> > How about the counter-example of the American
> right? In the 1950s and
> > early 1960s, right-wing thought seemed utterly
> dead, confined to a few
> > lunatic ideologues and small business types who
> subsidied them. They
> > persisted, organized, prosyletized, and won over
> considerable numbers of
> > converts. They didn't sit around pulling their
> puds waiting for their
> > Historical Moment.
>
The issue posed is key, and I have been puzzling over it. I don't think it's due to resources and wealth -- leaving aside the far left, the liberals had plenty of both in the 1950s and 60s. Part of it is that conventional liberal prescriptions failed after the crisis starting in 73, and that's certainly important. But I was thinking of what it was the right did to take over the GOP and to what extent we might learn from them as they seemto have in many ways learned from us.
Of course there was the networks of magazines and think tanks and lobbying for and against key legislation, but I was also thinking it wasn't just random. There is something uniting the range of things they prosthelytized about: free markets will solve your prsoblem, government can't solve your problems, the poor deserve their suffering, the rich their wealth, minorities are inferior, women are better off on the pedfastal, crime requires harsh repression rather than rehabilitation, it's unfair to whites and men to give historically disadavntaged groups special advranges, America has a special mission, we need military action to be saved from our Enemies, Godliness is crucial to a good life whether you like it or not, various things like that I think that's the main list, right?
A friend suggests that there is something common in this list that taps into the inchoate and somewhat inconsistent American value set, way of thinking, ideal, whatever you want to call it -- presuming that there is such a thing in broad sense, not shared by all but widely shared enough. I don't think that's crazy to believe, anyway, I think it is worth contempating that it is at least partly such a "cultural" factor that helps explain why social democracy and even further left solutions took root in Europe and not here. And I emphasize that the idea is not taht there is a single rigid ideology consciously shared by most Americvans, but rather a web of somewhat hazy tendency that has elements that might be enhanced or minimized. Th right enhangced a certain set of these.
My friend suggests that the key thread in the right wing catalog I've rattled off is that "some people are better than others," including you, playing off American individualism and pride in pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps (in the eyes of God of course, but he sanctions the hierarchy too -- doesn't he divide us into the damned and the saved?) Is that right, do you think? And what thread might we seize on to try to enhance to get our favored audience, the working class that doesn't even acknowledge that it is a working class, to start on the long trek left? My friend is absolutely certainly that Thomas Franks type populism, them and us, is the wrong place to start, that Americans are not going to respond to seeing themselves as downtrodden.
Ideas?
jks
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