The hard Right feels that their archetypal America is gone, their fantasy world of decent white folks living in rural or detached suburban housing, going to church, working in offices or running small businesses, a world where their kids will go to college and do even better than they did--going or gone. I call it Cleaverland, because its where the Beaver lived. In Cleaverland, everyone works hard, follows the rules, things always get better in time and there's even a chance that you might really do well for yourself some day. Everybody knows someone who won the lottery, right?. There is no competition or struggle in Cleaverland, businesses may compete but yours will do OK, everyone gets to keep their job and even gets a raise and promotion down the line. It is owed to them because they have bought into the program. "We have a Work Ethic. Those other people, don't." It is so obvious to them, after all, everyone they know feels the same way.

Am I exaggerating, oversimplifying? Of course. It's a highly stylized scenario, more stereotype than archetype, and not everyone fits it perfectly. But you get the general picture. That's where the Right is coming from.

But the world is changing, economically and socially, politically and culturally. Cleaverland is getting harder and harder to achieve; partly because of inevitable change and the march of history, but also because most of it was bought on credit: government, consumer and corporate debt. Not to mention, Cleaverland is a nostalgic paradise that never really existed for most of us. Hell, I never saw it, and I wasn't poor. I always had a full belly and shoes on my feet. But we lived in government projects, apartments and rented housing until I was in high school. A few of my childhood friends lived in Cleaverland, sometimes they even invited me into their homes. It was wonderful. It was just like on TV.

That's why it was called the American Dream. We all seemed to be just on the verge of achieving it, but for most of us, it was always just out of reach.

Now its starting to become clear that Cleaverland is slipping away, less and less of us are going to make it, and many of us who did make it are getting kicked out, or our kids will be denied the chance of ever getting in at all. We have never experienced this as a nation. Even the Depression was a temporary condition, not the New World Order.

The conservative feels this coming, in his bones, and it infuriates him. He needs a scapegoat, someone to blame; its the Communists, or the Liberals, or the Democrats, or the blacks, or the Mexicans, or the lazy, or the unions hippies, rock stars, MSM, intellectuals, kollege perfessers or any of the other villains and deadbeats he has populated his imaginary, betrayed, stabbed-in-the-back fatherland with.

Its on everyone but him and its everything except the inevitable flow of history. We have been living off our New Deal, wartime, and Cold War prosperity for over half a century and we've borrowed on it to the hilt. Now the time has come to pay the bills and the rest of the world is out there now wanting their own piece of Cleaverland. And they're lean and hungry, impatient and ruthless. And they no longer fear us. We sense that too and it scares the shit out of us.

So conservatives, building on perfectly legitimate and genuine concerns about excessive deficits and extravagant spending, have created a paranoid fantasy planet of Communists and spoiled, brutish poor people who are out to loot their stuff. And the few who have made it big in Cleaverland, the "1%" for lack of a better term, have harnessed and exploited that fear and anger to make sure they get to keep their piece of the action no matter what happens to the rest of us.

There is no Far Left in America, nothing comparable to our TParty Right, to counterbalance it and give our politics some equilibrium. America hasn't had a real Left since the 1930s. A foolish flirtation with Stalinism discredited it, and then McCarthyism came out and shot the wounded. And don't point out the 60s, that was a children's crusade, not a political movement. It never made it off campus. Sure, there were massive social changes and a renaissance of personal and civil freedoms, but our economic system remained essentially intact. Most government spending, after all, benefitted primarily the middle class. Whatever economic troubles the nation may be in now, the Right has no one to blame but themselves.

There is no international Communism, either. They were crushed decades ago, their theories discredited and the nations who remained Communist have now become either pathetic third world backwaters, or like Russia and China, Capitalist with a vengeance, the brutal cutthroat Capitalism of our own Gilded Age. The Communist bureacrats became Capitalist gangsters, not that there ever was that much difference between them two.

But the True Believer Conservative still clings to that bogeyman, he needs him, he sees him everywhere and in anyone who dares question the bogey map of the world or the bogey vision of history. He sincerely believes that a national health plan or social security program or a safety net will inevitably lead to the Gulag; that the poor are that way through choice (even though many of them hold two or three jobs and are still drowning), and that a brutal elite of intellectuals has allied themselves with the great unwashed just to plunder his hard-earned stuff. Who the fuck do these people think they are?

These people may deserve our help, our sympathy, even our pity. But don't turn your back on them. They are desperate, and that desperation has made them ruthless--and deadly.