Matt has the best comment I've seen on the hilarious-yet-deranged conservacomic series that us liberals have spent the last two days chortling over:
I think this sort of thing actually tells us something important about contemporary politics. It's rather odd to see persecution fantasies coming from the right at a moment when Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Executive Branch, the judiciary, most statehouses, and most state legislatures. And yet a right-wing persecution complex is evident to even a casual consumer of right-wing media. To hear the conservative blogs, magazines, and radio shows tell it, despite total conservative domination of the political system a coalition of liberal reporters, academics, and Hollywood stars manage to be the real governing force in America.
Matt goes on to write that, crazy as this all seems, it's not that crazy. Very little on the Republican agenda has been passed, and even less of the conservative wish list items have pulled through. A fair amount of outrageous bills have moved from Norquistian fantasy to American law, but they're mostly business items, the sort of stuff that ends up screwing over the same rank-and-file this comic series is aimed at. Government still grows, gays get more rights, stem cell research will happen, etc. They should be angry, he writes, at the conservative media, which has become a propaganda outlet for a party that's betrayed conservatism.
But I think that Matt mistakes what's going on here, at least a little bit. This isn't really a Christian comic book, and while many who buy it (assuming any buy it) will surely hate the homos, a future where the UN controls America is not really what's scaring the culture warriors. This is a propaganda sheet aimed at the guys stockpiling ammo out in Montana, theorizing about one-world-orders and The Bilderberg Group. And for them, conservatism's ascendance will never be enough, even if it was shrinking government (as, incidentally, Clinton did) and outlawing deviance. Because no matter how deep the strain of antigovernment conservatism runs, the Republican party is, nevertheless, an essentially pro-government institution. And they can never escape it.
No organization whose sole motivation in life is to win elections and govern the country can ever be the true ally of antigovernment crusaders. In the end, the Republican party will always need something to govern. Bush's perfect-world government would still be a government. More to the point, because the Republican party wants to get elected to governing positions, they have to protect popular programs, spend on public priorities, and continue expanding the reach of the state to deal with emerging problems. To hold their coalition together, they keep blaming all those actions on the Democrats, but that doesn't change anything.
