Joanna:
> Beg to disagree. Victim rhetoric is pretty much universal by
> now -- successfully used by the Right, beginning with Bakke
> and ending with Iraq war, which had to be entirely cast in
> victim rather than imperial rhetoric. We're not there the way
> the Brits were there at the end of the nineteenth century --
> to sieze what rightfully belonged to the empire.
> We're there to protect the U.S. and the world from terrorism and WMD.
> Victim rhetoric is the foundation of every right-wing rant
> and every "Xtian" reaction.
>
> Though I agree that the Left would win hearts and minds if it
> gave it up first.
You certainly have a point here. But in addition to victim rhetoric, the right also have other things in its arsenal, something that offers a positive vision, a warped one if you look underneath, but a positive vision that appeals to the mainstream and is capable of captivating its hearts and minds of the mainstream. That something is the ideology of freedom and personal "salvation" through the market. The left does not have anything of that sort. Nothing, nil, nada - just a bunch of look-what-they-are-doing-to-us rants.
Several years ago I did some work as a data analyst on a project studying Nazi propaganda between 1925 and 1933. Basically the investigators scanned the German press from that period for any mention of the Nazis, content-coded the article and then analyzed the data for patterns (pretty standard stuff in this kind of research). One of the interesting findings was a very visible change in the pattern of their rhetoric ca. 1930. Before that, it was mainly rant how much Germany was screwed - morally and politically - liberally peppered with Jew- and Bolshevism bashing. But around 1930 that rhetoric shifted quite dramatically. The rant and the bashing almost disappeared, replaced by serious proposals of economic and political measures aimed to improve the economic situation of the country. Not surprisingly, that change coincided with the onset of their electoral successes.
Wojtek