Even Conservatives Accuse the Republican Party of Mirror-Image Marxism

Well, he calls it inverted Marxism but Mike Lofgren shares, somewhat more eloquently, a lot of the criticisms I've been making about the modern Republican party in his article "Revolt of the Rich" at the American Conservative.* Especially when he writes regarding Grover Norquist and a number of other so-called Conservatives:

They were quick to denounce as socialism any attempt to mitigate its impact on society. Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions of people’s interests get damaged in the process of implementing their ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must never be tampered with, just as Lenin believed that his version of materialist laws were final and inexorable.

If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

This pattern in their thinking, expressed by other writers as market fundamentalism (among other terms) is becoming increasingly obvious, even to those who should be fellow travelers. It is scary to see this philosophy as having a chance of winning another election, rather than being consigned to the dustbin of history which it deserves to share with its close cousin, orthodox Marxism.

*I've been liking this magazine more and more lately. I think some of what they say about debt and deficits are rather daft, and their isolationism can go a little far for my taste (I think Libya was worth it, but largely agree with Larison on Syria) but on the whole it's a perspective worth reading. Unlike National Review, which more often than not leads me to ranting about how baseless so many of its claims are. With American Conservative, I often disagree with their positions, but I feel their positions are baseless far less often.