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Brain -> How Obama changed the right (6/23/2010 7:34:04 PM)
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This is a good article. It's very perceptive and I think it's accurate.
FTA:
One of the important groups on the right in the mid-20th century took the name Americans for Constitutional Action. The group, as Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab reported in their sociological classic, "The Politics of Unreason," favored "progressive repeal of the socialistic laws now on our books."
Attacks on a highly educated class that are a staple of conservative criticisms of Obama and his circle also have a long right-wing pedigree. "I can find you a lot more Harvard accents in Communist circles in America today than you can find me overalls," Robert Welch, founder of the Birch Society, declared in 1966.
What's remarkable is the extent to which the Tea Party movement has displaced the religious right as the dominant voice of conservative militancy. The religious conservatives have not disappeared, and Sarah Palin, a Tea Party hero, does share their views on abortion and gay marriage. But these issues have been overshadowed by the broader anti-government themes pushed by the New Old Right, and the "compassionate conservatism" that inspires parts of the Christian political movement has no place in the right's current order of battle.
Thus has Obama brought back to life a venerable if disturbing style of conservative thinking. In the short run, the new movement's energy threatens him. In the long run, its extremism may be his salvation.
How Obama changed the right
Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency's major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/20/AR2010062002367.html
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