In a previous letter, I focused on the enduring
tension between racism and reform at the center of the Democratic Party from
its inception in the 1830s through the 1960s. I also addressed the political
dilemma that President Lyndon Johnson confronted in 1965 that in embracing the
Civil Rights legislation on equal accommodations and voters rights, the
Democratic Party would likely lose the South for a generation or more.
This helps explain
the political decimation of the Democratic Party in the South over the next 60
years; however, the broader issue as to why the Party lost the white working
and lower middle classes throughout the county is a more complex matter. This
calls for grasping the dynamic power of the conservative reaction against the
radical political culture of the 1960s based on its key pillars of the civil
rights movement, the rise of a distinctively feminist consciousness, the
anti-Vietnam War protests, and the counterculture, which, in their cumulative
impact, represented a fundamental attack against mainstream values of work,
faith, family, and patriotism. So, the “radical left” was envisaged by its
cultural and political critics.
The election of
1968 was a crucial turning point. With the assassination of Senator Bobby
Kennedy, the most likely candidate to defeat Richard Nixon, the Democratic
Party splintered, with no chance of bringing working- and lower-class whites into
a coalition with their counterparts among African Americas and Hispanics, along
with progressives and academics inspired by social movements and left-based
ideological views of various sorts. This shift in political power was
symbolized in the so-called “hard hat riot” of May 8, 1970, when over 1,000
construction and office workers physically attacked an organized group of
anti-Vietnam War protestors who had converged on Manhattan’s financial district
a few days after the killing of four students at Kent State College by Ohio
National Guards.
The right-wing
reaction against the war protesters included outraged rhetorical bombasts by
the likes of Republican VP candidate Spiro Agnew and the “segregation forever,”
Alabama Governor George Wallace, who hitched onto the hard hat cause in his
presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1972. Agnew and Wallace spoke in a type of working-class
register, enflamed by a sense of righteous indignation that could be symbolized
in the not so subliminal message, “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” Meanwhile,
Nixon referred to a “silent majority” that stood for the traditional values of
patriotism, family, hard work, and a self-assured belief in God. These values became
entrenched within a well-orchestrated political and social movement that gained
much traction in the next several decades. This convergence reached a high
point in the merger of conservative politics and a nationalistic brand of
Christianity which self-identified as the moral majority. It was this movement
which sealed Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980.
This movement
gained strength through a well-orchestrated anti-abortion coalition in which
evangelicals joined Catholics in their contention that life begins at
conception. Those seeking to act out of the logic of this belief drew the
conclusion that a pro-choice stance is synonymous with support of murder, while
direct participation in abortions is tantamount to intentional murder. In
addition to such movement crusades, right wing populists were fired up by the over-the-top
rhetoric of talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh and his “ditto-heads,” a media
form which migrated to television with Fox News, which has perpetually beat the
more liberal, CNN and MSNBC, cable news programs in audience market share for
the past 25 years.
Meanwhile, conservative
think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute,
the Koch Network, and Americans for Prosperity have provided the intellectual and
policy-based framework for a broad range of economic, legislative, social, and
judicial positions in support of a range of issues that have undergird the
conservative movement since the1980s. Through the galvanized energies of its
multiple sources of power, this right-wing movement has shifted well beyond its
original center-right political party orientation. It is one whose source of
energy is currently dominated by a sense of grievance-based political warfare that
“their” country has been taken from them by some assortment of “costal elites”
and “woke” ideologues seeking to impose a “politically correct” view of
morality throughout our schools, workplaces, and media outlets.
The rhetorical
power of this movement can be discerned by a content analysis of any given
MSNBC news program dominated by segments about Trump’s perpetual legal woes,
DeSantis’s ever present culture wars, major Supreme Court decisions abhorred by
the highly intelligent hosts and guests, and the latest shenanigans of the
Republican-led House of Representatives. There is virtually no coverage of
President Biden, the accomplishments of his administration, key issues that
have motivated progressives for decades, or the Democratic-led US Senate.
While the right
wing highlights its grievance-based war on modernity, the Democrats offer
little by way of a galvanizing vision to sustain an enduring sense of political
majoritarian power. The Party cannot govern in any sustainable measure simply on
a sharply focused anti-MAGA message or through policy alone. However central their
policy orientation may be to the vitality of this nation’s core strengths, needs,
values, and power centers at home and abroad, Democrats need to frame what they
seek to accomplish through effectively rhetorical forms of persuasion to
motivate durable majorities in key states. That will require letting people
know in no uncertain terms what they propose and why it should matter to them.
They also need to establish sufficiently durable social movements, that include
significant scope for organized labor, that can sustain a sufficiently wide constituency
for the long haul. Nothing less than the
soul of the nation is on the line.
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