Nancy MacLean's new book

Skimming along Nancy MacLean's, Democracy in Chains, a history of the campaign to bring libertarianism into the mainstream of American politics, confirmed a religious belief I've now had for over fifty years: that the Right knows how to sustain the narrative while the Left merely reacts to it.

Consequently, we now live in the new dark ages of conservative think tanks and Freedom Caucasus and Heritage Foundations and Cato Institutes, spewing their arm-chair fantasies of rugged American individualism and every-man-for-himself. And the creators of this dark age--they're named in Nancy MacLean's book--now control what passes for dialog and too-often policy in this country.

After watching PBS Newshour last night, where yet again anchorwoman Woodruff lobbed ping-pong balls to two defenders of the current Administration, who battted them back to her like happy kitty-cats playing with a ball of grandma's yarn, I turned to C-SPAN for a little reality, catching the last half hour of a Congressional hearing on the Defense Department Financial Management.

Thank god for C-SPAN, and before C-SPAN I.F. Stone, and before Stone George Orwell, and before Orwell Mark Twain, and before Twain Socrates.

Switching from C-SPAN to Turner Movie Classics (TMC), I watched Sunrise at Campobello for a good half-hour, right up to 1924. In the last scene I viewed, FDR was strapped to a hospital bed, but doing chin-ups, Eleanor by his bed reading out loud headlines from the morning paper.

What would FDR make of our current guy? It's something to think about given how much they both have in common.

It's true FDR got lucky, serving before the rise of the corporate state and the lobotomy performed on the American public by those identified in Nancy MacLean's new book.