New York Times columnist David Brooks has long been engaged in a stealth campaign against the discoveries of science – especially neuroscience – that validate a more egalitarian and humanistic political order.

Brooks has skillfully branded himself as the Pundit Who Will Tell You About New Findings in the Human Sciences. But in Brooks’ hands all the new science somehow becomes justification for top-down, conservative and even authoritarian government. It’s all just a magical confirmation of Hobbes.

A moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large. That was the goal of the confidence men who sold us a false and destructive view of our own natures. So successful were they that many progressives (and most Democrats) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

Our most important a task involves replacing the deceitful view of humankind with the new – and true – picture of cooperative, empathic and complex human being (we can, obviously, be selfish, cruel and violent – but that’s not all we are).

David Wittman’s (aka DJ Dave) popular video, “Whole Foods Parking Lot,” is a hilarious send-up of some of the apparent moral contradictions of participants in today’s postmodern counter-culture. It’s a counter-culture only in the sense that it has more to do with the checkout counter than it does any challenge to the culture at large. Hell, it is the culture at large.

This week, George Lakoff published a piece called “Disaster Messaging” and Eric Alterman penned an essay called “Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, for Now.” Lakoff and Alterman know what is standing in the way of progressive achievement in America. Let’s call it The Wall. Lakoff speaks of the conservatives’ message advantages. Democrats [...]

We’ll turn to the oldest human story of all, the Epic of Gilgamesh, to understand what links the evangelical right to free market extremists. Until we understand them, we can’t beat them.

In the film, “The Reader,” Hannah Schmidt shocks the courtroom when she says that her Nazi-era failure to release 300 prisoners from a burning church made sense because chaos might have resulted from their release. But doesn’t the American health care system lock millions into a burning church that guarantees ill health and death?

Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model.

George Lakoff wants to give to truth all the advantages that propagandists have bestowed upon the lie.