Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
374
concerns will abate and the threat of democracy will be stilled, or so it is
hoped. Each individual may know that this description is not true of
himself or herself. But if, as alleged, that is the “in thing,” then perhaps
one’s natural inclinations can be suppressed under pressure of
conformity to what is heralded as the group norm. It is far from clear
that this aspect of the propaganda campaign has had very great
success.
2.2 The “Shift to the Right”: Rhetoric and Reality
It is commonly argued that there has been a great “shift to the right”
from the Kennedy to the Reagan years. There has indeed been a major
mobilization of the powerful forces of the class conscious business and
professional communities, and a shift to the right among the articulate
intelligentsia who increasingly associate themselves to these elites. But
the evidence hardly shows that the population has adopted the ideology
of reactionary jingoism, enhancement of state power and its role in
international violence and intervention in the economy, and enrichment
of the wealthy at the expense of the disadvantaged: the basic
components of contemporary ‘‘conservatism.”
The “Reagan landslide” is often cited as support for the alleged shift,
even on the left. But this is most misleading. In the first place, there was
no Reagan landslide. In his 1980 victory, Cohen and Rogers comment,
Reagan “gained a smaller percentage of the eligible electorate than
Wendell Willkie did in his decisive 1940 loss to Roosevelt”; the turnout
was “the third lowest in American history, higher only than the 1920
and 1924 elections that followed the abrupt swelling of the eligibility
rolls resulting from the enfranchisement of women.” Presidential
historian William Leuchtenburg comments that “Reagan, far from having