I came across this site called Right Web: Exposing the Architecture of Power that is Changing Our World. Here's its description of its purpose:
Efforts to push militaristic policies cross party lines, and so Right Web examines individuals and organizations across the political spectrum, as well as “nonpartisan” political actors. Reporters, researchers, and analysts have come to rely on Right Web for its well-documented research and analysis
I recommend it as a resource if you are interested in understanding the right-wing militarist mentality that I have been describing over and over in this blog as the internal enemy that must be resisted. I recognize that there's a place in every society for its Demostheneses and Churchills. There needs to be a voice that makes us aware of the dangers that confront us in a dangerous world. But that voice in our society is not a lonely voice on the fringes. It's the voice that dominates the system because of the complex way that the system demands war and more war. There has been no fair debate because war serves the interests of several oligarchical factions in this country who have had the capability to marginalize the voices of sanity and prudence.
I've been thinking a lot about this mentality and why it is so dominant. There are so many layers to it, but in an effort to understand why so many find it legitimate, I will temporarily occupy the mind of a sincere but fictional Neocon who lives in this mental world that purports to be democratic but is not. It is the age-old mindset of the oligarch who cannot trust the fate of the nation to the people.
Anyone who thinks differently is a dangerous fool or a traitor. Liberals laugh at Coulter, but she understands the way it is. Liberals think she's an over-the-top extremist, a comic entertainer, a send-up of the wackiest of wingnuts, but she simply states the obvious to anyone who understands how power works. The world is full of bold, dangerous people who understand that the world does not work according to liberal ideas of fair play. They understand that there is only the raw assertion of one's own will, and liberals who believe in peace and understanding are living in a dreamworld from which they will awaken only with the butt end of a rifle to the head.
Look at history. What is it but the long, violent story of war, of one group asserting itself and dominating another? What could possibly make anyone think that humans have changed or will ever change? Dominate or be dominated. Eat or be eaten. That is the real world no matter what liberals fantasize otherwise. Americans have become complacent because their nation has been dominant; they can afford to be complacent so long as people like us are running the show. But as soon as we lose that dominance, everyone will think as we do. Fair play, rule of law, process? Please. Embracing those values puts you on the fast track to become someone else's meal.
We Neocons understand and accept that history is the endless cycle of individuals and factions taking more than their "fair" share and acquiring as much as they can while the getting is good. We understood more quickly that everyone else that when the Soviet Union fell, a vacuum was created in the oil-rich Middle East, and that America must seize the opportunity to move in to fill that vacuum before the Chinese did. We know that you can't admit that in public. We know that all the bourgeois liberals living in their dreamworld would be upset: "Americans don't do that kind of thing. It's not nice."
So we came up with some b.s. about WMD, removing dictators, and promoting democracy. Whatever. No one would care as soon as we won, and the only reason people care now is because we didn't. We understood that once we decided to invade that nobody could stop us, and that once we invaded no one could oppose us without risking being branded as a traitor. Bush I and Clinton were gutless fools not to seize the opportunity in the nineties. But we finally got our chance when had our own fool sitting in the Oval Office.
Mistakes were made. It happens. Rumsfeld was wrong; Shinseki was right. But the objectives were worthy, and if we had it to do again, we would do it the Shinseki way. Our failure there has cost us the temporary loss of the White House. We'll get it back soon enough. In the meanwhile we will do what we have to to pressure the Democrats to keep a foothold in Iraq. We'll finish the job when we get back in power.
We Neocons understand and accept that the winners write history, that the winners are never held accountable for their atrocities, so the only important thing is not to lose. Unless, of course, you lose to liberals, because they don't hold anyone accountable. They are fools who will predictably take the path of least resistance. They are ridiculous; they want to reconcile the irreconcilable.
They make it so easy for us. All we have to do is kick up a fuss, cry foul at any move they make. We can say up is down and white is black and demand that the media take our ideas seriously no matter how ridiculous because there are always two sides, and they have to give both sides a fair hearing no matter how absurd. It's too easy, and that's why it won't be long until we are back in the driver's seat. The Liberals don't have the guts to fight it out with us. They know we'll scream bloody murder and accuse them of witch hunts and political vengeance. No worries. It's all so easy with the Reids, Feinsteins, Rockefellers, Pelosis, Schumers of the world. They are like Pavlov's dogs. Just ring the bell and they'll jump predictably in the way we've trained them. I don't know which is worse, the Democrats or the media.
The Dems think we're reasonable and that we will negotiate. They really believe that's how it works. So we'll pretend to be reasonable and to negotiate. It buys us time. And it's just a matter of time before we'll have our chance to return to power, because Liberals don't understand power and do not know how to fight to hold onto it--they understand "process." Fine--we'll gum up their process; we'll game the rules, and bring their process to a screeching halt, and we'll blame them for being ineffective, and the media will buy it because they only care about the game and being associated with the winner. The Dems don't deserve to have power because they don't know how to use it. We do, and we will use it to keep them tied in knots for the next four years, and we will before long find a way to seize it again.
We are a minority, but minorities have always ruled the world when they have been smart enough and ruthless enough to seize the power that others are too gutless or stupid to seize. We will be the saviors of this country because we understand how the world works, and that if we are not smarter and more ruthless than our challengers, our challengers will defeat us. If for whatever reason we are prevented from returning to power, the country is doomed. It will lie in the hands of fools who bring us to ruin as timid, limousine liberals Pericles and Nicias ruined the Athenian empire--the greatest power ever seen by the Greeks. We don't care about process. We care about survival, and we will do whatever it takes to prevent fools from bringing us to ruin.
We have nothing to fear from Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. The liberals will make half-hearted efforts to remove the infrastructure of control and repression we have laid in the last eight years, but we will fight them and we will win. Why? It's simple. We know how to fight, and they don't. We understand power and they don't. We're motivated, organized, and well funded. We can easily control the media narrative. We have our people deeply embedded in the bureaucracy. We know how easy it is to scare people into supporting us. We have learned how easy it is to suppress or manipulate the vote in purple states. We will get it done; we always do. We will do whatever it takes.
This has been the mentality of oligarchs since the dawn of democracy in ancient Athens. Do most conservative Republicans think this way? No. They don't have to--they just have to be vulnerable to the propaganda of people who do think this way. (Or they can be the types described here caught up in the Lost Cause fantasy.) Most Americans believe in democracy, but people with this mentality really don't, even if they say they do. If they are Americans, they see it as nuisance that must be tolerated because it's part of an American civil religious fantasy that cannot simply be abolished. And they don't have to abolish it so long as they can manipulate the game to their advantage with their cultural wedge issue and fear tactics as successfully as they have been able to do.
I share in the country's joy this week at the inauguration of a worthy, capable man to be its president. But he is all potential, and zero actuality as yet. I am very interested to see how he handles things, and I deeply hope that the crisis effected by Bush/Cheney in the last eight years will be the occasion for the nation's reassessing under his leadership what its real values and deepest aspirations are.
But we should not delude ourselves that all is well because the "system worked" in our electing him in the first place. The system is not working even remotely as it should, and we should not forget that the real crisis is not about our financial situation or the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan (these are symptoms, not the illness itself), but about the constitution, the rule of law, and whether the nation's democracy-destroying coalition of oligarchical factions can be marginalized. They shall always be with us hatching one plot or another to effect their narrow self-interested agendas, but the deeper question is whether we will see them for what they are and stop them.
P.S. Yes, we are all guilty of the administration's crimes if we just shrug them off: