CHAPTER I:

An Introduction to My Roots

Conservatism is in the Blood and Schoolyard Dreams

You may wonder that I would begin a book on political philosophy, political history and practical politics in the first person with personal references. Scholars ain't supposed to do that. But this ain't no kind of a scholarly book!

I have learned that political beliefs are intimately personal. They depend on a person's private history that gives them birth. Logical propositions and arguments can be abstracted from one's personal experiences. But beliefs that move us arise from the experiences directly. Arguments believers are prone to appreciate are the weapons and consolations of believers. As much as we philosophers may be loathe to admit it, people may love wisdom, but they only recognize as wise those abstractions that arise from what they have lived and with which they are closely acquainted. My family's life overlaps Lincoln's and TR's. Their deeds live in me. To them, I respond.

I will not pretend to some objective universality which is no better than the bull I hope to lasso, throw and tie up in this tome,² To help my reader understand where my arguments are coming from, I wish to let you know some of the experiences that have made certain premisses, arguments, syllogisms³ and other silly "isms"⁴ resound upon my soul. I will relieve the normally pretentious third person claims to objectivity with first person expressions and descriptions.

Mom and Dad opposed FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) in the 1990's, long before they ever conceived of their son. Their conservatism was then considered "Un-American" by some extreme democrats who branded as fascist any conservative or republican view. During the Nazi scares, my parents were called before a grand jury to be examined for their ultra-conservative views. Now, sixty years later, Mom is appalled to see her son turning against any who call themselves "conservatives," however tenuous may be their right to use the term, and regardless of how they abuse it. Her son intends to expose those facts.

History and politics were alive for me in a grand paw remembered well from my first seven years of life. We Marshalls are a quickly maturing, long lived lot. Grampy had served the Union Army from the age of 14 on. He still was serving the Union and TR after the charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War, toward the end of the last century. I was nursed on stories my Grampy told of why he fought for Lincoln long before he could vote, and why he followed TR (Teddy Roosevelt) into a hull and up a hill.

How much Grampy's tales were fiction, how much old soldiers' jug dreams, I may never know. One was of how Grampy carried out TR's directive to blow a hole in it side to seem to have tried to sink the Maine, and blame it all on Spain--to fire up the folk back home to "Remember the Maine" and go to war-only the ploy went awry and sadly failed and succeeded beyond belief when a magazine blew inside the hull. Others were of reconstruction, of the real work of really freeing slaves, of how the sulking Dixie Rebs used terror to prolong the suffering and get back power in the backwoods, bayous and plantations of the South. The old centurion died in 1948, a thousand tales gone by, singing, "Jimmy Crack Corn and I don't care, my master's gone away," too drunk to taste his jug was full of kerosene.

No matter what the truth of particular stories, he'd brought his story and history to life for his grandson. Later study brought more of it to light--like Spain insisting that their investigation showed a cannon magazine of the Maine had been blown as my Grampy had claimed, dying in regret that he'd not served his master well.

I was weaned on conservative political action: my first political act was in I960 protesting LBJ's candidacy by carrying a symbolic casket to Lyndon Johnson's rallies to recall precinct 19 in Duval County, Texas (not far from home) where the dead had voted to make LBJ Texas' Senator. A real X-file!

In South Texas, few "anglos" would have put it past LBJ, few would have been been shocked, although few would have disapproved, but, by 1968, most would not have been surprised, if LBJ really had conspired in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King--as King's son now charges. LBJ's New Deal liberalism, power politics, and civil rights advocacy made him thought of as a power-grubin', "nigger-lovin'" fool in certain certain circles of what passed for "conservatism" in South Texas by 1968. Many anglos in South Texas wouldn't have been upset to learn that LBJ and J. Edger Hoover had conspired with anyone, even Majestic Twelve's Black Band (of whom they'd never heard) to kill JFK and Robert Kennedy. They'd think that maybe LBJ allowed J. Edger to take out King to get Hoover's help to kill the Kennedys (even letting CIA goons go so far as to lace some drinks at Chappaquidik).

Ours was a racist society, although the Mexican Americans, called "Greasers" by those whom they called "Gringos," were the butt of the racism with which I grew up. The one black in my High School freshman class was our class president--in the mid fifties, barely after the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ruling. Our public schools were integrated in a way our community was not. Then, I went out into the wide, wide world of even stranger facts.

By 1965, Mom's precocious son had trekked through the snows of New Hampshire campaigning for Barry Goldwater. Earlier, I'd heard shortwave broadcasts from freedom fighters being slaughtered in fire-fights in Hungary and the Bay of Pigs. By then, I'd served in USAF's Security Service, witnessing Intelligence cables about a long reported Soviet nuclear missile build-up in Cuba, and the foolish American baptism in futile fire in Vietnam. I'd studied cables from an American spy station in the Vatican, as I learned how our government really operates in secret, and other things I can't talk of 'til I'm dead. Some real X-files!

Before I could vote for the first time, by a non-heroic accident, I may have kept my country from starting World War Three. I'd intercepted line of sight communications on a stand-by receiver no one was supposed to be monitoring at an Air Force spy station where I was stationed. These were calls for navigational help from a Russian bomber approaching St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. It was lost on a training mission and desperately seeking home, calling, "Anadyr, Ya Trotuar 21'. It was within minutes of having found Its way back home across the Bering Sea. Our Navy and Air Force wanted to shoot it down. Our planes had scrambled and streaked after it, looking for any excuse to blow the Rusky out of the sky in the tense months around the Cuban Missile Crisis. Shooting him down could have ignited the powder keg of tensions then smoldering. I got the unauthorized intelligence report off just in time to stop the shoot down. The soviet fighters scrambled in reaction to the imminent shoot down were already reporting "zack vot" (lock on) of radar to guide the missles. I could hear our jets streaking over before we verified stand down. The military reported this obvious error to the news air heads as an intentional overflight of American air space Alaska by a Russian bomber! They ate the party line and fed the people crap.

Do you wonder, then, that I can conceive of J. Edger, LBJ and Majestic 12 (or "Majiic," as intelligence reports addressed them) conspiring to control social and political movements by assassinations? Or that history is alive to me?

I had plowed New Hampshire's snows for Goldwater, hoping to bury Rockefeller's Eastern Establishment Fat Cats under an avalanche of popular protest in the 1964 primary. By Nov. 1964, I'd watched LBJ's unconscionable mushroom ads besmirch a great-hearted, if sometimes somewhat myopic, man. On a warm afternoon at Syracuse University in the summer of '65, I had listened to President Johnson lie about mythical North Vietnamese gun boat attacks which we both kew knew LBJ should have known never had taken place. That was just an excuse for expanding the war to save a dictator who might keep support for multinational corporations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Oil and rubber-and rubbers: the prophylactics of deniability. I'd already cast my second vote as a conservative, for Goldwater.

Years of study in philosophy and theatre, and work teaching and practicing as a philosopher, artist, and theatre designer and director quickly intervened. My history studies soon showed me that conservatism once had been the cautious, moderately progressive⁵, Constitutional, republican center between the extreme reactionary aristocratic and theocratic right wing and the extreme radical democratic left wing. That relied on the basic meaning of the term, "to conserve" the best society has created. That meaning was still true, but decreasingly so, from Lincoln's years through Teddy Roosevelt's years as President. None-th-less it is to that conservatism in the sould that I appeal. It does not preclude radical solutions to radical problems that remain after centuries of pain; it is not a knee jerk reflex to keep everything just because it is traditional; it is a passionate concern to discover the best we have and to maintain it until we have very good reason to adopt something better in its stead.

OURS IS A CAUTIOUS RELUCTANCE TO CHANGE ALONG WITH A PASSIONATE INSISTENCE ON CHANGE NEEDED TO SOLVE INTRACTABLE PROBLEMS. Since the French Revolution, rich reactionaries have become increasingly adept at leading people to allow them to use the word "conservative" to mean a right wing reactionary respect for any traditions that favor the rape by the rich of the poor by equating that tradition of expropriation with the maintenance of the values of the Theocrats. The changing meaning of those abstractions will be clarified in this book as we go along. They are a lot of what has confused the electorate.

I watched the nature and the power of conservatism change right and left before my eyes. My philosophical, historical, and political studies showed me the slow and on-going transformation of the use of the word "conservative" from that cautiously moderate pursuit of progress for all Americans under the guidance of our true Constitution as practiced by Washington and Marshall, to that cautiously moderate pursuit of progress for all Americans under the guidance of our true Constitution as practiced by Lincoln, McKinley, TR and, to a lesser extent, by Ike, but which the air head media had been increasingly led to call "radical liberalism" by the corporations that control the media and stand to profit from the change. People still haven't figured that one out.

I've watched the so called "new conservatism" devolve into the reactionary fascism of a warped new world order. That new conservatism subjects people to the rule of, by and for an unholy alliance of fundamentalist and Catholic "Theocrats," the remnants and political progeny of states' rights racist Dixiecrats, and multinational corporate Fat Cat fascist Oligarchs whom I'll call "Plutocrats."

Just as democrats seek rule ("crat") of, by and for the "demos" (people)--in case this is all Greek to you, too--theocrats believe in rule (crat) of, by and for some version of "theos" (God, or in Liatin, "Deos," said with a Greek lisp) as determined by some priests and true believers. The Dixiecrats seek rule of, by and for the nationalistic and racial myths of spiritual descendants of Dixie's Confederacy. Fat Cat fascists in practice are simply Plutocrats who seek rule ("arch" or "crat") of, by and for Pluto (Popeye's nemesis) and other wealthy scions of riches who own the multinational corporations in the new world order. They prefer being called "Aristocrats" (rule by the best!). I call them ass holes, Plutocrats to be formal, "Fat Cats" to be polite.⁶

Fascism in this broadest sense, governs as if the people exist for the sake of the ruling element, to be ruled for its good, and/or given rights that accord with it values--whether that ruling element be a state, a party, the "fatherland or motherland," a religious group, or a corporate or aristocratic oligarchy, or even a combination of them (as existed in Nazi Germany and as is being attempted in the "new conservatives'" "new world order"). In fascist states, laws are made to use the people for the good of some principle or faction. In our free society, laws are supposed to be made to use government for the good of all the people equally, never for principles or factions.

Democrats, Dixiecrats, Theocrats, aristocrats, plutocrats, and all other forms of old fascist farts or other crappy crats all oppose our limited, Constitutional republican democracy. That is limited rule of, by, and for the equal good of, all the people within the confining guidance of a highly structured, Constitutionally checked and balanced form of very limited democracy. Old Jefferson-Jackson democrats and New Conservatives have led people and parties astray from that true tradition, both Republicans and Democrats. Later, we'll discuss the views of the Constitution by which those two democratic presidents have miss-led their factions for years, for centuries!

A moderate mean between reactionary and radical extremes:

Lincoln, our President most conservative of our true Constitution, sought the moderately progressive means between extremes. On his right hand were rabidly reactionary Fat Cat and Theocrat (Abolitionist) extremists. They would have gladly violated our true Constitution and republican form of limited democracy, even destroyed the Union if that had served their purpose. Fat Cats hoped to influence economic policies to their advantage. Theocrats hoped to impose Abolitionists' religious beliefs against slavery to their spiritual satisfaction, They ignored the Constitution and the Courts in favor of their religious precepts and their consciences! The Fat Cats and Theocrats had scared the crap out of some Southern planters and traders who had visions of slave rebellions dancing in their nightmare heads.⁷

On Lincoln's left hand were radical Dixie democrats. Many actually believed Jefferson's

supposedly "strict," states' rights interpretation of the Constitution as creating little more than the Confederation whose laws were supposedly subject to "nullification" by the will of the people of each supposedly sovereign state. Many also insisted on President Jackson's emphasis on the will of the people as the unhindered democratic sovereign in the land. All would gladly destroy the Union to insist on locally popular views of slavery, states' rights and a very limited, confederate, form of national government. These were based on a supposedly and falsely "strict" reading of our Constitution (which they were perfectly willing to ignore wherever it thwarted their wills).

This picture was further complicated: In the North, the Fat Cats and Theocrats fanned the flamesof popular fuel until their views against Southern slavery became a democratic conflagration thatflagrantly ignored and violated Constitutional limits, such as in the Underground Railroad. Inthe South, the Fat Cat planters' reign of terror (who for economic reasons, sought to defend andexpand slavery) whipped the people up into a demagoguery of nationalistic sentiments for Dixie's independent states.

Finally, despite Lincoln's repeated assurances to the contrary, many of the Dixiecrats believedthat the federal government was going to impose a final solution by freeing the slaves against thewill of the people and the letter of the Constitution! Many of the poorest people, who wouldhave been better off if Lincoln really had felt he could Constitutionally free the slaves, as he would have liked to, and would have done within a decade by Contitutional means, quaked at the fearful thought of hordes of landless, homeless and unemployed "niggers" (blacks) plundering the countryside, raping women and cannibalizing kids!

The radical theocratic Abolitionists in Lincoln's party would gladly have ripped out the bloodyheart of Johnny Reb on principle, the welfare of the people and the slaves be damned, Lincoln, an Absolute Constitutional Conservative, ever faithful and conservative of the true Constitution and caring of the people, insisted: "I have proposed nothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers."⁸

Even when he was disgusted by the Constitutional necessity of voting for a fugitive slave law, as he would later be in having to make an Emancipation Proclamation to advance the war effort during the war, Lincoln obeyed the voice of the fathers and the call of the Constitution and common sense where he could:

...the people of the Southern States are entitled to a Congressional fugitive slave law--that it is a right fixed in the Constitution. .... And as the right is constitutional, I agree that the legislation shall be granted to it--and that not that we like the institution of slavery. We profess to have no taste for running and catching slaves--at least I profess no taste for that job at all. Why then do I yield support to a fugitive slave law? Because I do not understand that the Constitution, which guarantees that right, can be supported without it.... I say that no man can deny his obligation to support slavery... who believes it is a Constitutional right to have it.... No man can, who does not give...an argument to deny the obligation enjoined by the Constitution.⁹

Douglas Democrats, named for Lincoln's nemesis of debate renown, insisted on a supposedly "strict," but really a radically extreme, interpretation of the Constitution, a bastard fathered (like a lot of his mulatto slave children) by Jefferson. That "democratic" ideal would have allowed people in both states and territories to have slaves wherever it was popular, as an expression of a some mythical states' rights sovereignty. That Lincoln opposed because he was not constrained by the Constitution to approve. Lincoln interpreted our Constitution in the traditions of Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall's, "fair construction." Marshall championed fair over strict construction in Gibbons v. Ogden.¹⁰

The [Constitution] contains an enumeration of powers expressly granted by the people to their [federal] government. It has been said [by Jefferson and others, now for centuries] that these powers ought to be construed strictly; but why ought they to be so construed? Is there one sentence in the Constitution which gives countenance to this rule? ...nor is there one sentence in the Constitution ... that prescribes this rule. We do not therefore think ourselves justified in adopting it. What do gentlemen mean by a strict construction? If they contend only against that enlarged construction which would extend words beyond their natural and obvious import [against which "they" don't contend], we...should not controvert the principle. If they contend for that narrow construction which, in support of some theory not to be found in the Constitution, would deny to the government those powers which the word of the grant, as usually understood, impart, and which are consistent with the general views and objects [in the Preamble] of the [Constitution]; for that narrow construction which would cripple the government, and render it unequal to the objects for which it is declared to be instituted ["...to forma a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty...."] and to which the powers given, as fairly understood, render it competent; then we cannot perceive the propriety of this strict construction, nor adopt it as a rule by which the Constitution is to be expounded.

Those fair ways of understanding and applying our Constitution were not by strict or by loose "constructions" as the extreme right and left wings had led the people to believe. "Constructions" just means "interpretations." Those "strict" and "loose" constructions are usually demanded by left or right wing extremists. They hide a multitude of sins behind those simple signs. They usually obscure our Constitution's true meaning in meaningless limitations and/or applications according to usually fictitious and irrelevant inventions as to the intentions of our Constitution's authors and endorsers. The fair method of interpretation used when true conservatives such as John Marshall defined and refined it nearly two centuries ago, relied on looking at the most usual and most likely meanings and applications for the clauses in the ordinary use of such language in society at the time of authorship. Such interpretations always were the best way to assure that political hacks, including Thomas Jefferson (who dearly wished to, and largely succeeded in doing so--in his own way) do not rewrite our Constitution in their own partisan image. Fairness often failed to stem the tide of misinterpretation of those who sought to mold the Constitution in their own image. That once led to Civil War, and once to a Great Depression, now to harassment of the presidency!

Meanwhile, Lincoln, in the militant moderate middle between the demagogues of left and right, felt bound absolutely by a fair application of our republican Constitution, even when that required him to support bills to allow escaped slaves to be hunted down, as Interpreted by the Supreme Court, unless or until the Constitution could be properly amended--which no one dreamed was possible against a Southern veto until enough new non-slave territories entered the Union to change the balance of power and make amendment possible over southern states objections.

Lincoln, likewise militantly in the moderate middle, rejected both the call to pay no attention to states' claims to political status, and the states' rightists claims to sovereignty, in favor of rejecting sovereign states' rights for necessary state administrative rights:

They have invented an ingenious sophism which .... derives...its currency, from the assumption that there is some omnipotent, and sacred supremacy, pertaining to a State.... Our states have neither more, nor less power, than that reserved to them, in the Union, by the Constitution....

Having never been states...outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of "State rights" asserting a claim to power...? Much is said about the "sovereignty" of the states; but the word, even, is not in the national Constitution; nor...in any of the State constitutions. What is a "sovereignty," in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it "A political community, without a political superior"? .... The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status.... The Union...procured their independence, and their liberty.... [The] Union gave each of them, whatever of independence, and liberty, it has. ....

Unquestionably the States have the powers, and rights, reserved to them in, and by the National Constitution; but among these, surely, are not all conceivable powers...; but, at most, such only, as were known in the world, at the time, as governmental powers; as...merely administrative power. This relative matter of National power, and State rights, as a principle, is no other than the principle of generality and locality. Whatever concerns the whole, should be confided to the whole--to the general government; while, whatever concerns only the State, should be left exclusively, to the state. This is a11 there is of original principle about it.¹¹

Teddy Roosevelt, the other patron saint of our party, also tried to steer a moderately progressive, Constitutionally conservative course between the radical left wing extremists of his time such as the anarchists and socialists, and the reactionary right wing extremists such as the rich Fat Cats and other corporate bosses who had been supporting and controlling both political parties for decades. After twelve years in McKinley's and his own administrations, TR had hand picked Taft for nomination to replace himself as president. During his term, Taft had sold out to the extreme right wing fascist Fat Cats. So TR agreed to oppose Taft's renomination by running himself for President. After Taft's Fat Cats stole the Republican Presidential renomination for Taft against the will of the people of the Party in primaries, Teddy Roosevelt led the moderately progressive, Constitutionally conservative heart out of our Republican Party in a Bull Moose charge against Taft.

Teddy temporarily saved America from Taft's sell out to the extreme right wing fascists (while Taft abrogated to himself the term "conservative"). Teddy probably delayed the fleecing of America that resulted in the Great Depression by a decade. He might have either avoided the first world war or won a real and lasting peace if he had won the Presidency as a Bull Moose Republican instead of just beating Taft in a three way race that allowed that Woodrow Wilson wimp to waffle around while the world burned. But when TR did not run again and died so soon thereafter, the Fat Cats kept control of our party until after the eve of the second World War. They hadn't gotten to take out their first contract on America until the 1920's. Fat Cats had bled America dry through a do-nothing Democratic President and corrupt Fat Cat and corporate controlled Republican Presidents until we went into a depression from which it took another world war and another conservatively moderate man, President Eisenhower, to recover.

During those times of extremes after Teddy's presidency, definitions, positions, and parties further changed. Republicans, who'd lost their heart, moved to the extreme right, supporting corporate bosses against workers and even our small businessmen. Those reactionary fascist Fat Cats pretended to be conservatives or only "ultraconservatives" (which is just a euphemism for "reactionary extremist"). Many of them opposed resisting Hitler. Not realizing the radical change in their leaders, many traditional Republicans like my Mom continued to play follow the leader politics as usual: lemmings over the cliff. Many never knew they were being duped by fascist Fat Cats for over a century, sacrificed to government operated of, by and for the Fat Cats with the support of religious leaders to give them respectability and Dixiecrats to give them myths by which to resist unions and uppity blacks who might want a living wage for unskilled labor if they had ever gained their economic and political freedom!

My Mom was among many Republicans who had stayed after our party had strayed, TR's Bull Moose had charged, the Theocratic Prohibitionists had played their hand, and Bill Baily'd not come home. My mom thought conservative words and positions still meant the same as they always had back to Washington and Marshall. Instead they were now just code words for the wealthy and the Theocrats in cahoots again (as they'd been in the Federalists' administration and during the Civil War), in command and on the take. It wasn't just coincidence that the Theocrats' Prohibition and the Fat Cats' Roaring Twenties (while they both bound and fleeced America) greatly coincided, wrecking havoc on our people and ending with a whimper after they'd resulted in their disastrous big bangs, and the people had arisen as one to just say "Nol" to both.

Many old Bull Moose saw how our party had been subverted by the Theocrats and Fat Cat fascists. They could not come home. They had no choice but to work for FDR when TR's nephew created a coalition in the Democratic party that left a place for moderate progressives even if it ignored a place for their true Constitutional conservatism. But Democratic traditions left little room for Bull Moose republicans' Constitutionally fair conservatism. FDR's party was too extremely democratic. Still, its any port in a storm, especially in a gale of a depression.

Teddy's Bull Moose, moderately progressive Constitutional conservatism, had rejected both the "strict" constructions of extreme states rights' democrats (which had led to nullification, Confederacy, Civil War and racism) and the "loose" constructions of Fat Cats and theocratic fascists from Hamilton and John Adams onward (which had led to Anti-sedition laws, welfare for the wealthy, state support for religion, Abolition, Prohibition, Civil War, and Depression, both economic and psychological.)

This book is dedicated to helping all of us who are conservative (cautiously moderate in pursuing equal rights and progress for all) at heart rediscover our roots and rationale by drawing a distinction with the basic positions and priorities of the Democtrats and with the democrats and the fascists commandeering our party. The debacle of the recent Contract on America has set the stage for a realignment of the parties. Let those who believe in the basic democratic tenets of Jefferson and Jackson return to the Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson. Let those who agree with Lincoln on the purpose of government come home. As Lincoln said:

This is essentially a Peoples'.... struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders--to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all--to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life. ...this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we now contend. ...¹²

Let those Constitutionally conservative moderate progressives come home who agree with Lincoln's view of the heart of our problem:

That is the real issue...that will continue...when these poor tongues...shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face since the beginning of time: and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself ...that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruits of their labor, or for one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. [emphases added]¹³

We must tell those Dixiecrats and other Jefferson-Jackson champions of strict construction, states rights and democratic enthusiasms to go home to Jefferson's party, as they are beginning to do, to Clinton's New Democrats, which is just a return to the Jefferson/Jackson Dixiecrat democrats without the racist element too obviously strong yet. They are turning back our clock and turning out our moderately progressive, Constitutionally conservative Bull Moose from the home that that Teddy's nephew, FDR, emulating TR, made for them. So let TR's progeny find a home amongst us as we take back our party. It's our party and they'll cry when we want it! The pseudo-Republicans we send packing can go cry on Clinton's shoulders!

As a political party, we Republicans must pick up the pieces left from our last doleful debacle. Like the tin man, we Republicans must search for our heart that had strayed to the Democrats and is ready to come home. Or we Constitutionally conservative, moderately progressive Bull Moose Republicans must make a new and permanent party to inherit the wind to sail into our future. We must be willing to let the winds of change and fate lift us to soar above the ugliness of the Fat Cats, Theocrats, Dixiecrats and other Jefferson-Jackson democrats toward good government in a new party dedicated to the Constitutionally correct, militantly moderate middle like Madison of the Constitution, Washington, Marshall, Lincoln, TR and even Ike. For where we find our heart, there we will also find our political courage and intelligence. For we're not in Kansas anymore, ⁶do-do--or even in South Texas, Mom.

The Reactionary "New Conservative" fascists:

It doesn't take a Wizard to expose the bewitching Fat Cats, Theocrats and Dixiecrats who have subverted conservatism to a fascism that serves a coalition of multinational Fat Cats, Theocrats, Dixiecrats and other Jefferson-Jackson states rightists and radical democrats in collusion to create their new world order. Its 1984¹⁴ and "The Grand Inquisitor"¹⁵ all over again for the last-teeth time already. Only they're not fiction anymore, Mom. They are only too real. It's a recurrent collusion between the King and Priest; Hamilton and Adams' Federalists and the Antidisestablishmentarians; Yankee traders and other Fat Cat businessmen and the Abolitionists; Southern Planters and their Churches and workers fearing competition from below should the black amn receive his freedom; Corporate Fat Cats and the Prohibitionists; and the Eastern Establishment's military industrial complex and other multinational corporations conniving with the minions of the moral majority and Anti-choice Theocrats.

It doesn't take a scholar to see how states' rights Dixiecrat racists, holy rolling fundamentalists, Catholic and Mormon pseudo family value, and anti-choice fascistic Theocrats, and Fat Cat corporate welfare money grubbers all are subverting the republican protections of our Constitution. They've even appointed a Supreme Court that is breaking down our Constitution's Wall of Separation of Church and State, the branches of government, and protections against arbitrary search and seizure, and even allowing the incarceration of people who it is only feared will do a crime, to name but a trifle few of the anti-Constitutional reactionary incursions being made in the now newly soiled name of "conservatism."

The Supreme Court, Congress and the people are allowing the creation of a police state where freedom can be denied and property can be confiscated without due process right below our noses. It stinks to high heaven, but they've masked the smell of their fascism with the sweet scent of memories of our true conservatism. They ain't conserving nothing but their own power and our money for themselves.

I'll try not to talk like a scholar. After forty years of study, I beg my Mom and readers to bear with my backslides. We'll have enough of them (scholars and backslides--and bad jokes). I'll just talk to my Mom and any readers who will join us and join in our Bull Moose crusade to find the smarts, courage and heart of real republican Republicans to wear the ruby slippers of Constitutional protections as we walk our yellow brick road back to our future. I'll have much more to criticize of New Conservative fascists in the course of this work.

Moderately conservative Republicans must come to lead again on the Constitutionally fair, moderately progressive road to the people's progress. We, as TR and Lincoln before us, "...have proposed nothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers."¹⁶ We must conserve their wisdom and all the other great traditional institutions of social justice in secular American society, and save from the New Conservative fascists, to mention but a few: our true federalist Constitution; separation of church and state; civil rights for citizens, not corporations; government regulation of multi-national and other corporations; progressive taxation; public social security; medicare and medicaid; protection of the environment, and a multitude of other matters that matter. We must promote, against the fascists, moderately progressive reform of other currently inadequate institutions such as health care, education, the IRS, defense, our civil and criminal justice systems, other perversions of our Constitutional rights, and many other things. That schedule and everything left out does not pretend to be exhaustive, although it is exhausting. Much more on this later. Still, whether as Republicans or not, we Bull Moose must charge again! Otherwise we'll be put on the American Express to political extermination, be given our Visa's to pay for our mistakes, and be subjected to the Master Charge list of political debits from the true path to America's only bright future.

Backing into our future with our eyes on the past and our goals:

We must proceed according to Lincoln's formula for political peace:

With malice toward none; with charity for all with firmness in the right, as [we] see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds;...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.¹⁷

We suffer birth pangs of a new Age of Aquarius. We will give birth to the fulfillment of America's true manifest destiny in the next millennium. The great promise of our government went forth into the world in the Twentieth Century. For over two hundred years we have tweaked and tuned our Constitution and republican democracy to seek the best moderate balance of laissez faire, liberty, responsibility and order. We can see clearly now the essential correctness of our original Constitution and its Amendments and processes, and of our original, fair, means of interpretation or "construction" of our Constitution. Now it's time to keep our promises of a renewal of republican democracy at home and around the world.

We have lived through the false labors of the nineteen sixties when a premature Age of Aquarius cried for birthing. It was aborted and stillborn. Its death followed upon the panic and paranoia of people who had not yet been freed from selfish hedonism instilled by our monied and moralizing masters. Their Jeffersonian anarchy and radical democracy, supporting the hidden Fat Cat Oligarchs and Plutocrats, imbibed with their mother's milk and Dr. Spock, they thought would lead to the greening of America. It greyed with the anti-social individualism of flower children who turned off and dropped out--to become yuppies.

Individualistic myths spawned by the original opponents of the Constitution and fertilized by the present multinational corporate world order, did not prepare them to handle freedom and responsibility as two sides of one coin of the social realm. They did not realize that we are each a child of all others in the human community who have contributed to and facilitated the development of our shared cultural knowledge, conventions and heritage. They did not realize that we all must work together to help each of us find liberty, prosperity and our full potential Each child, (each one of us, and each of our children, and those of all our compatriots on the good green earth) is a child of us all, and an equally empowered and responsible member of the family of man. We share conventions by which we all define ourselves and are defined.

The solipsistic visions of the flower children perished on the infertile trash heap of history upon which Jefferson's idyllic visions should have long been discarded. Their greening browned on the dung heaps of naive, infantile illusions: drugs, delusions, and disillusionment. Their age was consumed by the myth that the love at the heart of the new age is only individualized, an internal emotion. Their delusions lived on the lie that love is an internal individualized spiritual condition and emotion. They did not realize that socially transforming love necessarily reflects and is reflected in and by all the forms, structures and institutions of government and society, and all individuals, who must use their power to reform the great institutions of society.

By the Eighties, the counter revolution of Reagan's "Me" generation mirrored and emphasized the least social and most individualistic and selfish strains of the aborted age. Like Alice looking through the looking glass, the Me-mes confused our American dream with drug and cash induced illusions. They replaced our loving caring with careless careening from one selfish goal to the next: sex, drugs, and IRAs! Yuppie! Faultlessly they were led around by their nose for career development and retirement accounts. They were being used.

Once again, time is pregnant with a new Age or Aquarius, of which its aborted and still born twin of the sixties was but a cartoonish harbinger. We now know that love must spring from the intrinsic structure or the social and political forms of society. The spirit of love must be born in those structures, forms of life and the liberating and limiting institutions of society. It must filter from society, focused through the family, to nourish children nurtured freely on love. Love must lead them freely to seek the welfare of brothers and sisters in all lands to the ends of our Earth.

Our forefathers knew this best. They knew that our potentials for wealth, decency and the fulfillment of all people's talents ("life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness") depend on the checks and balances written into the structure of society set up by our underlying social contract copied our Constitution where possible, and emulated or compromised where not. That Constitution reflects the bed rock conventions of fairness by which we live as they logically exist in the rational of our underlying social contract. Fairness was formalized by that document into the structure to guide our government. We must be vigilant to assure that each new generation of the new Age of Aquarius springs from gestation in the womb of time to live in the light of that Constitution. It conserves the best of our past, and fulfills our hopes for our children's futures. It shows and leads the way to loving progress.

Like our heros, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, we Bull Moose must speak softly but use some real schtick to gain and and carry a big stick called voter power. We must show no needless rancor. We must bring messages of understanding and forgiveness. However, we still must "tell it like it Is," as we said in the Sixties, unknowingly echoing TR. As Bull Moose serving as midwives for our new Age of Aquarius, like John the Baptist's, our voices must go forth through all lands to "Prepare Ye the Way." Only if moderately progressive, Constitutionally conservative children of good government grow healthily and happily in all lands of our great green Earth, nourished by the principle of persuasion alone, will any be truly safe.

We stand on the threshold of a new millennium. The new incarnation of the fascists' world order (that was aborted by our fathers' and grandfathers' sacrifices in the forties) is raising its ugly head again. It is in a "kinder, gentler." far more insidious and dangerously subtle form, pretending to uphold religion and morality and to preserve social conscience and caring to the individual and to religious institutions by reserving them to the individual while imposing them by force on all who disagree. All that is mostly to seek to remove government regulation of what they call the private sector (by which they mean "public corporations" who, Constitutionally have no rights) and to use government to protect the fascists' parasitism on our people and on our good green Earth's environment.

There will be a momentous struggle with the multinational fascists' new world order. It is being imposed by a conglomeration of Fat Cats from and for multinational corporations from the global economy with the connivance of Theocrats and modern versions of the Dixiecrats who wear pin stripes more than white sheets. These include the corporate, religious, racist and nationalist masters such as Gingrich and Lott and Pat Robertson against whose forbears Washington, Marshall, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower struggled.

These multinational corporate Fat Cats include the progeny of the new world-wide multinational military industrial complex about the earlier incarnation of which President Eisenhower sounded the alarm in the late 1950s. They have taking over both parties by campaign contributions, lobbying, dirty tricks, fraud and worse. They even tried to take over the revolution against the current parties by using massive amounts of money to have it led astray by a Texan whose size of ego seemed only to match his ears.

These corporate masters are served by theocratic moralists, a la 1984. The moralists symbiotically support their corporate masters like their holy antecedents once supported the nobility. All they demand in exchange for their support (that makes the corporate fascist world order possible) is being allowed to impose their values and morals on the rest of us. All they want is to rule our morals. They'll gladly let the Plutocrats, the Fat Cats' high priests of big business, rule and rape our economy. Together they would rule our lives with a paralyzing power over all our souls and pocketbooks.

Against the stifling rule and economic parasites of that neo-fascist world order, the Bull Moose surge for freedom and fulfillment of potential by all peoples of Earth must rise in conflict. May we do all that is worthy of our futures' promises of liberty, liberation fulfillment of potential for all. Otherwise, the world will greet the new millennium with chaos and upheavals that will destroy each new born child to good government and bury peoples' hopes and prayers for liberty and prosperity under a fifth reich that will last a thousand years and drown us in our tears.