Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981 marked the debut of a strategy to "starve the beast" of big government by ballooning its deficits and the national debt. That would generate a crisis severe enough to force drastic rollbacks of Social Security, Medicaid, and other programs that most Americans had come to regard as foundational to a healthy society.

Conservatives were determined to uproot a consensus that Franklin D. Roosevelt had consolidated half a century earlier in ways that had seeme irreversible: "We have come to a clear realization," FDR said in 1944, "that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." Quoting an English common-law dictum that "'Necessitous men are not free men,'" he warned that "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

Actually, people who only fear becoming hungry and unemployed can become that "stuff, "too, as supporters of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck, and other demagogues who've been sprouting like mushrooms make clear. They're a godsend to conservatives who've dreamed since 1932 of "starving the beast," as the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist reminded us a few years ago by quipping that he'd like to shrink government "to a size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

But why has this strategy won so many intelligent people's support, or at least acquiescence?

Let's sideline familiar explanations of class warfare or false consciousness and consider two others: First, certain personality types are drawn irresistibly to such appeals. Second, certain deep undercurrents in American political culture have always inclined even moderate people to share the conservative dream, as Reagan surely showed by striking those mystic chords.

Some historical background: The Gipper and his successors transformed their party from a champion of fiscal restraint into a pusher of fiscal profligacy, displacing the despised Democrats' "tax and spend" policies with "borrow and spend" policies accelerated by crowd-pleasing tax cuts. All this to force the emergency that would require us to do drastically what we wouldn't do rationally and moderately.

By the time George W. Bush left office, any new taxation was verboten and the country had embarked -- with collaboration from market-whipped Democrats -- on expensive new tax cuts, unnecessary wars, a huge Medicare prescription boondoggle for Big Pharma, and a virtual de-regulation of finance that ballooned public deficits, too.

All this was accelerated by an intimidatingly strong conservative noise-machine that, thanks to the deregulation of media ownership and of corporate "speech" which the First Amendment was never intended to protect, become adroit at touching the raw, jangling chords in stressed, angry citizens.

And so we've had Tea Party eruptions, choreographed rollbacks of public and private workers' security, and the elections of dozens of members of Congress who are holding the federal debt ceiling hostage to more rollbacks.

They haven't the intention or civic courage to resolve the crisis they've created with the "balanced approach" that Barack Obama, one of their hostages, has been begging them to support. What types of people have gotten behind and in front of this strategy, and why? Here are some, although I should emphasize that anyone you might think of as the incarnation of a particular type probably shifts back and forth among more than one of these types.

Greedheads and Opportunists. Most obvious (and, to me, least interesting) are people who've become rich or richer dishonestly and destructively but legally, thanks to the deregulation of finance, to war-profiteering and other public boondoggles, and to massive tax cuts.

We've been reenacting the Gilded Age, as Chris Lehmann shows in scathing, pointillist detail in his book Rich People Things: We're seeing the construction of gargantuan, arboreal castles and the lavish re-funding of the more elitist and obnoxious of the preparatory schools -- I mean some of those founded in the 1880s to secure the prerogatives and graces of a plutocracy that fancied its sons Platonic Guardians of the republic.

"To serve is to rule," reads the motto of the Groton School, whose alumni loathed fellow-graduate Franklin D. Roosevelt as a traitor to his class. Today, the Koch brothers, graduates of the kindred Deerfield Academy, are among many who'd have loathed FDR, too. (That these schools, sometimes despite themselves, also produced Roosevelts, Harrimans, Kennedys, and Vances is a story that I've told here but that too few care to hear these days, much less ponder.)

It's hardly necessary to name the current exemplars of the Greedhead/opportunist strain -- the Goldman-Sachsers and Citi-Groupers and hedge-fund hustlers who are in and out of government management posts -- or to identify the cash-and-carry lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, who too often take these people's instructions even when they're pretending to give them or to forge grand bargains.

Fountainheads. This group is named for The Fountainhead, the perennial best-selling novel by its libertarian heroine, Ayn Rand. Fountainheads aren't in it just for the money. From Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan to Scott Walker and Eric Cantor, they're true believers in her doctrine that human dignity is ultimately a lonely, Lockean-in-the-wilderness achievement and that "society" must constantly be pared back to liberate and, if it can, emulate those who are actually achieving it.

Aristotle considered man the noblest of animals with politics and the most depraved of beasts without it, but Fountainheads think that government, with its rational social engineering, is the beast. They think that society's foundations are pre-political -- divine or ordained in Natural Law -- and that much of what passes for democratic and republican politics is depraved.

Their populism is vociferous precisely to hide their conviction that most people are barely fit to govern themselves as individuals, let alone one another: Only Nietzschian, or at least Randian, generators and investors of wealth are fit to govern.

Godheads. Close to the Randians in some ways, but not as assuredly libertarian, are religious consevatives who emphasize the "divine" inspiration behind individual materialism. Listen to James Lucier, an assistant to conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms in 1980, talking to Elizabeth Drew just after Ronald Regan's election:

"The liberal leadership groups that run the country -- not just the media but also the politicians, corporate executives ... have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is ... highly rationalistic. That training excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches. The principles that we're espousing, have been around for thousands of years: The family ..., faith that ... there is a higher meaning than materialism. Property as a fundamental human right ... and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution ... . It's not the 'new right' - people are groping for a new term. It's pre-political."

To keep on believing this, you really would need God at your elbow, or you'd need the beliefs in ethno-racial destiny on sacred soil that were so potent and wildly popular in the deranged Europe of the 1930s, when Woodrow Wilson's liberal-nationalist imaginings had collapsed into capitalist exploitation and when godless Communism had begun to bare the ugly underside of a universalism that hadn't reckoned deeply enough with nationalist and religious yearnings.

When Americans do curb such fantasies of ethno-racial or dialectical materialist destiny, it is quite often, indeed, by turning to God; even Martin Luther King did that, as Glenn Beck reminded everyone at his big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. But this turn is often taken wrongly, toward what can only be called idolatry, as too many Republican candidates demonstrate every day. But who's to decide? The only way out is to diffuse and displace such currents, but with what?

The Liberals' Conundrum. FDR's answer was that a healthy society, like a healthy person, walks on two feet: Think of the left one as that of social provision (public education, health care, retirement insurance), without which the values that conservatives say they cherish couldn't flourish: It does take a village to raise a child. But think of the right foot as one of irreducibly personal responsibility without which even the most assiduous social engineering (and, indeed, especially that) would turn persons in to cogs, clients, or worse.

The problem is that each side emphasizes its own favored foot until it swells, hobbling the society's stride. Fountainhead boy Paul Ryan thinks that our safety net has become a hammock, lulling people into complacency and dependency; yet he and other true believers, and Greedheads and opportunists who back them, can't reconcile their calls for individual and family virtue with their knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of a capitalism that's dissolving everything they mean to defend. ("All that is solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned," as an observer of capital put many years ago, but never mind....)

Belief in God or in Ayn Rand can't deliver anyone from the growing irreconcilability of spiritual and material values in our present dispensation. Nor can the targeting of scapegoats that always accompanies these failures. The conservative course becomes become so hard to justify that Greedheads, Fountainheads, and Godheads become Airheads on the stump, or they find themselves championed by them - by the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmans (and an astonishingly large number of other women -- Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon) who were standard-bearers for the Absurd in the last election.)

One of the saddest truths in human history is that it's so easy for delusional escapes to become stampedes, in ways that the conservative zealots who stage them intuit more astutely than most liberals do. The latter are always rendered stupefied and speechless by surges of Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads, whether in Monkey trials, McCarthyism, "Bomb 'em Back Into the Stone Age" war-mongering, or the return to the "pre-political" as heralded by Reagan and the younger Bush.

A republic depends on citizens' rising above the rats-in-a maze scramble for individual security and distinction, driven by a casino-finance, corporate welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut that presses us to buy more burglar alarms and hire more private tutors and leaves us clueless about how a society cultivates safety and wisdom. A republic depends on citizen-entrepreneurs and organizers who advance enlightened self-interest and become their highest and best selves by reconciling their efforts with their pursuit of a common good.

Not all citizens have to do this, and not even a majority; some will always rightly commit their energies to generating wealth or to making contributions to religion, art, entertainment, recreation. But in a healthy republic, enough will seek to advance a common good to set standards, a tone, and an idiom of mutual obligation, respect, and reasoned deliberation that dampens the appeal and therefore the rewards of empty rhetoric and brutal action.

Republics need citizens committed to exercise public virtues, because, unlike monarchies, theocracies, or ethno-racial tribal societies, republics have "no other adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens' voluntary patriotism and willingness to uphold some public authority," as the historian Gordon Wood put it.

American Quirks. Conservatives are quite right about this and the importance of that right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility: The voluntarism in republican self-sacrifice, which can't be coerced by the state or incentivized by markets, is what makes a republic free, and an American republican ethos has embodied such voluntarism enough to inspire and sustain it with a mix of pragmatism, faith, and fakery that's better exemplified by Jack Nicholson than by John Roberts.

Evangelical Protestantism, common-sense moral reasoning, and Enlightenment affirmations of Natural Law were all involved in it. The American, wrote the early 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, is "an idealist working on matter.... There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character it might otherwise assume," making the American "successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies."

Santayana added that because the American is an individualist, "his goodwill is not officious. His instinct is to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship, expecting every man to stand on his own legs and to be helpful in his turn. When he has given his neighbor a chance he thinks he has done enough for him; but he feels it is an absolute duty to do that. It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America."

This American favored not redistribution of the material but inner renewal of the spiritual to temper self-aggrandizement with social obligation, re-centering the self in commitments to the society. "This linkage of American material productivity with an outpouring of the spirit over the whole world, of material with spiritual blessings, is and remains the key to American self justification," wrote Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar of the Puritan mission.

The very fragility of republican voluntarism's reliance on cooperative rather than coercive power is its strength, as Jonathan Schell shows in his book The Unconquerable World. Because cooperative power grows from give-and-take in everyday interactions that organize and reorganize themselves informally, it's too elusive for enemy armies to destroy, too independent of markets for wealth to buy off.

The Hunger for Myths. A society enhances its capacity to sustain trust by generating strong, shared ideas and story lines that sift the deluge of infotainment and inspire citizens to find themselves in an ever-evolving common good. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, gnawing hunger for spiritually deep myths has driven young Americans to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, which teach courage and loyalty to friends and a higher, common good in adversity.

Both of these were literary creations before they were corporate investments, their individual creators drawing on English mythic wellsprings whose pre-market depths and expressions were still widely, intimately shared.

Why do they have more power for American youngsters than American stories? "Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities," warned John Dewey of America in the roaring 1920s, a decade whose widespread frenzy, disorientation, and loss that we're recapitulating.

A shocked and stressed society's story lines metastasize into something alien and frightening to citizens trying to keep the civic faith. As a society loses its humane consensus, its words and deeds part company, as Hannah Arendt warned, leaving words empty and deeds to become unguided missiles, advancing no commitments a people can trust enough to trust its members to be faithful to them.

Without such consensus and trust, a polity loses conviction and traction. It lies open to manipulation by the few who are filled with passionate, factional intensities. Left as well as right flirt with the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt's appreciation of decisive, sovereign actions that cut through liberal democratic dithering. Widening gyres of violent, directionless infotainment unleash more shouts and undercurrents, driving public deliberation into a vortex from which ever-stranger misleadership emerges promising clarity and security, and, alongside such misleadership, a swooning desperation to obey it.

The more demagoguery, surveillance, police and prisons a republic has to deploy, the less civic oxygen it has and weaker it is, because it can't depend any longer on commitments that people feel motivated to keep even when no one is looking -- commitments motivated not only by irreducibly personal responsibility but by a love of society cultivated in a way of life that seeds trust in order to elicit it.

The faith, arts, and disciplines of that way of life are being undermined by conservatives who confuse today's casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer-marketing juggernaut with the Lockean capitalism and free markets they imagine they're defending. The more they get this wrong, the more they become Greedheads, Fountainheads, or Godheads, ending as Airheads in the public forum, which they destroy as their numbers grow.

That's the real cost of the strategically smart, three-decade-long campaign that conservatives have waged up through its recent, choreographed rollbacks of public and private workers' security in some states and its holding of the federal debt ceiling hostage.

The people who fomented the crisis haven't the intention or the civic courage to resolve it through the "balanced approach" which the president claims most Americans would support decisively if only they had a chance to think about it. But how can they think about it in any decisive way if the court of public opinion has been disbanded and is no longer capable of reaching decisions?

The Capitalization of Communication. The determined minority has deprived Americans of the chance to think by trading shrewdly on many people's disinclination to think much in the first place. The real scandal in the Murdoch empire isn't the phone hacking and official corruption, horrifically revealing though they are; it's his news outlets' relentless drive to make citizens fear and mistrust one another by dissociating increasingly empty slogans about self-governance from increasingly brutal images of "reality."

No such willful, systematic degradation of public discourse, which turns a society from cultivating cooperative power to legitimizing and glorifying coercive power, has been seen on a scale like Murdoch's since the 1930s, except, perhaps, in the worst excesses of Cold War anti-Communism.

Essential to this transformation has been a deregulation of a massive invasion of the republican deliberative processes by the protected "speech" of incorporeal (and, increasingly, non-American) "speakers" in election campaigns as well as in legislative drafting sessions and, of course, in every television commercial and virtually every highly visible debate forum, including those staged by media conglomerates. Their news organizations break "news" as bread-and-circus entertainment for audiences assembled and re-assembled on any pretext whatever - erotic, ethno-racial, ideological, nihilist -- solely for the production of maximum profit.

While the digital revolution has expanded everyone's ability to break news, it may have hobbled our capacity to break and sustain ideas that are good and shared enough to make human sense of the deluge of "news" and entertainment that's separating us from one another and plunging us into ourselves in troubling ways.

This sea change, and market-driven attempts not just to generate it but to corner it, are transforming how we present ourselves to one another and how we feel about ourselves and society. It's turning citizens into 24/7 competitors as self-marketers, corporate marketers, even predatory marketers, fearful and mistrustful of one another, who've forgotten how to deliberate and cooperate to achieve goods in common that they can't achieve alone.

These tendencies converge in the conservative minority's anti-government propaganda to generate a cacophony of angry sound-bites that is accelerating the disconnection of words from possible deeds, disabling the public sphere and rational analysis.

During the Iraq War, for example, the columnist Paul Krugman noted that although 60 percent of Americans believed wrongly that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had actually been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences "believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News.... [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had 'found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.'"

When deliberative democracy is sidelined like this, it won't be long before the determined, powerful few can administer more shocks and palliatives to an atomized body politic that's too frightened to challenge them and that, indeed, becomes disposed to embrace them.

In a moment of pique, Obama called the debt-crisis mongers "hostage takers" for refusing to approve even six months of unemployment benefits in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts. But Obama himself exhibited a hostage's Stockholm syndrome by praising his captors' patriotism even though, in their own mystical confusion, they are actually serving powers and patrons foreign to any republican polity or moral code.

A civic republican alternative? For decades after Roosevelt's 1944 speech about what it is required for "necessitous men" to achieve freedom, the non-rational, "pre-political" currents in American political life that James Lucier characterized were sublimated, and even elevated, by liberal education and assiduous civic-republican pedagogy. Against the darker currents of McCarthyism and Cold-War anti-Communist hysteria, they became something worth cherishing but seldom understood or appreciated by Marxist or post-modernist leftists any more than it is by Paleolithic, religious, and proto-fascist conservatives.

Can the small-"r" republican center hold? The conservative strategy to direct the capitalization of irrational undercurrents that too many liberals have dismissed has become the context or straightjacket within which Obama has been trying to renew FDR's reasonable, evolving balance between a left foot of social provision and a right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility and dignity.

If liberals don't acknowledge the right foot, they'll never regain power or deserve to regain it. And if conservatives can't sideline their Greedheads, Fountainheads, Godheads, and Airheads enough to give the left foot its turn, they'll keep turning the right foot into a staggering, suppurating limb that drags the republic to its doom.