I came across this quote today from Christian Realism and Political Problems (pp. 89-91) and had to write it down.
"Let us take the ideological conflict in modern technical society as an illustration [of the inadequacy of the scientific method in analyzing social and historical forces]. Even where the liberal world is not subject to the Marxist challenge, there is an ideological conflict between the more favored and the less favored members of the community. It is to be noted that in the more healthy societies this conflict does not result in a disruption of the community because it takes place against the background of value systems which do rough justice to both the individual and social dimension of human existence. But the degree to which individuality and individual initiative is cherished on the one hand, and social solidarity and security on the other, is clearly ideological. The bourgeois community tends to be libertarian and the industrial workers tend, even when they are not Marxist, to be equalitarian and collectivist. In this situation it is interesting to note what social science can and cannot do. A careful analysis of social sequences and causalities can refute the more extravagant claims of each side. There is, for instance, a pretty conclusive evidence that an uncontrolled economy does not automatically make for justice, and that a compounding of political and economic power, according to collectivist programs, will threaten both justice and liberty. Those societies in which there is a relative degree of impartial social observation mitigate the ideological conflict, but they cannot eliminate it. They are powerless to do so because of the existential intimacy between interest and idea. The classes which prefer liberty to security are those which already have a high measure of security through their social and professional skills, and who do not like to have their economic power subjected to political power. The classes on the other hand which prefer secuirty to liberty are on the whole devoid of special skills and therefore individual securities; and are exposed to the perils of a highly integrated technical society, and therfore fear insecurity more than they fear the loss of liberty. There can be no scientific dissolution of these preferences. It is probably true that the health of a democratic society depends more upon the spirit of forbearance with which each side tolerates the irreducible ideological preferences of the other than upon some supposed scientific resolution of them, because the scientific resolution always involves the peril that one side or the other will state its preferences as if they were scientifically validated value judgments." (emphasis mine)
Now I know that was one long paragraph, it takes up a page and a half in the book, but give it a chance. The fact that this conflict was stated in "matter of fact" terms that were apparently self-evident in Niebuhr's day, and is merely used to examine another issue really shines a light on how well the children of darkness have obscured the reality of American society. So-called conservatives (Niebuhr refers to them as "bourgeois liberals") have projected their values onto the working class so well that in all official frames they are considered universal. Liberty to proletarians without the security of organization used to mean simply the "freedom to starve," now many proles who in earlier times would know better believe that they can bargain better on their own with the boss when they are wholly expendable and replacable, meaning no leverage whatsoever.
Anyway, enough of the American electorate has internalized these bourgeois values to make an ideology that should be abhorrent to anyone who works for a living palatable. Or at least keeps them from focusing on economic security as a concern above abortion, gay marriage, guns, etc. Perhaps the recent full-court press on skilled professionals by the radical right in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere that is shattering economic security for public servants will gain new relevence in the electorate and we can finally draw the line. There is no common ground, there is no compromise; if republicans win, you lose. We are no longer a "healthy society" with a "background of value systems" that balance justice for community and the individual. It is a Brave New World where anyone is fair game.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Constantinople and overreach
A funny thing occurred to me just this morning as I was reading the headlines. The big progressive social programs, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, are the American version of New Rome or Constantinople. "The City" as Byzantine Romans used to think of it, was eternal, it was the defining feature of the Empire and all of their enemies knew it. As long as the City survived, so did the empire. Every attempt by invaders to take Constantinople failed and usually the Arabs/Persians/Turks/Avars/Pechenegs, etc. were driven back and decisively defeated, and the Empire survived. Similarly, every attempt to destroy Social Security and Medicare by republicans recently has been followed by their defeat. I know comparisons to Rome and America are at best reaches, but let's play this out just for the heck of it.
The outlines are tenuous right now, but conservative (a label that no longer really applies) attempts to strike at this backbone of American society seems to be backfiring for them. The essential comparative feature is that while Rome's enemies failed to take Constantinople, the Empire weakened steadily through the centuries while managing to keep their society afloat. They acted a lot like Democrats do today, giving ground to the ferocity of their enemies who desired nothing more than their absolute destruction, while fighting amongst themselves and pretending nothing was wrong. Our republic is hanging by a thread right now, what comes next is anybody's guess. The barbarians inside the gates aren't so much interested in destroying their opposition as capturing the state apparatus, these are the corporate republicans, to eliminate anything that hinders their bosses in business or works toward the common good and doesn't produce profits. It is always useful to have a neutered Democratic party around that postures but doesn't offer any real resistance.
It is a fundamentally different situation, the Byzantines were combatting violent invaders on the battlefield, while conservatives are waging a "bloodless" class war. What the endgame is, I couldn't say. Extermination? Slavery? Social Darwinism? Hard to say, but just like bush spent his "political capital" after the 2004 "election" trying to privatize Social Security and went all the way back to the Danube of political wilderness, this time around the Ryan republicans are hard at work holding the economy hostage. There plan was called, correctly, an effort to privatize and undermine Medicare and SS was bypassed for now. Many have pointed out that when Ryan's plan is described for what it is, that poll respondents reject it by huge margins.
Nevertheless, they are barrelling ahead in a grand attempt to turn over a highly successful and efficient program over to insurance gangsters. In our little historical parable this could turn out to parallel the Persian king Khusrau II's yearlong siege of Constantinople in concert with Avars on the European land side of the city during the early Seventh Century. It is a little too much to hope that President Obama would assume the role of Emperor Heraclius and maneuver an end-run around the besiegers and sack the Persian capital of Ctestiphon, thus ending not just Khusrau's reign but his state as well a few years later when the Muslims overran it. Obama seems more likely to be Heraclius at the end of his reign when he was too exhausted and sick to confront the same Muslims overrunning Egypt and the Levant.
UPDATE: I started this entry quite a while back. It seems our President, the leader of the Democratic Party, the same party that created Medicare and Social Security, is volunteering to hand it over to the barbarians. Now, I'm convinced that he is actually Alexios Angelos, the son of a deposed emperor who sweet-talked the leaders of the Fourth Crusade to attack their fellow Christians in 1204 to take the throne. Our story is complicated, like that of the insane history of the Fourth Crusade, but ultimately the crusaders sacked Constantinople and turned it into a Latin (Catholic) state for over half a century. The events don't line up of course, but rough parallels can be made, especially the sacrifice of the "team" in service to ambition. The increasing disconnect between not only the administration, but the Democratic Party as well, and the American people, even the party's own base is playing right into the hands of the barbarians. Objectively, I don't know who the president is trying to serve. Is it the "establishment" that has jumped on austerity? Or is he really a closet republican who has had this in mind for a long time?
It is hard to say, but if we draw out the analogy just a bit we can see what happens to Western Civilization. Everyone should look at the history of the Crusades era for its own sake, but its broad outlines spell disaster for so many vulnerable people when applied to the present day. I've completely lost track of who or what is where in this tale but as long as there is a vestige of civilization there is hope. I don't want to live through another Dark Age, or worse, and to think we the people could be sold out by "one of our own" is beyond gloom and doom. Regular conservatives and republicans will be harmed just as badly as liberals and democrats if our supposed representatives make a deal to "save" Social Security and Medicare, just because they are stupid and ignorant doesn't mean they won't spend their retirement years eating cat food and dying of easily preventable disease just to fatten even further our plutocrats profit margins. It was only after Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in 1453 that Christendom realized what had been lost. Extraordinary effort to regain the city came to nothing, and soon Europeans were defending Vienna tooth and nail. What would Vienna be in our analogy? The plutocrats and so-called conservatives have taken so much from us already, I don't know what it would be.
Anyway, just food for thought.
The outlines are tenuous right now, but conservative (a label that no longer really applies) attempts to strike at this backbone of American society seems to be backfiring for them. The essential comparative feature is that while Rome's enemies failed to take Constantinople, the Empire weakened steadily through the centuries while managing to keep their society afloat. They acted a lot like Democrats do today, giving ground to the ferocity of their enemies who desired nothing more than their absolute destruction, while fighting amongst themselves and pretending nothing was wrong. Our republic is hanging by a thread right now, what comes next is anybody's guess. The barbarians inside the gates aren't so much interested in destroying their opposition as capturing the state apparatus, these are the corporate republicans, to eliminate anything that hinders their bosses in business or works toward the common good and doesn't produce profits. It is always useful to have a neutered Democratic party around that postures but doesn't offer any real resistance.
It is a fundamentally different situation, the Byzantines were combatting violent invaders on the battlefield, while conservatives are waging a "bloodless" class war. What the endgame is, I couldn't say. Extermination? Slavery? Social Darwinism? Hard to say, but just like bush spent his "political capital" after the 2004 "election" trying to privatize Social Security and went all the way back to the Danube of political wilderness, this time around the Ryan republicans are hard at work holding the economy hostage. There plan was called, correctly, an effort to privatize and undermine Medicare and SS was bypassed for now. Many have pointed out that when Ryan's plan is described for what it is, that poll respondents reject it by huge margins.
Nevertheless, they are barrelling ahead in a grand attempt to turn over a highly successful and efficient program over to insurance gangsters. In our little historical parable this could turn out to parallel the Persian king Khusrau II's yearlong siege of Constantinople in concert with Avars on the European land side of the city during the early Seventh Century. It is a little too much to hope that President Obama would assume the role of Emperor Heraclius and maneuver an end-run around the besiegers and sack the Persian capital of Ctestiphon, thus ending not just Khusrau's reign but his state as well a few years later when the Muslims overran it. Obama seems more likely to be Heraclius at the end of his reign when he was too exhausted and sick to confront the same Muslims overrunning Egypt and the Levant.
UPDATE: I started this entry quite a while back. It seems our President, the leader of the Democratic Party, the same party that created Medicare and Social Security, is volunteering to hand it over to the barbarians. Now, I'm convinced that he is actually Alexios Angelos, the son of a deposed emperor who sweet-talked the leaders of the Fourth Crusade to attack their fellow Christians in 1204 to take the throne. Our story is complicated, like that of the insane history of the Fourth Crusade, but ultimately the crusaders sacked Constantinople and turned it into a Latin (Catholic) state for over half a century. The events don't line up of course, but rough parallels can be made, especially the sacrifice of the "team" in service to ambition. The increasing disconnect between not only the administration, but the Democratic Party as well, and the American people, even the party's own base is playing right into the hands of the barbarians. Objectively, I don't know who the president is trying to serve. Is it the "establishment" that has jumped on austerity? Or is he really a closet republican who has had this in mind for a long time?
It is hard to say, but if we draw out the analogy just a bit we can see what happens to Western Civilization. Everyone should look at the history of the Crusades era for its own sake, but its broad outlines spell disaster for so many vulnerable people when applied to the present day. I've completely lost track of who or what is where in this tale but as long as there is a vestige of civilization there is hope. I don't want to live through another Dark Age, or worse, and to think we the people could be sold out by "one of our own" is beyond gloom and doom. Regular conservatives and republicans will be harmed just as badly as liberals and democrats if our supposed representatives make a deal to "save" Social Security and Medicare, just because they are stupid and ignorant doesn't mean they won't spend their retirement years eating cat food and dying of easily preventable disease just to fatten even further our plutocrats profit margins. It was only after Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in 1453 that Christendom realized what had been lost. Extraordinary effort to regain the city came to nothing, and soon Europeans were defending Vienna tooth and nail. What would Vienna be in our analogy? The plutocrats and so-called conservatives have taken so much from us already, I don't know what it would be.
Anyway, just food for thought.
Monday, July 11, 2011
National Socialism: Motives and analysis
I have spent the last four weeks teaching WWII at a Jewish nursing home, a question that came up multiple times from both my "students" and quite a few people I mentioned the class to was "how could the nazis be so evil?" I didn't have a concise answer, this is a question historians are still trying to answer in entire books on the subject. But I feel like I need an answer if I teach a course like this again. I'm not an expert on German history or WWII but I have taken courses on the Third Reich and read a great deal of secondary scholarship on the subject. So much so that I really felt saturated on everything about WWII before this class and did not want to do it. I was scared to death the first day (having a cold didn't help) but now that it is over I'm actually craving the rush of being in front of a classroom (it feels a little like the rush of riding a rollercoaster. However, I need a straight answer to the question of why the nazis did what they did that will get the ideas out there without dominating the discussion.
My first thought is that National Socialism in Germany was a perfect storm of events, however many of the factors leading to the machtergreifung (seizure of power) are present in most of the West even today. The racial ideology of Hitler and like-minded nazis was created out of ancient myths, Nineteenth Century psuedo-science, and social/behavioral engineering movements that proceeded the First World War. Admittedly, the nazis took all of these to a depraved, but not entirely illogical conclusion. Myths about Jewish secret practices (blood libel, etc.) are very old and the desire of Christians to "purge" their society of anything different goes back at least to the People's Crusade of Peter the Hermit in 1099.
Superstitious nonsense aside, there was just enough doubt in antisemitic minds that Jews had secretive plots to take over the world through control of banking and the press, indeed that the whole war was engineered for this purpose. Then there was Hitler's fantasy that Jews were also behind the bolshevik revolution in Russia, even more pertinent was the story that Jews stabbed Germany in the back and caused the surrender. In reality, Jews were a powerless minority that could be made to seem to have conspiratorial and malicious intentions by skillful manipulators.
Then there was the "science" of phrenology, largely a reflection of European Imperialism that assigned a racial hierarchy for why much of the world came under the control of whites, and assigned Jews, Roma, and Slavs to a pretty low place. The social engineering movements of Eugenics and Social Darwinism were more complicated. SD came first, this was an interpretation of Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest species applied to humans. Social Darwinists felt that certain people did not deserve life but that letting nature dispose of them would benefit society, what it meant in practice was that charity and any kind of social assistance were sucking resources from the fittest and allowing the unfit to survive, reproduce and drag down the human race. Eugenics was a "Progressive" response to SD in some ways, though it had a negative and positive side, the former is more applicable here. Negative Eugenics tried to incorporate SD ideas of unfitness and intervene through sterilization instead of waiting for nature. Degenerates bred too much, while the superior humans declined. While SD applied to anyone who was poor, eugenics had a racial component from the beginning but was primarily concerned with "improving" the white race by weeding out the degenerates. For a determined, energetic group of true believers is it really such a stretch to apply eugenics... to the living?
At their core, the nazis were a collection of criminals and the mentally ill (schitzophrenics, sociopaths, psychopaths, etc.), while psychoanalyzing hitler and the top nazis is dubious at best, further down in the party structure these types predominated. William Shirer generalized that deranged people were naturally attracted to the megalomanical but charismatic hitler and also many hypernationalist veterans of the Great War were attracted as well out of a desire to make Germany strong again and punish the "traitors" to the Reich such as communists and socialists. This collection of angry, violent people found a vehicle to participate in the nazi party, they were largely unwelcome in the more traditional parties. It is quite difficult to really understand Germany after WWI, everything was turned upside down, defeat and the very harsh peace treaty after years of privation and rationing made for many desperate people. This combined with inexperience with democracy and republican government, anything was possible but misery was the most likely. There were revolutionary uprisings, inflation, foreign military occupation, and routine but violent street fighting between right wing freikorps gangs and communists.
Amazingly, things were actually improving under the Weimar goverment until the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression hit Germany hard. The economy was always fragile but international collapse caused widespread misery and unemployment in Germany, but opened the door for extremist political factions. Enter the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), whose intense organizing, demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda campaigns made them attractive to many lower-middle class Germans who did not support the more leftist parties but felt the mainstream parties had failed. These family farmers, small shopkeepers, and clerical professionals often discounted nazi antisemitism as overblown rhetoric. However, the nazis never won an outright majority or gained a popular mandate for world war and exterminating entire races.
Stay tuned for part 2, this is getting involved.
My first thought is that National Socialism in Germany was a perfect storm of events, however many of the factors leading to the machtergreifung (seizure of power) are present in most of the West even today. The racial ideology of Hitler and like-minded nazis was created out of ancient myths, Nineteenth Century psuedo-science, and social/behavioral engineering movements that proceeded the First World War. Admittedly, the nazis took all of these to a depraved, but not entirely illogical conclusion. Myths about Jewish secret practices (blood libel, etc.) are very old and the desire of Christians to "purge" their society of anything different goes back at least to the People's Crusade of Peter the Hermit in 1099.
Superstitious nonsense aside, there was just enough doubt in antisemitic minds that Jews had secretive plots to take over the world through control of banking and the press, indeed that the whole war was engineered for this purpose. Then there was Hitler's fantasy that Jews were also behind the bolshevik revolution in Russia, even more pertinent was the story that Jews stabbed Germany in the back and caused the surrender. In reality, Jews were a powerless minority that could be made to seem to have conspiratorial and malicious intentions by skillful manipulators.
Then there was the "science" of phrenology, largely a reflection of European Imperialism that assigned a racial hierarchy for why much of the world came under the control of whites, and assigned Jews, Roma, and Slavs to a pretty low place. The social engineering movements of Eugenics and Social Darwinism were more complicated. SD came first, this was an interpretation of Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest species applied to humans. Social Darwinists felt that certain people did not deserve life but that letting nature dispose of them would benefit society, what it meant in practice was that charity and any kind of social assistance were sucking resources from the fittest and allowing the unfit to survive, reproduce and drag down the human race. Eugenics was a "Progressive" response to SD in some ways, though it had a negative and positive side, the former is more applicable here. Negative Eugenics tried to incorporate SD ideas of unfitness and intervene through sterilization instead of waiting for nature. Degenerates bred too much, while the superior humans declined. While SD applied to anyone who was poor, eugenics had a racial component from the beginning but was primarily concerned with "improving" the white race by weeding out the degenerates. For a determined, energetic group of true believers is it really such a stretch to apply eugenics... to the living?
At their core, the nazis were a collection of criminals and the mentally ill (schitzophrenics, sociopaths, psychopaths, etc.), while psychoanalyzing hitler and the top nazis is dubious at best, further down in the party structure these types predominated. William Shirer generalized that deranged people were naturally attracted to the megalomanical but charismatic hitler and also many hypernationalist veterans of the Great War were attracted as well out of a desire to make Germany strong again and punish the "traitors" to the Reich such as communists and socialists. This collection of angry, violent people found a vehicle to participate in the nazi party, they were largely unwelcome in the more traditional parties. It is quite difficult to really understand Germany after WWI, everything was turned upside down, defeat and the very harsh peace treaty after years of privation and rationing made for many desperate people. This combined with inexperience with democracy and republican government, anything was possible but misery was the most likely. There were revolutionary uprisings, inflation, foreign military occupation, and routine but violent street fighting between right wing freikorps gangs and communists.
Amazingly, things were actually improving under the Weimar goverment until the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression hit Germany hard. The economy was always fragile but international collapse caused widespread misery and unemployment in Germany, but opened the door for extremist political factions. Enter the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), whose intense organizing, demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda campaigns made them attractive to many lower-middle class Germans who did not support the more leftist parties but felt the mainstream parties had failed. These family farmers, small shopkeepers, and clerical professionals often discounted nazi antisemitism as overblown rhetoric. However, the nazis never won an outright majority or gained a popular mandate for world war and exterminating entire races.
Stay tuned for part 2, this is getting involved.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Rule of Law
Republic: From the latin "res publica" or "the people's business." Form of government characterized by popular elections for public officials, the right of people to liberty, and the rule of law.
Rule of Law: The concept in government that leaders are subject to laws and not above them. Power is not exercised abitrarily but in line with precedent and tradition.
Both of these were trumped by yesterday's ruling in the Wisconsin state supreme court. According to JSonline, "[i]n a rash decision based on flimsy reasoning, four justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court have upended the state open meetings law and opened the door for political mischief." People have come to start calling Wisconsin "Fitzwalkerstan" after the governor and legislative leader acting like the autocratic rulers of some Central Asian country, the kind that boils political opponents alive. Now we can add the supreme court to the other branches whose ideology trumps any adherance to the above-referenced ideas.
Unlike what certain fans of this reactionary and highly anti-American political warfare claim, this is not about liberals "not liking the results of an election." This is about those traditions we all supposedly used to hold dear, such as government officials are not to break the law of the land, or radically alter the basis of government to harm the political opposition. Elections do have consequences, the winners have the authority to pursue policies to address issues that are the public's business. Elected leaders do not however, have the authority to pursue highly divisive and harmful policies for the benefit of special interests over the public interest, especially when laws already in place are violated in the pursuit. That is what the issue is, nothing more. Governor walker and the republicans in the legislature violated laws that we have for exactly this reason, to prevent favors to special interests from being rammed through without notifying the public. The so-called "budget repair bill" was rammed through without the requisite notice, without real debate, and without the public getting to see it. That is why the lower court judge ruled that it be delayed, the highest court in the land decided though nakedly partisan reasoning that it was imperative to screw the teachers as soon as possible.
Human nature is inherently flawed, the ambition for power is at the root of Niebuhr's conception of human sinfulness. We are moving away from the rule of law to the rule of money and power, those with enough are now above the law unless the children of light can summon the will to oppose them.
Rule of Law: The concept in government that leaders are subject to laws and not above them. Power is not exercised abitrarily but in line with precedent and tradition.
Both of these were trumped by yesterday's ruling in the Wisconsin state supreme court. According to JSonline, "[i]n a rash decision based on flimsy reasoning, four justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court have upended the state open meetings law and opened the door for political mischief." People have come to start calling Wisconsin "Fitzwalkerstan" after the governor and legislative leader acting like the autocratic rulers of some Central Asian country, the kind that boils political opponents alive. Now we can add the supreme court to the other branches whose ideology trumps any adherance to the above-referenced ideas.
Unlike what certain fans of this reactionary and highly anti-American political warfare claim, this is not about liberals "not liking the results of an election." This is about those traditions we all supposedly used to hold dear, such as government officials are not to break the law of the land, or radically alter the basis of government to harm the political opposition. Elections do have consequences, the winners have the authority to pursue policies to address issues that are the public's business. Elected leaders do not however, have the authority to pursue highly divisive and harmful policies for the benefit of special interests over the public interest, especially when laws already in place are violated in the pursuit. That is what the issue is, nothing more. Governor walker and the republicans in the legislature violated laws that we have for exactly this reason, to prevent favors to special interests from being rammed through without notifying the public. The so-called "budget repair bill" was rammed through without the requisite notice, without real debate, and without the public getting to see it. That is why the lower court judge ruled that it be delayed, the highest court in the land decided though nakedly partisan reasoning that it was imperative to screw the teachers as soon as possible.
Human nature is inherently flawed, the ambition for power is at the root of Niebuhr's conception of human sinfulness. We are moving away from the rule of law to the rule of money and power, those with enough are now above the law unless the children of light can summon the will to oppose them.
Children of Darkness and The Big Lie
Sarah Palin's (and now Michelle Bachmann's) recent mangling of American History is especially abrasive to me and I have to assume many people with more than just a passing interest in and knowledge of our past. Personally, at this stage she really is nothing, a distraction from what the real evil is up to, those who actually have some power. This could change if the current media frenzy continues and she is somehow able to acquire a position that will harm others. I know that many people in my position have sworn to ignore Palin for this very reason, but it reminds me of many primary sources I read on the rise of Hitler and the Nazis that wanted to get a few thoughts down. I don't want to suggest that the governquitter is going to seize power and start concentration camps or anything like that, or that primary sources of the machtergreifung actually reflect what she or other republicans are doing, but there is a similar flavor that I could never argue in my scholarly writing.
Here is one clip of her rewriting history, one of many not that it matters. How many of her followers are going to come away from that thinking "I did not know the Revolution was fought over the right to bear arms, this is something I value highly as well, that Palin's alright." I don't have specialized knowledge in the Revolutionary Era to really argue it differently, but I will say that this, at its heart, was not a battle for the individual's right to have a firearm it was a battle for collective rights. The colonists, first leaders like Samuel Adams and others, were beginning to identify more with their fellow Americans than as subjects of the British Crown and part of the Empire. Individual rights were an important aspect of this, but not the crucial one, but that Americans wanted to be free collectively to chart their own course and rejected the right of remote Parliament to infringe on their sovereignty.
Collective (or community) over individual is something conservatives have a hard time recognizing, just as my friend often notices the difficulty conservatives have understanding "gross" vs. "net" as in if the Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare succeeds, the gross cost of health care for seniors will not change (actually will increase) but cost to government will drop and net spending by government on Medicare will decrease. Conservatives do not understand government as "us" but as just one more instituition in American society, government is not a collective expression of the society's needs and concerns but a thing that takes in money and gives it out to corporations.
Why this is a problem is somewhat covered by this post by MMFA, Palin makes a dumb comment that contains some lucky guesses and the conservative media is right there to back her up. Here are some further links I found, I'll leave it up to you to decide if there are similarities.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitlerlie.html
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-profile-03-02.html
Here is one clip of her rewriting history, one of many not that it matters. How many of her followers are going to come away from that thinking "I did not know the Revolution was fought over the right to bear arms, this is something I value highly as well, that Palin's alright." I don't have specialized knowledge in the Revolutionary Era to really argue it differently, but I will say that this, at its heart, was not a battle for the individual's right to have a firearm it was a battle for collective rights. The colonists, first leaders like Samuel Adams and others, were beginning to identify more with their fellow Americans than as subjects of the British Crown and part of the Empire. Individual rights were an important aspect of this, but not the crucial one, but that Americans wanted to be free collectively to chart their own course and rejected the right of remote Parliament to infringe on their sovereignty.
Collective (or community) over individual is something conservatives have a hard time recognizing, just as my friend often notices the difficulty conservatives have understanding "gross" vs. "net" as in if the Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare succeeds, the gross cost of health care for seniors will not change (actually will increase) but cost to government will drop and net spending by government on Medicare will decrease. Conservatives do not understand government as "us" but as just one more instituition in American society, government is not a collective expression of the society's needs and concerns but a thing that takes in money and gives it out to corporations.
Why this is a problem is somewhat covered by this post by MMFA, Palin makes a dumb comment that contains some lucky guesses and the conservative media is right there to back her up. Here are some further links I found, I'll leave it up to you to decide if there are similarities.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitlerlie.html
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-profile-03-02.html
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