You’ve probably heard that polls show that only a third of Republicans think that a default would be a “major problem”.
How did we get to this place? How much of it was talk radio? How much of it was Fox News? How much of it was so-called conservative intellectuals?
arguingwithsignposts
Don’t try to distract us from our Schadenfest, DougJ. Rupert and James are getting hammered! There will be time for default talk later.
Slowbama
Dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine followed by massive corporate money into right wing disinformation, i.e., The Plan All Along.
Second phase of Plan after Southern Strategy successfully split all-powerful Democratic coalition along racial lines.
Combine this with the disastrous eroding of American critical thinking skills due to various educational issues and the corrupting influence of TV, and presto. All very predictable and indeed was predicted.
Yevgraf
Conservative “intellectuals” funded by Bircher ideologues are the main culprit – after that, it simply comes to salesmanship.
The elimination of “equal time” in an era where the nature of media ownership went into flux gave them an open field run.
Sadly, the Bircher ideologues are the same Texas oilboys that Eisenhower warned about as being stupid. While they are stupid, these descendants are connivingly corrupt to the gills.
zmulls
How much of it was home schooling?
The Moar You Know
I don’t know how we got here but I want out as rapidly as possible.
Napoleon
Once in a lifetime.
kindness
Get a rope….
mellowjohn
is it really permissible to use “conservative” and “intellectuals” in the same sentence?
Yevgraf
Oh, we haven’t begun to see the results of that yet.
Fundamentalism and ‘Murkan exceptionalism must have the hothouse environment of constant conditioning to thrive in. In parts of the South, homeschooling and Christian private schools have conditioned a significant minority of little Aryans to believe in their own bullshit to the point of violence.
And don’t kid yourself – those districts that are loaded with enough teatards to send teatards to Congress are overloaded with the same sorts of minds that would be willing to go violent against librul socialists…
WereBear
Not anymore!
Thanks, ya buncha dopes. Typical short term gain… and long term disaster.
GregB
Rupert Murdoch helped Roger Ailes cultivate an army of lazy people who need to be told what to think.
This is the end result.
General Stuck
Probly some of all of the above, and a natural widening of a pre existing chasm of world view in this country, and the proximate distance from the shared sense of purpose that brought us together for WW2 and its post war prosperity.
What we have is the natural default state of Venus and Mars, and Fox News congealed the right wing into a market and informational force of an army of idiots , that have always been out there wandering around like so many flesh eating zombies.
We need to get invaded by little green men with phasers and an appetite for destruction to get back that loving feeling born of common threat.
hilts
Fox News plus Rush Limbaugh and his cast of copycat radio talkshow hosts. Also flaming douchebags like Wolf Blitzer, John King, Anderson Cooper, David Gergen, Mark Halperin, Joe Klein, Chuck Todd, and David Gregory who keep pushing this he said / she said false equivalency bullshit narrative and continue treating rabid, foaming at the mouth Republican lunatics as sane, rational actors.
MattF
One has to bear in mind that “two thirds of all Republicans” is not a large number of people. The real $64 question is why a small number of crazy people have a huge influence on our politics.
celticdragonchick
Having spoken to my parents (who are the same age as McCain and supported him), I think it boils down to utter hatred of the guy in the White House. My parents loathe Obama in a way I still cannot fathom, and they are willing to do anything, no matter how destructive or injurious to the country and to their own finances, to get rid of him.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m gonna have to agree with the end of the Fairness Doctrine. Anecdote: Prior to Obama being elected, the local fox station had Mark Davis and a lawyer – I forget his name – to represent the Left. The lawyer would pretty much counter anything Mark put out. Once Obama was elected, they got rid of the lawer. Now Mark is free to spew Winger talking points.
I wonder if the Republicans would be willing to allow the default to occur if a rule was passed that said they couldn’t be elected for 40 years if the economy tanked if the default caused problems?
bkny
don’t discount the failure of the non-rupert media to counter the lies and disinformation they provide an outlet for — all in the name of ‘balance’ …
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
MattF
Matt, you’re reading the stat backwards: Only 1/3 of Republicans agree with the rest of us that a default is bad. 2/3 think it’ll be OK or minor.
Stefan
Look, most people simply don’t understand the economy. They don’t get it, never have, never will. In real life economic concepts are complicated and, quite often, counter-intuitive, so polling people on their opinion of economics, given the state of education in this country, is like polling them on their opinion of quantum physics.
For one thing, I bet only a small minority even understand that raising the debt ceiling enables us to pay back money we’ve already spent and/or committed to spending — instead, they think it relates to capping future spending.
Villago Delenda Est
Obama is near.
Couple this with Republican monarchism (only a Republican can be a legitimate President) and you’ve got trouble. 27% of the population refuses to accept a slam dunk election result.
MattF
@Belafon
Yeah, I just fixed that. Thanks.
Stefan
Having spoken to my parents (who are the same age as McCain and supported him), I think it boils down to utter hatred of the guy in the White House. My parents loathe Obama in a way still cannot fathom, and are willing to do anything, no matter how destructive or injurious to the country and to their own finances, to get rid of him.
OK, but why? Why do they hate him so? What’s driving this?
celticdragonchick
@ MattF
You have it backwards. It’s two thirds of Republicans who think that default would be dandy, and that is a super majority of GOP voters.
malraux
I’ll blame it on Reagan. The idea that the government can’t do anything well has an obvious corollary that whatever the government does is irrelevant and meaningless. Since the debt ceiling is a government activity, it therefore must be unimportant.
Chris
If you go by their definition of “intellectual” – a useless airhead who recites ideology by rote, has no idea how to live in the real world, but insists on telling people how to live their lives – it fits to a tee.
MattF
@celticdragonchick
Yes, an error, mea cluppa. Still, it shows that a united minority can get their way. Lesson here, maybe?
alwhite
You missed one – ‘we the people’
as a nation we have valued entertainment over education
as a nation we have valued quick, easy, gimmicks or actual solutions
as a nation we wanted more gave less
as a nation we believe we are Gawds chosen and nothing bad can happen to us if we do what makes us happy
.
All the bullshit spewed by the Limbaughs and Becks, O’Riellys and Palins works only because we have become a lazy, disinterested, greedy, distracted shit heap of a society. You are blaming the symptom not the disease. That they are dragging down the rest of us is their worst crime.
Chris
Okay, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice that the two Republican eras we’ve had since this laissez-faire bullshit started left us with a staggering economic disaster, or that the era of 90% tax rates was the single most prosperous era in the history of this country.
I’m no economics whiz, but I know how to read.
hilts
@bkny,
I refer to this phenomenon as The Night of the Living Pearl Clutchers.
General Stuck
Not only loss of racial birthright to run this country, and doubled grief Obama is a dem, and smarter and better at politics than them.
They hated Clinton for much the same reasons, except of course the obvious skin color reminder. Which is why they are running around howling about it being “a crime” for Obama to be seen in campaign photos at the WH.
Even though it is perfectly legal, and most other presidents have done the same. It is more race baiting code, that a stranger from somewhere else is living in the WASP mansion.
It is not working all that well for them so far, as those with a modicum of an open mind are liking Obama and trusting him without regard to his race. But it still is and will be close when election day rolls around.
alwhite
that should be “NOT” actual solutions – won’t allow me to edit
azlib
Simple answer – propaganda works.
Villago Delenda Est
Who are you going to believe?
Rush Limbaugh, or your own lyin’ eyes and critical thinking skills?
Mnemosyne
That’s probably a big part of it. I’m also starting to think that Republicans and conservatives hate him so much because he’s competent. Seriously. For all of our complaints about Obama not doing enough, he’s gotten more big legislation passed than the last three presidents combined. PPACA is a HUGE change to our healthcare system and so far … it’s working just fine.
They can’t stand to be reminded that government can actually do useful things and that they deliberately sandbagged it.
RAM
I agree with Slowbama @2. Removal of the Fairness Doctrine has been another huge deregulation disaster for the nation and its future prospects. We now glory in ignorance and there are fewer and fewer voices with any authority willing to call out the stupid. And, of course, there is no longer any price to pay by the powerful and connected for anything they do, from committing crimes against humanity to destroying the world’s financial system.
Sly
A population that is ignorant of the facts surrounding government spending and sovereign debt, and macroeconomics generally. That’s the first cause. The one that enables everything else. Successfully lying to someone is predicated on the fact that they don’t know the truth in the first place.
celticdragonchick
A lot of it is religion. MY mother really, literally thinks that Obama may be the anti-Christ. I know she has discussed it with their pastor. The last time I talked to my Dad, he called the President “a disgusting filthy liar” and I didn’t get any farther then that. I know they both buy the Fox News line that Obama is a Marxist who is subverting our Constitution and the economy. My Mom reads all the wacko urbam myth emails from my Pentacostal lay-preacher uncle describibg how Obama burnbed American flags in college etc etc. Attempts to actually refute any of these things merely makes her angry and she ends the conversation.
They believe these things because they want to believe them. “You cannot reason a person out of a position that they did not reason themselves into”.
As to why they believe these things, I cannot say. They do not use any racial code language about him. I do think the “secret Muslim” thing may have had real influence though. They were both missionaries to Zimbebwe some time back and they loathe Islam (and Mormonism as well) intensly.
arguingwithsignposts
@alwhite: Too simplistic. The populace has always gloried in ignorance. “Bread and Circuses” isn’t an American phrase.
RP
I hate to say it, but I put a lot of the blame on the hippies/counter culture movement in the 60’s. I think they laid the groundwork for Reagan, Fox News, and a lot of the other horrible stuff over the 30 years by pissing off a lot of moderates and allowing the media to equate liberals and hippies. I’m not absolving anyone on the right — there’s plenty of blame to go around — but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the role of the counter culture movement in the events of the last few decades.
Dennis SGMM
I’d say that the Cold War played a large part. During the Cold War we endured forty years of government-and-media-assisted national paranoia. Once the Soviet Union began to collapse the Republicans were smart enough, or lucky enough, to harness and redirect that paranoia at liberals, labor unions, welfare queens, etc.
Nemesis
We got here because the goopers want to blow up the US gummit. They want to prove we can all get along without gummit. They are willing to inflict financial pain worldwide because they dont give a shit about anyone outside of US caucasians. And the damage from an imploding US/world financial system is well worth the price if the muslim upsurper is dethroned. In a word: sociopathic.
And RP:
its so exhausting isnt it? The eternal pearl clutching, not to mention the vapors. So like Dems to waste time pissing on one another instead of kicking the living shit outta the gop.
celticdragonchick
@MattF
True, dat.
Davis X. Machina
@Stefan:
The bulk of the people I talk to have the same idea stuck in their heads.
These people have car loans and mortgages. This confusion is carefully cultivated.
The Moar You Know
Stefan: That’s a good question, and frankly it’s one that social scientists ought to be spending a lot of money trying to figure out. It’s not a phenomena that’s limited to any certain age group, although I have noticed that people under forty, while they may not like Obama, mostly don’t hold the suicidal level of hatred for the guy that quite a few people over forty do.
I think that quite a bit of it is rooted in racism, but I think the totality of the phenomena is not that simple. One thing I have noticed is that people who are secure in the life accomplishments tend not to get that bent out of shape about him, but those that are not have just gone around the bend about the man being elected – and about him being in office. Since most people are not that secure about their life’s work, you end up with a lot of people who are, as I said above, “suicidal” concerning their hatred of the man – they will cheerfully take actions that will bankrupt themselves, their country, and destroy their own lives and the lives of their children just to get him out of office.
I’m not sure that they understand that, though. There are a lot of folks that seem of the mindset that if you could just get rid of the uppity Negro occupying the White Man’s House, that everything would be awesome and we’d all be rich tomorrow. It is not a religious belief as such but it has all the hallmarks of one.
RP
The other big issue, of course, is race. We’ve seen a radical shift in the makeup of our population and the status of non-white people over the last 40 years, and it’s terrifying for a lot of older white folks. Obama is the perfect symbol for that shift, hence the deep hatred among many on the right.
Scamp Dog
How about all those media “liberals” who let conservative nonsense slide by without any push back? Why criticize “tax cuts increase revenue”? it’s not like its a fact that you could check or anything, and besides, you’ll just get beaten up for objecting to a revealed conservative truth anyway.
pika
Revanchism has always been a real dominant strand in U.S. politics, I think, and it reminds us of itself in waves: right after Reconstruction, right after the New Deal, certainly right after the 60s and 70s movements, and never more than now, I think. And that I attribute in large (but never total) part to absolute demographic [white] fear on the part of the Tea Party rank-and-file that’s been techno-whipped to a frenzy by the truly wealthy multinational powerful who, seeing all sorts of ends that they publicly deny (Peak Oil, human-driven climate change, etc.) but privately avow, seem obsessed with resource extraction (call it looting) before it all goes down. It’s honestly the only logical explanation I can see for what looks to me like Thanatotic mania.
Han's Big Snark Solo
How closely does this mirror the percent of people who thought there were “death panels” in the ACA?
The problem is that these “conservatives” can’t be informed on subjects. In the mid 90s there was one cable news channel (CNN) and one hate radio spewer (Limbaugh.) The “conservative” politicians could be educated on why triggering a government shutdown is a bad thing. These days conservative politicians are immune from education of any sort. They aren’t uninformed, they are misinformed.
Learning something right the first time is much easier than relearning. If you try to explain to one of these “conservatives” that they have their facts wrong you instantly become a “liberal” in their eyes.
RP
I’m not pissing on any one on the left today. I’m talking about the actual hippies in the 60’s who I think set off a culture clash that we’re still suffering from today.
Villago Delenda Est
Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland covers a lot of the ground on how we got here, from the general consensus in the aftermath of WWII to our current rapidly declining empire.
arguingwithsignposts
@Davis X. Machina:
There was a Crooks and Liars post recently about how many people who receive gov’t entitlements who don’t believe they do receive help from the government. Unless someone starts printing the flag on those checks, I don’t see how that is changed.
Dennis SGMM
@Davis X. Machina:
The bulk of the people still don’t understand how marginal tax rates actually work. Much of the Republicans’ anti-tax rhetoric is based on exploiting that ignorance. I’d love to be able to say that it’s possible to make people understand the basics of marginal tax rates at this late date but it ain’t gonna’ happen because there’s more short-term money to be made from an ignorant population.
Chris
The influence of the DFHs and actual left-wing radicals is way, way, way overstated in my opinion.
What turned off the moderates probably had a lot more to do with the changes that occurred during that era in terms of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gay rights and the anti-war movement. It was the “I miss my old 1950s America, where everything was calm and peaceful because black people and women didn’t make any waves, we didn’t have gay people and the military could do no wrong” sentiment. Only that doesn’t sound nearly as noble, so instead they complain about how unpatriotic and rude and scary and just gosh darned uncivilized the hippies were.
Which may’ve been what you were trying to say, but it’s an oversimplification to just talk about hippies and the counter-culture movement.
MattF
Not, in fact, off-topic:
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_National_0719.pdf
Marmot
Ain’t nobody blamed the totebaggers yet?
OK then — every time I hear an NPR story about the debt ceiling, this is the frame: “Obama and the Republicans have failed to come to an agreement about the debt ceiling.” Never mind that this is the first time a governmental faction has withheld its approval of raising the debt ceiling in 70+ years, just to force an adoption of screwball ideological policies.
Pointing that out would be too mean for NPR and the totebaggers. One acquaintance of mine doesn’t even listen to the news now because it all seems so contentious, so “negative” to her. Too much agitation. They need soothing voices, meditation, and nicey-nice.
The Moar You Know
RP: This. Most of the people I knew who were hippies back in the sixties ended up as coke-snorting Wall Street wannabes, Reagan voters all, in the eighties. They were never liberals, there were libertines of the worst sort, and the only reason they held any anti-war sentiment is that they simply didn’t want to go.
The liberals of the time made a lethal mistake by assuming that these people were on their side.
Villago Delenda Est
What terrifies them more than anything else is that the hippies and the counter-culture were speaking secret truths that the “silent majority” did not want to face. That mindless consumerism is pretty empty in the final analysis.
Dennis SGMM
@RP:
I was an actual hippy in the Sixties, a Berkeley attending, long-haired hippy to boot. There weren’t ever that many of us and our only effect on the culture was to provide sitcoms with hippy stereotypes to lampoon and the addition of “love beads” to the items on sale at Woolworths.
Try again.
Pococurante
Degrading a political party and its base is a conventional tactic when structuring a full or (as in this case) partial coup.
celticdragonchick
RP may be onto something about 60’s radicalsim and how it alienated an awful lot of the voting public. Note how at the time of the Kent State shootings, most Americans blamed the dead students for their own deaths, even though they were unarmed and two of them had been walking to their next class and had not been involved in the first place. Nixon painted them as “bums” and radicals and it worked.
Today, you see the same attempt to link Obama to Alinsky and leftist radical domestic terrorism. It doesn’t matter that the 60’s were four decades ago and Obama was a kid. Long haired radicals who blow up police cars still make for a great boogyman and it worked quite well for the over 50 set of voters.
Davis X. Machina
The Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t make much of an impact any more, not on TV anyways, if you brought it back. Cable broadcasters don’t ‘broadcast’ in sensu stricto — they don’t use the public airwaves, and it is the use of that commons — the electromagnetic spectrum — that was the rationale for it.
Media concentration is more the problem. The larger the barriers to entry for new and different voices, the more likely it is that the only way over them is to wheel up a huge tower of money and use that to get over, like a medieval siege engine.
Yevgraf
The cartoonish elements of the counterculture movement sure as shit did a lot of damage. To the bulk of the country, gone were the days of clean cut freedom riders that had a purpose, and in came the acid-dropping, lazy, stoned, DFHs.
That had an impact.
catclub
Chris : “I’m no economics whiz, but I know how to read.”
Damned elitist!
Danny
RP @ 39, Chris @ 53
My two cents: Both.
Just like moderates are now slowly but surely being turned off by both the fact that the Reagan revolution has outstayed it’s welcome in terms of policy usefullness, as well as by the excesses of the Teabaggers, the Fred Phelps, the Dick Cheneys.
Same back then: both policy victories bringing on a backlash from various discontents, as well as the cluelessness of the post-Vietnam New Left (Pigasus, Weather Underground, nominating McCarthy, the Ted Kennedy primary challenge, etc etc) brought us Reagan and what followed…
eyelessgame
I do want to point out that thirty years ago a lot of them thought – or said they thought – that nuclear war wouldn’t be such a big deal.
Alex S.
It’s the fucked up relationship between Americans and their government. People are not supposed to know the implications of hitting the debt ceiling. That’s why they should elect politicans they trust and those who do know about these things. But today too many people think that the government can’t do anything and that politicans should be just like them.
It took Congress weeks to catch up with the mechanics of the tools that created the financial crisis. Maybe things would not have been quite as bad if they actually had some knowledge about finance and the economy. People like Eric Cantor, or Louie Gohmert, or James Inhofe certainly do not.
Trollenschlongen
Why should this surprise anyone?
If there were a Republican president and a Dem House, however, the percentages in that poll would be reversed.
There is little to no intellectual honesty in the republican party.
fuzz
I’d echo what Stefan said above, most people (myself included) know very little about economics and finance. When you’re ignorant of a subject that means its important that you get what little news and knowledge you have about it from a good source, and unfortunately the only source for many conservatives is the right wing echo chamber. If the only thing you’ve ever learned about the economy came from Ayn Rand books and Reagan speeches, it’s not surprising you’re going to have a certain mindset when it comes to the economy, taxes, spending, etc.
celticdragonchick
.
Exactly. It is that cariacature that the GOP is still mining to scare the hoveround voters. They were scared of DFH’s in 1969 and that is still being exploited in their rest communities in Tempe AZ and West Palm Beach.
Dennis SGMM
@celticdragonchick:
Having been there at the time, I would say that the alienation was more the effect of making The Greatest Generation suspect that their government and the MIC had embroiled us in an endless war against a nation that was no threat to us whatsoever. This was a generation that had actually overcome an existential threat at the cost of much blood and treasure so challenging their faith in the goodness and rightness of American warmaking was profoundly unsettling to them.
Davis X. Machina
Change is scary. But the more you have to paddle just to stay where you are, the scarier change is.
People who are feeling like their present status is at-risk, contingent, who have to paddle like a son-of-a-bitch, who are convinced the game is zero-sum, are going to dig in their heels. Nothing-to-lose gets you a revolution. Something-to-lose, and feeling like you’re about to lose it, gets you stasis.
Things like PPCA and DADT (or a black president), wouldn’t have gone down perfectly smoothly under any circumstances, but tough times are more likely to amplify the chorus of ‘Stop’!
Stefan
Okay, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice that the two Republican eras we’ve had since this laissez-faire bullshit started left us with a staggering economic disaster, or that the era of 90% tax rates was the single most prosperous era in the history of this country.
You’d think so, but apparently it does.
Martin
Maybe Republicans simply listened to their representative? If their elected officials think that this is no big deal, why should voters question that?
There should be laws against lying to your constituents.
arguingwithsignposts
Bread and circuses:
Linnaeus
“Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…”
But seriously, I think the various social and cultural factors that folks have mentioned here all have played a role to some extent or another. I think it’s also worth considering related material factors as well. By the 1970s, the (mildly) interventionist New Deal state looked as if it could no longer provide the economic prosperity which many Americans assumed as a given, though this was due at least in part to factors beyond the control of the U.S. government. Couple that with the corporate class that was less and less willing to accommodate the New Deal welfare state, and you have, I think, a situation in which people are rendered less secure and it creates political and cultural space for right-wing narratives that purport to explain 1) the cause of that insecurity and 2) how to recover that security.
kindness
[email protected]
With all due respect, and with a post like that you deserve none, please go fuck yourself. Liberals (dirty hippies) did not cause the purposefully ignorant & selfish to spring to life. Those people have always been here. But it was those dirty hippies that have given you many of the civics that you take for granted. Again, with all due respect, you should know this and defend the people you choose to blame.
General Stuck
I still think if you had to state the biggest reason the country turned away from liberalism and the social change convulsion of the sixties, it was the courts and to a degree, the congress, finally taking on the abuses of the justice system and providing safeguards against police excesses. This was widely received by the general public as coddling criminals and caused the biggest backlash against dems and liberals. IMO
There was likely some energizing of the so called “silent majority” to come out and vote against the dope smoking long hairs and their scary free love making, but by the time Watergate finished and Carter was elected president, most of that had given way to other concerns. And then there was disco. There were plenty of snot nosed young wingnuts back then, but they mostly stayed indoors and jacked off to The Weekly Standard .
Villago Delenda Est
This is a very insightful observation.
The Raven
Most people aren’t policy wonks. At best, they depend on their elected representatives for policy judgment, and their elected representatives aren’t willing to speak the truth.
The Murdoch corruption hasn’t helped, either.
Stefan
I hate to say it, but I put a lot of the blame on the hippies/counter culture movement in the 60’s. I think they laid the groundwork for Reagan, Fox News, and a lot of the other horrible stuff over the 30 years by pissing off a lot of moderates and allowing the media to equate liberals and hippies. I’m not absolving anyone on the right—there’s plenty of blame to go around—but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the role of the counter culture movement in the events of the last few decades.
Um…”the last few decades”? That was over 40 years ago. It’s amazing to me how so much of the current day political culture is still seen through the prism of the 1960s. It would be as if back in the Sixties everyone was still talking about what had happened back in the Roaring Twenties and using that as a template for what to think and feel.
Danny
kindness @ 76
Was it really? Here stupid me was under the impression that it was guys like LBJ and Hubert Humphrey – you know the guys that you wanted to replace with a pig (because, you know, same shit) – who actually managed to get many if not most of those civics done.
Nemesis
RP:
But yes, you are.
RP
Right — I should have been clearer in that I’m not saying the hippies were entirely responsible for the cultural clash. As others have noted, there weren’t that many actual hippies, and their direct impact on the political scene was fairly small. But the perception of the counter cultural movement had a powerful and lasting impact, esp. when combined with the changes the country was going through at the time w/r/t to race and other hot button issues. That perception is a big reason the right has been able to brand “liberal” as a dirty word over the last 30 years: “liberals are those upper middle class jerks who want to smoke pot and betray their social class by befriending and advocating for their nonwhite friends.” Obviously that perception is very unfair, but I have little doubt that we’re still dealing with the effects of that 1960’s culture clash today.
Martin
My pro-choice, pro-safety net, pro-taxes, non-theocratic Republican voting mom has sited the counterculture period for why she’ll never support the Dems. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but there’s no shaking her from that viewpoint – and she’ll vote for Bachmann over Obama because of it.
She was born in 46 so that’s her generation, but she wanted no part of it. She was probably always wired to go in this direction, but I think the counterculture movement put a permanent wedge into people like her, much as the theocratic elements of the GOP are putting a permanent wedge into people like me.
NonyNony
@General Stuck
Sure. If you want to completely ignore the evidence that it was the passage of the FUCKING CIVIL RIGHTS ACT that kicked off our insane downward spiral in this country.
People are hippie punching and pontificating about what’s different now without looking at the largest fucking change in 20th century politics – the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Before that the “left wing” of the country was a coalition of liberal intelligencia, labor, and Southern “social conservatives” while the “right wing” of the country was a coalition of business interests and Southern black folks who were occasionally allowed to vote. After the CRA passed the whole country realigned and THAT’S the big change everyone is groping around to find.
It wasn’t the hippies that did it and it isn’t “fear of hippies” that keeps things the way they are now. It was the fact that the country’s politics completely realigned themselves over the course of the 1960s and we’re still dealing with the fallout.
alwhite
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/07/19/how-did-we-get-here/#comment-2678507
Yup! Most of the people I worked anti-war projects with ended up not being for any anti-war efforts just, trying to keep their skinny asses out of Viet Nam.
celticdragonchick
The 60’s were when the GOP defined itsself as the opposition to all things counterculture.
They are going to ride that as long as they can.
Chris
Yes, but not so much to the hippies as to the nonwhite friends. The trouble with the hippies wasn’t their wealth or their substance abuse or their radicalism. The “silent majority” was perfectly willing to put up with all these things in other circumstances – the problem here was that the hippies were seen as being on the side of “someone else,” with “on their side” here meaning “thinking they deserve the same shot at the American Dream that the self-Chosen have hitherto reserved for themselves.”
Mnemosyne
I really think this is it. Look at how many 60s radicals swung 180 degrees and became right-wing radicals. It’s because they wanted to be radicals, not because they wanted to be liberals, and when liberals moved away from radicalism, those radicals moved to the right wing and set up shop.
The number of people in the counterculture who were actual liberals or leftists is greatly exaggerated, IMO.
Stefan
OK then—every time I hear an NPR story about the debt ceiling, this is the frame: “Obama and the Republicans have failed to come to an agreement about the debt ceiling.” Never mind that this is the first time a governmental faction has withheld its approval of raising the debt ceiling in 70+ years, just to force an adoption of screwball ideological policies.
Absolutely. Or “Congress refuses to raise debt ceiling” instead of “Republicans in Congress refuse to raise the debt ceiling.” The first formulation puts the blame on the amorphous “government”, which feeds right into the GOP framing.
Paris
How did we get here? Republicans are stupid.
RP
Thank you for telling me to fuck myself in a respectful manner. That’s very thoughtful.
RP
40 years isn’t that long a period of time, and many of the people in positions of power today were born in the 40’s and 50’s, so the events of the 60’s had a huge impact on their perceptions.
Besides, I don’t think there’s much doubt that the roaring 20’s and its aftermath did have a significant impact on the people who were in power in the 1960’s.
aimai
I’d like to point out that the continued attacks on the 60’s, which (as someone pointed out happened forty years ago) are nothing compared to the continued invocation and re-fighting of the god damned Civil War. It is more true to say that we are still fighting that battle than any other. The counter culture/sexual revolution stuff is just the culture war convenient end of the stick. The exact same attacks on the classlessness, atheism, salaciousness and sexuality of liberalism were leveled at abolitionists, blacks, northerners in the run up to the Civil War and in its aftermath. The accusation that anarchists “believe in the community of women” (ie polyamory and polygamy) has been leveled at them since the last century. The uproar over Mormonism, mormon sexuality and mormon politics is also more than a century old.
Just because the right wing pretends not to remember doesn’t mean that those aren’t, in fact, the battles they are still fighting. Hell, they’ve been fighting taxes and tarriffs since 1832.
aimai
Kathy in St. Louis
When the major news source for a huge segment of the population has “trusted” faces telling their audience (read sheep) that this is all a huge scare tactic by the black devil in the White House, they believe it and are willing to bet their futures, and the future of the world’s economy, on the words of these charlatans.
I guess we’ve all noticed that when Fox News and Roger Ailes go with a scenario, it’s, “All hands on deck”. Viewers get the same story from morning until night, from the three lame-os on the couch, to Hannity, to O’Reilly, to Wallace on Sunday. Well, when EVERYBODY says the same thing, then it must be true. It’s hard to know who is more to blame…Fox News or the idiots who watch it regularly.
Brachiator
Hey, at least it’s only a third. Hard to tell if the wingnuts are temporarily decreasing or holding steady. And I love the conspiracy BS that the Aug 2 date was deliberately chosen so that Obama could lord it over the Republicans during his upcoming birthday/fund raising celebration.
@Slowbama:
Why does anyone care about the Fairness Doctrine. With all the stuff that has happened in media during the past ten years, this doctrine is a quaint, irrelevant relic of a bygone age. And it never did as much as people want to believe.
Hell, as far as I can tell, responsible journalism of any type was a rare hiccup in the midst of centuries of yellow journalism, propaganda and jingoistic bullshit.
Davis X. Machina:
Seems to me that “public airwaves” are almost entirely irrelevant now that cable, satellite and the Internets and various forms of broadband exist. There is digital broadcast television, but the assumption here is that this is the last refuge of anti-technology cranks and poor people.
And then there is the battle over net neutrality, patents, copyright and intellectual property, with corporate goons, and media and technology companies all fighting for dominance, with journalism demoted to a mere vestige of what is oddly referred to as “content.”
Nemesis
In regards to the counter-culture bashing going on here, Ill say Im quite pleased with that period of social upheaval occured and believe we are better off for it.
I grew up in that time and adults raising kids during that period were often completely vexed. Parents could not understand what we were doing (growing long hair, rebeling against what we were supposed to be, taking copius drugs) and what mattered most to us (ending the war, enjoying a way of life completely different from our parents, social justice).
Those who cite the DFH’s as the cause for their dislike of Dems remind me of those folks who hated – dispised – Muhammed Ali (the boxer) and therby extended their hate to all black people.
Citizen_X
Those of you who read Nixonland may remember that, in the ’72 election, the first in which 18-21 year olds could vote, Nixon actually won the 18-21 vote.
These same people are your Tea Partiers today.
DZ
@ 58 Dennis SGMM :
Exactly. I was not a hippie, but I knew people who were. Mostly, they just wanted to live their lives in a different way. You are also correcvt that there weren’t very many. Too many people equate hippies with the scum that eventually infested Haight-Ashbury asnd other places. Hippies were not in your face or violent.
Danny
Mnemosyne @ 89
Exactly. Then, once you realize how many of those very same “rad” DFHs (those that still claim to be on the left) are now full on the Queen Jane poutrage train, pretending that they’ve been loving on LBJ all along, a pattern emerges.
Half of them will get behind Ron or Rand Paul sooner or later. The Grover Nordqvist alliance was far from surprising if you know your progressive history.
Stefan
I’d echo what Stefan said above, most people (myself included) know very little about economics and finance. When you’re ignorant of a subject that means its important that you get what little news and knowledge you have about it from a good source, and unfortunately the only source for many conservatives is the right wing echo chamber.
This is why one of my pet causes is the absolute importance of financial education in junior high and high school. Students shouldn’t be able to leave school without a solid grounding in the basics and mechanics of how our economy operates and how it applies to them, including understanding savings rates, compound interest, credit cards, mortagages, car loans, tax rates, mutual funds, bonds, the stock market, etc.
But given the realities of school funding, and the fact that we’ve decided to Cut Our Way to Prosperity, this is never going to happen….
Marmot
@ Stefan #80
That amazes me too. But I’d place the prism of interpretation somewhere in the late ’70s — during our long national coke hangover. That’s when anti-’60s sentiment really kicked in, and it’s the era all the pundits (David Brooks, dead Broder, Joe Klein) refer to when they invoke the specter of liberalism gone craaaaazy. It was the national sentiment that eventually put Reagan in power.
Don’t know anything about it myself, but seems like that’s the only thing that comes to mind among some folks.
RP
These issues aren’t mutually exclusive. I agree that the civil rights act and race in general had a huge impact on society and the politics of the last 30-40 years, but I think the counter cultural movement magnified its impact by feeding the perception that the CRA would destablize the country.
The Raven
Hominids. Blame the powerless so that you don’t have to confront the powerful, or take responsibility for your own acts. The hippies then, like the progressives now, simply didn’t have the power to swing the country.
The immediate political cause of the current success of reactionary politics you are now going through is racism and sexism: that is, a reaction to the civil rights and feminist movements, as expressed politically in the ending of segregation in the South and the legalization of abortion.
Have a nice day.
Croak!
General Stuck
Far out, man.
RP
I don’t disagree — the counter-culture movement wasn’t inherently bad and a lot of good game out of it. But I think it’s foolish to ignore the possibility that it had a lasting negative impact on our politics.
Linnaeus
I’m sure most of the fine people here have read it, but I think the Powell Memo is instructive.
Citizen_X
Well, gosh: that’s right after a Republican administration caused what is arguably the worst government crisis in American history.
Funny, that.
cintibud
Back when I was a youth there was a book by Toffler (sp) called “Future Shock”. The basic premise was that change was occurring so rapidly that it would overwhelm personal and societal coping mechanisms. I think many of the comments above incorporate that idea. Things are changing so fast that folks “drop out” intellectually, feeling there is no way they can understand what is happening to the world. This leads to substituting gut feelings for research, “Faith” takes on a more central role in daily actions and folks who have answers are viewed with suspicion since it is difficult to independently verify what they are stating. Add in hucksters who manipulate opinion for their own ends and we’re well on the way
Bob Natas
I like this line of thinking. A couple of points:
1. I don’t think that, as a matter of history, that the liberals and the DFHs were (or today, are) the same set of people. When one thinks of postwar liberalism, guys like Robert McNamara come to mind, not guys like Timothy Leary; think “rule by experts.”
2. This kind of liberalism died over the course of the 60s and 70s. A new consensus emerged behind a new radical kind of conservatism in response to the failures of the liberalism of that era. You then get Reagan, Bush the Greater, Clinton, and then Bush the Lesser.
3. A lot of people (myself included) saw in Obama the opportunity for some sort of restoration of an era of stability, good governance, etc. This isn’t going to happen, because it would require a challenge to the dominant ideology of this era: radical conservatism. The shortcomings of this ideology are obvious, but no one seems to be able to come up with an alternative.
Stefan
Besides, I don’t think there’s much doubt that the roaring 20’s and its aftermath did have a significant impact on the people who were in power in the 1960’s.
Yes, true, it had an impact, as past events always do, but it didn’t capture the popular imagination the way that the Sixties did. In the Sixties themselves you didn’t hear people constantly talking about Harding and Coolidge and flappers and gin joints the way that today people still cite Nixon and Johnson and hippies and pot to explain current events.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
I don’t think this is true at all, that is, people who are secure in life not being as upset about Obama as others. I’ve seen what I call racial anxiety pop up in surprising places among people I previously thought were rational. And it’s not just among the over 40s that I have noticed this. By the way, I think that Hillary Clinton would have encountered a variety of this had she been elected. There are people who just cannot accept the leadership of a black man, or a woman, and would rather die than be helped by someone who they fundamentally believe to be their social or racial inferior.
And then you have the Tea Party People and their fellow travelers, who invent the possibility of a fantasy world in which America is what is was in 1850 or even 1750, and no one who is not a Real American(tm) need be recognized or accommodated.
Yep, you nailed it here.
Ash Can
The roots of the problem go back pretty far, but I still maintain that Ronald Reagan had the greatest impact in getting us to where we are now by mainstreaming all of the sentiments on the right that, up to then, had been kept under wraps as being detrimental to an advanced, civilized society. He mainstreamed the idea that government is the problem rather than the solution. Through his policies and appointments, if not his actual words, he told Americans loud and clear that it was okay to be bigoted, sexist, ignorant, wasteful, violent, xenophobic. It was a message that resonated with everyone who had ever wished for permission or justification to be a selfish asshole in some way.
Nowadays, of course, Reagan looks moderate compared to the current horde of GOP miscreants. But he’s the one who lifted the rock in the first place.
murbella
/yawn
we are still living in Distributed Jesusland&trade until the demographic timer goes.
Quit whining and fight.
One out of the two major political party is wholly religious, wholly white, and anti-empirical.
This country is still 70% white christian….and so is the electorate.
Mastertroll, do you see what Obama is doing?
Mitigate damage until 2020.
That is all we can do right now.
Marmot
@ CitizenX #108
Indeed. Maybe instead of decent national education in basic economics, we need a way to extend our populace’s memory beyond 6 months.
(Edited once to fix the blockquote.)
Martin
Forgot to add:
Good morning Kortney, Good morning ginormous green cock.
Stefan
But I’d place the prism of interpretation somewhere in the late ‘70s—during our long national coke hangover. That’s when anti-’60s sentiment really kicked in, and it’s the era all the pundits (David Brooks, dead Broder, Joe Klein) refer to when they invoke the specter of liberalism gone craaaaazy. It was the national sentiment that eventually put Reagan in power.
And, ironically, the “long national coke hangover” didn’t actually have anything to do with the hippies — rather, it was the square suburban types who were years later trying to ape the good time that they saw the hippies having by getting divorced, hosting key parties, and snorting coke. These were all the Nixon-voting, turtleneck wearing commuters and middle managers trying to get some, and then turning around and blaming the hippies when their efforts resulted in them getting divorced and losing the house.
Triassic Sands
Using conservative Republican math it breaks down as follows:
Talk Radio = 2/3
Fox News = 2/3
“Conservative intellectuals” = 2/3
So-called “conservative intellectuals,” now there’s an oxymoron.
Funny moment last night on NPR. A caller asked an “expert” if he had any credentials in economics. The “expert” said “yes,” he does econometrics for the Heritage Foundation. The caller responded, “That means nothing to me. I don’t consider the Heritage Foundation to be legitimate.” (Or words to that effect.)
I’ll say. Unfortunately, both radio and TV continue to fill their guest rolls with ideological hacks from the Conservative Welfare world of fake “academia.”
Nemesis
RP
Lasting effects, say, like LBJ losing the South for a generation or more by passing the Civil Rights Act?
Haters gonna hate. They just need a target.
murbella
America is the first nation informed by protestant thought.
White anglosaxon protestant thought at that.
Growing out of that is an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process.
And the death throes of an organism are rarely pretty.
Adam C
Blaming hippies is nonsense. You might as well blame unions or feminists. If hippies didn’t exist some other phenomenon (real or imagined) would have been the target. The source of this problem is the class war that the middle class was winning in the sixties. The ruling class has been inventing enemies ever since to justify taking the money back.
Stefan
Things are changing so fast that folks “drop out” intellectually, feeling there is no way they can understand what is happening to the world.
I certainly feel that way about the constant state of new Apple product releases.
And really, now I’m suddenly supposed to use Google+? I just signed up for Facebook….!
murbella
@the Raven
nah, not hominids– anglosaxon CHRISTIAN hominids.
That is where the anti-science, anti-empirical, anti-intellectual religiousity comes in.
Red/blue genetics demands it
RP
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I agree that the CRA had a huge impact by giving rise to the southern strategy. Are you saying the CRA was a bad idea and the LBJ made a mistake?
kindness
Conventions and conventional wisdom has shifted over the course of time. It was Eisenhower who sent the Federal Troops into Little Rock enforcing Brown vs Board of Education that started what became the Civil Rights laws. LBJ passed the laws & Nixon even added the EPA, Clean Water Act. When I came of age (late 60’s early 70’s) my republican family were what would be called liberals today. Fiscally prudent but socially liberal.
What’s changed since then? Well, the framing of issues and the Media pumping out the messages. Back then, after the Cleveland river caught fire, the Clean Water Act wasn’t questioned. It was plain to see why the law became a law. it was needed. Same thing with the EPA. Back then it was recent memory that people saw how the EPA cleaned our sky of some of the worse aspects of pollution & smog. Now, those things are distant memories. MSM outlets like Fox spin fairy tales of how pristine life used to be without Government intervention. Back then, anyone coming out and saying half the things they say on Fox every hour would have been publicly ridiculed and hounded from any important position. Now, you have Frank Lutz running the show. He and the Karl Rove want their public to believe the bs they peddle. Now you have Fox News coupling fear with selfishness and calling that patriotic. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how it could come to this. Americans are basically lazy and self entitled. It’s the liberals who have the hard job of keeping the dream alive.
Marmot
@ Adam # 121
Actually, that’s where I’d put my bet too. For decades the wealthy and powerful have been whittling at the bars of the cage that keeps them from once again dominating this country like it’s 1880.
Oh, and of course, no decent liberal politician will actually take up class war themes. Drove me totally crazy with Clinton, all that dereg and small-government talk and whatnot. It wasn’t hard to see that’d further legitimize the Right.
Berial
“All politics is local”. Don’t look to far afield to see why people believe what they do. If all you ever do is have conversations in an echo chamber, even the most intellectually curious becomes just one more cheerleader for their side eventually.
Technology has played a huge part in the balkanisation of our debate. It used to be you got your news from the local paper or the ‘big 3’ TV stations and so did everyone else. So everyone had a similar place to start a conversation. “I disagree with what Walter said last night” would lead to “I dunno, I think he’s right” and you could talk about it.
Today people tend to get their news from ‘preferred’ sources and the above conversation would just be ‘My facts say this and you must be lying if you disagree’. The back and forth between different view points is just a he-said/she-said farce or a yelling match.
I know I cannot have a real conversation with a ‘true believer’ Republican in which we both come away with a better understanding of where the other is coming from. I just don’t see their point of view as having a foothold in reality or any legitimacy. Apparently they have the same problem with me. I think their authoritarian bent is being used against them by their ‘betters’ who are never questioned and therefore can lie with impunity and they just think I’m lying about pretty much everything.
mk387
How did we get here?
By Congress changing the rules so that Murdoch could own all local news outlets.
Redshirt
I think there’s much to be said about the ever more efficient propaganda techniques employed by those on the Right. They’re using 1984 as a playbook, and have most of the tools of Corporate Power at their disposal to do so. Fox News IS the literal embodiment of Newspeak, and as we’re seeing, it works really well.
This is all Radical stuff – controlling behaviors and thoughts through language and propaganda – but then, the so called “Conservative Party” is one of the most radical mainstream parties America has ever seen.
murbella
ever more efficient propaganda techniques
;;coff-coff;; bulshytt!
rational sapients see right through the propaganda– it only penetrates teh Stupid.
Red/blue genetics in action.
:)
Scott
How did we get here?
Really, really late to the show, but America is still stuck in a millennialist mindset, still a bit disappointed that the world didn’t end in 2000. There’s an ongoing obsession with the “end of history,” and there are huge chunks of the populace, both powerful and powerless, who very much want to see the world end, for reasons religious, egomaniacal, and everywhere in between.
Blowing up the global economy is something they see they can do to bring about what they hope is the end of everything.
Chris
@ 110 Bob Natas,
Good call on the Establishment Liberalism of the time. Two wikipedia links to support it –
– from the Modern Liberalism in the United States article, Great Society section.
Also the term “embedded liberalism,” which refers to the consensus that guided Western governments from 1945 to the 1970s, and aimed “to construct the right blend of state, market, and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well-being, and stability.”
That consensus died in the 1960s over all the familiar issues, with the dominant Democratic Party imploding between a Dixiecrat insurgency, the New Left movement and an establishment in between the two that nobody trusted anymore. Nixon got elected by posing as a moderate, reasonable, middle-of-the-road, yet different alternative to the warring Democratic factions, and rallied a bunch of disaffected voters from their party. But the gold jewel in that new coalition of his was the Dixiecrats, and the biggest issue was race.
FFrank
my question is what do I select my 401 K to prevent it from losing 40-50% of it’s value over the next couple months if the idiots pull the pin on the grenade.
Chris
@ 113 Ash Can,
Sort of.
I think Reagan cemented their victory by taking Nixon’s electoral strategy and slipping Goldwater’s ideology into it – and then putting a shiny, smiling face on it that neither of them had, which I guess would count as “mainstreaming.”
In terms of cultural resentments and all that, though, Nixon did all the leg work.
@ 117 Stefan,
Yeah, I can’t remember who it was, but a month or two ago someone here posted (basically) “I’ve always thought a big reason for all the hate towards hippies was simple jealousy.” Simple but quite likely explanation.
Nemesis
RP
Many thing have lasting effects. Some are horseshit, like the premise that somehow we are to blame for decades of gop mismanagement. Other lasting effects, like the CRA, came from the so-called “movement” and, well, it speaks for itself.
Pococurante
Two hits songs in 1974, I remember them well:
“The Night Chicago Died”
“America Needs You (Harry Truman)”
Brachiator
And of course a good number of the people who were dismissed as slackers in the Roaring 20s later became the Greatest Generation that kicked Axis ass during WWII and helped not only contribute to postwar prosperity, but helped usher in the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, etc.
Yutsano
@FFrank:
You don’t. If the trigger gets pulled there will be no point, EVERYTHING will lose value.
OzoneR
We elected the black guy. Now the country must suffer.
gene108
Overlooking one important fact: For the last 40+ years, every time Republicans lose an election, they shift hard to the right.
The lost in 1960 and we went from Eisenhower to Goldwater and then to Nixon 1968.
They lost in 1976 and went to embrace Reaganism.
They lost in 1992 and then you had Gingrich, et. al. pushing the GOP further to the right.
They lost in 2008 and have gone further to the right again.
I don’t know what’s driving this in GOP, but after every major electoral loss they shift hard to the right to resurrect themselves.
For whatever reason this rightward rebranding seems to get them enough votes to come back and win one or two election cycles down the line, in either Congressional or Presidential races.
The real issue is why there’s such a backlash against Democratic ideas, when most Americans would generally agree with them, every time Democrats get power to enact legislation.
I disagree there was a consensus between the three Republican Presidents and President Clinton. Clinton terrified the bejesus out of Republicans, after getting elected.
He was young, charismatic, smart and could get Americans believing again that government was the solution and not the problem.
He just totally bungled things early in his tenure, with regards to pushing the more liberal parts of his agenda, such as health care reform and ending the military’s absolute ban for gays serving in the military (DADT was a compromise that allowed gays some chance to serve, where they had none before).
If Clinton had succeeded, he would’ve convinced Americans that government can play an important role in solving America’s problems, which would’ve undone Reagan’s “government is not the solution, government is the problem” mantra that has come to dominate the thinking of many Americans.
Paul in KY
Riffing off ‘Game of Thrones’:
Obama is coming.
The Raven
FFrank, #133: you might try hedging by investing in international funds which invest in China or India, but that’s speculative.
As to the broader issue, blaming the hippies for the conservative backlash is like blaming Muslims for the TSA. Un-unh. You hominids did it to yourselves.
RP
I’m not “blaming” anyone in the sense of judging them (at least no one on the left) — that was a poor choice of words in my opening post. I’m talking about cause and effect.
Ewww.
drkrick
Late to the party, but I’d say it goes back to the Civil Rights movement. The consensus that the US was for whites only that had been firmly established in the Jacksonian era finally began to break up and most sources of moral authority were discredited in two directions:
Those who came to understand that the united support for racism in America implicated the government, church, business and educational establishments and made their teachings untrustworthy.
Those who were happy with the Jacksonian consensus who believed they had been betrayed when much of the government, church, business and educational establishments withdrew that support and concluded that their teachings were untrustworthy.
The loss of a common source of moral authority in the culture allowed the first group to more easily abandon the old common wisdom about things like gender roles, sexual behavior, drugs and on and on. That helped accelerate the cultural defensive freakout the second group was already experiencing due to the collapse of the old racism.
At the end of the day, there’s no source with the moral authority to present information the listener doesn’t want to believe, whether about economics as in this case or about any other particular area of interest. The opportunities for self-interested shysters like Limbaugh, Ailes or Rove are obvious.
drkrick
They lost in 1960 and went from Nixon to Goldwater to Nixon. New Nixon or not, I don’t think that was some continuous march to the right over the eight years.
Paul in KY
RP, you have a dirty mind. If I had wrote ‘cumming’, then your ewww would have been right on.
However, in this case, you are not.
Ecks
Here’s what I’m thinking.
We need to hit the debt limit, keep paying our foreign bills, but start cutting off government funding for medicare, for air traffic control, for the army, etc.
And then we need to have Obama standing in front of the cameras as this is about to hit saying “look this is very easy. The Republicans think government is useless. They have cut off our credit cards, and now the nation is going to see what happens when we don’t pay for these things. Old people are not going to get medical care they need, planes aren’t going to be able to land as quickly, etc… This is what government does. This is what the Republicans are trying to get rid of. If you don’t like it, then the solution is very easy: Write to your Republican congress people and tell them that they need to let government start up again. They can do it in one easy vote. It’s not even hard to do. But every day that your grandmother is being told she can’t get an operation she needs is a day that Republicans are getting their wish of “getting big government off our backs.” If you don’t like it, then remember too that this is why we pay taxes. Because these are things we need, and they aren’t free.”
And then he should sit back and watch the news waves fill up with stationary tanks and hospital waiting rooms, and people starting to beg on streets and such. See how long the R’s can hold out then when their plan becomes clear.
pika
@aimai: Yes. Yes. Yes.
NamelessGenXer
Oooh, goodie! A generational flame war — my favorite :-)
All I have to say is:
radical ideologues the the left,
radical ideologues to the right,
here I am, stuck in the middle with my pragmatism.
Also too, a cookie for whoever said earlier in this thread that the current crisis was totally predictible.
Generational Scholars Strauss & Howe predicted this in detail in 1997, and they most certainly put the lion’s share of the blame on their Boomer cohorts. ‘Blame’ may not be the correct word, because, like winter, this Crisis had to come.
TryThe Fourth Turning to get an overview of the generational dynamics at work here.
Here’s a hair-raising 1997 prediction of what would be going on circa 2010:
This is certainly true of Congress (Grover Norquist, anyone?) but what they did not predict was that the President would NOT be a Boomer Culture Warrior, but rather a Give ’em Hell Pragmatist.
Interesting dynamic, that. We’ll see how it plays out. Based on the 20-somethings I was chatting with down at the OFA HQ this morning, my money’s on my tough-as-nails 1961 cohort.
gene108
I was thinking about this thread at lunch and it hit me Forrest Gump the movie (not the book, which had very little in common with the movie by the same name) was built around the conservative backlash against hippies. The movie was made in 1994.
For whatever reason the conservative narrative about how hippies screwed up America does have a hold.
JohnR
“How did we get to this place?”
Same way we always do. Human nature. Greed, lust for power (two sides of the same Darwinian coin, there – whatever gets the babes gets passed on) and fear of the Other. At this point, does it really matter, though? Once you’re at sea on the Titanic, and you’ve realized that nobody on the crew is willing to even listen, let alone take action, about all you can do is pray and drink a whole lot. Maybe you’ll make it into port again, you never know. Of course, there’s always a passenger mutiny (can passengers mutiny? or would it be more of an uprising?), but it’s hard to bring yourself to that point until it’s too late to have any good effect.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
So…from what I get in this topic:
The country literally does hate hippies too goddamn much to even dare sniff at anything liberal, and when the right DOES overreach, all it does is lurch even harder rightward and the country falls in love with them again, making the pendulum metaphor fucking useless because hippie punching throws the pendulum far fucking rightward every fucking time, and the only way it’s ever coming back left is if the GOP REEAAAAALLY fucks up this time, and even then we’ll have maybe 2-8 years before the GOP wins everyone over again by being out and out fascist.
Why the fuck should I even bother to fight anymore when it’s becoming obvious that liberals have totally fucking lost in every single fucking way in this country and will continue to lose because the country fucking hates hippies so goddamn much its willing to destroy itself just to spite the fucking non-existent hippies?
Just…fuck it.
NamelessGenXer
@Snarxist
Universal Truth: This too shall pass.
BTW, I love me some hippies and am glad I caught the 70s pseudo-hippie culture in my teenage years. In fact, I’m all set for the Furthur shows this weekend in Philly & Jersey. Should be one hell of a party (as always).
Bob Natas
I understand why one might think this; on the other hand, the sort of language and thinking that dominated his administration have a lot more in common with the kleptocracy administered by Bush the Lesser (though I don’t think the stealing was as extreme) than they do, say, the administration of an LBJ, or even a Richard Nixon. It seems to me that Clinton was heavily invested in notions like efficient markets, freeing up capital by eliminating “red tape,” and so on.
More simply put: traditional liberalism is long dead. It had some successes, but collapsed 35 or so years ago. Its successor is a melange of crackpot economic and geopolitical theories; I think we are now witnessing the unravelling of the successor. I could be wrong.
RP
Yes — great example. I hated the movie for exactly that reason.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@NamelessGenXer #153:
But what’s gonna be left when it does pass? Especially since the GOP seems intent on scorched earth policies and shitty laws that will be in place for at least a decade before it can even be thought of overturning them?
Brachiator
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
People invoke hippies as some kind of short hand for progressive movements. But they probably were not hippies and have a limited knowledge of history, that probably matches their limited knowledge of contemporary events as well.
People agitating for change have always had to fight, and have at times been knocked down not only by the forces of oppression, but also by some of the people they have been fighting for, and who later even grudgingly acknowledged those who fought for them.
What makes you so damn special that you are too good to fight, and too good to risk losing something worth fighting for?
There is not that far a jump from Ben Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” to Malcolm X, “It is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.”
The stakes are much higher than whether or not “America” loves or hates hippies.
Bob Natas
Mine isn’t, because no one born after 1945 (at least no one yet) seems to have coherent theory of how a liberal politics ought to work in a society dominated by private sector actors who are acting in bad faith in an era in which America is in decline. In the end, pragmatism may slow the rate at which the public treasury is drained, but it lacks resolve; it doesn’t pose a threat to the radical conservatives who (if one is being honest) have dominated the intellectual landscape for the last 30 or so years.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Fundamentalism and ‘Murkan exceptionalism must have the hothouse environment of constant conditioning to thrive in. In parts of the South, homeschooling and Christian private schools have conditioned a significant minority of little Aryans to believe in their own bullshit to the point of violence.
You bet. Take a read of this piece of wingnut crap and ask yourself if it wasn’t written originally in German.
NamelessGenXer
@Snarxist 153
Last time around, it was the Great Post-WWII Consumer Goods Economic Boom.
If the good guys win, it will be the Great Mid 21st Century Green Energy Boom.
If the bad guys win, it will be some Fugly Form of Post Civil War Reconstruction and I’ll be liquidating my assets, moving to Amsterdam, and taking myself out when my health fails.
NamelessGenXer
@Bob Natas 158
There is a well-documented 40 year stroke in the conservatism/progressivism cycle. We saw the pendulum swing in ’08 (exactly 40 years after Nixon). What we are witnessing now is the death throes of conservatism. The hideous damage they have wrought will be be undone over time.
These kids are a cheerful lot — one girl (21) was telling me all about her bright plans for her future (wants to go into government – foreign service – of all things).
The record turnout among young voters in ’08 was no fluke. They are The New Greatest and I believe they will crush fascism just like last time around.
Bill Murray
Really late here, but I think to many people are looking for one thing to be the reason and we didn’t get int the poophole we are in through just one thing. I would start at the end of WW2
1. The US decides to replace the Nazi-Japanese axis with the Soviets purging all leftists from polite society with McCarthyism
2. The Civil Rights act coupled with Nixon’s Southern strategy puts most of the crazies in one party. Before these were split between the parties and marginalized.
3. 60s counter-culture scares people like my grandparents and enthrones selfishness amongst many of its dabblers
4. Powell memorandum
5. rise of fundamentalist Christianity and its practitioners decision to be overtly political http://www.sbctakeover.com/index.htm
6. fairness doctrine and media consolidation — the fairness doctrine was important to Limbaugh and Beck getting a foothold in TV and making Fox News on TV through the rise of right-wing radio. I’d agree with the statement that on TV the fairness doctrine was relatively unimportant, but Limbaugh and his imitators don’t get where they are if the fairness doctrine had applied in radio.
I’d probably rate these 2, 5, 6, 4,1 3 =– with 2 and 5 way ahead of the others
Stefan
Take a read of this piece of wingnut crap….
“Built by hard-working men with their bare hands and with grit in their teeth, it was a nation of steel beams and bursting silos.”
Seriously, why does most wingnut crap sound like gay leather pron? Why is it always steel beams and bursting silos with these people?
…and ask yourself if it wasn’t written originally in German.
OK, I’m sick of this shit. Given the history of the last 60 years, I’d say “written originally in English” is more accurate.
Pat
How many news accounts in major print or broadcast media have attempted to explain any of the issues involved in the debt ceiling, deficit, etc. Not all people are stupid. Polls show that even large percentages of conservatives think some increase in taxes are needed, so folks can get it. But it needs constant explaining. I think few cable talkers understand , and not many other reporters either. It’s much easier to be MoDo or Gail Collins and write about Obambi and Bristol Palin than learning and thinking about real issues.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
…and ask yourself if it wasn’t written originally in German.
OK, I’m sick of this shit. Given the history of the last 60 years, I’d say “written originally in English” is more accurate.
Dude, you’ve read it. It could go almost word for word into any fascist manifesto. Fetishising a mythical past. A conspiracy theory describing “them”. An assertion of inherent greatness. A call to arms. Use of violent language.
It is precisely the sort of thing that got brownshirts roaming the streets.
Stefan
Yeah, and my point is that for the last two generations, that kind of language and fetishistic nationalist psycho-pathology has been far more the province of English speakers, specifically of the American variety, than it has been of anyone speaking German.
Bob Natas
No, it isn’t and no it won’t, though if you believe in the cyclical theory, I can understand why you would believe this (and I think the link is interesting). There is no ideology around that is as robust as this radical conservatism. The managerialism (and really, personal careerism) of the Obama “left” is going to be blown off the field by these fanatics (though I do expect Obama to win in 2012).
The experiences of people in the “Greatest Generation” cohort (my grandparents, for instance) did have an effect on postwar policy; with all of the flaws that they had, they did set up a robust international system that worked to the advantage of the US for several decades, but the conditions they faced in 1945 aren’t the same as the ones facing the US today; in 1945, the US was really the only game in town. Now, we are just another crappy casino.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Yeah, and my point is that for the last two generations, that kind of language and fetishistic nationalist psycho-pathology has been far more the province of English speakers, specifically of the American variety, than it has been of anyone speaking German.
Point – my apologies for not grasping your meaning.
It’s possible Russia is more likely to go fascist first though.