Mexico: What Do Third-world Countries Share with the U.S.?

Now it’s official. General McChrystal has been placed in the pantheon of American icons, sanctified next to the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. He now aligns with the many American gods that are manufactured as fast as a Big Mac or an Egg McMuffin. Heroes like these are not human. They only play the image of what America wants them to be, but mostly they reflect the self-delusion of the American culture, a bubble where we are morally superior, smarter, and therefore richer.

This month The Atlantic magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust.

Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition.

In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.”

By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.”

Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes?

Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder.

Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.”

Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda.

Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62).

Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy.

If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional.

If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used.

Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64).

The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded.

In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.

Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels.


In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility.

This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements.

This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society.

All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy.

Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially.

Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general.

Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class.

The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves.

Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty.

Mexico: Religious Morality Is Problematic—A Failure in Mexico & in the U.S.

"To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false," said Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon. "I have not lost any part—any single part—of Mexican territory."

Maybe Calderon should reconsider his claim. What about Ciudad Juarez? Calling in 5,000 troops sounds like an offensive mobilization of the Army to regain the territory lost by the local police.

“President Felipe Calderon said Thursday he wants to defeat the world's most powerful drug gangs before his term ends in 2012, disputing U.S. fears that Mexico is losing control of its territory, though his government plans to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to one city to try to control drug violence there.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29413556

How did Mexico come to the edge of being a failed State? The history of the country shows us how its political officials, from the lowest to the highest ranks have used any means possible—mostly illegal—to gain personal power and wealth. We learn from historians such as Enrique Krauze, in his book, Mexico: Biography of Power, how Mexico attempted to establish several constitutions over the last century while groping for its core guiding values. At the same time, the Catholic Church, in its struggle to retain control, varied its policies and values to assert its own slithering agenda.

Loss of Rational Core Values

As in other theocratic countries, in Mexico leaders constantly govern in arbitrary ways—void of core, rational values—in order to benefit themselves and the powerful wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return. Rolling Stone magazine recently revealed how Mexican officials, from the highest to the lowest ranks, benefit from revenue sharing in the Columbian cocaine industry.

As in Columbia, now too in Mexico, government officials at all levels collaborate with drug lords like El Chapo, a man made extremely wealthy from cocaine and marijuana, who is most likely to support these leaders in return for their favors, such as letting him out of a high security federal prison before his extradition to the U.S. Officials in the Bush-Cheney administration are not unfamiliar with these practices. Bush oil industry regulators spent American tax money on Columbian blow, and we have learned how their stimulating high aided in their sex parties with oil industry lobbyists.

Despite Bush’s claims of high moral standards as a born-again Christian, he and Cheney whittled away at what was once America’s moral high ground, once one of the touchstones of American world leadership. The Bush administration has inculcated the type of hypocritical immorality typical of popular religions that enforce ethical rules arbitrarily, depending on the situation and political needs.

Clothed in the image of Christian righteousness, the Bush-Cheney administration authorized torture as a means to obtain testimony—ultimately revealed to be false—to support the lies used to justify bombing Iraq and killing thousands of innocent civilians. Many reports have shown that the previous administration intentionally invaded Iraq, not for any alleged links to al Qaeda but for access to its oil reserves. Succeeding in this well-documented, premeditated plan would have benefited large oil companies, the wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return for the favor.

Political Use of Religion

Politicians often use popular religion to justify the abuse of power and force, degrading a nation into third-world status like Mexico. Unlike any other presidential administration in the U.S., the eight years of Bush-Cheney solidified a culture of corrupt favoritism for the wealthy, leaving the middle class to pay for our current financial and moral disaster. The financial catastrophe may be the result of decades of disastrous deregulation policies but, like the 9/11 attack, Bush-Cheney ignored all the warnings. So many disasters befell W’s administration as if he were the victim, a bystander struck by a MAC truck, not a leader in charge of the traffic, not really the decider.

Like the Bush-Cheney administration over the past eight years with its favoritism to big oil and its no-bid contracts with Halliburton, Mexican presidents have used similar means for centuries to use the resources of the many, the middle class, to benefit the few, the extremely wealthy and powerful.

This dismantling of the middle class in the U.S. has already begun to eat away at American core values. The more middle class Americans have to struggle to keep a roof over our children’s heads, the more we have to compromise our ethical standards. We are more willing to tolerate a preemptive, unjustified war if our leaders tell us it might make us safer and lower the prices at the pump. We are willing to tolerate the torture of prisoners if it means maintaining our standard of living.

The American voting public became aware of this by the end of the last Republican administration. They voted for change. As President Obama says in his statement about the release of Bush administration torture memos, “A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”

America’s ideals were founded by the rational, clear thinking of the Enlightenment, when obscure religious thought was ignored for the sake of moral values based on logical reasoning, as in classical Greece.

Mexico’s leaders, in contrast, have been inspired by the inquisitions and superstitions of the Baroque era. The leading architects of American government were not religious men at all. They were deists, inspired by the European Enlightenment. America’s ideals were founded not in arbitrary, popular religious dictates that deceptive politicians use to abuse power.

Yet this is exactly how the Mexican government has favored the wealthy in Mexico (and in the U.S.), at the expense of Mexico’s middle class. The drug industry in Mexico has become the most attractive means to stay in the middle class because the corrupt economic and political system has not enabled the middle-class families in Mexico to build a life by more legitimate and respectable means. They have compromised their ethics in order to keep a roof over the heads of their children.

Many Mexican citizens have lost all trust in their government. The Zetas, the Special Forces soldiers of the drug lords, routinely recruit Mexican soldiers into their ranks. Rolling Stone reporter Guy Lawson quotes the rationale of one such recruit.

"Chapo came to my village in a helicopter and gave out money to plant marijuana," Julio says. "He did this for the whole town. If I wanted to start a business of some kind in the city, he would provide me the money to start. He uses his money for his people, to help us progress."

As the Mexican political system fails, the more the middle-class Mexican has to tolerate immoral means of survival. In most of central and south America, the illegal drug industry has become the most effective means to increase a regular person’s income. For this reason it has gained overwhelming popularity, despite its dangers.

Likewise, the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration has led middle-class Americans to sacrifice our core values, with the hope that the unjustified destruction of a country, the torture of prisoners, and the free-wheeling, deregulated capitalism would somehow save the standard of living for us and our children.

As Mark Danner comments on this line of reasoning

“from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial’ to preventing ‘a major-casualty attack.’ This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.”

The lessons we learn from Mexico’s failures illuminate our own down fall in the U.S. during the last eight years. The damage done was so severe that we must remain vigilant, despite Obama’s Herculean leadership. We must pull ourselves out of a dire situation where our own political system failed and now teeters on the precipice of collapse.

Mexico: A Theocratic Model for Republicans

Here in Los Angeles, Sepulveda Boulevard serves as a main traffic artery for over 42 miles, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Hermosa Beach in the south—the longest road in Los Angeles County. Few Angelinos probably know what history lurks in the name, even if the name of the road was intended for some other historical person. 

Sepulveda, a militant racist, a fascist? A study of Mexico’s history reveals that Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494 - 1573) wrote that the natives are "as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people.” A Second Democritus: on the just causes of the war with the Indians was his most important book, shaping the course of Mexican history.
In his book, Mexico, Biography of Power, Enrique Krauze tells us: “The imperialist interpretation of the Conquest (stridently represented by Juan Gines de Sepulveda) justified the war against the Indians on the grounds of their allegedly natural vices and defects: they were subhuman, sodomites, barbarians, cannibals, cowards, idolaters, liars and depraved idlers. Their backwardness prevented them from freely submitting to the law; they were ‘slaves by nature.’”

Religious Doctrine--Political Policy

This fervent, Catholic, political ideology represented in Sepulveda’s writings resembles much of the North American Protestant justifications to decimate most of the American Indians. Sepulveda’s view sounds like a line straight from one of today’s Republican propaganda writers (Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, etc.) who brutally attack anyone of a dissenting opinion about torture, preemptive invasions, or any of their other policies.

We might excuse Sepulveda at least a little if we consider his own historical context during the end of the Dark Ages, a period of cultural decline and societal collapse, even though several of Sepulveda’s contemporaries advocated respect and tolerance for human rights. The Jesuit humanist Francisco Javier Clavijero “ascribed to the civilization of the Mexicas a classical rank equal to that of Greece and Rome.”  

Despite Sepulveda’s disadvantage of being born into the Dark Ages, the neocons and other Republicans cannot use any such excuse for their medieval views. When reading Sepulveda’s theocratic ideology, we find the same twisted logic and bellicose policies, supported by claiming it’s God’s will. Referring to God as support for a political policy was a hallmark of the Dark Ages, when reason was left twisting in the wind. The use of trumped-up religious authority as a justification for a political doctrine reveals the weakness of that doctrine. Instead of using rational thought and logic, theocrats lean on so-called sacred text, dictated by God, as the basis of policy.

Religion as a Political Platform 
It’s as though the Republicans ripped their policies out of Sepulveda’s pages and used them as their playbook. Sepulveda’s words contain the sounds of the same strand of blind theology that the W Administration used to manipulate the general public into a frenzy after the 9/11 attack, calling for a “crusade” and using it to justify the implementation of their long-planned, extreme, right-wing policies.

Bush often used religious terms in grandiose statements. "This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile.” “We will rid the world of the evil-doers." His use of religious expressions gained him popularity among gullible groups of born-again Christians throughout his career. W’s born-again Christian fundamentalism helped him to become governor of Texas. “But I feel God wants me to do this, and I must do it.” It was the right-wing members of the U.S. Supreme Court who made him president.

Once in the White House, W’s unreasoned policies fell straight into the greatest wishes of the likes of Osama bin Laden whose goal was to cause confusion and terror. What fundamentalist plans Osama bin Laden instigated, W unwittingly fulfilled. Leaders like these rely on traditionalism, meaning that they claim their authority derived from a religious text. In his essay, Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco explains how this style of leadership is an early form of fascism. 

Religious Doctrine--Traditionalism--Dangerous PoliciesIn its recent eight-year reign, the Republican Party took the U.S. from peace and prosperity to a historic deficit, unbridled financial disaster, preemptive war justified by lies to the public, and corporate corruption, especially among the oil titans which only expedites the looming environmental breakdown. Most born-again Christians believe that environmentalism is futile since the End Days are soon approaching for the Rapture and Christ’s second coming. Why bother trying to save the planet if God is going to snatch up the righteous to heaven and leave the rest of us sinners here to face the apocalypse?  

Such painful incompetence, irrational policies, and corruption once were the mark of third world countries like Mexico—until now. Given another Republican administration, the U.S. would have become a failed state, like Mexico today. Driven by a religious ideology that influenced every aspect of policy from economics to the judicial system, W’s presidency is an example of how religious fervor can bring a peaceful and prosperous nation into war and financial collapse.

If Republicans had remained in power, they would have gleefully transformed the U.S. into a born-again Christian theocratic government, run by and for the wealthy and justified by God’s will. Certain traits create the third-world conditions of Mexico, and they reflect closely the fundamentalist policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. today.

Like most Central and South American countries, Mexico has been under the yoke of the Catholic Church since before Cortés. For most Mexicans the Church still is the main source of culture and education. Krauze writes, “It was in other areas, like education, where the influence of the Church was clearly harmful.” He notes that the Church was responsible “above all, [for] the intolerant strain in Mexican thought, evident in 1910….”

Church + State = Third WorldOne church, one god, one dogma, one catechism, one way of thinking—this narrow mindedness is what fuels theocratic regimes. This holds true for Mexico today as it does for many other third-world countries like Israel, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, where reason flutters in the wind like a battle-torn flag, and where people view the world in terms of what God wills. They do this without realizing that God can be quite different from one tribe, gang, or congregation to the next.  They result is endless wars in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, or on the streets of Juarez.

Theocracies most often resemble fascist regimes, with their dogmatic control over every life. At different times and places, the degree of tyranny varies but the underlying characteristic of centralized command remains, just as it does in right-wing regimes, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Panama under Noriega, or Saudi Arabia under the Saud Monarchy, or Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Or Profirio Diaz, like many other Mexican presidents all the way to recent ex-President Vincente Fox, who “ran an ‘integral’ or ‘total’ government…by integrating into the person of the President the real powers—national and local politico-military leaders and army generals…and by neutralizing dissident voices.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, W’s administration muzzled dissident voices for several years by calling them unpatriotic, a claim that could ruin the career of a journalist like Dan Rather and former Ambassador Joe Wilson who published an opinion piece in the The New York Times, revealing how W twisted intelligence reports to justify the invasion of Iraq.   

Like most third-world countries, Mexico escaped the influence of the century of the Enlightenment. For Europe and the United States, the Enlightenment meant that facts, scientific method, and reason reemerge from antiquity as the measure of truth and sound ideas. It was a time when revolution tore down the arbitrary and whimsical “divine rights” of kings and other nutcase right-wing manipulators. As in France, the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S. fortunately had embraced the Age of Reason with its ideals of human rights, rational justice, and democracy.

Age of Enlightenment Revisited
Contrary to claims by members of the Republican Party, most of the Founders were Deists, hardly interested in any religion. They thought the universe had a creator, but one not concerned with the daily lives of humans and not in direct contact with them, either by revelation or by sacred texts. No, the Republicans are horribly wrong in their claims that America was founded as a Christian nation. As usual, when they make statements in the mainstream media, they revise history according to their own mythologies. Jefferson, on the contrary, believed that America’s strength arises from free thinking, critical citizens, unfettered from the chains of religious nonsense.

Eco writes that right-wing traditionalists see “the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason…as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”Krauze points out that the values of the Enlightenment “affected only the topmost level of society, and despite the historic breakthroughs of that period, Mexico held tight to the culture of the Baroque with centralized power in a monarchal-type president or a despot and religious superstitions in the place of science. Mexico remained resistant to the political and intellectual currents of the European Enlightenment.” The Republican Party ignores any type of rational system of justice and instead attempts to transform the U.S. justice system into an extension of its own arbitrary policies. Like Islam and Judaism, Christianity has been used as a propaganda channel for unified political power ever since it was accepted by political authorities, such as Constantine.

Today, the Republicans use religion to legitimize their own goals, such as to ignoring the habeas corpus and due process of the law in order to imprison and torture people without trial. Motivated by personal gain and fueled by favoritism for members of their own religious tribe, they appoint religious extremists to the Supreme Court and make deals with lobbyists of large corporations against the best interests of the people and the greater welfare of the country. As Octavio Paz describes Mexico in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, “ours is the Counter-reformation, Monopoly and Feudalism….”

By shifting power to a centralized executive branch, by favoring corporations that become monopolistic, by legislating religious superstitions like creationism as part of the educational curriculum in public schools, and so encouraging citizens to lose their grasp on clear thinking, not to mention science and reason, the Republican Party sought the dumbing-down of the  general public. The dumber citizens are, the easier it is to beguile them. The right wing is continuing its quest to bring the U.S. closer to the Dark Ages of feudalism, monopoly, and ignorance—and shared status, with Mexico, as a failed state.