Radicalism, USA

Facial expression of fear from Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Image from Wikipedia)

A few weeks ago, MSNBC covered a story about a proposal in Utah to cut the 12th grade. The story was presented as a fiscal issue i.e. how much money the state would save if they cut senior year. If money is the issue here, they could save a whole heap of cash by nixing 9th-11th grade, too, but I digress.

Some viewers wrote in. One teenager said it would be a real shame if kids couldn’t go to senior prom. Another said students waste their last year in high school goofing off, so trimming the fat wouldn’t harm anyone. Mostly, however, the story was about the sweet, sweet cash the state would save (reportedly around $60 million).

But the issue should have been framed differently. This assault on the public education system isn’t just a question of saving cash. If Republicans were really interested in budgetary conservatism, they would be significantly more concerned with controlling the bloated military budget and the Wall Street bailouts.

This is really about a radical anti-government, religiously motivated assault that has more in common with Al-Qaeda’s terror strategies than the original intentions of the Founding Fathers.

Howie Klein explains the conservatism-education relationship. (h/t Digby)

My best bud, Roland, is a dedicated public school teacher in Compton. He called this morning to tell me all his colleagues were buzzing about Utah Republicans trying to eliminate the 12th grade. “They don’t know about the Mormons,” he said; “never gave it much thought except how they put up the money to defeat gay marriage.” I guess they never saw September Dawn and don’t watch Big Love, South Park or… this (which has been removed, under pressure, from both YouTube and Vimeo and is only available in freer countries, in this case, France).

The bill, temporarily withdrawn, is the brainchild of arch conservative Republican Sen. Chris Buttars, an implacable, hate-filled foe of public education, gays, minorities. What I explained to Roland today is that organized, hierarchal religious organizations are, by their nature, supporters of the status quo and extremely conservative. Obvious scams like Mormonism and Scientology may seem more ridiculous and absurd than most of these organizations but they aren’t inherently any more or less conservative. Each, though, requires followers with no capacity for critical thought. It is why education has always been a target of hatred for religious organizations and for conservatives. Buttars is hardly the first right-wing extremist to persuade ordinary voters that education isn’t the way out of poverty for their children, but some kind of dark, conspiratorial enemy. read on

Placing anti-government, religiously zealot politicians in charge of the government and education is a bad idea. By nature, conservatives don’t believe in Big Government, so they have no incentive to better the system. Hence, it becomes one big race to the bottom. Just take a look at Colorado Springs, or New Jersey, or California to see what the Mad Max future looks like under Republican control.

When the public sector starts to fall apart, Republicans claim this is proof that Big Government has failed, and everything must be privatized because the free market just works better — unless it brings the world’s economies to the brink of catastrophe — in which case taxpayers must cough up trillions of dollars without questioning what’s going on.

Basically, they use fear over logic, just like another shadowy organization taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to fight.

Meanwhile, there is a very real domestic assault on education. Instead of throwing acid at schoolgirls, conservatives are mutilating the text books and performing soft censorship. The Texas Board of Education has removed Thomas Jefferson from textbooks, and instead chose to focus on the wonders of the free market and Capitalism following one of the most grotesque failures of that economic system in the world’s history. Quite simply, this is propaganda, but it’s the “acceptable” propaganda that sneaks its way into school curriculum.

The US government proudly declared it would bring the women of the Middle East freedom when its own female citizens are still treated as an oppressed underclass by domestic religious zealots.

Though the Hyde Amendment has existed for over a decade, and clearly bars the use of federal funds on abortion, anti-choice militants saw a chance to further obstruct a woman’s right to choose, and they seized upon that opportunity.

Legislative terrorists like Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson (both shining examples of the occasional bipartisan aspects of this extremism) are holding healthcare reform hostage because of their antiquated, dogmatic beliefs that women are incapable of making sound judgments concerning their own bodies.

The natural conclusion to the “women as incubators” logic arrived in Utah’s miscarriage bill, which originally included wording that could have women sent away for lifelong prison terms for the crimes of falling down stairs or staying in an abusive relationship (should those actions result in a fetus dying.)

The bill’s wording was later reworked after enormous public outcry, but the second version is still radical.

The revised version “designates the ‘intentional or knowing’ miscarriage as criminal homicide” and “stipulates that a woman can be charged with homicide for ‘the death of her unborn child’, unless the death qualifies as legal abortion”.

Thus are the women of Utah left with a new law that criminalises illegal abortion in a state that increasingly discourages legal abortions.

So what we have here is a systematic attack on the public sector and public schools (gutting funding, radicalizing curriculum, advocating privatization,) while chipping away at human rights (women as second-class citizens, the attack on teh gayz in California) and relying on fear tactics over substantive debate (scapegoating of immigrants, blaming blacks for the subprime crisis, etc.)

When an entire political party adopts — as its official philosophy — a full-fledged war on the US government and a substantial chunk of the US population, while primarily using fear as its propaganda tool, what should we call it?