Though an interesting thing about the Non-Partisan League is that is also did not concern itself with whether someone was a Democrat or Republican. The NPL laid down a program of specific policy objectives it wanted to achieve. These policies were all designed to assist farmers in getting fair treatment and prices when dealing with banks, railroads, terminals, elevators, grain processors and traders. The NPL maintained it would support either a Dem or Rep, so long as the candidate agreed to support the Non-Partisan League's policy objectives.

I'm not sure of the exact history, but I do know that the Farmer-Labor parties were not originally allied with the Democratic Party, and merger came a number of years later. Lindbergh was a Republican, and one of the most visible faces of the NPL, but a decade or two later it was the Democratic Party that absorbed most of the NPL network.

I call them "Birkenstock liberals."

But, generally, I dislike conservatives much more. I refuse to call conservatism “right-wing” because nothing about conservatism is correct. In the American Revolution, the conservatives sided with the Crown. In the American Civil War, the conservatives sided with the slave-holders. In the Civil Rights movement, the conservatives sided with the segregationists. And now, in the fight between representative democracy and corporatist fascism, the conservatives are siding with the corporations. There is nothing “right” about conservatism; it is wrong through and through.

But worst of all, conservatives are basically satanic. The entire basis of conservative economic theory is based on selfishness – self-centeredness. John Milton, in his classic Paradise Lost, makes its quite clear that Lucifer fell because of self-centeredness. That so many closet homosexuals, pedophiles, wife abusers and philanderers have been harbored in conservative political circles may be shocking, but it should be no surprise to anyone willing to look through the ad bites to what conservatism is really all about.

The satanic self-centeredness of conservatism is of course carried through to economic policies. The duplicity of conservative theology is stupefying, since conservative policies inevitably work injury to the common good, yet conservatives are loud and bold in their claim to be protectors of Judeo-Christian morality. The economic laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and the New Testament message of social and economic justice, are not just completely ignored, but actively derided and ridiculed by conservatives.

The recent Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United v FEC is a perfect example of the essential satanic self-centeredness at the core of conservatism. A brief reading of Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10, on the subject of political factions, will show how completely radical and historically unmoored the (conservative) majority decision was. Madison argues that the largest force behind the creation of factions is economic interest, yet the Court has now elevated the most extreme creature of economic interest, the corporation, and endowed it with the same rights as human beings. Lost entirely is the idea of why human beings have "certain inalienable rights" - because they are made in the image of their Creator, and thus possess the Divine Spark of Reason, with which they are supposed to do Good in the world. Corporations, having no souls, are not made in the image of God, and thus cannot and should not have the same rights has human beings. Yet, today, you see American conservatives, supposedly the self-proclaimed defenders of Christian morality, celebrating the Supreme Court decision giving human rights to corporations.

But my detestation of the wrong-wing of the political spectrum does not necessarily mean, as you would like to assume, that I find a comfortable fit on the left. The key problem on the left is also a lack or moral rigor, that is manifested by an inability to recognize the unique value of human life within an interdependent global environment. Simply put, it is absurd to argue, as many environmentalists and other leftists have, the flora and fauna should have the same legal standing and basic protections as human beings.

This position of the left, of course, is futher manifested as a dislike of, and even hostility toward, industry. But to no small degree, I believe this fault results from ignorance of alternative schemas of political economy to the standard “right-left” spectrum.

Of course, what I am thinking of is Thorstein Veblen’s schema of Lesiure Class versus Working Class, which Jonathan Larson, in his 1997 book Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, has refined as Predator Class versus Producer Class. Larson’s critique of Marx and Marxism is a delight to read, and it makes clear that the best way to understand the inevitable clash between groups with conflicting economic interests is along the working-producer / leisure-predator spectrum central to Veblen’s institutional economics.

Furthermore, Veblen’s economic analysis hews closer to real life as a result of Veblen incorporating religious and cultural beliefs as essential components of political economy. In his 1914 book The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, Veblen writes,

In the course of cultural growth most of those civilisations or peoples that have had a long history have from time to time been brought up against an imperative call to revise their scheme of institutions in the light of their native instincts, on pain of collapse or decay; and they have chosen variously, and for the most part blindly, to live or not to live, according as their instinctive bias [25] has driven them. In the cases where it has happened that those instincts which make directly for the material welfare of the community, such as the parental bent and the sense of workmanship, have been present in such potent force, or where the institutional elements at variance with the continued life-interests of the community or the civilisation in question have been in a sufficiently infirm state, there the bonds of custom, prescription, principles, precedent, have been broken - or loosened or shifted so as to let the current of life and cultural growth go on, with or without substantial retardation. But history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such as now (1913) faces the peoples of Christendom. Chief among those instinctive dispositions that conduce directly to the material well-being of the race, and therefore to its biological success, is perhaps the instinctive bias here spoken of as the sense of workmanship. . . .

The instinct of workmanship, on the other hand, occupies the interest with practical expedients, ways and means, devices and contrivances of efficiency and economy, proficiency, creative work and technological mastery of facts. Much of the functional content of the instinct of workmanship is a proclivity for taking pains. The best or most finished outcome of this disposition is not had under stress of great excitement or under extreme urgency from any of the instinctive propensities with which its work is associated or whose ends it serves. It shows at its best, both in the individual workman's technological efficiency and in the growth of technological [34] proficiency and insight in the community at large, under circumstances of moderate exigence, where there is work in hand and more of it in sight, since it is initially a disposition to do the next thing and do it as well as may be; whereas when interest falls off unduly through failure of provocation from the instinctive dispositions that afford an end to which to work, the stimulus to workmanship is likely to fail, and the outcome is as likely to be an endless fabrication of meaningless details and much ado about nothing.

Veblen goes on to explain how, in societies that fall under the sway of predators (though of course Veblen does not use that word), the producers inevitably begin to lose their sense of workmanship, with increasingly deleterious effects accumulating for the physical capacity of the society to maintain itself. And the physical capacity of a society to maintain itself (contrary to the ideas of the absolute dreck that has passed for economic science for the past half-century) – is the sine qua non of economics. This is a devastating critique of the effects of banking and financial deregulation, financialization, and the way in which industrial firms have been decimated and looted the past three decades.

Here again, I find that the conservatives, through their incapacity or unwillingness to differentiate between speculation and enterprise (another moral judgment that has to be made), do more damage to a society’s well being than "Birkenstock liberals." Indeed, much of the ill effects of industrial capitalism that the "Birkenstock liberals" protest against, are actually driven, at base, by the demands of financial capitalism that arise from the failure to differentiate between speculation and enterprise.