Those who live in the political world never write about its realities. They don’t REALIZE its realities.

It is like the Mantra. You explain it and explain it and slowly the obvious reality sinks in.

So the same respectable conservative who makes his living fighting liberal causes knows that someone whose credentials are the same as his, but on the left. But he never THINKS about it.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed, so did the major industry built around Soviet-American Friendship. This was the same industry that had been in the unilateral disarmament industry in Carter’s time and which staged the greatest last-ditch emergency political effort in history in the Nuclear Freeze Movement.

Every network had Nuclear Freezers as its heroes even down to its sitcoms. A giant movie special about nuclear war was made for TV, but it was so obviously propaganda that it flopped.

Comedians pushed the Nuclear Freeze. It was to stop the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was the last nail in the Soviet coffin.

The Soviet empire fell. It has been mentioned repeatedly that conservatives were left without Moscow as their national enemy. But what was never hinted was that there was also a PRO-Soviet industry.

Every former Soviet working at their Embassy said plainly after the fall that all of his time had been spent “recruiting.” Nobody questioned that. But, as usual, nobody THOUGHT about that.

Sixty years of full time recruiting and, if you were not a McCarthyite, you had to believe no one got recruited.

Even more so you had to accept that, while the right had huge anti-Communist organizations, there were no pro-Soviet ones on the left.

But no one can give a true history of the rise of environmentalist activism without pointing to the thousands who went straight from working in one part of the left to another.

When people talk about environmentalism, I can’t have much to say, because nobody is interested in the big reason for its explosive growth.

I have seen endless numbers of movements formed and I have formed a couple.

I explained about direct mailing in another piece. All those “spokesmen” you see on TV in Washington or New York draw a salary. Very few of them could live on a congressman’s salary, which is as high as government workers get.

They do this the good old American way, by entrepreneurship. But today they don’t found small businesses. They found groups to support a cause.

Competition is fierce. You have to think of a cause which can raise money but which no one has already taken over yet.

Many an organization to save the Peruvian Ringworm has been tried and failed. Many an organization has tried to set up another version of a proven money-maker like Ban Guns but found the field already over crowded.

In the real world, they pick causes the way Americans used to pick a location for a restaurant or a hardware store.

This is one of the most fundamental facts of American politics.

And you won’t read about it anywhere but in BUGS.