25% of Americans favor the shutdown and the position of the house Republican radicals. And that's not a fringe.

A Party of Paranoid Cranks

"Conservative" is such a misnomer for every faction of today’s "conservative coalition."

None of them are out to conserve America or its basic public institutions – by which I mean of course the “actually existing America” we grew up with and the actual institutions that have surrounded and given shape to all our lives.

All of these faux conservatives are in truth right wing revolutionaries in tri-cornered hats, claiming to want to conserve an America that has been gone for two hundred years but really out to destroy the America that is right here, right now.

The libertarians and so-called "fiscal conservatives" are right wing radicals frankly out to abolish more than a century of progress for the working class and all the non-rich of America, destroying everything from Medicare and the FDA to public education, public highways, and public fire departments.

The Christian right, what with 40% of all Americans saying they reject evolution and accept Biblical creationism, is every bit as radical.

They, too, pretend to want to conserve an America that has been gone not just since the sexual revolution but since Darwin and even, in some respects, since the end of colonial theocracy in New England.

But they are in fact cultural and political revolutionaries who reject and openly seek to overthrow a century of maturing American humanism.

With sometimes shocking candor, they want to abolish not only legal abortion but legal contraception, legal pornography, legal sex other than heterosexual and other than within a monogamous marriage, and divorce legal at all (the Catholic right) or legal for reasons other than infidelity (the Protestants).

And these two wings of the American revolutionary right, so profoundly opposed to each other ideologically, are united in practice only but very effectively in their implacable hostility to the actually existing America.

And that would be the real, contemporary, and established America so aptly described by Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich as a land of, albeit limited, secularism and socialism even as they also, and with entire success, completely mischaracterize us, its de facto conservative defenders, as the anti-American political and cultural revolutionaries they really are.