All the Republicans screeching about ‘ObamaCare’…They adamantly refuse to go along with the Medicare expansion…good…they can keep their current Medicaid with most states covering folks up to 50% of the poverty line and the Federal Government reimbursing them, on average, 50% of their expenditures or they can have, under the expanded Medicare provision of the Health Care Reform Act, folks covered up to 133% of the poverty line with the Federal Government paying 100% for three years and 95% afterward. They can cover less people for more money or more people for less money…sure it is optional. They can hate Obama more than they care about their constituents. When folks start leaving these idiotic states and voting the radical elitists out, they will come around. It will be funny to see all these self-righteous Obama haters groveling up to the bar…eating crow…looking more and more like their two-faced presidential candidate.

Oh, call it a tax or call it making folks responsible for their own health care…getting the free-loaders out of the system…I thought that was a Republican ideal? Not only will folks already with insurance NOT pay a tax, they will find their premiums going down when it goes into effect due to larger insurance pooling. The whole idea is a simple business idea that even Mitt should get – the larger the market the more the production and overhead costs come down. Mitt even defended the mandatory requirement of “RomneyCare” with this line of reasoning before he found his latest religion on the matter – hypocrite. God forbid that we tax the free-loaders…is that a Republican ideal? In any case, the lie of the Republican elite will be everyone will be taxed. Conveniently, they cannot seem to make fine distinctions. I suppose this has to do with orders from the top – Grover Norquist.

Why is it so hard to find consistency in Republican ideology these days? Even the academic elites in conservatism run from debates when empirical facts that cannot be spun are involved. This is so unlike the Republicans of old…the ones that made Justice Roberts what he is…

An ideology is bankrupt when it is reduced to sophistry and fanaticism.

Here is more proof the current batch of Republicans practice sophistry. Lately, they have been fond of talking about how President Obama is a dictator. Rush Limbaugh recently stated that President Obama’s immigration policy is a “dictator’s wet dream”. They think President Obama is circumventing the constitution with health care. They think that fast and furious is President Obama’s plan to snatch their guns from their cold, dead fingers. Funny, just a few months ago Rush and Santorum were calling President Obama an appeaser. Are appeaser’s dictators? Are dictators appeasers? I actually thought he was trying way to hard the first few years of his presidency to compromise with the Republicans to get things accomplished. They only turned any attempt to compromise into yet another reason to attack him. He was not leading. He was appeasing. Appeasers do not lead, they try to compromise. Well, now that he is leading, he is a dictator. President Obama should have figured out a long time ago that folks that hate you will not compromise with you. Hate is irrational and compromise is rational. If you try to lead them they will call you a dictator. It is an un-winnable situation. The best thing President Obama can do IS lead by circumventing the haters as much as possible. Most folks do not have that kind of hate for President Obama. His biggest strength is to show them up for what they are by leading. They will screech and foam at the mouth, too bad so sad. They will put a spectacle on that turn the vast majority of Americans against the Republicans. President’s Obama’s best political asset is that folks like him. When someone throws a temper tantrum against a person an observer likes, the observer feels sympathy for the person they like and dislikes the brute. President Obama should not let haters set the agenda for his initiatives. He should let the people that got him there set the agenda and we want him to lead until the Republicans are screaming like the zombies in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

In a rather involved discussion here, Jeff asked me,

If you were king for a day, how would you modify the way extra-market interventions are done in the U.S.? What changes would you make? And how well do you think government would do at those? (Or do you think the extra-market intervention needs to be something other than government?).

So, if I were king for a day…

First, I would get the money out of politics.

As far back as Plato’s Republic, Plato recognized that the problem with democracy was its susceptibility to manipulation by the tyrant (could be a tyrannical group as well). It is a brute reality that marketing counts on the fact that people are easily manipulated. If the goal of a political organization is to manipulate in order to achieve more power, then money is the way to get the job done. To the degree that it is possible, I would like to see politics out of the spotlight, off the stage, off television (with the exception of perhaps candidate debates), mass mailings and robo-calls. I would also like to see campaign finance reform so only individuals could contribute up to a fixed amount (like $2,500). I think it would be acceptable to have parties and candidates post their planks and positions on line (with references to research data preferably). I think folks should vote because they are actively interested and not passively manipulated into voting. An informed electorate is what makes democracy work. Being informed takes work and time. To the degree that manipulation is taken out of politics and educated voters are encouraged is to the same degree that I think democracy works.

Second, I would take the ‘lawyerly’ approach out of politics and put the engineering approach into politics. Lawyers, as Socrates would agree, are about the art of persuasion, sophistry. When governing becomes a product of rhetoric it loses. In particular, I would make a constitutional requirement that any government programs that exist and get incorporated into law have charters. The charters would clearly lay out the purpose of the program, the criteria for its continued existence in the form of how the success of the program is to be measured and by law continued and the end of life requirements. Some programs might be into perpetuity like Children’s Health Insurance Program, programs for the elderly, severely disabled folks etc. However, even those programs should have time bound charters that need updating and renewing on a periodic basis including cost reductions and efficiency requirements that are measured and invoke certain legal consequences if they are not met. Other programs should be designed so that they encourage transition to the private sector. One program that worked well in this regard was the Federal program that paid the tuition cost of migrant workers children and produced much more in new tax revenues and private business creation than the government paid for the program. Government programs of this type should not institutionalize recipients but make it possible for transition to more lucrative, private (non-government subsidized) enterprise. If folks are on the public payroll I do not think that having them have to perform something in return to the public sector is too much to ask in many cases. I think the private market does many things well but it has also not performed well historically in other areas such as health care (insurance company cheery picking, barriers to entry or pushing riskier customers out) and I think it is a bit simplistic to blame it all on the government for non-performance. When profit is the goal, certain endeavors should not be optional or put off for decades. They have to be addressed by an organizational system where profit is not the sole criteria. Adam Smith would agree with this. However, all this has to be a healthy balance between private and public sectors where the private sector is the preferred vehicle if possible. Additionally, I am not against block grants. In a perfect world I would love for Republicans to have 10 years at demonstrating their ideology and the Democrats have a 10 year shot at it. Since that will not happen, I think that if states and localities administered programs with block grants, over time, we would see which states folks migrated from and which states they migrated to. I think this would shed light on the viability of various ideologies. In some ways, I regret that Obama won the last election because I would have preferred to have the wizards of Republican economics continue their foray until voters could make a clear distinction of where that path leads.

Third, I would have the government involved in more long term R&D that could be handed off to private businesses in the form of patent free technology. We are doing this already in the areas such as health care and defense and it has worked well. Other countries, China comes to mind, are doing this reaping huge rewards in the national economy. To compete globally we will have to do this in the future. Long term private market R&D is costly and risky and therefore, makes a lucrative business model rarer and harder to achieve without this kind of public sector support.

Forth, with regard to government intervention here are my tentative ideas (as I know that I am not as well informed on these areas):

Government bonds to finance public debt – I think this has proven itself over time to be not only a good way to finance public debt but also to exercise a stable and alternate investment strategy to equities and commodities over time. I know there are pros and cons for callable public sector bonds but it would be a way for the government to ‘re-finance’ its debt to a lower service amount. I know the Fed can already to this to some extent by buying and selling government securities but that is really not their primary mission. I think callable bonds may have more pros than cons but I do not know for certain. The problem with public debt as an absolute number is that effective debt can rise or fall precipitously with economic stagnation or economic growth. I think this is one reason Keynes saw debt as more of a relative trade-off between private debt and public debt. When the private sector is accumulating more debt he thought it was ok at a certain critical point for the public sector to intervene and take on more public debt thereby exercising a ‘governing’ effect to keep the private sector from imploding. He also saw that when the private sector was growing, the boost in the economy meant more tax revenue and therefore an opportunity for the government to off-load public debt; in effect, due to the strength of the private sector. Of course, this depends on fiscal responsibility in good economic times and fair and consistent taxation. I do not think that the service obligation on public debt is something that lends itself to snapshot analysis due to its variability over time but this kind of analytic problem is not something alien to science and mathematics and should be rigorously monitored and on the average kept as low as possible to real GDP over time.

Monetary interventions (the Fed) – Let me preface this by focusing the perspective on international realities. Whether we like it or not, believe it is ‘free-market’ or not, the reality is that almost all other countries (and the Euro conglomerate) manipulate their currencies. They subsidize businesses and whole market segments to their advantage. If we cannot or will not play that game we will lose. We live in a world economy where such historical and simpler models such as the gold standard would put us at a huge disadvantage relative to the rest of the world. If you are playing with dirty poker players you better be up on your dirty game or you will lose the majority of the time. For this reason we need a Federal Reserve that can devalue our currency relative to other large economic powers such as the Euro and Chinese Renminbi. This makes our exports more attractive and stimulates growth in our country. The Fed has multiple functions historically but some of these like overnight deposits for local banks are not as important as they used to be and others like the ‘elasticity’ of money, the money supply available at a given time in the economy, are much more important than they used to be. The Fed has to strike a balance between putting too much money into circulation and increasing inflation or not putting enough in and driving the cost money up with higher interest rates thereby making credit harder to come by and growth slower. The flip side of putting more money in circulation is that our currency gets devalued relative to the rest of the world and our exports are stimulated. The Fed achieves the elasticity of money through buying and selling U.S. securities from the Treasury department (which is the agency actually responsible for ‘printing’ money). If we got rid of the Fed our currency would be at the mercy of the rest of the world economic powers. Therefore, we can control our monetary destiny or hand it to over to other powerful economies. This is where the real debate over the Fed needs to be centered. For this reason, I believe we need the Fed and our central banking system. Also, let’s not forget that the Fed is responsible for setting the reserve amounts that depository institutions (i.e., banks) must keep on hand so they do not over leverage themselves and set us up for a ‘run on the banks’ that we, the taxpayer, would have to cover through federally insured deposits (FDIC). They also give more assurance to the consistency and lowest possible rate that banks get charged when they borrow money from the Fed Bank (the discount rate). For those that would get rid of the Fed in favor of the unfettered ‘free market’ they would be sacrificing the elasticity of our money supply relative to other country’s un-free market like behavior, allowing banks and financial institutions to over leverage themselves (as has happened in recent history) and be at the mercy of inconsistent and regional, highest loan rates banks can get – do you really want to bet it would be lower than the discount rate (currently at 0.75%). If banks pay higher to borrow money where do you think that cost will ultimately reside and what do you think the effect will be?

private company bail outs – historically includes many companies and industries including railroads, Lockheed, banks, savings and loans, auto industry, financial institutions and insurance corporations to name a few. Generally, I am not in favor of this. Neither am I in favor of government loans to private companies as many presidents (and would-be presidents) have done. As I mentioned before, I prefer the government be involved in long term R&D over this kind of direct assistance.

regulations (including anti-piracy, monopolies, environmental, etc.) – this is an absolute must. Adam Smith took over a hundred pages in “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”) to recommend banking regulations. He knew the problems with over regulation but he also knew what could happen with under-regulation of the private market. For me, regulations are a no-brainer but good regulations actually involve a massive amount of gray matter.

market subsidies – In a perfect world I would be against this but as I previously discussed, we would be at a serious disadvantage relative to the rest of the world if we gave this up. One example is farming. If we did not subsidize our farmers as China does, farming products would chiefly be an import. We can see how well that has worked with the oil industry. We used to have puppet governments in the rest of the world to assure that we had cheap energy but that is no longer a viable method for us. Subsidizing certain industries is not an option in a world economy that will not play by our rules (or the rules of the ‘free market’).

If there were a one world ‘Fed’ of some type that may facilitate how all payers play by the same rules but it would also usher in a whole new set of problems. Would we really be able to fully trust the ‘free market’ that would result from such an organization? – I doubt it. In any case, it could be argued that the IMF, consolidations like the Euro, the UN and World Court could be taking us in that direction. I believe Gorge Bush Senior coined the term – new world order.

To conclude, I would also add that I think there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ free market if by ‘pure’ you mean only certain kinds of interventions are deemed ‘pure’ and other kinds are deemed ‘corrupt’. For me, the notion of a ‘pure’ free market is a residue of what we philosophers call metaphysics. We live in a world where these kinds of artificial designations have outlived their usefulness and we have learned that it is better to let the “order [get] defined in the process of its emergence.” If we pay attention to how things are without imputing an other-worldly, God-like, meta-language to them our rationality and systems can be organized according to the ‘things themselves’ (as phenomenology would suggest or the scientific method attempts). I see the parochial idea of a ‘pure’ free-market similar to a belief in God in that we impose our idea of what the free-market should be in opposition to what it is.

Yes, we should strive to make it better but from what ‘it is’ and not what it should be according to a micro-economic perspective (if indeed that perspective canonizes certain unfettered free market truths and demonizes certain free market corruptors in advance). What ‘it is’ is a way of organizing human commerce, economy, limited resources to our advantage; -the key word being ‘our’. Is ‘our’ the few or the many? If rewarding the few will trickle down to the many then by all means we should do it. However, if the few reap more and more rewards and the many sow less and less rewards and reap more and more hardships then we are ultimately faced with a value decision…and that has a lot to do with what group you actually belong to (not what group you aspire to belong). The ‘free market’ will get rigged one way or another. My determination (as king) is if we do nothing to rig the system for the many then the rich and powerful will rig the system in a way that benefits them. There is no ‘pure’ in this sense. Yes, competition is good for equal competitors but what do you think the Vegas odds would be on a best out of x number of David and Goliath match ups?

In my opinion, Hegel’s project can only be successful by the implicit conversion of nothingness into negation. A universalizing idealism must set out certain absolute categories that allow no unaccounted for excess. Thus, immediacy and mediation must be found to negate each other, essentially depend on each other and ultimately establish each other in an apodictic transformation. However, negation itself is a transformation. If Being and nothingness are juxtaposed, nothingness must retain the essential characteristics of negation. That is, in order to maintain categorical exclusivity aspects that move toward non-relational or non-relevancy must be deemphasized. In so doing, the force of the Logic is brought to the fore and the categorical ambivalences are subsumed as accidental, nonsensical or irrelevant. Pure Being for Hegel is empty. To merely think that something ‘is’ is absolutely indeterminate, featureless, empty and vacant; thus, the move from Being to its antithesis, nothing. If Being and nothingness and Being and not-Being are equivocal, differences must be relegated to a wasteland of irrelevancy. The Hegelian deduction from Being to nothingness is the transition from thesis to antithesis, the categorical negation of Being. The tour de jour that thrusts itself forward in any historical paradigm will undermine its own accounting of Error.

In Newtonian physics the evident predictability of its model downplayed the known errors and failures of the theory and favored its accomplishments for centuries. However, the implicit errors are what drove Einstein to discover the relativity of time and space and fundamentally overturn classical physics. In any Logic, or categorical classification the success of the category and its imperative are measured by its categorical specificity and uniqueness. To the degree that categorical characteristics are blurred by its members, errors come to the fore and the certainty of the categorical distinction is weakened. Error is the unaccounted for excess that the System cannot overcome.

With regard to Being and not-Being the ‘not’ of Being is simply the category of all that is not contained in the category of Being, its logical negation. The category of Being essentially implies it’s negation because any category, as bounded and determined, excludes all the members not brought under its Law. Justice then measures appropriateness and properness relative to Law, the categorical requirement. However, courts apply jurisprudence to determine violations of individual members. When errors are made that confuse categorical determinants the system of absolutes, categorical determinates, are brought into question – the force of Law is dispersed and categorical relevancy becomes a movement of concern. However, if the categories of Being and nothingness remain absolute then justice is meaningless with regard to these categories. These categories cannot be justified but only canonized; errors cannot be allowed and presuppositions rendered irrelevant – this move is violence. It can only be sustained by force and repetition.

For Hegel, the dialectic seems at many points to deny and prohibit the possibility for categorical error or at least attempt to postpone its deductive proofs by subsuming it in further progressions that retroactively are thought to sustain the originating categories. In so doing, the universal categories of Being and nothingness are thought to be concretized; presuppositions and criticism dismissed or thought to be already accounted for by later movements. This destination can only be arrived at from a recurring empirical force that recapitulates the universal likeness of members to its category and pushes the dissimilarities to the antithetical, the logical negation of its category. In this way, justice can be deemed universal and Law established as concrete not vis-à-vis the justice of the categories themselves but as decreed Truth.

Nothingness as antithetical to Being is nominalized as the logical case of the negation of Being. However, the logical case must sacrifice certain important dissimilarities in the notion of nothingness. Nothingness does not depend on Being as its negation. There is a kind of ‘prior to’ or better, non-relational significance that is thought with nothingness. Any attempt to delineate nothingness viz. negation of Being, can only be done in ‘bad faith’; making nothing something antithetical to Being and Being as ‘pure’. In this case, ‘pure’ is an absolutely empty concept and an analogous comparison is made to nothingness as if to exhaust further distinctions.

Descartes points out that the notion of infinity always overflows itself, the notion of nothingness always eludes the concept of itself, absolute purity or abstraction. Its being or non-being are indeterminate not at odds with Being. This is perhaps similar to Hesiod’s notion of chaos. Nothingness does not negate Being or deductively follow from Being as nothingness is absolutely irrelevant and non-relational with Being. Relations always necessarily imply ‘somethings’. To found a relation, an absolute deduction, from Being to nothingness is a bit of sleight of hand and trickery to equivocate pure abstraction with nothingness.

Hegelianism seems to push categories vis-à-vis idealism, the ideal form of an empirically denuded category. Already encapsulated in idealism is the vaccine from accountability and justice. Even the particular for Hegel seems to be an ideal particular and thus plays into the ideal universal. While denying the pure abstract forms of Kant, a more concrete form of idealism is touted. The concrete form is the logical deduction, the supposed tautological certainty that is acquired when justice is suspended. A certain kind of reciprocity of categories, the movement from nothingness back to Being as given in the vacuum of pure abstraction prohibits ambivalence, the out of phase with itself that Levinas thinks with ipseity; the identity of the self as accusative not nominative. Specific beings as Being are not redacted into an identity but diffused and blurred across beings and Being, self and other, individual and community. Beings do not exist as monadic constitutes of ideal categories that afford no excess, no categorical ambivalence, no Error. Idealism is just as much a reduction as materialism. The mechanism at work depletes, abstracts and refuses justice. Its Law is proclaimed not justified. The third other is only another case of the ideal not a reason for deliberation and justice. Moreover, justice is itself subsumed into its own abstract category; denuded of substitution, the imperative to answer for the other. Ethics is yet another idealization that consists in itself, in self-determination. Even more, other determination of self is inverted and reciprocated into self determination of other. The self and other are master becoming slave and slave becoming master so they can complete themselves in one another which preserves their distinction while at the same time announcing self-consciousness.

The reciprocating movement from Being to nothingness and nothingness to Being is movement, becoming. The reciprocating movement of self and other is self-consciousness. There is no residue unaccounted for in these idealizations, no erosion of the eternal categories and no place for Error. The force of light is obliteration of Spirit. That is, Spirit obliterates justice, the necessity to account for oneself, to give place to Error. Light, as the Error of the eye, of sight, deems Truth as what is seen, as what presents itself in presence. Its purity is thought together with the proper. The proper is given carte blanche, tacit acceptance as the real and conversely the unseen is subsumed by the hinterland, the other than real, the negation of proper and thus, the improper. In this vein, Foucault would indict the contingency of civilization on the necessity for madness, the implicit requirement for the proper too be what it is on the basis of the improper. This dialectic forces an essential categorical imperative on itself that can only continually re-affirm itself through force and repetition. This move in its ‘purest’ form is logical. The Logic accounts for all excess and ultimately, can only re-affirm itself, for Hegel, as the concrete universal. Error has been accounted for, dismissed and deemed accidental. Parmenides has won the Aristotelian day albeit taken from the problematic arena of ontology to the more sure footed stage of logic. Aristotle’s proclamation against Parmenides,

“What is cannot come to be (since it already is), while nothing can come to be from what is not”

has been discounted in the Hegelian edict that nothing does come from ‘what is not’ and also from what is in the absolute emptiness of pure Being. In this way nothingness resolves in essence, it no longer exceeds the thought of itself but has found place in categorical certitude. How could nothingness not be what it ‘is’ in the vacuity of Being and the ‘not’ of ‘is’? How could there be Error in this thought? How could sense be made of any excessiveness to the Hegelian edict? Wouldn’t this excess be non-sensible, improper, accidental; a mere faux pas of Error? How could the ‘reality’ of Error be posed without only re-affirming the inevitable outcome of the categorical imperative? A certain kind of circularity, a singularity, a hermeneutic circle would result that would have to be dismissed out of hand. After all, the proof of such a lunacy could only be made from the Logic that would immediately discount any basis for its assertion. In this then the reduction that can never achieve an exteriority, it can only forever repeat itself.

As the Logic is complete within itself, labor must absolve itself in finality. Labor achieves itself in its telos, the result of its effort. Labor is merely the means to capital. Its end justifies it means. What is endued with meaning is not the effort of labor but the outcome of labor, capital. In this way, Marx would want to think the notion of alienation. The Error, what is alienated, left behind, discounted, taken account of is what it takes to produce an outcome, the means of production. The means of production is justified by capital. Is it any wonder that acquiring capital would make short thrift of what it takes to produce it? The production is an afterthought; labor has value only by its ideal completion in capital. Thus, those that live by profit (viz. Adam Smith) have short-circuited the means to capital to only acquire the end and in Smith’s thinking:

“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two (219 Wealth of Nations).

Thus the interests of the third class run contrary to the interests of the other two; expansion actually raises the cost of labor and rent and increases competition, thereby lowering profits, so much so that the ruination of a country is actually in the best interests of the third class.” (see link cited above)

From this then, the excess of capital is labor. The excess has been accounted for in its completion, capital. Even more so, in modern markets, derivatives of derivatives and risk of capital depletion are abstracted into packages of mathematical ‘certainties’; labor has been relegated to the universal emptiness of abstraction. Capital beyond any mere laborers possible dreams has been, by many orders of magnitude, severed from any realistic possibility for a laborer. The outcome has been severely restrained from labor and reserved for those that live by profit. From this then, the particular has only been shown to be an example of the universal – without excess to its categorical relationship. The Logic has once again been affirmed in its correctness and universal claim.

Thus, justice has been resolved in its end not its means. The only needs that remain is to convince the laborers that the capital they are denied justifies their existence and satiates their concerns for equity. The System has founded and given meaning to their completion and their gratitude should be for the ‘job creators’ and dispensers of the capital that justifies their existence and makes meaning (the opposite of alienation) possible. The laborer’s meaning is not given by their work but by the entrepreneurs of capital, those that make capital possible.

This then is what has made post modernism possible.

…just a few comments with regard to this:

As has been already pointed out regarding the Stephens-Davidowitz’s study, the Google data may be already tilted towards the internet crowd which may not be representative of the US population in general. However, the study does make a good point here:

Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring: Google searchers are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express socially taboo thoughts (Kreuter et al., 2009). Furthermore, individuals say they are forthcoming with Google (Conti and Sobiesk, 2007). The large number of searches for pornography and sensitive health information adds additional evidence that Google searchers express interests not easily elicited by other means.

As a Southerner, I do not think that the net 3 to 5 points in voter loss is excessive. The data sorted by US states certainly showed a higher propensity to bigotry (“racial animus”) south of the Mason-Dixon Line which seems plausible. Additionally, I would not automatically assume that the new 3 to 5 point loss would have been recovered as Obama votes had the 4 to 6 point bigotry loss been erased. The negation of a vote against a candidate does not necessarily imply a vote for a candidate, there is the option for not voting at all.

There may be some liberals that would take the bigotry percentage as an indicator of “all Republicans or conservatives” but that position would not be supported by that low of a percentage and I think, untenable. Just as some conservatives suggest that “all Democrats are socialists or communists or even fascists (viz. Goldberg)”, the folks that take that position are on the fringe right and not mainstream Republicans I would think.

On another topic, I agreed with your discussion of pomocons (post modern conservatives) albeit probably coming from a different perspective. I have a few discussions of my own on this topic:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/02/what-is-a-postmodern-conservative/

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2012/02/01/postmodern-rationalism/

I even found a post modern Mormonism web site if you can believe that:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2012/02/11/postmodern-mormonism/

While post modernism (viz. Foucault) could allow for pockets of rationalism (via archaeology and genealogy), and thus escape extreme skepticism, the meta-language that is imputed to these pockets is denied by post modernism – probably correctly in my opinion. It is just as humorous to find pomocons that take their leave from Darwin and Machiavelli as it is to find liberals that bask in the will to power of Nietzsche. I certainly can appreciate the anti-totalitarian push in post modernism and the destruction of the ‘natural’ hegemony of the Enlightenment; I think that the canon, the logocentrism of the text, cannot be so easily and vapidly dismissed without committing a greater crime of psychological and sociological denial and repression (thus perhaps an ‘eternal reoccurrence’ of the same). The work of deconstructing the zeitgeist is not merely ‘subjective’. Perhaps the Renaissance may be thought of as a kind of beginning deconstruction of Latin domination and the Enlightenment itself as the final blow to a deprecated form of Hellenism. If so, post modernism would be a thrust against the notion of essence and origin, of “Truth” whether textualized as scientific, religious, idealism, humanism, etc. but in so doing run the risk of nihilism…perhaps Nietzsche was right that nihilism would be the triumphant going under of man and the arrival of the Übermensch… perhaps simply the silent release of Buddhism…perhaps a Heideggerian second beginning. In any case, in whatever form post modernism cloaks itself (pluralism, egalitarianism, anarchism, Darwinian elitism, etc.) it is here to stay, the Great Babylon has fallen (with great confusion) we will all live in the pieces of humpty-dumpty. Conservatism as re-instituting the past will inevitably have to resort to the force and repetition it ascribes to its nemesis. Its claim on virtue is just as soiled as its nemesis; as an unbearable weight of the past. I think we live in Nietzsche’s prophecy of the death of God and now we are beset with the hard work of hearing for the first time or dying in reactionary radicalism and disparate, meaningless acts of reconstitution.