whatever... Michael Hoover (fwd on Bush Advisor: Former Marxist):
``...Philosophically, Bush Gets Inspiration From an Unlikely Guru Marvin Olasky, a former Marxist, is the source of the governor's compassionate conservatism.
Now, Olasky's idea that religion can play a role in providing government social services has found special resonance with Bush, a fellow Texan and fervent Christian who wrote the foreword to Olasky's most recent book, a paean to faith-based charities published last month.
Olasky believes the current wall between church and state must be broken down to let religions use tax money to help the poor. An alcoholic needing treatment could take a government voucher to an evangelical abstinence program, for instance. Or a taxpayer could donate money to help fund a Buddhist self-help center. ''
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Over the last week various news items (Nightline, etc) have given enough of an impression of Bush and his advisors to get the idea of how he will campaign.
As far as I can tell the method of compassionate conservatism is to corrupt traditional liberal or social welfare state discourse with an over lay and comingling of nineteenth century homilies on competition, volunteerism and individual entrepreneurialism, coupled with an intensified dismantling and reconstitution of what remains of the federal welfare state. The compassion part comes in the form of actually addressing socio-economic issues instead of demonizing them, get it?
For each of the liberal agenda items in education, housing, and health for example, there is a response which reinterprets these problem areas to be the fault of past federal programs to address them---as if government had created the problem, prior to its existence. Then through a reconstitution of the federal programs charged with each item, there are offered the compassionate conservative designs. These of course turn out to be the same old Reaganite policies of throwing tax money at the problem by writing checks to various private sector service corporations, i.e. privatization schemes. Then as a corollary effort to cut waste, fraud and abuse, the federal agencies charged with oversight and management of these privatized federal contract schemes are slashed in the name of efficiency.
None of this is news of course since it is straight out of the Reagan era. The difference will mostly likely be in the method of delivering the message. This will probably rely heavily on what I think of as the Gingrich method or inversive rationalism.
The method attacks the relation between basic socio-economic problems and their governmental agency solutions. The inversion takes the form of a temporal reordering of cause and effect so that it appears that past liberal policies intended to mediate poverty and poor education are in fact the causative forces that generated both. It stands to reason therefore, that without these liberal policy initiatives, there would be no socio-economic problems to begin with.
Since most people are not interested in analizing this discursive inversion, they will simply turn-off and consider it all typical political bullshit.
But there are some interesting things to be seen. For example I think I have figured out how you drop from a heady Marxism of the Stalinist variety straight through your own asshole and arrive inside out as a typical fundamentalist christian rightwing jerk-off. This inside out or inversive transformation seems to characterize quite a few of the older conservative think-tank crew. Judging from news items, it seems Bush is making heavy use of them, probably since he suffers that vision thing deficiency. I wonder if it is genetic?
How do you get from Marxist to Rightwing bigot? Here is how I think it goes. In your heady and idealist Marxist phase, you come to understand that all that is morally wrong with the world is the fault of capitalism. Then you discover that liberal governments are actually the gung-ho facilitators of this atrocity and that various liberal policies in the socio-economic domain are used to mediate the effects and stave off a working class revolt. So you campaign though moral invective to whip up awareness and concern over the hypocrisy of government which manages both the socio-economic atrocity of capitalism and then tries to suppress revolt from overthrowing it through the mediation of the social welfare state. This is the high critique phase which I would characterize as ground level modernist rationalism, but it is also imbued with an idealization of working class virtue--working people are saints at heart, salt of the earth, etc.
But, since the poor and working class are hardly saints, they are seen to fall into milking state programs for all their worth, and you become outraged at this abuse, along with its implicit dismissal of your humanitarian concern for their well being. Disillusion sets in against your own idealizations of these angels in the mire. It appears to you these charges of the capitalist state are just as criminal, greedy, competitive and nasty as the system that they live under. The welfare state itself becomes the core moral problem since it is seen to corrupt your angels through its mediations. The mediations become the mire. It then appears that the by now naturalized competition of the market are the purifying waters, washing away the corruption and leaving the saintly working body to grow anew. The mire is the state welfare mediation and once washed away, it will leave the working class angels clean to re-assert their idealized being and reflect the proper and true moral rectitude of the world. This then is the key transformational passage through the last sphincter and most of the remaining journey inside out follows some natural ordering of its own accord. Until there comes a day when viola, the free market ideologue springs forth in the full throated song of capital, competition, and the moral grace of christian righteousness (oh, sweet mystery of life, at last I have found you...)... all of which is mere costume, supported by the ugly armature of realpolitik, and the cynical machinations of an old Stalinist asshole in his dementia.
Chuck Grimes