Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Origins of the Culture Wars

The Green Knight:
". . .The right-wing fear that the Administration -- and, by extension, the Democratic Party -- had been taken over by treacherous homosexual spies bent on America's defeat led directly to McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Centrist Republicans such as Eisenhower, desiring to regain the White House, played along, with electoral success. It was now established that this paranoid right-wing myth could be parlayed into votes for the Republican Party.

But it was during and after Vietnam that the Dolchstosslegende took on its modern form: the culture war. Although it was a Democratic administration that began the Vietnam War, it was a Republican one -- the Nixon administration -- that finished and lost it. . ."

Long and complicated, but a worthy back-track if you have the time.

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