Battle over Labor Law Reform Shows True Power of the Right

[Emit]

Battle over Labor Law Reform Shows True Power of the Right
By Abby Scher

Some people may enjoy watching the Right thrash around trying to find its way in the Obama Age, but I take the election results and their aftermath as a sign of a country dangerously divided. There really was a stark difference in the major party candidates, and 46 percent voted for the guy who lost. 59,946,378 is a lot of people. This political force isn’t going away.

~snip~

This spring’s tea party protestors reveled in the language of the Old Right, the same language warning of incipient socialism that Republican operatives rolled out in their attempt to defeat Obama in 2008 and that television and radio pundit Sean Hannity channels from some strange archaic source. The news stories and photos told the story:

The audience, which was quite large despite a heavy rain, was told that Obama was leading the country toward “dictatorship.” The government, we were told, was creating a crisis “100 times as grim as 9/11,” the people were being “brainwashed” into complacency by the media and soon “the face of big brother will be exposed and the slogans of a classless one party system are revealed to us.” (1)

In a desperate search for relevance to its shrinking electoral base. the Republican Party embraced the language of suspicion, conspiracy, and betrayal. Far from pushing the conspiracy-minded away in hopes of finding a vital center, Newt Gingrich and other GOP beltway heavies threw their weight behind the anti-Obama, anti-tax “tea parties,” and Republican congressmen, mayoral candidates and the like lined up to speak even though many protestors despised them as much as the Democrats.

~snip~

... The question is whether the Right’s institutions are strong enough even in the wake of electoral defeat for them to win key victories in such areas as health and workers’ rights that ensure reactionary dominance of the sectors progressives need to move the country closer to justice. The answer to that question is clearly yes. Don’t be distracted by the tea parties and think that only Fox News zealots are left to fight on core issues.


~snip~

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr., tried to groom the language of the Old Right, removing ugly anti-Semitism and name calling while retaining its glorification of a free market and anti-democratic sentiments. It seems outlandish that Americans for Prosperity and the rest of today’s Right will be able to groom their vision of a nation that derides the idea of climate change, keeps the free market a humming (though the notion is rank mythology), and dissolves the separation of church and state so your favorite religious group could discriminate in the delivery of government services. But the EFCA struggle shows we should not underestimate the enduring conservative combination of front groups generating lies for the media and corporate lobbyists. Let us hope their old magic does not keep unions weak when we need them most. Indeed, the battle is nothing less than a test of democracy.

http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n2/battle-over-labor.html

[Swede]

1. How can such a fractured and fractious bunch be governed?

Compromise seems the only way,but also seems out of the question.

[Emit]

2. The powers on the Right seem to

know full well that populist conspiracism serves well to distract from the social and economic injustices ~ injustices that are often inflicted upon the people by the very groups purporting to support them. I fear this is currently rendering large portions of the populace almost ungovernable, so to speak.