Richard Kim writes an interesting post in The Notion, entitled Freedom's Imperial March. He asks an important question that all progressives ought to be thinking about:

A hard question the left has yet to take up fully is: What came before and what comes after this particularly noxious imperial presidency?

The question is two-fold, the first being concerned with an evaluation of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton succession and how it brought us to Bush II, and the second being concerned with planning and then articulating a vision for a post-Bush nation.

Although the writer is not a Platonist in the strict sense, he has used the logical and rhetorical techniques of The Republic in many debates and arguments with right-wingers with great success. In Plato's universally-acclaimed masterpiece, his character Socrates, after having demolished the arguments of the sophist Thrasymachus--that justice is the will of the powerful--arrives by a process of dialectic at a definition of justice and then constructs before our very eyes the idea of a just state, together with its individual counterpart, the just individual. Plato proceeds in this manner because his theory of forms held that all objects of perception are inferior copies of true forms. The chair in my kitchen is an imperfect copy of the chair form. All chairs share the quality of "chairness" and participate more or less in the ideal form. The highest form was the good. The form of a just state was the ideal state, of which all states are inferior copies.

In The Republic, Plato attempted to define the ideal state, one that would serve as both as a model and a benchmark for actual states. If you want to know how just a state is, compare it to the form of a just state. If you want to establish a just state, then make it as close as possible to the form of a just state.

Plato is the father of a family of philosophies collectively described as realist, all of which hold, in one way or another, that forms are real. Red things partake of "redness." Bad men partake of "badness." The other powerful philosophical current in western thought, descending from Heraclitus and Aristotle, is nominalism, which holds that what the realists call forms are merely names without an independent existence. Alfred North Whitehead once observed that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Mortimer Adler later added that Aristotle wrote most of the footnotes. Indeed, it is difficult to find serious arguments in any field that do not involve, at their core, the opposition between realism and nominalism.

How does this apply to debates with right-winger? Simple. I ask them to tell me in detail they kind of country they want the United States to be. In other words, I am asking them to define for me the form of a nation. It is a perfectly logical and reasonable question. People who want to change things ought to be able to answer where they expect those changes to take us. Plato's idea of a just state might seem totalitarian to us, but at least Plato was ruthlessly honest; he tells us just where he wants us to go.

Don't expect this kind of ruthless honesty from the typical right-winger. Usually, they will do everything they can to change the subject, because either they haven't thought about where their program is likely to take us, or worse, wish to conceal their true objective because they know it is unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

Conservatism is profoundly anti-democratic; at its very heart, it is a belief that only a few are intelligent and wise enough to rule the nation and that the overwhelming majority of people are unworthy to participate in the political process. Conservatism in twenty-first century America is a faith in plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, there has been a significant shift of wealth and income from the lower and middle classes to the upper crust with very little protest from the people most affected. The Bush administration has accelerated this process by its irresponsible tax cuts and its current efforts to "balance the budget" by reducing public services, educational support and public relief, all of which benefit the middle and lower classes.

No conservative activist can admit that the end result of the conservative movement will be the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of nearly everyone save the favored few, so the entire conservative establishment of think tanks, non-profits, cable networks and political operatives must necessarily be continually engaged in perpetrating one monstrous lie--the lie that the goal of the conservative movement is to promote the general welfare of the American people.

That, dear reader, is why the conservative right-wingers will scatter when you ask the Platonic question. They also will realize that, whatever their answer may be, they will be asked next to tell us why their current policies and proposals will bring us closer to the nation they have just described.

One further caveat: Are we as progressives ready to answer those two questions without trying to change the subject? Can the Democratic Party answer those questions? Until they can, the American people have little reason to turn the future of their country over to them.