After the debacle of the Bush administration following the remarkably peaceful and prosperous Clinton era, the Republicans found themself with the dismal prospect of a replay of the Great Depression, with the long-awaited poster boy for the Right, Bush, cast in the Hoover role, and Obama playing the FDR part. It might mean the end of the Republican Party as we know it. Well, it seems that prophecy has come true after all, although perhaps not in a way they had anticipated.

The Inner Party of the GOP resurrected Nixon's old Southern Stategy, although instead of Dixiecrats fired up by Civil Rights, now it was a disintegrating middle class rapidly losing its hegemony and dominion due to a declining economy of excess and consumption, a rapidly upward transfer of wealth, and a spiral of corporate, consumer, financial and (yes, it must be conceded), government debt.

There's a lot of people out there suddenly realizing that the Social Contract was no longer worth the paper it was written on, and they needed a scapegoat--a class of dispossessed ripe for demagoguery and desperate for someone to blame it all on.

Several key factors were set in motion, an obstructionist Congress to ensure the new administration accomplished none of its goals, and the re-animation of that old standybye, the Red Scare. Sure, the old Bolshevik threat was long gone, but the Liberal Elite (all those filthy rich lefties in the arts, the press and academia) would fit the bill nicely. The victims?
The cloth-coat Republicans, Reagan Democrats, and other solid working class Joe the Plumber NFL and NASCAR Volk making up the new, improved Republican Party. You know, the one without any rich people in it (except for the few who made it as awntrapranewers because of their clear intrinsic moral superiority).

The effete snobs may control the Lamestream Media, but the REAL Americans can now be reached through the New Faux Press. The process was blueprinted a generation ago, the newly funded Right Wing Think Tanks lay down the theoretical framewok, the new class of conservative punditry and chattering classes propagate the faith, an activist class agitates socially, and a political movement is consequently built up. This is not new, its been going on since the 50s and 60s, although it never really gained traction until the age of Reagan.

So what does all this have to do with viral emails? With the legitimizing cachet of this philosophical underpinning, the suddenly threatened and diminishing middle class now finds itself with a means of self-organizing and publicizing itself, the internet, using the message generated in the new right-wing media outlets. No lie or obfuscation is off-limits, even stuff like the birther nonsense is pushed because by the time it is discredited, the new recruits will be brought into the fold and thoroughly indoctrinated. Do you really think people like Huckabee and Gingrich really believed all that Kenyan Mau-mau nonsense? Or what about the ones who never even tried to support these lies publicly, but never did anything to discourage them. "I don't have any reason to doubt the President's word, wink, wink."

There has been a concerted effort to recruit the ignorant, the uneducated, the anti-intellectual, the bigoted and the religious fanatics into a confederation of the desperate. These are the people sending out those viral emails. That's why they have that supermarket tabloid air about them.

No, these aren't the traditional conservatives, the people who believe in small government, lower taxes, and support of commerce, policies which are really quite reasonable. These people go much further, they are being agitated into a search for scapegoats, for enemies, for traitors. And politically, they are mobilized with those same policies that will work against their own self interest as workers, by convincing them they are not mere workers, but entrepreneurs frustrated by the grasping poor and the liberal elites who envy their work ethic and hate freedom.

How is this translated into political action in a democracy? By inciting class warfare. The young against the old, the ignorant against the educated, the middle class against the poor, (certainly not the rich, anybody can be rich if they just work hard!), and those who have enlisted the poor in their desire to bring down Jerusalem, the liberal elite...

The industrial unions have long been crushed, the government unions are now the targets. It's not just because they keep wages up, but because they are the only source of political funding left for liberal politicians in our new world of PACS and anonymous corporations with First Amendment rights and bottomless pockets. Add obstructionist legislative tactics, the blocking of all executive action, filibusters, gerrymandering, effective denial of the franchise to demographics likely to support the other side, in short, an integrated program whose only real goal is to keep salaries low, workers desperate, the safety net non existent, and social, environmental, consumer and safety regulation as toothless as possible.

And of course, the poor must be made to pay their fair share of taxes, they've been riding on the backs of the truly creative, innovative class long enough.

As for the possibility someone else, someone not a rightwinger, is behind this? I think not. The left's just not clever enough.

I gotta go.