'Family Values' Chutzpah by Harold Meyerson. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s.

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030601600.html

<snip> As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the '60s.

The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family's decline. But they've misidentified the decade. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. We've come to the very heart of the matter what fuels the engine of the

neocons: Roll back the 60s. Eradicate any influence in the culture made by "hippies", "dopers", "radicals", "women's libbers", "uppity blacks", trade unionists, etc. Return the bland, homogenous, racist, xenophobic, communist-fearing, reactionary 50s.

They want more than our money, more than power for their 1,000 year Reich. They want the culture and to control our personal lives through government.

[n2doc]

2. But, and this is major difference- They want to keep the outsourced economy

The 50's saw the rise of the (white) middle class, Real Union power, affordable housing, construction of freeways, cheap gas and cars....What they would be going to is a feudal oligarchy with a few ultra rich and layers of poor, each oppressing the ones less fortunate than themselves. With a collapsing infrastructure, massive debt, endless wars...

[no_hypocrisy]

3. To take away our money and our security is to ensure that once the

culture's changed, it can't literally afford to change back.

[DemBones DemBones]

4. Exactly! Unions had power in the Fifties and that

raised other salaries/wages as well. The Fifties were "Happy Days." In the Fifties, wives didn't have to work, one income was sufficient. The GOP has always been anti-union because conservatism is all about cheap labor.