Hail Fasciste.

Those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. You've got to change your evil ways. Baby.

Carlos Santayana

I have been ruminating a bit about the conservative gains in the recent elections. The sturm und drang of the tea partiers was in its full glory, even supplanting the republican candidate in New York with it's populist proxy. Who then lost.  Midterm elections are usually trouble for parties in power (especially for timid presidents who can't seize and control their agenda) and the breadth of the popular discontent can't really be quantified at this time.

I have a couple of thoughts to share. Number one, the conservative right are pretty poor sports, petulant babies who talk rebellion when things don't go their way. Liberals gritted our collective teeth throughout the Bush and Reagan terms, but I can't seem to recall anyone talking about watering the ol' liberty tree with the blood of the opposition.

It took a long time, incompetence and a lot of deregulation to put us into the spot we are in but of course it is all the current occupant of the hot seat's fault, Americans having remarkably short memories and dreadful analytic skills.

I was looking back into the history of the last century for a corollary and I can't help but keep thinking about the Spanish Civil War in 1936. I know that I am on close terms with hyperbole and will try to temper my prognostication. The Spanish conflict went down sort of like this. A group of Army generals in Spain called the nationalists, with the support of Germany, Italy and several other fascist enclaves initiated a revolt against the duly elected government of Manuel Azana. The United States was officially neutral, wink, wink. The usurpers were helped by various American corporations like Texaco, General Motors, Firestone and Ford. They eventually succeeded in bringing down the elected government and installed the dictator Franco to his long rule.  The whole conflict makes for very interesting reading, and the actions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade are very inspiring.

I have real concerns about the partisan divide in this country. With all the fervor about something as seemingly benign as health care, what kind of teeth gnashing is in store around the corner when something really dire raises its head? For even more consequential questions?

We don't like each other, can't talk civilly, our elected officials won't work together, it's just a big mess.  So the tea baggers can marshall their hysteria and try to bring down our side and if they are successful we can foment our own brand of rebellion and then subsequently try to torpedo their fleet.  My optimistic nature wants to believe that cooler centrist heads will prevail and that we will find some tangent center space in which to converse. That moderates on both sides, if any still in fact exist, can temper the radicals on either end of the equation and find a common language.

But we overlook the fascistic coloration of the god and guns mob at our peril.  If the right keeps feeding this beast, they may find themselves beholden to a monster that eats them alive.