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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 11/6/12

Power of Anti-Government Propaganda

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The anti-government message became pervasive, sometimes cleverly tailored to specific interest groups, such as young white men who were told that they had become the victims of "political correctness" when they faced punishment for uttering racial or sexist epithets. Even as millions of Americans were pushed down the ladder of personal success, many kept believing that the federal government was somehow at fault.

The Right also devoted some of its vast supply of money to assigning "scholars" the task of reframing the Founding narrative by cherry-picking a few quotes out of context to transform Framers like Madison into federal-government-hating, states'-rights-loving ideologues.

Much was made of Madison's efforts to downplay how radically he had expanded federal power under the Constitution and his agreement to add the Tenth Amendment as a sop to the Anti-Federalists, though it had little real meaning since it only reserved to the states and individuals powers not granted to the federal government under the Constitution, when those grants of power were already quite extensive.

One-Sided Argument

But the Right made its loud propaganda case often unopposed. By the 1990s, the Left's media had shriveled to irrelevance and the mainstream media was increasingly intimidated by right-wing attack groups that would go after individual journalists who could be labeled "liberal."

In this hostile climate, many Democrats also scurried to the center and struggled to protect the core programs of the 1930s and 1960s, the likes of Social Security and Medicare. But they made major concessions on issues like Wall Street regulations, enabling freewheeling casino capitalism to return.

The consequences of decades of Reaganomics and hostility to "guv-mint" landed on the American electorate just weeks before Election 2008 when Wall Street experienced its worst financial crash since the Great Depression.

The collapse helped Democrat Barack Obama to become the first African-American U.S. President, but the underlying ideological realities hadn't changed. The Republicans recognized that fact and immediately went to work seeking to ensure that Obama would be a one-termer, even if that meant worsening the suffering of Americans.

Drawing from the power of the Right's propaganda machinery, the Tea Party quickly emerged as a potent force in U.S. politics. And, as Obama futilely tried to gain some bipartisanship in Congress, the Republicans worked to make his political life miserable and the country as ungovernable as possible.

Their success can be measured in the Republican congressional victories in 2010 and the closeness of the election in 2012 as Obama sought to refashion the argument for an effective federal government as a fight to protect the embattled middle class.

However, Obama found himself arguing against a powerful and longstanding dynamic: how tens of millions of Americans had been taught to hate their own government.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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