I often joke (bitterly) that anyone to the left of Tony Blair (which would have been undoubtedly labelled a rightwing politician 30 years ago) is called an extremist nowadays, but that simply reflects how far these labels have moved lately, including on Dailykos.
To keep things simple, in the good old days, you could use the following (partly simplistic distinctions):
the right
freedom, the rich, ownership, stability & tradition (against change), individual rights, nationalism
the left
equality, the poor, workers, progress, the common good, (class) solidarity, history on our side
I'm neither an historian, nor a philosopher, nor a labor specialist, so don't ask me to go into much more detail... What matters is that in the past 30 years, we've seen a massive change in the values associated with both sides, as the result of a massive push of the right to change the terms of the debate, and capture new ground. As that fight was first waged in the US, many of you are in a better position to describe how that took place (via well funded think tanks, mindless but systematic repetition of vaguely plausible talking points, and relentless and shameless attempts to shame the media into compliant complicity), but the results are as follows:
the right
freedom, prosperity, ownership, change (towards more liberty), individual rights, nationalism, history on our side
the left
poverty, pampered minority, effete intellectuals, blaoted bureaucracy, laziness and privilege, treason
The end of the Soviet Union, which discredited the ideology they were running on, i.e. communism, helped massively to create the link between right wing policies and prosperity (vs left wing and poverty), and more precisely between individual selfsihness and collective prosperity - indeed, it took out any residual sense of shame at pursuing profit and eschewing solidarity in the economic sphere. But this would not have happened without the right loudly, relentlessly, shamelessly proclaiming its values and positions and repeating them ad nauseam.
They did not shut out their extremes - quite to the contrary, they gave them loudspeakers and stood by them shamelessly, relentlessly, which had a twin effect:
- it got their ideas in the public sphere, and got people slowly used to them;
- it forced the mainstream to take these ideas seriously, as even familiar moderates stood by them.
By additional shameless, relentless hounding the media for bias, it managed to get them to stick to "neutrality", i.e. stating the ideas presented on both sides without commenting on them. With one side sticking to business as usual, and the other pulling to ever more extremist positions, the middle steadily shifted right, a
self-sustaining and
self-fulfilling process after a while. Soon, the moderates of the left were treated with the same respect as the extremists of the right, and were no longer called moderates.
A fundamental insight was that the extremes of the right did not hide from that "extremist" label - they just wanted it to apply to their supposed mirror image on the left: the moderates and the centrists, leaving the traditional right in the comfortable role of bipartisan, moderate centrists, and forcing pundits, ever mindful of not taking sides, to parrot traditional right wing positions.
Blogs have started to fight back against this trend, by arguing relentlessly, shamelessly for points that would have been called moderate left a while back, but were treated as extremist just a few years ago. By claiming that ground relentlessly, shamelessly, it was brought back into the mainstream.
But while bloggers are aware of this topic on topics they care about (usually, to start with, the war on Iraq, or the rule of law), they may not necessarily be aware that the same effort needs to be done on other topics that they worry less about. What has been most impressive about the propaganda effort of the right is that it has been all-encompassing - social values, foreign policy, the economy, patriotism, they have swept everything, and influenced the discourse on every single topic. So, on topics that kossacks care less about, they will simply reflect what they have heard superficially, which is still, today, right wing talking points.
As a European, this strikes me particularly with respect to the "common wisdom" on topics I know well, like European politics and European economy. Unless you are a specialist of these issues in the US, it is highly unlikely that you will know much beyond things like "Europe is free-riding on our military", "they have a stagnant economy", "they have sclerotic labor markets", "they just want oil contracts in Iraq or Iran", etc..., each of which is just as true (not) as " Democrats lost the Vietnam War" or "Clinton failed to fight Ben Laden".
And on the economy, it's pretty much the same thing - but it's the core issue, everything else essentially being a distraction. "Government is part of the problem, not of the solution", the "American dream", "unions are losers trying to protect privileges they don't deserve", "taxes are bad", "if the Dow Jones is up, all is well" are similarly false messages that the right has managed to pound by sheer relentless, shameless repetition into America's collective consciousness and that are now mindlessly repeated by kossacks when they broach such topics without specialist knowledge.
To me, the brainwashing on the economy is no different to that on Iraq and one does not go without the other. To me, if you're on the left, you need to fight both.
Where things gets tricky is that, of course, those that have stayed away (or emerged from) from the rightist Iraqi delusions may not have done the same work on the economic front, and continue to stick to conventional wisdom on that topic, not knowing better, as the topic has (or had) less urgency. And the accusations of being rightwing, while understandable if you have that wider perspective on that specific issue, are, quite naturally, not well received.
The fight to bring back the debate to the genuine middle, and not to that defined by the neocons as the mid point between their extremist views and those of "centrists" like Lieberman is, to a large extent, won on some fronts like Iraq. But these successful counterattacks (which bring back the status quo, but in a context where irreversible damage has been caused by the Bush administration to the soft power and to the very idea of America) have yet to tackle issues like inequality, poverty and the indispensable role of government as the custodian of the common good, which have been wrecked by the rightist assault of the past 30 years.
The simple fact that people that describe themselves as reasonable conservatives can feel at home on DailyKos only shows how far things have moved. The middle, mindlessly identified by the media as the average of the "normal" rightist (McCain) and the "normal" leftist (Clinton), is to the right of many people that voted for Reagan or see themselves as conservatives but otherwise care enough to refuse to give up on values of solidarity, community or decency - mainstay rightwing voters a few decades ago, and "strident leftists" today. But that also means that the economic values of many of these supposed "leftists" are closer to those of the traditional right (self-reliance, belief in markets) than to those of the left (collective bargaining, the need for regulation) - and I say that fully aware that the middle between left and right in the US has been quite different to that in Europe.
What this means is simply that the fight is far from over, and that it must be waged against the real enemy, the neo-libs (or call them the markestistas if you prefer), rather than internally. The success of bloggers in changing the terms of the debate on Iraq - in forcing through the consciousness that that invasion was a catastrophe and a terrible strategic mistake must be repeated on the economic front. This will be done by standing relentlessly, shamelessly by ideas that are today labelled as "leftist" or "extremist", but that will lose these labels only if someone actually fights for them and stands by them, to slowly pull back the center on that front too.
And that will come by repeating relentlessly, shamelessly the following:
the right
privilege, the rich, selfishness, lack of social mobility, inequality, jingoism
the left
equality, the poor, workers, progress, the common good, (class) solidarity, facts on our side
Because, never forget, the rich are waging war on the poor and, as Warren Buffett noted, they are winning. Ultimately, Iraq is just a distraction - but it is a great tool to wage that particular war.
