Sunday, August 28, 2016

How A Clinton Victory Would Powerfully Unite The Right

Ralph Benko emails:

In a previous column I considered how the coalition that is the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy began to fray after losing the common enemy against which it had united:
In 1988, as reported by the LA Times, one of President Gorbachev’s key advisors gave away the game. “Our major secret weapon,” said Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, “is to deprive you of an enemy.”
That column explored how the loss of its common enemy -- the USSR -- caused the right wing coalition to begin to fray and unravel and, thus, the GOP to lose its moorings...
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, though, her victory holds the distinct possibility of even more fundamentally uniting the right, bringing the GOP back to its core values of peace, equitable prosperity, and human dignity.

How might this be?

Clinton, a center-left Neoliberal, could well portend a Götterdämmerung for the classical republican order, galvanizing the right in ways that President Obama never quite did. Clinton lacks President Obama’s suaveness, and the opportunity that would be afforded to her to constitute a center-left Supreme Court would be catastrophic to major elements of the conservative coalition.

For these reasons, the right is more likely to recognize the fact that a mortal enemy, a worthy successor to the USSR, has definitively emerged. Clinton, by preponderance of evidence a nurturing and idealistic person, is not that mortal enemy. Yet she would be its loyal agent.

The true mortal enemy is what I have elsewhere called a “Cultural Revolution.” It is an ongoing effort to replace the classical liberal republican order with an egalitarian democratic cultural hegemony.

This struggle has been mistaken for a “culture war,” a very different thing. The right has been stymied by applying ineffectual “culture war” tactics. Thus the left has racked up a long string of tactical victories...

The left is proposing and imposing a brand new cultural hegemony, one antithetical to classical liberal republican principles. The left is winning almost all the skirmishes. It is poised to win the Cultural Revolution. The left’s proposed cultural hegemony is one of undifferentiated sameness. They characterize it as “equality.”

To give the left credit, it believes this to be the legitimate recipe for happiness. That said, there is precious little evidence for that belief.

The left’s radically egalitarian ethos applies across-the-board: in economic policy, foreign and defense policy, and social policy. Under this new cultural hegemony no distinctions are permitted.  This is the left’s meta-narrative and strategic objective.

It’s a real and radical Cultural Revolution.

The list of progressive victories is long, and is getting longer. If a Democratic president is elected, the left will have final and plenary victory within sight.

Unless the right wakes up.

The common denominator of the left’s worldview — radical egalitarianism — is de-legitimizing distinctions. This represents the left’s strategic objective and unifying theme.

Once recognized for what it is — a Cultural Revolution — all of the factions of the right can once again put aside differences and unite again against a newly recognized common enemy, one as anathema to all as was communism....

Although none dare call it nihilism much of the left’s program defies common sense or at least America’s deepest social ethos. The left’s victories are mostly being won in apolitical arenas: the courts and regulatory bodies. Thus its gains are brittle, not resilient. If confronted with clear vision and sound strategy, the left’s edifice would fall like a house of cards...

If its factions will put aside their differences, the classical liberal republicans have the wherewithal to win big. Ironically, a Hillary Clinton victory would likely unite the right with paradoxical political 

Read the full column here.

3 comments:

  1. Sounds like Benko has been reading your articles Bob in which Hillary will unite large blocs of people in hatred for her.

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  2. A Hitler victory would powerfully unite the opposition. This was actually believed. The logic is so flawed as to not even be worth discussing.

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    Replies
    1. The point is not that Hillary is a good thing but that she is a statist with serious opposition whereas Trump is a statist with serious support with a percentage of the population.

      Trump fills stadiums, Hilary doesn't.

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