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.

And that seems to be the trend. No matter how hard this administration tries to include opposition views and moderate its position, Republicans and, increasingly, moderate Democrats continue to obstruct and even to weave conspiracy tales of liberal perfidy. Cap-and-trade legislation with broad public support was rendered so feeble as to be unworthy of the trees to print it. Giving up single-payer health care in pursuit of a compromise “public plan option” looks increasingly unlikely to yield either. His very moderate Court pick is denounced in very public forums by very serious politicians as “racist.”

The Mr. Nice Guy routine is not working. America faces real crises in the years ahead, and “solutions” acceptable to everyone are not solutions at all. Health care isn’t unaffordable by accident; insurance and drug companies made their executives and shareholders rich making it so. Global Warming isn’t an act of God; Energy and Auto companies depend for their profits on dirty, unsafe fossil fuels. Solving the very serious problems facing America is going to mean pissing somebody off. The sooner we face that fact and build the coalitions necessary to win, the better.

Conservatives often speak as if the choices that confront us in Economic Policy are Socialism and what they insist on calling “free market” ideology. Opponents of using tax money to subsidize the destructive export of entire industries are labeled as enemies of “free” trade and of “free” enterprise, as little better than Communists, adherents of a dead creed best consigned to “the ash heap of history.”

But it’s a strange brand of freedom conservatives offer. People aren’t free to quit their jobs or to organize for better wages and working conditions. Families aren’t free to plan and build a better future. Communities aren’t free to protect themselves from becoming empty, impoverished shells.  Meanwhile, America slides slowly, disastrously, into its new status as a second-rate economic power, its currency discarded, it products unwanted, its people tainted with decline and doubt.

The middle class falls further behind every year, real median household income having peaked in the 1970s. Growing indebtedness, spiraling educational costs, and health care spinning out of reach have ended the American dream for millions of families. But not everyone suffers. The top one percent of income earners enjoy a greater share of national wealth than at any time since 1929. The prices of luxury goods, higher education, homes in good school districts, and high-quality health care have spiraled out of reach for everyone but an elite few. The conservatives brought us, not free markets, but rigged markets.

There are more than 35,000 lobbyists in Washington, and tens of thousands more in state capitals across America. Their corporate clients are well-represented in legislation and regulation, which has been diverted from its purpose of protecting our workers, communities and planet. Innumerable subsidies and other favors have systematically twisted our economy into a casino where the house always wins.

Reviving the American economy will be one of the most difficult jobs government has ever attempted. We will have to reduce government spending, and refocus the smaller amount on measures to increase the long-term competitiveness of the American people. We must reduce both public and private debt, and take measures to bolster our manufacturing sector, particularly in high-tech, high value-added goods where we still retain a broad advantage.

The most important factor in twenty-first century competitiveness will be human capital. The ingenuity of its people is all any country will ultimately have to sell. America still enjoys the most productive workers and greatest universities in the world, but our secondary education suffers from real problems that portray our flawed choices over the last quarter-century. Schools funded by property taxes have maximized local control, but only at the price of ensuring that those communities most in need of the leveling effects of high-quality public education have been denied what they need to compete. We need new methods of funding public education that spur greater equality of opportunity.

America needs a first-class national defense, but our defense budget  serves what President Eisenhower called the “Military-Industrial Complex,” rather than national security.  We spend more than the rest of the world put together on national defense, and we have Virginia-class attack submarines with no Al Qaeda subs to sink, Raptor stealth fighters with no Taliban bombers to shoot down, Trident submarine missiles with no FARC missile silos to vaporize, and a Ballistic Missile Defense with no Hezbollah ICBMs to stop. These programs cost between 35 and 300 billion dollars apiece. If we weren’t fighting a non-existent Cold War and were instead equipping our soldiers for the war they’re actually fighting, we would save hundreds of billions, and hundreds of lives, a year. Our troops wouldn’t have to buy their own body armor. We wouldn’t have to hide thousands of disabled soldiers and marines, crippled for life because we couldn’t or wouldn’t buy them IED-resistant vehicles to patrol in.

The United States of America, with the greatest concentration of scientists and engineers in human history, takes second place to Germany in shipping solar panels, to Brazil in the use of biofuels, to Europe and Japan in fuel-efficient automobiles. Meanwhile, oil rockets past $135 a barrel and the polar ice caps are disappearing before our eyes. There is enormous demand for “green” technologies and we’re in an enviable position to supply them, having educated a huge portion of the world’s engineers and possessing a unique mix of geography that lets us implement every major alternative energy technology. Tax credits for firms and households developing and using these technologies would serve as magnets for these profitable industries, which can strengthen America’s economy for generations.

Health care costs consume more than 16 percent of GDP, more than that of any country in the world. The costs and risks of the American health care system are helping to hobble the rest of our economy, raising the costs of manufactured goods, deterring business formation and labor migration, and sucking capital out of other productive sectors. Health care costs associated with severe and chronic illness are among the largest causes of bankruptcy in America today. Providing American families with universal access to health care would not only be morally right, but economically wise, with benefits to the entire national economy and to every community.

We can, should, and must shift a portion of our tax burden from the middle class onto the top one percent of income earners, who have enjoyed a virtual tax holiday over the last twenty-five years. Middle-class families have seen their real incomes stagnate, if not decline, over the same period. Reducing their tax burden, while addressing their need for greater security and social mobility, would restart the engine of American productivity and allow America to compete in the global marketplace against all comers.

We can and must meet the economic challenges of the Twenty-First Century. Working together as one nation, we will conquer these challenges and help lead the world to greater prosperity and peace. Some vested interests will lose subsidies and tax breaks they thought were keeping them in business, but their defeats will help usher in a new era of shared prosperity that will lift their boats as well. We have no reason to be divided on the issue of restoring America to its rightful place as the world’s sole economic superpower.