More evidence of US rightward shift: NYT quietly glosses over its previous opposition to Iraq War.

[Leopolds Ghost]

Let's not fool ourselves: we are seeing a party identification switch in the midst of the depths of a 35-year rightward shift in ideology that began in the late 70s. What this means is that in order to attain popularity Dems and the activist base have been carried along with the rightward shift in sentiments, known as the Overton window, to attract people turned off by Bush who would be rock-ribbed republicans if Reagan were around. In fact, most elected Dems today have nothing bad to say about Reagan, which tells you right away that the progressive/New Deal coalition has fallen apart.

Exhibit A is the NYT (never mind the Post, which actually publishes editorials criticizing anyone who ever doubted that the war in Iraq was essential) essentially apologizing for previous opposition to the war, which they'd have you believe nobody questions anymore (since that is basically the truth, people don't give a shit, the only people still talking about Iraq are the people who supported it, what does that say?)

Exchibit 1:

the tragedy (of Rumsfeld) is that the Iraq occupation was nearly wrecked by the kind of mistakes he had spent his career diagnosing. By the time Rumsfeld resigned, the day after Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterm elections, the United States was on the verge of outright defeat. The replacement of his strategy with that of the so-called surge has stabilized Iraq greatly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Caldwell-t.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

Exhibit 2 is A. O. Scott's review of The Hurt Locker and numerous others -- the movie got 95% positive reviews, and what's scary is 90% of them took home an unapologetically jingoistic message about the Iraq war and how we "finally have a film that dares to show the sacrifices of our soldiers" instead of "merely criticising" the war and how "so many people criticized" the war when it was going badly, and now we "finally have a film that shows what's really going on there". Other reviews noted how war is a drug "and what a glorious drug it is" or words to that effect. AO Scott's review is equally jingoistic:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/movies/26hurt.html

Numerous readers in the comments section picked up on the same crap I did about what's going on here...

An immoral, decadent society that has abandoned all pretense of cultural or generational memory, and leaves its mistakes behind in the dust.

Which is, of course, what happens when you have an increasingly illiterate society whose oral tradition consists of various bloody entertainments and whose media is tightly owned and controlled by an informal blacklist imposed on anyone who says the wrong thing.

The problem is there are a whole generation of people coming up now who are too young to remember when the War on Terror started and do not have an informed opinion about Reaganism (the ideology later adopted by the right wing of the Democratic Party -- modern Republicans are well to the right of Reagan) or any objections to endless war in the Middle East so long as American deaths are kept to a minimum. And many of these people in the upcoming generation are only too happy to hide behind their recent votes for Democrats... actual liberals and lefties will be sorely disappointed when these college-age flock to another Reagan clone, like they did in 1980 while Dems continue to pander to the Overton strategy of adopting the Republican policies of 4 years ago. Mitt Romney, for instance, with his mandated private health insurance proposal.

[HamdenRice]

1. Laughably counter-factual. The country just voted in the Democrats on an anti-war agenda

Structurally, we are going through a generational re-alignment toward the left, not the right. The financial crash may not have put the nail in the coffin of the era of greed that started with Reagan, but it certainly started the SEC, FDIC, Treasury and other economic management departments measuring pine boards for the regulatory casket of that era. On the wastefulness and futility of war compared to cooperation, the environment, women's rights, the rights of minorities, economic regulation, health care and most other issues, there is now a solid progressive consensus among the majority in the country.