While FOX Enables and We, Congress, Blitzer, and Russert Accommodate. . .

A Far Right coup d'etat is on the way, here at home, in America. It's no longer a question. It's a fact.

Many folks have been saying so for some time. Inevitably, these are people skilled at long-range strategic thinking, committed to the Constitution, keenly interested in politics, and personally experienced to some degree with Washington's dark side. Few have been in places of high visibility until recently.

The warnings are coming faster and thicker now. Bill Moyers, former Press Secretary to President Lyndon Johnson Daniel Ellsberg, he of The Pentagon Papers, Vietnam vet, and former RAND analyst; Jim Hightower, Frank Rich, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein.

That last one deserves urgent attention.

Other people, too, are slowly waking, each expressing rising concern as he or she sees this or that upsetting piece of the puzzle.

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan is alarmed at US Customs' treatment of visitors and returning Americans--and this is on top of his upset over torture, the Christianists, and other constitutional affronts from Bushco. Cruise his posts over the past year for more.

A handful of lawyers has challenged the legality of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib on several issues, starting with torture and illegal detention.

Several folks, including a CIA chief who was fired for it, are upset by our country's recent embrace of torture.

There's been a flap lately about BlackwaterUSA, the powerful private army owned by a fundamentalist Rightwing Bush funder/supporter and, in turn, a recipient of much (taxpayer) funding and support by Bush.

Some folks, including former Reagan White House assistant counsel and USAF judge advocate Michael Weinstein, and the Military Religous Freedom Foundation, have noticed and vigorously oppose the militant "Christianizing" of the US armed forces and military academies. I hope someone soon notices the plague of "Christian" military high schools sprouting up, funded, no doubt, by the US Depts. of Education and Defense.

Others are alarmed at ENDGAME, Homeland Security's written-down detention/deportation plan, and at Halliburton's contract to build big detention centers on US soil, allegedly for dealing with foreign invaders, and "for other purposes" not specified. If you haven't read this document, you're in for a real treat.

Some, including even conservative Constitution scholars Bruce Fein and Norman Ornstein, oppose the rapidly expanding domestic spying apparatus and the active involvement of giant telecoms--involvement that evidently requires retroactive immunity from criminal liability. They call domestic wiretapping impeachable.

Others oppose HR 4088 the Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007 (SAVE), the new bill introduced by uber-nationists Bilbrey and Shuler. Among other things, the bill would add 8,000 more privatized (read Blackwater) guards to the southern border. Some of us think this is just as handy for keeping people in as out, and for shooting the spunkiest, and is just another way to force taxpayers to fund the President's private fascist army.

Naomi Klein provided the anatomy of the coup in The Shock Doctrine, noting the longstanding ties among this set of high-level administration officials, the University of Chicago, the Pinochet coup in Chile, the occupation of Iraq, and the "management" of New Orleans. The connections are deep: economic ideology, political philosophy, the Pinochet coup in Chile that turned a 160-year-old stable democracy into a gulag and playpen for the uber-rich, and trashed its middle class. The themes of "free market," "de-regulation," justifiable lying to the public, strong-man rule, and privatization run throughout all of them. We're talking Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Friedman, Cheney. . . .

There's also the business about the Right's ongoing effort, begun under Reagan, to concentrate media ownership into a few hands . This has caused a wrinkle here and there, along with Karl Rove's orchestration of Rightwing (ahem) "talking points" and purchasing of "news" commentary and "swiftboating" (lying about) opposition candidates.

The rampage of privatization, begun under Reagan but powerhoused by Bushco, and the tiny group of plutocrats who benefit. But see The Shock Doctrine on that. And New Orleans.

Then there's the soundtrack, the 20-year campaign of hate and demonization spewed from Rightwing firehoses like Coulter, Savage, Beck, and Limbaugh at Liberals, gays and lesbians, minorities, immigrants, and its desensitizing effects. Things that once no decent person would think are now said aloud: the new vernacular. We have permission to brutalize anybody who Bush labels a terrorist, from environmentalists and Quaker war protesters to 9-11 terrorists as long as they're not from Saudi Arabia.

Here in Phx, I hear from a pastor involved in our migrant watch that border enforcement snatched a two-year-old from its mother's arm at a Target store, deported his mom and dad, and put him in detention. Decent Americans demure. A two-year-old in detention? Hello? It's not the first time. Our pulpits are not ringing in righteous condemnation.

Pastors jailed for six months merely for attempting to deliver a letter of protest to Ft. Huachucha. Willkommen nach Amerika.

Systematized and professionalized vote tampering.

The demise of habeas corpus.

Why, even Congress itself was troubled when Mukasey opined that the president need not obey our laws. It just wasn't troubled enough to bar him from becoming the first Attorney General in our history who won't call torture "torture" and who believes the President is a Divine-Right monarch. We owe special thanks to Sens. Feinstein and Schumer, both Democrats, for caving on this one. It could have been the path to timely impeachment.

It's deductive reasoning, isn't it--I always get this mixed up--that extracts its conclusions from a set of given data?

Or you could just call it rubbing two brain cells together. How much more evidence is needed? What would a smart person do?

If my tone is sarcastic, it's because I doubt we Americans will be any different from the Germans who filed their nails for ten years as Hitler built his mighty Third Reich. It doesn't happen overnight. It does happen, though, deliberately in tiny steps easy to dismiss. It does happen. Unless we suspend our disbelieve, stop squelching our concern and outrage and fear, and defy it.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

At the very least, call your senators and representative daily and demand immediate impeachment. Remind the Republicans that not even they are safe from the reach of a violent dictator.

Torture, Mad Max, and the American Right

Andrew Sullivan writes:

If America does not stand against the torture of individuals seized without due process by an unchecked executive power, then American stands for nothing. In fact, if this standard had applied two centuries ago, America would not exist at all. . . . To destroy the constitution, the rule of law, and habeas corpus and to legalize torture in the false hope of saving lives is the action of those who do not understand freedom and who do not understand America. It is the action of cowards and slaves.

What part of "Live Free Or Die" do these people not understand?

Amen.

But.

It's not that these people—BushCo, the Right--"don't understand." It's that they operate in a different paradigm. They've left behind the WWII paradigm. That was then. Now it's not about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It’s about boythink, how one type of post-industrial male, brought up on TV and movies, defines American masculinity.

From the Twin Towers to torture, the symbolic reference for the Right has always been psycho-sexual. Unless the its response is understood in that context, it seems wildly contradictory. How can a “patriot” espouse warrantless wiretapping, unaccountable detention, a unitary presidency, and torture?

Try this. As I've said for years, 9-11 was a bogglingly huge symbolic genital excision. It wasn't just that America's great towering (global corporatist) phallus was excised. It was also that it was brought down by a bunch of what the Brits used so nicely to call "wogs." Both go to the heart of white male America's greatest and most sacred myths: the myth of the self-made man, the invincible cowboy/frontiersman, the ever-successful Indian fighter/slave holder/ conquistador native tamer. Only a female bin Ladin would have been worse.

So, lacking a wholer and more richly nuanced definition of masculinity, a Rightwing America grown or growing of age in a post-industrial economy and starved for a viable new myth of the American Male latched on to the only role model it can comprehend. No, not John Wayne.

For all his faults, Wayne was hero to an older and better generation. Wayne was the WWII role model. Once we let him go and step from the 20th to the 21st Century, the veil suddenly lifts.

The model for today's Rightwing man is Blackwater. For Iraq, for Bush, for Cheney, for the corporatist/fascist power structure now presuming to speak for us, it’s Max Rockatansky with a paw on his chest.

For this Rightwing generation, the model American male is Mad Max, not coincidentally the character for which homophobe antisemite Mel Gibson is best known, who does his thing in a post-nuclear war dystopia brought about by the global oil shortage. And ironically, he's not even American. He's the pseudo-nationalist for the pseudo-patriot.

The Rightwing vision – playing out now in Iraq and embodied by men like Alberto Gonzales, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Erik Prince--canonizes vengeful, brutal, unrestrained and unaccountable men. Men like Max, only in this case, men who actually don't remember a time when principle was an intrinsic part of the authentic male ideal, men who areincapable of the U-turn that (too late) allowed movie Max to reclaim his soul, men who, for the most part, have had other priorities than putting themselves under fire, men for whom money is the measure of self-worth.

As we see every day, such men view laws as helpful in their place but not applicable to them. They also see the Constitution as just a piece of paper. For them, principles and restraint are for "pussies." The Rightwing vocabulary and the supporting role of faithful, super-orthodox women and minority characters (Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Lynne Cheney, Mary Matalin, Ann Coulter) pretty much say all we need to know about how today’s Rightwing American Man sees himself in relation to the rest of the world.

So it follows as night follows day that men like Bush, Gonzales, Limbaugh, Cheney and the rest view the capacity to dish out torture as the mark of manhood. Not surprisingly, it's the inverse of an older principle that saw the capacity to withstand torture and never deign to sink to its level as the core of the authentic adult male.

The Long US March to Christo-Fascism: Part III

Note: This is Part III of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. This series will be updated and revised as information and time are available. Part I. Part II.

Parts I and II of this series told in broad strokes the foundations of the secular and the religious Rightwing strategies for transforming a country that fought against the Third Reich into a country increasingly under fundamentalist, fascistic, and corporatist domination.

In Part III, we provide a series of links to other parts of the 30-year rise of the Right, beginning with Consortium's account of how, as the Left concentrated on tending the grassroots, the Right aimed at controlling US media.

The Long US March to Christo-Fascism: Part II

Note: This is Part II of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. See Part I. Part III. The series will be updated and revised as time and information are available.

Turns out it wasn’t drugs, sex, or hair that galvanized powerful stakeholders in a full-scale, brilliant, long-term reactionary war. It was, above all, what was framed as the new generation's “frontal assault on free enterprise”―ironically an assault grounded, among other sources, in profound regard for the US Constitution.

In the 1970s, two camps emerged, each bitterly opposed to the nation’s movement toward its constitutional potential—a Liberal society with at least some of its most cannibalistic and plutocratic capitalist tendencies at least somewhat constrained by tax and regulatory policy.

Among early leader/thinkers representing the secular conservative establishment were Lewis Powell, later Nixon’s appointee to the US Supreme Court, and economist Milton Friedman, father of Neo-conservative "free market" economics (see The Shock Doctrine).

Among early leader/thinkers representing hard-core cultural and theological dissidents were the members of a strategy-coordinating body called the Coalition on Revival (COR), headed by Christian Reconstructionist minister Jay Grimstead, then a Young Life regional leader trained at Fuller Theological Seminary. Its 60-member steering committee includes or included multimillionaire Left Behind series author Tim LaHaye, his wife, Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America, home schooling pioneer and fundamentalist Patrick Henry College Chancellor Michael Farris, Dee Jepsen, board chair of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

Significantly, COR members including Gary North and Tim LaHaye are also founders of the rightwing Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive and ultra-powerful strategy organization of Republican strategists, activists, and financiers.

Another major player in the US and global Relgious Right is Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, international arms merchant, and owner of the rightwing Washington Times newspaper empire.

A good part of the back story of the intense secular effort to reverse the “liberalization” of the country can be found at MediaTransparency. Its centerpiece is a memorandum from then corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to a colleague at the US Chamber of Commerce. The Powell memorandum laid out a comprehensive, coordinated strategy for a militantly conservative takeover of law, business, economics, government, and media, and to put a stop to such self-restraint as there was on the part of most US corporations.

The story of the Coalition on Revival is a placeholder in a sense. It is a heads-up briefing intended to call attention to the wealth and power of the numerous direct and indirect allies and offshoots of Grimstead and his formative biblical Reconstructionist organizers. Because of the secrecy and sheer extent of parts of the “Religious Right” movement in the US, the full story is harder to get at, and certainly won’t be found here.

However, much of the story has been gradually exposed by folks like Frederick Clarkson, Skipp Porteous, Sara Diamond, Theocracy Watch, MediaTransparency, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Cursor.org, RightWeb, The Public Eye, People for the American Way, and others, to whom I am (we are all) hugely indebted.

At its center is a comprehensive strategic plan to transform the United States from a constitutional democracy to a theocracy governed by Mosaic law as presented in the “Old Testament” of the Christian Bible, King James translation. These strategic documents emerged in the mid-1980s. Critical to its growth and influence has been our determination not to take it seriously. We blind ourselves to it by dismissing the Christian Right as just a “lunatic fringe,” thereby becoming its greatest asset.

Actually, it turns out that what many regard as merely ad hoc attacks on “liberalism” was actually a huge movement coordinated and focused by the steering committee of COR. COR's 17 Worldview Documents are, for us, a roadmap for deciphering the enormity and coordination of numerous legislative, judicial, executive branch, domestic and foreign policy, and cultural developments that have occurred in the US in the last 20 years. Clearly, as important as the strategy itself was the covenant sworn among its members to fulfill it, even to the point of martyrdom.

From these strategic deliberations--usually unknown to the rank and file evangelical-charismatic-fundamentalist churchgoer--eventually came hugely influential, richly funded for-profit and nonprofit projects in such spheres as media acquisitions/operations, music, entertainment, fiction, video games, fundraising, public relations, political organizing, political action, social networking, church-building, education, science and medicine, the family, and, of course, in the Republican Party. On balance, the constitutional democracy that we know has been under attack from every direction for more than 20 years, with great effect.

The most significant political development stemmed, ironically, from the failure of the Moral Majority to put Pat Robertson in the White House in 1988. It was a highly successful, brilliant strategy to take over the Republican Party secretly, from the grassroots up, and was engineered by men like Ralph Reed, the deceptively baby-faced pal of recently convicted GOP operative Jack Abramoff and the then Executive Director of the Christian Coalition of America, successor to the Moral Majority. The rest of us first noticed it in 1991-1992, following what is now known as the San Diego Stealth Initiative. This strategy and its “fifteen percent solution” gave the “Christian Right” ownership of the Republican Party.

Today, entities like The Federalist Society, the Madison Project, and the Council on National Policy, among other conservative oligarchs, determine who will candidate for our appellate courts, the Supreme Court, and other high public office.

About the Federalist Society, Theocracy Watch reported:

The Federalist Society formed twenty years ago in reaction to the powers the Supreme Court was granting the federal government. It is a network of lawyers, elected officials and scholars who want to free corporations from government regulations. It is hostile to civil rights, environmental protections, worker safety laws, a separation between church and state and more.

Some prominent leaders of the Religious Right play a dominant role in the Federalist Society. For example former President of the Christian Coalition, Donald Hodel is a board member. Twenty four of President Bush's top cabinet members and most of his court nominations are members of the Federalist Society. The list includes John Ashcroft, Attorney General; Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Energy; Gail Norton, Secretary of the Interior; and Theodore Olson, Solicitor General. Other notable members are Justices Scalia and Thomas, Orrin Hatch, Kenneth Starr.

People for the American Way prepared an in-depth report. The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power

The Christian Coalition, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, and dozens more obviously well-funded organizations deliver millions of charismatic, evangelical, and fundamentalist voters to the Republican Party, aided by thousands of small and large churches in flagrant defiance of tax law. Naturally, this criminal enterprise is ignored by the Republican Party, which prefers to focus its tax watchdogs on progressive churches.

Meanwhile, these and hundreds more—think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, political action organizations, media behemoths like the Christian Broadcasting Network, and even BlackwaterUSA, a private mercenary army--many of which are or have been funded by the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, Erik Prince, the Texas Hunt family, and other super-wealthy scions or dynasties—exist for one overarching purpose: to ensure that the rest of us--religion and Constitution notwithstanding--live according to their fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and the Constitution, by force if necessary.

How are they doing? It has taken 30 years, vast resources, brilliant strategizing, and dogged effort, but today George W. Bush is in the White House. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia sit on the US Supreme Court. Senators, congressmen, state governors and legislators too numerous to mention belong to this movement. The right of choice is about to go away and the right of privacy is in the gunsights. Thousands of public documents have been and are being hidden by Adminstration operatives, and the President and Vice President and BlackwaterUSA and Scooter Libby reside in a realm above the law. Gay and lesbian people—-not to mention Democrats and liberals-are being demonized systematically by techniques developed in pre-War Germany. Our President speaks only to Republicans while using our tax dollars, and as we've seen recently, Republicans speak mostly only to white people. Far-right conservatives--many Christian conservatives--have extensive involvement in the armaments industry and in the US intelligence apparatus. George H.W. Bush was CIA head before he was Reagan's Vice President and, later, President.

Colleges like Patrick Henry, Liberty U., and Regent are training cadres of lawyers every year, and now contribute phalanxes of interns to the White House, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, State, Education, and Defense. Media such as Fox, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Clear Channel determine FTC media ownership policies and decide what a generation of Americans will hear and see. Young Life and similar powerful campus-based propaganda ministries flourish, and the attack on public schools is visible in the home schooling movement mostly coordinated by centralized Christianist curriculum and materials, the voucher program, No Child Left Behind, and a national war on teachers. Government scientists are gagged on subjects like women’s reproductive health, global warming, stem cell research, environmental destruction, genetic engineering, food safety and the global practices of agribusiness. Creationism is being taught in our schools as serious science. Our military academies are being evangelized, and our military are evangelized and used by white supremacists as training camps.

These are, of course, also partly due to the influence of secular conservative corporate interests, because there is enormous overlap between the secular Right and the Religious Right, as the person of BlackwaterUSA’s Erik Prince and the Coors and Hunt families and others illustrate.

But wait, there’s more. What in the sixties had begun to be a productive dialog between corporations and progressive Americans has become a multinational monolog, a one-way, top-down, like-it-or-lump it frenzy of profit making without social accountability or, increasingly, regulation. That’s the free market way. (See Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.)

From USAID, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank bringing destitution to a country near you, to the blatant corruption associated with Halliburton, KBR, BlackwaterUSA, and other war profiteers, to the erosion of constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms brought by The Patriot Acts, to the control of healthcare by pharmaceuticals and for-profit hospitals, insurors, and providers, to the manufacture of genetically altered crops that exterminate natural counterparts just by being planted, to the privatization of water itself, to the outsourcing of US jobs, to the systematic suppression of US labor rights, to the orchestrated dumbing-down of the public by TV and radio that give 24/7 coverage to trivia and propaganda but ignore (suppress) news that might damage the Right’s agenda, to energy policy set by big oil--all this and more can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Lewis Powell’s brilliant coordinating strategy for reinstituting unregulated “free enterprise,” and to the toxic influence of the Religious Right.

This summary sketch is merely an overview. Daunting as it is, there is also good news. The truth always outs, the majority of the American people want none of this, and, as we have begun to see in the last two years, over-reaching movements have a way of falling.

Not least, as the Right learned from the Left in the seventies, strategy per se is not partisan. It can be adopted by the opposition. The Left could do worse than pursuing media ownership and well-designed, coordinated political organization, voter registration, and grassroots Party change models pioneered by the Right, while keeping its eyes, mind, and heart fixed firmly on the Constitution and the safety and wellbeing of the commonwealth.

The Long US March to Christo-Fascism: Part I

Note: This is Part I of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. This series will be updated and revised as information and time are available. Part II. Part III.


As we are reeling from this week’s revelations about Blackwater, not to mention other monumental developments of the last six years, many wonder how in the hell we got here.

It will take time to tell the whole story—this overview doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive—but while the rest of America was focused elsewhere, a fluid coalition of secular economic and political conservatives, cultural/religious conservatives, and other hard rightwingers launched two brilliant, loosely coordinated strategies to seize control of the country for the Right. The secular strategy came from the establishment. The cultural/religious one originated at the grassroots. Both eventually attracted followers at all levels. This takeover began in earnest in the early 1970s.

For 30 years, the Right has branded the New Deal as "communism" and the sixties a wholesale assault on decency. What actually happened in the sixties was that “the new generation”—now aging Boomers—saw certain dominant but fundamental and entrenched American values as they are, and we challenged them. Numerous radical thinkers on the Left (radical = root, fundamental) had said it all before in miles of manifestos, but Charles Reich preached it to the suburbs in his best selling The Greening of America (1970):

The logic and necessity of the new generation -- and what they are so furiously opposed to -- must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason" -- reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation.

By the mid-60s, building on the Enlightenment, the nobler tendencies of populism, the labor movement, and New Deal forebears, and working both in and outside the system, we had begun to change the nation. What stunned the Right were gigantic waves of reform to US government, law, culture, religion, and business. All were fueled conceptually and politically by thousands of little-known and famous radical-to-liberal "micro-projects," like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, and by the much larger civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements.

These waves took their main visible form as Medicare and Medicaid (1965), The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a host of consumer protections, environmental safeguards, workplace regulations, think tanks, publications, and nonprofits. These continued over the coming decades to empower minorities, women, workers, and the elderly, and even began to lift up the unemployed poor.

Meanwhile, we also forced Americans to see, beneath the veneer of flags and rhetoric, the lies and devastation of war and the corruption of the “military-industrial complex" that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so presciently warned us about:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together

What we accomplished was not too shabby. Be proud, sisters and brothers of the Left. Be damned proud.

Turns out it wasn’t drugs, sex, or hair that galvanized powerful stakeholders in a full-scale, brilliant, long-term reactionary war. It was, above all, what was framed as the new generation's “frontal assault on free enterprise”―ironically an assault grounded, among other sources, in profound regard for the US Constitution.

In the 1970s two camps emerged, each bitterly opposed to the nation’s movement toward its constitutional potential—a Liberal society with at least some of its most cannibalistic capitalist tendencies at least somewhat constrained by tax and regulatory policy. [Continued in Part II.]