Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 08, 2024, 01:36 AMOriginally the Left was not an evil Satan. It was about Working People. Working People taking control of the means of production to stop exploitation.
In America the Right successfully perverted the meaning of Left to be the support of rights of every kind. In particular ridiculous ones that would pervert basic family values, and which are offensive to all but the perverted.
Although the Left definitely suffered by identification with some unpopular social ideals and morality, IMHO the main reason it has failed to gain traction in the FSoA is that the Right has been very successful with 2 things:
1- Perpetuating economic and political mythology
2- Equating Communism with Totalitarianism.
The great Amerikan Lie is that everyone has an equal shot at getting rich, and that you can get rich without it being at somebody else's expense. Every person who came here wanted to believe that if they just worked hard and followed the rules they would get a fair shake and a fair share of the American dream. There's nothing wrong with being rich goes the mythology, it's the just reward for being smart and working hard and saving your money. Every kid has the chance for an equal education and equal opportunity to get any job, even to be President.
Just about none of this mythology is really true, but most people believe it if they came from the top half of the society. The only people really aware just how skewed opportunity and education is are from the lowest class, and their complaints are seen as sour grapes.
The worst promoters gf the myths are not the people born rich, but the ones who DID live the American Dream and yanked themselves out of poverty by one means or another. There's always a few success stories in every generation, and that's all the media needs to perpetuate the myths.
Collective action has always been denigrated in favor of rugged individualism, the Entrepreneur raised up as Hero and the Union projected as Evil. Acting together to Strike is unfair, but an owner closing a factory to move it to cheap labor in Mexico is rightful good bizness practice. Union leaders are "corrupt "Bosses". Bankers are law abiding "CEOs".
The early years of Chinese Communists all wearing the same Black Pajamas and Russians all in drab gray military outfits played on Amerikans deepest fears of all being relegated to poverty, and given that neither the USSR or China was very successful economicaally in the post war years it was easy to play on these fears. As long as the grocery stores here were full and the Ruskies were standing in line for bread, it was easy to convince people Capitalism was superior to Communism economically.
All of that growth came at a price though, which we are only now learning about. There's no free lunch, and by pulling future production forward with debt, the illusion could be maintained that the incresing standard of living didn't have a pricetag. It did, of course.
The demonization of the left in the FSoA has been so successful for the last century that no real left politics even exist here at all, except in intellectual circles, and intellectual thought is another thing successfully propagandized against by the right. This has been so successful that generally the stupider the politician the more successful, from either party.
As a result of this history, it's hard to see where new leadership will come from here, and we'll only see real change once the right has so thoroughly destroyed the country there's almost nothing left to save. If they elect Trumpovetsky again, that won't take long.
RE