How did the US become the most right-wing country in the Western world ?

[steve2470]

I saw this in another thread and thought it deserved its own thread. Please critique, thanks.

http://politicsandgovernment.blog.my/2011/06/how-did-the-us-become-the-most-right-wing-country-in-the-western-world/#comment-18021

By suppressing the power of unions and transferring it to corporations.

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people — not the corporations — were in control. So what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually start exercising more control than the individuals who created them?

The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century — the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed."

President Lincoln’s warning went unheeded. Corporations continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges they did not have before.

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech.

In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into ever larger and more complex units of resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing, to the point where many of them became economically more powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one of the world’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred corporations controlled forty-two percent of the world’s wealth. Today corporations freely buy each other’s stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please.

Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible, undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent from a stunned and inured populace.

We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing, we plead. Please don’t cut down any more ancient forests. Please don’t pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don’t move your factories and jobs offshore either). Please don’t use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. Please don’t play governments off against each other to get a better deal. We’ve spent so much time bowed down in deference, we’ve forgotten how to stand up straight.

The unofficial history of America, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

*end of quote, not copyrighted as far as I know*

[aquart]

1. By allowing and encouraging the accumulation of extreme wealth.

The first HUGE mistake was in not nationalizing our energy resources.

[RKP5637]

2. Eventually, the US will just be a subsidiary to a corporate cartel, and we

are well on our way. USA, Inc. Then, we will see the corporate wars emerge, one battling the other for control, power, money and dominance. "We the people" won't stand a chance. I don't see this as fiction, but factual. ... just needs a little more time. Hell, many corporations are already larger than some countries.

I think many of us feel we have been reduced to servitude. I was telling someone recently never in my life have I felt more like a peasant, the wealth discrepancies are soooo extreme.

[dameocrat67]

3. That is one reason the second reason would be slavery

It made the poor whites one level above the bottom, and they fought to preserve this state, that meant they often fought for their exploiters.

[Drale]

4. Andrew Johnson

destroyed the South during reconstruction. Had Lincoln survived and there had been an easy reconstruction, the US could look very very different.

[wilt the stilt]

12. radical republicans

led by Thaddeus Stevens(PA) are responsible for reconstruction. Johnson was so ineffectual that he was impeached. It wasn't until 1876 and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes that the troops were pulled out and that was a compromise so Hayes would win.

[Art_from_Ark]

19. Johnson was not impeached because he was ineffectual

He was impeached because he was considered too conciliatory toward the defeated South. He hated Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War he had "inherited" from Lincoln, and wanted to remove Stanton from the Cabinet. In response, the Congress hastily prepared and passed the Tenure Act which tried to make it illegal for Johnson to fire Stanton. Johnson fired Stanton anyway, and that provided the basis for the impeachment. The Tenure Act was ultimately declared unconstitutional in the 1920s.

[wilt the stilt]

22. yes you are correct

but it was the radical republicans who punished the south

[The Magistrate]

13. You Mean 'Tolerated White Supremacist Terrorism', Sir

We would be a lot better off if the South had indeed been properly pacified....

[Art_from_Ark]

16. It was Grant who destroyed the South during Reconstruction

Reconstruction lasted until 1876, the end of Grant's very corrupt administration, and it only ended because of an agreement worked out by the Republicans to legally steal the election of 1876 from the rightful winner, Samuel Tilden. It was overseen by Republicans whose job was not to actually "reconstruct" the South, but to plunder whatever they could get their hands on as "restitution". They disenfranchised Democratic voters in the South and set up corrupt state governments, and basically wasted little opportunity to remind Southerners that they had lost the war.

[wilt the stilt]

23. That is what I said

except I didn't go into detail except it was the radical republicans who led the charge. They were headed by Thaddeus Stevens. Look it up.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Importing a swarm of Nazis after WW 2 by the Dulles brothers didn't help. nt

[TheKentuckian]

6. Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, leaving little competition.

[hifiguy]

7. The lack of a state religion is a factor.

In every Western country with a state church, religion has withered away to something that is at most strictly ceremonial for most people. Which is a significant reason those countries behave in a sane manner for the most part. There are no pentecostal "tongues speaking" snake handlers or witchfinders in, say, France or Germany.

Here, every gomer who got blitzed (or was batshit nuts) and thought he saw jeebus could set himself up as a "preacher" and go into the business of confounding uneducated people with complete bullshit and fleecing the same people blind. Needless to say this highly successful, and easy to duplicate, business model - not unlike that of Barnum's dictum that there's a sucker born every minute and two to cheat him - spread like the pox and has been a blight of boils on the american polity ever since. It replicates itself every generation and, thanks to the great 'murkan tradition of hating the educated and education itself, never runs out of boobs to con and cheat. And the snake-oil salesmen use more sophisticated technology with each new generation.

[Nay]

14. You beat me to it, Hifi. Lack of a state religion that withered away over

the years. It's funny how "freedom of religion" has turned into "can't get away from nutball religion" in the states. Everywhere else, ppl let go of all that nonsense and got on with living.

[Recursion]

21. In fairness, those state-religion countries kicked the snake handlers out, and they came here

ie, some of our crazy comes from the fact that Europe dumped their crazy here.

[hifiguy]

28. True that. The revered "pilgrims" were so obnoxious,

priggish and sanctimonious that they were thrown out of England and decamped to the Netherlands. Not even the Dutch - the most religiously tolerant people in Europe, who even welcomed Jews persecuted in other countries - could put up with them and booted them out. So guess where they came? The Native peoples should have forced them back on the boat at the point of arrows and spears.

[RagAss]

8. One fucking word.....Religion !

[MicaelS]

9. DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK!

I got an alert on my NO32 AV, and the link was terminated. Showed a virus at that location.

7/28/2011 4:42:29 PM

HTML/Iframe.B.Gen virus

connection terminated - quarantined

HTML/Iframe.B.Gen
Type of infiltration: Virus
Size: Variable

Short description
HTML/Iframe.B.Gen is generic detection of malicious IFRAME tags embedded in HTML pages, which redirect the browser to a specific URL location with malicious software.

[steve2470]

10. thanks for this warning nt

[steve2470]

11. Don't click on the link I supplied, it has a virus. The mods have been notified to edit the OP nt

[SpartanDem]

15. Corporations have little to do with this

this something that is as old as America itself, one of this country's biggest strengths our multicultural population has been a big driver of the right wing politics in the country since it was founded. It is not a coincidence that countries with the best social safety net are the most homogeneous. Even before the Civil War the Know Nothings were fearing mongering that White, Anglo Saxon Protestants would no longer control the country and nothing has changed in almost two hundred years. A tea party leader warned the same thing months ago https://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-parties/19-news/76-tea-party-nation-warns-of-white-anglo-saxon-protestant-extinction.

The other is religion I recently read something online about the reason why churches so conservative compared to those in in Europe. It has with how churches were set up at the countries founding in Europe churches were college educated and organized in top down fashion. Here were they independent particularly on the frontier and they set up their own schools to train preachers. This is the reason why you have so many of these bible colleges in the country well if all you do is teach the bible you're going to interpret and teach it in very literal fashion.

[Bonobo]

17. Religion. nt

[Gabi Hayes]

18. remember good old Lewis Powell and his bestest big toe, Bill Simon?

RIGHT WING THINK TANKS......

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting5

read the whole thing, starting here:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting1

[Recursion]

20. No, no. There's still Israel (nt)

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

24. By selling contrived superiority to white losers for 300 years.

And those cultivating this preposterous sense of racial solidarity the said losers believe their interests to be in harmony with the ruling class.

[WinkyDink]

25. We imported Nazis post-1945.

[Courtesy Flush]

26. WE should have dibs on the Tea Party name

Although I cringe when I hear those two words now (thanks to the Kochs), The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against the exact same scenario described by the OP. I know that you guys already know this, but it wasn't about taxes. It was about keeping the government from granting corporate monopolies (any freepers lurking here, read up on The Tea Act of 1773).

We started a revolution over much less than this!

[rosesaylavee]

27. By ignoring the blatant election fraud during our national elections.

Florida, Ohio, Missour, New Mexico. Possibly other states as well do not have secure voting methods at least since the 2000 election.

[woo me with science]

29. Wall Street has infiltrated both parties. We have no real Democratic voices.

Both parties are being directed by Wall Street, and even our Democratic President is mouthing the Republican lies and talking points.

We have ceded the battleground.

[librechik]

30. Lots and lots of money and lobbyists, combined with RWers buying our media institutions

we might as well be a conquered people. they just did it commercially rather than martially.

[Morizovich]

31. You mean the Most God-Fearing Country, right?

:O8)
:sarcasm: