The neocon attack plan is stolen right out the Nazi and Soviet playbooks. The trick is not to just present a coherent program, that would risk leftists with similar opinions on some issues and conservatives who might differ with them on other issues, joining them. Instead, they demand uniformity of opinion and unanimity of policy.

Having potential enemies and untrustworthy allies in their camp would make control and discipline too difficult, after all, that's what makes the liberals so disorganized, they tolerate dissent. So they go for an ideological purity litmus test that specifies detailed positions on every conceivable issue. That way, anyone who disagrees, liberal or conservative, can simply be attacked as subversive, treacherous and unpatriotic, no need to engage them on issues. Now, there have always been legit conservatives who objected to the neocon program on Iraq, both Lind and Pat Buchanan are examples, so they had to be ignored and marginalized. The neocons call them paleoconservatives.

Another problem was the fringe groups the neocons needed for support: the religious right, cultural conservatives, libertarians and both small business and massive corporate interests all had to be accomodated. Many of these people had little in common besides core conservative economic principles and were in open conflict on many cultural issues. The broad-brush picture of a big bad monolithic liberal conspiracy was designed to keep the disparate groups together.

This coalition held together until it started to fracture under pressure of the Iraq war. Small business and working class conservatives clashed with corporate giants on the issues of immigration and international trade, and the cultural conservatives and bible-bangers had very little in common with the skinny-tie, crew-cut yuppie entrepreneur wannabees and the beltway right wing think tanks. Libertarians, of course, succeed in alienating everyone. They're the right wing equivalent of anarchists.

The tragic result for the country is not that there are liberals and/or conservatives, that is a natural and wholesome condition. Those are labels which describe a spectrum of values, from ultraviolet to infrared and all that lies in between. It also implies that every individual is free to pick different positions on that spectrum on different issues, there is no reason why an feminist evagelical Christian couldn't be anti-war, or a gay union Democrat being a hawk on military matters. No, the crime of the neocons was to split the country into a bimodal distribution of conflicting political persuasions, and an insistence that each side fall into a unanimous acceptance of a consistent constellation of political values on totally unrelated issues. In short, they divided the country in two, and we're already paying a heavy price for it.