Today's Conservatives Say It Out Loud: They Hate Democracy

by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

Friday 23 September 2011

The roots of today's toxic conservative movement lie in Ayn Rand's teaching that wealthy "producers" -- now called "job creators" -- should be left alone by the government, namely the rest of us. The rest of us are "freeloaders," "moochers," "leeches" and "parasites" who feed off these producers and who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions to collect taxes from them or regulate them or interfere in most other ways. The Randians hate democracy, and say so, declaring that "collectivism" sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes.

(See Concern Over Republican Embrace Of The Ayn Rand Poison.)

For decades these selfish, childish, "you can't make me" beliefs stayed largely below the radar, because conservatives understood that voicing them in public risked alienating ... well, anyone with any sense at all. But for various reasons sense has departed the country and conservatives are finally saying it out loud, for everyone to hear: they hate democracy. They want to limit the country's decision-making and the rewards of our society and economy to those they feel "deserve" to be on top, namely the "producers" and "job-creators."

Writing in Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American conservative columnist Matthew Vadum reflects these views, writing that democracy is "like handing out burglary tools to criminals." He writes,

It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives. "When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote," said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C. "They know how to vote."

Vadum echoes the Randian ideology that we should be government by the "producer" supermen, and the parasites (the rest of us) should have no say in this, calling it communism:

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Thom Hartmann talks on his TV show with Vadum about this:

In response, conservative outlets like FOX News have been giving Vadum a platform to repeat his views to large numbers of people:

Other Conservatives Weigh In

Vadum's perspective are not unique in conservative circles. Rush Limbaugh has questioned on the air whether poor people should be allowed to vote. Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation thinks voting should be limited to those who "own property."

Other conservatives are also on the record as opposing democracy. Walter Williams, in Democracy Versus Liberty, writes, "I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government." He echoes the old "taxes are theft" line, writing, "Laws do not represent reason. They represent force."

Pat Buchanan picks up the baton and mocks democracy, calling it a "childlike faith," and laments the downfall of a corrupt tyrant, in The Democracy Worshipers,

...Hosni Mubarak, though a ruthless ruler, had been our man in Cairo since the assassination of Anwar Sadat, fighting alongside us in the Gulf War, keeping the peace with Israel, allying with us in the war on terror.

But as soon as the tide turned against him, we ditched him and cheered on the crowd in Tahrir Square, a few of whom celebrated the downfall of despotism with a sexual mauling of Lara Logan.

Some Good Points

Earlier this year, writing at the Cato Institute, Senior Fellow Steve H. Hanke offers a more nuanced view of democracy's failings, in, On Democracy Versus Liberty Mr. Hanke makes very good points about the tendencies of the public to be steered toward bad decisions by panic during crisis. "The result is that crises acted as a ratchet, shifting the trend line of government size and scope up to a higher level." Later, he equates the power of organized wealth (Cato's funders, anyone???) to influence lawmakers with the problems of majority rule! He uses examples including farmers continuing to receive subsidies long after the depression ended, and the Bush-era expansion of government in response to 9/11.

But Hanke fails to see that it is not democracy that causes these distortions, but the failure of our system to keep the power of concentrated wealth from shouting down the collected wisdom of the people. It is the suppression of democracy that causes the very problems Henke attributes to democracy.

Republican War On Voting

Today in several states Republicans are making it harder to vote. In The Next Voting Rights Movement Must Start Now, CAF's Isaiah J. Poole warns,

In state after state, new hurdles, such as voter ID laws, are being constructed to the right to vote that will especially trip up low-income people, students, rural residents and seniors. They disproportionately affect many of the groups who helped put Barack Obama in the White House in 2008 and who are in the vanguard of opposition to right-wing economic policies today. This disenfranchisement is largely happening below the radar of a populace and a national media preoccupied with the poor state of the economy and with the series of attacks by governors on public employee unions.

Ari Berman, in The GOP War on Voting at Rolling Stone,

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.

. . . In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.

In Taking Back The Vote, CAF's Terrance Heath writes about the Republican war on voting,

If tea party conservatives have their way, the right to vote will revert back to a privilege — and one enjoyed by far fewer people. It's easy to dismiss media motormouths like Ann Coulter, when she says that women should not have the right to vote, because too many of them vote Democratic (single women, anyway). But it's a mistake to shrug off someone like Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips, who thinks it would be a good idea to put "certain restrictions on the right to vote," like restricting voting to property owners.

Phillips' claim is reminiscent of Republican attempts to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the 2008 election in states like Michigan and Ohio. When right-wing pundits like Matthew Vadum(author of the ACORN "exposé" Subversion, Inc.) and Rush Limbaugh say that the poor shouldn't have the right to vote, they're expressing the same sentiment. It's a manifestation of the conservative concern that too many of the "wrong people" have too much of a voice in politics, and too few of the "right people" have any. That's what Paul Weyrich meant when he said to a group of evangelical activists in 1980: "I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Undermining Democracy On Purpose

We are not dealing with the Republican Party we used to know. This is not even George W. Bush's Republican party anymore. In Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult, retiring Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren writes,

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

[. . .] A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Please read that again, and then read the whole piece. This is a Republican writing, from the inside. They are doing it on purpose. They are making the government dysfunctional on purpose. They are making people hate government on purpose. They are working to turn people against democracy and put themselves in power in its place.

Economic Mess of the Century-How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us into It

Holland's new book shows how the corporate Right obscured how they've rigged the "free market" so they always come out on top.
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 15, 2010

Editor's note: AlterNet is proud to present this excerpt from senior writer Joshua Holland's new book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy (And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America). Holland's research-rich but entertainingly written book slices and dices the latest talking points, explaining the issues with depth and nuance. The book tells an important story about the American economy that you won't read in the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. It's one that is vitally important to understand as we grapple with some new economic realities. It's a story about how the corporate Right has obscured the ways in which they've rigged the “free market” so they always come out on top. Ultimately, it goes a long way toward explaining how so few Americans noticed as a new Gilded Age emerged under a haze of lies, half-truths and distortions.

*****

The Great Recession that began in 2008 wiped out $13 trillion in Americans' household wealth —in home values and stocks and bonds—stoking the kind of anger we’ve seen from pissed off progressives and from the Tea Partiers who dominated the news in the summer of 2009.

But although a lot of people threw around some angry rhetoric—and even invoked the specter of armed revolution—the reality is that when the economy nosedived, we basically took it. We didn’t riot; we took the bailouts, tolerated our stagnant wages, and accepted that Washington wasn’t about to give struggling families any real relief.

Yet the meltdown was global in nature, and it’s worth noting that citizens of other wealthy countries weren’t so complacent. As the Telegraph, a British tabloid, reported, “A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads toward 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia.” Another British paper, the Guardian, reported scenes of “Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers” in France. French officials went so far as to delay the release of unemployment data, “apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.”

You might wonder why Americans are so docile compared to others in the face of such a brutal economic onslaught by a small and entitled elite. Any number of theories have been offered to explain the apparent disconnect. Thomas Frank argued eloquently in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? that wedge social issues—“God, guns and gays”—that the American Right nurtures with such care, obscure the fundamental differences between rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Class consciousness, common to other liberal democracies, has been trumped by social anxieties,* according to Frank.

I would offer two additional explanations. First, the 90 percent of Americans who haven’t seen a raise in 35 years compensated for their stagnant incomes and kept on consuming, buying televisions and going out to dinner. How did they do it? First, by bringing women into the workforce in huge numbers, transforming the “typical” single-breadwinner family into a two-earner household. Between 1955 and 2002, the percentage of married women who had jobs outside the home almost doubled. Workers’ salaries stayed pretty much the same, but the average family now had two paychecks instead of one.

After that, we started to finance our lifestyles through debt—mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded, and the government started to run big budget deficits, year in and year out. In the period after World War II, while wages were still rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away 7 to 12 percent of the nation’s income in savings annually (the data only go back as far as 1959). But in the 1980s, that began to decline—the savings rate fell from around 10 percent in the 1960s and the 1970s to about 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at less than 1 percent (it’s rebounded somewhat since the crash—to 3.3 percent at the beginning of 2010).

The second reason Americans seem complacent in the face of this tectonic shift in their economic fortunes is more controversial: the “New Conservative Movement” built a highly influential message machine that’s helped obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself.

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let’s return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that’s more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that—a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there’s a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn’t reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We’ve all grown accustomed to conservatives’ conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call “intellectual infrastructure” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

In 1973, brewer Joseph Coors kicked in $250,000 for seed money to start the now highly influential Heritage Foundation (with the help of the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos foundations). In 1977, Charles Koch, an oil billionaire, started the libertarian CATO Institute. Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy right-wing philanthropist who would later fund the shady “Arkansas Project” that almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency, bought the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1970. The American Enterprise Institute, which was founded as the American Enterprise Association in the 1930s and remained relatively obscure through the 1960s, was transformed into an ideological powerhouse when it added a research faculty in 1972. The Hoover Institution, founded by Herbert himself in 1928, saw a huge increase in funding in the 1960s and would be transformed during the 1980s into the Washington advocacy organization that it is today.

In 1982, billionaire and right-wing messianic leader Sun Myung Moon started the Washington Times as an antidote to the “liberal” Washington Post. The paper, which promoted competition in the free market over all other human virtues, would be subsidized by the "Moonies” to a tune of $1.7 billion during the next 20 years. In 2000, United Press International, a venerable but declining newswire, was bought up by Moon’s media conglomerate, World News Communications.

With generous financing from that same group of conservative foundations, the Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The Federalist Society continues to have a major impact on our legal community.

In 2005, one of the most influential right-wing funders, the John M. Olin Foundation, actually declared its “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times reported that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.” And that’s not even mentioning Rupert Murdoch’s vast, and vastly dishonest, media empire.

The rise of the conservative “noise machine” has been discussed at length in a number of other works, and conservatives dismiss it as a conspiracy theory of sorts. In truth, it’s anything but—it’s simply a matter of people with ample resources engaging in some savvy politics in an age of highly effective mass communication. There’s nothing new about that; what’s changed is that the world of advertising and marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, and the Right has played the instrument of modern public relations like a maestro.

Taken as a whole, it’s difficult to overstate how profound an impact these ideological armies have had on our economic debates. Writing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Hall and Joseph Capella, two scholars with the Annenberg School of Communication, discussed the findings of a study in which they coded and analyzed the content broadcast across conservative media networks. They found a tendency to “enwrap [their audience] in a world in which facts supportive of Democratic claims are discredited and those consistent with conservative ones championed.” The scholars warned, “When one systematically misperceives the positions of those of a supposedly different ideology, one may decide to oppose legislation or vote against a candidate with whom, on some issues of importance, one actually agrees.”

A larger issue is that the corporate Right’s messaging doesn’t remain confined to the conservative media. The end of the Cold War brought about a sense of economic triumphalism, which infected the conventional wisdom that ultimately shapes the news stories we read—U.S.-style capitalism had slain the socialist beast, proving to many that in the words of Tom Paine, “government is best when it governs least.”

A wave of mergers also concentrated our media in the hands of a few highly influential corporations. In 2009, there was a rare (public) example of one such corporation nakedly exerting editorial control over the decisions of one of its news “assets.” During a meeting between the top management of General Electric, which owned NBC-Universal with its various news networks, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, GE executives agreed to force MSNBC’s firebrand host Keith Olbermann to cease fire in his long-standing feud with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, “The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn’t even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC’s journalism.”

Most notably, the deal wasn’t engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O’Reilly’s show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O’Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp.

Five months previously, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had been criticized for touting GE’s stock on his show, "Morning Joe," without disclosing that the company owned the network that employed him. “I never invest in the stock market because I think—I’ve always thought—that it’s just—it’s a crap shoot,” he said. “[But] GE goes down to five, six, or seven, and I’m thinking, ‘My god. I’m gonna invest for the first time, and I’m gonna send my kids to college through this.’“

A week after that, Scarborough invited Nancy Snyderman, a regular medical correspondent for NBC’s networks, onto the show to discuss the health care reform bill then moving through Congress. Snyderman, who was presented to the audience as an impartial medical expert, had lost the ABC News job she’d previously held for 17 years due to a conflict of interest. The Nashville Examiner reported that “she was briefly suspended for being paid to promote J & J’s product Tylenol. She later spent four years with Johnson & Johnson as Vice President of Consumer Education.”

In another ABC segment, Snyderman weighed in on congressional hearings about autism without disclosing that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary was the target of litigation alleging that one of its vaccines may help cause the condition. It was a “blatant conflict of interest,” in the words of National Autism Association vice president Ann Brasher.

Snyderman is hardly unique. A months-long investigation in 2010 by the Nation’s Sebastian Jones revealed what he called a far-reaching “media-lobbying complex”—dozens of corporate hired guns who appear on network broadcasts without disclosing their ties to the firms they work for. Jones wrote of “the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news,” citing such appearances as former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, who went on MSNBC—which conservatives insist is the liberal antidote to Fox News—to urge the Obama administration to launch an ambitious energy program.

The first step [toward a green economy], Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.” 

As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Jones found that during just the previous three years, “at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials—people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests”—had appeared on the major news channels. “Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” he wrote.

There’s a final piece of this puzzle that’s less insidious than what Jones unearthed but probably has a bigger impact on our discourse: the standard-issue “he-said/she-said” reporting that’s so instinctive to neutral, “unbiased” journalists. Reporters are expected to get “both sides” of every story, even if one of those sides is making factually dishonest arguments. And there are an untold number of consultants, corporate flacks, lobbyists, and right-wing think-tankers who are always good for a quick quote for a reporter working on deadline.

The economic perception that emerges from all of this simply doesn’t depict the economy in which most Americans live and work. Before the crash of 2008, most Americans saw news of a relatively robust economy, with solid growth and rising stock prices. But their own incomes had essentially stagnated for a generation. I’ve long thought that the disconnect may help explain why Americans suffer from depression at higher rates than do the citizens of most other advanced countries—if you think the economy’s solid, everyone else is prospering, and yet you still just can’t get ahead, isn’t it natural to conclude it must be the result of some fundamental flaw in yourself?

Maybe you do have flaws—sure, you do—but it’s important to understand how the economy helps shape one’s fortunes. In The 15 Biggest Lies, we’ll look at some of the Right’s most cherished rhetoric and try to burn off some of the fog that shrouds our economic discourse.

***

(*I totally agree.--jef)

TBoE Forces Conservatism Down the Throats of US School children

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhh!

~#0#~

Texas State Board of Education Approves New Curriculum Standards
by Terrence Stutz

AUSTIN - In a landmark vote that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past.

Split along party lines, the board voted 9-5 to adopt the new standards, which will dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for future textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade.

Texas standards often wind up being taught in other states because national publishers typically tailor their materials to Texas, one of the biggest textbook purchasers in the country.

Approval came after the GOP-dominated board approved a new curriculum standard that would encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation - a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer.

Before the final vote on the lengthy list of standards, the board's five Democrats criticized the Republican majority - primarily social conservatives - for injecting their political and religious views into the standards and giving short shrift to important minority figures in history.

Republicans called the standards a major step forward that will boost instruction in history, government and other social studies classes.

Regarding the complaint that Republicans and conservative ideology have been given more prominence, board member Don McLeroy, R-College Station, said the panel was trying to make up for the liberal-slanted curriculum now being used in schools.

"I think we've corrected the imbalance we've had in the past and now have our curriculum headed straight down the middle," said McLeroy, one of seven social conservatives on the board. "I'm very pleased with what we've accomplished.

Board Democrats accused the Republicans of a "cut-and-paste" job on the standards that included a flurry of late amendments undoing much of the work of teachers and academics who were appointed to review teams to draft the curriculum requirements last year.

"Here we are trying to approve standards for our children that will be used for years and we are being asked to approve all these last-minute cut-and-paste proposals," said Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi.

"I don't think any teacher would accept work like this," she said. "They would have thrown this paper in the trash. We've done an injustice to the children of this state."

Board member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, called the proposal a "travesty."

"The board has made these standards political and had little academic discussion about what students need to learn," she said. "I am ashamed of what we have done to the students and teachers of this state."

Several Republicans left the board meeting room while Democrats laid out their objections to the document, but returned to defeat a Democratic effort to delay action on the proposal until July. One Republican, Bob Craig of Lubbock, supported the delay motion.

Board member Geraldine Miller, R-Dallas, was absent for both votes, on postponement and then final adoption.

Democratic lawmakers and other critics have suggested that when a new board of education takes office in January - after two social conservatives have been replaced by more moderate members - the board should reconsider the standards and make substantial changes.

Asked about that possibility, McLeroy said there is nothing to prohibit such a move, but he contended that "when people look at what we've done, they won't find much to change."

Most experts say it is unlikely that the board will revisit the social studies curriculum - unless Democrat Bill White wins the governor's race this fall. If that happened, White would appoint the education board chairman, who controls the panel's agenda and could put the issue back before the board next year.

Change would be unlikely if Gov. Rick Perry wins re-election. The last two board chairs appointed by Perry were part of the social conservative bloc - McLeroy and current Chairwoman Gail Lowe - who strongly support the new social studies requirements.

In addition, state Education Commissioner Robert Scott warned against further delays since the new standards are scheduled to be phased in to classroom instruction in the 2011-12 school year.

Board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, another social conservative, opened Friday's board meeting with an invocation that referred to the U.S. and its history as a "Christian land governed by Christian principles."

"I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses," she said.

Before approving the standards on Friday, board members adopted scores of additional changes - including the restoration of Thomas Jefferson's name to a list of political philosophers that students will study in world history. Board members had come under criticism for removing Jefferson's name earlier this year though they pointed out that Jefferson would still be studied in other areas of the curriculum such as U.S. history and government.

Board members also adopted a standard that calls on high school students to "compare and contrast" the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment - barring establishment of a state religion - with the legal doctrine of church-state separation that emerged from U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

"We need to have students compare and contrast this current view of separation of church and state with the actual language in the First Amendment," said McLeroy, who like other social conservatives contends that separation of church and state was established in the law only by activist judges and not by the Constitution or Bill of Rights.

Knight led opposition to the proposal, saying it "implies there is no such thing as the legal doctrine of separation of church and state" despite numerous rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts that have firmly linked the requirement to the First Amendment.

The curriculum standards adopted by the GOP majority have a definite political and philosophical bent in many areas. For example, high school students will have to learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s in U.S. history - but not about liberal or minority rights groups that are identified as such.

Board members also gave a thumbs down to requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage in the curriculum. In addition, the requirements place Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a more positive light in U.S. history despite the view of most historians who condemn the late Republican senator's tactics and his view that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists in the 1950s.