> 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?
(snip)
> 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?
-----------------------------
The scapegoating of racial minorities, oppression of women, militarism,
religion, xenophobia, and other forms of cultural backwardness which
reactionary elites have exploited is not unique to the US. It is an
historical, universal problem which has been progressively relieved by the
transformation of predominantly rural into predominantly urban societies
even though, as the red and blue states show, there is still a long way to
go. At the same time, it is remarkable how quickly such seemingly
intractable prejudices are sloughed off - or suppressed - when the need for
solidarity and social change presents itself. If that weren't the case,
there would have been no social progress, no social revolutions.
The confidence in individual opportunity and success is characteristically American, and is solidly rooted in the unprecedented level and duration of peace, prosperity, and social mobility which Americans have enjoyed relative to the rest of the world. But I think the high point of the Horatio Alger myth coincided with the expansion of the American frontier in the 19th century and Fordism in the 20th. This generation of American workers seems more economically insecure and reportedly perceives that its children will be the first to be less well off than they are.
I'm not a cultural determinist. I think the popular culture has to be followed carefully and political possibilities weighed against it, but I don't believe there are inherent cultural attributes which congenitally prevent certain peoples from becoming conscious of their "downtrodden" condition where such is (or becomes) the case.
MG