Reply #24: You've picked up on only part of Frank's thesis [View All]

[dumpster_baby]

You wrote:<i>
the Dems have abandoned their traditional base of working class people to court the more well-heeled and politically powerful corporate class.
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Yes

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The Repubs have stepped into the vacuum the Dems left behind, appealing to the working class with emotional social issues like busing, welfare, guns, abortion, etc., painting Dems and liberals as elitists and the natural enemies of working people.
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yes.


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The result is that previously solid Democratic areas--the rural South and midwest, the rust belt, Catholic suburbs--have become solidly Republican, even to the point of turning anti-union and pro-"free" market.

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yes, but it is a TWO-pronged attack: you are forgetting the other part: the Big Money-funded think tanks, media personality grants, and other issue management and development institutions. These entities are really the foundation of the media assault that has been able to find its way into the mind of white middle Americans. Once they had assaulted the American mind for a couple of decades, putting out rightwing economic memes (e.g., govt is against the little people, flat taxation rates are good, less govt is better, tax cuts are good, etc). Also the machine put out class war social memes (e.g., the liberal media, the liberal elite). Unless you sow the ground with these memes for years, you cannot use those memes to win elections.

What nader is trying to do is get a movement started by capturing time in mass media in order to sow left wing economic memes. The Left is now shut out of the mass media. The Dems are not getting out any leftwing economic memes to speak of. Edwards put out some. Zilch from Kerry.

And getting issues out into the mass media is the only way to counteract the Right Wing memes. It really does not matter whether a dem or gop is in the white house if you cannot get out leftwing memes. Clinton is the perfect example. His administration put out zero left wing economic memes. But they put out plenty of leftwing social memes (e.g., identity politics (gay and minority rights and set-asides), gun laws, etc., in short all the things that label the Dems as The Anti-White party in the minds of white America).