Goldwater Affect
Starting at the 1964 San Francisco Republican National Convention, right wingers world wide have wage an unrelenting almost 50 year long war to 'level' left wing elites, as they understand them.
Time perhaps, to see what has been achieved..... and at what cost to the right wing itself.
1945 Annus Mirabilis
It is fair to say that in early 1945, the right wing globally was Hegemonic ; we saw the world through their ideological eyes and we were basically respectful to all elites - and the right, of course, occupied most of the seats at the table of the elect.
So we respected them above all.
But the rapidly post-hegemonic world that emerged at the end of 1945 troubled the previously hegemonic Right most of all.
Reds Under The Bed
At first, their response was to blame it on hardline communists at home and abroad, but by 1964 they began to see that their real enemy was social-cultural not military-political and was coming from softline left-liberals.
Clinton vs Kennedy
Right wingers threw off centuries of deference to elites , even to elites not of their own tastes and vociferously exposed the post-1964 sex life of President Clinton in a way they never did for the pre-1964 President Kennedy ---- though Kennedy was probably more sexually active outside marriage than Clinton.
But a rising tide of elite levelling - intended only for left-liberal elites - levels all elites.
Ironic "Backfire", 50 Years Later
Ironically we can credit today's sexual, ethnic and religious liberations to the hard righters of the Goldwater Convention.
The Right would not be so beleaguered today, if its attack dogs hadn't given permission for all sorts of levellers to attack elites.
In the cultural chaos of our post-hegemonic world, media forces , once unleashed, wander as they will.
When most of the world's elites are right wingers, any sort of levelling talk is like speaking of rope in a house of a man about to be hung...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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