“Hopes and Dreams: The Decline of the Left and the Development of the Right"
Originally titled as: The Development of the Right
Summer 1985
By Leonard Zeskind
for Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought

This article was written during the months immediately after the re-election of Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1984.  At that time, Shmate was an irreverent periodical published by Steve Fankuchen, who managed to combine a keen sense of humor with sharp political analysis and ridiculous drivel all in the same pages.  And I thank him today for giving me the opportunity to express, however badly, these ideas back then.  

 The most outstanding feature of the development of the Right in the last ten years is that it has come to embody the hopes and aspirations for the future of millions of white Americans. The political Right has done more than just capture the apparatus of the Republican Party and occupy the White House.  It has shaped the national debate on what constitutes a humane, decent life and how a society should organize itself. The Right has generated an image (of itself-ed.) not as the reactionary defender of the privileged few, but as the vehicle for the future of the popular millions.  This change in perception, even if not in actuality, has meant a major change in the United States political landscape.

 That landscape, of course, is not entirely made up of the Right. Forces normally known as Left, Liberal, and Centrist still exist. In fact, the development and prospects of the Right are determined by the development of the Left and Center. Each exists independently, but only as they exist in their interconnectedness. To understand the development of the Right, it is necessary to understand its relationship to other forces. Most of the discussion of the Right since 1976 has treated it as if it had sprung out of nowhere and was connected to nothing.

 1968 was the year Martin Luther King was assassinated and Black communities all across the country let loose a mighty roar of pain and anguish – and power – that shook this country to its foundations. 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive, and the U.S. Armed Forces began to taste its first defeat in its imperial history. 1968 was also the year of the Columbia University strike, a symbol of a movement among white Americans unequaled since the trade union battles of the thirties.  All across the country people were questioning the status quo and experimenting with different ways to live.

 1968 was .also the year that George Wallace launched an independent campaign for President. His campaign apparatus was brimming with every conceivable kind of racist, .anti-Semite, and far-rightist. He attacked the student movement, he demeaned Black people, and he campaigned with General Curtis “Bomb 'em Back to the Stone Age" LeMay. George Wallace also received ten million votes and carried a number of Southern States. He also did very well among the urban ethnic groups of the industrial North.

 On the one hand a movement was in full swing that was challenging every assumption of the status quo. On the other hand a reactionary movement existed, composed of people with their own frustrations, trying to defend the way they thought life should be. But the two different movements were not of equal strength or dynamism. When the election was over, Wallace's movement fell apart and eventually dissipated. The
other movement forced the President to retire and still continued to grow and challenge an increasingly broader array of social assumptions.

 By 1974 the situation was exactly the reverse. Again a President was forced out of office, and what should have been a victory for the anti-establishment Left was, in fact, a stalemate. Watergate became the symbol of public corruption and abuse of power by the privileged few.  The government was exposed as essentially anti-democratic, more interested in thwarting the public will than in being responsive to it. The critique of society projected by the social protest movements of the Sixties seemed to become public facts. Yet, unlike the Sixties, the social movements did not grow as a result of their apparent success. Instead of toppling a President and then developing a stronger, broader movement like in 1968, Nixon's resignation seemed to benefit only Woodward and Bernstein.

 Of course the Right didn't do any better in 1974; that would come later. The Right was still disoriented from its inability to meet the challenges from a progressive and democratic movement on the Left.

 And the establishment-center didn't have any cards up its sleeve either. They had been buffeted by the Black movement, then the youth movement, and then the women's movement. Each movement had broken a sector of the population away from the handed-down consensus of normative social relations. And after Watergate, nobody trusted the government. It was as if everybody had come out of ninth grade civics class with an "F".

 In addition a severe economic crisis in the Seventies superimposed itself on the social and cultural crisis of the Sixties. The unquestioned economic supremacy of the United States disappeared. The dollar was unhooked from the gold standard.  Technological competition from Japan and Germany escalated. The term stagflation was invented to cover the appearance of inflation and stagnation at the same time. By the end of the Seventies the existence of entire industries -steel, rail, and auto-were questioned. A new economic debate opened up at the highest corporate levels. It was undecided whether the basic industries in the "rust-belt" should be recapitalized or scrapped in favor of new, high-tech and service industries. Even as millions of people were thrown out of work and forced to move from Cleveland to Houston, the corporations could not reach a consensus on the road out of the economic quagmire.

 It was as if everything had become unhinged and nobody had a screwdriver to tighten it back up again. A political vacuum had opened up. The old ideas had been challenged and found wanting; the new ideas were yet to emerge. For whatever reason (and I'm sure each SHMATE reader has a different one), the Left never found a way to include the millions of middle-class whites, whose conditions of life were being challenged on every side.

 Eventually the Right did. The New Right appeared with its "new ideas" eight years before Gary Hart. The new ideas were designed to roll back the uncertainties of
the Sixties and Seventies and restore the social relations of white supremacy and patriarchy to their "natural" place.

 After Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory, everyone looked up and wondered what happened. But the New Right had already been organizing against Jimmy Carter's "malaise" for four years. By the time of the 1984 Republican Party convention, the New Right was able to institutionalize itself within the party apparatus. The pundits now openly discuss the possibility of an electoral realignment occurring in the next election similar to that which occurred in 1936 and made New Deal Liberalism the center of the nation's political spectrum. Although the Right, through the Reagan administration, has been able to steal center stage and dominate the national debate, they are still unable to totally control national events. Despite the Reagan "recovery," none of the essential questions about the direction of the economy has been resolved; although it does seem like the high-tech, service industry side has the upper hand. Unemployment has not yet- and probably won't- return to its previous low levels(5.8%). And although the Reagan administration has been successful at undermining and removing the Civil Rights gains of the previous period, Black people are not laying down and playing dead. And most significantly for the New Right, it is unlikely that they will be able to win their social agenda for women and the family. The number of women working outside the home guarantees a long and difficult return to the traditions of the 1950's.

 But the radicalization of middle class white Americans represented by the New Right has not yet abated. Their dreams remain unfulfilled. The social issues are still unresolved to their satisfaction. They may become even more right-wing as the New Right becomes part of the Center of American politics.

End