> On Oct 2, 2009, at 9:55 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> This is astute. For the left, liberals are the Other, but the same
>> dynamic doesn't hold on the right. And this relationship needs to
>> change. That's basically what I was trying to get at here:
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090914/012915.html
>>
>>
>> But for that relationship to change, a lot of other things have to
>> change. It seems to me the model for the right relationship is
>> obvious - the popular front. But this raises a paradox: In the past,
>> it's typically the *left* that's been most enthusiastic about popular
>> fronts. It was always a matter of persuading liberals to join with
>> the disreputable red-pinks, not the other way around. And the
>> assumption on all sides was that when liberals do join up, it's the
>> radicals who get the most out of the partnership. Yet today the left
>> stands deliberately aloof from liberalism. Why is that?
>
> Coupla things. First, the situation on the right a few decades ago
> wasn't all that dissimilar to that on the left today. Then, the
> movement conservatives hated the centrist Republicans and saw them as
> the enemy.
That's right. Back then, the conservatives did see the centrist Repubs as the Other. Now they just see them as contemptibly watered-down versions of themselves. That changed because at a certain point the conservative movement succeeded in seizing hegemony over the entire right half of the spectrum and winning the battle to define what it meant to be on the right. (I'd say that happened in 1975-80.)
> Obama has to make a show of placating the liberal wing of his party,
> but it really has surprisingly little influence over him - on health
> care, on Gitmo, on Afghanistan, on whatever. Instead he looks for
> Republican support.
That's exactly like the relationship between Nixon and the conservatives. But what's amazing is how quickly things changed. In 1972 William Rusher was complaining that Nixon had caused the conservative movement to virtually disappear. But by 1975, there would be a huge burst of New Right organizing, which laid the basis for Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford, which more than anything else defined what it meant to be a conservative vs. a sell-out.
I was recently in Ann Arbor at the Gerald Ford Library looking at the Ford campaign records, especially pollster Robert Teeter's analysis of Republican primary voters. At the start of the campaign the Ford forces thought they had it in the bag; they believed Republican primary voters were clueless partisans who just assumed Ford was conservative (because he was a midwestern Republican; just like Obama's a big-city Democrat) when in fact Ford was amazingly liberal. But as the Reagan camp gathered steam, on the basis of a lot of grassroots conservative organizing, the Fordites started to panic - suddenly those clueless Republicans were starting to see what a real conservative was, and why Ford wasn't one. Ford ended up winning the nomination by like one vote. The history of the Republican Party over the next four years was the history of the Reagan camp gaining total hegemony over the party, so that Ford-style moderates like Howard Baker were suddenly no longer viable candidates.
In other words, rank-and-file small-c conservatives had to go through a learning process. What I would like to hope is that the disillusioned liberals are currently going through the same learning process with Obama right now, and that maybe we'll see the fruits of that in a few years. But that's where the analogy breaks down. In 1975 there was already a whole conservative subculture, infrastructure, activist network - and most of all - intellectual framework, in place to take hegemony. The situation now on the left is nothing like that. We have neither infrastructure nor potentially hegemonic ideas.
SA