Actually, it all goes back to 1980 and Reagan and Thatcher. Actually, it goes back to the "stagflation" of the 1970's that "discredited" Keynesianism (and "re-credited" 19th Century economics which political-economic philosophy has gone on to wreck things ever since as "neo-classicism" or "neoliberalism").
But, regardless, it sounds like an interesting book. It's called When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s and it's by John Ganz.
Ganz covers a lot of territory here — from a brief yet productive engagement with the theories of Antonio Gramsci to careful and compelling analyses of the POW/MIA movement (a “nationalist cult of the undead,” Ganz calls it), the late-twentieth-century politics of divorce, the pervasive anti-Asian racism of the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the racial tensions that marked early 1990s New York City.
...
Against this backdrop of staggering inequality and selective austerity, con men, kooks, and conspiracists had a field day. Figures such as David Duke — and marginally less racist ones like Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell — connected with a disenchanted public through talk radio, daytime talk shows, cable TV, and other less traditional media. Less-heralded characters like Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard generally liked what they saw. For them, Duke, Buchanan, and other firebrands represented the vanguard of a movement to undo the liberal order forged through the New Deal and the Cold War. Francis, for his part, endorsed a “new nationalism” to dismantle both the “managerial” regime — a forerunner of sorts to the “PMC” — and the “globalism” that flowed from Francis Fukuyama’s supposed “end of history.” In Rothbard’s words, this incipient movement sought to “repeal the twentieth century.”
So, yeah. It doesn't provide a detailed chart showing how Trump's 2016 victory was clearly foretold by the events of 1992. Nothing could. Because of free will and quantum physics and butterfly wings and what have you.
2 comments:
This sort of book is often interesting, but too often they neglect what to me is the key issue. They talk about various popular or intellectually influential people, as if this is all some kind of organic process of cultural change. But they don't follow the money. Someone bought those radio stations and selectively put people like Limbaugh on them. Somebody endowed the chair of right wing economic bullshit at Very Wealthy University. The cultural change didn't organically happen, it was mostly bought.
The cultural inquiry isn't completely bankrupt--there were certain, um, paths of least resistance that the PR people hired by the money predictably pushed along, lines of rhetoric that could be expected to work as opposed to other lines that wouldn't. There were naturally occurring ideas and attitudes that could be inflated. But still, if you ignore the money you get a quite false picture of how the history of the ideas worked and how inherently attractive or cogent they were (IMO not very if they didn't have all the dough backing them).
This in turn creates false impressions of why certain other ideas have faltered and become less popular.
Just to be clear, I don't know if this book neglects the money side. But they often do.
Purple library guy,
The idea that social democracy (to say nothing of socialism) was an abomination and that capitalists needed to think long-term to get rid of it began since before FDR graduated from college. (If not earlier.)
You had Hayek and Von Mises and their Mont Perelin Institute (or however you spell it and whoever was actually in it). You had Ayn Rand. You had the Liberty League. You had fascism I guess.
You had Ronald Reagan doing commercials for GE or Westinghouse or whoever.
You had Milton Friedman.
The John Birch Society.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Some guy, ... an executive, an ideologue, wrote some famous letter that foretold their who "long march through the institutions" that did all this.
Perhaps what the book might be valid about is the specific way that right-wing, social-conservative male assholes (and to a lesser extent their right-wing socially conservative wimmen) responded to the right-wing counterrevolution of Reagan and Thatcher by stupidly demanding more of the same (not knowing their own self-interest) and it eventually morphed into Trumpism.
The ideological eco-system though (like you say with Rush Limbaugh and the whole "Christian" mega-church grifter apparatus, and etc.,) was subsidized though.
I'm tired.
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