The "Second American Revolution" Has Begun

[BVS]

Altruism is a farce.

Wow, you're a little young to be so cynical...

 

[Earnie Shavers]

I caught a bit of Fox over the weekend. I just can't understand how such blatant stupidity has been allowed to become a part of the mainstream debate over there. In talking about healthcare, I saw Hannity calling Obama a radical and dropping references to Communism, destruction of America etc in there?

That is a real "WTF is he talking about?!?!?" thing to see, but even given that he's just base level partisan entertainment for the none-too-bright, and every country has those people (and on both sides of politics) and that on it's own is okay, it must be truly scary to see it have somehow (how?) been whipped up beyond the fringe and into the main debate. I mean... wow.

I've been reading a book about Europe between the wars, a lot of it about the whipping up of the public into such wrong paths in places like Germany. No, I'm not making a comparison between Nazi's and the US right, but reading one and watching the other, batshit crazy does seem to be pretty easy to sell, no?

I loved that guy that got up at the Obama town hall and said that he only gets his news from the cable networks because he doesn't like the spin elsewhere. That right there is this particular kind of stupid personified.

 

[Irvine511]

I caught a bit of Fox over the weekend. I just can't understand how such blatant stupidity has been allowed to become a part of the mainstream debate over there.

it's because it sells.

America is changing. rapidly. the gays are getting married, the blacks are in the Oval Office, women are taking over the workplace, China is on the rise, people are speaking Spanish, and the economy has been gradually squeezing older white people in the rust belt for the past 25 years. old certainties have been swept away. the pull of nostalgia grows for some with each passing year.

there's anger, much of which is earned, but it needs a target, and what these entertainers do -- Rush, Beck, Hannity, Coulter, Savage, the entirety of Fox News -- is give people low-hanging fruit at which to vent their anger. "liberals" or "the government" or "the terrorists." it's all shadowy and ill defined and thusly free to be most conveniently defined in the mind of the beholder.

this isn't exclusive to older white people, or conservatives. there's lots of ill-defined anger at generalities to go around, it just seems that the Right has done a particularly acute job of packaging that anger and selling it. or, more likely, shrewd businessmen have sold that anger to the Right.

 

[AliEnvy]

or, more likely, shrewd businessmen have sold that anger to the Right.

Yeah, I'd go with that.

 

[Irvine511]

Joe Klein wrote this shortly after Palin's selection as VP, and before Obama won, and i think it bears repeating here:

The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: "We grow good people in our small towns ..." And then added, "I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America."

Except that's not really true. We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American ... includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were — at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia for a courtly antebellum South that never really existed.

During the past 50 years, the rest of the country has caught up to the South in the nostalgia department. We lost a war in Vietnam; Iraq hasn't gone so well either. And there are two other developments that have cut into the sense of American perfection. The middle class has begun to lose altitude — there isn't the certainty anymore that our children will live better than we do. More important, the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 — the widespread use of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the feminist and gay-rights revolutions, the breakdown of the two-parent family. With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns. The political impact was a conservative reaction of enormous vehemence.

Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street ... at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.

Sarah Palin's Myth of America - TIME

 

[AliEnvy]

The 'city mouse' contempt for the 'country mouse' vibe of that article is the old-fashioned idea that fuels Sarah Palin's popularity more than any nostalgia of the good old days, IMO.

 

[Irvine511]

i think there are other myths, ones that apply to liberals, ones that apply to meritocrats, etc.

it just seems that the Republicans wield the power of nostalgia very effectively, and we know how that particular card has played out historically.

 

[BEAL]

I guess the question is, where will it end? If networks, or groups that are selling this line of "hate" or "fear", eventually someone is going to do something stupid.

Someone else in this thread brought it up, but we don't talk about the issues anymore. The second Health Care comes up, it's Death Panels. When the economy comes up, it's Socialism.

It's just key words that sell for ratings, but there's enough stupid people around that could potentially take things too far. Is that really what Hannity or Rush want? I personally believe not, but they want their ratings, they want their sponsors, and they want their $.

 

[Irvine511]

I guess the question is, where will it end? If networks, or groups that are selling this line of "hate" or "fear", eventually someone is going to do something stupid.

Someone else in this thread brought it up, but we don't talk about the issues anymore. The second Health Care comes up, it's Death Panels. When the economy comes up, it's Socialism.

It's just key words that sell for ratings, but there's enough stupid people around that could potentially take things too far. Is that really what Hannity or Rush want? I personally believe not, but they want their ratings, they want their sponsors, and they want their $.

one could say that it's the fault of the GOP as they have failed to have a national leader -- Bush was effectively neutered in 2006 and left office the most disapproved of president in history, McCain wound up getting thrashed in the election and he destroyed his credibility with moderates, Palin only appeals to a kind of rural base that can't be much more than 30% of the party. no one seems to like Mittens.

the GOP has to get itself in order so they have a leader who isn't Sean, Rush, Anne, Glen, etc.

 

[maycocksean]

I had to chuckle at the excerpt from Reagan's speech where he grew up in a time when "America didn't even know it had a racial problem."

I'm sure many white folks "didn't even know it had a racial problem" in those days. But Black America knew it all too well.

For me, I've never been found the nostalgic longing for a yesteryear appealing, because I know that America wouldn't have been for me any way. I find it hilarious how so many conservatives romanticize the past as a moral, even more "Christian" time in America. Tell that to Emmett Till. Tell that to the Native Americans. Sure, we gave Jesus more lip service in the past, but in my view that's not worth much.

What ever losses in moral values we might have experienced in recent years as a nation are balanced by the moral gains.

 

[BEAL]

one could say that it's the fault of the GOP as they have failed to have a national leader -- Bush was effectively neutered in 2006 and left office the most disapproved of president in history, McCain wound up getting thrashed in the election and he destroyed his credibility with moderates, Palin only appeals to a kind of rural base that can't be much more than 30% of the party. no one seems to like Mittens.

the GOP has to get itself in order so they have a leader who isn't Sean, Rush, Anne, Glen, etc.

I agree with this, and know you mentioned it in your earlier post.

Who is it though? Seems to me that the GOP just has no clue. They'll throw someone out there....token black guy??? Check. Our own "muslim looking dude" check. Female, check.

Mittens isn't too bad I guess, but there has to be SOMEONE who isn't bat shit crazy (Palin) or who can speak above a 3rd grade level (Jindal).

 

[INDY500]

The second Health Care comes up, it's Death Panels. When the economy comes up, it's Socialism.

It's just key words that sell for ratings, but there's enough stupid people around that could potentially take things too far.

And what of key words like "torture," "domestic spying" or "stolen election"? Accurate or redmeat?

 

[Irvine511]

And what of key words like "torture," "domestic spying" or "stolen election"?

wait, seriously?

you're throwing the proven fact of "torture" in there? you're really comparing these things to "Death Panels"?

please, tell me, who is the leader of the GOP?

 

[maycocksean]

And what of key words like "torture," "domestic spying" or "stolen election"? Accurate or redmeat?

"torture"--I believe the issue whether we should use torture or not, not whether or not the actions being taken were torture.

"domestic spying"--was this term used widely? I don't recall hearing it that often.

"stolen election"--Yeah, I'd say that's redmeat. What happened in the 2000 election really is a matter of opinion as far as I'm concerned.

 

[elevated_u2_fan]

redmeat?

 

[maycocksean]

redmeat?

I dunno. It's just the term he used. I don't really know what it means.

 

[elevated_u2_fan]

I know, I was talking about his use of it anyway - I am assuming this is some complaint about him having to give up red meat?

 

[yolland]

Unless I missed something, the OP article never gets around to identifying what the radically new and different system these alleged 'revolutionaries' seek to establish is?

 

[dazzledbylight]

For some reason, America split into two and that rift is getting wider and wider, while the claws are getting longer. While I certainly hope there won't be any violence from either side, I wouldn't be surprised if a few go that far. There are wackos on both sides of the spectrum.

Much of the major problem is ( i was talking to a couple from Bon, Germany yesterday) is that ever since FDR basically created Social Security, I don't remember whether Social Security Disability was done at he same time,medicare and later medicaid........

the uber conservatives have wanted to GET RID OF THESE PROGRAMS!
Even Reagan realized it wasn't good to kill Social Secuirty.

Ever since Reagan we also have moved so much rightward.......

I could for (volunteer before i was old enough to vote) back in the late 1960's for a Liberal Republican instead of certain conservative Democrats

Right now we have the far right BAMBOOZLing People........

"don't Let the Goverment take MY Mecicare" away......

ding, ding, ding.........

MEDICARE IS a Goverment Run Program!!!!


AN the only reason in general that there ARE complants (not talking about Fraud-- THAT's Disgusting! ) IS that-- it dosen't cover a bunch of things..or have very low payments

you KNOW WHY...........????


Because FUCKING NEWT GINGRICH and his people back in the 80's wanted to makke

"Medicare WITHER on the Vine"

that's a DIRECT QUOTE/ look it up!

IN fact through the all the YEARS the Republicans were IN Control of Congress -- they KEPT REDUCING Monies FOR medicare


THERE ARE NO MF Death Panels !
Obama DOESN't want to
"kill YOUR Granny"

Nut NEWT & HIS PALS did & DO- UNLESS you are RICH.
.....and have been trying to in various sneaky and outright ways since the 80's

YOU WHY I'm SOOOO teed off?????

Right now MY Healthcare is mostly good and will stay that way at least for some years longer...... (i'll have to fight my battles later if certain other things don't go well)

but RIGHT NOW AND in the last several years friends of mine on THIS Site have GONE THROUGH HELL b/c they were deined b/c of pre-existing conditions, or have been dropped..., lost heir jobs etc

I FIGHT FOR MY Friends!

I fight for my Family!!! ( my sib if she loses her job-- she's had several operations she'll have hell of a time getting health care-- she'll be one of "THOSE" ("icky") people who have pre-existing conditions......

I fight FOR THE FAIRNESS that all people have the right to healthcare NOT just the rich!

How CAN you have the
" the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" // and the "General Welfare of The People"
IF you are Terrified of being a few paychecks away from? foreclosure, homelessness or Death b/c you can no longer afford or were tossed out of your insurance plan......

I PRAY I AM RICH one day, and I'll be HAPPY to give a few more % points of MY Money B/C THe country has good to me
( monetarily speaking- it''s been good to me in other ways as well ) .....
to those less fortunate than me!

B/c I AM (generally) not Selfish like many of these people who say:
"I Got mine. TOO BAD ABOUT YOU!"

AMerican is Not just suppoesd to be a country of "rugged individuals" we are supposed to be a COMMUNITY.........

Right now rich people pay LESS than they did UNDER EIsenhower for taxes maybr even REagan ( not sure) ( adjusted for inflation etc)

THen there are the smaller BUT dangerous racists who want to assasinate Obama because he IS black. period. end. of. story.

they also stirring up people on the health care issue to neutralize Obama politically if they can't physically.

There have been people never happy that these NOT LIKE THEM -- less than rich, Not-White ( oh, yeah, and not quiet compliant women , either) have been allowed ( and fought with blood. death & the ballot box) to have a better life ESPECIALLY over the past decades since WW2.

I salute those who have fought for tyhis and keep on fighting.


BTW
I'd NEVER call myself "an activist" b/c I don't "do enough" compared to others but I can call myself -- a semi-activist" for about 42 yrs

maybe I've come to some kind of peace about that ........

if you're raised catholic and ESP a womam (esp from the late 50's) hooooo take time and fun etc for yourself!!???!!! HA!

I AM emotional because THE FACTS ARE thes:

TOO many people are FUTHER INJURED, ILL OR DYING
because of the the GREED of certain indiviuals, Health Inusrance Comapanies ansd other Corporations ( not all).

 

[AliEnvy]

Unless I missed something, the OP article never gets around to identifying what the radically new and different system these alleged 'revolutionaries' seek to establish is?

The article suggests that the revolution will be a fundamental shift in the political landscape and I tend to agree. If the two sides are divided too deep, there will have to be a third option that emerges at some point.

Also, if the republicans can't get their leadership house in order and Obama can't control unemployment and home foreclosures, it's a golden opportunity for a viable third party to form.