The primary effort of this blog, with the help of John Dean, Robert Altemeyer, Shadia Drury, Philip Zimbardo and many others, has been about our close call with becoming a single-party state under the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and other conservatives without conscience. This history has spanned almost 40 years and has been described relative to the Executive and Legislative branches of our federal government. It has been about a minority of the Republican Party that is strongly authoritarian; born-again white evangelicals lead by neocons that favor preemptive continuous war, fear mongering and rule by the unitary bully pulpit. It has been about what has happened and could have happened under the rule by this totalitarian minority.
Now that the nation has reached a major turning point, I will be taking this blog around that corner away from the “you’re on your own” me society toward a more empathetic society where a limited federal government empowers and protects its citizens from various abusive power brokers including big business and big government.
As we turn, I will do my best to explain why the authoritarians are who they are and what we can learn from them to replace their conservative infrastructure with a new progressive one. The conservatives have spent almost 40 years building this infrastructure and progressives have just laid a foundation for building theirs. Are we ready to build on this foundation?
“This [presidential] victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change.” – President Elect Barack Obama, 11/4/08.
Andy Hailey