Reading from Stone Tablets

We all keep puzzling away at what is going on in the world. The latest puzzler is John Dean, longing for the good old days of Goldwater, and describing the new conservative forces as authoritarian in nature. He is right, but that doesn't quite go far enough.

In the past, conservative leaders saw themselves as being one half of a dance to the music of time. Sometimes the right was in power, sometimes the left, one would favor big business and the rich for a while, and then when the people had decided that had gone on long enough the pendulum would swing back and a government would be elected that favored the poor and the workers.

Sometimes though strong leaders like Mussolini, Franco, Napoleon, Pinochet, Sukarno, Batista, and the Roman Emperors arise. Such dictators took the business of looking after their rich friends even further than elected rulers of the right. In doing so they were more authoritarian, had more support from the army, had more control over people's lives, were in the business of crushing dissent, but they were still doing it all within the context of the existing social order. Sure they wanted to be at the top of the heap forever, perhaps hand it on to their sons to keep the good life in the family, but they were happy for the rest of society to keep going much as it had been in order to keep supplying that good life.

But there is another kind of dictatorship which arises from time to time - people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Cromwell, Robespierre, Calvin, Khomeini, Kim Il Sung, strong leaders determined to fundamentally change the society they live in. Oh of course they enjoy the power, and, sometimes, the good life, but these are people on a mission. These dictators were people who wanted to change their societies radically and forever (sometimes, actually and symbolically, they even altered the calendar to start again from year one). They have come down from the mountain with tablets of stone from a god or an economist or a racial supremacist, and they set about turning those commandments into reality.

Every aspect of society from the education of children, to media, to marriage, to clothing, to language, to the economy, to religious observance, to flags, to militarism, to the glorious history, to sport, to the arts, to science, will be bent to the vision of the great leader, until all of the country is formed in the image of his mind. And then, not infrequently, one country is no longer enough, and other countries must be forced to share the vision. Dissent, debate, disagreement, protest, are no longer permitted, and indeed left and right politics are no longer relevant in society (and it is often hard to tell where in the political spectrum such leaders fit).

Because they are so convinced of the beauty of their minds, they will, and indeed must, stop at nothing to gain power and maintain it. Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed. 'How can they behave like that?' we progressives cry. But morality is irrelevant when you have a vision. Such leaders are determined that they and their kind will rule forever in the new heaven they have created on Earth.

So, dear reader, who do you think are the role models of the present day conservative leaders around the world?