The Las Vegas Review-Journal introduced me to a new right-wing fringe group, The Oath Keepers. With a motto of "Not on Our Watch", the group bills itself as a "non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, peace officers, fire-fighters, and veterans who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." You can imagine who the domestic enemy is.

Founded in March of this year by Stewart Rhodes, a former staffer to Texas GOP Congressman Ron Paul and a former Army paratrooper with a Yale Law degree, the group is targeting law enforcement and military personnel for membership. The group, whose membership in the thousands, is to hold its first convention in Las Vegas beginning October 24th.

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It is not difficult to see that conservatives in the United States see themselves as besieged. Read any conservative blog and what jumps out other than the sheer amount of unbelievable ignorance that pervades and a deep, irrational adherence to failed socio-economic policies that have accrued an eleven trillion national debt and brought about an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor is a notion that their America is disappearing. I am not really sure that their America ever really existed, but that aside, the conservative mindset is a frightened, paranoid one.

Democracy Corps' James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Karl Agne have a new report out that finds that "self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America." They go on to say that "these voters identify themselves as part of a `mocked' minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge." Knowledge? Knowledge is based on empirical observation. These have a deep-seeded faith but knowledge they wholly lack. I could spend the rest of my days demonstrating to these people how Ronald Reagan's crew set in motion a process that redistributed income from the middle class towards the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans and these people would still worship Ronald Reagan. They are beyond reason and to engage in a rational debate with them is fruitless. Facts don't matter to these people. To them a cool day in July disproves global warming while an early season snow storm signals the advent of an ice age.

The key findings:

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a `secret agenda' to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years. This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country - a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites. They also believe they possess a level of knowledge and understanding when it comes to politics and current events, one gained from a rejection of the mainstream media and an embrace of conservative media and pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which sets them apart even more.

Looking at the current political debate, it was evident in our focus group discussions that the divide between conservative Republicans and even the most conservative-leaning independents remains very, very wide. Independents harbor doubts about Obama's health care reform but are desperate to see some version of health care reform pass this year; the conservative Republicans view any health care reform as a victory for Obama and are militantly opposed. The language they use further reflects this divide. Conservative Republicans fully embrace the `socialism' attacks on Obama and believe it is the best, most accurate way to describe him and his agenda. Independents largely dismiss these attacks as partisan rhetoric detracting from a legitimate debate about what many of them do see as excessive government control and spending.

Conservatives now use the term "socialist" to refer to any increase in government power because the word "liberalism" has lost its potency as an epithet. So they have upped the ante throwing around terms such as "socialism", "fascism" and "communism". In doing so, they only prove that they don't even fully understand these terms. Moreover, they preach "limited government" and fail to even recognize how the party they support intrudes on the lives of Americans with warrantless wiretapping to take but one example. At least, libertarians are consistent on this. The only consistency about conservatives is their inconsistency. They preach the sanctity of life for the unborn but capital punishment bothers them not one iota.

One can understand why a Mitt Romney, a Dick Cheney, a Pierre DuPont, a Steve Forbes, a Patricia Woertz, a Steve Wynn or a Rupert Murdoch are conservatives. They benefit financially from the unfettered free market policies and low tax schemes espoused by conservatives. It's harder to understand why an Erick Erickson is conservative.

Furthermore, conservatives are nothing more than hypocritical when it comes to bemoaning government intervention in the economy. Take the Farm Bill. Look at corn subsidies in United States. They totaled $56.2 billion from 1995-2006 and the primary beneficiary was Archer Daniels Midland, the company run by Patricia Woertz. According to the Cato Institute, 43 percent of ADM's profit over this period was directly attributable to government subsidies received by the company. Between 2002 and 2007, Halliburton received $21 billion in government contracts, often without competitive bidding. For a man who has spent all but five of the last 37 years as a public servant, Dick Cheney has an estimated net worth of over $90 million thanks largely to that cozy relationship between corporations and public officials. And yet Steve Wynn, the CEO of the Las Vegas based Wynn Resorts, claimed just last week that "government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history."Freepers, meanwhile, swallow that lie hook, line and sinker.

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Once again Ross Douhat is wrong as usual. In a column entitled Inequality As Usual in the New York Times, Mr. Douhat seeks to divert attention from the causes of social inequality and reassign culpability from its conservative progenitors to liberalism for failing in nine short months to reverse a three decade assault on the middle class and the poor.

According to Mr. Douhat should the Obama Administration fail to reverse our still-widening social inequality, it "will represent a significant policy failure." Perhaps but I take issue with a number of Mr. Douhat's assertions. Only a deluded conservative could claim that the federal income tax is already quite progressive. Quite the opposite. In 1948, still at the start of our "Great Compression", the effective Federal Tax Rate (Income Tax + FICA) for median families stood at 5.30 percent while the effective Federal Tax Rate on the richest one percent was 76.9 percent. Even as late as 1980, the effective Federal Tax Rate for median families was 23.68 percent versus 31.7 percent for the top percent. By 1985, Reagan's tax cuts narrowed that margin to just 46 basis points, 24.44 percent on median families versus 24.9 percent on the richest one percent. While real income for the bottom 90 percent of the population fell by 11 percent between 1973 and 2005, those in the top .01 percent bracket, comprising some 14,000 households with annual incomes averaging nearly $13 million, saw their take increase by 250 percent over the same period and yet they were gifted by the Bush Administration with unparalled tax cuts.

I'm also struck by the problem is too vexing so let's not fix it mentality of Mr. Douhat.

There's only so much that politicians can do about broad socioeconomic trends. The rise of a more unequal America is a vexingly complicated issue, whose roots may wind too deep for public policy to reach.

The zenith of fairness in America was the mid-1960s. That achievement was the fruit of the public policies that were enacted during the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. The great reduction of inequality that undid the gross divide of the 1920s and created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change that included the adoption of a progressive tax structure that enabled a larger government role in the economy and provided the basis for a broad range of redistributive programs. Mr. Douhat is simply wrong to suggest that there's only so much that politicians can do about social inequality. History proves otherwise.

On the other hand, we face problems that FDR did not have. One critical difference between then and now is that the Federal Government, thanks largely to 'limited government' GOP Administrations, is encumbered by over $11 trillion in debt. Much of that debt was accrued to pay for a defense build-up that ultimately was little more than a redistributive transfer of wealth to the arms industry. Or take the Bush-Cheney Energy Bill which provided $6 billion in direct subsidies to the oil & gas sector plus another $20 billion to $32 billion in indirect subsidies over 20 years. Our five-year $300 billion Farm Bill includes $15 billion in annual subsidies mostly to large agri-businesses such as Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill. Note that 75 percent of these subsidies go to a handful of commodities (mostly wheat, corn, and oilseeds) used as food additives, making highly processed junk food cheap – while fruits and vegetables and whole foods currently get almost no aid. Nearly 70 percent of farm subsidies go to the top 10 percent of the country's biggest growers – while America loses one family farm every half an hour. There's socialism for the wealthy in this country. Conservatives just seem to want to gloss over that fact, perhaps because they are the beneficiaries.

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