Funny you should ask. You won't actually find any reference to a mission in the party platform. Indeed, the platform is little more than a recitation of slogans which pass for general principles. But if we examine party tactics long established over the decades, we can infer its mission. And fasten your seatbelt because that mission is nothing less than the destruction of all civic life.

If this sounds hysterically paranoid, it's only because you and I are frogs. Yes, that's right, frogs. You remember the folklore; when a frog is tossed into a pan of boiling water, it will leap out to save its life, but when placed in tepid water and heated slowly to a boil, it will remain until it burns to death.

So here we are, you and I, just a couple frogs hanging out and somehow still believing this is all about the Democrats and Republicans as if Eisenhower were still President and "Father Knows Best" were still in first run. And while we have been enjoying our delusion, over the decades the Republican Party has radicalized so far to the political right that its ideology is hostile to the very concept of public life.

In the Republican vision, American society consists of two classes: server and served. Since the vast majority of citizens, (what we know as the middle and working classes), are good for nothing more than fodder to serve the rest, elaborate government agencies need not be dedicated for them. Thus the Republicans have been setting about to destroy these agencies and to transfer their programs to private hands.

These programs include the public school system, Medicare, and Social Security. And inasmuch as a server class scarcely has any need for human rights, these include also constitutional guarantees thereto as well as constraints on government abuse (such as habeas corpus and limits on search and seizure).

Even programs which benefit all citizens are on the Republican hit list. Protections for the environment, consumer safety, food and drug quality, and fair trade are among the many targets. Not even the venerable post office, highway system, city parks, or local water works are exempt.

The Republicans seek to destroy nothing less than the free market itself — yes, even as they extol it in the talking points of party rhetoric. After all, free and fair competition constrains global corporate dominance, and thus it has to go. The party's hostility to anti-trust regulation is Exhibit A.

For the coup de grace, the Republicans are working to dismantle the very foundation of American government, not least of which are the checks and balances among the different branches. Anything which (for the sake of the common good) gives individual citizens a voice or otherwise constrains corporations in the pursuit of profit is in the Republican sights.

Take no comfort in thinking this mission would be political suicide. The Republicans know this full well, so they achieve their aims not by a direct assault but rather by suffocating all public programs through a slow but inexorable deprivation of tax subsidies. By ever lowering taxes, civic life will ultimately wither and die. Hence the persistent and unrelenting mantra and battlecry: "No new taxes." To the Republican, no tax is ever low enough or regressive enough.

And this is all by design.

The best thing the Republicans have going for them is that such a radical mission is unthinkable to the rank and file. So we remain asleep at the switch, unwittingly complicit in our silence and comfortable in our delusion that it's all an honest difference among people of good will over the role of government and the extent to which its programs should be funded.

And yet signs to the contrary abound. Before our eyes the federal government has become a corporate proxy, distributing its capital and doing its bidding. The income gap between haves and have-nots continues to increase. Every year private fees replace public taxes. Assets once wholly in the public domain now carry corporate names. Media consolidation exerts more control over the dissemination of information, (the blogosphere notwithstanding). Town squares are a thing of yesteryear, long since replaced by food courts in shopping malls. And the server class is indoctrinated with the mythology that hours of toil leads to wealth.

So, my fellow frog, shall we remain in our consumer slumber or shall we open our eyes, leap out of the hot water together, and DO something about this?