economic plan as if he doesn’t know the difference between freshman Senator and President.

Most insulting of all, it seems to be working. The polls have pulled even. It remains to be seen what the actual turnout will be in the Primary (always unpredictable), but if Greene can spend his way into the General, the Republicans keep the seat (a child could do their ads), Meek does something more rewarding than human punching bag, and we are all worse off for it. If money alone can turn Jeff Greene into Cesar Chavez, then I might as well go make some money in some other business where we rip people off retail instead of wholesale.

I was cruisin’ the tubes when I came across a blog post on the Atlantic Monthly site about female support (or more precisely, the lack thereof) for Sarah Palin. At the bottom of the comments section was this gem from a “tnorton:”

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

If she didn’t have a good chance you liberals would not keep running stories daily headlines about her not being qualified, nor would your supporters spend most of their time responding or commenting on how she doesn’t have a chance. Funny how an attractive, intelligent republican female scares you guys so much. Must be because she not the average female liberal, A mullet wearing, PETA supporting lesbian member of NOW. Poor libs cant sleep at night worring about her. GO SARAH!!

Now, suffice it to say, I had one or two points of disagreement with this brilliant person, but the foremost was the idea that liberals thought that Palin running for President was a BAD THING. I felt compelled to share the following insight:

Are you freakin’ kidding me? I’m wetting myself with glee, and so is everybody I know. She’s our dream opponent. She lays bare everything about your party and ideology that we hold in utter contempt: Your cluelessness, arrogance, utter lack of concern for the vulnerable and the future, your worship of wealth as the determinant of human value, your casual attitude toward the grave responsibilities of public office, your substitution of glib talking points for policy analysis, your mindless jingoism, your rank hypocrisy, your deeply troubled relationship with the truth. She is a better refutation of the conservative creed than anything we could make up. She is a giant gift-wrapped wet dream for liberals who might otherwise be concerned about 2012. I’m on my knees praying to the God I cherish that conservatives are THAT FRICKIN’ STUPID! If she announces, I’m going to launch a fund-raising drive for her among my liberal friends. In the words of my second-least-favorite President: “Bring it on!”

Reading that last paragraph, the only thing I regret is the absence of the word “vacuous.” Feel free to insert it where appropriate.

The Republican Party has experienced hacks and gifted wonks at its call. It has people who can look good in a suit, stare into a camera, and recite a focus-group tested soundbite with the best of them. Can we dare to hope that the rabid base is gullible enough to believe that this human train wreck is the best choice to run against one of the best political operators in the history of American politics? Can we really be that lucky?

The wave of chronic conditions America faces over the rest of the century demand early detection and intervention to control the costs and misery that they produce. Gaps and lapses in coverage will make those diseases more expensive for those patients and the rest of us. Preventing those gaps in coverage will require serving the low-income patients currently ill-served by the current mix of overstretched public programs and private high-deductible plans and still bend the cost curve down. That will require a plan that can deliver overhead in the 3-6% range. Only a public plan can do that.

The best solution would have been to put the entire population on a very low overhead plan. This was HR 676, Medicare for Everybody, Single-Payer. It never had a chance. Both Houses “placed it off the table” before negotiations began. The reasons for that decision are irrelevant, its consequences are all too clear. Moderate Democrats now pronounce the barely adequate public option DOA in the Senate. Without single-payer to draw fire, the opposition can focus on defeating the public plan option, If they had focused their energy on the socialism (i.e., public policy with which conservatives disagree) of single-payer health care, we could respond with the massive market reform of retaining the entire private health insurance with a single public program with subsidies for those who earn up to 4 times the localized poverty rate. Conservatives would hail this as a leg-up to the middle class, rather than welfare. We would have gotten the public plan we wanted, with ribbons affixed. They would hail their great market-driven defeat of the evil socialism of the hated liberals and declare it a great victory,

Instead we took the bogeyman away before the game started, leaving the public option as the target of the antis. We did so hoping to make them pros. This was possibly the most naive moment in contemporary American politics. The antis are anti not because of the actuarial tables or because Ludwig Von Mises hated regulation, but because we’re not them. We can’t be trusted to worship at the alter of God, CEO, therefore we are the enemy of all that is fine and good.

President Obama and Congressional leadership egregiously underestimated the irrational sectarian motivations of their opponents and chose to try to accomodate them, which merely served to slide the agenda rightward while buying nothing we couldn’t already take were we willing to ignore those we beat in November, as they have done to us and will again.

Thus are 22,000 Americans a year sacrificed to the demon of “Dear God, don’t let us be seen being Democrats.” God Bless America.

The first problem is under-participation. The AMA has estimated that more than half of Americans do not have their own Primary Care Physicians.  Add to that, of course, the more than 50 million Americans with no health coverage at all, and you can see that more than 150 million people in this country are not getting regular checkups, do not have the medical care they do receive coordinated by anybody, have no central store for medical records, have no way to manage the risk of pharmaceutical interaction, are not detecting disease early and are not treating it effectively. We can see the consequences when more than ten percent of our health care costs stem from one disease: Diabetes. Since most diabetes is Type 2, the vast majority of these costs are preventable through early risk identification and lifestyle changes. Instead, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to treat people who should never have been sick.

The second problem is the role of profit in the health insurance industry. It’s not simply that thirty percent of our extravagant spending goes to profit and the recision and denial mechanisms necessary to protect it, but the profit motive of employer-based care produces perverse incentives. Care is denied whenever possible. Early intervention is denied to minimize “medical loss,” even though it would reduce future outlays, because insurers do not know if they will cover the patient when they get sicker. They have no incentive to reduce their future costs by eliminating deductibles and co-pays for diagnostic and preventive care. Thus the financial incentives of insurers are perversely related to the health outcomes of their policyholders. Insurers are profitable while Americans become sicker every year.

The third problem has been the least-discussed: the subsidized corn sugars and soy oils that are killing us. The modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes are directly related to the late twentieth-century surge of subsidies into factory farms that produce little but empty calories. Our foods contain steadily diminishing quantities of vitamins, anti-oxidants and amino acids as a giant biochemistry experiment engulfs its third generation. The health consequences of our fast-food culture are so severe that life expectancies are actually beginning to drop.

So, we’re facing a fifty trillion dollar Medicare iceberg at the same time we’re spending tens of billions a year to subsidize the foods that are killing us. But conservatives choose to blame poorly educated working class families with little money and less time for patronizing the businesses these same conservatives spend their time fighting for. The hypocrisy of it would be startling were not hypocrisy the operating standard of the conservative movement. On the one hand, the mounting data linking modern factory food to every form of chronic disease is dismissed as liberal “culture war” against good old-fashioned American food. On the other hand, people who uncritically consume this fare are blamed for the diseases that result. Don’t they know this stuff is bad for you?

All too often, they don’t. Industrial food is huge business in the United States, spending billions of dollars a year to market their products, targeted specifically at younger, poorer people who do not know about the link between the epidemics of diabetes and obesity and the food they are eating. Fast food outlets are located where poorer, less-educated people work, shop and live. Two-income families working three or four part-time jobs with little control over their working hours lack the ability to get together for a home-cooked meal. Even if they could make the time, they find that the fresh fruits and vegetables they need to stay healthy are not subsidized, not as available in their neighborhoods and require a struggle to get small children to eat, a struggle they no longer have the time or energy to undertake. So they get the fried chicken or the Happy Meal and stave off hunger for another day, frequently unaware that these foods are not just vaguely unhealthy but specifically deadly to precisely the kind of poorer, less-educated families the companies that sell them target with their advertisements and store placement.

So, minimum wage workers must show “personal responsibility” but food industry and health insurance executives are allowed, no, required, to cut any corner, tell any lie, spare no expense, walk away from any number of sick and needy people, to make profits that enrich them and their shareholders. If one were to wake up and say to herself “I make money from human misery and basic human decency demands that I stop,” she would be treated as mentally ill and possibly face tort action.

Capitalism is a vital part of modern society and I wouldn’t live in any country without it, but if there are no other values in a society save those of the marketplace, that society is in crisis. We have to stop arguing about the obvious and we have to stop treating corporate interests as if they were inviolate. Our physical and economic futures depend on it. Let’s put single-payer back on the table and justify it by pointing to the fiscal crisis in Medicare. And let’s stop paying Cargill, Monsanto and ADM to make us sick.

Let’s start by asking: what is the right? Broadly speaking, the Right started as a coalition of Libertarians, Theocrats, and Business types that might be at odds, but were unified by extreme anti-communism. When the Wall fell, the Right had achieved its ultimate object, but lost its unifying cause. Libertarians, Evangelicals, and Corporate executives seeking special market advantage through government will naturally be at odds about every significant issue.

“Liberalism” is a weak rallying point because, well, it doesn’t really exist. There are liberals in both houses of Congress, but no more than, say, Corvair fans. It would make just as much sense to construct a political philosophy around opposing the philatelist menace.

Yet these rebels without a cause have won every important political battle of the last thirty years! Clinton got elected, but couldn’t even pass a health care bill. He wound up abolishing AFDC, declaring the “era of big government is over,” deregulating the banks, keeping the inevitable tax hike limited to a one percent top bracket marginal bump, balancing the budget, and keeping the defense budget intact. The only concession the conservatives had to make was the letter after the President’s name. Clinton was the most effective Republican president of the Twentieth Century.

Then, they crooked their crazy nephew in, and he screwed the pooch. His administration was so corrupt and inept they actually managed to convince the smarter type of conservatives (all six of them) not to be conservatives any more. Still, they keep winning battles. They bottled up the Employee Free Choice Act, watered down the cap-and trade bill, gutted the stimulus bill, turned a slam-dunk Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a circus, and may well end up killing health care reform. And that’s with large Democratic majorities in both house and the White House in Democratic hands!

How do they pull off controlling the course of American politics without holding the seats of power? They control the terms of the debate. When the handful of Progressives that actually exist proposed that we reform our health care system by instituting a single-payer national insurance plan that will actually address the problems behind escalating health-care costs, we were told by our betters that it was politically impossible. One of the people delivering this message was our “Yes We Can,” “Change We Can Believe In,” “Muslim Socialist” President explaining, in conservative terms, that change would be too disruptive. We have to preserve a system of employer-based health insurance born out of the unique experience of World War II that no longer makes sense in a country where people change jobs every few years because it had somehow become “the American Way.” In one lifetime? Really?

Conservatives didn’t have to beat Barack Obama, and they didn’t have to join him. They swallowed him whole. This is why the Birthers are so crazy. They are so out there they don’t even realize they are unnecessary.

Conservatives have turned the preservation of corporate interests into a national religion. They control the language of national debates, they set the baseline of acceptable policies, and they have a stranglehold on my model voter, the radiology tech from Casselberry. When I talk politics with him, his questions, concerns, and objections may as well have been written by Frank Luntz himself.

They did it with money, time, and attacking ideas first and people second. The conservative foundations (Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Coors, Annenberg, et al.) committed themselves to funding the think tanks and media outlets that spread conservative ideas. These institutions plucked right-wingers out of college and gave them jobs, nurturing three generations of conservative leaders and providing an economic base for the movement. They established quiet, invite-only meetings in Washington where staffers, elected officials and lobbyists receive their marching orders. They maintain safe houses in the DC area so they don’t get caught influence-peddling and screwing around. They are a real movement.

We are a disorganized grab-bag of people motivated mostly by common attachment to basic decency and empirical reality. We splinter more easily than a balsa-wood glider in a hurricane, so we litter the landscape with tiny factions devoted to a handful of issues. At the end of the day, we lose all the major policy battles because they are all playing on the same team and we are not.

The first thing we need to learn is to stop trying to sell our issues to the public. This is a waste of time. Right-wingers didn’t control the economic policy debate by sending every American a copy of “The Road To Serfdom.” No, they convinced Americans that pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer policies were anti-American. They used the existing Horatio Alger myth to good effect, equating General Electric with the Gold Rush spirit. There are now tens of millions of poor, mostly white men certain that any measure to protect them as workers or consumers is taking the money out of their pockets they will have when they, uh … win the lottery or something, they’re not sure, but however these abused people are going to get rich, they don’t want some bureaucrat taxing them to pay for vital services or telling them that cannot cheat their workers or poison their customers.

If we want to undo the incalculable damage these maniacs have done, we must be patient and think strategically. We must work through the universities, think tanks, and the media. We must discredit the Church of Gimmie, expose conservative policies as crony capitalism, espouse real markets and level playing fields, and make conservatives as ashamed of their c-word as Democrats were of the L-word for thirty years.

Then, when our viewpoint has permeated the culture, we insist that our party conform. We challenge any Democrat, no matter how powerful, who persists in conservative heresy and drum them out of our party. We take over from the counties to the Speaker’s office. Then, and only then, can we address global warming, worker’s rights, economic security, and equal rights for all Americans. Until we turn the Democratic Party democratic, then electing corporate “Democrats” is just a waste of time and money.

I find this an illuminating way to think about the cultural and political connotations of new media.

Even as the poles have been heating alarmingly for decades, the champions of corporate interests have fought a long delaying action, first denying the facts, then their meaning, and finally that we can’t solve the problem. Most human beings live within 300 miles of the sea, and all are threatened by a surge in global sea levels. Every living thing is tied intimately to the ecosystems that we disrupt so heedlessly, yet those who think this should be treated as the survival issue that it is are told to grow up, to live in the “real world” of fake politics and false impunity.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States, the supposed exemplar of freedom, maintains nearly a thousand major overseas bases and a dozen carrier battle groups roam the oceans of the planet, pursuing a global grand strategy of denial and disruption as if we were at war with the world. We cloak this aggression in the language of patriotism and sacrifice, as if the nameless villagers of Helmand Province who we have bombed out with quarter-billion dollar stealth bombers were a threat to the United States. This is an unconscionable drain on our wealth, our most vulnerable and dedicated citizens, our goodwill overseas, and our national energy and attention at a time of real threats to our survival.

Average Americans, we are told, will never make the sacrifices necessary to address the problems that we face. This is, as Bill Moyers would so eloquently say, “bull.” On last night’s program, Mr. Moyers gave an impassioned diagnosis of the state of American democracy. Our nation’s deeply flawed policies have nothing to do with the preferences of ordinary Americans. They are bought and paid for a handful of people whose wealth finances, and is subsidized and protected by, the special interest industry in Washington and the state capitals.

It was refreshing to hear such honesty on national television, but sobering to realize that about eleven people were watching. Our vaunted democracy is a sick joke. A tiny number of people participate in politics, and even fewer are well informed about policy. Public life is dominated by superstition and outright lies. Parties go up, parties go down, but policies never budge. American politics is a shadowplay. It has the same relationship to the way we are governed as fan fiction does to the plot of a television program.

We all know this, and it’s weird that we accept it. Our futures and freedoms have been stolen for nothing more than the private gain of a a handful of wealthy people, and all we care about is what’s on TV. If we want to save our country, we’re going to have to expect more from our fellow citizens and from ourselves.

A crisis is what happens when one factor slips in a previously tolerable situation. Those living in the situation know, or should know, that things are getting worse. They patch or ignore the symptoms of the problem, hoping that things will get better or tell themselves that things are not so bad. Then the thing that allows them to practice this self-deception disappears. In a moment, a bad but tolerable situation becomes untenable in a way that no amount of self-deception can disguise.

A crisis is a fork in the road of our lives. It can lead us to death or to a kind of rebirth. Time and memory are divided into pre-crisis and post-crisis. It can rob us of everything we need to survive and adapt, or it can provide us energy, discipline and determination that we didn’t know we had. These resources can allow us to tackle the challenges we face. We can, if we are lucky enough to survive it, come to see a crisis as our salvation.

Other civilizations have declined, of course. Neither the Romans nor the British were famous for their ecology or human development. But the scale and global appeal of the American Dream threaten a human future on this planet in a way that neither of those civilizations could match.

Recent history is full of crackpots who foresaw elements of the current crisis. These contemptible nutcases drew guffaws if they were noticed at all. Meanwhile, the sober men of sound judgment built and maintained a civilization that has eaten the world then turned upon itself. People who can see beyond the present are more necessary than ever when the old answers have simply stopped working. So many of the ways in which we live our lives are just habit hardened into institution. The details of our daily life often have more to do with the interests of a few powerful people than with efficacy or the possibilities available to us. Instead of turning off our minds and ears when unusual people say unusual things we should be asking ourselves why we find them so threatening. Even those with so much invested in current practice could always adapt and reinvest in better ways of thinking and living. Why is change so scary?

I think people have learned to cope with the insane by pretending that it is normal. When our world is shown to be dangerously out of balance, it threatens this carefully-cultivated ignorance and the sense of well-being it allows. When Dr. Strangelove was released, it was beloved by younger audiences but reviled by older ones. Its undeniable picture of the lunacy of the Cold War was unacceptable for those who had helped construct that world. It caused them to feel the fear and shame which were the natural human responses to a thoroughly unnatural way of living. The reverence and consensus reality needed to stave off these uncomfortable feelings melted under the dark humor at the heart of Kubrick’s film.

We will have to learn to accept how unreal our world is. Our homes, our jobs, our politics, our culture and our lives are built around a series of expectations formed during a unique moment in history when the world was nearly destroyed and America alone stood unscathed, unrivaled in wealth and power. Those days have long passed, and the plenty they promised faded into memory for all but a few.

We can recover and even thrive in the years to come, but it will mean accepting new ideas regardless of the source. Workable ways of building a human future are not going to come from people saying the expected things and behaving in expected ways. They are going to come from the strange, the unusual, and the awkward. We need to be able to think in a way that allows us to perceive the value of ideas even if they scare us a little, because accepting the status quo is the most frightening idea of all.