Over at public opinion there is a tossaway line in a post about the US Presidential election. It mentions a divided American nation, the electoral success of a religious conservativism, and the latter as the counter-enlightenment.
Here is the paragraph in question:
"America is two nations that loathe and fear each other. Their contempt and hate for each other means warfare, not forgiveness, reconciliation or unity. The fault line between the two halves of America is clear and the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Liberalism is the loser, as a culturally conservative Republicanism tightens its grip on Congress. The liberal separation of religion and state is under now attack from the Red America of the right-wing populist revolt."
Thompson says that the Democrats (Gore and Kerry) suffered from an inability:
"...to counter the political momentum of the neoconservative shock troops and, although they are not completely distinct, the wizards of economic neoliberalism. This inability has sprung from a crisis in American liberalism; from the degeneration of liberal political ideas into little more than mere market relationships and the worst forms of consumptive individualism. This revision of the liberal ethos has eroded the foundations upon which the Democratic Party once stood. No longer is it willing to emphasize social welfare, confront inequality through the state, or stave off anti-democratic threats to civil liberties. The result has been an abandonment of progressive social policy at a time when it is needed most."
Thompson remarks that there has been a conservative-populist revolt against a social liberal culture. He says that understanding the conservative attack on the social democratic (New Deal) themes of American liberalism is crucial for comprehending the current state of American politics and its drift rightward.
"This sustained attack has not only been political in nature, but ideological as well. It has been against what I will call here, after John Dewey, the “social liberalism” of the first several decades of American political thought and policy which emphasized a new conception of political and economic life and steered American democratic ideas down the path of social democracy."Thompson's account concentrates on the decline of social liberalism rather than a conservative populism:
"...what we have seen in the last two and a half decades is the degeneration of social liberalism and, as a consequence, its gradual inability to provide vigorous alternatives to the current neoconservative project, which itself has appropriated the old individualistic and Social Darwinist version of economic liberalism. It is an interpretation of liberalism that emphasizes the rights to property and economic liberty and conservatives have been successful in meshing this with populist concerns about big government."It is right on the transformation of liberalism, but he operates with a simplistic understanding of populism; one that has little conception of its history.
Thompson does not get much further than that. He sees populism in conventional terms of backlash against liberalism and does not explore it. So he does not help us understand conservative populism.
What does backlash mean? Thompson does not really say.