As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself...
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner...
Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy...
All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters,"...
There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials...
Goodbye to all that: Reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult
He asserts that the GOP has only three platforms: protect the rich, wage wars, and pander to religion. He makes a compelling argument that the latter - the politicization of religion - is both the worst and the source of all other evils. Democracies only function when dissent is noble; but under monotheistic religions, dissent is diabolic. You can't mix religion and politics without destroying both.
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