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... if no one hears it?
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself ... The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda - before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's distrubing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world - lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the world
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Like the American and other Western Communist parties in their heyday, the American conservative movement has created a kind of alternative intellectual and political universe - a set of institutions parallel to and modelled on the institutions of mainstream society (many of which the movement sees, or imagines, as the organs of a disciplined Liberal Establishment) and dedicated to the single purpose of advancinga predetermined polictial agenda. There is a kind of Inner Movement, consisting of a few hundrer founders, senior organizations leaders, lawyers, and prominent media personalities (but only a handful of pracitcing politicians,) and an Outer Movement, consisting of a few hundred staff people, grant workers, and low level operatives of one kind or another. The movement has its own newspapers (the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Journal's editorial page), its own magazines (the Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, Commentary, and many more), its own broadcasting operations (Fox News and an army of Christian broadcast outlets), its own publishing houses (Regnery prominent among them), its own quasi-academic research institutions (the Heritage Foundation, the American Interprise Institute), and even its own Popular Front - the Republican Party, important elements of which (the party's congressional and judicial leadership, for example) it has successfully commandeered. These closely linked organizations (the vanguard of the consevative revolution, you might say) compose an entire social world with its own rituals, celebrations, and anniversaries, within which it is possible to live one's entire life. It is a world with its own elaborate system of incentives and sanctions, through which ... energetic conformity is rewarded with honors and promotions while deviations from the movement line, depending on their seriousness, are punished with anything from mild social disaproval to outright excommunication. - Hendrik Hertzberg, "Can You Forgive Him?", The New Yorker, March 11, 2002
