We can’t be in America – this isn’t where I grew up.

How can people with incomes less than $100,000/year continue to vote for the Neo-con regime in opposition to their own monetary self-interest? This is probably the biggest question any progressive has today. How can people with low paying jobs and a high cost of living continue to vote for the party that refuses to raise the minimum wage and gives tax breaks to the industry with the highest profit in U.S. history?

James Carville might say, “It’s the war, stupid!” And, he would be right – almost. It’s war all right, but it’s not the Iraq war, or the war in Afghanistan, it’s the war between the parties. And, it’s an uncivil war, with almost no rules of engagement.

But, how did the Neocons turn voters into soldiers? Well, as young voters, many people simply follow their parents lead and vote according to what they’ve heard at the kitchen table. If not, then they follow the most popular of their friends or whatever seems to be the group consensus at the time. The point is that they didn’t really make a political decision. They joined a team.

Teams are fun things to be on. Life’s path is easier to travel when everyone’s going in the same direction. Then, because the players serve on both offense and defense, the team they are on becomes part of their personal identity. Thinking is focused on what’s good for the team. And, that’s ok as far as it goes, because people can change teams as they grow.

Even when politics was just a game losing wasn’t fun, but it could be dealt with. Besides, a new game would start in a year or two, and the chance of winning was always out there. The game of politics, like sports, had written rules and rules of etiquette. Sure, some people broke the rules. But up until now cheaters had been penalized or ejected from the game. We play sports against other human beings. Knowing this is what keeps the game humane.

But, It’s not a game anymore. It’s war. The Neo-con regime has upgraded the players from teammates to comrades-in-arms, and all rules have been suspended. Part of the objective is to utterly destroy the opposition.

Absurd you say? Consider this. The first step in making it possible for a soldier to kill or maim is to convince them that their opponent isn’t human. Soldiers can be taught to hate, and convinced to attack gooks, or rag-heads, but when the target is another person with a family just like your own, it gets a little dicey. So, in order to turn their players into soldiers, the Neo-cons gave them liberals and gays to hate and reduce to a state of less-than-us.

For over six years we have watched as the Neocons divided the country by inciting their troops with war cries. They are not as good as we are. Liberals kill their babies! Gays are against God! We hate them. We don’t have to listen to them. Anything they say is a lie.

And in the heat of hatred an identity is fixed.

To question it is treason.

A soldier is born.

Now it’s ok to openly speak caustically about liberals and gays, call them names, vote to diminish their right to free speech, to free assembly, to equal protection under the law, and even equal monetary rights in a capitalist society. When it’s time to vote about these things, the soldiers do as they’re told. Soldiers often do what is not in their own best interest. Like charging a machine gun with a knife – if that’s what they are told to do, or what they’ve been taught to believe is good at the moment. Now it includes giving up rights and freedoms just to deny them to someone else.

At the same time that the Neocon army is being convinced that Liberals and Gays lie, the idea that Neocons tell only the truth is hammered home. After which, nothing that comes from the Neocon leadership is questioned, only repeated.

Not just repeated – chanted in unison.

That is why people earning less that $100,000/year can vote for a regime which reduces their ability to earn while raising the price of everything. A regime which has created a socio-economic condition in which some people need a 50 year mortgage to buy a home. A regime which has created a society in which some can’t make more than interest payments on a home and by default will never become more than sharecroppers beholden to the company store.

And, as we stand by watching helplessly, our Congress changes our laws to move the tax burden from the rich to the poor, to reduce our liberties and spy on us, to diminish our access to the courts when we are harmed by corporations, and gut hard won and necessary social programs from the national budget.

What was once the greatest middle class in the history of the world is quickly becoming a land of indentured servants to all-powerful corporations.

We remember Hitler. He knew how

to get people riled up,

to get them to hate,

to make war.

We told ourselves it could never happen here,

but it is happening.

Vilification and hatred are the tools used

to inflame,

to divide,

to render senseless,

and control us.

It isn’t being done by some skinhead radical group

it’s being done by our own government.

In an autocratic state? Of course.

But, here?

In America?