Economic absurdities that Democrats must expose:
...because it's wrong to penalize success and hard work.
...therefore, we should eliminate the capital gains tax.
...After all, they came from, and understand, business.
...even though it is based on pitting the worlds' workers against
each other.
...union bosses are only out for themselves.
...and the more the rich have, the more will trickle down to
everyone else.
...Democrats are communists, or at least, socialists at heart.
...so when we tax wealthy investors, we lose jobs.
...so investors, not workers, create wealth.
...so we should give them all the tax breaks possible.
...Democrats just want to tax and spend today.
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General Issues:
...for those of Indonesia, Mexico, China and India.
...and how not to do it again.
...and the "crisis" is just a ploy by those who want to destroy
it.
...Republicans' most important propaganda technique.
...and get the media on your side
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Feel free to download this material for personal, not-for-profit, use.
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Book Review: The Rise of the Right, by
William Rusher
William Morrow & Company, New York, 1984
Book Review: The Rise of the Right, by William A. Rusher, William
Morrow & Company, New York, 1984.
This is a book every liberal should read.
Not because it is an expose of America’s right-wing crackpots, but because
it is written by one of the most influential founders of the neocon
movement. It’s hard to imagine why Rusher would publicize how the
right-wing came to power, since its proclaimed values are so
anti-traditional-American. It’s an indication of the narrow-mindedness of
ideological fanatics who become unable to objectively analyze their own
motives, or to realize how those motives and values would come across to
any objective analyst.
Rusher is quite clear about training
“journalists” to be advocates of conservative economic and social
policies—rather than to be objective reporters of reality. The nature of
the Republican “southern strategy” (pitting resentful whites against
minorities) is clearly a divisive strategy endorsed by America’s
right-wing.
One of his "six canons of conservative
thought" rejects the ethical standard of utility (see Utility: our forgotten moral
standard). Two other canons reject socially-based morality, and consider personal and religious morality as the only
morality of consequence (e.g., sex behavior, commitment to Christianity, etc.).
See Two different bases of
morality and their effects.
And how did the neocons destroy our
traditional American values? By financing professional “verbalizers” who
would reframe and publicize economic and social concepts in such a way as
to discredit “big government,” the “biased liberal news media,”
“pointy-headed intellectuals,” and, in general, all things that benefit
middle- and low-income Americans.
It’s surely a fact that many of today’s
“conservatives” have no idea of the extent to which the founders of their
own movement are really closet aristocrats who don’t believe in a strong
and vibrant middle-class, and with a minimum number of citizens in
poverty.
Excerpts from the book:
Front page of the dust jacket: “an
eye-opening, behind-the-scenes- history of the conservative movement by
one of its leading and most outspoken founders. Inside the jacket: “And
the political movement Ronald Reagan rode to power is in the full tide of
its maturity. It is equipped with the whole apparatus necessary for
survival: think tanks, journals of opinion, legal foundations, a growing
youth movement (Young Americans for Freedom), grass-roots organizations,
political action committees, journalistic training centers, and schools
for political candidates.”
P. 29
Among the “six canons of conservative
thought”: (1) …Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral
problems… (2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of
traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and
equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems…. (3)
Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only
true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at leveling lead to
despair, if enforced by positive legislation….
p. 322
Governmental intervention, especially in
its newer forms (e.g. pollution control), is henceforth more likely to be
employed principally as a means of hamstringing the hitherto dominant
producing class, while the new class of verbalizers tries to establish,
through its grip on the realm of ideas a rival and ultimately superior
center of power. We have already seen the development in Washington of a
corps of verbalizers, based in the media, in certain “think tanks,” and in
the more secure echelons for the bureaucracy, which wages war on
presidential administrations not to its liking. The score in this contest,
which has been going on since the assassination of John Kennedy, is
running heavily against the presidents. But Ronald Reagan has done rather
better than his predecessors, precisely because of his prowess as the
Great Communicator-i.e., by virtue of his ability, as a verbalizer on
behalf of the older social classes, to compete with the new class
effectively on its own terms….
At a somewhat longer remove, there is one
other battle that the conservative movement must fight and win. As the
media will be the battleground of the first, the academy will be the arena
of the second. It will be the most important and most difficult battle of
them all.
P. 291-2
It is, of course, ridiculous to speak of
Jimmy Carter as “conservative” in any but the most relative sense. But in
politics positions are relative, and in 1976 Jimmy Carter was, with the
exception of George Wallace, relatively the most conservative candidate
seeking the Democratic nomination. He recognized this by choosing Senator
Walter Mondale as his vice presidential running mate, in an obvious effort
to balance the ticket….
The most important lesson of 1976,
therefore, as that the Republican party’s soundest strategy was to
nominate a candidate capable of uniting economic and social conservatives
in an anti-liberal coalition. If it failed to do so—if it insisted, as in
1976, on naming a presidential candidate who appealed only to economic
conservatives—it would lose to a Democrat capable of repatriating even a
portion of the social conservatives.
P. 222-3
(Kevin) Phillips, in a dazzling display
of erudition and statistics, demonstrated that the Roosevelt coalition was
falling apart like the one-hoss shay and that several major components of
it were susceptible to Republican blandishment of the proper sort….
Phillips drew some portentous conclusions: The long-range meaning of the
political upheaval of 1968 rests on the Republican opportunity to fashion
a majority among the 57 per cent of the American electorate which voted to
eject the Democratic Party from national power…. The most decisive
anti-Democratic voting stream of 1968 was that of the fifteen million or
so conservative Democrats who shunned Hubert Humphrey to divide about
evenly between Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Such elements stretched
from the “Okie” Great Central Valley of California to the mountain towns
of Idaho, Florida’s space centers, Rural South Carolina, Bavarian
Minnesota, the Irish sidewalks of New York and the Levittowns of
Magalopolis….
Now go to:
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