An Essay on Opposing War and the Right......

[whistle]

....it's lengthy but provides an excellent overview of how well established the right-wing is and why it won't be easy to remove their political power:

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May 22, 2005 @ 20:55 GMT

Globalization, Theocracy and the New Fascism:
Taking the Right's Rise to Power Seriously

By Carl Davidson
www.solidarityeconomy.net

Since George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the Christian right in the U.S. has come under new scrutiny, here and around the world. Some, of course, are celebrating the religious right's rise to power; but a great many others are worried about the political direction the country has taken-on matters of war and peace, on the future of respect for liberty and diversity, and on prospects for equitable and sustainable development.

The worry is quite justified. With two Islamic countries occupied by U.S. troops, with Iran and North Korea on the nuclear threshold to counter threats of occupation, with the ongoing violence and counter-violence of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, with the continuing plots against Venezuela for its oil-who would not be worried about a White House under the thumb of zealots longing for theocracy, the Apocalypse and the Second Coming?

America's cantankerous relationship with its right wing preachers over the years is no longer simply a part of our country's 'local color.' Bush's victory, even if narrow, against his multilateralist and corporate liberal rivals in the ruling class, as well as against the popular 'Anybody But Bush' forces that mobilized against him, has caused the Christian Coalition forces to become even bolder. America's theocrats are now a global concern and a growing danger to all.

Today's Christian and conservative rightists, to be sure, didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere. Their current incarnation spans nearly four decades. They got their big start in 1968 when Alabama Gov. George Wallace led a mass movement of anti-civil-rights white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into an alliance with Richard Nixon's GOP through its 1968 and 1972 'Southern Strategy.' With Nixon's Watergate demise in the 1970s, the key organizers of what was then dubbed 'the New Right,' chiefly Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, retrenched and began raising and spending millions from big capitalists to build the think tanks, policy coalitions, grassroots churches and media infrastructure that, by 1980, helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House.

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<link> http://indymedia.us/en/2005/05/7680.shtml

[atommom]

1. This is a good read and brings up some important points...

BUILDING THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT The New Right in the U.S. made use of globalization's economic stress and erosion of traditional identities to build a new politics of resentment. To fund it, Weyrich and Viguerie, and dozens of others who learned from them, raised millions from the super-rich of the right:
Mellon's Scaife Foundations, Coors' Castle Rock Foundations, the Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Olin Foundation, just to name the top five with combined assets of nearly $2 billion. They helped to deploy the money to build dozens of think tanks and hundreds of policy groups and coalitions, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the Rockford Institute, just to name a few. And they gave resentment a political focus, particularly around the themes of race, gender and class.

* Race. They used post-segregation affirmative action and immigration growth to fuel chauvinism and racism rooted in the fear of the erosion of white privilege.

* Gender. They used independence won by women in reproductive rights and entry into the workforce, along with the gains of the gay rights movement, to grow female insecurity over family breakups and to nurture the 'angry white male' syndrome in response to challenges to weakened traditional notions of masculinity and male identity.

* Class. They used class anger over job loss and wage decline, stemming from capital flight and outsourcing, to target the 'power elites' of corporate liberalism and its mass media.