On 8/30/2010 2:49 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Beck's rally signifies a sharp shift to the right.
> Compared with when? Yeah, the right is mobilized, but we got far more people out to antiwar demos in 2002 and 2003. Not that that had any effect. But the Republicans are going to pick up seats in Nov and Beck's turnout hasn't changed any of that. In fact, it could energize liberals who might otherwise be too demoralized to vote.
To be clear, I'm not talking about this one rally alone but the whole phenomenon it's a part of - this remobilization of the right. I don't think this sort of thing necessarily has much effect on the number of seats won or lost in Congress. But it does have an effect on what type of people occupy those seats and what types of things they do. The Republicans were predestined to win a lot of seats, given the Dem incumbent in the WH and the state of the economy. But it was not predestined that the Republicans would continue to be so (and become even more) right-wing. In the 1966 elections there was a similar bounce-back in the direction of the GOP after the LBJ landslide and the riots - but that election was noteworthy for producing a lot of prominent moderate Republicans who later ended up seriously undermining support for the war. Recall that after Nov. 2008 there was a lot of talk about how the Republicans needed to move to the center - even from some conservative pundits. The opposite has happened, and the Tea Party, Glen Beck's 9/12 freakshow, the health-care town hall spectacles - they had a lot to do with it.
SA