One of the most surprising aspects of contemporary Republican politics has
been their across-the-board attack on women's health services and women's
rights. Rather than an isolated
misogynistic program, these attacks should be viewed as one part of a conservative
agenda to role back gains made in the sixties.
Recently, MoveOn reported "Top 10 Shocking Attacks
from the GOP's War on Women" ranging from changing the definition of
rape to denying abortions in all circumstances to limiting access to
contraception to defunding preschool programs and family planning agencies. It's not only the women's movement that's
being attacked, but also the civil-rights movement, the consumer movement, the
environmental movement, and the gay-rights movement. All the accomplishments of the sixties are
under attack by Republicans. They've
returned to the conservative ideological framework that worked for them up
until the McCain-Palin campaign,
Beginning in the Reagan Administration, Republicans attacked a so-called "liberal
culture of permissiveness" they claimed had been unleashed by the social events
of the sixties. They accused Democrats of
espousing "sixties values": "if it feels good, do it." Republicans declared that a mythical liberal
attack on traditional values produced many of America's problems such as
poverty, promiscuity, and drug use. In
1993, conservative scholar Myron Magnet
produced the seminal expression of this philosophy, "The Dream and the
Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass". Magnet argued that liberal ideology promoted
a "culture of victimization" that held "the
poor back from advancement by robbing them of responsibility for their fate and
thus further squelching their initiative and energy." "The Dream and the
Nightmare" influenced George W. Bush, "who told the Wall Street
Journal that it was the most important book he'd ever read, after the Bible."
The Republican belief that
liberalism fostered a culture of victimization strongly influenced the Bush
Administration's domestic and foreign policy.
Combined with faith that the free market would inevitably solve most
social problems, Bush's conservatism produced a potpourri of aberrant social
policies: Don't give poor children free
lunches or special tutoring because that will enhance their sense of being victims.
Don't provide women with birth control because that will cause them to become
promiscuous. Don't provide clean needles
for drug users because that will legitimize their behavior. And so forth.
In response to every American
social problem, the Bush Administration relied upon a simple conservative maxim:
individual behavior equates to individual responsibility. They argued that Government programs are
unnecessary because behavior change requires only willpower; all an individual
needs to do is to "just say no" and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They believed the free market provided unlimited
opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of it.
Since the Reagan era, Republicans have been adept at
mobilizing resentment based upon the notion of the "culture of victimization." In campaign after campaign Republicans have
fueled the anger of lower and middle-class whites and redirected it to
imaginary groups: liberal elites who promote "sixties values," black welfare
"queens," promiscuous women who want abortion on demand, aggressive homosexuals
who seek to convert others to their "lifestyle," and most recently illegal
aliens who steal American jobs and benefits. Tom Frank described this process
in "What's the Matter with Kansas": within the Republican Party,
economic conservatives distract social conservatives with inflammatory social
issues in order to get their votes and keep them from noticing the
life-threatening problems caused by conservative economic policies.
What we're seeing from the 2012 Republican Party is more than
a strategy. It cannot be explained as a
shared belief the liberalism has fostered a culture of victimization. As University of California Professor George Lakoff explains: there is now an overriding
"conservative moral logic." This is inherently
patriarchal: "The idealized conservative family is structured around a strict
father." Family values are the values
established by the strict father. By
extension, they are set by a Republican candidate such as Romney or Santorum.
Lakoff observes that conservatives project the "strict father"
model onto all societal institutions. A
proper church is governed by a strict father God, the Christian Old Testament
God. The marketplace is controlled by a
mythical strict father, whose invisible hand ensures that business transactions
ultimately benefit society. The military
is run by a strict father without interference from civilians. And so forth.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
