``In fact liberal policies are supported by majorities.'' Max Sawicky
``Huh? This is somewhere between a big oversimplification and a fantasy. What are you talking about?'' Doug
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I think I know what Max is talking about. If you go back and look at the list of civil rights legislation and war on poverty programs (quoted in the More on OEO and CAP threads), you will see that a large number of these are still on the books, still functioning and still popular.
Like what? Like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and other pieces of Johnson administration's War on Poverty. Or to bring in the current economic worries, say HUD and HFA, liberal creations of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Most of the above have now achieved sacred cow status, almost equal to Social Security. Well, even if they have been morphed into foobar land.
So I agree, Obama or Clinton could say, ``...you can say my policies are popular and good, so eff your labels.''
Beyond the fact that I think they are both chicken shit to say something like that to the right, I also suspect they are both ignorant.
Part of the reason I spent so much bandwidth going back and detailing out some of the War on Poverty programs and history, is I think most people don't know this history. I think it especially important to know something of it, if you consider yourself a liberal, progressive or leftist.
I don't really `know' the history at the study level, only through now almost forgotten experiences, as I realized in the end of that thread.
Which reminds me that on many earlier threads over fascism and the rightwing, Chip Bertlet kept telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. I kept ignoring him or poo-pooing his objections.
I now repent. Bad Chuck. Bad Chuck.
When I finally got around to it, I got his book, Right-Wing Populism in America. I am reading the last sections New Faces for White Nationalism. I've learned that rightwing populism has been a constant and often mainstream theme in US political history beginning with the War of Independence. I realize too, that all those periods of US history I just drowned out of mind while reading in high school and college (because they were loathsome) like the Jackson era were full of populist movements, and that what I think of as religious craziness, ignorance and mean-spiritedness---were in fact, US politics. They were not just flukes or tangents or nutiness. They were part of our traditional political thinking (which I still think of as mostly composed of flukes, tangents and nutiness..)
So, then when a more sober view of the current history of the criminality, corruption, religious nutiness, and nastiness of the Bush regime is finally written down, it will no doubt find like CP, this was just another of those turns to traditional American rightwing populism.
I will probably still argue such a view obscures the experience which I found, felt a lot closer to fascism, but then I tend to the strident and hostile. After reading a fair amount of European political history (French and German) where very similar populist movements were common in the 19thC, I still think I see the trace toward what became certified fascist movements in their 20thC political histories.
Getting back to 60s-70s history of popular movements, I had forgotten a lot of the welfare rights battles. After reading Piven's bio, I'll go back in awhile and get a couple of her books. This kind of reading gives great insights into the potential development and possibly good directions to take in social reform.
CG