A Government That Doesn't Believe in Government

Katha Pollitt just eviscerates the Right in her last article for The Nation. The gist of her essay, which couldn't be more correct, is that the creeping Christian fundamentalism is a mindset perfectly prepared, nay necessary, for accepting the decline of the American Empire. Read the essay, but all I need to do is post this perfect paragraph and allow it to sit squarely on your screen so that the fairies in your cranial cavity can do their work of providing us humans memory and understanding. (They are amazing creatures, aren't they?)

For decades the right has worked day and night to delegitimize concepts without which no society can thrive, or maybe even survive--the common good, social solidarity, knowledge and expertise, public service. God, abstinence and the market were supposed to solve all our problems. Bad news--climate change, rising poverty, racial and gender disparities, educational failure, the mess in Iraq--was just flimflam from liberals who hate freedom. Is there another world power that lives in such a fantasy world? Now, in old people left to drown in their nursing home beds, in police who reportedly demanded that young women stranded on rooftops bare their breasts in return for rescue, in the contempt for public safety shown by Bush's transformation of FEMA into a pasture for hapless cronies--we can all see what those fantasies obscured. A government that doesn't believe in government was a disaster waiting to happen.