When the dumb bitch wrote this sentence, everything else she wrote was suspect and taken with a
Posted on 10/25/2015 12:58:50 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
They also linked Roosevelt with socialists and, further to the left, communists. Communists, of course, had very progressive ideas about gender roles and race equality. So the opponents of the New Deal said, “Look, he is just a communist and communists are atheists, want women working outside the home and want to help Mexican-Americans in California organize and essentially challenge white supremacy.”
They associated Roosevelt’s liberalism with what they saw as radical changes in gender roles, racial hierarchies, and religious attitudes in California.
With the notable exception of #tcot and National Review’s Kevin Williamson, most informed and engaged observers of American politics understand how central the civil rights movement — and the backlash against its successes — was to the creation of the conservative movement. The narrative has many well-known manifestations; there’s the (perhaps apocryphal) story of LBJ claiming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would “lose” the South for the Democratic Party for “a generation.” There’s the Southern Strategy. There’s the GOP’s embrace of “states’ rights.”
But what if that narrative is wrong — or at least incomplete? What if the conservative movement’s creation happened earlier, and westward? What if the archetypal founder of the modern right is not a former Dixiecrat or a resentful “Reagan Democrat,” but rather a mega-tycoon like, say, one of the Koch brothers? What if the foundation of conservatism as we know it wasn’t laid by recalcitrant segregationists in the Deep South in the 1960s, but by anti-labor big businessmen in 1930s California instead?
That’s the argument put forward by University of California, Davis professor and historian Kathryn Olmsted in her new book, “Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism.” If she’s right, it means the way we understand American politics today is due for some profound alterations. Recently, Salon spoke with Olmsted over the phone about her argument and its implications. Our conversation can be found below and has been edited for clarity and length.
What is the conventional narrative of how conservatism as we know it came to be? And what about that narrative struck you as incorrect?
The assumption is that this movement arose in the southeast of the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, in reaction to the civil rights movement, and in the nation’s suburbs, in response to cultural issues like sex education and abortion.
I started writing a journal article about labor struggles in California in the 1930s and I got into the archives of agro-business leaders in California and conservative leaders around the country. The same themes that people talked about as rising in the 1960s were actually present in California in the 1930s. The same philosophies, the same strategies and even the same individuals.
So I believed that our narrative about the origins of modern conservatism needed to be revised. We need to think about it as coming from the West and as a reaction against New Deal labor laws.
Let’s talk about how the New Deal changed the status quo with regard to big business and labor. What was big business’ relationship with the government like in the years before the New Deal changed labor law in the country?
Most businesses were not anti-statist before the New Deal. They were very pleased with government intervention in the economy, since the government usually intervened to help big business: expanding their markets, imposing tariffs, controlling immigration, prohibiting alcohol and building large infrastructure projects. So big businessmen — especially in the West, where they needed a lot of government projects to develop the economy — were not anti-government at all.
Indeed, even in the 1930s, most large businessmen in California were very happy with certain parts of the New Deal. They liked The Agricultural Adjustment Act and were just thrilled by the subsidies they got for not growing crops. They were also very pleased with the New Deal’s dams and canals, because they brought them subsidized water. It was labor policies that really infuriated them.
So what was it about those labor policies that they hated so much?
What upset them was [the New Deal’s] giving workers government protection for the right to organize.
In the past, they had the legal rights to organize — but nothing stopped businessmen from refusing to deal with unions or firing people for belonging to unions. What changed in the 1930s is that the government says that workers have the right to collectively bargain and [employers] had to recognize that right or the government would intervene.
This infuriated a lot of big businessmen around the country, because they thought of it as government interference with their relationship with their workers. What was ironic about it in California was that the agro-businessmen who led the charge against New Deal labor laws were not affected by them.
Why not?
In order to get his labor laws passed, Roosevelt made a bargain with Southern legislators and said that these protections did not apply to farm and domestic workers [who were disproportionately African-American]. He had to make that exception in order to get those laws passed through Congress.
As a result, that meant that the farm workers in California weren’t covered by these laws. But they didn’t know that.
California farmhands thought the laws protected them, too?
The farm workers thought they were covered. They went out on strike in massive numbers in 1933.
The businessmen then blamed the New Dealers for creating new attitude among their workers, even though they hadn’t been legally protected for their strikes. They had been inspired to go out on strike and demand unionization and higher wages, and that infuriated the largest owners in the corporate farms in California. advertisement
Yet despite the businessmen’s accusations that the New Deal was communistic, you argue that Roosevelt’s motivations were, in a sense, conservative. How so?
Roosevelt was not a socialist. He saw himself as the savior of capitalism and he believed it was necessary to help the economy recover to figure out a way for workers to earn more money.
Rather than tax the rich and redistribute the income to the poor, he decided that he would encourage [workers] to collectively bargain so they could join unions that would help them raise their wages. Once they had more money, they would spend more money, and the economy would recover. It was his attempt to help the economy recover without too much government interaction.
Nevertheless, big business in California responded to the New Deal with accusations that it was radical. And their accusations weren’t limited to the economic realm, right? They claimed he was trying to upend the social order, too.
They said they believed that Roosevelt was making the state the source of subsistence and benefits, instead of the family. Therefore, [they said,] his policies were absolutely an assault on the family.
They also linked Roosevelt with socialists and, further to the left, communists. Communists, of course, had very progressive ideas about gender roles and race equality. So the opponents of the New Deal said, “Look, he is just a communist and communists are atheists, want women working outside the home and want to help Mexican-Americans in California organize and essentially challenge white supremacy.”
They associated Roosevelt’s liberalism with what they saw as radical changes in gender roles, racial hierarchies, and religious attitudes in California.
So even though you’re shifting our focus away from the South and the response to the civil rights movement, it doesn’t sound like you’re downplaying the role racism played in creating this movement.
Race is very important. But it was a different dynamic in California, because there weren’t as many African-Americans [there]. Instead, the racial issue was the division between white Californians and [Latino]/Asian immigrants (and a small number of African Americans).
Another dynamic that’s still important today, which you trace to this time and place, has to do with the ideological spectrum in American politics. A lot of people have argued before that the U.S. doesn’t really have a left; it has a center-left that is pretty similar to the center-right in a lot of Western European democracies (Democratic Party), and it has a right and far-right (the GOP); but no left. How do you trace this, too, back to California in the New Deal era?
You can really see this as being used as a conscious political strategy by the right.
In the 1934 campaign for governor in California ran Upton Sinclair, a former socialist and world-famous author. He got the Democratic nomination. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t endorse Sinclair and, at the end, the Roosevelt administration really distanced itself from Sinclair. They did not want to be called socialists. They didn’t want to be associated with him, even if meant losing the California governorship for the Democrats.
Didn’t really work, though, did it? Roosevelt was called a radical leftist all the same.
In the [’34] campaign, the professional political consultants who were hired by the Republicans associated the center with the left and accused the center of coddling the left. This was at a time when the center was distancing itself from the left.
It was a strategy that, for the center, did not work. But the right discovered that it was very useful to associate the center with the left. They used this technique in 1934, and they would refine it and use it elsewhere.
I’ve saved the biggest question for last. Namely, if we accept your narrative of the birth of modern conservatism, how should that influence the way we understand our politics today?
I think that we need to consider the importance of labor and anti-labor politics in the rise of the “new right.”
Yes, it was about race and cultural issues. But it was also about a struggle between employers and workers; and employers’ anger over having to share more power with workers. If we understand that, we see that the origins of the movement are in the 1930s, when that wealth and power was just being taken away from employers.
So the New Deal really matters. It was a real shift in American politics, and it caused a re-alignment not only on the left but also on the right.
And if we understand the importance of labor for conservative politics, then we can see the significance of the right’s attack on labor today. It is because [unions] have been key to social democracy in the United States since 1930s. And the opponents of social democracy realized that at the time and that’s why they mobilized against the New Deal. They have been fighting against labor unions and social democracy ever since.
>> They [conservatives] have been fighting against labor unions and social democracy ever since.
The fight against socialism is an honest and worthwhile fight.
FDR was a hard leftist.
Many in the democratic party at that time were communist.
They still are.
They still don’t get it...
It really is true that for the left, history begins anew nearly every morning.
The Wisconsin Idea in Education, Politics and Media. [.........."For more than a century, the university system has been guided by the Wisconsin Idea, a tradition first enunciated by University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise in 1904. Van Hise declared that he would "never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state". Today that belief permeates the UW System's work, fostering close working relationships within the state, throughout the country, and around the world."...........]
My folks used to call FDR the Great White Father.
It was the New Deal and Social Security that caused my father to become a Republican.
They didn’t look at this ‘historically.’ They lived it, having come into their own prior to the 1st Great Depression.
Interesting out the interviewer works to deny that there even is a Left, only a Center-left - “like Europe’s Center-Right.”
They must remain current - adapt history to appeal to an aggrieved voting base.
It's as if the American leftists are children who live in another fantasy universe all by themselves, one they alone define, perpetually pretending that they created civilization and this civilization is being invaded by barbarians from outer space...[whose ideological base is actually much older and more mature than their own.]
FDR was a progressive guilty about being rich with money he did not earn himself socialist
But he was not politically correct and all the cultural leftism we endure was virtually unknown to him
The left is worse now across the board
Most leftists even then were patriotic when push came to shove
They are not now
They view America and Europe basically all things white Christian and male as oppression causative and the root of social injustice and inequality
Oh bull....
For them, everything must be politicized, with Climate Change as their faith - the structural “cathedral” for healing what ails us, where all social wrongs will be put right and ensure good social order - where there can be no debate to slow down their march to global governance.
Industrialists and "Robber Barrens" helped build the United States and free the world from oppression.
You can almost feel the "You didn't build that" meme oozing from this piece.
In 1923, the Frankfurt School-a Marxist think-tank-was founded in Weimar Germany. Among its founders were Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. The school was a multidisciplinary effort which included sociologists, sexologists, and psychologists.
The primary goal of the Frankfurt School was to translate Marxism from economic terms into cultural terms. It would provide the ideas on which to base a new political theory of revoltuion based on culture, harnessing new oppressed groups for the faithless proletariat. Smashing religion, morals, It would also build a constituency among academics, who could build careers studying and writing about the new oppression.
Toward this end, Marcuse-who favored polymorphous perversion-expanded the ranks of Gramsci’s new proletariat by including homosexuals, lesbians, and transsexuals. Into this was spliced Lukacs radical sex education and cultural terrorism tactics. Gramsci’s ‘long march’ was added to the mix, and then all of this was wedded to Freudian psychoanalysis and psychological conditioning techniques. The end product was Cultural Marxism, now known in the West as multiculturalism.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/02/cultural_marxism.html
To Leftists (Gnostic pagans) reality is a play script that with each sunrise is edited by erasing everything disliked about yesterday’s version. Thus every freshly edited play script sees “new” genders, “new” definitions, and “new” meaning. In this way they not only maintain but build upon their delusions and obvious insanity from where they exist on the other side of the Looking Glass.
In summary, psychotic race and gender obsessed leftist is hired by a major university to indoctrinate young people. She writes a book about how wonderful and “progressive” the commies are on women and race and how this created the evil conservatives. This nonsense is then promoted by a leftist echo chamber as a brilliant revelation and likely becomes historical canon, mindlessly repeated for generations until it is “commonly accepted” as fact.
Did she actually say this country doesn’t have a left?
I thought it started with the Founders.
When the dumb bitch wrote this sentence, everything else she wrote was suspect and taken with a
. At the time of the new deal, an age when one could still argue that the Republic was moored to the Constitution, a Republican, a conservative would ask, are these proposed labor laws constitutional? Note, the author of this piece never even pays the Constitution a passing reference even though the age in question is indisputably a time when these issues were being thrashed out and the matter of their constitutionality was being litigated. Even though we won the court packing contest, constitutionalists lost the Constitution and the waywardness of the new deal prevails to this day.
The author of this piece ties all the motivations of the right to economic concerns, almost a purely Marxist analysis. If the Republican Party in California is motivated by greed, any decent person would move to uphold the rights of oppressed laborers. But if the question is whether the Democrat party is invading the Constitution in order to gain political power and pile up votes on election day, the dark motivations of the Republicans become benign and "humane" motivations of the Democrats become dark.
Today we live in a post-Constitutional world in America so the issue of whether Obama care would be held constitutional never came into the consideration of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Its constitutionality was not merely assumed, it was assumed to be irrelevant. It was assumed to be irrelevant because the left had won the argument over the constitutionality of the new deal and there has never been a meaningful constitutional restraint on the power of the federal government to regulate our lives ever since.
That is the way the left operates, when it is on the losing side of an argument it simply changes the predicates or changes the venue. The predicate should be, is this proposed law regulating labor constitutional but instead the question becomes whether this law regulating labor conditions puts to right Republican/capitalist oppression of defenseless workers? When Roosevelt was losing much of his new deal to constitutionalists on the Supreme Court he proposed to change the venue, that is, to change the court by packing it.
Today the left moves disputes it cannot win from the federal legislature to the executive branch. Thus we see extraconstitutional laws being made every day by unaccountable bureaucrats who work in corners of the federal government such as the EPA, or BLM, or IRS. If the left cannot find an obliging bureaucratic cubbyhole to have its way, it will go to international treaties and so we have TPP and UN contrivances to regulate the right to bear arms.
When a farmer in California fights to save his farm from bankruptcy he is not necessarily a bigot as has been insinuated in this article, he is a sturdy yeoman fighting for the survival of his family just as our early pioneers did. We change the definitions, we change the predicates, and if necessary, we change the venues in order for The Left to win every battle on a new set of ad hoc rules.
Those of us who are stubborn constitutionalists in an age which despises us, those of us who look to article 5 of the Constitution to restore human rights to an oppressed yeomanry all around the nation, know that we must not lose the battle over definitions or predicates or venues if we are to save the Republic.
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