I would think it important to separate this new “conservatism” from the traditional variety. Remember the American vice is to use language to hide meaning. I’ll quote myself from an earlier post:

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate.

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, “red” is the color of the left, but in America, the term, “red state”, means one that is right-wing and “blue”, which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call “liberal”, which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing… These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, “conservative”.

The new conservative is, in plain English, in fact, a neo-fascist and the personality traits we observe on the American right these days are those of a fascist.

What is the difference

If a person is born into a well to do, stable family, where the parents respect and perhaps even love each other and treat the child kindly and his/her exposure to traditional religion is benign. He/she is likely to accept the family’s traditions and values unquestioningly.

From that point his/her attitude will be one of prudence, of not spoiling  (for him/her and his/her family) a good thing… and his/her attitude toward the less fortunate than himself/herself may even be benevolent and paternalistic and be expressed in contributions to charity and other good works.

What we are seeing in the Republicans now, has little or nothing to do with that kind of conservatism. We are looking at exasperated, paranoiac, xenophobic, racist nastiness, in short a fascistic mentality of crippled personalities in reaction to changing mores and a failing economy.

Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

Shinola, take a whiff

Watching the antics of Romney, Santorum, Bachman, Paul, Cain and Perry and contemplating the mere possibility that someone who should only be handled with forceps like Newt Gingrich could now lead a party once led by Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower, one gets the feeling that the spirit of the republic is a little like the Bruce Willis character in “The Sixth Sense”, he’s dead but doesn’t know it yet and only one small boy seems to understand the situation… Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement is that “small boy”.

In American-Speak someone of little understanding is said to be unable to distinguish between excrement and shoe polish, we say then that he or she “can’t tell shit from Shinola”.  It appears that in the Occupy Wall Street movement, a perhaps critical mass of Americans have taken it upon themselves to investigate the why and the how of the odor coming from the collective “shoe” and have set about to do something about it. Not a moment too soon if the race for the Republican presidential nomination is any sort of a leading olfactory indicator of the nation’s mental health. Read the rest of this entry →

We are cohabiting with a wounded political-economic system that is pouring legitimacy out of its every vein and with every beat of its heart, spurting incoherency from every artery and its heart is beating very fast as it thrashes around. In this company paranoia is a default option.

Paranoia is a home game for the ultra-right, because that is where they live in the flushest times… it is in the times of the disintegration of the most common and garden variety certainties that their message resonates most dangerously…. times like these. To some extent all of us are vulnerable to that message now. Awareness is our best defense.

In trying to get to the heart of any movement’s mentality the art it produces is the most accessible path. Artists exist to reveal just as politicians often exist to conceal. A picture is worth a thousand words: “Socialist Realism” tells you more about the bleak mentality of “Really Existent Socialism” than a hundred “World Peace Conferences” ever could.

Probably the most fertile and creative artist on the American ultra-right is Frank Miller,  the author of endless noir comic books, screenplays and films.  I would say that you could learn more about the American ultra-right and neocon mind set from even  tiny samples of Miller’s prolific production than by a wastepaper basket full of articles and policy papers by such neocon icons as William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer or the American Enterprise Institute. Read the rest of this entry →

I am recently arrived here at FDL and thus in the process of introducing myself, so I thought that some new readers might appreciate a little context to see exactly what I mean when I emphasize the importance of the OWS movement.

I consider this highly original political phenomenon,  in essence, as an awakening or “satori” of the American people. I believe it is an American political, social, ethical, moral and one by one personal, awakening from what seemed to me a sort of drug induced slumber of Jacksonian (Michael not Andrew) proportions. With a view to providing that context I am re-posting something I wrote on October 18th 2010. Re-reading it, I find the lineaments of its sinister implications are even more visible now than when I wrote it.  David Seaton