Is Neo-con Ideology Dead?

[Cary]

God willing. . .

This thread sparked my thoughts this morning:

Behold the unfolding of a tipping point, the camels back is breaking,

One feature of their ideology is their insane devotion to "property". Taxation, according to them, is stealing. Of course when you point out to them that all of their schemes are not feasible, and simply amount to shifting the tax burden from the ultra wealthy to the middle class, they either freeze up completely or they do a "so what, it's only fair that everybody pay the same amount of tax" kind of thing.

So, they really do want to shift the tax burden from those who can actually pay it, to everyone else. That pretty much explains their fiscal irresponsibility. The fact that they just hate government, don't believe in government, and want government to fail explains the incompetence.

But what explains the fact that people support this, cutting off their noses to spite their faces? To truly stomp this out we need to have a powerful grasp of it and yank it out by its roots. What part of this thing is so pernicious that it survived the 2004 election?

A recent statistic, I think, may be the key:

10% of our population believes they are in the top 1%.

Having been duped, people like this will surely be inclined to eschew reality in favor of ideological constructs like worshiping the notion of "property" or complaining that the problem with democracy is that when they figure it out the population will vote wealth transfers to themselves. This is a grossly simplistic way of viewing economics, not to mention the whole fraud that is "supply-side economics." I mean "redistribution" is an unpleasant notion, but it's not like social legislation is the only avenue of "redistribution", or even the most pernicious or subversive.

Why do we want to be more like Mexico?

Of course, we don't want to be more like Mexico. People need to see this and it needs to be at the core of our message. "Property" is simply a legal concept, and if you study the history of "property" it isn't even remotely like the concept that the neo-cons make it out to be. We have this legal construct because it works for us to have it. We have this legal construct because we have a concensus that it is good to have this legal construct.

"Property" is not a "value".

The neo-cons are correct in this sense: if the system breaks down and doesn't work well enough to satisfy a sufficient number of people, the concensus will break down. If and when this happens, then what is the point of keeping the system?

How long can you fool 10% of the population, making them believe that they are in the top 1%? Where is the other 90% on this?

I think we are seeing a breakdown of the neo-cons. People are seeing through the flim flam. But how deep are the roots of thing, and how much of it has been yanked out?

[melody]

1. It's old fascism in new bottles - they'll just repackage

Then they'll try to sell it again.

Fascism is a very comfortable dynamic for these totalitarians - Bush or Stalin or Cheney or Hitler, et al.

It'll keep coming back up. We have to be vigilant.

[DanCa]

2. Undead maybe

I still have the mispleasure to know a few of this zombified neo cons.

[Cary]

4. Interesting terminology.

But an ideology never really dies, exactly. It simply morphs into some new thesis.

[monktonman]

3. was never alive in the first place