On Sunday, February 13, 2011, a few hundred union members gathered at the state capitol building in Madison, WI to confront Gov. Scott Walker over a bill designed to strip public employees of their right to organize. The next day, they were joined by over a thousand teaching assistants from the state’s two public universities. The day after that, Madison schools were closing because teachers had moved from the classrooms to the front lines; news reports estimated 10,000 people inside the capitol, and another 3,000 protesting outside in the winter cold.

By the end of the week, 70,000 people filled Madison’s streets, and 14 state legislators had fled to Illinois rather than give Walker a quorum to vote on his horrible bill. The numbers continued to snowball, until the protest peaked at 180,000 people early the following week. Glenn Beck was booted off his Madison radio affiliate. The entire state was radicalized — setting the stage for a similar showdown when Gov. John Kasich of Ohio attempts a similar bill a few weeks later.

It’s a thrilling story that progressives need to hear, know, write on their hearts, and tell over and over for decades to come. These are the moments we tell our grandkids about, the ones where we say, proudly: “We were there.”

On Tuesday morning of the Take Back the American Dream conference, a standing-room-only crowd got to hear the story told by nearly a dozen of the people who lived it. The conversation, moderated by John Nichols — a Wisconsin-born journalist for The Nation who found himself at the center of the story — was given deeper context by the Occupy Wall Street protests, which everyone recognized as the next step in the movement that they started.

“This is bringing Wisconsin to Manhattan,” Nichols. “Those who are elected are not to rule as despots for four years.”

Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the firefighters’ union (who is now challenging Walker for his job in the coming recall), recalled the transformational moment that the firefighters — who had endorsed Walker, and had been exempted from the rights-stripping effort in return — marched up to the capitol in their dress uniforms, with a band of bagpipers announcing their arrival.

“When he told us he was going to [strip everyone else's bargaining rights], we not only told him ‘no;’ we told him ‘hell, no,’” recalled Mitchell. “We knew that it was a divide-and-conquer tactic, and we knew they’d be coming after us next.”

On the way to the march, the firefighters stopped off at the Madison M&I Bank and collectively withdrew $290,000 in personal funds — enough to cause a run on the bank, and put it out of business. They then headed over to the capitol, with their bagpipers. “We were just responding to an emergency — that’s what cops and firefighters do.” Mitchell said. “There was an emergency in our state, and we needed to be there.”

(Mitchell offered another piece of sage advice for organizers everywhere: “Never go anywhere without bagpipers.”)

The first national union to take up the cause was the United Steelworkers, even though they’re not a public employees’ union and weren’t threatened by Walker’s bill. Mike Pyne pointed out that their interests converge: “It has a lot to do with our membership, because our members pay taxes, which have a lot to do with city and county services. We are intertwined; one can’t survive without the other.

Doug Burnett of ASCME became the point man on the attempt to recall Republican state senators who supported Walker’s putch. “We’re blessed with some good history,” he said, noting that the first recall law in America was put on the books in Wisconsin by progressive legend Bob LaFollette — and it was put there specifically to allow the state’s citizens to oust would-be union-busters. But before this year, it had only been used twice in over 80 years on the books.

AFSCME was the natural leader for this fight. “We’re the only union that gets to elect our bosses,” he said. He also pointed out that the recall mania that followed the protests was started by the Republicans, who launched the first recall effort against one of the Democrats who’d left the state to prevent the bill’s passage. “They picked the fight, but we beat them back — hard.”

Courtney Foley of the UFCW picked up the story of how the protests moved into Ohio on February 18. In one day flat, the legislature introduced and passed a union-stripping law, and Gov. Kasich signed it. But they had their revenge: eight weeks later, the unions had collected 1.3 million signatures – enough petitions that they threatened to break the floor of the secretary of state’s office when they were delivered. Those petitions are now on the November ballot as Issue 2.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that we have to stop trying just not to lose,” said SEIU organizer Bruce Colburn. “As we do these fights, we have to make sure that after every fight, we’re stronger than when we entered the fight.” He also pointed out that a big part of the Wisconsin story was in the small towns where people organized in support of the recalls — a point echoed by Mary Bell of the teacher’s union, who pointed out that when Walker went after teachers, voters saw that as going after their own kids’ educations as well — and the resulting rage fueled much of the backlash.

“Who is coming up with these bad ideas?” asked Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy. She and her colleagues came up with the answer, doing the deep research on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). “We know that Scott Walker is not the brightest bulb on the planet,” she said dryly; he couldn’t be coming up with all this mischief on his own. The CMD’s research uncovered the link to ALEC — a national conservative group that develops model policy and rolls it out across the states — during the Ohio campaign. Bottari noted that conservative efforts to gut public sector jobs will be the death of many small towns where public sector jobs are the only decent jobs left. “Take those way, and people have got nothing.”

Scott Goodstein was among the organizers doing on-the-fly organizing as people and resources flowed into Madison. He emphasized the essential role that social media played in bringing crowds together. When several musical groups, including Street Dogs, MC5, and members of Rage Against The Machine, decided to do a show in support of the Madison protests, they promoted it on Facebook, and turned out 6,000 mostly young protestors literally overnight. When Michael Moore announced at noon that he was coming to speak at the firehouse, they passed the word to people by phone. Just a few hours later: “When they pushed open the door of the firehouse, there were six thousand teachers and firefighters, with the bagpipers, waiting for him.”

What comes next? Of course, there’s the Ohio vote on Issue 2 on November 8, and the expected recall of Scott Walker in early 2012. In addition, an activist from Phoenix announced that ALEC is having a three-day summit meeting from November 30 to December 2 to indoctrinate new members of the Arizona legislature; protests are now being planned. In New Hampshire, where Republicans outnumber Democrats in the legislature by two-to-one, they’re also fighting the full ALEC agenda, which is being rammed through despite consistent vetoes from the Democratic governor. There, too, people are organizing.

And what lessons should we take away from the days of rage and glory in Wisconsin and Ohio? John Nichols offered some reflections in closing. A protest has to be deeply rooted in the progressive history of the place where you are. Invoking Wisconsin at a protest in Oregon won’t resonate as well as another story that roots the protest in a piece of Oregon’s own culture and history. “Every state has its own heart and soul. Dig deep into who you are.”

How do we talk about the American Dream? And is this a story Americans are ready to hear?

According to communications experts Drew Westen and Celinda Lake, they’re beyond ready to hear it; in fact, they’ve been waiting for years for progressives to speak to them with the muscular populism that marked earlier progressives like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. This is the kind of language that actively challenges old Republican frames, and stands strongly for the interests of the middle class.

Westen and Lake got down to the details of what this kind of language sounds like during their presentation at Take Back the American Dream on Monday afternoon. “Without vision, the people will perish,” said Westen, quoting from the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. And right now, he continued, the right wing’s vision for America seems limited to death and no taxes.

“That’s the GOP’s solution to everything,” he said. No health insurance? Serving your country? Facing the death penalty? Fry ‘em. “Two years ago, they were against death panels; now, they seem to be their answer for everything.”

Unfortunately, Westen continued, Democratic politicians aren’t doing much better. They consistently repeat right-wing formulations of problems, accepting both their facts and their moral assumptions without question. The upshot is that the country’s dominant narrative is that government is still the problem, and still not the solution. Given that, it’s small wonder that Americans can’t see the differences between the left and the right.

How do we get past this? Westen pointed to research that showed that frankly populist messages — strong, assertive descriptions of the conflict between the people and the powerful — poll surprisingly well, even in the most nominally conservative parts of the country, among audiences ranging from far left to far right. People are ready to hear their problems described this way. Now, the challenge is to produce political leaders who are capable of doing it. “This should have been the horse we rode in on, ” Westen said. “But nobody’s getting on the horse.”

Getting down to specifics, Westen noted that “there’s no red or blue America — just a confused and angry one.” Talking about that means taking several key steps:

* Talk about morals. “Our vision is the opposite of ‘every man for himself.’” Offer a new vision for how we treat each other — rich and poor and middle class, and what our communities can be like.

* Tie stories back to core principles. This is key to taking back the progressive brand.

* Tell stories not just about who we are, but also about who the Republicans are. “Glenn Beck was doing a better job of branding us than we do. The right spends hundreds of millions of dollars in branding progressives.” President Obama is currently doing some of this in his rhetoric around the jobs issue and GOP obstructionism, but we need to be doing much more of it.

* Make stories visceral and personal. For example, rather than getting wonky talking about revenues versus entitlements, talk about “raising taxes versus kicking granny out of the nursing home.” (And stop using the word “entitlements,” which implies that people are getting something they don’t deserve.) Likewise: when we talk about Medicaid, we should point out that it’s insurance — something you’ve paid into for years. When the time comes to file a claim, nobody had better deny it. Social Security, likewise, is insurance that we pay for through our taxes.

Other phrases that resonate in Westen’s polling:

* I want to see the words ‘made in America’ again

* Government of, by, and for the people — not of, by, and for the corporations

* It’s time our major import was something other than foreign oil, and our major export something other than American jobs

* Americans should be working their way into the middle class, not falling out of it

* Most of us don’t expect to be rich or famous, but do expect a living wage and good American benefits for a hard day’s work

* You can’t have a vibrant economy without a vibrant middle class. Because somebody’s got to build things, and somebody’s got to buy them.

* The best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work fixing our schools, roads, and bridges.

* The question isn’t who’s going to cut your taxes — it’s whose taxes they’re going to cut.

* In tough times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.

Pollster Celinda Lake presented research that further proved Westen’s point. According to her research, only 17% of Americans agreed that “the American Dream is still very much alive” — though specific talk about the American Dream as an idea resonates strongly across the board. “The American Dream is a powerful frame,” she said. “It’s both aspirational, and it also allows us to attach progressive policies and goals to it.”

In particular, Lake’s research has found that stories focused on economic security, middle-class populism, investment in America, and having a balanced approach to our economic problems all resonate strongly. And she agrees with Westen that relentlessly connecting these ideas with small, personal, kitchen-table issues is critical to having them be understood. A few examples:

* We’re not just opposed to tax breaks for the rich; we oppose them because they come at the expense of our kids’ public educations.

* We’re not just opposed to tax breaks for big corporations; we’re opposed to them because they encourage those corporations to send American jobs abroad.

“The American dream is modest,” Lake pointed out. “People are willing to work hard for it; they don’t expect to win the lottery. They just want a fair chance to own a home, educate their kids, and retire. It’s not too much to ask that our government support those goals, or that our politics be reformed to help make that happen.”

Populist rhetoric is working now because a strong majority of Americans — 71%, according to Lake’s research — think that the younger generation will be worse off than the current ones. Forty-nine percent say that unemployment is the most important economic issue, because they believe that the American Dream is anchored to their jobs. If the job disappears, so does your shot at the dream.

The core piece of the American Dream is economic security. Lake has found that this includes a living wage, health care, a secure retirement, and creating opportunities for the next generation. A majority of Americans still see these things within reach –but are also terrified of losing that access in the near future, and have grave concerns about whether or not they’ll be there for their kids. This is a deep and motivating set of fears that Democratic candidates are failing to address, both in their campaigns and in their policies. That has to change.

Lake has found three themes that consistently poll over 80% — even among conservatives and people in red zones of the countrys. The first is family economic security — hard work leading to success and the chance for the next generation to do better. The second is the need for a strong middle class — a goal all Americans agree strongly on, given that 85% of us consider ourselves members of the middle class. The third is equal opportunity: there should be no barriers to success built into the economic system; and those that exist should be removed.

She also offered some language that should be avoided. Talk about “the less fortunate” should be brought back and grounded in specifics (like “throwing Granny out of the nursing home”). Talk about “the right to clean air and water” instead of abstractions like “the environment.” Avoid policy minutia; keep it personal and specific, and tell stories about real people. Don’t talk about the past, or project too far in the future — people are terrified about what’s happening to them right now, and are worried about how they’re going to even get to the future.

Finally, she said, stay away from ideas that don’t fit the larger progressive populist frame. “People can reject facts, ” she pointed out; “but they won’t reject the larger frame.”

Progressives have suspected for years that working- and middle-class Americans vote for the GOP because they have a deeply unrealistic idea about their real chances of becoming wealthy. We’ve joked that working stiffs vote for tax cuts and other goodies for the rich because they seriously believe that they’re going to be rich themselves someday, and want to make sure those advantages will be there for them, come the day.

To date, this has been just a guess on our part — but a recent study now proves that this guess was right on the money. The Myth of the Self-Made American is being bolstered by a delusionally optimistic view of just how many people actually make it to the top 3% income level. It’s a delusion that affects almost everyone, but particularly those who vote Republican.

Ryan Enos at yougov.com explains the results of a YouGov/Polimetrix poll conducted a few weeks before the recent election. As he explains their findings:

The hot button issue with the tax cuts is whether to renew the cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. The wrangling among politicians over this issue seems to mostly involve whether or not earning that amount of money qualifies somebody as wealthy.

What’s amazing about the magic number of $250,000 is that, based on responses to a recent YouGov/Polimetrix poll, by and large, Americans have a very distorted view of how many people make that much money.

Any idea what proportion of American families make more than $250,000 a year? Or, to potentially make it easier, any idea what proportion of families in your state make more than $250,000 a year?

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know—most people don’t. The actual number, nationwide is somewhere less than 3% of families earn more than $250,000 a year. What did the survey respondents say when asked this question? The average response was close to 17%!—meaning your typical survey respondent thinks that almost 1 in 5 families in America earn that kind of money, when the answer is closer to 1 in 50!

Enos goes on to point out that there are only a few states where the actual number of $250K earners even cracks 8% — Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. But when the question was put to people in those states, they weren’t even half right, because their answers tilted upward, to about 21%.

Furthermore: the more money you make, and the more education you have, the more accurate your guess becomes. People making over $150K guessed an average of about 11%; those making under $30K thought it was more like 21%. College graduates guessed 12%; people with graduate degrees were closer, but not by much.

And only 15% of the survey participants answered 3% or under –though one-third of those answered “zero,” meaning they thought nobody in the country makes more than $250K a year. Deduct this disconnected 5%, and you’re left with just 10% of Americans who have a realistic sense of just how rare a $250K income is in this country.

While Republicans and Democrats gave about the same answers, the study also found that the more distorted peoples’ views were, the lower their opinion of President Obama was, and the more likely they were to vote Republican last November 2. The bottom line, says Enos is this: “A person that says 20% of people make $250,000 is more likely to vote Republican than a person that says 5% of people make $250,000.”

The irony, writes Enos, is that “people making less money actually believe that there are more wealthy people out there than wealthy people do.”

This distortion explains a good deal about why middle- and working-class people vote for the GOP. A quarter of a million dollars sounds like an attainable income to most people — they know at least a few people around town whom they imagine have already made it — and they honestly think that with the right break or a little work, they might get there someday, too. It could happen.

Combine this with the common misunderstanding about how marginal tax rates work (hint: it’s only the income over $250K that’s taxed at the higher rate, not the whole year’s take), and it’s not hard to see why so many people making the average household income of $53K are incensed by the idea of increasing the marginal tax rate on the top 3% — and why they think Obama is attacking them personally by suggesting such a horrible thing. They’ve bought into a myth about their chances of moving up the economic ladder that’s at vast odds with the actual facts.

Some critics think Obama picked the wrong number, and that proposing at top tax rate that kicks in at $500K or a cool million would have avoided this problem. The average voter might have had a harder time imagining these numbers as being attainable. Maybe so. But maybe not: given how strong the myth of the self-made American is, and how many falsehoods you have to take on faith to believe it, we may be dealing with a level of delusion that’s impervious to even really huge numbers, the kind that define only the top 0.5% of Americans.

We are living in a fact-free world now. Stories are all that matter. And in hard times, people tend to cling harder to their dreams — especially the dream that no matter how bad things are now, someday they’re going to rise above all this and triumph. Telling them the truth under these conditions is hard, and perhaps even cruel.

But one of the hallmarks of countries that are falling into chaos is that people come to believe more and more absurd things. Truth gives way to truthiness; facts aren’t given the same weight as feelings. The huge disconnect between people’s perceived prospects and their actual prospects shows just what a masterful job conservatives have done. They’ve convinced people to believe that their potential for mobility is as good or better than it ever was — even as they’ve stolen the usual routes to a better life (education, home ownership, public investment, and so on) right out from under them.

If last Tuesday showed us anything, it’s this: We are not going to get America back on the right road — the one that leads to a progressive, just, carbon-free, equal-opportunity future — by political means alone.

That was an illusion, and it’s time to give it up. We are up against powers so massive that their leaders rightly describe themselves as Masters of the Universe (MOTUs, for short). They’ve got so much money that they can buy off any politician in the world; and so much clout that they maintain branch offices right inside the West Wing. Because of their influence, our courts and our Congress no longer work for us. Our media no longer tells us the truth. Our votes are the prizes in corporate bidding wars. Our jobs are mere chips in a global poker game. Our doctors can only give us the health care corporate insurers willing to pay for, even when better choices exist.

Everything from the food on our table to the content of our kids’ education is chosen for us on the basis of what will put the most money in the pockets of people who are already rich beyond the imagination of a Caesar. Increasingly, we have no say about anything that happens to us. Every choice we make is predetermined to deliver our money, time, and life energy into the service of this increasingly remote and amoral aristocracy.

It goes way beyond Washington. It’s the whole rotten system. And if we really want that system to change, forget taking to the streets. (The MOTUs long ago learned to tune out public protests.) It’s time to take our non-compliance to the next level. It’s time to get serious about not participating in this system at all, until it either breaks or changes.

It will not be easy. The overblown corporate-driven economy exists because we allow it to — and we allow it to because there’s so much that passively cheap and easy and comfortable about being part of it. Compared to a lot of the world, we don’t have it so bad; and the MOTUs are counting on that inertia to keep the money and power flowing their way. But it’s beyond obvious now that we cannot change things unless we’re willing to give up those comforts, and take matters into our own hands.

The good news is that if we’re willing to do that, there are plenty of high leverage points in this system, places we can jam in a hard stick and whang on it and actually hope to create some change. And since we know now that Washington will be totally gridlocked for the next two years, this is as good a time as any to start.

A starting place
The ten suggestions below are just a starting place. (I’m thinking of turning them into a book, and would love your additions to the list.) But they all turn on two basic assumptions about where our leverage lies.

The first assumption is: Big national corporations and the MOTUs who profit from them only have money in the first place because we give it to them. So stop giving it to them.

The second is: People in government only have power because we give it to them. So, wherever possible and appropriate, pull that power away from the federal level, and bring it back to the local level, where we can keep an eye on it — and where the best solutions to our most pressing problems are already being worked out.

With those two core assumptions in mind, here’s what we need to do to defund the Masters of the Universe and get our country back.

1 Live within your means
Taking apart the systems that sustain our comfort is a risky business. The first task, then, is to insulate ourselves from those risks to the extent we can. And the first step is living within our means.

It’s not that big a reach, though it feels like that at first. We just need to resurrect the values of our Depression-era grandparents, who gauged someone’s status on the basis of their thrift and prudence rather than their extravagance. For them, it wasn’t about what you drove or what you wore on your back; it was about what you had in the bank, and what you could give back to your community.

Buy a car you can pay for outright, or hang on to the one that’s already paid off. Let go of the things you don’t use — the toys and trinkets that are just taking up space. Give up junk food and start a garden. Ask if you could get by with a smaller, cheaper house. And consider the possibility that, after you’ve pruned your life down to something more manageable, you might just be happier (and healthier) for it.

Having enough surplus salted away, plus some to share with others, gives you personal resilience in the face of hard times. It means you can lose a job or get sick, and still have a margin to fall back on. It also means that nobody owns you: America’s bosses would treat us a lot better if more of us had a take-this-job-and-shove-it fund in the bank that enabled us to walk away from bad conditions or abusive treatment.

Living with less also means fewer expenses, fewer distractions, and more time and energy for the things that matter. Which is good, because some of the other things we need to do will take a little more time, energy, and money than we’ve been used to spending.

Read more about this: Your Money Or Your Life

2 Stop using credit cards
Conservatives howl that sales taxes are a huge drag on the economy, since they take a little bite out of the value of every transaction. But you never hear them howling about the 3% sales tax we pay to the banks for every credit card transaction. There’s a whole lot to be said about the perverse economics of this; but the short summary is that if we’re going to defund the powers that are choking the life out of our democracy, the first thing we need to do is stop handing over 3% of almost every transaction we make.

The second is to stop paying out an even larger percentage of our annual income in interest. The average American household pays $1500 a year in credit card interest; in some households, it’s much more than that. Bet you can find a better use for that money than the bank can.

If you can’t manage life without plastic, there are still better options than sending your wages to Citi or Chase. Move your credit card to a local bank, which will invest its earnings in your town’s economy. Use a debit card (which takes lower fees) for online transactions, and start doing everything else possible with cash. (As an added bonus: using cash gets your personal business out of the data stream, increasing your personal privacy as well.)

Credit cards are the single biggest hook the MOTUs have into us after our mortgages, student loans, and car payments. It’s also one we have the most control over, so let’s stop sending them that money.

Watch here: In Debt We Trust

3 Move your money to a local bank
Arianna Huffington deserves credit for putting the “slow money” movement on the progressive map. It’s a powerful concept, because it directly defunds the people who are trying to buy our government.

The idea is simple: take your banking — your savings, checking, mortgage, car payment, 401K and other retirement funds, and credit cards — away from the bankasaurs, and give it to a local or regional bank or a credit union. These banks are often safer these days than the big boys, since they’re less likely to get caught up in big finance scams. And, even better: they’re far more likely to put your money to work financing local homeowners, businesses, and farms.

Keeping that money in the hometown economy is an investment in resilience for the long haul. It ensures that your neighbors will have good jobs, that house prices will remain stable, and that small entrepreneurs can find the capital to start companies that are far less likely to relocate. These small businesses usually return far more in spending, jobs, and taxes to the local economy than big out-of-town businesses do, so keeping your money close to home is one way to invest in a stronger community.

Read more: Move Your Money

4 Eat local. Eat organic. Cook your own.
More and more of us are aware that the processed foods that fill the center aisles of the supermarket aren’t particularly good for us. They’re full of sugar, salt, fake fat, fake flavorings, preservatives, and GMO frankenstuff. They come from factories thousands of miles away. And we’re sometimes suspicious that the food safety isn’t all it should be.

This is why farmer’s markets, community-supported farms, and food co-ops can now be found in almost every corner of the country, with more coming on line each year. People want alternatives — preferably fresh, organic fare produced by farmers who are close enough to get to know.

I love the fact that my food dollar isn’t going to Cargill or ADM. It’s not adding tons of petroleum-based fertilizers (those damned oil companies again) to the soil and the watershed. It’s not paying to truck food two thousand miles to my store. Instead, it’s going to Mike Finger, my CSA farmer, who lives five miles from my house. It’s keeping our town’s outrageous Saturday farmer’s market alive and lively. It’s providing hundreds of jobs for dairymen and women, cheese and butter makers, bakers, farmers, small meat operations, co-op workers, chicken ranchers, and all kinds of other talented folks in my community. And it’s creating an alternative food stream that banishes the big corporations (and the big banks that fund them) out of my kitchen and off of my family’s plates.

Read more: La Vida Locavore

5 Don’t shop in big-box stores; support local merchants instead
We all know how Wal-Mart bleeds small town Main Streets dry, kills mom-and-pop merchants, decimates local tax bases, and replaces good-paying jobs with non-union McJobs that pay so low that people holding them still qualify for welfare and food stamps.

But it’s not just Wal-Mart. Every dollar you spend at any big box store or chain restaurant is doing pretty much the same thing. The money you give them doesn’t stay in town, creating decent jobs and supporting prosperous middle-class families. It’s going to some corporate HQ in Far Yonder. And from there, in this new post-Citizens United world, a lot of it will be going to lobbyists, who will be using it to more fully corporatize our government.

Cut them off at the knees. Find and use local options wherever you can. Local merchants often carry a wider and more interesting selection (and can order anything they don’t have in stock). They pay higher wages. They know their merchandise — and special tastes of the local clientele. And they pay into the local tax base, supporting your own teachers and firefighters and cops.

And don’t even assume that you’ll be charged more. In some areas, you may pay 5-10% more in a local shop; in others, you may be surprised to find prices comparable to what you’ll find over at the big box. A local restaurant may have better food at better prices, and pay their staff better as well. Not all of the mom-and-pops are good enough to deserve our support; but the great ones are irreplaceable assets in our local economies, and deserve all the support we can give them.

Read more: The Small-Mart Revolution

6 Make your own energy
In our economy, energy is money — which is why the big energy producers have more money than anybody else. If we want them to have less power over us, we need to stop buying their product. And that goes for the big private energy utilities, too, which are the biggest coal users in the country.

Adding solar panels or geothermal pumps to your house isn’t cheap (or even easy); but if you plan to be in the house for many years, it’s an investment that’s worth making. If that’s not feasible, look into community power solutions, and encourage your town to invest in clean, local sources of power. At the very least, the odds are overwhelmingly good that your energy company offers a green power option where you can pay a bit more per month to subsidize the development of clean power sources for your region.

Whatever you can do to replace coal, oil, and gas as your household and community power sources adds a bit more leverage to the effort to remove Big Fossil from its powerful political perch.

Read more: The Renewable Energy Handbook

7 Buy used whenever possible
The Big Consumer Machine runs on our constant appetite for new stuff. One of the best ways to jam it is to simply stop buying what they’re selling. It’s better for our wallets, better for the Earth, and it takes money directly out of the pockets of people who are (literally) banking on our poor impulse control.

Over the past century, our massive consumer engine has manufactured so much stuff that odds are the perfect item you’re looking for — a sturdy winter coat for your kid, extra plates for Thanksgiving dinner — already exists out there somewhere. And it’s increasingly easy to find it, thanks to eBay and Craigslist and Freecycle. Why go to K-Mart when there’s undoubtedly someone local looking to unload something that’s one-of-a-kind (and probably better quality) for a fraction of the price — and will help you raise the finger to the corporate consumer machine while you’re at it?

Read more: The Compact
The Great American Apparel Diet

8 Buy American. Buy union.
If you’ve got to buy it new, and there’s no choice but to buy it from a big chain retailer, at least make sure your money is going to support another American worker’s family. Living without imported Chinese goods is almost impossible (as this woman found out); but again, going out of our way to make better choices is an important way we can shift the leverage in the entire system that’s killing our democracy.

Buying American is good. Buying union is even better. Unions have always been our biggest, strongest, best bulwark against creeping corporatocracy. The more support we can give them — and the more unionized workers we have — the more leverage we have against the big money interests, and the more likely we’ll be able to take our country back in the long run. If we want to restore the middle class, we need to be deadly serious about buying union-made stuff.

Read more: UNITE’s guide to buying union-made goods

9 Cut your use of fossil fuels
There are a hundred good reasons to do this, but the big four are:

1) It reduces our dependence on foreign oil, which also reduces our need to spend 58% of our federal budget on defense. Since defense contractors are among the biggest lobbyists in Washington, defunding the military-industrial complex is an important strategic objective in taking our country back.

2) It cuts the profits of Big Fossil — the oil and coal industries — who are the biggest and most influential donors in Congress, period.

3) Your choices and investments will spur the market for clean technology options, which will accelerate our progress in moving toward a greener future — again, at the expense of Big Fossil.

4) Over time, moving to non-fossil alternatives in food, transit, manufacturing, and so on will make your household and community far more resilient in the face of energy price shocks and climate change itself — an important step toward empowering local governments over higher-level ones.

There are a thousand books and ten thousand websites full of suggestions for how to move beyond the basics like changing out your light bulbs and recycling. But now you have another reason to do it: it’s one of the best things we can do to defund the MOTUs who own our country.

10 Hire a better employer
Our choices as consumers matter, no doubt. But the biggest contribution we make to this system isn’t in our spending; it’s in our earning. The fact is that the best jobs in America in terms of salary and benefits are also too often the same ones that are most deeply involved in the corporatization of our government. And we need to confront and deal with the truth: when we give 40 or 50 hours of our lives to these enterprises, week in and week out, we are contributing far more to the problem than we can ever make up for by anything we do on our own time.

Of course, it’s too much to ask people to walk away from a good-paying, stable job in the teeth of devastating recession. But as a long-term goal, we might be thinking about how to arrange our lives and our communities so that we can stop giving our time, energy, talents, and best efforts to the same aristocrats who want to enslave us. If we get out of debt and off credit cards, build up local businesses and create resilient economies, and learn to live a little smaller, we may in time, also be freer to make career choices that are better aligned with our values, and put our labor beyond the reach of the system that oppresses us.

As I said: none of this will be easy. But we’ve tried to create change while staying within our circle of comfort; and it hasn’t worked. It’s time to move outside that circle, and get on with the work of creating the future we want our children to have — even if that means changing our most familiar and intimate habits and routines.

Still, you’re probably already doing at least a few of these things, for all kinds of good reasons — as economizing measures in hard times, as an effort to reduce your carbon footprint, or out of solidarity with your local community. But there’s added motivation — and even some sweet revenge — if we bear in mind that the things that we’re already doing to protect ourselves in the present and prepare for the next future are also some of the best things we can do to take our money, our lives, and our broken democracy back from the MOTU bastards as well.

One of the biggest problems facing the Democrats going into this election is that they’re getting absolutely zero respect for everything they’ve done for the average American over the past two years. Tax cuts, health care reform, financial reform, expanded veterans’ benefits, direct funding of student loans — the list is long, and one that, by rights, should get the Democrats re-elected handily.

The problem is that the average voter has no idea that any of this ever happened. In fact, if you ask most Americans (even a lot of Democrats), they’ll tell you that Obama raised their taxes.

This ignorance is on full display at your average Tea Party gathering, which is full of people who will proudly insist that they’re entirely self-made. “I did it all myself,” they’ll snarl, quivering in spittle-flecked outrage. “I didn’t get any government handouts. Nobody ever did anything for me — so why are all my tax dollars going to support those shiftless welfare cheats who aren’t willing to work like I did?”

The magnitude of the self-delusion is gobstopping. Did Mr. Self-Made Man grow up in a VA or FHA-funded house? Attend a public school or college? Go to school on the GI Bill, Pell Grants, or student loans? Does he claim a mortgage interest tax deduction every year? Does he support his retired parents out of pocket, or does Social Security do it for him? Does his employer get government contracts or subsidies that make his paycheck possible? Does his business depend on a sound currency, enforceable contracts, or reliable transportation systems?

It’s like his rich Uncle Sam, the benefactor whose generous bequests paid his way into the middle class, has been written totally out of his entire life story. Forget gratitude; these social contract deniers insist loudly that none of that ever happened. At all. They pay taxes; but they’ve never seen a cent returned to them for anything. And they write their “self-made” myths accordingly.

Unfortunately, this is just a symptom of a much larger problem, one that progressives need to resolve if we are to prevail in the future. The bizarre fact is that most Americans who’ve made it into the middle class got there with the help of seriously life-changing government investments and subsidies — and yet, ironically, if you ask them if they’ve ever used a government program in their lives, they’re very likely to tell you: Nope. Never. I did it all on my own.

Suzanne Mettler, a professor at Cornell, actually documented this effect in a 2008 study. She asked people who’d been the beneficiaries of 19 specific government programs — including some of the most popular and widespread programs in the country — whether or not they’d ever used a government social program. Here’s what she found:

There it is, in black and white. Sixty percent of people who get home mortgage interest deductions (one of the most important and lucrative middle-class subsidies going) don’t see this as a form of government help to their households, even though many of them wouldn’t be homeowners at all without it. Fifty-three percent of the people who got through college on student loans — and 40 percent of GI Bill beneficiaries — also think they’ve paid their own freight. And 44 percent of Social Security recipients don’t think that Social Security is a government program — which comes as no surprise to those of us who remember the ubiquitous calls during last year’s health care fight to “get your fllthy government hands off my Social Security.”

What’s going on here? How can so many people receive so much, and yet remain in such obstinate denial about where it all came from?

A big part of the problem, says Mettler, is that some government programs are simply more visible to the average voter than others. The visible ones tend to be the ones that are administered directly by a government agency, and show up in the budgets as clear line items. In particular, the programs that benefit the poor are often right out there on the table, where voters can see them and activists can ignite them into political issues: welfare, food stamps, government subsidized housing, education, Head Start.

But these programs are just a small fraction of America’s overall social spending. The bulk of our tax money goes to other programs — such as the mortgage interest deduction, student loan programs, and military spending — that are hidden from easy public view in what Mettler calls “the submerged state.” This spending is usually done in ways that are not directly visible to voters. A lot of it is corporate welfare, designed to prop up favored industries that are so powerful that no change is possible unless they’re somehow bought off with new profit opportunities or subsidies. These industries have a strong interest in keeping this spending out of the public eye and off the political table, where it might be challenged. An important subcategory includes government-funded programs that are run through private companies, like prisons or pre-reform student loans (or, for that matter, Obamacare). The money comes straight out of Uncle Sam’s pocket, but the beneficiaries never see his hand directly.

The big disconnect occurs because so many of the programs that benefit the middle class fall into this category. Take the mortgage interest deduction. This is, in effect, a subsidy that keeps America’s real estate and building trades sectors in business — and, as we’ve painfully discovered, was also of huge interest to the banks as well. But even though every homeowner in America profits handsomely from this subsidy, most Americans don’t understand very much about it. It’s just a line item on their income taxes. And there’s strong pressure to keep it that way. If the magnitude of this subsidy somehow moved into general awareness, it might be challenged. It would be subject to political debate. And that’s the last thing the builders and bankers want.

The 58 percent of our federal spending that goes to defense is almost certainly the biggest skeleton in the “submerged state” closet. A lot of that spending goes to businesses, large and small, around the country. If you’re a Congress member protecting jobs in your district (including your own), there is absolutely no upside to making an issue out of this. And, again, the beneficiaries are largely middle-class households, who fail to see the very real connection between these “government programs” and their own paychecks.

Mettler argues that any real reform that involves these hidden non-state actors must begin with explicitly making the invisible visible to the eyes of the public. It takes time and effort to bring the machinery of the submerged state up into the light of day, but it’s necessary — and effective. Obama’s effort to restore direct federal funding of student loans was a good example of this. The banks were making billions each year off this program, at the expense of millions of students who should have been getting that money instead. He was able to pull this off because activists and journalists had already spent several years hauling the ugly wreck of a policy up into public view, which weakened the ability of banking lobbyists to defend their position. By the time Obama arrived, they were weak enough that he could demand — and get — a complete end to this lucrative subsidy.

Making the invisible visible is also essential if we’re going to counter the Tea Party’s self-serving, denial-wracked narratives, and open the way for Democrats and progressives to get the credit they deserve for the good that they do. We need to start pointing out, loudly and often, all the covert-but-effective ways that government investment and intervention has made the middle class possible.

Specifically, we need to drive home the fact that anybody who calls themselves an American cannot, in the same breath, declare that they are in any sense entirely “self-made.” This is indeed the land of opportunity. But those opportunities exist only as long as we work together to create them; and willfully denying that is an insult to every other American who sacrificed to make your opportunities possible. It’s like saying your parents had nothing to do with raising you. You’d expect them to be hurt, offended, and angry at your lack of gratitude. The rest of us who contributed to your success aren’t wrong to feel insulted, too.

Progressives know the truth: Nobody in America ever did it alone, for themselves. For the past 220 years, we’ve done it together, for each other. Bringing that interdependence back out into the light and putting at the center of our politics shifts the entire dialogue in ways that can help the progressives over the long haul, in at least three ways.

First, it reaffirms the democratic social contract. From the arrogant Wall Street bankers who still think they deserve bonuses for tanking the economy to the furious white men of the Tea Party, people who’ve convinced themselves that nobody ever gave them anything are justified (at least in their own minds) in deciding that they don’t owe anything to anyone else, either. And as long as they can keep the “self-made” lie going, they’ll also go on believing that they’re totally exempt from the whole social contract on which a democracy runs.

Second: It calls the conservatives’ politics-of-rage game. The self-made myth allows the conservative movement to keep feeding on the fury of aggrieved people who falsely think they’re getting nothing for something, even while they’re standing on a pile of wealth that we helped put under their feet. Setting the record straight on exactly what they did get for their tax dollars removes a lot of the justification for this outrage, and makes them look like the tantrum-throwing spoiled brats they are.

Third: It demands that people give credit where credit is due. Nothing changes until those of us who’ve paid our share of taxes, worked hard and played by the rules, struggled to raise sound families and build decent communities, and served our country at home and abroad start demanding acknowledgment, respect, and a proper “Thank you” for everything we’ve each contributed to make so much mutual success possible. And the real patriot is the one who always makes sure that Uncle Sam himself is the very first one to stand for applause.

Putting the lie to the “self-made” myth is critical to restoring the progressive ideas of common wealth, common sense, and the common good to a central place in our political story. It’s time to hand the country’s real “entitlement classes” the full, complete, annotated bill for everything they’ve received from the government’s hand — and demand that they never again forget to thank the 300 million of us who made it all possible.

In August 2009, I wrote a piece titled Fascist America: Are We There Yet? that sparked much discussion on both the left and right ends of the blogosphere. In it, I argued that — according to the best scholarship on how fascist regimes emerge — America was on a path that was running much too close to the fail-safe point beyond which no previous democracy has ever been able to turn back from a full-on fascist state. I also noted that the then-emerging Tea Party had a lot of proto-fascist hallmarks, and that it had the potential to become a clear and present danger to the future of our democracy if it ever got enough traction to start winning elections in a big way.

On the first anniversary of that article, Jonah Goldberg — the right’s revisionist-in-chief on the subject of fascism — actually used an entire National Review column to taunt me about what he characterized as a failure of prediction. Where’s that fascist state you promised? he hooted.

It’s funny he should ask. Because this coming election may, in fact, be a critical turning point on that road.

The Fascist America series of three articles (the other two are here and here) was built out of Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism — a landmark work of scholarship that lays out that specific conditions and prognosis of fascism as a political form. Paxton defined fascism as:

…a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton laid out the five basic lifecycle stages of successful fascist movements. In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that’s based on nationalist renewal. This movement invariably rejects reason and glorifies raw emotion, promises to restore lost national pride, co-opts the nation’s traditional myths for its own purposes, and insists that the country must be purged of the toxic influence of outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.

(Sound familiar yet?)

In the second stage, the movement takes root, turns into a real political party, and seizes a seat at the table. Success at this stage, Paxton writes, “depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.”

(Paging the Party of No….)

In the face of this deadlock, the corporate elites forge an alliance with rural nationalists, creating an unholy marriage that, if it continues, will soon breed a fascist state. And, of course, this is precisely what’s happening now between the Koch Brothers, the oil companies, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.

The majority of history’s would-be fascist movements have died right at this stage — almost always because of the basic authoritarian ineptitude of their leadership, which ensured that they’d never gain anything more than a small and temporary handful of seats at the political table. The successful fascisms, on the other hand, were the ones that held together and to gained enough political leverage that capturing their governments became inevitable. And once that happened, there was no turning back, because they now had the political power and street muscle to silence any opposition. (Fascist parties almost never enjoy majority support at any stage — but being a minority faction is only a problem in a functioning democracy. It’s no problem at all if you’re willing to use force to get your way.)

According to Paxton, there are three quick questions that let you know you’ve crossed that fail-safe line beyond which an emerging fascist regime has too much power to be stopped:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

If the answer to all three is “yes,” you’re probably on for the rest of the ride, which can run for at least a decade or two before it burns through.

A year ago, I noted that we were already three for three on these questions. Now, the “yes” answers are far more resounding. With over 70 Tea Party candidates running for major state and federal offices on the ballot this November, it’s fair to say that the 2010 election is shaping up as a national referendum on the Tea Party’s future viability. And if they succeed at winning enough of these races, it may very well be the last vote on the subject we ever get.

The Alternatives
There are only a few ways this plays out. A few scenarios:

1. The Tea Party is rejected outright by the voters on November 2. A handful of their candidates do win their races; and for the next few years, the Democrats have a grand time pointing out their sheer wingnuttitude, bolstering a compelling case against electing any more of them in the future. The party begins to lose momentum, and in a few years is defunct.

2. The Tea Party elects a credible number of these 70-odd candidates — enough to make a solid showing and establish its political bona fides, but not enough to get anything serious done. If this happens, progressives need to work fast and hard. If this right-wing tide continues to build as we head into the 2012 election, we’ll still be cruising straight into a fascist future — just not quite yet. There’s time to stop it, but the momentum is not on our side — and stopping it only gets harder with every passing week.

3. A solid majority of the Tea Party candidates win their races, cementing the movement’s lock on the GOP and turning it into a genuine political power in this country. They’ve already promised us that if they take either house of Congress, the next two years will be a lurid nightmare of hearings, trials, impeachments, and character assassinations against progressives. (Which could, in the end, backfire on the GOP as badly as the Clinton impeachment did. We can hope.) Similar scorched-earth harassment awaits officials at every other level of government, too. And casual violence against immigrants, gays, and progressives may escalate as the Tea Party brownshirts become bolder, confident that at least some authorities will either back them up or look the other way.

In this scenario, the fail-safe point — the point beyond which no country has ever turned back from the full fascist nightmare — may well be behind us when we wake up on November 3. From there, the rest will play out in agonizing slow motion; and the character of the rest of this decade will hinge almost entirely on whether the corporatists, the militarists, or the theocrats ultimately get the upper hand in the emerging regime.

Really? Are you serious?
It’s fair to wonder if the Tea Party deserves to be taken this seriously. After all, there’s always been this faction in US politics — the 10-12% rightwing authoritarian hard core that fueled McCarthyism and the Bircher movement and the Moral Majority; that voted for Goldwater and then George Wallace and even put KKK leader David Duke into office for a time. The far right has always been with us. It’s one of the constants in our political landscape.

But they’ve always been a fringe movement, and it’s mostly kept to itself. What’s different now is that all the crazy ideas of the radical right — climate and evolution denialism, banning contraception, sovereign citizenship, End Times theology, white nationalism, all of it — have been catalyzed by the magic of the Internet and widespread economic disaster into one coherent mass subculture that, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday, has attracted a full 35% of the country’s likely voters. According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, the Tea Parties are a broad movement that brings together several preexisting formations on the political right:

– Economic libertarians who worry about big government collectivist tyranny

– Christian Right Conservatives who oppose liberal government social policies

– Right-wing apocalyptic Christians who fear a Satanic New World Order

– Nebulous conspiracy theorists who fear a secular New World Order

– Nationalistic ultra-patriots concerned that US sovereignty is eroding

– Xenophobic anti-immigrant white nationalists who worry about preserving the “real” America.

This unification of right-wing forces around radical far-right ideas has never happened on anything like this scale in modern American history. And it’s why we need to recognize the Tea Party as something unique under the political sun — and seriously evaluate the future that awaits us if it becomes any more powerful.

That future is a painful thing to contemplate. I’ve been called an alarmist for even daring to use the F-word to describe the situation we’re facing. But that’s one of the universal hallmarks of fascism: by the time everybody finally wakes up and realizes that they’re in it, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. Here’s how Milton Mayer described his experience of this as the Nazi thrall descended in Germany:

In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.

And yet the day comes when it’s all too clear, Mayer writes — and on that day, it’s too late to stand up.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

There are only a few days left before the election. Whatever you do between now and then will be a small matter — a matter of making a few phone calls, of knocking on some doors, of following up with friends. And yet any compromise now could be the one we will remember with breaking hearts five years from now, when the country we knew is gone, and our future has been seized by people who represent the worst of everything we are.

Be the one who sees where this is taking us. Be the one who stands while you still can. The future these people have in mind for us is one that dozens of countries have already lived through; and all of them will carry the scars for centuries. It’s not fascism yet; but if the Tea Party manages to get its hands on the levers of power, it will be.

I haven’t been blogging for the past few weeks because I was busy moving house. After nearly seven years in Canada, my husband and son and I packed up our things, and came home to the US. The decision was almost an accidental one — it’s a long and not very interesting story; suffice to say that there were family commitments involved — but the upshot is that we’re now at home in Bellingham, WA, a small college and farming town of 80,000 souls located 70 miles north of Seattle and just 20 miles south of the US/Canada border.

The move has given my son access to the high school of his dreams, and allowed my husband to accept a good job in Seattle. I’m exploring my new surroundings, getting back into the flow of American life.

I spent the first week back in low-grade culture shock. I couldn’t figure out whether seven years immersed in the gentle waves of Canadian Nice had softened my hide, or Americans really had gotten that much rougher and meaner to each other while I was gone. Every time I went into town, I heard people grousing at each other — and sometimes, at me. Female bloggers don’t last long in the business unless they have a pretty thick hide to start with; but it was becoming clear that mine was going to need to get even thicker, or else I was going to have to stop going out altogether.

Other friends who’ve lived abroad for a while and then returned to the US reassured me that this is a common reaction to coming home. America really is a socially much rougher, more competitive, and less forgiving place than Europe, Latin America, or much of the rest of the world. But we don’t really realize it until we step outside of that for a while and then step back into it. It’s like being doused with a bucket of ice water.

Happily, living in Canada taught me some new strategies for dealing with this. I’d never seen niceness used as an offensive weapon until I moved north of the border. Whenever I’d get my prickly American red-headed let-me-talk-to-your-supervisor sass on, they’d just outnice me until I felt like a pluperfect idiot. The more obstreperous you get, the nicer Canadians get (and they’re just soooo sorry you’re having such a bad day), until it’s obvious even to you who the problem person in this conversation is. I was caught by this a couple of times before I made it my business to learn the trick rather than be trapped by it.

Turns out that this is a great way to deal with grouchy people here, too — this tactic just confuses the hell out of Americans.

Another area of adjustment is the sheer quantity of stuff that’s available to Americans. Canada, at just 34 million souls, is a smaller marketplace than California, so it doesn’t have the same intensively-cultivated consumer culture the US does. Shopping isn’t as big a focus there, largely because there simply isn’t anything like the huge selection of stuff that’s available here, even in a middling-sized town like Bellingham. As we settle in, I find I’m spending a couple hours a day just shopping for things. Some of this is normal when you’re trying to outfit a new home, but I’d forgotten just how cheap and easy to get things are, and how seductively overwhelming American-style consumerism can be.

On the upside, I appear to have landed in a locavore’s paradise. The greenies in town have provided a thriving market for the family farmers, who have obliged them by going organic and/or converting to CSAs by the dozen. This has been going on for over 20 years, creating a foodshed that’s so robust that you can eat a rich and varied 50-mile diet here eight months out of the year. I can get fruits and vegetables, every kind of meat and dairy product, fresh fish from Puget Sound, and even household cleaners and wooly winter socks entirely made by local hands. (One of the goat cheese makers produces a sweet, light chevre that’s literally entered my dreams.) There’s a huge food co-op, a nearly year-round farmer’s market that’s a weekly all-city event, two local grocery chains that pride themselves on selling local food, and the aforementioned CSAs. What there isn’t is a Whole Foods — who needs them, when you’ve got all this?

The lively resilience movement here has important political implications, too. It’s forged a partnership between the deeply conservative Dutch farmers out in the countryside (where the Tea Party is huge), and the big in-town progressive community that’s anchored by the university. The townfolk support the family farms; in return, the farmers manage the land in sustainable ways, and get to keep farming like their grandfathers did. Food is the place where everybody’s interests align, regardless of their politics. At the end of the day — despite the grousing at each other downtown — we’re all eating from the same dinner table, teaching each other long-lost homely skills, and forming community almost in spite of ourselves.

If America ever comes back together as a nation, this is one way it might happen: one town, one farmer’s market, one table at a time. Right or left, the interconnections between us become undeniably obvious when we’re working together to make our shared local environment sustainable and resilient for the long haul. And those connections may, in time, help us learn to trust each other enough to begin to govern together again.

Living in Canada was an adventure — and there’s a real possibility we’ll be going back in a couple of years — but for now, my life is here. America has its troubles, and the future looks hard and rocky; but (as my Canadian neighbors will be the first to tell you), you can take the girl out of America, but you can’t ever take America out of the girl.

It’s good to be home.

Now that the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy is slipping off the front pages for the first time in weeks, it’s time to ask: Just what the hell was all that about, anyway? Why was it so important that we had to spend all that time discussing it? And why are the conservatives taking out after the Muslim community now — nine full years after 9/11?

By now, it’s pretty obvious that this was never really about sacred ground or respecting the memories of the dead. What it was really about was the future of the conservative movement.

Where Have All The Bad Guys Gone?
Conservatives can do without a God, but they can’t get through the day without a devil. Their entire model of reality revolves around the existence of an existential enemy who’s out to annihilate them. Take that focal point away, and their whole worldview collapses into incoherence. This need is so central to their thinking that if there are no actual enemies around, they’ll go to considerable lengths to make some (or just make some up).

Unfortunately, the past couple of decades have been rough for them on this front. Losing the Communists as the Bad Guys left a big gap in the conservative cosmology, which they’ve been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to fill ever since. This void has driven them crazy, forcing them to reveal their inner ugliness in all kinds of ways as they thrash around looking for some likely replacement. The longer this goes on, the more of that ugliness we’ve all seen — and the less coherent their politics have become.

They had some luck early on with gays. But that target had one serious flaw. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of conjuring yourself a major existential demon, you want one people can hate on with unfettered abandon for at least a couple of decades to come. The biggest threat to that goal is familiarity: it’s nearly impossible to sustain the necessary level of fear when members of the feared group are living on your own street (or can be seen regularly on your own TV), where you’re forced to deal with them as actual human beings. It’s a question of ROI: you don’t want to invest all that effort in a creating a target, only to have people figure out within just a few years that you were flat-out lying about how awful those people are. In the end, hating on gays turned out to be nothing but a big fat credibility hit, which they’re still paying for.

Hating on Latinos seemed promising for a while; but it’s fizzling out, too. Even the most rageaholic right-wingers now realize that the GOP has no future if conservatives don’t knock off that crap, preferably 15 years ago. You’ve got a rising Millennial generation that’s 44% minority — a plurality of it Latino — that will probably not be voting Republican in their lifetimes due to this new New Southern Strategy. So that’s not going to work, either.

For a couple of years around 2008-2009, they tried to ratchet up the liberal-hating. The proximity problem made liberals a bad target from the get. But on top of that, there was a scary rash of nutjobs who didn’t get the memo that this was all just political noisemaking, and the “liberals are a mortal threat to the nation” exhortation wasn’t meant to be taken as a literal call to arms. In less than a year, over a dozen people were murdered in cold blood as a direct result of this hatemongering; and Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bernard Goldberg, and Bill O’Reilly were all put in the uncomfortable position of telling people that they didn’t mean for their blustering eliminationist screeds to be taken seriously. Given the choice between dialing down the liberal-bashing or acknowledging the blood on their hands, they picked the obvious alternative.

All this leaves the conservatives right back where they were in 1990 — still flailing around trying to find their next scapegoat. And at this stage, there’s nobody really left to pick on but the Muslims. They’ve got all the perfect attributes for a solid long-term enemy: brown, Not Like Us, we’ve actually been in a war with some of them, and they’re mostly so far away that it’s unlikely that any red-blooded conservative will ever actually have to acknowledge one as a fellow human being. Apart from the messy downsides like war, debt, world approbation, continued terror, and so on, the right wing is starting to see the Muslim Threat as potentially the best thing that’s happened to them since the Communists.

“Teachable Moments” — Conservative Style
Having identified such a great potential target, the next logical step was to whip up public outrage and give people emotionally satisfying reasons to adopt this group as a worthy object of hate. Fortunately for the right wing, conservative PR folks have made an art form out of creating calculated, protracted media crises that drag on for weeks, during which they get to suck up all the news time and create “teachable moments” that put some new agenda item on dramatic public display.

Take two past examples: Terry Schiavo and the Minutemen. Both were ginned-up controversies carefully designed to create a public crisis around a new right-wing political initiative. The goal in both cases was to create a public outcry that someone in a back room somewhere hoped would galvanize the nation into mass political action.

Sometimes this works; sometimes, it doesn’t. Schiavo was a spectacular failure. Americans of all persuasions took one look at that situation and recoiled: it turned out nobody in the country wanted Congress and/or the Southern Baptists making their end-of-life decisions for them. But the Minutemen’s summer campouts on the border succeeded in bringing immigration and border security to the front burner, ultimately feeding into the militancy of the Tea Party and leading to the building of the border wall.

And that’s what the Ground Zero Mosque tantrum was — yet another conservative PR confection designed to put a new boogeyman on the public agenda. (And the media, as usual, went right after the fake throw — again. My dog is too smart for that trick, but our corporate media can be counted on to go for it every time.) The right wing has put us on notice that after nine years, they’ve abandoned Bush-era restraint where Islam is concerned, and are now declaring the entire Muslim world to be the new Devil who will fill that yawning void at the center of their cosmology.

As a target, Muslims were just too tempting to resist any longer. They can be killed with impunity. They can be used to justify endless war. As a demon, they’re likely to have tremendous staying power: after all, in the white, straight, Christian enclaves where most American conservatives live, Muslims are far rarer on the ground than even gays, Latinos, or liberals.

Fighting Back
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. American Muslims (including our homegrown Black Muslims, who are collateral damage in all this) are strong and well-organized, and they’re already fighting back. They’re taking steps to define their faith in the public mind, rather than let conservatives do it for them; and to make themselves and their cultures more familiar to the average American. (This was, in fact, the ultimate goal of building a Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan in the first place.) The hate campaign can only last as long as most Americans don’t know a few Muslims personally. The sooner that ignorance is fixed, the sooner this nonsense stops.

As progressives, we need to give them all the help we can, for two reasons. The first is that we have a clear moral obligation to step up and defend the civil rights of a group that’s now been declared a high-profile public target. We’ve always done this, and history is calling on us to do it again. The media has moved on; but now that war has been declared, the conservative haters have their orders, and we’d be smart to expect more attacks on our Muslim neighbors, no matter where in the country we live.

But beyond that, if we can deprive the conservatives of this made-to-order boogeyman, we may be able to keep that void at the center of the conservative cosmos wide open — thus forcing them to keep their essential meanness on full public display. Conservatism doesn’t thrive in cultures where diversity is recognized, embraced, and celebrated. As long as we keep debunking their devils, we make it very hard for them to regroup politically and present themselves as sane.

Dave Johnson’s post on the broken contract that’s allowed private interests to siphon off our public wealth for the past 30 years is incredibly important. His basic argument is this:

We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, courts, monetary system, etc. that enable enterprise to prosper. That prosperity is the bounty of our democracy and by contract it is supposed to be shared and reinvested. That is the contract. Our system enables some people to become wealthy but all of us are supposed to benefit from this system. Why else would We, the People have set up this system, if not for the benefit of We, the People?

Dave points to the practical effects of a piece of conservative theology that deserves a bit of deeper drilling. It’s this: Conservatives believe that only private individuals should hold wealth. They do not believe in commonly-held public wealth of any kind. And that’s why they feel perfectly free to raid the vast legacy that our ancestors have accumulated and stewarded for us over the past 230 years.

It is a legacy — the biggest one ever amassed in history, in fact — and we do need to be thinking about it that way.. What they’ve stolen from us and arbitraged away isn’t just our own money; it’s the vast accumulation of civilizational wealth that was bought with the blood, sweat, tears, endless sacrifice, earnest planning, and bold dreaming of a dozen generations of American ancestors, and then bequeathed to us to ensure our own futures. Each of those generations received it in trust from the one that came before, added its own unique contributions to it, and then passed it on as an endowment to the next. As time compounded the gift, the legacy got richer; and our sense of who was entitled to share in the bounty got broader. By the time we got our hands on it, the American legacy was, quite simply, the biggest trust fund of physical, social, and cultural capital on earth.

To understand the magnitude of the gift, consider how things work in the great aristocratic houses, both in Europe and the US. If you are a Mountbatten or a Rothschild or a Morgan or a Bush, your clan has a deep well of resources, built up over many centuries of careful investment, that ensures that you will never go without. There’s always a family-owned house somewhere to stay in, an income stream to support you, and connections that will open any doors you might want to pass through. There’s a villa, chalet, or yacht where you can vacation. There’s a fleet of cars standing by to take you wherever you need to go. There are trusted family retainers to advise you on matters of money and law. If you need anything at all, ask around: there’s undoubtedly someone in the extended clan who already has it to share, or knows how to get it for you.

It’s impossible to underestimate or overstate the lifelong advantages that come with being born into a family like this. At every turn, throughout your life, you’ll have every opportunity to make good — and no excuses not to.

For the first 200 years of our existence, being born American was not unlike being born into the richest, most powerful family on the planet. By the middle of the 20th century, generations of sound investment and careful stewardship had built our collective trust fund to the point where we, too, began to believe that the shame would be on us if any member of our great household ever had to go without. If you needed decent housing or a monthly remittance to get by, we could cover that. If you needed doors opened for you in other countries, we had friends all over the world who were glad to deal with Americans. If you wanted a world-class education or the vacation of a lifetime, no problem: the family ran the best schools and universities in the world, and owned breathtaking national parks for your pleasure. If you needed to get around, we provided safe transportation networks. If you needed advice or help with a plan, there were trusted public servants on retainer. Our attitude toward the proper role of government was that, at our best, America was a big, powerful clan that had a moral duty (however imperfectly and selectively met in practice) to take care of its own, and maximize the opportunties availble to its members.

It’s only when you think about our common wealth the way the world’s richest families do — as a bequest from a long line of distinguished ancestors, as a vast common resource base that provides us with extraordinary material comfort today, and as a sacred trust that we must manage and multiply on behalf of generations yet to come — that you can really begin to understand the sheer magnitude of everything they took from us.

The thieves didn’t just steal our houses, our retirement funds, our careers, or our tax money. It went far beyond that. They also stole the family jewels — the vast infrastructure that’s been built up for centuries by generations of foresighted Americans, now collapsing into uselessness. They defunded the great universities, crowded our kids into classrooms like factory farmed chickens, and are shutting down the magnificent state and national parks. And they’re also stealing our future, committing us to endless debt, sucking the marrow out of our international standing, foreclosing our opportunties, making it impossible to solve looming problems, and forcing us to hand off to our children a far more meager legacy than the one we received.

They’re not just cheating us. They’re stealing from all those hardworking generations that sacrificed to bring us here; and all the generations still yet to come, who will be so much poorer because we let them loot us blind.

Here’s the irony: the people who did this to us did it precisely because they also understand wealth in these generational terms. In many cases, the thieves were themselves from wealthy families that have operated exactly this same way for a very long time, and who have personally benefitted from the private wealth accumulated by their ancestors. In other cases, they were “self-made” billionaires who may not have wealth in their past, but were determined to capitalize a dynasty in the future.

So, if they understand this, where’s the disconnect? Why couldn’t they respect the public’s need to manage our common wealth the same way they manage their own private wealth?

The disconnect is this: In the conservative worldview, it’s right and legitimate for private families and corporations to accrue generational wealth, and build great dynasties. But it’s absolutely wrong for the democratic masses to accumulate wealth that way; or to collaborate, via the government, to ensure that all of their children will have a birthright sufficient to open the doors to their dreams.

Maggie Thatcher told us outright: “There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families, and their interests.” And if there’s no such thing as society, then society has no right to accumulate wealth — via taxes, investment, or any other means. Viewed this way, a conservative might even think it’s a virtuous thing to defund and defraud the public out of any capital it does manage to acquire.

In the view of these economic royalists, the bottom line is this: it’s OK to steal from their American brothers and sisters because they don’t really believe that the family is legitimate in the first place. Being bastards — heirs only to a social contract they insist never existed in the first place — the rest of us were never entitled to the blessings of a birthright, any more than we’re entitled to any other rights, including the right to govern ourselves.

The beat goes on.

In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series, an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco — one that’s often been at the center of Glenn Beck’s blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, this just in: President Obama is attempting to foment a race war, complete with New Black Panthers in the streets, in order to win the November elections.

I know. It’s just so hard to keep up.

In the last post, I defined a conspiracy theory as “any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others — even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended.” And I talked about the cultural conditions that soften up people’s skulls and predispose them to accepting these baroque works of storytelling rather than simply accept what the evidence shows.

This post moves from outside influences to what goes on inside our heads. What’s going on internally that makes conspiracy stories appealing to us as individuals? As before, I’m drawing heavily on David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Shaping Modern History as one of the better guides out there to all the factors at play when we willfully choose to believe the unbelievable.

The dark side of celebrity envy
A huge number of theories revolve around the deaths of celebrities — JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana. There’s a direct correlation between the public’s adoration of the good and great and the level of public obsession with every pornographically intimate detail surrounding the stories of their last moments on earth. People find these stories endlessly fascinating — and the more disgusting and perverse the detail, the more obsessed we are with it. What’s up with that?

Part of this is pretty straightforward schadenfreude: as Aaronovitch put it, “Whatever we might have envied in these people, we sure don’t envy them now.” But we may also be obsessed with the realization that such extraordinary people could die at the hands of ordinary people — people very much like us. And worse: we find it hard to confront the possibility that our own passion for them may have played a role in causing their deaths. “It was not our thirst for gossip that killed Norma Jean or England’s Rose, but the CIA,” says Aaronovitch. “It wasn’t an ordinary Joe with a rifle who murdered the young president, but the Mafia or the FBI.

“Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility.”

There’s another way we deflect this responsibility, too:

Beware of powerful enemies
When bad things happen to good people — especially people who were agents of positive change like the Kennedys or Paul Wellstone — it’s also easy to imagine, in our more paranoid moments, that they were targeted by the people who were most threatened by what they were doing.

Out here on the left, we’re at least as prone to this as the right wing is. In our grief, we look for reasons for our loss — and too often, there simply aren’t any. Cars and planes crash. Crazy guys with guns target public figures for reasons that exist only in their own imaginations. These are everyday events that just happen; and in the overwhelming majority of cases, there’s no conspiracy involved.

Even so: these high-profile conspiracy theories trickle down through the culture, feeding the paranoia of hardcore conspiracy theorists who eventually come to believe that they’re next on the list. (They always assume that somewhere, there’s a list.) Because I’m so right (and so smart and so important), they must be out to silence me. People who’ve gone over this edge are prone to interpret everyday events — a police car driving past the house or a temporary glitch in their Internet service — as evidence that they’ve been targeted, and are being closely watched.

And for the rest of us, they serve as cautionary tales that blunt our will to engage injustice — or, perhaps, convenient excuses that let us off the hook. Don’t rock the boat too much — or you could end up dead in a ditch, just like Karen Silkwood did.

I’m smart. You’re not.
Conspiracy theories make us feel smart. They’re populist fables that lay bare the supposed actions taken by the power elites against the people. But the real elite (at least in their own minds) are those who are insightful enough to see through the official story and divine the truth of the matter. Being the only one perceptive enough to have cracked the code irrefutably proves that you’re superior to the sheeple around you.

This attitude makes it easy to wave off skeptics. All that insistence on evidence and data and credentials and plausibility is just a smokescreen that hides the reality that they’ve closed their narrow minds to the truth. From this skewed perspective, clinging to reason is for idiots. The real “intellectual” is the one who has opened her mind to all the possibilities — even the most Byzantine and improbable ones.

Unfortunately, this assumption also feeds a grandiose sense of paranoia that actually undermines the ability to think rationally. When embarrassing holes in the story are exposed, they’re invariably blamed on those cunning plotters, who obviously cooked up these inconvenient truths to throw those of lesser intellect off the scent. In fact, in ConspiracyWorld, the bigger the pile of evidence against a theory grows, the more certain the True Believers are that they’re absolutely on the right track. We’ve all met otherwise pretty smart people who are quite sure that the more their facts are disproven by the evidence, the more right they must be.

And weirdly, people who take to this conceit aren’t entirely unjustified:

The smarter they are, the harder they fall
The stereotype of conspiracy believers is that they’re the kind of people who devour the National Enquirer along with their Big Macs and the latest episode of Jerry Springer back at the mobile home park. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Your average conspiracy theory buff actually tends to be well-educated (usually with at least at least one college degree), and a well-established member of the middle- to upper-middle class. According to Aaronovitch, they’re “the professors, university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants.” It’s not the working stiffs who are propagating this stuff — it’s the chattering classes.

Why would these smart people fall for such absurd tales? Some of it may be due to intellectual arrogance. When we’re used to being an authority in one field, it’s all too tempting to assume that we’re also equally competent to assess data from other fields, too. This is why people usually fall for conspiracies where the details are outside of their own field of competence: they’re quite sure they understand what’s really going on, but they honestly don’t.

Historians generally don’t fall for historical conspiracies like the DaVinci Code hoaxes. And you won’t meet very many structural engineers or pilots who think 9/11 was an inside job. They know better, because they’ve got intimate knowledge of the field, and the flaws in the theory are obvious to them. However, the streets are packed with educated non-lawyers who don’t have the slightest idea how government records or citizenship laws work, but still insist that Obama’s not an American citizen. They’re “experts” in their own minds, even though they have no actual expertise in the field.

History as written by losers
A lot of conspiracy theories are nothing more than a cop-out — sour-grapes stories told by people on the losing side of history. If we can blame our losses on a conspiracy, then we don’t have to confront our own fatal flaws — our disorganization or stupidity or unpopularity. Instead, it’s very reassuring to tell ourselves that the loss was entirely due to the overwhelming ruthlessness of our opposition, who were willing to stop at nothing to defeat us. (See the next item.)

This factor, almost all on its own, explains the never-ending conspiracy obsessions of the Tea Party, which only gets more deranged every time the rest of the country rejects its candidates and its ideas. If you find your movement engulfed in conspiracy theories, look around. They’re a pretty clear indicator that you’ve already lost, and your broken-hearted followers are now working overtime to concoct excuses that will salve their sense of failure.

Evil has no limits
Conspiracy theories confirm our beliefs about the evilness of the other side; and this explains why there’s often a certain symmetry to them. For example: several polls have found that about 58% of Republicans doubt Obama’s right to be president. Conversely, the Scripps Survey Research Center found in 2006 that about 54% of Democrats thought that 9/11 was an inside job.

Likewise, during the Bush years, progressives were deeply worried by FEMA’s plans to build emergency housing camps, suspecting that they might be used as concentration camps for liberal upstarts. The conservatives, naturally, thought we were nuts. Now, it’s an article of faith in Tea Party circles that the government is preparing those same camps to round them up when Obama hands America over to the Muslims, the Socialist International, or the Mexicans and Canadians (the villains change weekly — it’s hard to keep up) — and most of us are pretty sure they’re nuts, too.

It’s just good old-fashioned bias confirmation at work. We tend to believe theories that point up the sulfurous and venal evil of those on the other side, and entirely discount those aimed at the paragons of virtue on our own side. And any neutral object that happens to be lying around on the landscape can be twisted around and used as a weapon by either side.

You can’t just stop at one
Conspiracy theories tend to build on each other, eating away at your reasoning capacity as they take over your brain. If your thinking is muddled or sloppy enough that you’ll accept one wrong thing as fact, you’re statistically more susceptible to accepting any number of other wrong things, too. The only antidote for this is better education and training in garden-variety critical thinking skills, with an emphasis on evaluating evidence, assessing the credibility of those offering it, and drawing sound conclusions from their data.

As noted last week: our teach-to-the-test school system isn’t helping here. But the fact that these theories are so often promoted by people who are well-educated enough to know better, we probably need to be looking at the standards of reason being taught in our universities as well. And beyond college, too many professions have also become lax about demanding rigorous standards of argument and evidence from their members.

Some psychologists who study conspiracy theories lay the blame for all this directly at the feet of post-modernism, which insists that all narratives are more or less equally true. If that’s the case, there’s no such thing as objective reality — and hence no facts to defend, and no need to critically evaluate anything. Whatever sounds or feels truthy enough must be the truth. It’s beyond ironic that the biggest post-modernists on the American scene right now are on the right wing, which creates its own reality with breathtaking abandon — and zero regard for factual truth.

There’s one simple question that separates a dedicated conspiracy theorist from someone whose rational faculties are still intact:

What would it take for you to reject this story? What evidence, if it appeared, would thoroughly refute this theory in your eyes?

If they can’t provide three pieces of evidence that they’d accept as discrediting, congratulations. You’ve found a True Believer.

But it feels so true!
Conspiracy theories often reverberate with emotional truth, even when the facts don’t make any rational sense. The first step in understanding any conspiracy theory is to look for the grain of validity at its core — the deeper truth that speaks to the emotional reality of those who believe it.

Aaronovitch recalls that in the wake of Katrina, the conspiracy theories were even thicker on the ground than the mud in New Orleans. One of the most persistent stories was the levees had been breached deliberately to destroy the city’s African-American neighborhoods. While no facts have ever emerged to support this belief (which would have required implausibly massive collusion followed by years of successfully sustained cover-up by hundreds of local, state, and federal authorities), the story is a powerful parable about the way poor black Americans are always abused, lied to, and neglected by people in power. The facts may be wrong, but listening for the deeper emotional truth and responding to that is the best way to open a dialogue and regain trust.

Who’s in charge here? Nobody.
The bottom line on why we believe conspiracy theories is this: We’re terrified of admitting that nobody is really in control. It’s a lot more comforting to think that *somebody* engineered a crisis than to reckon with the horrible, sickening fact that *nobody* did.

Most humans don’t deal at all well with the cruel, capricious randomness of fate. Shit happens — and it often happens for absolutely no meaningful reason at all. That thought makes people crazy with terror, so we make up entities to blame — God, Satan, the Freemasons, the CIA, or the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron. It’s far easier to blame it all on imaginary Lizard People from another planet than have to deal with the bald fact that millions of lives have been upended (or just ended) by an event — and yet there is simply is nobody out there to blame for it.

As my friend Bob Mackey puts it: “The alternative is a universe that is controlled by absolutely nobody. There is no control, no security, no Men in Black or Black Helicopters or Black Hussein Presidents to frighten the God-fearing upright citizens.” In the end, conspiracy theories are simply stories we tell to fill the blackness of the existential void.

Bob also reminds us to “Never confuse a conspiracy with a massive cluster f**k.” The bare truth is: most conspiracies start with massive clusterfucks. And this brings us back full circle to where this series started last week — with the gusher in the Gulf, which is much easier to explain as the massive clusterfuck the evidence tells us it is than it is to attribute any of it to malice or venality on the part of President Obama.

Next week, this series will finish with some suggestions for how we can ratchet down the overheated level of paranoia, and gently move American discourse back toward the rational, reasonable, and sane.