Articles like the article below by William Pfaff is long overdue. There are many writers out there that must come out and fill the internet space with truthful progressive information in order to remove the fallacies and false perceptions of the Right. After-all, only one can be correct and the evidence of 30 years of their failed policies being effected mostly through effective propaganda and misinformation techniques have scared politicians to vote against the interest of their constituencies.

My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
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America’s Lethal National Ideologies

by www.williampfaff.com

Paris, April 12, 2011 – The determination of the Republican congressional majority to destroy the country’s legacy of what once was known (in religious circles, at least) as social justice is being accomplished amidst the ignorance of the vast majority that such a thing ever existed and was defended, in the 1940s and 1950s and even after, by what were known as progressive Republicans. Not only has that breed been stamped out but so has the memory that such a movement existed under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover (a humanist, if a credulous economist), Dwight Eisenhower, Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, and even under the demonized Richard Nixon.
What has replaced it has been an ignorant and repressive socio-political ideology that rests on assumptions of class and individual privilege devoid of responsibility. The United States has experienced this before. It might in Rumsfeldian idiom be called one of the known knowns of American history; and that history would indicate that it will eventually be brought to an end by electoral choice, after voters have experienced its consequences. When this will happen is an unknown known.
This ideology in its modern American version is a ”conservative” attack on the popular rights proclaimed in Europe in the nineteenth century by such genuinely conservative figures as Prussia’s Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (in 1883-1887) and Pope Leo XIII, in his 1891 Encyclical Letter “Rerum Novarum,” intended to liberate people from a condition in which “the rich had in effect enslaved the poor.” The Encyclical demanded the guarantee to workers of a minimum wage, the right to form unions, to bargain collectively, and to possess individual property. Bismarck, “against violent opposition,” created national sickness, accident and old age insurance, limits on child and women’s labor, and fixed working hours for laborers.
The contemporary rationale for oppressing the poor is national debt and deficit, which could otherwise be relieved only by raising taxes on the rich and requiring corporations to bear an equitable share of the national tax burden, which in the Republican party, and a part of the Democratic party today, is unacceptable (and plausibly thought politically suicidal, in view of the current alignment of available political funds and of the legislation governing campaign practice – quite possibly irreversible, since this alignment would seem automatically to disallow reversal).

William PFAFF-America’s Lethal National Ideologies – Columns – News