GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM :

Fighting the spectre of the far right : Populist politicians who hold government in contempt and raise the alarm about "outsiders" can be stopped only by a strong social democracy. (Godfrey Hodgson, 10th June 2002, New Statesman)

Analysis of the American experience over the past 40 years shows just how much damage can be done, not by fascism or extremism directly, but by the corruption of the discourse of mainstream politics. A backlash against black migration to the northern cities set off a chain reaction that has frightened even liberals into deriding government, and into looking to corporate business to undertake many of the proper functions of government. In Britain, new Labour is imitating this mistaken strategy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American political landscape was transformed by a wave of immigrants. The political failure to handle the fierce resentments set off by that migration has affected not just civil society, but public philosophy as well.

I do not have in mind the 30 million or so immigrants, more than half of them from Latin America, who have settled in the United States as a result of the Kennedy administration's reform of the previously racist immigration law. The migrants I mean are the more than four million black men and women who poured out of the rural south into the slums of northern cities. The reaction to that mass migration has largely (and unjustifiably) discredited the liberal consensus that did so much to civilise American society from the time of the New Deal to that of the Great Society.

Mr. Hodgson wrote a just barely worthwhile book about conservatism several years ago : The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (1996). But we noted even then that he was obsessed with race. In this essay he goes beyond obsession to genuine head-banging, talking-in-tongues, jacket with one sleeve, help me Nurse Ratched, Beautiful Mind dementia. The America he describes herein exists only in his tortured psyche. Somebody better boost his meds, quick. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2002 8:17 PM