| Richie, thanks for this post. It's spot on. I have had personal experience of sociopaths and the people in power in the U.S. fit the description to a T. They are exploiting the ignorance of Protestant fundamentalists by manipulating symbols, and this keeps them in power. They are also (to keep power in a Senate defined by physical geography) taking advantage of the Mormon political machine in the Western states.
The key to breaking neoconservative power is to force either their Southern or Western supporters to become disillusioned with them and either defect to the Democrats or form a new party. The focus that is most important to accomplish this is the Senate, as the House is easily made Democrat.
I predict this task will occur in one of two ways:
In the South, where the hard right is not under a single leadership and religious organizations are fragmented and relatively democratic, a political movement led by the young would be sufficient to accomplish the task. Katrina drove a wedge in long-standing political assumptions here in the South. Obama doesn't have a large enough organization to take advantage of it, although it may get him elected.
In the West, the key will come as younger generations in the upper-middle class drop out of Mormonism, and immigrants to the area move into the upper-middle class. This is a slow process though, and I give it a twenty-year window. Eventually the politics of Utah, Nevada and possibly Idaho will resemble those of Oregon. Again, the reason why this is important is because control of the Senate depends on physical and not demographic geography.
A new party with a platform that basically amounts to Goldwater conservatism could do well in the South and West, but would have to make headway against the many formal and informal restrictions against third parties. I don't see this as a possibility yet.
The only way the Republicans can prevent these scenarios is by moving gradually back to the center over the next two decades.
If they do not, and continue down their current criminal and unconstitutional path, I expect an economic collapse. One of the features of sociopathy is a poor ability to forecast long-term results. This is because people are not well understood by sociopaths, except in the short-term time frame of manipulation. The underlying motives that provide identification and planning would require empathy to be understood.
The same lack of empathy is likely to cause a lot of business failures as technological change forces certain monopolies to compete with newly empowered consumers. I believe the RIAA lawsuits are only the beginning of a new wave of attacks by entrenched interests directly on consumers, who are learning to both vote with their feet, and do without.
Did anyone else hear about the health crackdown on truckers that is happening now, and how much of that is motivated by payback for their recent gas price protests?
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