11-05-2020, 01:10 AM
(11-04-2020, 10:19 AM)David Horn Wrote:(11-01-2020, 01:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-01-2020, 09:54 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-01-2020, 08:41 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-31-2020, 03:05 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Conservatives made something of a comeback after 1968, but it was a partial one, and after Watergate it went away... Many Silents and Boomers were persuaded to give up their sixties and seventies idealism and join in the greedy fun. Strauss and Howe called the 1984 victory an all-generational acquiescence into indulgence.
So it was more than the racist vote versus the black vote. There are a lot of concerns around which our current polarization has developed.
Where you live, I think you're right. Where I live, not so much. Here, and many places less urban than the Blue Coasts, there was a fascination with all things Southern starting with the Nixon era, but really gaining speed under Carter (or perhaps, Carter was another example of the trend). It's only beginning to wane today.
Baked-in culture is much harder to dislodge than more superficial and temporary fads, and we baked in that culture for decades. Of course the 3T ran overly long. A lot of it was the immense anti-hippie backlash, and some is more mundane, like religion. But the prime motivator was a fear of an uncertain future ... of progress itself. Moving that toward another belief structure will be many decades in the making.
Some of it was future shock. Enough changed in the 1960s that there was a rejection of more change. But I think the blue idea was debated endlessly and enough throughout the unravelling that we will slip into it easy enough.
Yes, Dixie went reactionary fairly soon, especially culturally, but overall some progress continued in the 1970s in the environmental and consumer movements and women's and gay rights, and war lost its appeal and momentum for a while. But huge spending to reduce poverty went out of style fairly quickly I must admit. It continued to some extent, with jobs programs continuing, and then was reversed in the 1980s and from then on.
As long as dog whistles still work, we're changing nothing. Trump ran up a huge Latinx vote in Miami-Dade county Florida, by screaming SOCIALISM! It worked, and will continue to work on the fearful many who still remain -- mostly older folks, though not all. Socialism has been used as a battle cry for over a century, and it still has that old magic for enough to make it useful.
Indeed, along with slogans about guns and abortion. It would be good to get the Cuba issue off the table. If Biden and maybe Secretary of State Rice (?) can open up to Cuba again, and nudge them to at least gradually respect human rights and democracy more, if not the greedy capitalism many of those refugees favored and miss, they will be ameliorated and maybe they will go home again. Many of them are already young people who were never in Cuba, and yet they can be hypnotized and deceived by that slogan.
Only in the USA is socialism such a dirty word. It is the heritage of our red scares, principally at 30-year intervals in the 1920s, 50s and 80s and the tea-party 2010s too. The USA led the Cold War, and socialism and communism was the enemy. But socialism brought good government to Milwaukee, as a PBS doc showed. It can be a mixed economy and a democracy and it does not lead to tyranny. Many governments have been socialist to a degree, including ours from 1933 to 1981. Socialism is part of our revolutionary heritage that has liberated humanity to some degree since 1789, in the three great phases of which it was the second. It is essential, if not sufficient, to progress.