i’m always impressed at how often, and how consistently, liberals & progressives repeat right-wing marketing rhetoric as if it were not just true, but self-evident.
lately, i feel like i’ve heard these floating around (all bullshit invented in the late 1900s, some of it in my lifetime):
– the right (or, sometimes, the far right) “moved from the margins to the center” between the 1960s and the 2000s. just absolute crap: if there’s one constant in u.s. politics since 1776, it’s the depth of white (especially wealthy white) support for the overtly white nationalist far right, which has never been separate from the rest of the u.s. right in anything but aesthetics.
– the right used to have an intellectually rigorous, morally grounded wing that kept its less respectable side in check. bill buckley’s patrician accent doesn’t make what he said, wrote, believed, and advocated – and who he was allied with – any different from what you’re hearing from any other rabid death-cultist, from calhoun to cohn to roof.
– the democratic party is in some way affiliated with the left. the least-justified fantasy since the faeries at the bottom of arthur conan doyle’s garden. perhaps such an alliance could could have been made at the 1964 democratic party convention, if it hadn’t refused to seat the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. it says everything you need to know that in ’68, when a not-lily-white delegation was seated, it no longer claimed to represent “freedom”: it was the “Loyal Democrats”. that loyalty – still driving electoral progressives near you! – is part of why we do need a name for identifying with people who are actively trying to kill you instead of folks trying to keep you alive (“stockholm syndrome” is a misogynist lie invented to curb criticism of the police).
– the “elites” of our society are media workers and the professoriate (who’re supposedly liberal: also generally a lie), not the people with actual economic and political power (including the ones who own media corporations and control universities).
it’s more disappointing (if less common) for folks who’re actual radicals to do this, of course. in that zone, the one i see coming up all the time lately is this:
– the right, or the far right, or some parts of the right, are “anti-state”. now, there is a small slice of the libertarian right that might in fact oppose state structures as such. but most libertarians, and all neocons, paleocons, and other rightwingers who use an “anti-government” rhetoric base their whole political program on the existence of the state. some don’t want the current state, based on the slaveowners’ constitution of 1787, but all of them are aiming to maintain, and to control, a hierarchical, centralized, territorial structure of rule that legitimizes violence (by its agents, its supporters, and at times others) in service of its policies. you can tell because they want borders, they want enforced order, and they want “free enterprise” to be “protected”. that, my friends, is a description of a state and its policies, not of an “anti-state” position.
aside from making me annoyed, when liberals, progressives, and radicals parrot these various lines of bullshit, it strengthens the right. it turns their lies into “common sense”. and it makes them harder to fight. don’t do it. talk with your friends who do. and treat any analysis based on this junk as what it is: a right-wing analysis that supports and assists the right, even – especially – when it comes from liberals & progressives.