On 9/2/2010 10:08 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> "Posed fairly" = answers are very sensitive to how the questions are
> worded. Anyone who thinks that there isn't deep hostility to a welfare
> state in American popular opinion just isn't looking. Yeah, there are
> contradictions, but it's not hard for right-wing politicians to bring
> out the hostility.
I totally agree with this, but it should always be kept in mind that you can look at it equally from the other angle. This is why I keep emphasizing the importance of the current remobilization of the right and its ideology. The classic 1967 statement by Free and Cantril - that on issues concerning the structure of capitalism Americans are *both* "programmatically liberal" and "ideologically conservative" - is constantly re-confirmed by political scientists. (See this paper for the latest work on this issue - http://www.unc.edu/~jstimson/Pathways.pdf )
This produces the classic political dynamic, where debates on critical issues play out with the right making broad ideological appeals and the left appealing to facts and pie charts. The right's ability to mobilize ideology is almost always what causes it to win these debates (when it wins). The right's lack of pie charts was once a problem for it, but it tried to address the problem by creating think tanks, which was a pretty successful strategy.
But the left - both the radical and liberal left - is, was, and remains afraid, unwilling, or unable to address its mirror-image problem, the dominance of right-wing ideology. I think this is a deeply psychological handicap. It's a mental cycle: On the one hand, there's this great desire to laugh at the rubes. Then the laughter sours when it dawns that the rubes' ideology has a real, crippling hold on Americans. But then rather than thinking about what could be done about it, the desire to laugh at the rubes takes hold again. "Please, please, don't make me take this nonsense seriously!" It's like a defense mechanism.
SA