[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

When that happens, which it does about once a generation, the politics of a nation goes through a "seismic shift." A lot of the old guard find themselves sidelined and irrelevant.

The last time that really happened was during the Reagan years, with the election of a man able to emotionally motivate people with an effectiveness rarely seen. He pulled in fundamentalist Christians in unprecedented numbers.

However, the economic difficulties of the mid-70s due to the OPEC cartel, combined with Carter's perceived ineffectiveness during the Iran Hostage Crisis, are what penetrated the fog enough that the general citizenry willingly listened.

The fundamentalists didn't get Reagan elected, the frustration with the oil shortage and the Carter administration did.

It was both, and other things besides. The old FDR coalition had fractured over both economic and social issues, and Carter had a knack for saying and doing precisely the wrong thing to accelerate the matter. Don't make the mistake, BTW, of thinking that 'fundamentalist' and 'social conservative' mean the same thing. They overlap but most socons aren't fundamentalists and some fundamentalists are social libs, too.

[quote]

In the previous generation, the items that penetrated the fog were the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.

With the Civil Rights movement, it wasn't Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, or Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, or the Black Panthers, that caused the change. They were a side-show. It was the televised brutality used against peaceful protesters by a violent minority of the white population, combined with the eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Remember, King was only considered an "extremist" by southern "Dixiecrat" conservatives and blue-collar whites who didn't want to have to compete for jobs with blacks. To the vast majority of the nation, which was steadily making the shift to middle-class, his was the calm voice of reason and compassion. The political opinion of the majority of the population -- the center of the bell curve -- had already shifted toward belief in desegregation and greater equality.

The brutality shown on television, followed by the assassination of King, acted as "trigger-events" that actually got the general population involved enough to support civil rights laws.

Actually, King was mostly frosting, it would have happened approximately the same way without him (or rather, someone else would have filled a somewhat similar role). The rise of the civil rights movement as we think of that went back to the 1920s, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s was the culmination of decades of work and effort.

The right-wing extremists who drive the Republican Party can't govern, now, for exactly the same reasons. That's why their preferred policies continue to fail, throughout the country. They've shifted so far to the right that they've alienated a slim majority of Americans, and demographics are against them. Their supporters are mostly older, and many of their most vocal opponents have only just reached their 30s and 40s.

No. The GOP is not far-right at all. They're barely conservative, and they actively dislike and detest their own voters. That's why they've been losing. The idea that the GOP is dominated by a 'far right' is easily disprovable simply by looking at their actions

In fact, I'd guess that, if anything, the backlash against the Reagan-Bush shift to the right should have happened a long time ago, and doubtlessly would have except for the events of 9/11. That put a damper on things for a decade, but that's only allowed the pressure of the backlash to grow.

Again, no.

The backlash, such as it was, was in the 90s, and over by 2000. The politics since then have little to do with Reagan or Carter, and everything to do with an emerging aristocrat vs. commoner divide on both economic and social issues. It's not Democrat vs. Republican, it's elite Dem/GOP vs street level Dem/GOP, though the latter are only just now starting to react to that. One reason both parties ' elites are meeting such resistance to their preferred candidates (Jeb and Hillary) is that more and more people see them as two faces of one outfit (even aside from the distasteful dynastic aspect of it).

It's true 911 covered that up for a little while, but it was out in the open by 2006.

But, again, while the extremists will have influence, they can never govern. The country has begun a shift to the left, but it won't go as far as the most vocal of the gay-rights' activists think, and the supporters of single-payer health care won't get what they want, any time soon, and the 2nd Amendment is in no danger.

Depends on which faction wins the elite/common argument (with a backbeat
of 'birth dearth' issues rapidly rising that look likely to make Western politics very different from today even 10 years from now).