American Right
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Quote of the Day: Peter Kuznick
Americans were very hostile to Britain until the 20th century, till the World War I period, because that was the empire, and we were consciously anti-imperial. John Quincy Adams has a great speech that he made on July 4, 1819, in which he says we don’t go forth in search of foreign monsters to destroy.
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The Two Rights
There are two factions within the American Right: the plutocratic right, for which Romney is a kind of caricature; and the cultural right, whose identity is so deeply entwined with values have been under attack since the dawn of the Enlightenment and are being pushed over the cliff now by consumer capitalism. These two factions
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Quote of the Day: Chris Hedges
Any mass movement that arises—and I believe one is coming—will be fueled, like the Occupy movement, by radicals who have as deep a revulsion for Democrats as they do for Republicans. The radicals who triumph, however, may not be progressive. Populist movements, from labor unions to an independent press to socialist third parties, have been
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Mythos & Logos 2
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed,
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Triumph of the Will
You have to admire how right wingers are so certain that their simplistic, 19th-Century program will save America. But it's precisely this unblinking certainty that the world as it exists has any relationship to the world as it looks in their fevered imaginataions of it that makes them so frightening: (h/t: TPM)
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Traditional White America
I don't know if the real Bill O'Reilly is more of a sendup on himself than his mocking imitator: The Colbert ReportGet More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
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Michael Lind on Realignment
Michael Lind this afternoon in a post on Salon: When party systems collapse in American history, the new party system tends to emerge from within the dominant party. The defeat of the Confederates meant that the politics of the Gilded Age would be fought between the business and farmer wings of the hegemonic Republican Party.
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Obama’s Acceptance Speech
Most of it seemed kind of canned, flat, laundry listy–what makes America great, etc., etc., etc. But it ended on an impassioned, stronger note: We're not as divided as our politics suggests. We're the United States of America. Not red and blue. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions. Yes and no.
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Realigning with Rednecks
Lynn Parramore in Salon/Alternet. Maybe if cultrally left progressives started to look at non-extremist cultural conservatives as something more than semi-human troglodytes, we might actually start some coalition building on interests. Let's use our frontal lobes people. I grew up with white Southern men. Some of them hard-core Republicans. They have been my classmates. My