``..Thus, it is argued that contemporary "backlash" conservatism relies on racism. Chuck talks about George Wallace, but he doesn't give any examples of how contemporary backlash conservatives fan the flames of racism... I suggest you talk to people like this and observe how often race comes up. Not very often.'' Chuck0
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Maybe your right, maybe not. Joe Noonan and Johy Lacny's posts which I just read covered most of what I was going to say. So, I won't belabor points already made.
Whatever is going on between Chuck0 and John Lacny, I don't know and don't care. I think the topic is too important to get lost in personal bullshit.
``The major bogeyman for the conservatives are the liberals and anything that can be linked to liberals.''
I understand. But remember `Liberal' is code.
First, remember when backlash was called `white' backlash? It was all about the `white' backlash against the `Liberal' reforms like affirmative action, busing, affordable housing, etc.
So dot, dot, dot, in a few years `white' and `reform' were dropped and now it's just about the `Liberals'. `Liberals' stands for the `enemy', i.e those who fight against the white reactionary backlash. Opps, replace `reactionary' with `conservative' and drop `white', and change `backlash' to `populism' but keep Enemy and Liberal part. Sorry.
We are dealing with a code world here. Sure at the moment, the rightwing code world is all about the War on Terror, code for White Christian Crusade of the righteous America against the dark hooded hordes of Islam who span the globe, some 1.3 billion people strong from Morocco to the Philippines. Terrorism is indeed everywhere, if that is the Enemy of Freedom.
In the foreign policy domain of rightwing codeland, Liberals are just the same as always: soft on terrorism, soft on national security, just like they are soft on crime, giving criminals rights they shouldn't have, a bunch of elite intellectual queer crapolla, all wishy-washy, limp wrist hand waving at a vicious Enemy who must be exterminated like insects, so forth and so on.
The real question in my mind is how do Democrats or `progressives' who want to, get some of those white working class votes back? It obviously won't do any good to call people racist.
So, the only way I can see is political education. Name the policies on the Right agenda that systematic institutionalize racism, as racist, since that's what the policies do. There are a very long list of them: school vouchers, privatized public services, and numerous so-called rightwing `reforms' in public housing, urban re-development, zoning, affordable housing, public transportation, bilingual education, re-districting, employee benefits, labor, minimum wage, `right to work' laws, public health, drug rehab, and of course the whole `law and order' routine with the prison-industrial-complex, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes, death penalty, juvenal justice, family services, probation departments etc, etc, etc.
Each of the above domestic policies and many, many more covertly systemize defacto segregation, discrimination, and institutionalize racism, building into the fabric of daily life a `separate' theoretically `equal' set of systems, one for middle class white, one for others, where any economic privilege operates to magnify the separation by denigrating the public sector, privilaging the private sector, so as to join an economic class privilage to an already existing race or color line---however fuzzy that line might be at the moment.
This isn't much of a plan, but political education on the issues is about the only way I can think of to expose this white reactionary backlash for what it is. By that I mean argue about the fairness or lack of it and the resulting impacts on people, often along economic lines, and more often on race and ethnicity. Sure the white working class may or may not care or change their mind, but at least lay out the public policy implications and let them make their decisions on some honest appraisal of conditions, rather than deepen the code pretexts and pretend these sorts of policies are about something else.
Public education, public health, criminal justice are key focal points and battle grounds where race first and then economic class are almost always the subtext and almost always conjoined.
In each and every one, the word Liberal is made to stand for some race subtext in which Liberal means `racial preference', yet another code word to obscure discrimination and inequality of access.
I just read Dwayne Monroe's post. Yeah, like that.
So the codes depend on and feed these multiple and parallel threads where `plausible deniability' is always operating to keep the Right from looking too much like their Klan ancestors. And the same sort of deniability operates just about everywhere in the political arena. Sometimes there is a big slip, like when Lott toasted Strom Thurmond, so the Right moves those backsliders out of the lime light and tosses a few smoke grenades on stage for a screen, and we move on.
CG