Desperate people do desperate things.

Once upon a time in America, a defeated southern white society told itself a number of lies and incorporated them into its culture. Scholars call this the “lost cause.” It shows up in the language, literature, and politics of the South. The story is well-known and widely told now. When Reagan talked of “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair, he was picking up the “southern strategy;” as we have seen, the GOP actually doubled-down again in the last cycle. But the conservative movement has swallowed its own Kool Aid in the process. Think of all the issues that keep coming up with the class of culture warriors installed last November: they want to revisit the battles over collective bargaining rights, gays in the military, abortion, health care reform, gay marriage, the Civil Rights Act, and the pre-Civil War issue of nullification. All of these are lost causes.

Furthermore, the language of the right has gotten more desperate. On top of eliminationism (“empty the clip” on illegal immigration, Sarah Palin’s crosshairs), there is a strong sense of finality. This is an ingrained part of human culture; apocalypse mythology appears in every human society. But such tales are actually about our experiences with civilizational collapse, and as we rush towards the bottom of the peak oil spike the “new” Republican Party uniformly rejects the doom we face and substitutes its own, imaginary doom. Furthermore, the time to face their imaginary doom is always now, and always in the extreme. The actual, real, not-imaginary doom is put off to…what? There is no what. There is only the next election, and as we are on the very verge of socialislamicommufascism we must stand and fight now or lose our freedom. See how that works?

The “new” GOP is more committed than ever before to tearing down the America we have built and replacing it with oligarchy. They see us getting wise to them, and so they go for broke. 2012 is more than Mayan calendar baloney, it’s the year they trust Citizens United and their culture warriors and idiots to save them. They figure that Democrats will have to spend at least four years undoing and repairing the damage, and that they’ll pay no price in the memory of voters. Sadly, they may not be wrong. The last stand of the culture warriors never actually ends, you see: culture wars are not meant to be won, they are meant to be continuous. This is so that we may all enjoy a more hierarchical society — you know, like in the Old Testament.

By ceding the cultural ground instead of seeding it:

Ever since the early days of Rush Limbaugh, liberals/progressives have been playing a defensive game in the media.  They ceded the AM radio dial, while corporate conservatives bought up companies and radio stations by the plentiful, allowing for a multitude of conservative hosts to dominate the airwaves.  Meanwhile, the liberals argued that the only way to combat such was to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine; they did not buy radio clusters, or even cultivate hosts, until the early-to-mid-2000s, and by then, conservatives had a hierarchy of voices. Even by the time MSNBC—a network that started operations at around the same time as Fox News Channel in 1996—truly began pushing a more liberal viewpoint in late 2007, Fox News had cornered the conservative market—and by extension, the political media narrative—for 11 years.

Meanwhile, several progressive publications and radio networks went underfunded, or had a less-than-ideal business plan, and folded in the same period.  Nevertheless, while all this was going on, where were all these donors, who Mr. Soros claims are all disaffected, and tired of politicians not fighting “losing battles”?  Wherever they were, it was not helping to build a counterbalance to a Fox News, or a Wall Street Journal, while Rupert Murdoch took control of that paper; lending a hand, or even a couple hundred million dollars, to create a venue for the progressive message.  They were doing little of anything and remaining silent, as the conservatives pilloried and did their dirt right out in the open.

To some extent, liberal media has circumvented the media gap via podcasting. But as Nicole Sandler and Bob Kincaid can testify, no one gets rich podcasting either. Here, as with the internet,  one basic problem is that bloggers are not rewarded for centrism. My traffic is abysmal for a “major site.” Not only does the left need to stop whining about a president who isn’t on the ballot, the movement must organically grow some simple causes, and must do so by supporting alternative media while alt media pushes causes. We forgot the “roots” in netroots.

I mean, where are Van Jones and “GREEN JOBS NOW”? I talk about these things here, but they don’t make me rich, either. I heard at Netroots Nation that some 20,000 Americans are blogging full time at an average of $22,000 a year, and I’ve had about $1500 in fundraising for the entire year.  Even a progressive rock goddess like Shannyn Moore is not rich. She has no book deal, and if she did have one the left has no direct mail infrastructure to give away copies for a dollar or put her on a national tour. There is no path to fame through the more liberal end of cable, either, as it spends most of its time just dissecting the smoke coming from the fear factory.

Bob Kincaid has estimated that for every hour a liberal spends on the air, there are one thousand hours of Radio Rwanda. Until that changes, liberalism is a dirty word and progressive causes will have wasted their greatest opportunity in a generation. They must stop ceding the ground and start seeding it.

At TIME, the admirable Christopher Hayes previews his forthcoming book on American elites:

It’s beyond our ability to recognize the imperceptible upward creep of global temperatures, so we must rely on the authority of those who are doing the highly complicated measuring. But at a moment when we desperately need élites and experts to use their social capital to warn the populace of the dangers of catastrophic climate change, skepticism is rising. A comprehensive Pew poll released in October found that only 57% of respondents think there’s evidence of warming (down from 71% last year), and just 36% think it’s because of human activity (down from 47%). This is the danger of living in a society in which the landscape of authority has been leveled: it’s not there when you actually need it. (Emphasis mine)

That is precisely the point of ClimateGate and the fossil fuels industry’s campaign to affect public discussion: it levels authority. Empirical reality does not have a Heritage Foundation, a CATO Institute, or a FreedomWorks. Academic institutions are full of people who study empirical reality, but the right has been undermining these since the Powell Memo. Furthermore, a counterculture of idiocracy has bloomed within conservatism. Editorial pages are replete with anti-elitism. Talk radio blasts the word ‘elite’ through the airwaves as a pejorative. It is endemic to the wingnutosphere.

Against this, the climatologists begin at a disadvantage. For in the age of false media balance, each climate expert must be counterweighted with an opposing voice. Mind you, the very act of arguing an opposite position from the empirical reality is inherently counterfactual; the pundit who argues that global warming is a myth is telling you wrong things as if they were true. Multiplied by a thousand times in the cable news cycle, it is Goebbels’ “big lie” in action. Danny Goldberg at Alternet notes:

In the last election a large segment of the American public decided to blame government instead of Wall Street for their problems. This did not come about by happenstance or an act of God. Corporation worship among the masses has been inculcated by decades of expensive conservative effort in many media and forums. The Koch bothers and others have poured large sums of money into the conservative idea factory. Because the right wing’s primary function is to represent the interests of big business, Republicans and conservatives have long had a more intimate relationship with the dark arts of persuasion than liberals. In The Education of Ronald Reagan, the pro-Reagan author Thomas Evans describes how the future president was hired in the 1950s by Lemuel Boulware, the marketing genius of General Electric, to convince the company’s workers not to unionize. Boulware wrote most of Reagan’s career-changing 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon’s powerful chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman spent twenty years at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency before moving to the White House. Reagan’s “Morning In America” re-election campaign was created by Phil Dusenberry who had created the Pepsi ad with Michael Jackson. (Emphasis mine)

The kulturkampf being waged against meritocracy and rationalism is actually one of the fiercest. It serves the interests of a very narrow elite. Oligarchy can only exist in a state of general poverty and ignorance, after all. The current political environment rewards ignorance and creates poverty on purpose. The hacking and misrepresentation of climate scientists’ emails was a direct action by the denial industry.

I’ll be curious to see if Hayes recognizes the kulturkampf being waged within the elites, or just writes about them as a monolithic whole.

More and more, it’s becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts. (Emphasis mine)

Or, the president accepts that middle America believes things that aren’t true, such as the greatness of Reagan and the “need” for austerity. Maybe the president sees the actual self-identification demographics and understands the relative power of “conservative” and “liberal” and “progressive.”

Like the firebagging over single-payer, the frustration that shows up in Krugman’s post is really about the lack of power and traction empirical reality gets. Progressive taxation and single-payer are both demonstrably better than the alternatives, but neither has a powerful lobby in Washington or employs an army of talking heads to fill media with its narratives.

The idea that one man, however central, will either win the kulturkampf single-handed or ruin the nation with centrism is itself a mythology with no resemblance to the facts. If Krugman really wants to change things, he can quit bitching about the president and start a movement. It should have been building for decades, the way the right has done; but it’s so much easier to write clever criticism of those with actual responsibility for governance.

Empirical evidence says there is no controversy: tax cuts do not produce growth. Yet a controversy it remains, feeding the politics of resentment despite all the charts and graphs we might put together. Why? Because no one is having a different conversation.

We may look to the states as examples of regressive taxation (where Buffet pays a smaller percentage of tax than his secretary) at work. From Accounting Today.com:

“The harsh reality is that most states require their poor and middle-income taxpayers to pay the most taxes as a share of income,” said Matthew Gardner, lead author of the study, “Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States.”

Ten states — Washington, Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Alabama — are identified in the study as particularly regressive. These “Terrible Ten” states ask poor families — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — to pay almost six times as much of their earnings in taxes as do the wealthy. Middle-income families in these states pay up to three-and-a-half times as high a share of their income as the wealthiest families. (Emphasis mine)

Alabama has one of the most regressive tax schemes in the country, charging millionaires half the effective rate of our poorest residents for almost 110 years now. Alabama remains near dead-last in every indicator of prosperity, yet if I ask everyone on Goat Hill about tax cuts I will probably not find even a single Montgomery Democrat who would dare question the conventional wisdom. Which brings me to mention Newt Gingrich, who told the Republican Governors Association about his plan

requiring the jobless to take training programs in return for unemployment compensation, moving toward replacing President Barack Obama’s health care law, and paying good teachers more while cutting loose bad ones.

Get that? Retraining the unemployed for jobs that don’t exist, restoring the crisis of health insurance costs, and so-called “merit pay” schemes are all examples of resentment politics. It gets worse:

“The challenge for us is to have a Republican Party of jobs and paychecks replace a Democratic Party of bureaucracy and food stamps,” Gingrich said, adding that the effort starts in statehouses across the country. (Emphasis mine)

But that effort has already started. In Alabama, it has been underway for more than a century. Gingrich branding the GOP as “jobs” and the Democrats as “bureaucracy…food stamps” is nothing but the same kulturkampf already being waged against working America:

Middle classes have always been creations of government policy. What you see in that chart is shrinkage of the middle class through the Bush II regime as the benefits of tax policy accrued not to them, but to the richest Americans — who then did not invest the money.

Let me say that again: empirical, observable reality shows zero “trickle down” and precious little economic activity while the Bush tax cuts have been in effect. With the recession, their behavior has become even more miserly. In the last two years, the richest one percent of Americans have banked $10.5 trillion (.PDF) while waiting for someone else to stimulate the economy.

This comes after the largest upward-transfer of wealth in American history. Empirical reality again:

These are the wages of kulturkampf.

Playing the ‘undeserving’ poor as a foil, apostles of the tax cut gospel have spent decades convincing middle class voters that taxes on billionaires are taxes on themselves. In fact, the middle class has been taking the burden for the rich while blaming their problems on the poor. A state of class warfare exists, but it is not coming from the left. It is a false flag operation of the right.

Hyperbole? Arthur C. Brooks, president of the tea party-backing American Enterprise Institute, actually called for a “new” culture war to defend billionaire-friendly tax schemes in an op-ed for the Washington Post this May:

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. (Emphasis mine)

Note how Brooks includes taxes last — as the final thought to a paragraph with phrases like “free enterprise” and “entrepreneurship.” In fact, both free enterprise and entrepreneurship are scarce today with the Bush tax cuts in place, and for reasons that have nothing to do with taxation: a difficult credit environment, slow private sector growth, and reduced consumption by the 99% of us who aren’t rich.

This particular kulturkampf is very old, and has some roots in the 1971 Powell Memo. It also has a name: producerism, a word (predictably) borrowed from Ayn Rand’s science fiction novel Atlas Shrugged.

Substituting an invisible hand for the Christian God, the producerist religion holds that special, rare people possess more money than we do because we are not rare and special; that if we only developed our talents and invested wisely we, too, could be rare and special. Unlike the “prosperity gospel” of charismatic Christianity, there is no suggestion of charity or tithes. The rich are listening: even as they banked their trillions, charitable contributions are down among the rich. Bloomberg:

Average giving by survey respondents decreased 35 percent to $54,016 last year compared with 2007, after adjusting for inflation, the biennial report found. About 98 percent of the 801 households in the survey donated to philanthropies in 2009, unchanged from two years earlier. Bank of America surveyed households with an income greater than $200,000 or a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences.

The percentage of income dedicated to giving fell to about 9 percent from 11 percent in 2007, today’s report said. High- net-worth households account for about two-thirds of all individual giving in the U.S., according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, which co-wrote the report.(Emphasis mine)

Low taxes haven’t spurred the top 1% of American households to do anything producerism would predict of them: they haven’t invested and haven’t given.  They might have consumed (the rich do consume more), but consume what?  Alan Grayson brought this point home quite effectively last week:

“Here’s one possibility: they can buy an $83,000 Mercedes Benz E-Class car, not just once, but every single year for the next decade,” he said. “And each year, when they get tired of their brand new Mercedes Benz E-Class car, they can just give it to somebody ’cause they can afford another one. They can give it to a spouse, a sister, a son, a daughter — anybody. Every single year for the next 10 years, the Republican tax plan is to give millionaires enough money for a Mercedes Benz.”

In part, the media narrative and the Beltway consensus are in a state of deep capture by producerism because government and media are largely dominated by the so-called “producer” class. But the American Enterprise Institute is only one star in a sky full of right-wing, “libertarian” think-tanks and lobbying organizations that have been fighting this kulturkampf for decades. Progressives have yet to meet this challenge. Rational empiricism has little representation because no one has voiced a one-word alternative around which a movement can coalesce.

Presenting his documentary Capitalism: A Love Story on late night television, Michael Moore offered “democracy;” but the word has other meanings that actually cloud its intended impact. Any movement must combine the lower and middle against the upper class — in other words, that 99 percent of us who have been turned on each other must understand we are under mutual disparity from the top. Perhaps that gives us the winning term: Ninety-Nine Percentism.

But whatever the term, it needs to show up on the front steps of Congress soon. There is no lobby or propaganda shop for ninety-nine percent of us. The top one percent are actually idolized by the bottom ninety-nine, who have been raised to want and believe in their upward mobility to one-percenter status even as that club becomes more rarefied than ever. Pull the magic invisible hand’s finger, and it will make you a rock star. Until a different narrative appears in the culture, the top one percent have all the advantages.

(kl-trkämpf): n 1. The struggle (1871-1883) between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government under Bismarck for control over school and ecclesiastical appointments and civil marriage. 2. A conflict between secular and religious authorities: “The 1920s proved to be the focal decade in the Kulturkampf of American Protestantism” (Richard Hofstadter). 3. Politics as the continuation of warfare by other means.

OK, I added that third entry to the definition of The Free Dictionary.com, I admit. We might also coin the phrase “kulturkampf studies” to describe the content of this blog.

A disambiguation: Kulturkrieg, literally culture war, is what emerges at the fringe of right-wing politics. Head-stompers and “patriot” militias are two examples. Kulturkampf translates as “culture struggle” and was coined to describe Bismarck’s oppressive anti-Catholic laws. Germany, like so many European nation-states, struggled with the issues of church and state; but that kulturkampf is as unique as our current American one.

Kulturkampf is recognizable in rhetoric. Palin’s “targets,” Allen West’s “battlefield,” and the eliminationism cataloged here and at Crooks and Liars.com, are the plenteous examples of homicidal imagery invoked by right-wing authoritarian Republicans. Kultur-zealotry also manifests itself in C-Street admiration of Mao and Hitler and Stalin as examples of will-to-power philosophy and the projection of those same attributes on Democrats.

Make no mistake: if the tea party has achieved anything, it is the near-wholesale destruction of conservative Democrats. Obeying the calculus of pure power, the party of the right has consumed its allies and seeks to turn Democrats into the “outer party” of Washington. Moreover, in attitude and voting behavior the Republican party has learned the utility of lockstep behavior and is now encouraged to double-down: Big Money + big noise + fearmongery = victory, so why not?

You’ll be seeing more kulturkampf in the future. Count on it. They do it because it works; and until some group of people rallies to an opposing set of ideas it will own the struggle by default.

The term ‘culture war’ broke into the mainstream with Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech:

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. (Emphasis mine)

Just eight months prior to that speech, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. With the old enemy gone, Buchanan focused on domestic “enemies”: Democrats, gays, lesbians, feminists, liberals. His call to arms invoked all the cultural divisions that Republicans had exploited with increasing success for the previous thirty years. Today, Buchanan’s speech could be considered mild. The apparent failure of the southern strategy in 2008 has been eclipsed by its resurgence as the south turns almost entirely red:

What you see in the chart above (courtesy of The Economist) is the consequence of a deliberate and sustained strategy. This blog has adequately chronicled the language of culture war, but I feel it necessary to highlight three key parts here:

• Zero-sum worldview. As exemplified by the infamous “white hands” ad, the conservative movement has consistently framed issues of culture war in loss-win terms: a job for a black person is a lost job for a white person. Just look at the chart; as southern state Democratic parties have diversified, there has been a “white flight” equivalent to that from public schools and urban areas. The politics of resentment and division begin with race and end with class by compounding the two in the public conversation.

• Pro-life absolutism. Ask any Republican if there’s a single question they could ask to understand another person’s political views. Nine times out of ten, the answer will be abortion. Republicans have kicked all their pro-choice moderates out of Congress, and this year’s freshmen Republican class is far more likely than any previous to agree that no exceptions should exist to an abortion ban.

• End Times and conspiracy. Glenn Beck has only brought to mainstream television what had already been active propaganda on the radio for decades. In the paranoid universe, all signs invariably become proof of the central concept. No mind-set is more apt at rationalization than a frightened one: offer it a world of simple, Manichean black-and-white, and that mind will create its own propaganda.

There is no more Manichean human activity than war. There are only ever two sides, and the issue is total; so are suspicion and righteousness. Victories are counted in miles of territory or cities or body counts. In the most deceptive turn of all, winning battles can lead a society to think superior willpower or character or piety has been the difference when the reality is quite material. Thus the weight of Republican and right-wing rhetoric has become militant in part because it is such a natural fit for faith-based politics.

And in fact, one can easily argue the Republican Party behaves in a militant fashion. The tea party has succeeded in resurrecting the ardor of conservatives and bringing them en masse under the GOP banner; ‘conservative Democrats’ are a nearly-extinct species. Leadership squabbles among Republicans are short, and Republican legislators have developed lockstep habits in voting. Mitch McConnell runs his Senate minority with an iron hand. John Boehner has indicated he will use earmarks to bring Republicans under control. To be sure, Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann aim to replace them or at least bring them further to the right (and use the language of war doing so); they want to lead the leaders, but in the end they will follow. Yes, the tea party doesn’t like earmarks — but they’ll be back next election, and behaving worse than ever. Head-stomping will seem quaint in 2012.

And what of the propaganda filling the airwaves and internet? What of Pamela Geller’s midsummer crusade against a mosque-that-wasn’t-a-mosque? What of two New Black Panthers blown up into a marauding army of Obama goons? What of spurious accusations of vote fraud? What of the smearing and defunding of ACORN? What of Darrell Issa’s promises to investigate the White House? They are part and parcel of the strategy of “no” and obstructed appointments: there will be no progress, there will be no advance. WE are the ones under attack.

Conservatives understand these things inherently. At the Huntsville appearance of the Tea Party Express bus tour in April of 2010, the attitude was exemplified by a sign that read: if we lose our FREEDOM here there is no place to escape. This is the last stand on Earth. Those are the stakes: total destruction or victory.

That the wholesale rejection of legitimacy — for the president, for Democrats, for their legislation — is “grounded” in a birth certificate tells you much about the mentality of the new right. Progress is foreign, alien, not-American. It is brown people and Muslims. “Progress” will only take away what is yours and give it to “them.” I’ll keep my money, another sign read, you keep the change. If politics is about compromise, this is not politics — for there is no compromise here.

Compromise with the devil is impossible. Right? Sixty million copies of Left Behind cannot be wrong; there is a constituency for the absolutism of “no.” On the other side, however, there is no appreciation for the kulturkampf being waged by the right. Obama attempted to set a civil tone in his inaugural address, and I fear his words may have lulled progressives into a stupor:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

But there is no civility in war, and no quarter to be had from the right. In 2008, the cultural power of conservatism seemed dead, but the cynics have raised their movement from the grave, and those “stale” arguments are suddenly all too fresh. The ‘rational middle’ is certainly worried about jobs, wages, health care, and retirement; but with one side offering simple answers (however untrue) and the other offering complex legislation, it’s not a fair fight. As Booman put it after the midterm debacle:

(Republicans) knew the left would get dispirited and frustrated and start fighting amongst themselves. They knew their own base would love it and reward them for it. They knew the media wouldn’t be an honest referee. They knew that in a bad economy, white majority America would respond to their ACORN/Henry Louis Gates Jr./New Black Panther Party/Shirley Sherrod/Health-Care-is-for-minorities/Sharia Law/Ground Zero mosque/illegal immigration themes. And they knew that if they only stuck to the plan, there wouldn’t be a damn thing the Democrats could do about it. And there wasn’t. They went scorched Earth, and if you’re honest, we didn’t have the tools to combat them. (Emphasis mine)

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Worse, this midterm put Republicans in a position to gerrymander their survival for another ten years without having to moderate at all, much less deal with social change. In Arizona, the white supremacist-written S.B. 1070 has caused Hispanics to leave the state, giving us our first example of tea party-style ethnic cleansing. Kulturkampf has real and lasting consequences. Meanwhile, as Van Jones put it recently:

There’s been too much focus on Obama among progressives, Jones says, and not enough on growing the movement on our own terms, even though, he notes, progressives helped to create as many jobs in the wind energy industry as there are coal miners in America — 80,000 — and another 46,000 in the solar energy industry.

“But somehow we became a movement, after our greatest victory, that sits around munching popcorn, waiting for one person to give a great speech so we can feel good,” tells the activists. “Now, that’s gotta stop.” (Emphasis mine)

Indeed, I would argue that firebaggers fed right into the tea party’s hysterics by focusing so much fire on the president. There are  issues where the president is very much at the center (see: Appalachia Rising), but legislation is the Constitutional purview of Congress.  The name “Obama” did not appear on the ballot this year, yet Republicans succeeded in nationalizing the midterms and defying the gravity of O’Neill’s law by demonizing Pelosi, Reid, and Obama without answer.

That must change if we are to survive. I cannot emphasize that enough: this right-wing movement will destroy the country, and the world right along with it. Any movement so divorced from empirical reality, so ready to substitute its own reality, so ready to obey authoritarian instincts should be cause for loud alarms.

The following passage is about a role-playing exercise (.PDF) in which right-wing authoritarians (RWAs) literally run the world:

Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the “wedgies” started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth–7.4 billion people–and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.

When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a “United Nations” meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.

At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but–perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting–no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems “back home,” Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises–take your pick–and nobody came.

By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world–although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.

The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.”

There is nothing “Christian” or “patriotic” about these attitudes. The steady advance of idiocracy — reelection of wingnuts to the Texas State Board of Education, the House Energy Committee led by a Republican who denies global warming on the basis of Biblical inerrancy — will damage America as surely as deregulated drilling damaged the ecology of the Gulf region. Meanwhile, the right already considers itself under attack. Railing against Hollywood and “lamestream media” isn’t just an exercise in blame-gaming, it’s a deliberate attempt to dress up conservatism as the victim of cultural aggression. In short: avoiding kulturkampf is impossible. It is already being waged by people convinced a kulturkampf is being waged against them.

Calls for ‘sanity’ may fill out the National Mall, but they do not fill out ballots — especially when the middle ground has evaporated in hard times. Progress will only come through fearless action. The tea party can no longer be allowed to control the terms of debate; it cannot assemble unchallenged. FOX News has more than earned direct action and even civil disobedience. More importantly, progressives must be armed with fewer facts and more high-explosive ideas. To wit:

• Does your “right to life” end at birth? That’s the essence of conservative politics: people vote because of the unborn yet are conditioned to care nothing for Americans alive and breathing. I’ve already told every Democrat left in my region of Alabama that the phrase “pro-life Democrat” is political cyanide; the answer to the abortion question is that they believe in a right to life that does not end at birth. This reframes the debate to our terms.

• The president is an American and so am I. Progressives must not only counteract the personal-polarization of right-wing politics, they must humanize their movement. ‘Green’ needs to be the color of human rights, jobs, and a new economy, not just the environmental movement. It must be the new red, white, and blue. Which brings me to:

• They’re called the “United” States. We rise or fall together. There is no separating us. There is no defeating us. We can, we will be great together.

This is by no means exhaustive, but it is a start. Kulturkampf demands a resoluteness and solidarity currently absent on the progressive side, but I think we can get there as long as we avoid the pitfalls of One Nation:

In an effort to replicate the tea party’s success, 170 liberal and civil rights groups are forming a coalition that they hope will match the movement’s political energy and influence. They promise to “counter the tea party narrative” and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of floundering.

The large-scale attempt at liberal unity, dubbed “One Nation,” will try to revive themes that energized the progressive grassroots two years ago. In a repurposing of Barack Obama’s old campaign slogan, organizers are demanding “all the change” they voted for — a poke at the White House.

But the liberal groups have long had a kind of sibling rivalry, jostling over competing agendas and seeking to influence some of the same lawmakers. In forming the coalition, the groups struggled to settle on a name. Even now, two of the major players disagree about who came up with the idea of holding a march this fall. (Emphasis mine)

What has to happen is the opposite of the tea party: progressives have to organize and act locally while the big movement players react to us. Media must react to us. Rather than the top-down astroturfing of K-Street, the response has to be led by the grassroots and built upon by the apparatus already in place. I would love to see a mass demonstration before Congress demanding green jobs and led by Van Jones; I would love to see progressives and Democrats descend on Republican town halls. Until we do, the right will always control the terms of debate.

We can put them back on their heels because we are better at this than they are – but we must first stop pretending reform and progress are an individual achievement. To make any progress in this kulturkampf, we will need a progressive army.

The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art”, with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: “I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” The tour had to be cancelled.

Nothing has changed: America has always been a land of great creativity that is mostly lost on its own political leadership. Read the rest here.