Democracy or Demagoguery (On scapegoating in our society)

[inthebrain]

This piece hits is rather well. Pretty much hits all aspects of the problem and why America can't seem to get it's act together. Much of this has to do with our affinity for instant gratification although little can be found.
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Democracy or Demagoguery

"Today's Sun Belt represents a confluence of Social Darwinism, entrepreneurialism, high technology, nationalism, nostalgia and fundamentalist religion, and any Sun Belt hegemony over our politics has a unique potential. . .to accommodate a drift toward apple-pie authoritarianism." So wrote conservative strategist Kevin Phillips in his 1982 book, Post-Conservative America.

The failed American Dream can give way to a new American fairness or a neo-fascist nig htmlare. It can happen in Europe. It can happen here.

As Sinclair Lewis warned in It Can't Happen Here, through the voice of newspaper editor Doremus Jessup: "The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest."

Clinton's favorite strategy is a well-tested failure: the best defense is a good sellout. Sell out labor; dump Lani Guinier, Joycelyn Elders, and numerous others deemed politically incorrect by rightwingers; scapegoat single mothers; make court appointments courting conservatives; and so on. Clinton and company behave like defense lawyers who plea bargain every case, no matter the particulars of guilt or innocence. Who wants a lawyer with a track record of pleading their clients "part guilty"?

The Democrats have reaped the scapegoating divisions they have sown with their moves to the right on welfare, immigration, and so on. They divide their electoral base of workers, Blacks, and women, and wonder why Republicans conquer. It's an impossible process of multiplication by division.

Right-wing politicians won in 1994 because their base (mostly religious conservative Republicans, but also like-minded Independents and Democrats) was mobilized to turn out in force--and there was no Perot to divert them--while the more liberal and moderate Democratic base was demoralized and turned off.

According to a report by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, the proportion of the 1994 electorate (not a representative sample of the larger population) calling themselves conservative increased 7 points nationally. Nearly one in five voters (19 percent) identified themselves as part of "the religious right political movement."

During the 1980s, Reaganites were the shock troops of global corporate capitalism, lowering wages, busting unions, scapegoating Blacks and women, rolling back communism, socialism, and social democracy abroad--and rolling back welfare and social services and democracy at home. In many ways, rightwingers continue to serve that shock troop purpose. But as shock troops and their leaders grow more powerful, they have more power to implement their more radical agenda, an agenda that is not fully shared by global corporate elites--and can ultimately threaten them.

To put it simply, corporate executives want their own oligarchy, not the Christian Coalition's theocracy.

In a 1992 New York Times Magazine article, Kevin Phillips reflected on the contemporary "politics of frustration." He noted "the radicalization of the usually nonideological midsection of the population because of cultural and economic trauma," and warned: "This can lead to dangerous politics, the most terrible example being Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, when hard times and a collapsing center produced Adolf Hitler."

Phillips continued:

"One measure of the depth of the current frustration in America is that Duke could win the support of a majority of white Louisiana voters in two straight statewide elections, notwithstanding television advertisements showing him in Ku Klux Klan robes and swastika armbands.

" Buchanan took many of the same positions as Duke on immigration, race, welfare, trade and nationalism, albeit more moderately. And the charges of nativism, fascism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism inspired by his statements had little effect on his support. When a radicalizing middle class regards the establishment as bankrupt and the status quo as intolerable, normal standards fall quite easily."

Scapegoating fuels fear and fear fuels scapegoating. It is not far-fetched to see the seeds of "ethnic cleansing"--the widely-adopted euphemism for genocide in the former Yugoslavia--in the widespread support given California's Proposition 187. Land plundered from Mexico is called Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona--while undocumented Mexican immigrants are called "illegal aliens." The anti-"alien" scapegoating is spreading rapidly to legal immigrants. Think about how successful the Big Lie technique has been: how easy it's been to scapegoat women on welfare. How easy it's been to roll back civil liberties with the excuse of fighting the racially biased "War on Drugs." How easy it's become to spend more money on prisons and less on education. How easy it's been to relabel millions of children as illegitimate.


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http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/hs_econo.html

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