This is a response to Devilstower's most excellent
Playing Chicken with the Apocalypse diary.
I think the role of choice -- or specifically, the refusal to choose something different -- is worth some more detailed exploration...specifically, the choices of the Republicans for the past 20 years, in regards to their views on truth, justice, and reality.
For I believe that it is willful ignorance that is going to harm us the most. That is the finger on the house of cards. It is less a foot on the accelerator than on the brakes of progress.
Somebody else needs to be doing the driving, stat.
Introduction
From centuries in remove we enjoy an objectivity that the denizens of Yuessa (alt. USA, or United States of America) did not, in their time of great schism.
We of the Age of Peace owe this society much, both good and bad.
American flouting of environmentalism paved the way for the colonization of Antarctica; disregard for the outmoded Geneva Conventions facilitated the outshipment of political prisoners to the various Zones (Sapphire for America, Saffron for China, etc.) on the Seventh Continent.
American outlawry of stem cell research open the path for Brazil to assume dominance in genetic engineering, and the rise of the Emerald Alliance that is the cornerstone of Terran power and freedom in the current era.
American disregard for human rights disabled many of the restrictions to the development of broad- and narrow-cast psychological controls and medical commerce that are the basis of immortality for the noble (and best, and deservedly so) classes in contemporary society.
The Americans' aggressive retaliation against the highly fortunate attack on New York in 2001 eliminated the entirety of the Islamic world, paving the way for Han, Indian, and Brazilian expansion after it was clear that the Americans lacked both the means and the lack of compunction to take full advantage of their actions in the first half of the 21st century.
Driven from the so-called Old World by superior competition from more popular, more advanced and more populous powers, the Americans did as all marginalized powers do -- they placed a succession of ever-riskier bets in order to keep their standing. For a time, the attempt to assert power in West Africa kept America afloat, but more populous (and forewarned) Africa fought off the Americans with ease, for by this time Brazil was asserting itself, and this was also the onset of the Age of Plagues, where Brazil's more liberal genetics policies trumped America's inherited (and shrinking) wealth base.
Then came the Antarctica project, where the Americans sought to develop means to build cities and industries on the ice. It was a valuable exercise that paved the way for development of both the oceans and offworld colonies, but the motif for the Americans, as in other pursuits, was not to colonize but to delegate others (sometimes on pain of death) to take advantage of opportunities that they themselves no longer had the stomach to enjoy. At first it was conscripts, overseen by 'veterans homesteads', to divert the return of soldiers that did not always come back to America happy with its leadership. Later it was anyone and everyone who was dissident, or undesirable, or just in the way.
By the late 21st century, America was not the third power (as long predicted) but the fifth, outstripped not only by China and India but by Japan and Brazil as well, with Indonesia and waning but now-robust Europe close behind.
Historians wonder at times, why within a single century of near-unassailable dominance, did the Americans fall athwart of fate.
The contemporary theory is that the explosion of the Yellowstone Caldera in 2318 did in the Americans; true, this was the largest natural disaster from antiquity, but it post-dates the fall of the United States from global dominance by over 250 years.
Then there was the much-maligned (and ignored) Aechaivee (archaic: AIDS) Plague, which is estimated to have taken 750 million lives before the year 2050. While the first of the great menaces of the millennium took 63 million lives in the former Yuessa/USA, at no point prior to the Yellowstone Explosion itself, save for the Partisan Wars, had the population of the former superpower experienced a net loss.
Which brings us to the best-regarded hypothesis of the decline of the Americans: internecine strife out of recrimination for the failed Bush Doctrine in Iraq and latent scores from the previous lost war in Vietnam.
This, too, is not quite the reason. Though the 12 year-long civil war in North America claimed close to 30 million lives on that continent alone and spun off conflict on all six of the then-inhabited continents, natural population growth and immigration overcame the deficit.
What damaged American superpowerdom most was the one straw too many. A naturally robust society, the Yuessa/USA could handle disease, economic distress, war, even natural disaster.
What the country could not surpass was the concerted attempt by half of its number to dismantle the very formula for its success, in order to avoid being replaced by those who came afterward.
The one straw too many was the dismantling of the knowledge base of the Americans by the then-dominant Republican party of the approximate era 1980-2008, the period immediately preceding the Partisan Wars.
It is one thing to say that had Iraq never happened, had 9/11 never happened, had AIDS never occurred, that perhaps the country would have survived to fulfill its ancient promise. But such incidents were happenstance in comparison to the conscious choice of a majority political faction to force-feed a disregard for knowledge, for novelty, for community and even for freedom on a civilization that had risen to greatness on the back of a love for all such things.
This, not the wars foreign and domestic, not the plagues, and not the cataclysm of Yellowstone, is what sent the Americans on the path of the forgotten and barely-remembered.
We can only imagine what would have occurred, had the Republicans been stopped in time.
We can only wonder what history had been like, had Freedom and Reason never died at the hands of the American conservatives.
The Political Economy of Unreason
Impaired GDP: Perhaps one reason for the hostility toward reason and empiricism was that it was so easy to use reason and empiricism to prove that the reactionaries were wrong. It was costing the early 21st century United States a net 3.85% per year in GDP to have exclusively-Republican governance.
Impaired Returns on Capital: Ostensibly, the then-extant Republican party was friendly to the investor class, but its actions were severely damaging to the equity markets of the time -- either by bad public policy initiatives, or bad policy choices in response to events outside of its control.
Impaired Health for Americans: Not only were Americans poorer across all classes under Republican rule, they were sicker, as well. On a host of other social health criteria, the so-called Red States were garishly undeveloped relative to their 'Blue State' contemporaries, who were cast by media allies of the right -- and successfully -- as rivals, exploiters, even enemies of the poor, virtuous, righteous and appropriately vengeful Reds.
More crass, more cruel Americans: Further, what few goods there existed in the Red states were concentrated in the hands of a few who tossed out crumbs to their increasingly-desperate base that in time ran out of patience with rule of law and their own partisan leadership to get what they were entitled to, according to decades of agitprop via television opinion shows and AM radio broadcasting.
Unreasonable entititlement: This entitlement, the cultivated barely-restrained violence of the conservative movement, the sense of letdown and betrayal of system, country, government and partisan representation was bad enough. Toss in the deliberate targeting of Enlightenment-era institutions and values, and had a ticking bomb far more powerful than the mere thermonuclear variety.
2004: The Demographic Watershed
As for why the reactionaries felt let down, it was a question of demographics that the GOP had to find an answer to. Demographically and democratically, the Republican party could not adhere to a "be non-Hispanic White...culturally" marketing approach and expect any sort of long-term success in electoral politics. Starting in 2004, they attempted some changes in that regard that probably secured then-president George W. Bush a second term in office, but upset many white Southern supporters, who were not so much upset about African-American votes as what political price was paid to obtain them.
2004: The Reactionary Wish List
Fine, many of the GOP base said; then we'll raise our price: the white conservatives expected much more aggressive initiative on its social agenda. The 'real right' wanted euthanasia, homosexuality, sex education, contraception, jury trials, parole, abortion, pornography, protesters and rule of just and secular laws out. It wanted censorship, religious indoctrination, abstinence, death penalties, mandatory sentencing, creationism, political purges of the bench, and rule of decent, God-fearing men in.
As it became apparent that the GOP did not have quite the commanding mandate that a slim victory at the polls suggested (to them) that they possessed, few if any of these goods were obtained; the base was immediately wrathful about it. Conservatives were hardly going to fly into the arms of the Democrats, whom they had long since written off as unwelcome occupants of their country, that is, if they were in a generous mood. But by late 2005, an unprecedented chorus of dissension in the GOP ranks was present -- they didn't want to hear that they had to wait. They won the election! They had the mandate! It was their country, darn it to heck! But we have to compromise, we don't quite have the numbers. We need to be...reasonable, they were told by uncomfortable Republican leaders. Let's try to be...gulp, objective, here.
After decades of hearing how bankrupt the concepts of reason and rationalism and objectivity were, the base just went through the roof.
2005: The Levee Broke
Then the self-censorship levee that had held for five years broke, and the flood of news about investigations and indictments hit the airwaves. These were not bit-player names, either, but persons at the very top of leadership, or close to same. DeLay. Frist. Abramoff. Rove. Libby. Franklin. A decade earlier, the Republicans had clamored about Democratic corruption. This did not look good.
The base took this as evidence of cupidity, cowardice and liberal dirty tricks. Bill Clinton was no longer president, and had buddied up with former President Bush (father of the current chief executive), so it was no longer his fault, but rather that of his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The GOP leadership, happy to be out of the crosshairs, did not discourage such misplaced and mistaken outrage. It was uneducated, unreasonable and insensate lashing-out. Absolute mobthink.
A better-educated base might have set the ax against the proper necks.
But better her than us, they said. Thank God for ignorance, the Pubs sighed with relief.
2005: New Orleans, the Great City that Almost Wasn't
Key points in history are called watershed events; never was the term more apropos than for the devastation of the city of New Orleans -- not by the powerful Hurricane Katrina, but by willful, blatant and unconscionable neglect.
Storms such as Katrina were rare, but rare in the sense that the Gulf of Mexico experienced such natural disasters rountinely during peak decades. The seas were rising, and would rise another 20 meters total before peaking centuries after the flooding of New Orleans. By then, the techniques for excluding the seas from the cities would be obviated --- because the means for including coastal cities in the seas were now quite successful.
Today, there are three "solar" class cities in North America. One is Mexico City, the major spaceport hub. The second is New York, the first true world city.
The third is New Orleans, the largest land-sea-airspace transit port in the Western Hemisphere, for next to the Bay of Bengal and the Sea of Japan, the Gulf of Mexico is the single most heavily-settled piece of ocean real estate on the planet.
The Crystal City: Much of modern New Orleans fans out in crystal corridors, paralleling the structure of the Mississippi delta, leaving channels for sediment to clear, rather than accumulate against (and endanger) the city from its new problem -- too much land trying to overcome its defenses. Tourists, though, prefer to visit what is coyly called the Superdome -- the original diamond-reinforced containment (several interlocked domes, actually) protecting the original metropolis and its historical sites, including the French Quarter, the original arena, the Convention Center memorial and portions of the original levee system. Sealane College, the first submerged American institution of higher learning, and the still-popular Kitsos gold filtration station are located at Metairie and Slidell, respectively.
And all of it almost never happened, because of a lack of resolve, or desire, on the part of the then-extant Republican administration to deal as swiftly with the hurricane that struck New Orleans as it would, before and after, when hurricanes struck areas that tended to vote Republican. Some contemporaries referred to it as The Forsaken Trust; while it did not appall conservatives, it offended to distraction everyone else in the country, and made the Republican party a lame-duck majority, causing great embarrassment to its leadership and the country at large.
From one account at the time:
It is appalling that in four short years, that lesson in the power of trust has been forgotten by a sufficient number of people to endanger the very fabric of our civilization, in a way that no terrorist attack ever could.
If we do not trust each other for aid during the flood, how can we possibly do so during the fire?
In the end, the discussion of whether or not to rebuild New Orleans, flooded and emptied of everything decent and good and deliciously decadent that has made it one of the cornerstones of American culture, is a referendum on whether or not to rebuild the Union, which has been struck down in a storm of forsaken trust.
It is a conversation about whether or not the sort of risk that America took in getting behind New York after 9/11 will ever happen again, or if that was in fact the swan song of the Republic.
It would turn out to be not so much the swan song, but the harbinger of darker times to follow.
The Katrina Diaspora
One of the consequences of the temporary depopulation of New Orleans was a several decades-long dispersion of "Nolas" -- New Orleans folk -- across the country.
It is estimated that approximately 20% of Lousiana and 10% of Mississippi fled the Gulf Coast, with Alabama displacees mostly remaining within the Old South region of the country.
It is Nebraskans who first called the refugees Nolas, a play on the common abbreviation for the city (N.O., LA) used at the time; African-American displacees tended to congregate in urban population centers where existing groupings were found. While Omaha was no stranger to diversity, the shock of an additional 150,000 residents over the course of a decade, generated considerable resentment, that is, until the relocation of the music industries of both New Orleans, and in time Detroit to what would be the music Mecca of the 21st century, with a proliferation of new styles (See: Canto, Epic Rap , and Hoop). As pod music faded and synth composition emerged, Omaha became the creativity capital of the country for a time, and the last holdout against soul succumbed, and was grateful for it.
The term "Nola" was made famous nationwide by Georgia Tennyson's novel Swans of Denise.
The New Orleans that rose first beside, then beneath, the rising waters of the Greenhouse Era would regain some of its former legacy in music and the arts, but due to its role as a major flashpoint in the Partisan Wars.
The Gretna Legend
The legend provides an interesting monograph of folk literature from the mid-26th century, as both a morality tale and an explanation for why there is, to this day, no archaeological evidence that the town of Gretna, which is clearly marked on 21st century maps, ever existed. It also deals with a then-contemporary concern -- the sudden proliferation of giant squid in shallow waters, which included brazen attacks on shipping but no documented attacks on human settlements. The squid retreated after a time, but not their notoreity.
For centuries, denizens of the Superdome have talked of seeing fluorescent light to the southeast, ultimately attributable to plankton or documented sightings of deep-ocean species, most often giant squid that range bravely these days, now that the whales are extinct, preying on large fish, humans and the remnant cetaceans alike.
This has given rise to a legend, that there was once a Gretna undersea habitat, but when the squid first rose to the surface waters, they showed up in large numbers to protect against whales -- and to finish off any of their ancient foes that still remained. Instead, they found Humanity invading their world, and the still-inconclusive battle for the pelagic habitat ensued. Man has his weapons, but he is vulnerable inside his impressive diamond shells, and the squid have sufficient strength, speed, stealth to deal with submarines and sea-cties alike -- and now they cooperate, a lesson learned from eons of dealing with the cetaceans.
That's what the children are told, anyway: Be good or the Kraken will tear the crystal panes away and drown you and eat everybody up!
The story goes that the people of Gretna were especially bad, and back when the cities were on land, one day the people of New Orleans needed help and the Gretnels, as they were called, refused to give them aid, and even threaten to kill their neighbors if they ever came near them, ever again.
The people of New Orleans remembered this, and kept away. Forever. They turned their backs on the Gretnels, and forgot they even had neighbors. The bridge was destroyed, and when the land flooded and the domes were built, there were no tunnels or submarine courses or anything connecting the Gretnels with the rest of the world. They just kept to themselves, and everyone else stayed away, on account the Gretnels had said they'd kill anyone who came round ever again.
Then the giant squid came, because there were now too many of them down in the deep trenches of the Caribbean, and those squid were colonists from the really big squid countries far, far away in the Pacific, so they had nowhere else to go but up to the light, where the water was so thin it hurt to swim in, but that was where the food was. That was also where the giant club-shaped monsters used to be, fast and smart and just as hungry all the time as the squid, but scouts came back and told their friends that the big monsters were gone -- except for the little loud ones that could send blasts of sound through the water and hurt the squid, only not as well as the whales could.
They came to the big city of New Orleans, and learned the hard way that it was too dangerous to approached in force; the strange crystal city could shoot out beams that were loud, and others that were really bright and hot, but the worst were the beams that crushed everything near them into themselves, even the water, then let up and everything suddenly exploded. The squid did not like those beams at all and swam away as fast as they could.
They came to Gretna, though, and found a lot fewer people, with a lot fewer dangerous weapons, and while it was going to be tough, this was prey the squid could eat, if they were smart and cooperated, like they had learned the hard way from the whales.
The squid first ate up a few stray Gretnels, just to see if they tasted alright, because it had been a long time since any squid had tasted human meat, and none of the Caribbean colonists had, ever. They figured out that the hard shells were resistant to biting with their big, sharp beaks, but that if you stabbed in and wiggled your beak just so, the pieces would flay apart and you could gobble up the soft meat inside. And better yet -- if you could break apart one of the big, really hard beasts that loitered about the human cities under the sea, there'd be lots of tasty humans in there -- and they didn't have shells, either! The squid figured that the submarines were either predators or pregnant humans, and started going after shipping first.
From the perspective of the Gretnels, suddenly the waters around their isolated, perfect city, pure of any of "those people's influences", were full of hundreds of giant squid that quickly blockaded any traffic around town; the Gretnels were no longer able to work outside, or to fish or work the seafloor farms or filtration mines that they used to get metals and plastics and trace gases that they required from the seawater itself.
Perhaps we should ask for help, someone suggested. He was sent out the airlock without a diving suit; the squid liked him a lot, so much so that he was made a part of them, one bite at a time.
We'll have to fight, the Gretnels said. But with what? They tried exploding harpoons, but the squid were too smart and fast for them to hit often, and too soft (save for the very center) if they did make contact. They tried proximity mines, but the squid just fell back and let the currents waft them away; some fell against the city of New Orleans and exploded, and the Nolas treated it as yet another raid by their despicable neighbors that they ignored on principle, even when severely provoked. This assured that no help whatsoever would come from that direction.
Finally, the Gretnels tried electricity, and that worked for a time. However, many denizens of the abyss use electrical shock to stun or slay prey, and the squid knew the risks and countermeasures against such nuisances, chief among them being give the threat a lot of decoys to shock, then move in when it was out of juice.
The squid of that era were violent and irritable and hungry, and individuals died in squabbles over territory, status and morsels every day. There were, as a result, plenty of corpses, most of which were usually gobbled up, on account squid are not squeamish about cannibalism.
One morning, though, they fasted, expecting a banquet that evening, and cast their dead brothers and sisters against the Gretna defenses at high speed, shoving them with their own jet propulsion, then casting them loose.
It took two dozen salvos; it became necessary to kill a few extra squid to keep up the effort.
And it worked. The lights inside of Gretna flickered, then died.
The squid moved in, pried apart the diamond glass panes protecting their prey, and let the floodwaters prepare the feast for them. They fed for five days, breaking apart pressurized structures within the breached Gretna dome, one by one. Nothing was left untouched, or unshattered. The squid crushed every thing to dust and shrapnel and pulp, and ate much of all three.
And that is why there is nothing, nothing at all, where once the town of Gretna lay. The monsters came and ate them up. So be good, and say your prayers, and go to sleep, children.
Afterword: Despite occasional requests to see it, no trace remains of the ancient town of Gretna, which was not included in the conversion of the local communities to oceanic existence, reason for the omission unknown. Treasure-seekers have taken repeated trips outside the city, hoping to find relics, but not even a brickbat or a broken bone remain.
So much progress! We've got to do something before it's too late!
The Gretnels of legend were an exponent of a flight from objectivity, to conserve a countenance, no matter how outmoded or self-destructive, by hiding both from an ever-changing reality and from contact with those who were more comfortable in the company of facts.
Why this movement was so pervasive is less a case study in madness, but in a strategic calculus that, while insensate to us, made perfect sense to those who were in command of the world's affairs at the time, and feared the time of changes to come, so much so that they initiated a plan to stop change, leastwise human progress, for keeps, inspired by a classic 20th century novel.
We live in an age where continuous education is not a matter of public policy, but of literacy. An average person today uses more information in a day, either consciously or very remote personalities, than the entire Earth's population once did in a year, and is consciously processing more in a day than his or her 21st century counterpart once did in a year. It is impossible to exist, save as a ward of the state, without a well-maintained facility for learning.
It is this talent, and the infrastructure that supports it, that is the concern of the public sphere. That, and protection and the dilution, sequestration, corruption and destruction of knowledge. For when individuals are so porous to data, any tampering with truth is a violation, and a proven danger.
For this reason, these offenses are the only ones remaining that have the rarely-used option of capital punishment.
For this reason, it's difficult for we of the late Third Millennium to comprehend just What. Those. Idiots. Were. Thinking.
That a society, or any fraction of it, would actively campaign to dilute or destroy information capital, on behalf of an enthusiastic and grateful constituency, is repulsive.
Ending Progress
America at the onset of the Third Millennium was at the peak of its game, relative to its rivals elsewhere on Earth -- and there were no other elsewheres, either. America ruled Earth, and laughable as that accomplishment is to us now, once upon a time that meant something special.
But like all hegemons in their dotage, the American elites recalled the vitality of their youth and saw it in the rising generations of China and India, and if they looked farther down the road, in Brazil, as well. Even Europe and Japan were showing some spark again, though their own summits had been obtained and lost.
But the Americans had a grand plan -- stop moving. Stop changing. Stop progressing. Because any additional transformation in how energy was processed, how goods were made or transported, how votes were counted and vaccines distributed threated the delicate balance, with American might balancing atop it.
The plan was to stem the tide of scientific progress, to not enhance knowledge but discredit it, to divorce the actions of the multitude from the reasons of the few for doing so. To recapitulate Orwell's "1984" -- stop history, or make a game effort to do so.
To make this happen would require a secular change in the world order, from one of dispersion of power and increase of order to one of concentration of power and increase of chaos and disorder, to render the balance of power to a simple match of military might versus military might, a contest that, at the present, the United States possesses unsurpassable advantage.
To bring this about would require increasing all the components of misery and suffering worldwide, to not only refusing support but actively thwarting discrediting all forms of remediation in all policy venues, be they economic, scientific, environmental, health, ecclesiastical, you name it.
To keep the status quo, all progress must stop. Now. To keep America supreme, given current conditions, the world must be made not safer, but less safe. Not richer, but impoverished. Not free of scourges such as poverty, famine and AIDS, but profuse with them.
It would prove impossible to stop the world from moving. The conservatives could not even stop themselves from changing, and hated themselves for having to do so. Incapable of self-criticism, after decades of indoctrination that it was their own system that was keeping them down, they would rather have torn everything down, even their own homes, rather than change.
The Rhetoric and Agenda of Neoconservatism
Implementing this agenda was a litany of inconsistent, even incompatible rhetoric save one thing -- do whatever it takes to be in charge.
It boiled down to these elements:
- Neocons equate violence in the service of unilateral American interests with moral right.
- To constrain American dominance is metaphysically wrong.
- Violence against those who oppose America is not only just, but compulsory.
- The preferred mode of diplomacy is implication of violent pro-American action should American interests be disregarded or defied.
- To disregard American interests is the same as defiance.
- Defiance must be confronted, decisive action taken in the context of pro-American moral clarity .
- Who decides what is pro-American and morally clear? Why, people who are pro-American and morally clear, of course. Who decides which are which? Those who support pro-American and morally clear action are the good guys, silly. What are pro-American and morally clear actions? Those which do not dissent or disregard American dominion. Drrr.
- Since all moral right derives from not only possession of might but application of same, we need a bigger defense budget, and a more aggressive stance vis a vis dissent and defiance, both at home and abroad.
- American interests are served by permanent military bases abroad.
- The carrier fleets sustain the illusion that America can come and go in response to threats to its interests, which encourages the dangerous policy of disengagement from the business of maintaining a pro-American, morally clear international order. Thus, we need to reduce the number of carrier fleets in favor of permanent land bases.
- We need to control the international commons. Freedom outside of pro-American, morally clear context is a nom sequitur, and that includes both access and use of outer space as well as cyberspace.
- Anticipatory violence against disregard and dissent to American interests is valid and serves to warn the international order of the price of even thinking about challenging America. See above - the expression of American military might is not only just, but compulsory.
- That which is pro-American and morally clear, per neoconservative doctrine, is mainstream. That which disgregards or dissents from neoconservatism, even to least letter, is extremism and must be crushed.
- "Promotion of freedom abroad" means the expanding and enhancing the decisionmaking space of America to assert its interests, and expand them as dissent and disgregard are crushed
- Making the world one with America through submission to American interpretation of right, law, justice and order is the sine quae non of not only American ethics, but of all ethics.
- To defy this agenda is terrorism, and renders the dissenter an outlaw, whether individual person or a federation of sovereign powers.
It is doctrine of extreme moral relativism -- that anyone done by yourself is virtuous, the more violent the better, but anything done by those outside your association is vile, no matter how salutary. It was the doctrine of opposition to education, to reason, to rational compromise, to objectivity, to universal moral right, to the preceding three centuries of scientific and moral progress, rendered into an action plan.
And that plan, that entitlement to all the marbles, and they'd better be red, white and blue, had been force-fed into the hearts and minds of the Republican base for two decades.
There was no turning back. No, the headlong march for the precipice was accelerated, once the edge was in sight.
Education and Superpowerdom
What the Neocons missed, however, was how dumping education was diminishing American power.
It's possible to retrospectively assess the dangers that should have been obvious to American decisionmakers in 2005, should they choose not to ramp up the quality of information available, not just to children but to all citizens, but choose to diminish, dilute, discredit and contaminate the knowledge base instead.
What was readily apparent was that the projection loss of first-rank status by the United States to competitors, should then-extant trends be suffered, was on the order of four decades.
What baffles analysts even now is why the American conservatives chose with such zeal a course that would ensure American loss of eminence inside of four years.
It was the solipsism that conformity and stasis were both possible to implement and that it was imperative to do so, both of which ideas were thoroughly discredited by the real-time experience of the Republicans, and commented on internally.
Regardless, the party could not stop, for it is only possible to argue for a change in course if people value facts, reason, objectivity and empiricism, and are capable of assessing that change is a better deal, and willing to do so.
Thus, it was possible for cogent conservative observers to both note the obvious -- that things were not working -- and condemn critics, even themselves, for not coming up with ideas to make the proven-false course workable. Advisements to try alternatives were dismissed, if they did not fortify the existing objective.
Even the base was grumbling, largely fossilized in support for what it felt it had coming, and what liberals had coming, thanks to nonstop propaganda that America must stay the course, no matter what, even though 'the course' was a vague, slippery thing that no one had sufficient information on to determine.
In our own era, the wrongful concealment of public policy information would be sufficient grounds for impeachment and removal of trustees, elected or appointed. Most of the affronts committed by the early Third Millennium Republicans would bring up charges that carried severe penalties -- long prison time, cortical smoothing (alt, 'shaving') of various severity, or outright execution. However, the (to us obvious) connection between devotion to truth and the safety and welfare of the commonwealth had not quite been made a thousand years ago. Or, if it had been made, was a mode of progress discounted and abandoned with all the others.
Wrap
Oops. I kind of got carried away. I'll have to finish up some other time. :)