That’s the funny part. The guy cofounded the Arizona NAACP. He spoke passionately about the plight of Native Americans. Goldwater voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 but opposed the ‘60 version. No doubt by that time the doozies had totally permeated Barry’s inner circle. Wha happen? He must have known these people were nuts.

Same goes for Reagan. The former New Dealer was advocating troops to enforce school desgregation well into the early sixties before he found himself on the Bircher’s double opt in mailing list.

I agree with you that the best thing for the Repub party would be lose badly in 2008. The problem is where do they find enough moderates, mavericks and true conservatives who are going to be willing to go to war with the current GOP base and infrastructure ? As Brownstein’s piece demonstrated these folks give no ground on anything.

You have to build a broad powerful coalition that moves the party back towards the center. For instance, what Mike Huckabee said recently about the Clintons. That’s a good start but you need it from more than a guy who has no chance of winning.

Also, Nixon recognized that these people were crazy and that he had to cross them sometimes. Unlike the current crop he knew he was holding something that could blow up in his hand.

Adjust your tin foil hats, boys and girls, we’re about to enter a dimension beyond space and time…

Shortly after the space shuttle Columbia disaster (it blew up while trying to land, in 2003), I heard Carolyn Myss explain this event as an example of an omen:

After the disaster, it was found that Columbia’s left wing was damaged on take-off, and so the spaceship was trying to land using only its right wing. Myss argued that it’s no accident that Columbia blew up right over W’s home state of Texas.

My fear (articulated in #18) is that our country has been badly damaged by the dominance of the right + weakness of the left – and there are plenty of examples in history where this has been catastrophic to other countries. And so Myss’ interpretation of these events isn’t as far fetched as it might seem.

Gag me.

For the entire history of this nation (and every other nation before it) there have been two human impulses: The desire for everyone to control or be controlled in a hierarchy of dominance (whether it be based on wealth, race, religion, military force, or good old-fashioned hereditary aristocracy), competing with the desire for everyone to have an equal voice and an equal opportunity to fulfill his or her potential.

The former impulse is what we call “conservatism”, and the latter is what we call “liberalism”. You can pick any political controversy you like; there’s always one side that will tend to reinforce or increase the differences in privilege between one group and another, and another side that will tend to break down the existing patterns of privilege and put everyone on a more equal footing, and the first is the “conservative” side and the second is the “liberal” side. Always.

The reason the people Maha calls “pseudo-conservatives” are opposed to some of the basic founding principles of America isn’t that they’re not conservative, it’s that conservatives opposed those founding principles back in the 1700s and some still oppose them today.

Eisenhower was a guy who struck a balance between liberal and conservative. To call him a “real conservative” because he sometimes agreed with liberals, and characterize people who firmly and consistently oppose liberalism as “pseudo-conservatives,” is to badly blur the meaning of “conservative,” if you ask me.

John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience is an attempt to popularize this research, to disseminate understanding of how authoritarians think, and what can be done about them.

Dean is a self-avowed conservative, and he (and his mentor Barry Goldwater) were alarmed at how right wing authoritarianism displaced their style of conservativism in the Republican party. The book’s title is a take-off on Goldwater’s 1960 manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative.

And so it’s important to distinguish between these types of people. You can reason with a John Dean style conservative, you cannot reason with an authoritarian. The John Dean style of conservatives are fleeing to the Democratic party, which has become like a swamped lifeboat, for people repulsed by the extremist Republican freak show.

I fear that this, and other factors are going to render the Democratic party, for now, to be merely a party of moderation, one that will offer mostly incremental change, but one that won’t have the ability to make the sweeping reforms necessary to correct our country’s disastrous slide. Recall that the party’s forerunner, Hillary Clinton, started out in life as a Republican, back when they were more moderate. That’s essentially how she seems to pitching herself today.

I also agree with the commenter upstream who referenced Dave and Sara’s work at Orcinus – given the seeds of disaster deliberately sown by the far right over these last few decades, I think our country’s prospects of returning to its usual balancing act between two opposition parties isn’t guaranteed nor is likely IMO. It would take awesome leadership from the moderate and progressive factions of this country to restore this healthy dichotomy, and I don’t see this caliber of leadership in the wings, plus they face enormous entrenched opposition from the right wing machine. This machine works best when it’s in opposition, which is one reason why they don’t mind the Democrats taking over for now, to catch the blame from the last seven years of disaster.

What’s needed above all is Respect – same as what Aretha Franklin sang about years ago. Respect for each other, Respect for the rule of law, Respect for the Truth. Until these things can be restored, and until all of us can realize this is what we’ve lost, and how we came to lose it – our country is on the edge of disaster. So much of our public mental space has been deliberately poisoned, to the point where critical thining skills are a rare thing in this country these days. We’ve created plenty of enemies who are now living for the day to give us that final push over the edge.

I would argue that Nixon and Eisenhower both were essentially the right wing of the liberal consensus, and not conservatives as conservatives themselves understand conservatism.