Reply #13: history isn't a mathmatical equation... [View All]

[theanarch]

...with fixed variables and one-answer-only products; it's a narrative of different, and often competing, opinions; i'm just offering mine. Nixon's Southern Strategy was George Wallace, who articulated a "populist", anti-corporate, anti-establishment rhetoric far more genuinely than Tricky ever could--the point was to have a third party loser draw off enough southern votes from Democrats (or at least HHH) to split the DP and elect Republicans/Nixon. 12 years later, with the collapse of the AIP, and the GOP having inherited Wallace's Dixiecrats as (anti-) social issue voters, they repeated the trick, by having the 'moderate' John Anderson siphon off enough mod-lib votes from Carter to elect Reagan. 12 years later, Clinton returned the favor bestowed by Perot to beat Bush I and Dole. And four years after that...

As for the Cold War, national security in a geo-political/strategic sense was a concern, but the military--as an institution--was not held in particularly high regard; today, no one takes the WOT seriously, but America's GI Joe's and Jane's, and "military service", are worshipped with an almost religious intensity. Again, this is an evolutionary (which is to say, devolutionary) change for the worse...we no longer think about security in rational terms, but emote over the mythic heroism of those who wear uniforms, carry guns and shoot 'the brown people'...without having to inconvenience ourselves with history, politics, culture, religious differences, economics, etc.