frankly, what I think we're doing here, is documenting the last gasps of democracy. Updated

[MisterP]

350. it's a whole pile of things that converged

neoliberalism (or "monetarism" if you're fancypants) has been the law of the land since Ford and Carter--and the free trade and "financialization" (everything is turned into a "revenue source" for the yuppies and Wall Street) produces galloping inequality and hemorrhaging work

after the 1994 GOP "sweep" (lots of Southern-Dem turncoats, really) the DLC took over: they figured that the party needed money, and thus donors, and thus it's been spiraling rightwards since then: even the GOP and Dems of 2001-2 are unrecognizable--who're the Pubs' Jeffords and Weickers?

since the late 70s there's been a spate of think tanks to coopt and synchronize everything from Baptism to pharmacists; this is derived from the 1971 Powell Memo which insisted that the Establishment was under siege by youths, women, and Frenchmen and had to be defended (even Neil deGrasse Tyson sounds like a strange reflection of Powell sometimes); Reagan then welded together today's GOP, with the four factions of Big Business, right-libertarians, fundies, and militarists

under Reagan, everything they put into the Patriot Act in the span of 7 days was set up and ready to roll at the first disaster, with Ollie North putting it together nicely: that's scarier to me than any MIHOP--that they had all this in the chamber and it could've been, like, a dam-break that starts it off

so we have a bipartisan economic consensus (that's shared even by Jean Chretien or Mitterrand or the PSOE), a conservative takeover of the party apparatus in the name of bringing in the dinero, think tanks tightly controlling what's permissible, and a national security state with total secrecy and impunity until there's a leak