more; it hardly seems possible suchdeclasse effronteries could get anywhere in a society with a high school completion rate of 90 percent. But tenders of a 23-Cent Heart Miracle seem to work just fine on the readers of the magazine where Ann Coulter began her journalistic ascent in the late nineties by pimping the notion that liberals are all gullible rubes. In an alternate universe where Coulter would be capable of rational self-reflection, it would be fascinating to ask her what she thinks about, say, the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined Ideas Will Drive Conservatives Revival. Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed Health News included the headlines Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days, Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easilywithout drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet, and High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points. It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying thats now sutured into the modern conservative movements DNAand to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.The history of that movement echoes with the sonorous names of long-dead Austrian economists, of indefatigable door-knocking cadres, of soaring perorations on a nation finally poised to realize its rendezvous with destiny. Search high and low, however, and theres no mention of oilfields in the placenta. Nor anything about, say, the massive intersection between the culture of network or multilevel marketingwhere ordinary folks try to get rich via pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bagand the institutions of both evangelical Christianity and Mitt Romneys Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.And yet this stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological struggles that make up its official historyif not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one placeand the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.Those tactics gelled in the seventiesthough they were rooted, like all things right-wing and infrastructural, in the movement that led to Barry Goldwaters presidential nomination in 1964. In 1961 Richard Viguerie, a kid from Houston whose heroes, he once told me, were the two MacsJoe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthurtook a job as executive director for the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The organization was itself something of a con, a front for the ideological ambitions of the grownups running National Review. And fittingly enough, the middle-aged man who ran the operation, Marvin Liebman, was something of a P. T. Barnum figure, famous on the right for selling the claim that he had amassed no less than a million signatures on petitions opposing the Peoples Republic of Chinas entry into the United Nations. (He said they were in a warehouse in New Jersey. No