Conservative chaos after the shock of McCain’s beating offered an opportunity, as Naomi Klein so beautifully explained in her book Shock Doctrine, for radical party faithful to take advantage. Instead of the conservative agenda becoming more compromising as normal people would expect, the extreme rightwing element of the Republican Party coalesced under the patriotic sounding Tea Party name. Within that context, an even more rightwing subset grabbed for power and got it not because of righteousness but because of circumstance. This subset consists of several young people who followed the same playbook. The “Young Guns”, which is a macho way to call attention to their success in the 2010 election, is similar to think tanks using a patriotic name to claim to be something they are not. With election of Rep. Boehner as Speaker of the House, the Young Guns positioned themselves as ideological leaders of a new movement over his head because without them the rational conservative’s minority could do nothing. Thus, a small radical political group has control of the conservative vote in the House of Representative; the very place where the founding fathers intended the majority of people to hold sway.
For those who care, the basic philosophy of the young guns comes from Ayn Rand the author of the book The Virtues of Selfishness. Her philosophy, based on social Darwinism, is as cruel as it is simple—greed pays. They treat altruism in any degree as utter foolishness. If you are rich and successful you deserve to survive, if not you are on your own; they simply do not care one way or the other. For the doubters, refer to the legislative agenda promoted by this pseudo majority. Everything for the top 1%, the rest don’t count; defunding food stamps, aid for dependent children, planned parenthood, tax cuts for the wealth, etcetera, etcetera. With the altruist gone, the Democratic Party would be gone. the Young Guns would have successfully committed politicide. Don’t worry, it will not happen but what worries me is the damage they do while trying.
The Young Guns have co-opted the Republican Party thus compromised democracy. In the House of Reprehensive, Eric Cantor, as Majority Leader is Caesar’s Brutus, the guy standing behind Boehner holding the knife, which is highly significant because Boehner wants to hang on to his job very, very badly. In the Senate, because of seniority, Paul Ryan, is the chair of the Senate Budget Committee who authored the infamous “Republican” budget.
He like several others admitted in several formats that he adores Ayn Rand because of her philosophy. Which bring up the point that very few politicians admit such a thing because the “philosophy of greed” is very un-popular—no one teaches their children to be greedy. Unlike altruism, greed is not reflexive; I want to be nice to other people and have other people be nice to me but if greedy, I need other people to not be greedy.
In the Tea Party power structure, moving from the U.S. House ands Senate, we come to Reince Priebus, the Chair of the Republican National Committee; before that, he was Chair of the Wisconsin Republican party. This ties Ryan to Scott Walker, the very unpopular and soon to be recalled Gov. of Wisc. From there we go to Rep. Michelle Bachman (Minnesota), who not only claimed leadership of the Tea Party but also sited her relationship with Jim DeMint, the radical Senator, as a reason people should vote for her in her bid for the presidency.
The Tea Party structure supports the election of radical republican candidates in state government elections: they have succeeded in electing a number of State Governors: Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Snyder along with some other governors and state government legislators. All of these people have very low popularity ratings, which suggest voters elected them without knowing their agenda. The Tea Party accomplishes this by funding candidates, especially in primary challenges against those who do not support their positions; they opposed Republicans as well as Democrats. With control of governorships and state legislatures, they change the voting rules at the state level to favor conservatives under the guise of preventing voter fraud, which by the way does not exist; and pass very unpopular laws aimed at destroying labor unions, the ones that normally support Democratic Candidates. Their funding is there because the Roberts’ court is the way it is because of the funding; a clever and rewarding circularity. Citizens United Ruling calling money ‘words’, hence free speech give radical right-wingers billionaires Charles and David Koch more words than most.
The subject of the Supreme Court brings up the subject of “deep government”; the appointment of radically partisan people to civil service positions at all levels, especially judgeships, by elected officials and the in turn by the appointees; another circularity. Their influence peddling does not stop with the government. In addition to government, they target educational institutes. Charles Koch offered Florida State University, Department of Economic a $1,500,000 grant (Miami Bay Times, May 10, 2011). They attached only a large number of strings; in addition to controlling whom FSU hired to teach, professors had to require students read Ayn Rand novel Atlas. The greed of a few university administrators caused them to accept and in doing so gave up an important measure of their freedom: greed feeding on greed.
Greediness is an innate primitive biological trait. Because of self-centeredness, the Young Guns fail to see the accumulating public wrath. What they fail to realize is that unlike them, people have senses, feelings, and emotions, which instills altruism in our being, a sense of caring for others and not just their narrow moral group. Without altruism, we would have anarchy.
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