Polemic Alert If you don't like my political polemics, skip this piece of self-indulgence. I wrote it on my recent cruise and poured it into the screen as soon as I got home.

I can speak with some authority on this, having been a victim of a con myself recently.

To make a long story short, a corporate bank account is a test of character. Those with character treat it as a shared trust. Those without character treat it as a private piggy bank.

Cons continue for two reasons. One is conspiracy, in which cons share the gains. The other, more common reason is guilt, a denial by victims followed by fear that a whistle blower will pull them down, too, and finally condemnation of the whistle blower.

We've seen a lot of that lately. And the temptation is to create a mastermind, blaming the guy at the top. Nicholas Kristof of the Times says, in the case of George W. Bush, that animus is misplaced. (Bush image from CNN.)

In some ways he is right. Bush is, at best, a front. He's far too dim to have pulled such an elaborate con himself. Presidential politics, as Nixon said, is like riding a wild animal. It's the animal's will that controls the game.

In fact this con was propelled, as we know, by three distinct groups of people, three movements which, through Bush, captured the Republican Party and set us on the course we have followed these last four years.

There were the American Ayatollahs, people like Pat Robertson, who laid their plans in the 1980s, first taking over churches, then TV sets.

There were the neo-cons, men like David Horowitz, who went from the Far Left straight to the Far Right, and whose view of men and power was that the former were sheep while the latter was a dark zero-sum game.

There were the anti-tax "starve the beast" men, like Grover Norquist, who sought to strip government of any hope for doing good and thus become courtiers in a class structure like that of 18th century Europe.

Enough has been said on all of that. The fact is all these movements crystallized under Bush. They captured him and swallowed him whole. They exercise all his power. They are mutually dependent, they are one. If he falls they are exposed, and if they fall he is.

The great joke, of course, is who is being conned here. I believe the conned are those of the conservative movement, the rising that began in the early 1960s with William F. Buckley's Sharon Statement and Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative." (That's Goldwater, on the cover of Time, at right.)

It may be hard to remember, now, the raw American idealism that fueled those movements, so corrupted have they become by what then was their lunatic fringe. But Goldwater did love liberty - the inherent right of every individual to be themselves, free insofar as possible of government interference. There was idealism in Karl Marx, too, until his name was used by Lenin's Bolsheviks to create dictatorships which, at their height, controlled nearly half the world's people.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, said Goldwater. But he was wrong, for in extremism there can be no liberty. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, he added, but again he was wrong. Without moderation there is no justice.

The good news is we don't have to convince all this con's victims that they have been had. The bad news is that the cons have cleverly brought many of the nation's largest corporations into the game, on their side.

I'm not talking here just of firms like Halliburton and Enron, which directly benefitted from the massive frauds of the last four years. I'm talking here of the great media companies - Disney and Viacom, GE and Fox - who bought in through media concentration laws that let them exchange their responsibilities as competing businesses for the oligopoly of easy profit and unquestioned power.

Why doesn't ABC stand up to this Administration? Could it be that Michael Eisner remains secure in office at parent Disney, despite his abominable profit record? Why doesn't CBS stand up? Could it be that Sumner Redstone's personal control of Viacom has been vindicated? How about GE? Its attempts to monopolize many basic industries remain unfought, so NBC stands silent. Time Warner has spent the last few years struggling for survival, in no position to object to anything. Rupert Murdoch, of course, thinks he's not just in on the game, but directing it.

This is how conspiracies hold together. This is how gangs work. Everyone believes they're in charge. Everyone else feels that, if they speak out, they will be destroyed by those who are in charge. Omerta.

But this is also every conspiracy's weakness. Because as in any organized crime the main conspirators have contradictory motives. A Christian America can't exist without a strong government to enforce its edicts. Nor can the neo-conservative dictatorship exist without ample funding, funding opposed by the "starve the beast" crowd.

It's much like America's previous great con, the Confederacy. It couldn't compete without a strong central authority, yet its reason for being was total opposition to such a center. So its states defied Richmond, and counties often defied the states. The men in charge used the language of liberty to justify the enslavement of one-third their number, in black men and women. As Jefferson Davis (left, from Civilwarhome) himself wrote at the time, "If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory."

The internal contradictions in this conspiracy will also bring it flying apart, even if Bush should win re-election. The only difference, as it was for the Confederates, is that the short-term success will result in the total destruction of the nation. And we're all in that nation.

The question Democrats have asked themselves throughout this cycle is how can we best break this conspiracy, now, and reverse the total destruction of everything America represents? In many ways these have mirrored the debates over Communism in the last century. The strongest anti-Conservatives, like Howard Dean, demanded a firm line, fighting tit-for-tat, standing up to the bully, employing his own weapons against him. The more moderate camp, that of Kerry, Gephardt, and the Democratic Committee, argued that the con should play itself out, that (as with Communism) it would fall of its own contradictions, in its own time, that if we merely acted moderate, and non-threatening, people would come slowly our way.

In the end Democrats chose the Kerry approach, and rejected the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. They did this deliberately, much as Republicans in 1952 chose Eisenhower over Taft.

But no campaign consists only of its leaders. A Kerry Administration would not consist of just John Kerry and a few hand-picked favorites. In America, parties rule, not people. And in great contests like this one parties win, not just candidates.

The coming campaign will be, no matter how John Kerry would not wish it to be, for Kerry and Democracy. (Kerry and Dean are to the left, from MSNBC.) Kerry himself will be a figurehead, just as George W. Bush will be a figurehead. What will matter is who can hold their coalition together best, who can tell the most compelling story, who can get their people out in greater numbers when it counts.

I have said here for the last year that our best hope for victory lies in pulling parts of the Republican coalition off from Bush, and I still believe that. There are great targets of opportunity there, libertarians who feel conned by the Ayatollahs, religious leaders who feel conned by the absolutism of the chosen, foreign policy realists leery of crusades, even small government conservatives who fear the growing power of this government.

The debate I want to initiate, today, is over how we can peel 5%, 10%, 15% of that Great Con apart from its center, not as snitches, not as converts, but as Americans who know that one election is, and should, be always followed by another, and another. We need to convince some unknown number of millions to either skip this Election Day, or decide, just once, to give the other side a chance, if only to see that their leaders are right, and that we're incapable of properly governing.

Give us a chance, Democrats will ask Republicans, so you can regain control of your own party from its lunatic fringe, and give it back to its own roots, in Goldwater and Reagan, of Dole and Ford. You've been had, conned, and you have one last chance to get out of it, to take your party back.

We don't have much time.