Reply #6: Well done, but the shift is far more fundemental than that...

[madmusic]

You are correct about the popular conservative v. liberal issues of the day, I think, but the Right's propaganda machine strives for control no matter the issue. Issues come and go, their machine drags on. At its root, their machine wants to run down any New Deal success because they made Democrats so popular and powerful. They don't care if any of those New Deal programs were good for Americans, no, they want to dismantle them anyway. Social Security is the most obvious example. They don't have the support to eliminate it outright, so they try to Rightize it and then claim it as a conservative value.

This war is most obvious in the fight against crime. Liberal New Deal policies, and JFK and Johnson reaching out to help the poor and minorities, were immensely popular. The Right's propaganda machine had to demonize those polices, and they did so very well. We recognize and even believe their party slogans: "coddling criminals," "crack babies," "welfare queens" and the list goes on. Following their Straussian foundations, they fought to eliminate any "liberal professor's" studies showing that "bleeding heart" programs did any good, so they managed to demonize science as well. This discredited the studies no matter their merit, and removed them from the public debate. From then on, anything liberal actually CAUSED crime and the only solution was tougher laws and more prisons. Therefore, ALL liberal polices were bad.

Anything liberal came under attack, meaning any thread of the social net. Science and thought is coming back into vogue, and with it, so is liberalism. The very ground conservatism walks on is shaking. Conservatives are keeping a close eye on the Richter Scale. If Clinton's "Stop and think" becomes the party slogan, conservatives will fall like boweling pins.