Most of which has resulted in one big cultural bowel movement, and now America - or what's classically left of it - is floating in the bowl, waiting for The Big Flush.
--H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Posted on 03/23/2012 6:22:26 PM PDT by SmithL
Columns Reversing the Sixties: The 2012 Republican Agenda By Bob Burnett Friday March 23, 2012 - 12:44:00 PM Bookmark and Share
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.
To incite their conservative base, the Romney and Santorum campaigns have turned away from the economy to family values. And they have focused on women’s rights and health services. From their perspective men – the strict fathers – control reproduction. From the Republican point-of-view, unmarried women who have sex are immoral, and providing them with birth control supports immoral behavior.
Republicans have a consistent conservative philosophy that they dogmatically promulgate. Their objective is not merely to elect a true believer such as Santorum or (perhaps) Romney. The GOP objective is reverse the gains made in the sixties – gains they link to “sixties values.” Republicans plan to destroy the civil-rights movement, the consumer movement, the environmental movement, the gay-rights movement, and the women’s movement.
Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net
This article is why I cheer through most of the beginning of the movie `2012.’
She doesn't get out much, to look at the Society we have today, I guess.
"We got too much Fluekin' goin' on out dere...."
Thanks.
Every decade or so it’s fun to read something ridiculous from the lost Planet.
Suck it up, Cupcake . . . and take a Q.
Yeah, you'd think there'd be at least one or two nationally known Republican women who'd come to the defense of the truth. So far I've heard only crickets.
Guess they think the charge is true. :(
Most of which has resulted in one big cultural bowel movement, and now America - or what's classically left of it - is floating in the bowl, waiting for The Big Flush.
--H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
‘Reversing the 60s’ and not a moment too soon. (one who was there..).
Who'dathunk?
Women were second-class citizens in the 50s? They got to put shoes on, leave the kitchen and have fewer than 16 children only when the enlightened 60s arrived!
I probably was simply too young and didn't realize that what I was witnessing with my own eyes was a "potemkin" society created by evil Republican Conservatives!
Thank you, Planet Berkeley, for enlightening me!
Not having government fund something is an attack?
I grew up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It was not just a different world, it was not even in the same galaxy as we are in now.
When I was in grammar school, I trusted everyone. I trusted my parents, teachers and the government. I remember the korean war. We would sometimes discuss it among the boys. We knew the U.S. had never lost a war and the thought of losing one never even occurred to us.
The first time I saw a crack in the wall of trust was when Eisenhower lied about the U2. My best friend said Eisenhower was lying but I did not believe it. When the facts came out, it really affected me.
The next thing was the media which I also trusted completely. I can remember wanting to take my little .22 and go join Castro in Cuba. He was the good guy. There was a civil rights demonstration in my home town. The Blacks decided to swim in the lake which had been White only. There wasn’t even a place for them to swim.
Although I sort of felt for the Blacks, when I saw a news story about the demonstration, I realized the media was simply lying. What happened did not even remotely resemble what actually happened.
What actually happened was their Mothers came down and grabbed the boys and dragged them back home. I didn’t see any police involvement at all except they were there. The media had them blocking the demonstrators then embarrassing them and threatening them with beatings etc.
That was the first time I realized the media were liars.
By the time of the Viet Nam Was it was clear to me that not only were the media pro communist, the American government was so infiltrated with fifth columnists that we could not wage a real war, just a messing around war in which our soldiers were killed for nothing.
From that time to now the radical marxists, radical social leaders, haters of religion and even religion itself had turned into probably what Satan wanted it to be.
Fortunately there are still a lot of good people who see things the way they are but so many have been indoctrinated or brainwashed by the constant media manipulation that we are way in the minority.
I really think the country is finished. Electing Obama proved it.
Maybe all is lost but I think eventually we will fight back, probably in a losing effort but it is the only thing we will be able to do as they have seized control of nearly all means of information and are consolidating their power daily.
Folks. the America of the past is dead and gone. It is now under the control of it’s worst enemies.
>> Asshat: “women’s health services and women’s rights”
What a lying sack-o-crap. Maybe 30 million females were slaughtered to death in the name of “women’s health”.
Go pound sand, jackass.
“Reversing the 60’s and not a moment too soon. (one who was there...)”
That makes two of us.
It happened almost immediately after the election of that Democrat president in 1960.
Everything started to change, the crazies came out of the woodwork, up was down, down was up, good was bad and bad was good. Absolutely amazing, unsettling and obnoxious.
IMHO
Which was, in turn, because of vote rigging by the Daley machine, which Nixon didn't contest.
“Which was, in turn, because of vote rigging by the Daley machine, which Nixon didn’t contest.”
One wonders why.
Had he done so, he might have changed the course of history.
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