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Still, you should consider the conditions in Russia, and in Germany at the time of those successes. A lost war which had wiped out an entire generation, and the crushing poverty which followed it in Germany, a huge peasant population in Russia which literally didn't know who was running things, or to what end -- unschooled in modern politics and economics at all.
I am considering those conditions. Kevin Phillips is seing those sorts of conditions on the way. So is Chalmers Johnson. There is a huge population here that doesn't know who is running things. If there wasn't George Bush would not be president.
To turn the American people into that kind of cannon fodder would be quite a trick, no matter how distasteful they find kinky sex, or how incomprehensible scientific research is to them.
Permanent war and the threat of a permanent enemy turn people into that. That's what has been going on.
Also, the creation of alternate realities is an enormously labor and energy-intensive enterprise. Every unpleasant fact, every ideological deviation, must have its counter-foghorn (presently) or its secret policeman/commissar (in your hypothetical future.) Could -- can -- our present right-wing nasties manage this in a country of 300 million consumers? Frankly, I doubt it.
They don't have to. Read Huxley's essays on totalitarian propaganda. They didn't have to do that in Germany. Most people will remain oblivious, happy in their private lives. Its only the people that take an interest in politics that pose a problem.
And then, of course, there's us. We aren't exactly standing around, I hope....
Look, "nascent" does not mean "imminent", and stating that movement conservatism is a nascent totalitarian movement does not mean that totalitarianism is what will happen to America.
The fact that people know Bush's lies ... that's the point. Now is the time that you stop totalitarianism ... you never let it happen in the first place. That's the road movement conservatism is headed down, and people need to know that. To know what is at stake.
The founding fathers saw in a tea tax - a TEA TAX - the road to tyranny. Given that they had no democratic recourse, they waged a revolution to win their freedom. We have our freedom, we have our democratic recourse, so my message is LET'S USE IT OR LOSE IT. What's going on now, the Constitutional violations happening, are more serious than a tea tax.
