> Doug Henwood wrote:
> > The right has beaten us on at least two important fronts - one, the
sort
> > of database building that Weyrich did, and two, getting radical
ideas
> > taken more seriously by the less radical. I was a right-winger in
1971,
> > and you have no idea how marginal we were. Now, it's CW.
That might be true of college campuses and affiliated places, but not about the US population at large. The US is a very conservative country - meaning that a rather sizeable part of the population believes in conservative ideas - from religious fundamentalism, to sucking up to powers that be, to the hatred of unpopular minority groups. Until the so-called Reagan revolution, the views of these people were relatively absent from the national public discourse, mainly because that discourse was controlled by educated elites who scorned Bubbas and their bunker head mentality and favored a more urbane views. I think HK Mencken is a good role model of such elites - fairly conservative, yet derisive of the "booboisie," their primitive religiosity and unsophisticated views.
But the success behind the "conservative revolution" of the 1980s is based on the mobilization of the "booboisie" - partly by giving them voice in the national discourse (cf. Rush Limbaugh). That is to say, that all that right wing organizers had to do was to let the riff raff into the news rooms and media studios. There was nothing particularly brilliant about this organizing strategy, just tapping into the previously underutilized reserves of bigotry and obscurantism.
The Left, on the other hand, would never be capable of accomplish the same mobilization level simply because the booboisie, the "masses" prefer right-wing bigotry to anything that the Left holds dear. That the tenor of the US politics is quite conservative and that anything smacking of the Left ideas is dead on arrival is due not to shrewd maneuvers of a few conservative politicians, or lack of organizational skills on the Left, but to bigotry and conservatism of a large share of the US population.
Wojtek