We “could be a menace” – J T Dolan, A Founding Father of Modern Conservatism

In the beginning, Republican Dudley Do-Wrongs accused liberals of unraveling America's moral fiber. That was OK with many of us, since much of the fiber that Republicans had in mind needed unraveling. But still, as long ago as the 1960s it angered liberals that politics was morphing into a shallow, moral-values game of crass one-upmanship.

Then, Republican leaders went and did a silly thing. They backed themselves into the most extreme section of the right wing -- the wing inhabited almost solely by insufferable, fire-breathing fundamentalists. So now, if one believes the polls, it seems the GOP has pretty much honked everyone off except Focus on the Family subscribers, and even they are getting testy with their sponsors.

In short, old anger on the left seems to have metastasized into fresh, general electoral disgust.

Some said liberals remained angry because the country at large wouldn’t concede that George W. Bush is a duplicitous bumbler. Some said it was because liberals merely resented their long, well-deserved ideological decline. Others said a seedy impeachment, a stolen election and illegal war kept liberals in a boil.

Some of these are true, some not. But there's a more seminal cause of lasting liberal anger. And in view of Americans’ historical forgetfulness, it’s not surprising that this intra-liberal anger took so long to metamorphose into the plain disgust we see among the much larger body politic today.

And the seminal cause was this: The post-Watergate movement of the “New Right” -- a well-orchestrated confederation of political action committees, think tanks, neoconservatives, social conservatives and economic libertarians -- introduced into American politics a fresh supply of opportunism. As I have written before, in a 1980 Washington Post interview one of the New Right’s founding fathers, John Terry Dolan, elaborated on the movement’s “cutting edge of politics.” He bragged that New Right activists “are potentially very dangerous to the political process.” We “could be a menace,” Dolan boasted. We “could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want…. A group like ours could lie through its teeth.”

And that's just what Dolan’s group, the National Conservative Political Action Committee -- “Nickpack” -- did, along with dozens of likeminded, equally well-financed groups. To discredit what it called the failed Liberal Establishment, the New Right crushed opponents with outrageously false attack ads, painted dissenting opinions as disloyal, and contaminated American politics with an unprecedented barrage of half-truths and whole untruths about liberal motives, the “liberal media,” the “liberal elite” and the “liberal agenda.”

Paul Weyrich, a right-wing contemporary of Dolan, mused that the New Right’s war on liberalism was “the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil … that we have seen in our country.” Zealousness inspired the movement to bar no holds. Any expediency drafted in the cause against godless liberalism was legitimate. The end, quite simply, justified the means.

Now all the overreaching and the lies that naturally came with it, the grandstanding -- and not least of all -- the utter inattention to the country’s real needs are taking their toll. We seem to be witnessing a genuine disgust with the incumbent power in America that sprang from the New Right -- and it seems to be growing deeper and wider, rooting far beyond the left itself.

What’s more, the disgust seems rooted in more than just Tom and Bill’s theocracy du jour, or even George’s imperial bumbling and domestic cluelessness. It seems more of a “We’ve-had-it” disgust with the very seeds of modern conservatism.

Comments

[Lucullus]

While I agree whole heartedly with what you say, the truth of the matter is American peasentry for that's what's they've become, is just too stupid, lazy and concerned acquiring new toys, i.e., newest cell phone, ipod, etc., to be concerned about a pack of jackels tearing apart the body politic.

[Marblex]

Agree main commentary....Lucullus...true to a point..the point at which the very real coming gas shortage and economic collapse, coupled with the indendured servitude bill passed by what we continue laughingly to call our "elected" representatives, will turn out millions of Americans into the streets -- not in protest, but to live. There are already 59 known military prison camps thathave been built throughout the u.s., ready to house millions of americans who will be swept out of their lives, into debtor's prisons, where the privatized prison system will use us as slaves for private industry. Once that happens, there will be open revolt.

I hope and pray that this time, progressives DO NOT sell out again for another New Deal. This time, the anti-human capitalist nightmare must END FOR GOOD.

So, ultimately, people will come around, as the struggle to survive surpasses all fears of anal sex and undeveloped cell clusters in utero.

[penman]

Please provide any references you may have that support your statement:
". . . the privatized prison system will use us as slaves for private industry. . . "

[Mrs. Robinson]

Pemman, this took me all of about five seconds to find on Google:

This article lays out that basic issues, but there are many more like it. This stuff's been going on for over a decade. There are inmates making clothes for major retailers, doing electronics manufacturing, and taking phone orders for mail-order companies and reservations for airlines (yes, you may be giving your credit card data to a felon -- and yes, there have been "incidents."). And they're getting paid wages that are on par with what slave labor makes in China.

The private prison companies pocket a tidy markup for administering this racket (which they like to promote as a rehab program). The client companies like it because there's no health care cost (it's covered by the state at the infirmary), no holiday or vacation or other benefits, and no unions (agitators simply disappear into the solitary confinement wing).

It's rapidly getting to the point where the working class will be more valuable to its corporate masters in jail than outside of it. Believe it.

[Mrs. Robinson]

Sorry, the link to the article I cited didn't come through. Here it is again:

http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~kastor/private/prison-labor.html