It’s worth giving your public email and a fake zip code to get past the registration barrier at The New Republic to read Johnann Hari’s account of being afloat with a bunch of conservatives afloat on a luxury cruise sponsored by National Review. It’s a great peek at the skull beneath the skin of modern conservatism. It confirms my feeling that the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, was the best thing that could have happened to conservatives. Time and social change has long since made it unacceptable for them to whip up fear of the niggers and kikes (except eupehmistically, using the fantasias of welfare queens and the Liberal Media), and even faggot-bashing is beginning to lose its charm in certain circles. To the rescue comes the image of swarthy hordes from the East, ready to overwhelm the more civilized folks:

Some people go on singles’ cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races”–i.e., white people–“are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be “large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015” as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.” He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures–he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping–to “prove” his case.

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block–already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times–I counted–when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States.

The authoritarianism of the Right has become more and more naked in the last few years, and increasingly, I don’t know whether to see it as farce or tragedy. The ruling of the Supreme Court in favor of school segregation was a real blow to me, and I’m still reeling from it. Not that other rulings lately haven’t been just as bad, but there’s something about this latest one that is particularly heartbreaking. For over fifty years, Brown vs. Board of Education has been important not only because of the actual, direct changes that it made to people’s lives, but as a symbol that our system worked; that even when there were massive, long-standing injustices that contradicted our essential beliefs of justice and democracy, we had tools and the will to address those injustices, without having to set up guillotines and gallows in the streets. But in handing down its judgment, the Supreme Court not only wiped that judgment away as a symbol (or at least leaves it toothless), but cruelly, cynically, claimed that it was doing so in the name of furthering MLK’s Dream^®. National Review itself tries to spin the new decision by praising Brown: “…the decision resembles Brown in a crucial respect: Starting now in Louisville and Seattle, students won’t be blocked from certain schools simply because they lack the proper melanin content.”

Avedon Carol is a much better thinker than I am, and so expresses with an elegant beauty exactly what scares me so much about the people who have been running our country for the last twenty years, and even better — why American Democracy is a beautiful thing well worth preserving:

When our Constitution was signed, two things made it stand out and brought praise and admiration from all over the world. One was the idea of rule of law from which no one was exempt, in a country without any kind of a king. The other – the thing that made us genuinely, literally unique, was that we had written the secular nature of our government into law, maintaining that there was no religious test for public office, no state religion, a wall of separation between church and state.

The conservative movement’s goal has always been to overturn both of those fundamental principles, and they are doing it. They must be stopped.

The twin philosophies driving the Republican Party — theocracy and governance by the free market — are fundamentally anti-democratic, more well-suited to a feudal society than to a democracy. Although it’s become de rigeur to shut down any implication that many pundits and politicians have intentions that are clearly authoritarian by tossing back Godwin’s Law, it’s time to say it: George W. Bush and his friends are fascists. There shouldn’t even be an argument about this, especially after the latest revelations of Cheney’s total disregard for the system of checks and balances. When John fucking Dean, a veteran of the Watergate scandal, starts touring the country criticizing an administration for being too out-of-control with executive power, we should clearly respond with something better than “how interesting.”

The Republicans on the cruise certainly seem less disingenuous about their contempt for democracy, even while trying to convince themselves that Iraq has been a “triumph” that “couldn’t have gone better,” (the wisdom of Norman Podhoretz at work):

Tonight, there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entrée has arrived. I drop the news that there are moves in Germany to have Rumsfeld extradited to face war crimes charges. A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, “If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to cite the Pinochet precedent, and [Kate] O’Beirne snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: “Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.” “Exactly,” adds O’Beirne’s husband. “And he privatized Social Security.”

And while they reminisce about fascist dictators of the past, Dinesh D’souza, a waste of a good oxygen-to-carbon-dioxide recycling system if there ever was one, helps push the new version of the Dolchstosslegende with the help of Robert Bork, no doubt figuring that if it worked so well in Weimar, why not now?

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public–that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich–are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”

The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

It’ll be the Jews’ fault in the end. Just keep reading the script.

I have kind of a personal connection to National Review. In the mid-eighties, I spent two summers in Ohio, working for my grandfather, an immigrant from East Europe who owned his own electrical contracting firm. Ronald Reagan was as beloved to him as he was as loathed by me, and he not only subscribed to National Review for years, but swore by it as a font of wisdom. He often passed articles to me much like a missionary distributes tracts to a heathen, hoping that one of them would open my eyes to the Way. At one point, after I was in college, he even bought me a subscription for my birthday. And yes, I did read it, in fact.

National Review always seemed like a strange choice for my grandfather. Yes, he was definitely right-wing, and yes, it was people like him who made the Reagan Revolution possible. But National Review has always a very patrician tone. It is to the Right what The Nation is to the Left; not only in terms of prominence, but also in its bias favoring East Coast intellectuals who went to the right schools — in short, the very people my grandfather disdained most. It’s not a magazine of the heartland, nor is it one of the working class. One thing that I always disliked about it was the air of condescension that its articles were steeped in. Even in its better days, it was the magazine for people who had been born on third base and remained convinced that they had hit a triple.

But the meanness and petty cruelty of modern conservatives wasn’t present when my grandfather was passing those articles to me, and in Hari’s article, they even seem embarrassed of founder William F. Buckley, as if he’s a senile old uncle who’s turned into a bleeding-heart liberal. Beneath the patrician smugness, Buckley always had not only a working intellect, but a basic decency, both of which are liabilities nowadays. In the old days, when he hosted Firing Line, he had guests from across the political spectrum, including radical lefties like Noam Chomsky. And he didn’t bully them or turn off their microphone in a fit of pique. Nowadays, that alone makes him look like a radical.

More commentary on this article by Digby and James Wolcott. Props again to Avedon Carol for the original link.