"Is America a right-wing country?" By Lance Selfa

Socialistworker.org

Column: Lance Selfa

Is America a right-wing country?

Republicans may be poised to win in the November elections, but that doesn't mean a majority of ordinary Americans accept the right's ideology and program as their own.

September 7, 2010

"...IN A number of recent interviews, leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky has compared the atmosphere in the U.S. today to that of the Weimar Republic in Germany before Adolf Hitler took power. 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? With the midterm election campaign heating up, one obvious factor is the polling evidence over almost a year showing that the Republicans are positioned to make major gains in November. More startling signs come from a number of events that seemed to indicate a real shift rightward among sections of the population: from Tea Party protests to public support for rounding up immigrants or denying Muslims places to worship....But what makes people move from observations about support for conservatives to worries about incipient fascism is the notion that "it wasn't supposed to be like this."....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....The Republican Party rebuilt its mass component through an appeal to segments of the population that rejected the social changes of the 1960s.....The 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, although ending up on the losing end of the biggest presidential landslide in U.S. history, road-tested a new approach that conservatives later perfected. Conservatives learned how to excite political passions--not with their traditional rhetoric about property rights, but when they talked about so-called "cultural" issues that appealed to large sections of the population, particularly white southerners moving away from the Democratic Party as the civil rights movement challenged the old order....Thus, the conservative establishment was able to pull off something that had eluded it in the past--a fusion between traditional conservatives worried about holding back social change and business conservatives more interested in the bottom line....It wasn't simply that conservatives learned to appeal to two different groups. They made "big government" the enemy. The business conservatives could oppose "big government" for reasons of taxes and regulations, while traditionalists could cast themselves as opponents of a political system that was seen as siding with Blacks, women, welfare recipients and so on, against them...."

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