Guest columnist: GOP sideshow obscures a nation seized
Not sure how much we can post here, so I will go with the first 3 paragraphs, but it is sure worth reading:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120107/OPINION01/301070022/1036/opinion01/Guest-columnist-GOP-sideshow-obscures-nation-seized
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"Three years after the shellacking President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave them in 1932, conservatives began an “American Way” campaign to push the country to the right after World War II, resulting partly in the union-slowing Taft-Hartley Act.
Their push to the right sputtered, however, once the civil rights and anti-poverty movements helped deliver a second shellacking in the election of 1964.
With that, conservatives regrouped, made common cause with the Christian right, bypassed the news media by creating their own networks, and founded new institutions to push the country right: the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Cato, Hudson, Manhattan, and, later, the Federalist Society, to name but a few.
By 1978, 70 of those institutions were in place, reversing the national discourse from public good to private gain. They also helped oust a half-dozen Democratic senators — including Iowans Dick Clark and John Culver — then elected Ronald Reagan president. By 2000, there were 500 of them.
The Reagan administration not only helped form one of the 500, the Federalist Society, to push the judiciary to the right — it also buried broadcasting’s Fairness Doctrine."