What follows is an early meditation on falangism and its relationship to technology. I am not at all sure my characterization of my parent's true desires is correct, and while I meant for the essay to be fair, it has to be said that it is entirely a conjecture. I think it's nearly impossible to remember accurately what one hoped for, anyway.

"Malthusian" is used in a very different sense here than the way it is usually; Thomas Robert Malthus' anxiety about overpopulation was only a tiny component of his overall outlook. Malthus actually believed that piety could be used constructively to mold môres; in particular, he hoped that the celibacy, including celibacy within marriage, would become recognized as urgently necessary for human flourishing. He was unable to endorse either contraception because it was still poorly developed in Europe, and was strongly identified in the clerical mind with infanticide. At the same time, however, he was opposed to charitable activity since he believed it merely stimulated population growth among the improvident. As perverse as this pair of religious inferences are, they actually remain very common among the Christian right.

My point here is that he was a particularly prominent advocate for the association of piety with hygiene; the association of devout rigor with materially wholesome living. In later years, this spirit of religion being a discipline, in which the elect thereby won unlimited mastery over events, would be ever-more pure of any peculiarly Christian content. The pure life was one not of resistance to temptation, but a stern, unsentimental conquest of the natural world by the pure will. When technology was acknowledged generally as a detached, and autonomous force within human affairs, then it became the purest idea&%151;the epiphany&%151;of success in the spiritual discipline.

QUESTION: How well are we are we served by introducing a new term (foreign to most Americans) into the discussion at this point? Why not merely refer to it as, "American fascism"?

At first I favored this, but then I realized there were two problems:
(a) "American fascism" sounds to many as if the speaker thinks the United States (rather than Latin America) is the prototype. It sounds like—not that it is, it just sounds that way—the speaker has lost any sense of proportion and is denouncing the United States as an actual, fascist state.

(b) The reason why I wanted another term was that I saw that a lot of conservatives could point out important differences between far-right ideology here, and the fascists of Europe. These differences do exist, and they are so profound that the right has (as Orcinus points out) been able to score points with it. This has obscured genuine and alarming parallels.

What do I mean by techno-falangism? Let me define my terms: falangism is a type of authoritarian society, which is comfortable with neo-liberal, unregulated capitalism. Technocratic governments seek to impose austere market policies on countries that are likely to suffer pain from them; the evidence suggests that technocratic regimes are not terribly successful at managing the economy. Technocracies, however, can hoe this line for decades like Salazar's government in Portugal. They are boring affairs, lacking the macabre bombast of fascism.

But I made up "techno-falangism" myself to describe a disturbing trend: the way in which technological improvements may sometimes favor aggressive, authoritarian regimes. Improved methods of surveillance, better propaganda, and new production functions can definitely undermine freedom. Is this inevitable?

Let me now turn to Whittier, the birthplace of yours truly as well as Pres. Nixon. Whittier is an attractive city of about 110,000 people, now demographically mixed. In the late '70's it was a WASP outpost in the Hispanic and African American tide, and we had a very prominent John Birch Society; my parents were members of an austere Calvinist denomination of Protestantism (a pastor of which later murdered a gynecologist as part of his crusade against abortion). My parents were, in one sense, very progressive. Christian Fundamentalism was, for them, a sort of Malthusian path to a productive, robust society. My father is very strongly oriented to duty and patriotism, and I think he would love to live in an austere socialist society provided we didn't use the s-word. Say, for example, we had an American de Gaulle...

I noticed there was a certain type of personality which loved the clean, moral clarity of the high desert: the gleaming aluminum jewels to the sky, the mastery of reason over chaos, the joy of new machines and the unembarrassed indulgence in excess. To such people there was no questioning of progress. The Vietnam War had been doomed by sloppiness and corruptly liberal Democrats; I see now that my parents, in their approval of the Reagan Revolution, were radical in a way that shocked my innately conservative sensibilities. The radicalism lay in the revolutionary vision of a society machine-tooled to clean, hygienic efficiency; a society machine-tooled to clean odorless, Sunset-Magazine mastery of order over barbaric looseness. I was struck by the way they seemed to worship not Jesus so much as Paul. Their messiah Paul, I visualized as the dapper retired Northrop engineer who was the pastor at the OPC. To me Jesus was — and is — the irreversible moral authority who tormented me with his stare.

How could he look on this and approve? I wondered; and yet I knew my future was bound up in being a good exponent of the modern, unquestioning virtue of progress.

The developers who practically ran Whittier as a Protestant Israeli settlement in the midst of a Roman Catholic Palestine (yes, this is a cartoon) were market fundamentalists; but they were enthusiasts of the gracile metal insects that Los Angeles spawned, the Phantoms and Voodoos, the Corsairs and the Crusaders that could carry 1000 kilos of ordnance under each wing at mach 2. The Minutemen whose SRB's were manufactured in Downey could each commit ten 9-11 massacres in milliseconds, but the John Birch Society relished the prospect of their use. Decades later I am driving in another gleaming beetle on a smooth ribbon of tarmac, fiddling with the radio tuner. AM ghetto; a voice declares, "Most Muslims are rational people; only 20% are haters and the only thing you can do with them is kill them...which you have to do..." Hitler without the rage; Genghis without the risk.

It's a cheap shot, perhaps, but think of the ease and impunity with which our weapons probe the earth. And as for sacrifice: most policymakers are Keynesians even when they deny it vociferously, and war is publicly said to stimulate the economy. Most of us believe that building and deploying another wing of F-22 Raptors has negative net cost. In contrast, our enemies are reduced to the epitome of pathos, kamikaze bombing. They do this because we are busily looting their homes, seizing their water, and sneering at their poverty. Our enemies are men with war in their hearts; we fight them with robots and sanctions. Their ideologies stink but they make the ultimate sacrifice for them.

Now, I look at this state of affairs and I feel a little as King Lear must have felt when Goneril and Regan shut him out in the rain. You know... "I will go mad!" But I'm also trained as an economist. We all understand that it was our production function, which brought us here; that, while individuals have free will to challenge this wickedness, whole economies do not and require strong institutions to do so.

(Economists can be very dishonest as professional experts, but I'm a not one of those...yet).