HunterByrd

Conservative 'Revolution'

Former SecTreas Robert B. Reich contends there has been a conservative revolution in America. There aren't many people who would disagree with him.

The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, has been used by Republicans to justify their continuing dominance, but the ideological revolution at issue here preceded the "war against terror." Why did the revolution occur?

He employs two recently published works to get the reader round to his way of thinking. Right Nation, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, journalists at The Economist. The authors argue that conservative power in this country is the result of a pendulum swing in reaction to the Supreme Court's seminal civil rights rulings from 1954 through to 1973, the major civil rights Acts of the 60's which brought with them an economic impact, as well as the the counter-culture liberalism of that era. "It's a tidy story," says Reich.

The second book, What’s the Matter With America? (published in the United States as What’s the Matter with Kansas), by journalist Thomas Frank. The author posits that the America's 'lurch' to the right stems from a more recent spate of 'cultural liberalism'. Reich is amenable to Frank's theory. Frank says:

"Nearly everyone has a conversion story to tell -- how their dad had been a union steelworker and a stalwart Democrat, but how all their brothers and sisters started voting Republican; or how their cousin gave up on Methodism and started going to the Pentecostal church out on the edge of town; or how they themselves just got so sick of being scolded for eating meat or for wearing clothes emblazoned with the State U’s Indian mascot that one day Fox News [an unabashedly right-wing TV network] started to seem ‘fair and balanced’ to them after all."

Reich says that, while Frank's argument is the more realistic of the two, he makes the fantastic claim that it's the Dems who should have benefitted from the Red State Revolt.

As Frank emphasizes, the backlash has been cultural rather than economic. Yet it emerged about the same time that the heartland’s economy was unraveling. Through the late 1980s and ’90s, huge chain stores like Wal-Mart crushed local retail businesses. During the same years, giant agri-businesses drove tens of thousands of small farmers into ruin. What was left of America’s factory jobs skipped off to Latin America and China. Meanwhile, a steadily smaller number of wealthy Americans grew even wealthier. The free market didn’t accomplish this on its own, of course. It was egged on by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and even Bill Clinton, all of whom deregulated, privatized, and opened American markets to foreign competition.

No wonder the heartland has felt oppressed and angry. But why is the resentment expressed in cultural, not economic, terms? In its drive to stop liberal elites from "intruding," the backlash has even embraced free market ideology -- the same ideology that has been responsible for its economic free fall. Kansas "sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate -- and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place."

Of course, Reich would blame the conservatives, and laugh at them for shooting themselves in the foot, then cheering about it. Things are never so simple as that. Mickelthwait & Woolridge's argument is inextricably linked with Frank's -- you can't separate the two and still have the Revolution that Reich is so bitter about (because Republican's stole what the Dems traditionally deserve by default).

Reich is smart , but he is also hopelessly locked in to an ideology that is too often ungrounded. Read the article through, and this will become apparent to you the further down the column you go.

We’re back to the days of the robber barons of the 19th century. The rich didn’t get where they are solely through hard work. The captains of American industry and their Wall Street advisors have shown no lack of ingenuity in robbing small investors and duping blue-collar employees.

"Democrats no longer constitute a recognizable political movement." He's right about that, for all the wrong reasons. And they ARE wrong. His article (which I enjoyed) brims with condescension, too.

Whether a consersvative person is patrician, middle or lower class, or neauveu riche, the concept of socialism beyond the 'safety net' is simply incompatible with the proper world view, i.e., that one is responsible for one's own action or inaction, and that the free market system is just that (in this sense, we are globalists, albeit reluctant ones). We are the product of a great America embued with a rough, wild, wonderful sense of freedom, Robert. Quit whining.