Clearly, they were thinking long term, and
it paid off: Ronald Reagan's victory came 16 years later, in 1980. How
did they do it?
In the years after the Goldwater debacle, billionaire conservative
tycoons bought up mass-media outlets book-publishing firms,
newspapers, cable news networks, etc. They funded their own think
tanks, with their in-house academic types churning out
intellectual-sounding arguments.
They supported with millions of dollars right-wing student groups on college campuses. They sponsored how-to-win-election workshops for potential candidates. They donated huge amounts to centrist news networks, such as PBS (look at who supports "The News Hour" these days: Chevron, Pacific Life Insurance, Archer Daniels Midlands, et al.), to help dilute the tenor of objective journalism.
Liberals, meanwhile, were, as usual, dazed
and confused, in denial about what was happening to them and supremely
over-confident that their fortress of power was unassailable. A native
fascism could never happen in America, they believed, since reason
would win out over demagoguery and extremist, authoritarian, Big-Lie
politics. Right.
Whack an "Enemy'
Every movement needs a hated enemy. Having one helps stir the emotions, which means lots of small donations from millions of scared citizens, which means a huge mailing/recruitment list to build from.
In the post-World War II period, up until
the Communist Party imploded in the Soviet Union in the
late-'80s, the Republicans' favorite bete noire was "godless
communism," both abroad and internally. "Socialism" was included under
the hated rubric "communism," just to be sure, and then "liberalism"
was conflated with "socialism," to destroy that brand.
In the 1990s, the conservatives' enemies of choice included
homosexuals and blacks and browns; later those "enemies" morphed into
"terrorists," "immigrants" and, for too many, "Muslims." Quick version:
the Other. You can always count on "God, Guns & Gays" to help you
win votes.
What is being played so skillfully by the power-composers of the Right
(with Karl Rove as conductor extraordinaire) is the instrument of
change as something to fear. The calm, comfortable world that most
middle-class whites grew up in is quickly cracking apart.
More and more ethnic and social minorities
are moving out of their real and perceived "ghetto" and proudly moving
into the social, political and cultural mainstream, jockeying for
power and influence just like everybody else.
Internationally, similar changes are happening, as formerly
subservient countries and leaders chafe under U.S. hegemony and begin
to push back. American exceptionalism is taking a beating.
All this is genuinely unsettling, disturbing, scary to many, some of
whom feel -- thanks to incendiary language and incitement to action by
rightwing bloviators -- encouraged to initiate violence against
leader-identified "enemies." Don't those people and nations know their
"place"?
And then a "perfect storm" of social/political/economic collapse occurred in the last years of the CheneyBush Administration:
--Virtually unregulated, rapacious capitalism led to a meltdown of the
financial system, showing up most visibly in desperate failures of the
huge investment houses, which had been selling unsecured debt
instruments in a massive Ponzi-like scheme.
The ramifications of such giant failures
affected economies in countries worldwide, and led to austerity programs
negatively impacting mostly the working and middle-classes. (Unlike
docile Americans, millions of Spaniards and French and Belgians and
Greeks have erupted into open opposition in the streets.)
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