>> You never know what could happen. Since the country is about equally
>> divided between Dem & Rep (ignoring, for the moment, those who've
>> excused themselves), if they moved to the extremes, the average might
>> stay the same but volatility increase markedly. It's easy to imagine
>> parts of the American right - the people that Lew Rockwell talked
>> about in his red state fascism essay - going wildly racist and
>> nationalist. But a lot of the pop isn't like that and could resist.
>> But how many, and how much? The mood in this country after 9/11 was
>> hideous, which isn't a happy portent for what could happen in a
>> crisis.
>>
>> Doug
>
> In general for a country so divided as ours it would seem easier to move
> right
> than left. The right would not fear to stand up to any move towards the
> left but
> the converse is not AS true. Similar to the McCarthy era. Fear is a
> powerful
> motivator and a tool used by the right much more effectively than the
> left. The
> fears the right play up are easily understood and stimulate a primitive
> response mechanism. The fears the left play on are more complicated and do
> not as easily provoke such a response.
>
> John Thornton
-------------------------------
It is about fear, as in the panicky response to 9/11. You can make the case
that all great progressive change as well as reaction has been the result of
fear - in such cases, the fear of suffering and death from hunger or war or
both. Recent left-wing generations have not had to address these fears. My
sense is that people, when pushed hard enough, will weigh their fear of
material deprivation or worse against their fear of repression, and the
latter will not always prevail, or we wouldn't have any explanation for
social reform and revolution.
I don't wish for "the worse, the better" because, as you both stress, the outcome of an acute crisis is very uncertain and there is a large potential fascist base out there to serve as the instrument of repression. The dilemma seems to be that it will probably take nothing short of a sharp deterioration in living standards for the mass of the population to bestir itself assertively enough to break through the primitive fear-mongering of the right. It last united to do so during the Depression, when race and other social divisions were, if anything, stronger than they are now.
But we can become too preoccupied with the effects of a possible social crisis, not least myself. In the meantime, there are many less epic but not unimportant fights being waged today around Iraq, social security, abortion rights, terminal care (Shiavo), stem cell research, appointments to the Supreme Court, etc. in which polls have shown the American public too be not as backward and supine as we sometimes suppose. These are good portents, so long as there are no more terrorist attacks on American soil - a big if.
Anyway, I'm way over limit on postings these past two days. But I've been busy with other things the past couple of months and will be so again, so I've taken the opportunity to cash in some accumulated chits.
MG