A New Age of Unreason

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted August 31, 2004.

Appalled and frightened. That's how Mark Crispin Miller believes Founding Fathers would describe their emotions if they were around to witness the actions of the current occupants of the White House and the disintegration of our republic.

A professor of media studies at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller is the author of the wildly humourous and best-selling "Bush Dyslexicon." Miller's new book, "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order" (Norton, 2004), is of a more serious nature. In it, Miller argues that the ascendant Bush Republicans are in the midst of subverting the United States' republic with a theocracy, and that Bush & Co. have embarked us in a new age of unreason that rejects many of the Enlightenment concepts upon which this country was founded.

Miller sat down with AlterNet for an interview during a recent visit to San Francisco to talk about the state of conservatism in this country and how the folks in the White House believe their "higher father" wants them to govern the United States.

Your book title is "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order." So it's about Bush and Cheney, two self-described conservatives. Yet the word "conservative" doesn't appear when you write about them. Why is that?

I don't use the word conservative in my book once to describe Bush & Company. That's a misnomer. Conservatism. Let's talk about it for a minute. What is it? Is it just being a nasty prick? That's what you'd think looking at the "conservative" landscape. What does Ann Coulter stand for, what are her principles? She just says the vilest possible things she can say.

Conservatism as far as I know means strict limits on federal power, a refusal to meddle in the affairs of other nations, an ornery distrust of ideologies and theories – instead a favoritism of the lessons of experience. Real conservatives also believe in economic self-sufficiency – you don't get a handout, and you thrive by dint of your hard work and playing by the rules. Not one of these qualities has been honored by this administration.

On the contrary, this is a radical administration. They have a radical view on the expansion of police powers. They believe in unilateral preemptive war – which is about as radical and unconservative as you can get. Regarding the typical conservative distrust of ideologies, this is a totally ideologized presidency. John Ashcroft prosecutes those things that offend his religious scruples – like Oregon's suicide law. In a time of terrorism that's what they prosecute.

See, they don't live in the real world – they can't learn from experience. Finally, there's nothing conservative about crony capitalism. They are completely fucking the average person, making it harder to declare bankruptcy and so on. People are getting absolutely screwed, and the administration so far has functioned in an economic sense to take every penny of public wealth and put it in private coffers. So, I don't see any conservativism there.

Meanwhile, radicals on the left are sticking with the notion that there's no difference between the two parties.

Some of the radical lefty journalists write that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. That's just crap. That's the kind of armchair marxism that allows one to be more radical than thou. Those guys think in economistic terms – "it's all a matter of capital." That's not the case here. There's something else going on. Most of the business community is rational. There's a tremendous corporate effort to deal with global warming, because it's going to destroy a lot of them – the insurance industry for example.

Jan Frel is AlterNet's political editor.

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