For some time now, I've been reluctant about referring to the political animals hogging the media as Republicans, conservatives or fundamentalists. They obviously care nothing for res publica, the affairs or interests of the people. Indeed, everything public has garnered their opprobrium:
public health
public transit
public education
public welfare
public information
public hearings
etc.
Judd Gregg, whom President Obama adjudged of sufficient talent to nominate him to the Secretary of Commerce chair, was honest enough to admit that populism turns him off. Government by the people is not a felicitous prospect for the proponents of representation--i.e. going through the motions of re-presenting or repeating the public interest and not doing anything more about it than a parrot.
Conservative, on the other hand, is a misnomer.
No, actually, "conservative" is downright deceptive, unless one believes that the sovereign ruling elite or rotating dictatorship was what was actually agreed to when the Constitution was adopted. While it may be an attractive idea to petty potentates that "government by the people" was a belated invention by Abraham Lincoln, the notion of "sovereign immunity"--i.e. that the official actions of rulers, however selected, are not to be questioned or challenged--was effectively negated as early as 1789, when the Alien Tort Claims Act was passed to recognize that foreigners are entitle to sue public officials. That American citizens weren't entitled to hold public officials to account for negligence or malfeasance just slipped through the cracks until fraudulent military contracting during World War II prompted the passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act.
It almost seems as if immunity from being accountable to the public is the most favored perk of public officials. Prosecutors still enjoy it, as a matter of tradition, absolutely. And our agents of law enforcement get it "qualified." That is, as long as they can claim being obedient to their training, just about any mayhem they commit is excused--at least as long as nobody documents the effects.
So, OK, if conservatives are willing to admit that their agenda is to perpetrate mayhem without retribution, then the term might apply. Still, I prefer deprivators, which is not a dictionary word, even though the deprivation of rights, which is what mayhem conserving public officials are about, is well known. There's even a crime, deprivation of rights under color of law, which public officials alone are able to commit whenever they pretend to be enforcing the law when they deprive individuals of their rights. Because deprivation of rights is supposed to be reserved for punishment of proven crime. Punishing first to prevent a crime is not contemplated or permitted in the Constitution, even if the proponents of preemption would like to argue otherwise.
Fundamentalists want to go back to the basics, which, in their minds, involves a system of social organization arising out of the preconceived notion that man is a disobedient, evil creature whom some people must be empowered to direct and put to work. It's a notion that seems designed in retrospect-- by people whose personal deficits, rendering them practically incapable of useful enterprise, force them to rely on other people doing things for them. Which may well account for why establishments of religion are sprouting like weeds. Perhaps, since the number of secular official slots are relatively fixed, the surplus of incompetents produced by our growing population is having to be absorbed by the religious class. And, since remunerative prospects are no longer as good as they used to be, that's what accounts for the increasing effort to attach religious enterprise to the public teat.
No doubt about it, fundamentalists are self-centered and presumably self-serving even though they cloak themselves in religious symbolism. And those who reject the mantle of religion are just as self-centered, even as they serve neither themselves nor anyone else well. Which is why it occurs to me that identifying them as Randians might be just the ticket to help us understand them and their, by now un-mistakeable, characteristic attitudes and behaviors.
deprivation
do nothingness
isolation
antagonism
insecurity
meanness
Why the Randians seem particularly antagonistic towards women is a puzzlement since they obviously like to interact with them. So, perhaps it's a matter of great disappointment which leads them to issue pronouncements designed to antagonize. Except.......
If we look back on the full flowering of the Randians in the Bush/Cheney administration of no, we might recognize that the "Party of No" was not only manifest in a do-nothing Congress, but also in an administration where "nobody could expect." Taken literally, that phrase tells us we're dealing with people who do not look ahead. Their future isn't uncertain because they are not able to look at it objectively. If nobody can or could expect, then even preemptive action takes place in the present and in response to an immediate prompt which, in the case of Bush/Cheney seems to have been an unfounded but pervasive sense of fear.
But, if we apply the "nobody expects" model to the present, then it may well be that the antagonisms being expressed in legislation, which aims to deprive people of rights, is being promoted by people who don't expect laws to have any effect. You know, just like the sixth commandment doesn't keep people from bumping each other off. Law making, it would seem, is like love making--a feel good exercise which "nobody expects" to have any consequence. It lets Randians be randy.
Now, ain't that dandy.