the right tapped into a pre-existing condition - they didn't create it.
Doug
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I think the right certainly did create the mental climate or political discourse or public mind, or common sense of the time---along with the confusion, where people vote and speak against their own self-interest.
What is the whole privatization drive, the free market uber alles, the poor deserve their lot, the rich earn their money, public education is bad, starve the beast, etc, about? We've been living in an at least three decade long sea of bullshit, specifically engineered by the Right.
I agree that the Right does not control the poles you cite. If the Right can't control the mind-set, then they sow seeds of rhetorical confusion, like this so called healthcare debate, or the run up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or now the discussions over torture, mayhem etc, or the idea that torture is a necessary in the war on terror, where that so-called war is a completely meaningless idea, even to begin with.
Anyway I am at about page 130 something pages in Michael Perelman's Confiscation, of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression (2007), were he has spend most of the text detailing out the history of this take over of the American mind or whatever you want to call it.
So, then Alan Rudy writes:
``Doug probably meant, by no one, few if any of the likely-to-be-polled public...''
Yes.
And by BTW the Alan Rudy has a book out on the Novartis deal with UCB. Universities in the Age of Corporate Science (2007), which is also sitting on my desk---not read yet.
It took me forever to explain why that deal was a really bad idea to several bio-science friends who were more skeptical of me than the couple of high powered professors and administration who engineered the the deal. The science crowd are as easily taken in as the blue collar crowd. What the science crowd needs are more expensive presentations, little conferences, and other paraphernalia of corp-speak to be shown. It also helps to have job fairs where grads are promised interesting work and high salaries on the cutting edge of development---developments specifically engineered through the patent laws to exploit the very phD studies and research funded by government.. now turned to proprietary products... these grads sign up for...etc.
Anyway, I am not saying that it has been a rightwing conspiracy. I am saying it has been a long standing corporate funded political and rhetorical battle conducted in the open.
And for anyone who is somehow still skeptical of how the Right has created the conditions, please pick up Mike Perelman's book. It is a great history of this battle and how it has changed the US.
CG