Is America a right-wing country?

[Hannah Bell]

IN A number of recent interviews, leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky... compared the base of the so-called Tea Party movement to the base of the Nazi Party, and many on the left likewise see in the Tea Partiers an incipient American fascism. What exactly is motivating people to make these sorts of comparisons...? MOST OF the explanations for this situation tend to explain support for the right as a bottom-up affair--a shift in cultural attitudes in reaction to the 1960s or a "false consciousness" that prioritizes social issues like abortion above economic issues like job security. While these explanations reflect a certain reality, they don't explain it. It is better to look at the overall political climate that shaped these perceptions.

Following the Second World War, a postwar economic boom seemed to guarantee steadily rising living standards and social spending, no matter which party occupied the White House. But when the postwar boom came to an end in the mid-1970s, the corporate class collectively launched an aggressive employers' offensive aimed at breaking the power of major industrial unions, rolling back the social gains of the 1960s and challenging regulatory victories against business won by the likes of Ralph Nader and the environmental movement.

Reducing the "social wage" required an assault on liberalism, the main ideological prop to the postwar welfare state. Big business spent millions to create an infrastructure of think tanks, journals, legal foundations and other organizations dedicated to reviving the old "free-market" ideas of neoliberalism. This process is still going on today. Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker exposé documents how the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers have largely bankrolled the "grassroots" Tea Party movement...

Moreover, the successful enactment of the neoliberal program of tax cuts for the rich, cuts in social spending and attacks on trade unions has undermined the foundations of the liberal state--which weren't that strong to begin with in the U.S. For example, the corporate gutting of pensions and their shift into market-based 401(k) programs means that a politics of resentment can take root among those who have been devastated in the financial crash. People who lost thousands in their 401(k)s can be susceptible to arguments--which the right will furnish without hesitation--about "greedy" public-sector workers who still have pensions. A generation ago--before the dismantling of the pension system--it wouldn't have been as easy to sow these divisions.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/09/07/right-wing-country

[pipoman]

1. No

As it's always been...the masses are moving around the middle of the continuum, and equal numbers at both the left and right extreme of the continuum. Depending on perceived conditions or issues the masses shift left then righ of center. This is I believe true around the world. since there seem to be conservatives and liberals in every culture.

[old mark]

2. Not as such - Historically, I think we have a lot of undereducated and gullible people

in the US and have poisioned the mix with fundamentalist religion and slavery. We thus have developed hatred, fear and magical thinking instead of the rational thought espoused by our founders.


mark

[Enthusiast]

3. There are powerful interests that

want to make it a right wing country, all the way right wing.

[mmonk]

4. Yes, currently it is.

[Lorien]

5. Not when you turn off the TV and talk to people it isn't. nt

[annabanana]

6. +1

The more people understand about, you know, facts, the further left it goes...

[mmonk]

7. It doesn't matter. It matters in how it is run.

[Octafish]

8. What would give anyone that idea?

Like a NAZI.

[MajorChode]

9. Throughout recorded history, the lower and middle classes have always been under assault

The postwar economic boom for the middle class had more to do with the changing American economy (from an agrarian based economy to an industrial one). For many years, the America has been changing from an agrarian economy to a service based economy. The same forces are at work taking advantage of the middle and lower classes. The only difference is they have more useful idiots fully willing to vote against their own best interests.