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Part IV. The Specter on the Right
- University of Illinois Press
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Part IV The Specter on the Right Historians on the left now study the rise of the right. In this section I examine the origins of that conservative turn in politics, law, and culture that has so fascinated contemporary scholars. Here I not only explore the conservative triumph of the last three decades, but I also probe those weaknesses within the social democratic order, at home and abroad, that opened the door to the emergence of a potent conservatism during even the most liberal decades of the twentieth century. This was apparent during the Depression, and in the inaugural essay for this section I pose the query “Was the Fascist Door Open?” during that tumultuous decade. Then the American right refashioned and revitalized those conservative themes and tropes—denunciation of the welfare state as an overweening governmental bureaucracy, a culture war against all those who rejected the United States as a Christian nation, and the fear of home-grown social insurgencies—which have become highly successful in our own day. And that assault was given wide latitude in the 1950s and early 1960s by many of the most influential of America’s liberal intellectuals. Their sanguine faith in social and political pluralism, economic modernization, and the amelioration of all the historic conflicts that were characteristic of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism made them a prominent but highly “wishful” cohort that found themselves subject to ideological ambush and marginalization when a dynamic conservative movement reemerged after 1973. In particular, this liberal wishfulness proved highly detrimental to the labor movement, which, even at the height of its size and power, faced an unrelenting ideological assault from the right that defined as corrupt and illegitimate virtually all efforts to tame the labor market, either by collective bargaining or state regulation. Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 155 5/24/13 8:04 AM 156 the specter on the right The New Leftists of generation 1968 defined themselves against those Western liberals or the equally self-satisfied comrades who presided over an even more bureaucratic set of modernizing regimes in the East. But if the ’68ers bravely and accurately deconstructed any number of liberal conceits, not to mention the very real repression that was characteristic of Eastern European Communism, they also failed to arm themselves for the looming war with the right. There the most decisive battles would take place not on a cultural terrain but within a world reshaped by capitalism’s propensity toward a creative destruction of so much that was once characteristic of business and politics during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In the essay “Did 1968 Change History?” I argue that when it came to the economy, New Leftists of that era thought capitalism was entirely too stable, a claustrophobic economic system that functioned with machine-like precision. If they wanted to overthrow that system, it was not because capitalism faced an imminent crisis, or even because it did not produce for the majority of the population, but because the existing economic order was such a sturdy, inhumane iron cage. And this was their greatest ideological failure, because it would be the right and not the left that would prove most successful in taking advantage of the radical shifts in the nature of world capitalism that were about to come. The antistatist, neoliberal ideas that have accompanied the reconfiguration of American capitalism have generated a toxic environment for the trade unions, public as well as private. In “Bashing Public Employees and Their Unions” I consider the idea of governmental “sovereignty,” as used by the right, to undermine the rationale for collective bargaining in the public sector. From the Boston Police Strike of 1919 forward, conservatives have considered the organization of government workers to be incompatible with the sovereign status of those entities sustained by taxes and elected by the populace. Public employee unions subverted the will of elected officeholders and undermined state power. That antiunion ideology faded in the two decades after 1958 when public employee unionism grew by leaps and bounds, but in recent years it has returned, albeit in a distinctively neoliberal, antistate guise. Conservatives today charge that instead of challenging the power of the state, public sector unionism is illegitimate because these institutions support those governmental functions that regulate commerce, sustain public education, and provide other public goods now under attack from the neoliberal right. Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 156 5/24/13 8:04 AM ...