Has Mead been transforming himself?
Doug -------------
I don't know Mead at all and don't really follow the WSJ except what is posted here. But I get the general idea through those postings.
As for transformation in general, it is very difficult to not get lost and very easy to forget. If Mead has any redeeming features, somebody should do him an intellectual favor and remind him of whatever those features might be. I just judged him on what he wrote in the article on Helms.
It seems to me from extremely vague memories, that Helms was linked to this Wallace thing through Nixon since I think Helms changed parties from Dixiecrats to Republican and ran for Senate in that year ('72). Helms at that time was a fly weight compared to the really nasty critters like Wallace, but Carter was right that Wallace even if he hadn't gotten shot had been eclipsed in a larger sort of historical movement.
(This is from memory and intuitive. A real historian or somebody who remembers better than I do, should say something here.)
The suburban communities were finally beginning to dominate the larger political landscape by then (`72) and the party machines that had been so predominately urban, were collapsing. Daley's performance in the Chicago Democratic convention is usually cited as the marker for this change. This union of suburban community backlash (racism) and the old line southern segregationists' fake Populism really started to take off about this time.
I consider the old Dixiecrats a fake Populism, or manufactured little-guy ideology, because the pricks that espoused it seemed to me to be actually very snobby and elitist within their own narrow little worlds. They would no more invite a poor working class white guy to their dinner table than they would let a stray dog in the back door---and that's the analogy as I imagine they saw it. So I call it a fake Populism.
Just read Max Sawicky's post. Yeah, that sounds more like it. But, I have a hard time keeping my Southerners straight Max---so apologies in advance.
But I see the former socialist's and liberal's contribution (Horowitz, et.al) to fall in more with the general suburbanite backlash, giving this rather inarticulate movement, some better articulation and political sophistication---rounding it out, giving it words and ideas that helped legitimatize what was really just an unadorned racism and anti-property tax impulse (ie. traditional bourgeois values of bigotry, greed, and stinginess). What these (not necessarily Jewish) liberals and socialists did, was help re-make the Republicans by re-interpreting the traditional liberal political constructs of democratic freedoms and rights into a kind of strident ideology of individualism.
This move fit well with the pre-existing fake Populism of the old segregationists. The emphasis and development of this neo-individualism was an attempt to erase the broad construction of equality which by then was solidly linked to civil rights, and de-link collective equality from the concept of individual rights. So, individuals have rights, but broad classes of people do not have rights. Politically, this helped to deconstruct almost all the popular mass movements of the era which were predicated on various immergent collective identities in race, gender, disability, and economic class (Nixon's hardhats). And since the broad collectives could be effaced in principle through a kind of anti-communist scare routine (this is America and we don't believe in collectives) then, the thorough going racist elements in this movement could be very conveniently ignored. Black consciousness doesn't exist, since there are only your individual nigra Americans, as Archie Bunker might have said.
It was all so much more proper that arguments could be cast in a contest of one to one individual rights. Since the overwhelming weight of material wealth, social privileges and educational/background advantages were and are solidly held by white upper middle class men, then, when all political argument is cast in an abstract case of individual rights, one to one, of course we all have the same stance---this is a democracy, right? An individual rights based discourse creates an artifical homegeneity or equivalence between individuals where none exists.
It's magic. Race, gender, privilege, class, wealth, political power all disappear in that sort of individual rights discourse. It's about my rights against your rights. Individualism. This also fit well with the then emerging new corporatism and its struggles against federal environmental and consumer regulation. Corporations are individuals with rights. But the environment and consumers are broad collectives, classes so to speak, and only communists believe in such things; and we are all against communism. Since there are no legitimate class rights, all questions devolve into questions and discussions of the rights of individual corporations. You have the right to make money, don't you? Well, they have the right to make money too. Get it? This same line also rather awkwardly fits various states rights and right to work blather. Unions like the federal government are collectives and are in principle oppressive, etc, etc.
So that is what I see as the neo-conservative contribution.
It does help to have a menu to distinguish between these uniformly foul swamp critters. I can't tell one slimy, snapping, creepy crawly in the pot from another without it. Thanks Max. So, the neo-cons added the argumentative flourish of individualist rights from the suburbs and the downtown free-for-all greed of free market corporatism into the pot to make the more brutal Wallace inspired paleo-con eugenics of the antebellum police state palatable.
But, the Christian fundamentalists have to be added into this bouillabaisse du swamp in such a way that they blend naturally with all the mix of flavors---nasty, stale, and ugly as these might be.
I think some historical grounding is needed to fit the Christian right into the pot, mainly from the Jackson era with its religious revivals and fragmenting and reorganization of Protestant denominations. In this regard then the concept of an individual's relation to god and organized religion---its basic protestantism helps to see the ideological blending of the two other swamp collections. On the one hand, this individual declaration of faith which is at the core of both fundamentalism and its old revivalist roots fits well with the extreme emphasis on individual rights of the Horowitzian neo-cons. On the other hand, its authoritarian and punitive Old Testament moral code fits well with the Wallaceite paleo-cons.
Horowitz and Wallace. What a pair. I think I can see them in a kind brutish Old Testament begetting---agreeing on circumcision, slavery, subjugation of women, defending property to the death, and other manly virtues, while agreeing to hate anything that wears red like the devil, communists, prostitutes, and homosexuals.
Chuck Grimes
ps. I should actually get the Lind , Carter and Chip Berlet's books. But this is such foul shit to read, even if its well written, researched, etc.