I think this one of the most truly brilliant analysis of the Occupation movement and its possibilities by the always brilliant Michael Lind. I do hope everyone reads this insightful article in its full:
Tuesday, Oct 18, 2011 9:00 PM 01:09:59 UTC+1000
Occupation and realignment
How a real leftist movement could create a new center in American politicsBy Michael Lind
Will the worldwide “occupy” demonstrations make 2011 the new 1968?
The liberal left must hope not. The global wave of left-wing radicalism that peaked in 1968 was followed by a generation of right-wing reaction in the United States and Europe. The rise of counterculture frightened the “silent majority” in the U.S. and Europe into supporting politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, running campaigns based largely on patriotism and traditional values and “law and order,” used their power to undermine the labor market regulations and social insurance programs that had protected the socially conservative working classes who voted for them.
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Because there was no longer any significant economic radicalism after the Cold War, old-fashioned economic progressivism — the living wage, universal social insurance, equality of educational opportunity — became defined as “the radical left” in the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, which had been the right-most right during the 1970s and 1980s, was out-flanked by an even more extreme free market fundamentalism, symbolized by the Tea Party — a further right.
The appearance of the further right, and the disappearance of the far left, shifted the entire spectrum to the right for the last two decades. New Deal-style progressivism, once the center between Marxism and conservatism, became the left. Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, having been the right, became the new center; and a new, radical economic libertarian right, far more extreme than Reaganism and Thatcherism, became the new right.
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The Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to help the center-left, even if some of its activists despise the center-left the way that the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s dismissed progressive-liberals like the Kennedys and Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” promoting the “warfare-welfare state.” The reemergence of a radical economic left can create a fourth point on the political spectrum, changing the relative position of all other points. The Tea Party right, now the mainstream right, would become the far right. Today’s center, shared by Clinton and Obama with Reagan and the Bushes, would become the new center-right. And the new center-left would be something like New Deal liberalism — to the left of Clinton and Obama, but to the right of an anti-capitalist left. Better yet, if the public tired of Tea Party conservatism, the far right could implode and the new “far right” would be moderate economic conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama variety. What until recently has been the left — old-fashioned social democratic reformism in the New Deal tradition — might once again be the center.
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/occupation_and_realignment/singleton/ Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution.
More Michael Lind http://www.salon.com/writer/michael_lind/.