Reply #124: You Might Want To See No. 105, Below, Addressed To Mr. Wolf, Ma'am [View All]

There is no doubt that there has been a sort of "red shift" to the right in public discourse on politics, that has been in train for at least two decades, and that is a very troubling phenomenon. You are quite correct that a number of positions that in my youth would have been viewed as barely left of center are now freely described by some as "far left", and a good deal that would then have been viewed as "loony right" proclaimed to be within the mainstream. Part of this, certainly, is the result of rightist organization and funding of various platforms and echo chambers, but as these are beyond our power to directly affect, it would seem wiser for us on the left to focus our attentions on what contributionsd to this may have come from our own activities, since we have the power to alter our own behavior.

One of the most serious structural problems contributing to this is the divorce of the activist left and what we might call still for convenience "blue collar" people, which occured during the Viet Nam period and was cemented in the Reagan era. It seems to me the left has seriously under-rated the attachment of such people to traditional totems of patriotism, and the personal attachment such people have to the view of their country as good and great. This seems to me to be a leading reason why it does not seem possible for the left to tap into the tremendous discontent among these same people with the conditions of their work and the poor wages they receive. Viewing the left as "anti=patriot", they will then give no hearing to anything else from that direction, even though it might really be just what they want to hear. Politics simply cannot be done successfully without an appreciation of emotional and irrational factors, for therse dictate the greatest proportion of political behavior, particularly among people who do not pay a great deal of attention to political life normally.