The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

In 1995, Hilary Clinton referenced the “vast right wing conspiracy” that had targeted herself and her husband. For this, she was roundly mocked and ridiculed.

Yet, here we are, just about 30 years later, and what have we discovered? Well, that there really was and is now a vast network of right wing think tanks, PACs, activists, politicized churches, schools, and organizations all of them directed and funded by a small coterie of extremely wealthy, extremely right-wing individuals. 

And moreover, this group is within a hair’s breadth of imposing an entirely new form of government on the United States--the plutocratic, theocratic, oligarchy envisioned in Project 2025 and embodied in Donald Trump.

So what do we do about it? Honestly, I don’t know. I do know that we have to keep fighting. And we have to make absolutely certain that never again does the GOP control all three branches of the government. Or, if possible, any of them.

And I also know this. Our Republic will not again be safe until we have confronted “the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” And the people who created it.

The people who for some reason believed that their right to obscenely great wealth, and enormous power...outweighed our right to truth, justice, well-being, and, indeed...

To life itself.

The vast right wing conspiracy...is real. 

The Most Moral Among Us

So, here’s something I’ve talked about before, but I’ll revisit it in light of the current election…

Certain figures in American politics (mostly on the Right) tell me, quite forcefully, that they represent the best in us. They say they are principled, strong, wise, and, for lack of a better term, genuinely American and truly Christian.

Which may be so…but…well…

I am a middle class, middle-aged chap who lives in the suburbs. I pay my bills on time. I don’t deal in drugs or steal cars or snatch purses. I have never cheated on my wife and don’t intend to. I don’t molest children. I even go to church on a regular basis.

And yet…

I just can’t escape the feeling that if those figures in politics, with all their self-professed morality, should come to power…

I might find myself in a very difficult position. I might find my, shall we say? position in society…terminated.

With extreme prejudice.

Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.