I’m annoyed by the lack of realization of why we got our butts kicked
Roe vs. Wade was passed in 1973. Religious groups and “pro-life” groups began mobilizing for a fight. Not something that would last a year or two or just in presidential election years but in everything all the time. The pro-life groups didn’t look at this as a one or two year battle but as a battle for the soul of America.
Eventually, they began to work with other right wing groups, many left over for the fights in the 1940’s and 50’s, such as the John Birch Society, KKK, NRA and various southern conservative groups. These groups had been driven underground and marginalized in the 70’s and 80’s but found new life under the pro-life umbrella.
Once the right wing groups joined with the pro-life groups, they began morphing into a single group with a wider range of ideas. Pro-life, yes. But also the anti-New Deal groups began getting funding from the sons and families of the anti-New Deal families in the 1940’s like the Koch’s and wealthy southern families.
It has taken more than 50 years for the pro-life movement to realize their goal of possibly overturning Roe vs. Wade. But along with reaching their goal, the other less popular right wing groups are also going to start realizing their goals.
These groups, primarily made up to zealots of one kind or another, have worked almost every day to accomplish what they want – even if only a small fraction of American’s agree with them.
Consider the problem of convicting policemen accused of police violence. Almost never happens, no matter how egregious the crime. Why? Look at how many police, both active and retired, serve on city councils. The police {and now fire} have a political arm that encourages and supports policemen to running for office – any office. Dog catcher, council, education, assembly, representative, mayor - anything to get them into a position of influence. Once they are in a position, they support their fellow police. If a presentation in Tulsa to a city council goes well, within months that same presentation will be made in council across America. Always stressing about how important police are to protecting citizens from some imagined calamity. Did you know that most people think crime has spiked the past decade when it fact, it has declined? Why – because police groups emphasize how it goes up and only by devoting more of a city’s resources to police departments can possibly keep people safe. And they are in a position to protect their own in times of need. Even when a scandal erupts and a police is accused of a crime, the political machine works in their favor, even against public opinion and facts, and within a few weeks any backlash against the police dissipates.
Consider the NRA. Even most NRA supporters don’t support all the positions of the NRA – but they win by being incessantly involved in politics at the local level again all the way down to city councils. How many of your council candidates touted support from the NRA? And the NRA and religious groups have formed a truly unholy alliance – witness McConnell with his “guns, god, guts” chant.
What about corporations? They also have political action groups, funded and coordinated across the country. The Chamber of Commerce is an obvious example but less obvious and more important are, again, the number of corporate shills that are supported by business and encouraged to run for various offices. Look at your councils and education and assembly seats filled by ex-public utility officials who drew large salaries right up to the day they were elected but encouraged to run by their companies.
Were these firms devoted to encouraging the best talent for the region to run or encouraging the best talent for them to preserve their business model to run?
I think the most egregious example is religion. Churches routinely involve themselves in political activities, in spite of laws limiting their participation for fear of losing their tax-free status. When is the last time you heard of a church being punished? It isn’t. The political strength of the church overwhelms the willingness of officials to enforce the law.
But more importantly, religious groups use the political process to support religion. Consider the “In God We Trust” motto prominent in most city council chambers. This is a relatively new idea {last 10 or 15 years} where religious groups began promoting an idea that no elected official once to fight – we love god. A small group began visiting meetings of elected officials around the country offering to pay for the cost of a sign or lettering if it would be installed in the meeting rooms. The message was subtle – we are a country that believes in god. But even officials who realized the implicit message that America is a christen nation were not going to argue over the sign. Who wants to be against god?
Finally, consider how these different groups began developing an infrastructure to train people in presenting their message to outside groups – Liberty University and Oral Roberts University for religion, George Mason University for laissez faire economics, all the weird “non-partisan” think tanks for economic thought funded by the Koch’s – all of these with a single idea of promoting a specific type of society. All of these institutions are legitimate, safe and reasonable. If you consider re-writing history and re-interpreting facts in your favor as legitimate and reasonable activities.
I’m not even going to touch the military – but ask yourselves why the military shows up at every NFL game. You would think the US military wouldn’t have to advertise to draw support.
While each of these different groups has a purpose, they do not work against the others. Sometimes they don’t work against each other, but it is hard to find many instances where the police acted against a goal of the religious right or corporations denounced religious freedom or the behavior of the police.
The point is, that the people involved in these groups work every single day to push their ideas. Not once every 4 years. Every single day.
Outside of environmental policy, find me any comparable, well-funded groups that work against the interests of the religious, police {or public safety}, military and corporate interests every single day.
On election night, someone here at dailykos complained we were getting beat in Florida by a guy with no ground game – wrong. The right has a built in, permanent ground game. They are what beat us. Even though they are smaller, their ideas benefit a few and are meant to enrich or support just a few, and are bad for the country, they have built themselves a strong and permanent political machine that has no counterpart on the left. Find me a university devoted to turning out educated liberals to move into government. Find me the political equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce. Find the left wing equivalent of Fox News, devoted to pushing the right wing agenda. Each of these pushes the same, factually wrong, but warm and comfortable philosophy about American Exceptionalism and being a Christen nation. Even if no one {except maybe southerners} believes it, the totality of the message is the rights ground game.
Unless the left realizes and develops a permanent and daily strategy to counter the right wing, we are going to continue losing. Even if polls show people agree with the tenants of the left over the philosophy of the right, we will keep losing because we don’t have the infrastructure that the right has built in the past 50 years.
