Peggy Noonan has a WSJ article entitled "A Nation That Believes Nothing." Her points are well taken; Noonan argues that today's Democrats say any false thing that gets them elected, and (establishment) Republicans are slow to call the Democrats on their dishonest assault on the Constitution. The result is that neither side enunciates a coherent political position, and certainly not a position based on Constitutional principles. No one believes either of the mainstream political parties, and the approval rating for Congress is in the 10% range.

This results in a long period of compromise between dedicated leftists and moderate Republicans, and consequently the polity has moved steadily leftward. The national debt has gone from essentially zero to over $15 trillion in just thirty years, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it but indebtedness that will fall on future generations. Democrats like to blame the effects of their own policies on Republicans, but that exposes both Democrats' dishonesty and their profound ignorance of cause and effect. Unless, of course, Democrats are deliberately trying to destroy the Republic, which is exactly what Marxists have done to so many former states.

But everyone believes in something. There is a long history of political shifts in the USA: Federalists, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Dixiecrats. The two extremes in American political thought today are the Constitutionalists on the right, represented by the Tea Party, and the Manifestoists on the left, epitomized by the elitist followers of President Obama. The last of the old establishment Republicans are going away, after repeated failures to defend American values: Bush I, Dole, Bush II, McCain. The very last of the old Democrats is Joe Lieberman (now an independent), who is retiring.

The Tea Party is a recent development that is much closer to Thomas Jefferson than to the various establishment Republicans who have dominated the Republican debate before and since Ronald Reagan. Obama and Romney-Ryan are neck-and-neck. Democrat supporters identify with Obama and Tea Party supporters identify with the Constitution; note how slowly the Tea Party embraced Romney and how quickly the Tea Party stood tall when Ryan joined the ticket.

Economic communism has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere it has been tried. Antonio Gramsci proposed a cultural communism about eighty years ago. If you are not familiar with Comrade Gramsci, he proposed to take over cultural institutions (media, academia, political parties, churches) by infiltration in order to further the goals of a Marxist Utopia. Gramsci's plan has worked quite well here in the USA, insofar as takeover is concerned, but not so well in the surfeit of failures of the Obama administration.

It is quite astonishing that the Manifestoists have gained power so rapidly -- well within my lifetime. Senators Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson were strong members of the Democratic Party with American constitutional values. They reflected the prevailing Democratic Party consensus of that time, which consistently rejected the Manifestoists during the Great Depression and up until the last few years. So how is it that the political landscape has changed so abruptly?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Manifestoists win by lying, cheating, and stealing. There are exactly two current major philosophical systems that make a holy sacrament of dishonesty: Marxism and Islamism. Not coincidentally, these and similar traits are characteristic of psychopaths, as listed in Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathic Check List - Revised. For example. on "NBC NEWS' MEET THE PRESS," on Sunday, May 22, 2005, Dr. Howard Dean, then Chairman of the Democratic Party, stated:

Our [Democratic Party] moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans', is we don't think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.

Absolutely no one thinks kids ought to go to bed hungry at night. Watching Dr. Dean on the program, he is so earnest, so sincere, so dishonest, and so like a psychopath. A display of callousness toward his victims is one of the items that tag a psychopath, as Dr. Dean demonstrates. If Democrats are so concerned about hunger and poverty, why do the Democratic Party-controlled big-city ghettos remain mired in poverty, ignorance, crime, and corruption decade after decade? The only major city to make progress in these areas was New York City, but that was under Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Chicago is a cesspool of corruption, with the Illinois governors regularly sent to prison and the city administration thoroughly corrupt. The Democratic Party constituent factions are quite willing to sell their birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage.

Dr. Dean's statement is ludicrous, too silly for serious consideration, except that the Manifestoists have prepared the battlefield carefully with their Goering-grade media propaganda. Democrats lead in spending more and more for education, and we get lower and lower academic performance. We wasted trillions of dollars on houses no one could afford and now no one wants. Poverty is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. We waste trillions of dollars on stimulus jobs programs, and no net jobs are created. But favored political classes are paid off, with extremely small dollops of the Democratic Party largesse going to the actual poor, paid for by the middle class which took a massive financial hit when the Democrats' housing bubble collapsed.

All that wasted money comes from the productive members in our economy, from China, or from government printing presses (QE1, QE2) and goes to Democratic Party factions and to our rapidly expanding nomenklatura and their $4-million vacations. Manifestoists are trying to build the perfect dependent society: ignorant, poor, easy to impress, and easy to control. Elitist Manifestoists are utterly contemptuous of the people in what they call fly-over country, and of the republican (small r) values that made the United States of America the greatest and strongest nation in the world.