> On Jul 17, 2006, at 9:55 PM, Tim Francis-Wright wrote:
> > For what it's worth, Ferguson and Rogers's _Right Turn: The Decline
> > of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics_, published in
> > 1986, has a different spin on this thesis. They portray a
> > Democratic party that turned rightward in the late 1970s ahead of
> > any rightward movement by the electorate. Perhaps they overplay
> > the investment theory of politics a bit much.
> > --tim f-w
> I always assumed that those passages were mainly Ferguson's work.
> Ferguson's a bit paranoid, I heard some years back. Fearing his phone
> was tapped, he used to make calls from pay phones.
> Doug <<<<<>>>>>
golly gee willickers, the investment theory of politics is the product of a paranoid mind...
agree that the theory itself is probably more ferguson than rogers given that it was introduced by the former in an early volume of _research in political economy...
oh wait, this is the journal edited by paul zarembka, the most recent volume on 9/11 reveals him to be a consipiracist of the highest order...
plus, the theory initially stuck its head above ground in a collection that ferguson and rogers edited following the 1980 (no doubt, ferguson had the bigger role in this)...
the editors' essay posited that wealthy & corporate corporations winnow out candidates in a *hidden election* preceding formal campaigning and the voting process (once again, fergy is the likely culprit here given the shroud of secrecy or maybe this poli sci pair are just really good detectives to have come across something so well concealed)...
as for _right turn_, what ferguson and rogers were correct about at the time the book appeared in the mid-80s was that there was no - and i would maintain there is still no - basis for a conservative voting bloc majority, they showed that general public opinion ran contrary - often quite strongly - to just about every reagan agenda item...
two things they overlooked were that the portion of 'the eligible electorate' most likely to disengage was comprised of democratic/potential democratic voters (the so-called 'vanishing voter' syndrome occurring mostly between the mid-60s and mid-70s) *and* that an increasing percentage of voters was displaying less party loyalty (although 'true' independents are still not as great in number as some folks think)...
the democratic party did not really begin to play the current version of the money and marketing game until the early 1980s when it began to do what those seeking investments do: woo investors...
where ferguson and rogers simpified things (and, perhaps, ferguson has continued to do so since) is in a conception of the democratic party as a coherent whole moving to the political right along a clear ideological line, as they saw it, this slide to the right could be offset by the party *simply* moving back to the 'left' in similar fashion...
political money not only provides those giving it with opportunities to pursue their particular interests, it can also grant them a *veto* over what they don't like, for example, much more significant than republican opposition to health care legislation in the unified government years of the early clinton presidency was a *veto bloc* of investors in the democratic party creating such internal divisions that it could not pass anything... michael hoover