Tfgray’s Weblog

I have Rachel Maddow to thank for introducing me to The Family. For the past three broadcasts, she’s been covering this shadowy fundamentalist organization. The first two nights, she interviewed Jeff Sharlet, author of a book on the subject. I read it over the weekend, and my hands are still shaking.

The Family, formerly referred to as The Fellowship, is highly organized in cells modeled on the Communist Party, but chooses to think of itself as not an organization at all, very convenient when your money passes “man to man,” i.e., without benefit of tax reporting, a technique they picked up from one of the organizations they profess to admire: the Mafia.

In its original formulation, it’s The Idea. The Reverend Abram Vereide, in the depths of the Depression, had a vision: The world would be saved by its ‘Big Men.’ If all power could be granted to the wealthiest and most powerful, the superior men would rule, and the world would be perfected. The problem, as he saw it, was that the little men were not satisfied with their lot, and through unions were attempting to displace the big men from their God-given authority.

And that authority, he knew, was God-given. After all, was it possible that such men could occupy their positions if it were against God’s will?

How did he know this? God appeared to him in a blinding white light and told him. He would preach a manly Christ, a forceful Christ, a Christ who embraced the moneychangers and whipped the poor from the temple, a Christ on the side of the Pharisees.

Now, I know a little about white light experiences. At the age of 25, in the throes of a deep personal crisis, I found myself waking into white light, an awesome, blissful experience, with all my synapses firing at once. Like others having that experience, I heard a voice. “You can do anything you want, have anything you want, be anything you want,” it told me. At a certain level, that’s true. On the other hand, your head can get pretty puffed up if you take that sort of message without a big wonking grain of salt. My reaction was, “I bet Adolph Hitler had a voice just like that in his head,” and chose to downplay it.

The voice told Vereide something a little different. He was to recruit the Big Men to Jesus, and they would conquer the world in His name. What’s not to like? His version of the reign of Jesus, however, has some interesting features. All power was to be aggregated to the few. The poor and powerless? Let them eat prayers. The wealthy and powerful would, if left to their own devices, rule in perfect justice. If any of this sounds familiar, up to  and including the notion that the economy, if freed from regulation, will function with perfect balance and perfect fairness, there’s a reason for that. For the past 75 years, Veriede and his followers have assiduously brown-nosed the powerful, afflicted the afflicted, and comforted the comfortable. In the name of Jesus, of course, recruiting them into prayer groups, aka “cells.”

But back to that white light. I remembered something while reading Sharlet’s book, two things, actually: the story of Jesus’s encounter with Satan, after his 40 days in the desert. Satan made him an offer—limitless wealth and power. Jesus told him to get lost. The other thing I remembered is that Satan’s original name was Lucifer, “Lightbearer.”

Could there be a connection? Could it be that the White Light is not God, but Lucifer, the Lightbearer, who was ejected from heaven for presuming to be God’s equal? To me, it’s all metaphor, but I can see where the expression of unlimited power without the need for anything resembling human decency would qualify as satanic. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether you call them sociopaths, demonically possessed, or authoritarian social dominants. They call it Jesus, and in their minds the name of the Lord has become a code word for oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy, enforced by brutality, where needed.

One of Sharlet’s examples, mentioned in his first interview with Rachel, was a Family workshop at which the leader asked a Congressman, “What would I think of you if I knew you had raped three little girls?” The congressman was shocked, “You’d think I was a monster.”

“No,” the leader replied. “You are one of the Chosen.” One of the chosen, one of the Big Men, who would rule in perfect justice, when not violating everything in sight, or perhaps by violating everything in sight. What balm to the souls of sociopaths! Not only can they sin with impunity, God smiles upon them! Is it any surprise that both Governor Sanford and Senator Ensign are Family members, and that neither of them is resigning?

Sharlet, in his book, outlines the major projects of the Idea/Family/Fellowship. The Cold War: The Vietnam War-50,000 American dead, 8 million Vietnamese dead, a devastated, poisoned environment, thousands of babies born deformed due to exposure to Agent Orange. Latin American death squads. Somalia, destroyed by its dictator Siad Barr, armed first by the Soviet Union when he fought against Ethiopia, then by the United States, through the influence of Family members Senator Chuck Grassley and Joint Chief of Staff Chairman General David Jones, which weapons he turned upon his own people. Indonesia’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. Uganda, making progress in its battle against AIDS until the Family-infested Bush Administration replaced its programs with lectures on morality. The Ugandan AIDS rate doubled. All projects favored by the Family. They seek out the powerful and will arm and fund anyone who will bend a knee with them and mouth the word “Jesus.” Oh yes, and murder ans oppress the “little men,” their wives, and their children.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Liberty University withdrew recognition of itsYoung Democrats Club, on the grounds that no Democrat can be a Christian. Brigham Young University withdrew recognition of both its Republican and Democratic student groups.

While Liberty says it is willing to restore recognition, provided the young Dems ally with a group with “Life” in the title, this move is not only about the  “abortion, socialist, and LGBT agenda.” There’s more beneath the surface.

A couple of weeks ago, I was surfing the upper reaches of Dish Network’s offerings and found, along with channels selling everything from jewelry to exercise equipment, a Christian infomercial channel. The fellow hawking his wares at that moment was a historian promoting the view that the Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and that, in fact, a Republican form of government was founded upon Christian principles, whereas a Democratic form of government would inevitably decline into dictatorship and totalitarianism. He attributed this nugget to Noah Webster. I mean, after all, the guy who wrote the dictionary should know the proper meaning of words, right? 

Webster, as noted by www.Conservapedia,com, began as a freethinker, but became increasingly authoritarian as he aged. (Their word, not mine. Full quote:

Webster viewed language as a tool to control unruly thoughts. His American Dictionary emphasized the virtues of social control over human passions and individualism, submission to authority, and fear of God; they were necessary for the maintenance of the American social order. As he grew older, Webster’s attitudes changed from those of an optimistic revolutionary in the 1780s to those of a pessimistic critic of man and society by the 1820s.

Still, one would think that the founder of Amherst College and inventor of American spelling would have known that the Roman Republic had sprung forth, flowered, and decayed into the Roman Empire before the birth of Christ.

This is simply an Orwellian play on words. If you’d like more examples, go to www.wallbuilders.com, where the nexus of Christian and Conservatism is fully explained.

The thing I find most interesting is that these folks, who trumpet their Christianity most loudly, will opt for Old Testament teachings any time the actual words of Jesus contradict them. Well, maybe that’s not the part that strikes me most profoundly. I’m even more distressed by their quest to define “Democracy” as Evil and “Republican” as Good, and the attendant slippery slope into religious-based warfare thereby created. The site quotes copiously from the writings of noted extreme Right Wing theologian R.J. Rushdoony, whose name rhymes with looney, thus proving no only that there is a God, but that he is a just God and that He has a sense of humor.

Let’s look at the dictionary (Merriam-Webster) definition of those terms:

Republic: a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president; a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.

Democracy: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority; a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.

Subtle difference: In a Democracy, “the People” get to vote. In a Republic, “a body of citizens” is entitled to vote. Remember, in the original American set-up, only men, and specifically “men of property,” i.e., landowners, were allowed to vote. Would anyone like to guess what criteria Wallbuilders might be hoping for in their ideal Republic? (For an eye-opener, click here. Read down to the part about it being okay to enslave non-believers. The Bible says so. So there.) They have an interesting workaround on that verse that okays selling your daughter into slavery. It’s for her protection. And the terms “Christian” and “Free” are identical and interchangeable, the latter being impossible without the former.

Okay, free from what and free to do what?

I’ve put off writing this post for years, since it’s hard to phrase it in a way that won’t sound insulting, but I’ll do my best. Social Dominants (read up on the issue here) are essentially people who are entirely convinced of their own superiority and consequent fitness to control others. One of the characteristics of those scoring highly on social dominance measures is the notion they hold that they are just so much smarter than everyone else, and the related belief, “Everyone else is an idiot.”

Ok. Here’s the part that will piss people off: statistically speaking, one half of every population will be below average on some measure. While things like height, weight, and suchlike are no big deal, when the topic turns to intelligence, well, people get cranky. We all want to live in Lake Woebegon, “where all the children are above average.”

So how does this pertain to the Karl Rove “50% + 1″ strategy that served the Republican Party so well for a decade or so? Well, the Party, at least the Country Club faction, which dominated it for a century or so, serves the interests of approximately 1% of the population. All they have to do to win elections is convince about 50% of the population to go along with them, against their own self interest. Why do I bring it up now, at this late date?

Click here.

I long ago noticed that every time you thought the Right Wing could go no lower, they’d rent a backhoe, but Sean Hannity has made it all the way to the center of the earth with this one. And it is a sad fact that a sizable number of Conservatives apparently believe that Stephen Colbert agrees with their views.

You can go back and watch Bush’s body language, hell, his verbal language as he explains his policies. Clearly, he is speaking to people he considers morons. This has been the Right Wing strategy all along, and unfortunately, it worked for a long time. Rupert Murdoch made billions betting on the notion that 50% of the population is intellectually below average.

This is changing, however. As Keith Olbermann pointed out the other night, with no small degree of schadenfreude, Murdoch’s media empire is tanking financially, with earnings down a staggering 47% over the past year.

 And speaking of Hannity, when, I wonder, will someone tell him that, since Jesus said “faith is like a mustard seed,” people who put mustard on their burgers are obviously more spiritual than those who do not? I want to see him process that one, live, on national TV.

Update:

I just came across this quote from George W. Bush, at the 2001 Gridiron Dinner:

“You can fool some of the people all of the

time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

When my children were small, and wanted a friend to stay overnight, they would come to me and ask, “Will you call Jimmy’s mom and ask for an overnight, because, you know, you have the voice thing.”

They named it, but it’s a phenomena I’d noticed years before (and which really has nothing to do with the normal exchange of favors by grown-ups that got my kids the sleepovers they craved.)

Decades before I became a parent, I had a circle of friends that were a bit (well, a lot) to the Right of me. We’d sit and chat, telling stories and jokes, but I noticed that when one had something to say that he wanted to remain uncontested, he would use a certain tone of voice. It always worked, no matter who offered the opinion or what it was, although the most frequent practitioner was the son of an Air Force colonel. Years later, while driving cross-country, through a land of unfamiliar radio frequencies, I came across a station where the announcer talked in the same tone of voice. I had stumbled upon Right-wing talk radio, as I figured out after hearing one or two of the opinions the guy was spouting.

The Voice Thing.

I realized that some people are trained to respond to particular tones of voice. In some cases, it’s the gruff, confident tones of Right-wing talk radio, modeled, I suspect, on the vocal patterns of a military officer. “…well you know, Bob, those pointy-headed liberals want us to believe that we’ll be better off with clean water. Well, anybody with his head on straight knows that if you have a job you can buy all the bottled water you want, and if we have all those stupid regulations, nobody will have a job.” 

Others are attuned to the cadence of the preacher. “If you believe-uh, you will receive-uh.” Anything delivered in the proper tone of voice produces an unquestioning wave of bobble-headedness among authoritarian followers.

George Bush, neither father nor son, has the voice thing, although W can put on a pretty good imitation when he’s, say, talking about WMD at the UN. Dick Cheney has it. In spades. He’s got a picture-perfect example of the Right-wing radio voice, and when he speaks even I, who have done enough research to trust him less than half as far as I could hypothetically throw him, find myself doubting my senses. Nixon was a master of the form. Sarah Palin thinks she is. For a series of examples, click here.

John Kerry didn’t have it. Neither did Dukakis. Al Gore had the timbre, but not the phrasing. John McCain? Nowhere close. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both have it, although not the right-wing variant. I recall reading some right-wing commentary during the election in which the poster was complaining, “How can we beat Obama when he sounds like a preacher?”

Teacher, more likely, yet another form of authority figure. Professor, actually, as he demonstrated in yesterday’s session with Republican members of Congress. Pay attention, class.

 They did.

So we need to pay attention. Are we listening to facts or letting things slide in under the radar because the delivery is one we have become attuned to? Can we use this technique, say, when talking to a right-wing friend or co-worker? Would their heads explode if they heard opinions they disagreed with in a vocal mode that they were programmed to accept unquestioningly? Would the alternative viewpoint sink in?

Has anyone else ever noticed this? Comments, please.

 I listen to the political debate, and hear Republicans demonizing government spending in pretty much any form other than the military and police. This, they say, is the proper role of government: protecting the nation and protecting individuals and property.

Okay. No welfare, no health care, no protection of the environment, and if you want to see that your children get an education, well, there’s always The Discover Channel, I guess. This is Freedom, they tell us. Freedom from rules, from regulation, from Government Control.

But what do you call a government that consists only of an army and police? What do you call a government that demands the ability to arrest citizens, torture them, and hold them indefinitely without trial?

Isn’t that a Police State?

I’ll let you see this before I comment. Sessions is “Worst,” the third story in this segment.

There are some interesting things to think about here. Sessions has been around long enough to remember when the Taliban were those heroic Freedom Fighters led by that man among men, our good friend and anti-Communist ally Osama bin Laden.  Sessions has been around a while. I suppose we can forgive him forgetting that that world turned upside down on September 11, not that he and his friends have ever let us forget it. I’m not sure we can forgive him for making that comment the day after the head of the Arkansas State Medical Board was blown up in his driveway, Baghdad-style.

More troubling are the rumblings from the Right that their cause is so righteous that violence is justified. It’s not just Sessions. Not just David Duke. There’s Charles Colson, preaching this sermon in 1996. (“Only the Church collectively can decide at what point a government becomes sufficiently corrupt that a believer must resist it. But, with fear and trembling, I have begun to believe that, however Christians in America gather to reach their consensus, we are fast approaching this point. “) Although Colson, et al would beg to differ, this sounds like a call to theocratic revolution to me, you know, like the Taliban. Apparently is also sounded that way to billionaire heir Eric Prince, who founded Blackwater a month after Colson’s essay was published, now in possession of massive amounts of armament and combat choppers, thanks to its Iraq profits. 

It’s my husband’s dittohead co-workers talking about how “We’re going to have to fight the Government.”

One of them made that comment in my presence. I asked him, “What part of the government? The part that paves your street? The part that sends a lady over to watch your disabled girlfriend for free so you can go to work?”  He grinned and admitted that I had a point.

“You mean the Republican Party, don’t you?” I asked. “The part of the government that trashed the economy and got us into a land war in Asia.”

He thought about it.

He grinned. “Yeah,” he said.

If their recent statements and actions are any guide, the Republican Party cares only for its own power, and at present there are few willing to grant any to them. Their primary constituency has always been George Bush’s Base, not the Christian Right, but the “Got Mine’s and the Got More’s,” along with anyone they can bribe, cajole, or sucker into buying their agenda.

What is going on inside the Republican squirrel cage these days? The country club Republicans have fallen silent. Perhaps they have begun to realize that the economic policies they favored, while enriching them in the short run, have come perilously close to killing the golden goose called the American Economy. Perhaps they are too busy trying to save their own businesses and salvage their own portfolios. Perhaps, having got out in time,  they are looking for nice condos in Dubai, or, if not, sulking and sticking pins in their Bernie Madoff voodoo dolls.

This explains the apparent ascendancy of Limbaugh, the thoroughly corrupt mouthpiece; Palin, who will eventually face the same charges that brought down Ted Stevens, involving the free house she got from those contractor buddies who went on to build the massive Wasilla Sports Center on no-bid contracts at vast government expense, not to mention all the days she got paid extra to stay home from work; and Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurtzelbach, not a plumber, really, but he plays one on TV.

Right now there is a wide open playing field for the other side of the Republican Party, the shock troops, the true believers, the religious anti-abortion, anti-gay activists, the gun huggers.  The authoritarian followers who are conditioned to favor belief in authority over independent thought. Those who talk tough about self-defense and national defense, but who cling in panic to Big Brother’s trouser leg, selling off their Constitutional rights in exchange for alleged security while regarding the government whose newly-expanded powers they support as “too big” and “too powerful.”

They are the other side of the Obama story. The one that says, “You don’t have to be born rich or connected, heck you don’t even have to be particularly smart, get your facts straight, or work hard. All you need to do is have the right belief system, and you will be raised up to prominence. They look at Sarah and Joe and say, “That could be me!” 

And they support politicians that systematically knock the pegs out from under the very programs that could help them advance.

Stimulus package? A lot of fatty-assed bureaucrats taking our hard earned money. Never mind the construction jobs. We’ll do better if the money’s in our own pockets.

When’s the last time your neighborhood took up a collection to get the potholes fixed? Add a room to the local school? Hire a new policeman or teacher?

What part of government are you planning on fighting?

Oh, um, not the part that runs the Lottery.

It’s been common to regard McCain’s campaign strategy as an ever-changing grab bag of random tactics. I’m starting to think that the apparent chaos has been, up until now, a shiny object to hold our attention while the real work goes on elsewhere. The latest piece of glitter is the “Nice Guy/Gal Strategy” being pursued on the late night circuit. McCain was charming at the Al Smith dinner and on Letterman. I’m sure Palin will be on her best behavior on SNL, laughing as Tina Fey mocks her. This is the smiley face of the campaign, the part that makes you think, “Hey, they’re okay!” The other face, however, is not so pretty.

First a couple of basic principles: The Republicans are by nature a minority party. Their primary issues are the economic interests of the top 5% or less of the American people, with sops thrown to social conservatives and hawks in order to win their votes. Given that, their first strategy is vote suppression. If you can mobilize the authoritarian followers, roughly 25% of the population, add in the 5% or so who actually benefit from Republican policies, and prevent most of the remaining voters from either casting their votes or having their votes counted, you win. Here are some tried and true tactics:

• Caging, which is to say, eliminating as many voters as possible from the rolls. Katherine Harris of Florida was notorious for this in 2000. The process continues today. In the small town of Las Vegas, NM, Paul Maez, the local Supervisor of Elections could not vote in the recent primary. His name had been purged from the rolls.
• False information: wrong poll locations or hours. Leaflets stating that you will lose custody of your children or social services if you attempt to vote.
• False charges of voter fraud, such as the ones that led to the firing of 9 District Attorneys in 2006 and the current investigation of ACORN.
• Court challenges, again, see the Florida presidential race in 2000 and the Washington gubernatorial race in 2004. While Democrats may be willing to step aside in the interests of national unity, the last Republican to do so was Richard Nixon in 1960, although he never stopped insisting that the election had been stolen from him.
• When all else fails, stage a riot, like the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that stopped the vote count in Miami in 2000.

This last is what concerns me most. Is that why McCain said “fight” 20 times in his speech today? What I fear is not a few dozen Republican congressional staffers bullying the Bureau of Elections this time, but the way the word “fight” is being shouted at people who have become convinced by propaganda that if the Democrats take power, America will fail, their churches will be shut down, their daughters will be raped, and they will be beggared.

Economic times are strange enough these days. That alone is stoking people’s fears, but when coupled with robocall and junk mail campaigns by operatives like Richard Viguere and Frank Gaffney trumpeting a smorgasboard of accusations: Obama is a Marxist, Obama is a Muslim controlled by jihadists, Obama is a Black Muslim allied with a Jewish financier (George Soros, of course, but don’t take my word for it. Click here.) I can’t help but wonder if the Republicans aren’t trying to stoke some kind of low-intensity Civil War as a fallback for an electoral loss.

Is there more? Oh, pshaw, you might say, take off your tinfoil hat. All I can say in response is that it wouldn’t be the first time. In 1933, a cabal of prominent businessmen approached U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, whom they felt would be able to rouse the veterans of America to form an army to overthrow FDR. Butler played along and eventually discovered the identities of the conspirators, who included Grayson Murphy, director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel, a number of Morgan banks, and the original financier of the American Legion; noted art collector Robert Sterling Clark, who felt so threatened by the New Deal that he was reportedly “willing to spend half of my $60 million in order to save the rest of it;” John Davis, former presidential candidate and senior attorney for J.P. Morgan; Democratic former NY governor Al Smith, whose annual memorial dinner is now a big-ticket fundraiser that showcased the comedic talents of McCain and Obama just last night, and Irenee duPont. Yes, Democrats and Republicans both.

Source: http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/whitehouse.html

The congressional report was a whitewash and nothing came of it, no arrests, no trials, no mention of the word “treason.” Some say this was to cover up the role of members of the president’s own party in the plot. My personal theory was that Roosevelt used the internal, non-whitewashed version to blackmail the plotters into stopping their activities. Rumors of the plot were dismissed in the press as a joke. The plot, however, was stopped cold.

Why would they do this? What could persuade successful, presumably practical-minded men to try to pull off such a stunt? I think that Ben Franklin, that many-faceted genius, may have nailed it with this one:

Great wealth has never made a man happy. Instead of filling a vacuum, it creates one.

I think that’s what we’re up against now. If you look at the economy since Reagan, you’ll see a gradual siphoning of income and wealth from the bottom to the top. While you can’t attribute the behavior of the entire economy to one factor (it functions as a super-gizmoey Rube Goldberg machine) it does appear that without a feedback mechanism such as a decent minimum wage, progressive tax structure, or Federal revenue-sharing to return sufficient funds to the middle and bottom of the sandwich, the upper crust balloons into that airy froth commonly known as a “bubble.” Too much money trying to multiply itself by rearranging itself into newer and fancier configuations will eventually collapse upon itself, like bread dough that has risen too long.

Here’s the most interesting nugget. Larry Bartels, a professor of political science at Princeton University, has written a book, Unequal Democracy, that compares the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican rule.

From 1948 to 2007, Republican administrations averaged GDP growth of 1.64% per year. Democrats, 2.78%. Bartels points out that the 1.14% difference, if maintained over 8 years, would amount to an increase of 9.33% additional growth under Democrats. In addition, income inequality increases under Republican rule and decreases under the Dems, but even the top 5% , those guys who are so terrified of somebody trying to “share their wealth,” do better under the Democrats, with income growth averaging 2.20%, as oposed to the 1.90% they average under their preferred policies.

There is such a thing as killing the golden goose, and the Right Wing appears to be determined to do it, based upon a deranged view of how the economy works.  Next time your Republican/Neo-con/redneck uncle/friend/office mate blathers about how dangerous to his financial health an Obama presidency would be, run these numbers past him. Here’s the source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31view.html

In just one day we have McCain trying to bail not only himself out of debating Obama but Palin out of debating Biden, his lying to David Letterman in order to go down the street to talk to Katie Couric (after telling Letterman he was canceling in order to go to Washington to deal with the mortgage thingie), and suspending his campaign on the high-minded pretext of needing to focus on the TARP bill right after he launched a week’s worth of slanderous mud at Obama that leaves him wide open to a retrospective on the Keating 5.

Surely, this marks the end of his presidential ambitions, right? Not quite, according to Jonathan Chait, writing in today’s The New Republic:

Last February, political scientists Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State published the results of an experiment designed to test the effects of political untruths. The results would unsettle any idealist. The first conclusion they found was that lies work. When subjects were confronted with an untrue political claim (President Bush banned stem-cell research; weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq) respondents naturally moved toward those positions. When the lie was corrected, however, the effect of the untruth in moving opinions largely remained. The truth, in other words, is no antidote for a lie.

Their second conclusion was even more disturbing. Subjects who identified as politically conservative were not only immune to the effects of having a lie corrected, the correction made them even more likely to believe a lie. So, for instance, one group of conservative subjects was presented with a news story that depicted President Bush claiming weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. A second group of conservatives was presented with the same thing, along with a paragraph noting that Bush’s statement was untrue. The second group was more likely than the first to believe that Iraq possessed WMDs. The very fact of the press challenging their beliefs seems to have made conservatives more likely to embrace them. If this finding is broadly correct, then the media’s newfound willingness to fact-check McCain will only succeed in rallying the GOP base to his side.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=71756e51-a09c-4b7d-b270-c6327191b341

If you read my earlier post, What Gives Neo-cons Their Power? you’ll recognize the Authoritarian mentality at work here. According to Bob Altemeyer, who did 40 years research on the subject, about 25% of us are subject to such thinking. Perhaps you’ve noticed that in the past few elections, only about 50% of eligible voters showed up at the polls, and the Right left no stone unturned making sure that the Authoritarian 25% made up half of that total. Add in the 1% or so that actually benefit from Republican policies and you have a recipe for squeaker victories for the Right.

Obama’s got the right strategy. Get out the vote.

How is it that the neoconservatives, with their authoritarian tendencies, crackpot economic theories, and foreign policy tirebiting have come to so dominate the GOP? Interesting insights emerge if you look into their financing. Yes, there are domestic millionaires contributing to their think tanks, whose definition of Freedom is the repeal of the entire 20th Century (except for the nukes) creating a glorious return to the days of the Robber Barons when you could legally shovel dead rats into the sausage grinder, child labor was an acceptable alternative to education, and everybody peed in the streams. However, a sizeable amount of their support comes from a surprising source.

Sun Moon financed the founding of the premier neo-con daily, The Washington Times, and writes Bill Kristol’s paycheck over at the Weekly Standard. Why exactly is the Right so eager to ally themselves with a man who has announced that his goal is to destroy American democracy and replace it with a theocracy that worships himself? Why is he financing the Neocon agenda, rather than the Democrats, who, according to the Neocons, are the “real” traitors?

Sun Moon, a North Korean, built his relationship to the Right back in the Fifties, with massive contributions to the World Anti-Communist League. For detailed information on Moon’s revenue stream, go to www.consortiumnews.com, where Bob Parry has kept the investigative flame burning since he broke the Iran-Contra story decades ago. Links to his series of articles on Moon are on the left-hand rail.

Two personality traits that enable this counterintuitive alliance are known as Authoritarianism and Social Dominance. According to forty years worth of studies conducted by Dr. Bob Altemeyer, recently retired from the University of Manitoba, Authoritarians comprise about 25% of the population, which may explain why there seems to be a point below which which Republican support levels will not fall. Authoritarians function most comfortably in a rigid hierarchy that values obedience over thought, tend to be parochial, intolerant, easily led, and gravitate toward religious fundamentalism. Altemeyer’s studies show this to be true regardless of religion, so the same personality dynamic driving the jihadists can be seen driving elements of the Christian Right. One defining characteristic of authoritarian thought process is the ability to “compartmentalize;” to fail to see contradictions within one’s belief system or between one’s beliefs and one’s behavior.

Altemeyer identified Social Dominants by positive responses to such questions as “The most valuable skill you can learn is to look someone in the eye and lie to them.” He found that this group comprises 5 to 10% of the population. These individuals are generally amoral, value personal status and success over all other factors, and will do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals.

The Authoritarian Social Dominant is most dangerous. These individuals combine the compartmentalization and lack of critical thinking skills of the authoritarian with the power drive and amorality of the social dominant. Altemeyer cites Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as extreme examples. John Dean drew heavily on Altemeyer’s research for his study of the neo-cons, Conservatives Without Conscience. You can study up on the subject at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ where Altemeyer’s book, The Authoritarians, is posted.

In an email exchange, I asked Dr. Bob if he thought Governor Palin would be considered a “Double High,” and he responded:

I can’t say that Sarah Palin is a Double High. I couldn’t say she was if she scored highly on the RWA [Right Wing Authoritarian] and SDO [Social Dominant] scales. That’s an individual diagnosis, and ought to be based on patterns of behavior (as I did in the book with Tom DeLay, GWB, and Pat Robertson). Sarah Palin is too new on the scene, and there’s too much false information floating around about her.

That said, many established facts support the Double High hypothesis. I don’t think there’s much doubt about the RWA part, given her various stands. Has she shown signs of high social dominance? Well, her firings when she became mayor, her intimidation of the town librarian, her firing of the Public Safety Commissioner, her drumbeat lying about The Bridge to Nowhere and earmarks all fit the pattern. More telling to me is her seeming attitude that she can tell her followers anything and they’ll believe her. That looks like a social dominator leading high RWAs.

TF: In your research, or do you know of anyone else’s research, that speaks to successful techniques for countering authoritarian social dominants?

How do you counter social dominators? Vigorously, I’d say (although I’ve no studies on this and it’s just my opinion). It’s very much the same as how do you control playground bullies when the adults don’t. If you just “take” the bullying, it will never end. People have to unite against social dominators and fight back. I think a good example of that now is how the Obama campaign has changed its tone recently.

Responses posted with Dr. Altemeyer’s permission.