I was trying out the phrase "evangelical Conservatives" for the first time in that post, and your response tells me it's a pretty weak phrase. I meant it in a very precise and literal way: Conservatives who feel compelled to proselytize their ideology, to spread the "good word", and to make converts, sometimes at gunpoint. I most definitely was not referring to Christian Conservatives in particular...but now I know that my meaning isn't clear. I'll have to look for another phrase...how about "militant Conservatives"? It's weaker, but I could also explain my point as a negative: Conservatives who do not feel compelled to crush dissent.

I don't think of "Country Club Republicans" as Conservatives, but more as the genuine Republicans. The Party was theirs for eighty years before the Conservative-with-a-capital-C "movement" was founded in the late 1940s. I think that they're still in charge of the Party, and that they've opportunistically used Conservative ideology as a recruiting tool to gain the electoral power they needed to push their self-serving agenda.

Ever notice how Republicans routinely deliver on their promises to Big Business and the wealthy elite, while their promises to Conservative ideologues and social Conservatives are always somehow thwarted by evil Liberals? Ain't it funny how the wealthy got their tax cut, but abortion remains legal and prayer in the schools remains illegal.

The slaver mentality is just a particular instance of the resource exploitation mentality. Masters thought they could work their slaves to death and always obtain more, just as resource extracters assume that when they exhaust one pocket of a resource, they can always move on to another. That's the mentality of those Country Club Republicans, and I'm afraid that what we're seeing today is their perception that they've just about milked America dry, and that it's time to move on to greener pastures (not that, as I've said before, Dubai is actually green, except with money).

The modern practice of slavery is more accurately called "human husbandry", I'd say; a little more humane, a little more enlightened about maintaining the livestock in good health...and to take the analogy to its logical conclusion, I'd say that America is scheduled to be left economically fallow for a century or so, to allow the stock to recover, and to be grateful when the masters return and once again trickle down their benevolence upon our heads.

----Cue Tom's exploding-head post here----

But like I said earlier, there are many different kinds of Conservatives, and not all of them have forgotten their traditional, and healthy, distrust of power. Not all Conservatives are authoritarian Conservatives. I know Conservatives who don't try to make the entirely artificial distinction between governmental and economic power. They understand that while the kings we rejected might have claimed that their power came from God and inheritance, in practice they maintained and perpetuated their power because they had a monopoly on wealth with which to pay soldiers and buy ammo. Ever heard of a poor king? Only briefly...their reigns tended to be very short.

"Wealth is power" it's said. It might be more accurate to say that power requires wealth, and without wealth there is no power. The distribution of wealth in any particular society is an exact measure of the distribution of power in that society. Has America become a neofeudalist society? Well, if you check the distribution of wealth metrics in the UN Human Development Programme's annual quality of life survey, you find the United States nestled cozily between Nicaragua and El Salvador, way down in the middle of the list. I don't know about you, but I'm not at all happy to think of America as a banana republic writ large. But nobody asked my opinion on the matter.