Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.

You see, I’ve published articles saying I do “believe in global warming.” Yes, I’ve also questioned the extent to which man-made gases have contributed to that warming and concluded that expenditures to reduce those emissions would be as worthless as they’d be horrifically expensive. No matter; just call me “Ted.” Or “Charlie.” Or “Fidel.”

This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century, from the heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” to the swine flu “pandemic” that killed vastly fewer people than seasonal flu, to “runaway Toyotas.” Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue – like believing that an incredibly mild strain of flu could kill eight times as many Americans as normal seasonal flu. (It killed about a third as many.)

I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.

But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.

Extremism in the defense of nothing

Nothing the new right does is evidently outrageous enough to receive more than a peep of indignation from the new right. Heartland pulled its billboards because of funder withdrawals, not because any conservatives spoke up and said it had crossed a line.

Last month U.S. Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican recently considered by some as vice-president material, insisted that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party, again with little condemnation from the new right.

Mitt Romney took a question at a town hall meeting this month from a woman who insisted President Obama be “tried for treason,” without challenging, demurring from or even commenting on her assertion.

And then there’s the late Andrew Breitbart (assassinated on the orders of Obama, natch). A video from February shows him shrieking at peaceful protesters: “You’re freaks and animals! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy raping, murdering freaks!” He went on for a minute-and-a-half like that. Speak not ill of the dead? Sen. Ted Kennedy’s body was barely cold when Breitbart labeled him “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.”

The new right loved it! Upon his own death shortly after, Breitbart was immediately sanctified and sent to lead the Seraphim. He was repeatedly eulogized as “the most important conservative of our time never to hold office,” skipping right past William F. What’s-his-name Jr.

There was nothing “conservative” about Breitbart. Ever-consummate gentlemen like Buckley and Ronald Reagan would have been mortified by such behavior as Breitbart’s – or West’s or Heartland’s. “There you go again,” the Gipper would have said in his soft but powerful voice.

Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. Burke, not incidentally, was a true Tea Party supporter, risking everything as a member of Parliament to support the rebellion in the United States.

All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Turning people against each other. Taking seeds of fear, anger and hatred and planting them to grow a new crop.

Conservatism has also historically emphasized empiricism. Joe Friday of “Dragnet” must have been a conservative: “All we want are the facts, Ma’am.” When President Reagan famously said, “Facts are stupid things,” he meant to quote President John Adams’ observation that “Facts are stubborn things.” But how much fact was there in Heartland’s billboards, whose shock purpose has been likened to tactics of the hard-left animal activist group PETA, with whom I’ve repeatedly locked horns. Or in West’s assertion? Or Breitbart’s tirades? Rush Limbaugh compared Breitbart, who never wrote a single investigative report, to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the dynamic duo who brought down the thoroughly corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. He actually said Breitbart’s work was superior. Oh, dear!

I know these words coming from somebody identified with the right are heresy – as defined by this new right. An invite to a marshmallow roast with you as guest of honor. Or worse. It’s to be labeled with the ultimate epithet: RINO. Republican in name only. GOP Sen. Scott Brown  bears that mark of Cain. Coming from super-liberal Massachusetts, he only has a 74 percent American Conservative Union rating. There you go, then!

So there’s an auto-da-fé out there right now with my name on it. Torquemada is holding the torch; the wieners and s’mores are flying off the shelves. Truth be known, though, I haven’t considered myself a Republican since 1982. Why? That was the year of the massive Reagan tax hike. I figured that’s what liberal Democrats are for. Tore up my donor card and never gave again. By being a conservative at that time, I was a RINO. By being one now, I’m also a RINO. A very curious animal, that.

The hate, anger and fear machine

A single author, Ann Coulter, has published best-selling books accusing liberals, in the titles, of being demonic, godless and treasonous. Michelle Malkin, ranked by the Internet search company PeekYou as having the most traffic of any political blogger, routinely dismisses them as “moonbats, morons and idiots.” Limbaugh infamously dispatched a young woman who expressed her opinion that the government should provide free birth control as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

As a conservative, I disagree with the political opinions of liberals. But to me, a verbal assault indicates insecurity and weakness on the part of the assaulter, as in “Is that the best they can do?” This playground bullying – the name-calling, the screaming, the horrible accusations – all are intended to stifle debate, the very lifeblood of a democracy.

Meanwhile, these people who practice shutting down the opposition through shouts and smears accuse President Obama of having dictatorial dreams? A recent email I received, based on accusations from umpteen right-wing groups, blared in caps-lock fury: “BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA HAS SIGNED A MARTIAL LAW EXECUTIVE ORDER!” This specific message, from a group calling itself RightMarch.org, goes on: “THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! BARACK OBAMA IS TRYING TO VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION, BECOME A DICTATOR, AND TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHTS!”

Outrageous, indeed. Obama’s order updated a National Defense Resource Preparedness act, which was essentially identical to one signed 19 years earlier and actually originated in 1950. It granted no authority to Obama that he did not already have under existing laws.

President Obama is regularly referred to as a Marxist/Socialist, Nazi, tyrant, Muslim terrorist supporter and – let me look this up, but I’ll bet probably the antichrist, too. Yup, there it is! Over 5 million Google references. There should be a contest to see if there’s anything for which Obama hasn’t been accused. Athlete’s foot? The “killer bees”? Maybe. In any case, the very people who coined and promoted such terms as “Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Derangement Syndrome and Palin Derangement Syndrome” have been promoting hysterical attitudes toward Obama since before he was even sworn in.

No, I’m not cherry-picking. When I say “regularly referred to,” interpret literally. Polls show that about half of voting Republican buy into the birther nonsense (one of the more prominent hysterias within the hysteria). Only about a fourth seem truly sure that Obama was actually born here. In her nationally syndicated column Michelle Malkin wrote regarding Limbaugh’s slut remarks, that “I’m sorry the civility police now have an opening to demonize the entire right based on one radio comment.” In a stroke she’s expressed her disdain for civility and declared the new right’s sins can be dispatched as an itsy-bitsy little single faux pas, “one radio comment.”

No, Michelle, incivility – nay, outright meanness and puerility – rears its ugly head daily on your blog, which as I write this on May 23 has one item referring in the headline to “Pig Maher’s boy [Bill Maher]” and another to “Jaczko the Jerk,” [former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko]. She calls Limbaugh target Sandra Fluke a “femme-agogue” and her supporters “[George] Soros monkeys.” Pigs? Monkeys? Moonbats? It’s literal dehumanization.

Sure, there are enough hate-and-anger mongers on the left to go around. Among the worst was Keith Olbermann, who once called Malkin a “mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Very edifying, Keith! But as the Christian Science Monitor reported, his ratings recently collapsed from an average of 354,000 viewers a night when he debuted on Current TV, to 58,000 viewers by the first quarter of 2012. He was recently fired. Again. Air America was intended to counter right-wing talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. I was on Al Franken’s show while he made fun of a soldier from my first battle who is now permanently paralyzed. Touché, Al! But Air America also failed.

Malkin, who revels in playing the victim, says that she’s been called all sorts of horrible things, many based on her Filipina heritage. But most of what she cites come from email or anonymous comments on blog sites. It wasn’t usually from paid professionals with large audiences, like her, aimed at paid professionals like her. It’s thus hard to compare with the host of the most popular talk show host in history taking shots at an unknown 22-year-old woman. (She’s hardly that now; Limbaugh himself promoted her to a national spokeswoman.)

Incivility is hardly the domain of the new right. American society grows ever coarser. But this is cold comfort. Conservative ideology demands civility of conservatives; demands, yes, self-policing. Let others act as they will, bearing evidence of the shallowness of their positions. It also demands respect for official offices, such as the presidency. When our guy is in office, you give him that modicum of respect – and when your guy is in office, we do the same. The other party is to be referred to as “the loyal opposition,” not with words the FCC forbids on the air.

Muckraking becometh buckraking

In the grief-fest at Breitbart’s death, forgiven (and indeed practically forgotten) was his crucial role in building the single most popular liberal website, the Huffington Post. Some of Breitbart’s friends admitted he was absent of ideology. “I don’t recall Andrew Breitbart ever mentioning electoral politics,” wrote Tucker Carlson. “It bored him.” Breitbart’s inspiration, then? George Washington through Benjamin Franklin – printed in primarily green ink on cotton stock.

Limbaugh pulls down a stunning $38 million annual salary. Leaked Heartland Institute documents revealed it’s gotten over $14 million in the past six years from a single individual. RightMarch.com accompanied the Obama-cum-tyrant message with an offer to “Blast Fax” every member of Congress for $139 – for a profit of about $139. Surely these people have their fingers crossed that President Obama is reelected.

I personally know a lot of the leaders of this new rabid right. Most are very nice on a personal basis. Honestly, you’d be shocked. Unlike Breitbart, some began as real conservatives. One called me her mentor in her first book and attended my wedding. Many once sang my praises. Again, unlike Breitbart, Malkin was once a true investigative reporter. You can still see elements of actual research in Ann Coulter’s work, too.

But when times changed, and it became profitable to move from honorable advocacy to shrill name-calling, they changed too. They cashed in their reputations, as well as their ideology, for lucre. Those who didn’t – because conservatism runs against screaming, extremism and sensationalism – began disappearing from the talk shows, magazines and store shelves. They were replaced by pod people.

Conservatism, RIP

You cannot be identified by what you oppose, only by what you stand for. But this curious creature’s main claim to the title of “conservative” is that it hates liberals – as do liberals and lots of others on many points of the political spectrum. Obama is routinely bashed in such places as the Nation. The right-wing Nation?

Indeed in any violent anti-democratic revolution – Jacobite, Bolshevik, National Socialist – the first goal is to eliminate the real competition, those with ideals. The guys who really believed in liberty, fraternity and equality or rule by the proletariat were identified, isolated and eliminated early on to leave only two extremes to choose from. “It’s us or the Bourbons! It’s us or the Romanovs!” In Germany, the conservatives and liberals were dispatched to the labor camps before the Nazis felt safe to send the Jews to the death camps.

The new right cannot advance a conservative agenda precisely because, other than a few small holdouts like the American Conservative magazine or that battleship that refuses to become a museum, George Will, it is not itself conservative. Pod people are running the show. It has no such capability; no such desire. I find that disturbing for obvious reasons. But, based on my own conversations with liberals, I think – nay, I know – that if more of these allegedly godless, treasonous people understood real conservatism a lot would embrace many conservative positions.

Thus everybody realizes government spending has lost its airbrakes. But while the new right screams the most about big government, it nonetheless supported President George W. Bush as he presided over the largest expansion of government spending since uber-liberal FDR and left us with a massive debt before President Obama was sworn in. Why? Silly rabbit! Because the left opposed him.

The same has been said for the right’s otherwise seemingly unfathomable enchantment with Sarah Palin; it’s a defense of their damsel in distress. The veracity of the left’s claims about her are irrelevant. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Or so thought that uber-liberal FDR about good ol’ “Uncle Joe” right to the end, even as conservative Winston Churchill tried desperately to convince him otherwise. And so fell the Iron Curtain.

Eating its own

Obsessed with attacking, the new right will carpet-bomb positions of the old right if the left comes around to it.

Thus the right has traditionally opposed government subsidies. My first cover story was in Buckley’s National Review, arguing against ethanol subsidies that ultimately grew to $6 billion annually. But when the Senate sought to repeal the subsidy last year, right-wing guru and Jack Abramoff henchman Grover Norquist fought it – with the stunning argument that cutting a government subsidy is actually a tax hike in disguise!

And how ironic that for decades liberals unfairly accused conservatives of “McCarthyism” to shut down debate. (Oh, how I remember!) Yet now the right countenances a prominent congressman who has literally outdone “Tailgunner Joe.”

McCarthy’s infamous list comprised only 57 Communists who were merely State Department employees, not “78 to 81” of the nation’s top elected officials.

Pity the poor Onion; there’s nothing left to satirize.

Gridlock

Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse.

• Drastic action is required now, nay yesterday, to start bringing expenditures in line with income. About half our government spending is fueled by borrowing, and that spending accounts for a fourth of GDP. Without borrowing, then, our GDP would drop 12 percent or more – well into depression range.
• Entitlement spending, that which requires no new legislation, is en route to consuming all tax revenue.
• Excluding the very top earners, household incomes have been declining for a decade.
• The real employment level has been trending downward since the mid-1980s. Unemployment for a year or more, the kind that just sucks the heart and soul out of people, is about double what it was in late 2009 – and yet in the 1960s it was essentially nonexistent.
• Income inequality is the highest since before the Great Depression, understandably fostering resentment.

For many, the American dream became a nightmare long ago. It’s little wonder that Americans are afraid and angry.

One member of the new right seemed to acknowledge that reckless character assassination was merely stalemating the system. “Let’s come back to the issues,” he told NPR in an interview last year. “Let’s come back to talking about how do we set the conditions here in Washington, D.C., for long-term sustainable economic and job growth.” Unfortunately, that was congressman Allen West.

The right didn’t create this reservoir of fear, anger and hate. But it has both tapped into it and roiled it. Indeed, the right-wing mass hysteria is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It occurs when a society is undergoing a wrenching transformation. Somebody then comes along and creates a “folk devil” both to provide an explanation for bad conditions, real or imagined, and a target. Kill the devil; eliminate the bad conditions. But the right has no serious incentive to help solve or ameliorate these problems. Indeed, as with the reelection of Obama, it will benefit from their continuation or worsening.

So animosity has now reached levels both hysterical and historical. The last time anything like this occurred was during World War II, when at least it was aimed outward. Before that? Just before the Civil War.

Back then a tall bearded Republican declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Just another one of those idiot, moron, “duplicitous bastard” RINOs.

Serious commentators are right to balk at the notion of judging candidates by their appearance. It diverts attention from the candidate’s ideas and policies, the stuff that actually matters. But hair is sometimes more than a matter of dumb fashion, as the sociologist Anthony Synnott writes: “The debate over hair symbolism is both ancient and complex, and applies not only to gender but also to politics.”

So now that it’s one of the criteria for selecting a candidate to run for president of the United States, it’s time we discussed hair, and the lack of it on our politicians’ heads.

There are plenty of minorities still woefully under-represented in politics, but none more so than men who choose to wear their hair long or funky. The fact that men with follicular abundance don’t have anyone to represent them in government, or even reading the news on TV, is hardly a civil rights issue. But like gay men often have before them, intelligent men who wish to wear a long or funky hairstyle sometimes have to sacrifice an important part of their identity to be taken seriously in establishment circles.

Hair style and dress sense are the only issues where politicians present a narrower range of options for voters than policies. Their political conservatism is reflected, and possibly shaped by, their follicular safeness. If you like, you can research this yourself. But you will find, after inspecting candidates’ heads at the local, state and federal level, there are very few afros, perms, ducktails, beehives, streaks, mop-tops, hi-top fades, curtains, asymmetrical fringes, Mohicans, pony-tails, dreadlocks, cornrows, Jheri curls, devilocks, liberty spikes, rat tails, bowl-cuts, under-cuts or mullets.

If you are one of the thousands or millions of men with one of these things on your head, voting can be a lonely and frustrating process.

Today’s politicians don’t actually have a thing against long hair per se, since a lot of them are deserters from the long-haired community. Look at old pictures of Barack Obama with an afro, Bill Clinton’s shaggy mop and Tony Blair in his Mick Jagger phase. But they visited the barber before they ran for office because politics is an annex of the banking, legal, military and other notoriously short-haired professions.

The political establishment and its associated industries simply use a candidate’s appearance as a means of weeding out people who don’t act in their interests. So we end up with phrases like “presidential hair,” which means, on a more subtextual level, that the man underneath it won’t be out of place pressing flesh at a Wall Street dinner or engaging in bonhomie with military personnel. In short, these industries want to make sure the candidate is one of their guys, and in their antiquated world of alpha masculinity, something approaching a buzz cut is essential. Considering their election campaigns — especially the fundraising part — are essentially a series of job interviews with a panel of generals, bankers and super-rich lawyers, it’s not surprising that candidates scissor themselves as soon as their name gets near a ballot paper.

Of course, upper-class American hair culture is based on a misconception: that long hair is an indicator of liberalism, radicalism and bad personal hygiene, mostly because of its association with various subcultures like the hippies and punks. And that’s the reason you don’t see many GOP candidates with brightly colored wood-glued Mohicans. Those guys are the enemy — unpatriotic, anarchists, socialists. But even the supposed liberals and radicals in politics play it safe, probably because they’re scared of being called out as a stoned slacker by Bill O’Reilly. So if you line the likes of Dennis Kucinich and (to a slightly lesser extent) Bernie Sanders up against the far-right conservatives, it looks like they all went to the same barber.

This saddens me. But long-haired liberals aren’t the only ones who should be interested in fighting against the homogeneity of mainstream hair culture, because it’s also possible to be a misguided right-wing zealot with any hair style whatsoever. Ask Johnny Ramone, a lifelong conservative who thanked George W. Bush for his presidency when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Just as his politics never mellowed, neither did his hair. And to think that it wasn’t his ludicrous perspective on the world that kept Johnny Ramone from being a presidential contender, but his leather jacket and heroin mullet — Republicans today, who have to choose between Romney and a bunch of identical crackpots in suits, must be furious. Forget Ron Paul — Johnny Ramone would have been the real anti-Washington candidate.

One annoyance for long-hairs is that when we do see a variation from the comb over or baldness on a politician nowadays — and it’s only ever a slight variation — it tends to indicate that the guy wearing it has done something seriously unethical while in office. The guy with the most flamboyant bouffant seen in some time, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, is serving 14 years in jail for corruption. In my native U.K., the politicians with the longest hair, London mayor Boris Johnson and Mike Hancock (a member of Parliament), are both serial adulterers. But the few slightly long-haired politicians out there are no less trustworthy than your average hair-off-the-collar public official, who will, on average, embezzle and screw around just as much as Blagojevich, Hancock and Johnson. The combined hair lengths of regular trimmers like Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond and Newt Gingrich — embezzlers, love rats and hypocrites of an epic scale — is enough to dismiss the argument that only long hair indicates an unsuitability for serving one’s country.

The idea that voters won’t go for a long-haired candidate is untested and in all likelihood false. The electorate certainly wouldn’t disapprove of a long-haired legislature any more than it does of the current bunch of knuckle-heads. It would be almost impossible, unless we came up with a way of calculating negative approval ratings. Public support for Congress couldn’t get much lower, even if Rasputin was installed as speaker of the House. As Mike Huckabee puts it: Congress is polling “just barely above a pedophile.”

Since 2008, a key source of disapproval has become politicians’ links to big business and their support for foreign wars. Even Newt Gingrich has jumped on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon to attack Mitt Romney’s past as a vulture capitalist. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are throwing themselves away from Wall Street (publicly at least) like it’s an exploding bomb. Yet, one of the reasons people don’t believe guys like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Barack Obama when they say they’re not stooges for Wall Street or the military industrial complex (besides the fact that we all know they are) is because they look so at home there. Their thousand-dollar suits and bi-weekly visits to the barber mean voters don’t have to have such wild imaginations to envisage any of the contenders for president buddying up with Stanley McChrystal and Lloyd Blankfein in an after-hours poker game — gambling away the country’s economy in unnecessary military spending, corporate tax breaks and bank bailouts.

If political candidates — Democrat or Republican — want to distance themselves from these industries, they could start by ditching the uniform. Turning up to a fundraiser with a Roddy Piper-style perma-mullet would erase the conundrum of having to take all that Wall Street cash, since there won’t be as much of it on offer.

BLITZER’S BLOG: It’s going to get nasty!

By Wolf Blitzer, CNN
(CNN) – If you think it’s been a rough ride for the Republican candidates during this current campaign season, just wait. This will be seen as child’s play once the general election campaign begins.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: the war of words between President Obama and his campaign supporters versus the eventual Republican nominee and his supporters will be fierce.

Even though there has already been a lot of talking and stuff happening during this political campaign, you won’t believe how much additional talking and arguing there will be as it continues. I have said in the past that Barack Obama and the person running against him will say things at and about each other, and I am saying it again. Things will be said.

If you think Wolf Blitzer’s blog post about the intensity of this campaign is finished, just wait. He quotes three lines from last night’s debate, then writes four more one-sentence paragraphs:

And that’s just for starters. Just wait for what’s coming.

By the way, the president and his supporters will not be shy in fighting back.

And like the Republicans, they will have hundreds of millions of dollars to finance attack ads.

Get ready for a brutal political season.

I am, Wolf! I am!

THIS JUST IN TO THE SITUATION ROOM: Every other political blogger has retired from political blogging to curate Pinterests about sandwiches instead, because Wolf Blitzer just made our jobs redundant.

The only remaining question is whether Wolf Blitzer is a better blogger than his Fox counterpoint in incisive online commentary, Greta Van Susteren. As long as CNN insists on “copy editing” Blitzer, we may never know for sure.

But progressives have no monopoly on political art. Last week, a realist painter from Utah, Jon McNaughton, offered a different take on Obama. A veteran of landscapes and religious tableaux, McNaughton caught the blogosphere’s attention when his 2010 work “The Forgotten Man” showed up on Rachel Maddow’s blog, as an entry in a caption contest. The painting depicts President Obama standing, arms crossed, on top of the Constitution, while a distraught James Madison, backed by a legion of fellow presidents, pleads for him to stop. To Obama’s right, a blond-haired, jut-jawed giant — the titular Forgotten Man — sits slumped over on a park bench. In the background, the White House stands, its flag at half mast, beneath menacing storm clouds (which McNaughton, writing on his website, says represent the federal deficit). A YouTube trailer that McNaughton did after he completed the painting now has 3.5 million hits. Salon caught up with McNaughton by phone at the McNaughton Fine Art Gallery in Provo, Utah.

Your painting has struck a nerve. How are sales?

Oh, they’ve just gone through the ceiling. We’ve probably had a 100-fold increase. Our website crashed, so I’ve been taking orders over the phone.

You used to paint mostly landscapes, then your art took a political turn. Why?

I started doing political paintings in 2008. The reaction was huge. When I painted a landscape painting, it was like dropping a pebble in a pond. When I started doing these political paintings, it was like throwing a stick of dynamite.

On your website, you say you’re not partisan, but there’s Obama trampling on the Constitution, and you have Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton clapping in the background…

I also have George W. Bush standing behind Obama, grouped with them. It’s more about who’s for big government, not who’s a Democrat or Republican. They’re also all kind of looking off in the distance, instead of at the Forgotten Man. I did that to imply they have their own vision of what they want America to become.

I notice Reagan isn’t over in that group. But didn’t the debt increase a couple trillion on his watch?

I’m not saying he’s innocent. As I note on my website, he says the debt he accrued was the biggest disappointment of his presidency.

I’ve seen your website. Your work is exceptionally well-annotated. [McNaughton's site has an interactive feature for the larger painting, where you can scroll your mouse across the paintings and little explanations and notes on who everyone is will pop up.] Does explaining art rob it of its mystery?

I want people to understand exactly what I mean by it. Some people will just take it at face value, but those who dig a little deeper will find all these layers of meaning, of metaphor.

And the metaphor in the Forgotten Man?

The Forgotten Man is the the average American — every man, woman and child — who may not have the same opportunities in the future because of what our presidents have done, which strays from the original intent of the Constitution.

And Obama?

Obama standing on the Constitution represents his taking action against what the Constitution stands for, which, to my mind, is limited government. I wasn’t trying to make fun of Obama I tried to paint him in a very serious manner. He understands the Constitution and he knows exactly what he’s doing.

I mean, he was a constitutional law professor.

And that’s the irony. [laughs]

Several of your paintings, like “One Nation Under God” [in which Jesus holds aloft the Constitution, while, at his feel, various American archetypes sit in two groups, Last Judgment-style -- a Marine, a schoolteacher, a farmer and a minister on the left, a news reporter, a professor, a politician, a lawyer and a weeping Supreme Court Justice on the right] draw a strong link between religion and politics. How does that square constitutionally?

I don’t have an issue with separation of church and state. I just believe the Constitution is divinely inspired and our Founders were inspired by God.

The Forgotten Man is very handsome. Who’s the model?

[Laughs] I’ve got a close friend I use. I’m not ready to reveal him yet.

He’s got that look of abject despair down pat, with those hunched shoulders …

Some people make issue of the fact that it’s a white guy sitting on the bench, like it’s somehow racial. I was talking with an African-American man and he asked why I didn’t make him black or something else. And I said, “Well, if I made him black, then certainly the issue of the painting would have been racial.” If I had made him Latino, then it would have been about illegal immigration. And if I’d made him a woman, imagine what that would have been.

The college student in “One Nation Under God” is black.

Yeah, in that bottom left-hand corner, that’s the one part I tried to show the actual percentages of different ethnicities in America. I’ve got a black man, a Latino, an Asian. I kind of like the idea of having a black college student, holding that particular book.

What is it?

It’s called “The Five Year Leap” [by the anti-Communist author Cleon Skousen]. It explains that our Constitution was divinely inspired.

That professor clutching “The Origin of Species” looks a lot like Jonathan Franzen.

Who’s that? Is he an actor?

He’s a writer. He wrote that book “Freedom.”

People say that Latino schoolteacher looks like Sarah Palin.

Should art be political?

If it’s an artist’s individual expression, sure, why not? I’ve had people accuse me of making propaganda. It’s a nice word to throw out there. It brings to mind posters from Nazi Germany and Chairman Mao and stuff of that nature. But those were commissioned by a state. I’m just an American citizen expressing his own views under the First Amendment. I’m not doing this for anyone but myself.

Speaking of world leaders, in “Wake Up, America” [a sequel to "The Forgotten Man," in which a beaming Obama, showered with money, addresses a group of supporters, unaware that they are being wrapped in chains; the Forgotten Man is shown taking a hacksaw to the chains] you’ve got a whole row of them watching Obama, looking pretty happy. Kim Jong Il, Putin, Ahmadinejad, King Abdullah, Hu Jintao — and is that Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner? How’d they get in there?

Well, you know, Bernanke is the Federal Reserve chairman, which manipulates the dollar, which affects the inflation rate and the national debt. I agree with a number of Ron Paul’s critiques.

On your blog you say you’re a Ron Paul man.

No, I wrote that I like Ron Paul. There are things I like about all of the candidates and things I don’t like. Ron Paul is the one who I probably identify with the most because he’s a constitutionalist.

Who buys your paintings?

Conservatives. I’ve noticed a change in the art market the last few years. You used to paint pictures for people to decorate their homes with; now people want art that speaks to what they truly believe. They don’t care whether it matches their couch.

I have this idea that conservatives tend to eschew most art because they consider the art world the providence of elites.

Well, look at the NEA and how they’ve promoted out-on-the-fringe modern art and even some contemporary art — Mapplethorpe, for example — that’s very offensive to Christians. That kind of thing has created this resentment among conservatives that the art elite is out of touch with the average person. I think there’s room for all kinds of art — modern, contemporary, traditional. Maybe I have a different perspective than most conservatives because I’m an artist, but you wouldn’t see that in the music industry. They accept everybody. It’d be like someone who does jazz music walking up to a country music artist and being like, “You don’t do real art.”

Do you feel locked out from that establishment?

I don’t really care. But when I was an art student I was kind of frustrated because I was trying to get help as a traditional artist and I wasn’t finding it. A lot of my classmates were doing contemporary art, as were my instructors. I was kind of rebellious. I wanted to do my own thing and it was frowned upon because it was representational. Fifty years ago, it was the rebels who were doing modern art.

What are you painting now?

The title is “One Nation Under Socialism.” It’s a political one.

This is wrong. Flip-flopping is not a vice but a virtue. It embodies the very genius of the American political system. It helps explain how America could evolve from a backwater colony to a global superpower and why it is highly unlikely that a successful third party will emerge.

To see why too much principle makes bad politics we must look at a principle of physics – yes, physics. Called the constructal law, it holds that all design in nature – picture the tree-like shape of river basins, lightning bolts and our circulatory system – emerges to facilitate the flow of currents (in these examples of water, electricity and blood).

Politics is also a flow system with multiple currents, including ideas, infrastructure, money and supporters. As river basins move water through a network of rivulets, brooks, streams and rivers like the Mississippi, political currents flow through actual channels.  Politics, after all, is another name for the movement of ideas and other currents from here to there. All require paths to move. All must overcome various forms of resistance that dot the landscape, whether it’s hard ground or opposing parties.

National politics, then, is a tapestry of flows that sweep the land, leading to and coming from a decision-making point, in Washington, D.C. Just like the Mississippi River basin, the political flow has a tree-shaped configuration: The country is the tree canopy, and the trunk is rooted in the capital.

This explains why it is so hard for third parties to take root. Channels need time, work and resources to form. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was the Nile. Over time, these channels become entrenched, as they improve their capacity to move more current more easily.

The Democratic Party (founded in the 1790s) and the Republican Party (founded in 1854) have had a long time to generate good designs. Short of a cataclysmic event that reshapes the political landscape, such as the wrenching divide over slavery that gave birth to the Republicans, it is extremely difficult for upstarts to compete with these entrenched parties.

But this is only part of the story. Flip-flopping covers much of the rest. Or, to put it in physics term, the genius of our two-party system is its freedom to change. Just as river basins configure and reconfigure themselves to flow more easily, our major parties adapt to the evolving needs and desires of the American people.

No one would confuse the Democratic Party led by Thomas Jefferson, with its embrace of slavery and celebration of the yeoman farmer, with the party led by Barack Obama. Republicans extol Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt as iconic figures, but few of today’s GOP faithful would support their push for activist government.

The two parties have persisted because they have offered new ideas when the older ones no longer flowed.

Similarly, a key to Romney and Obama’s success is their ability to adapt their message to a changing electorate, without appearing to lack all integrity. Take healthcare, where both men are being accused of flip-flopping. In reality, they reconfigured their views to overcome resistance that threatened to block the flow of their ideas. Both men vowed to reform healthcare when they took office – Romney as governor of Massachusetts, Obama as president. Romney, as leader of one of the most progressive states in the country, offered a plan that he felt would improve the delivery of care and move through his legislature. (He’s also noted that many of the bills he signed and the judges he appointed reflected the state’s political realities.)

Obama, recognizing that he was no longer addressing Hyde Park liberals, ditched the single-payer concept he had long endorsed in favor of a plan that could overcome the resistance for a House filled with antagonistic Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. This is why both men describe their plans as imperfect, and as the best they could have hoped to accomplish.

Romney, adapting to a different electorate as he runs for president, is reconfiguring his plan once more.

One could offer a similar analysis for most every politician on a host of issues. Practically speaking, those who accuse politicians of flip-flopping focus on the idea they want to flow but ignore the resistance it must overcome.Compromise and tradeoff are two other names for the process of finding ways to change the design to maintain flow when ideas encounter bottlenecks and resistance. This is the physics of politics. So the next time folks accuse your favorite candidate of flip-flopping, thank them for the compliment. The ability to change is a virtue.