Relax, liberals. You've already won.

No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long conservative counterrevolution is over.



Now that Hillary Clinton has conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, the primaries are over and the general election campaign for the White House has begun. On the Republican side, however, the general election campaign began months ago -- and presumptive nominee John McCain has spent much of that time tacking toward the center. He praised multilateralism in a March 26 speech in Los Angeles and in general is trying to appear more like an Eisenhower Republican than a Reagan Republican. True, every four years all major-party presidential candidates race toward the center. But in the last decade, even during the seven-plus years of the Bush presidency, the center of American politics has moved considerably to the left. Whether Obama or McCain wins the White House, liberalism has already won the national debate about the future of the country.

For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as "conservatives" are better described as "counterrevolutionaries." The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radicals who dreamed of a counterrevolution. They didn't just want to stop the clock. They wanted to turn it back.

Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.

And they failed. On every front conservatives have failed, completely, undeniably and irreversibly. The failure of the right has left the structure of 20th-century American liberalism standing, battered and cratered but still intact.

<snip>

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/06/10/liberals/

why are my civil liberties still in the toilet?

why is there an illegal occupation still being funded?

why is there still 'wars' on abstract things like 'drugs' and 'terror'?

why do airports resemble concentration camps?

why is GITMO (and other prisons like it) still running?

why are the people who perpetrated all of the above not standing trial for their actions?

Sorry, I feel this article is, at best, premature.

Optimistic, but premature. The conservative right has more money than liberals could ever dream of - they aren't going anywhere, nor is their influence gone.

we still have a great deal to do yet to shift the paradigm, and that shift will register a "10" on the socio-political Richter scale. Even requiring Americans to make sacrifices to arrive at a rational energy policy or convincing Americans that everyone will be better off with universal health-care will be a journey of 10,000 miles.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."- President Eisenhower

I wonder if he had any idea then that "stupid" would end up infecting the entire GOP?

His final speech as President, warning us about the military industrial complex, is evidence of that. But even beyond that, Ike knew all about the Bush Crime Family. They're the ones who made him President, even though he never embraced their agenda....


(Dick Nixon and Prescott Bush, pictured here in the 1940's)

It was none other than Grandpa Prescott Bush (funder of the Third Reich) who introduced his golfing buddy Ike to the Bush Crime Family protege Dick Nixon, and the two became the 1952 Republican presidential ticket.

... is a given. The reich wing has been nothing but a total failure.

But to say they have lost the election is premature. One example is that of Al Franken vs Norm Coleman --- many are predicting that the Dems will win this senate seat. But upon what basis? Coleman remains ahead in the polls, gets very favorable news media attention, and the Republican smear campaign against Franken is going along full blast without so much as a reply from the Dems.

As for the White House, I have already heard from a couple of Dems who got disgusted at Obama's succumbing to AIPAC and how he sounds more like a Republican rather than a Democrat over Middle Eastern affairs {this could well cost him many votes}. In fact, on another web site, a couple of pro war Republicans gloated by saying Obama is more pro war than McCain.

While the article is correct in saying that right wing extremism is a dismal failure, this is no guarantee of victory in November both in local and national elections. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that some Democrats will not adopt the wicked and failed ways of Republicans.

No, the decades long anti-American KKKonservative movement is not dead. It could have been destroyed if the Democrats decided to impeach Reagan in the 80s. Today it could have been given a mortal wound if they chose to impeach Bush. But that evil revolution is alive and well thanks to Democratic party passivity and, I'm afraid, will be around for a long time. True, it may not be quite as strong today as in the recent past. But it's still here like it or not.

over confident or complacent now. This is the General Election. Time to dig in and fight the good fight with all of your might.

do not let your guard down for a minute around these snakes

I should note. People like me, but distinct from many people around here who are more liberal, progressive or leftist as the case may be.

"The defeat of the conservative counterrevolution should not inspire complacency among liberals and centrists. By rejecting the radical right, the American electorate has not endorsed bold new initiatives. The public has merely signaled its support of the older New Deal/Great Society/Civil Rights liberalism that the right sought to uproot.

Nor does the defeat of the counterrevolutionary right mean that conservatives may not win victories on some issues, from immigration restriction to the rollback by means of state initiatives and federal court decisions of race-based affirmative action. An increasingly conservative federal judiciary, appointed by a Republican president, might shift public policy toward conservative ideas of deregulation and approve of some state limitations on abortion. "

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

like putrid lumbering zombies , they won't stay dead or gone. As long as the self-centered, greedy, the-end-justifies-the-means, neo-con mentality exists, so will they.

I'm going to work harder, but with a much lighter heart. As Victor Laszlo said in Casablanca, "This time, I know our side will win." See y'all in Brazzaville!

:scared:

Just a bunch of people throwing shit via cult of personality.

-KNOW it's self-serving bullshit meant to create apathy among the Dems....just as the republicans are saying that McCain has huge problems and it doesn't look good for republican McBush...Dems fall for this same bullshit every time the republicans throw it out to them.....Dem's, just like in this DU forum, eat it all up without even coming up to breathe.

Apathy has ALWAYS been a republican tool, just as powerful as republican owned electronic voting machines, making the poor & elderly show ID's or they can't vote and controlling the only five media television news corporations and 90% of talk radio....republicans know creating apathy works....just like money, lies, smearing of character & attack ads, they all work together!

If these republican fuckers like Delay are saying it, you better know it's only meant to help DeLay the republican party and create apathy among democratic voters!

but true to conservative form, just because you've been proven wrong doesn't mean you have to give up power or even that you'll be held accountable.

They will continue to obfuscate, hoodwink, bamboozle, brainwash and propagandize until they are driven back into the woodwork from which they came.

Even they know they're wrong, but there's still money to be made.

Assuming that we can still save this country from them, we will need to be vigilant in shining the light of truth on these cockroaches.

Sociopaths just have different criteria for success than would sane people so you have to adjust your evaluation standards accordingly, then view the past seven-plus years through the Bushie/PNAC/neo-con lens. If they actually manage to avoid prosecution for their two-term international crime spree, it's mission accomplished.

Here's a few of the Bushies' greatest successes, where endless war is just another profit center, domestic economic wreckage is a buying opportunity for the ultra-rich and a population that's so worried about their own economic problems that the crimes of the Bushies don't even register.

- Ever more money and power for themselves and their cronies, courtesy of the tax code and privatization.

- Continuous upward transfer of wealth, again through various provisions in the tax code along with unending war.

- A cowering, docile population that will swallow any kind of shit that's shoveled into their mouths and thank them for the meal.

- Complete political destabilization and social dislocation throughout the Middle East, giving Israel (and its 150 nukes) the opportunity to step in and take charge.

- Continuous wars of resource acquisition designed to provide a pretext for a permanent US military presence in the heart of oil country, and the immense opportunities for theft and plundering those bases provide.

- A broken US economy saddled with such crippling debt that progressive social programs are over and gone, possibly forever. The Bushies' pals in the US for-profit medical scam are happy with that one.

- A balance of trade that has given the US the world's most lopsided import-export imbalance, which pays off big for the multinational oligarchies that actually run things.

- A scared, deeply indebted workforce, only 8 percent of which is now unionized, who will accept any outrage as long as they can still have their little pissant job, for which they're actually thankful to the swine who rolled back the meaning of work to the gilded age and beyond. What's next; repeal of all child labor and locking the doors from the outside like they were while dozens of women were roasted alive at the Triangle Shirt Fire?

So they're doing just about what they set out to do.


wp

Great OP! Thanks! The rethugs aren't gone yet...

Here's to hoping for even bigger changes in November! :toast: