Paul Krugman put a bee ee ay yootiful column up a few days ago about how the Bush Administration is busily resurrecting practices that were discarded as ineffectual and dangerous all the way back in Medieval Europe (the tax farming reference is explained here, by the way). What’s remarkable about this isn’t so much the knuckleheaded incompetence with which these things are executed or the sheer grasping avarice motivating them - these things are simply expected from the Bushies at this point. Rather, what’s really interesting here is what this reveals about their ultimate goals and motives, and by extension those of the broader conservative movement that nurtured them, brought them to power, and enabled (enables, rather) their every excess not merely willingly, but with what appears to be positive glee.

You see, the traditional definition of a conservative was simply someone who liked things pretty much the way they were, and wanted change to come in a form that was gradual, mild, and, if possible, basically illusionary. Revolutions of almost any kind are purest anathema to conservatives of this kind. The modern form of Republicanism (manifested most profoundly in the Bush Administration) is shaped from a very different mold. These conservatives (often referred to as “movement conservatives”) want to tear up and remold the most basic institutions of our society and government into the form of the most corrupt, elitist, and anti-democratic institutions of the past. Instead of the careful, if at times infuriating or even oppressive, caution of the conservatives of the past, these modern movement conservatives represent a peculiar species of reactionary revolutionaries.

Why is it so important to understand this? Because this reality underlies essentially every goal and action of the modern conservative movement. The war in Iraq, and Cheney’s secret energy task force, and the whole Plamegate fiasco? Conceived and maintained as part of a plan to roll back the carefully limited system of checks and balances put in place by the Founders in favor of a kind of executive absolutism that would not be out of place in pre-Revolutionary France. The attempted privatisation of Social Security, and of the armed forces, and of tax collection, and of…? Part of a plan to destroy the popular administration of public goods that only became really firmly rooted in America with FDR’s New Deal in order to shift the profit - and the power - to an unaccountable corporate oligarchy akin to the Medicis in Florence, or the Gilded Age right here in America.

Put simply, the core goal of the modern conservative movement is to kill everything that makes America a place worth living in, and maybe even (when they aren’t running it, anyway) a place to admire. A place to believe in. And we. Must. Stop. Them.

End rant.