I have written before about my concerns regarding the rabid ignorant violent fear-adled right. They have certainly turned it up a notch since Obama's election, as expected.

There are very real concerns to this, such as another McVeigh of course, as well as derailments and distractions from useful and important legislation, which affects us every day already.

Even local politics have been infected. I have a local activist friend who heads a non profit conservation group. He says the atmosphere has turned decidedly ugly. He talks about buying a gun (!).

The "get government out of medicare" phenomena has reached truly tragically epic proportions, a tremendous amount of misdirected and misinformed outrage.

I can't decide what alarms me more, the pathology, or the ignorance.

In any case, where does this go?

Do the grown ups take over, or do we get what James Kunstler calls a "corn pone Hitler" (hello Sara Palin)?

I am having a hard time visualizing how we extract ourselves from this hole without locking up and lobotomizing some 40 million people.

I would like to be able to look past all this to another golden age of enlightenment and progressive humanity. But frankly, I don't see how we get there from here.

It all has to do with money. The people who have money are able to use the money to keep the money they have, and to get more money, with the help of our elected representatives, who need the money from the moneyed classes to get re-elected so that they can keep raising money. So if those who have the money are the ones who think that Sarah Palin is qualified to lead the Free World, and that "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" is a coherent foreign policy, well then our congresspeople will do whatever they say, and fuck anyone who isn't rolling in dough.

Meanwhile, we can't afford health care, or education, or environmental clean-up.

I'm beginning to think you were right about voting Green. At least for every election to Congress. The senators from my state, and my representative--all Democrats--are absolutely indistinguishable from Republicans. Blanche Lincoln has actually threatened to join a Republican filibuster against health care. Mike Ross has been Chief Obstructionist and Water Carrier for Big Pharma in the House of Representatives. I'll be goddammed if either of them will ever get a vote from me again.

They like that Palin won't get in their way. It's the poor and middle class dipshits who actually believe in her.

But yes, it is all about money and the capture of our government by those with it. I actually avoided mentioning that in the top post (I wanted to give Ryerson a chance to chime in before I went there).

The absolute fucked up politics we have right now, raging ignorant wingnuts and all, it all serves the interests of the kleptocrats.

The answer is to restrain corporate power and to reform the campaign system, and the media along with it.

THAT is how we will get better politics, and better policy.

As long as the Dems are feeding from the same campaign trough as the Repugs, we won't get there. I think a lot of people on the left are finally starting to come to that conclusion.

Here's a semi-related nugget: <link>

Nowhere. Because nobody reads any of us here, either. Since 2007 we've been an island unto ourselves on BOTF, and it's the same thing here (albeit without the manic-depressive criminally insane posters)

(Yeah, I'm off topic, but it still relates, man)

That you are an island, that you are an outlier, alone. No one else thinks like you. Better yet: you're insane.

They've done it to idiotic right wingers who are afraid of their own shadows. But worse yet, they've done it to intelligent aware liberals too.

You are an outlier.

of whom you speak did not just magically appear with the election of Obama. They had become rather quiet in the failing, waning years of the Bush administration, but they were there. They were there in spirit with the water cannons and the dogs during the Civil Rights years. Their forefathers created Joe McCarthy and their forefathers before them fought the Union at Gettysburg and burrowed into their holes at Vicksburg.

These people of whom you speak don't give up easy and they never change. Only the issues change and they don't like change. Sometimes they win a few rounds, but in the end - and make no mistake about this - in the end they always lose.

Do you weary from the battle? Do you fear a setback here or there? Take a rest. Plant a garden. Turn off your TV. Read a book. I hear Sarah Palin wrote one. That ought to be good for some laughs. Come back and join the fight after your heart has found peace. You will not have missed a thing. I promise.

And thanks for the reminder.

I was looking to the McCarthy era as a model. But is is so much more widespread now, so much more sophisticated.

Besides like I said above, its not about muslims or communism or liberals or unions or abortion or school vouchers or reds or chinks or japs or whatever it is about this time. It's about diversion of discontent (to borrow a phrase).

Saw the PBS documentary about this just last week: <link>

Nothing new under the sun.

Things will continue to get worse for several more years.When a majority of Americans understand that everything they ever hoped for is rapidly sinking out of sight, it is possible that they will do what needs to be done.

Is that a prediction for revolution (a violent or otherwise widespread populist democratic uprising) as an actual possibility?

Will there be a dabbling with full-on fascism first?

That's the fork in the road I am curious about. Do we go directly from the broken corporatist model back into progressive reform, or do we all get behind a popularly-endorsed round of fascism first?

I mean, we are three fourths the way to the fascism thing, do we go all the way and actually make liberalism a crime?

Well exactly, that's where I digress from Lennon. I am having a hard time imaging how we get to another progresive era or a 1968 from here, let alone a global awakening.

Or maybe we don't. Maybe the rest of the world awakens but we don't, We just kill ourselves. We're the catalyst for everyone else.

Or is that my Christian indoctrination talking?

As Apollonius might have said, America has built up a mountain of pretty bad karma, and that debt needs to be paid off at a national level. The nation is going down even as some individuals may find their individual salvation.

There are probably even worse things than fascism if you can envision the limits of our Yankee ingenuity. A feudalism where most people are just left out in an Apartheid of medical care, education, jobs, transportation, religion, etc. That might be less caring (if less insane) than Hitler's Germany was for Germans and Mussolini's Italy was for Italians.