Upton Sinclair once said that fascism will come to this country draped in the American flag, and carrying a Bible. Little did he know that its sincerest agents of apologism would come from mainstream academia instead.

In a previous post, I made the argument that one of the Christian Right's greatest achievements has been its mainstreaming of extremist views. I would make the same argument for neoliberal economics. Namely, that market fundamentalists use the ideological cover provided by mainstream economic theory to safely advocate extreme, anti-democratic ideas.

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This could not be more palpably clear than in Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics. In it, Caplan argues that democracies are irrational because most voters are both altruistic and ill-informed. He suggests that best the solution is to limit the electorate to a small core of professional, informed voters who are fluent with economics, disenfranchising the rest. According to Caplan, transforming politics from a commons into a market would result in the best possible outcome for the whole of society, since the rational decisions of those who did vote would have a spillover effect that would provide more opportunity for everyone.

There is nothing new about Caplan's perverse theory. Three thousand years ago, Plato was advocating a utopian Republic that was ruled by all-knowing philosophers who knew the best interests of everyone. Caplan simply replaces Platonism with libertarianism, and philosophers with economists. But there is nothing fringe about Caplan, either: he is a tenured economics professor at George Mason University, VA.

Nor is there anything fringe about most of his argument. Let me emphasize that most of the assumptions on which he is basing his absurd arguments are very much mainstream economic views. The laissez-faire notion that human beings are inherently selfish seekers of wealth, and that individual selfishness has a good cumulative effect, is the cornerstone of capitalist theory. If the market is the amalgamation of true human behavior, and economists are the only people who truly understand it, then why not have them rule everything? When you take the original assumptions for granted, the follow-up argument - however anti-democratic - makes sense within the context.

And that's where we should start the fight: by challenging these groups' ridiculous, innocuous assumptions before they even have a chance to metasticize into the abominations of the far-Right.

Progressives are seekers of truth. But what draws us together is the deeply held conviction that truth-seeking is a group activity. No party or group or class has a monopoly on it. You will know the dogmatists and fundamentalists by their acute refusal of that idea. You will find them scuttling in caves, frantically chasing the shadows that dance upon the walls, confident that they are in fact philosophers.