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The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade-long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth. E.J. Dionne Jr. - Washington Post

This budget says the Republicans had Mr Obama right all along. The draft contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal. Clive Crook - Financial Times

President Obama proposes to raise the taxes of America's richest citizens, whose tax bill has been getting smaller and smaller for the last thirty years. This disagreeable prospect finds the political defenders of this wealthy minority, the Republican party, in a state of ideological collapse, with the prestige of the market economy and Reaganomics in tatters.

Now, in trying to forecast how this situation will play out I base a lot of my analysis on a assumption that many may find quite controversial or even unfair. This assumption, briefly stated, is as follows: that the possessors of huge amounts of money are, with many honorable exceptions, greedier and more ruthless in the acquisition and defense of their wealth than the average person is of his modest possessions and that they also have at their disposal many more tools to express these traits than the average person does.

As I say, many may find this characterization of the rich unfair, however if you take this assumption of mine as a given, it is safe to say that the wealthiest Americans are not going to take the prospect of paying more taxes lying down. They will fight hard and fight to win.

How will they fight?

Before continuing, I would like to make a short aside to remember something an old Spanish communist told me way back in the 1970s. He said, "David, if the right ever called for a mass demonstration behind the slogan, 'Workers arise, defend the property of the wealthy!', nobody would come, maybe ten people might show up. So the wealthy have to call up mass movements to defend their interests behind the screen of, 'God and country' or even racial hatred".

How is that for teaching the ABCs?

For some thirty years, the American political conversation has been dominated by a strain of ideological conservatism that wields market fundamentalism as a sword and cultural populism as a shield. Hendrik Hertzberg - New Yorker

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this breakdown of faith in the market economy, because we are talking about transcendence. To have the economy collapse the way it is doing does not just mean material hardship, it is a "dark night of the soul" for many Americans.

It might sound like a crude joke, but for many Americans the line where capitalism ends and where Jesus begins has been steadily blurred and wrapped in the flag since the beginning of the "Cold War" and the "red scare" of the late 40s and early 50s. If you choose to consider that an accident or a coincidence, well it's a free country, isn't it?

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall this transformation of money making into a universal faith open to all, where everybody wins, has become worldwide. This can take paradoxical forms:

A couple of years ago, John Berger made a salient point apropos of a French publicity poster of the internet investment brokers' company Selftrade: under the image of a hammer and sickle cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds, the caption reads "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy of this poster is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian Communist criteria, everybody can participate in it. Slavoj Žižek - "The Undead Lenin"

For a long time not only have the wealthy had their money practically untouched, they have been admired and encouraged to flaunt it. That era has crashed and is burning.

I wrote this in June 2007:

Millions of middle-middle class people who have been living in a dream world, thinking that were somehow part of the same universe as Bill Gates, are going to have to make drastic decisions about allocating their resources if they are not to lose their homes. They are going to re-discover why there was ever a universal demand for good, free public schools and universities or (in the countries lucky enough to have gotten that far) first class, free public health care in the first place. They will rediscover the nearness of the abyss of destitution and humiliation that terrified their parents and grandparents who lived through the Great Depression. As much as an economic and political readjustment, it will be a cultural change, for never before in history have so many "normal" people identified with the wealthy and considered them harmless or even benevolent.

The "sword of market fundamentalism" is broken:

President Barack Obama enjoys widespread backing from a frightened American public for his ambitious, front-loaded agenda, a new poll indicates. He is more popular than ever, Americans are hopeful about his leadership, and opposition Republicans are getting drubbed in public opinion, the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests. Wall Street Journal

That leaves the "shield of cultural populism" as untrammeled wealth's last line of political defense: Jesus, fear and the flag. The shield can be couched in calm, reasonable language:

Even though Obama’s audacious agenda might provide short-term relief to the economic and social challenges that now beset us, over the long term the Obama revolution is likely to erode first the religious and then the civic and moral fabric of the nation. Undoubtedly, this is not the change religious believers who put their faith in Obama last November are hoping for from this president. But if the European experiment with the welfare state tells us anything, it tells us that this is the change we can expect from a successful Obama revolution. W. Bradford Wilcox - Witherspoon Institute

Or it can be the red meat on display at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference :

In an address at CPAC, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee compared Obama and the Democrats' agenda to that of the former Soviet Union. "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," Huckabee said. Market Watch - Wall Street Journal

The rage is close to the surface:

"What is so strange about being honest and saying I want Barack Obama to fail, if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?" (Rush) Limbaugh said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Boston Globe

Probably the only card left to play with the economy in meltdown is the fear card and it certainly wasn't expressed subtly at CPAC conference:

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton believes the security of the United States is at dire risk under the Obama administration. And before a gathering of conservatives in Washington on Thursday morning, he suggested, as something of a joke, that President Barack Obama might learn a needed lesson if Chicago were destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Mother Jones

That is crazy talk, but that gives us a clear idea of the present fantasies of the neocons and we have certainly learned though painful experience that they are not people who are readily satisfied with just fantasies: they tend to act out.

By now, after eight years of Bush, I take these people seriously. There are at this moment a group of very well funded, well organized people who would rejoice if the United State suffered a huge terrorist attack or was dragged into a major war.

Armageddon is probably the last, best chance that the "Conservative Revolution" has of surviving and the only chance the super rich of America have of not ending up paying, what for them would seem, Scandinavian scale taxes.

They have plenty of potential disasters to choose from, for today's world is a "target rich" environment.

Finally the success of president Obama's "revolution" may well depend on the goodwill of the Communist Party of China and their endless purchasing of US debt, the cooperation of Vladimir Putin in Afghanistan and beyond, the passivity of the Ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the good faith of the Israeli Likud, which itself depends on the support of neofascist, Avigdor Lieberman... and of course, last of all, but not least of all, the acquiescence and quiescence of Al Qaeda.

Have I left anybody out?

The major challenge of progressives in the months and years to come will be to keep America out of war. DS

Huckabee: and you thought things couldn't get worse?

"Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It's a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext -- who's the Christian in this race? -- would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear."
Charles Krauthammer

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God (any god you like, take your pick) only knows that I don't like to find myself in agreement with Charles Krauthammer about anything, but today I think he's hit the nail on the head as far as Mike Huckabee is concerned.

I would add that Huckabee, like Krauthammer, forms part of America's slide toward its own unique brand of paranoiac, whimpering, Jesus ridden, Disneyesque, something or other that we might even call "fascism", if that word hadn't lost almost all its meaning; as by now the word "Fascist" has become degraded into an all purpose term of abuse without its former precision.

In one speech, however, his CPAC "islamo-fascist" speech, Huckabee went well over the line (YouTube link) directly into classic fascism as defined by former Columbia University Professor Robert O. Paxton in Wikipedia's article on the subject:

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Paxton further defines fascism's essence as:

...a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination."

Here is an extract of the speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, some of whose phrases I have highlighted to emphasize their conformity to Paxton's definition:

We all understand we are in an unconventional war. I have said, and I believe with all my heart, we are not on the brink of; we are in the midst of a World War III. (Applause)

And the Islamic fascists who have declared enmity against us are not interested in settling the types of lines of demarcation that normally settle wars.

Because this is not a war about property. This is not a war about personalities. This is not a war even about power.

What makes this so unusual is that the radical Islamic fascists—not representative of the entire Muslim religion, but the radical Islamic fascists who have declared war on us do so not from a political perspective but from a theological perspective.

And a lot of people I don't think understand that when that is the basis, there can be no negotiation. Because while one may be able to negotiate with diplomats, one does not negotiate with God.

When they declare that their sole purpose is the destruction of Israel, the United States and anything that resembles us, let us be clear. They are not interested in detente. They are not interested in some type of peaceful co-existence.

They are not just interested; they are solely determined for one and only one thing, and that is not our decline. It is our ultimate and absolute annihilation and destruction.

This is a war we cannot and must not lose. Because it doesn't mean that we have a shrinked (ph) border. It means that we have a nonexistence.

They are not marching under the banner of a flag and wearing the uniforms of soldiers and carrying the banner of a country. It is an unconventional war.

And I am convinced it will require an unconventional response, through unconventional means, with special operations and heavy use of intelligence and a different kind of approach to fight it and to win it.

But the one thing that we must be committed to as a nation—be we liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, urban or rural—is that we understand the nature of this enemy and we understand that at stake is not simply higher taxes, changed lifestyles, but existence itself as a people and as a civilization.

We must win this war. (Applause)

Much of the Huckabee "movement" has to do with decontenting and eviscerating language. Try listening to Huckabee answering the evolution question: Youtube link. Or on Gays in the military. Youtube link. Here is my 'guru' William Pfaff on this language question:

"The debasement of language is political, due to the American electoral system, by which campaigning is entirely by unlimited paid television (or radio) advertising, imposing demagogy and simplism, frequently testing the limits of defamation and calumny. It also is due to the power of special interests in Congress and their influence on the public debate in Washington, distorting argument, cultivating euphemism, setting the media agenda, and imposing demagogy." William Pfaff

That debasement of language (in the widest sense of the meaning of "language") is at the heart of it all. Remember "compassionate conservatism"?

What we are seeing with Mike Huckabee is a post 9-11 retread of George W. Bush's year 2000, oxymoronic "compassionate conservatism": with the difference that Huckabee is much more credible than Bush was at delivering that oxymoron and it is an oxymoron that has resonated mightily with the American people and still does.

In fact "Compassionate Conservatism" is a magic phrase that holds in itself all the contradictions of contemporary America and certainly Huckabee is much better suited to deliver it than the hapless present tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Huckabee's political skills are of quite another order of magnitude than Dubya's and can only be compared to fellow Arkansan, "Slick Willy" Clinton's. (is there something in the water in Arkansas that loosens the tongue so prodigiously?)

You probably think that the United States cannot produce a worse president than George W. Bush... You are wrong. The best thing about Bush is how clumsy and inept he is. Imagine someone with Bush's ideology and Bill Clinton's political skills. Bush is only Huckabee's "John the Baptist", the "good news" is on the way. DS