Eisenhower... Candy Ass Liberal

"We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war."

missed that sarcasm there eh, Frank?

Frank the day I'm brighter than you is the day I will go ahead and retire... having achieved all I possibly can

Amazing how an entire country seems to have slid/been shoved to the right.

The rich and powerful pour a lot of money into controlling how people think. The fact that the American media, other than Fox is routinely described as 'liberal,' shows how well the drip drip approach works.

No, Americans have been successfully cozened by a steady drum beat of partisan propaganda for more than 30 years, dating back to the days of the 1976 primary campaign. Reagan ran against Ford, and lost. Ford was the ultimate Washington insider, although not visibly so, and Reagan's handlers saw that they'd have to distinguish him within the ranks of the Republicans. The Nixon "silent majority" thing hadn't worked out the way it had been planned, just as subsequently the "moral majority" thing wouldn't work. People (at least in the United States) don't like to be told what they are, they prefer to identify themselves based on what they value.

What Reagan's handlers came up with brilliant. First, he was the "gosh, Ma'am" boy next door, and a member of the World War II generation, so that voters could identify with him on their own, without being told they should do so. But even more brilliant was the appeal to "founding principles." The "shining city on the hill" is taken from a sermon delivered by John Winthrop aboard ship in 1630 as he sailed to Massachusetts to set up their "godly republic in the wilderness." Winthrop told these new colonists that they would found a "city upon a hill" which would be watched by the world. Arriving in Massachusetts Bay, where Boston was founded, it seemed literally to be a "city upon a hill" (actually, several small hills). I don't know when it became the shining city, or who added that, but it was the first expression of American exceptionalism, and someone smart on Reagan's team dusted it off and successfully offered the nation American exceptionalism as though it were brand new. Ironically, John Kennedy had used that in 1961. Although Reagan did not use the phrase in a speech until the end of his first term, the concept of American exceptionalism was disseminated in several modest forms by his campaign--no pushy slogans, just offering a "we all think the same on these issues, don't we?" Conservative propagandists have been successfully appealing to the "values" of the founders ever since.

World War II vets and their wives liked that. They liked the notion that they were exceptional, and the propagandists played to it. They became "the greatest generation." What they valued became the values of decency and honor. No one pushed this on them--it was offered and they took it. Timing meant a lot, too. Southerners were fed up with the Democratic Party, which they felt had let them down, and had even betrayed them, leading to the phenomenon of the Reagan Democrats who voted for what the man represented to them, and not for the party. It wasn't hard to rather quickly move southern states into the Republican fold. Less than 20 years earlier, conservative had been successfully demonized by associating it with an image of Goldwater as a dangerous fanatic. Now conservative became a label to be proud of, and liberal was pretty quickly demonized. The Reagan landslide made it all seem inevitable (Reagan beat Carter by 10% in the popular vote, but beat him by 10 to 1 in the Electoral College). People now not only could call themselves conservatives with no shame, but could do so proudly.

From Goldwater to Reagan was less than 20 years. One wonders when and how soon it might turn around again. Personally, i don't think it will happen too soon, though. First because so many people who were kids when Reagan was president idolized him, and they are now in their 40s and 50s; second, because the Democrats have always been a very large body of fragmentary interests, lacking the concentrated and well-directed propagandistic vision of the Republicans. Who can say?