How to defeat the conservative coalition. Article from Monthly Review

[Alpharetta]

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/wolff050805.html

Dividing the Conservative Coalition
by Rick Wolff

The Bush government, itself a coalition of the willing, cobbles together four different streams of conservatives. Like all coalitions, it is vulnerable to events. Patrick Buchanan, the journal National Interest, and the think tank Cato Institute, are conservatives against Bush’s Iraq policy. Similarly, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation criticize Bush's fiscal policies. Moderate Republicans oppose the party's extreme right wing on social policies and state-church relations. Strained also by other divisions, the coalition is vulnerable to divide-and-conquer interventions if its opponents clearly understand the different origins and goals of each coalition "partner."

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Yet divisions and tensions also beset the conservative coalition. While some fundamentalist religious leaders share the neocons’ enthusiasm for US global "dominion," they don't all agree on what dominion means. Not all advocates of rolling back the New Deal see benefits from denouncing multiculturalism. Not a few Christian fundamentalists find their alliance with opponents of Social Security and with neocons uncomfortable or worse.

The strategy of the coalition's opponents can include aggravating its divisions and tensions. Oppositional think tanks might devise arguments against anti-New Deal business interests that document their support for the social agenda of religious fundamentalists. Oppositional media might weaken the appeal of anti-multiculturalist movements by stressing their alliance with neocon imperialists and their costly war policies. Systematically exposing religious fundamentalism as a key support for the anti-New Deal assault on such programs as Social Security might well yield powerful slogans for politicians seeking to divide and weaken the conservative coalition. Connecting neocon wars with rising federal power, taxes, deficits, and falling social support programs such as student loans and public services might well do likewise.

Of course, a positive alternative program and a counter-hegemonic coalition are the crucial requirements to defeat the conservative coalition. Yet, divisive intervention -- based on a clear grasp of the coalition's fragility -- can make a difference. A successful strategy to reverse the current direction of social change requires both positive and negative components.

Rick Wolff is Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of many books and articles, including (with Stephen Resnick) Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the U.S.S.R. (Routledge, 2002)

Middle of article found at:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/wolff050805.html

[Alpharetta]

1. bumper sticker suggestions:

Support Balanced Budgets: Keep Iraq Wars off the Books

Don't Want a "Nanny State"? Stop watching my bedroom.

Repeal the New Deal. No corporation left behind.

[yurbud]

2. obvious stuff, but inexplicably, not being done

because DLC is courting corporate base of GOP.