Do you dispute the fact that Samuel Dickstein was a paid agent of the NKVD and the co-founder of the persecutory body which specifically targeted the right-wing? It only turned anti-commie after tankie-in-chief FDR died and Dickstein retired months later. The Ware Group, the Perlo Group, and countless others were operating critical portions of the US government under FDR's tenure. After many of the spies mysteriously died of heart attacks and fell out of buildings simultaneously, Harry Truman did the dirty work to ensure that the depth of communist infiltration under FDR was hidden as much as possible, all the while communist spies continued to operate culminating in the loss of nuclear secrets. By contrast, Hugh S Johnson was basically as economically managerial as anyone in FDR's early crowd and led the very influential National Recovery Administration, yet he was ousted by 1934 for merely saying a couple flattering things about Mussolini. I don't see how it gets any more embedded than that.
Actually, Dickstein worked with Martin Dies to root out communists in the U.S. as early as 1932.
I don't dispute that Dickstein was a Soviet agent--but the U.S. had spies abroad too, "embedded" in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The presence of Soviet spies in the U.S. was hardly enough to undermine its liberal democratic and predominantly capitalist values system, not to mention the grip of its market ideologues.
You act like the presence of these agents counteracted and rewrote the basis of U.S. politics. That's simply absurd.
FDR's term was the most consequential of any president's in our history, it amounted to a completely new era in American politics. The expansion of government regulation under his communist-friendly term is responsible for everything from the war on drugs to the MIC to the runaway administrative state. His Stalin-friendly foreign policy was instrumental in ensuring that half of the world turned to communism in one form or another. His very last diplomatic act was in petitioning the king of Saudi Arabia to support the creation of Israel, which would of course come into being a few years later under his successor.
The Soviet Union collapsed. 1989 marked the "end of history," according to Francis Fukuyama; Western liberal democracy proved to be the more resilient political form, championing markets over communism. Diplomatic relations between countries does not mean that one country approves of another's economic policy and wants to import it.
'American right' is in and of itself a bit of an oxymoron anyways, split between corporate dupes and defense contractor whores, with only a very tiny handful of contemporary (and largely powerless) exceptions like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie. Trump and his "conservative populism" is only making that more transparent. The last real shot at an American right revival died with Robert Taft. Every attempt since him either imploded or literally died, e.g. Goldwater, Ron Paul, Larry McDonald. Nixon was virtually identical to LBJ on most policy, Reagan sucked up to evangelicals and had a single based moment in firing the air controller union, but otherwise he passed gun restrictions, mandatory emergency room care, massive deficits, the war on drugs, and various other left-wing items. GWB's major legislative accomplishment was medicare part D.
The war on drugs and prohibition were developments of
moral progressivism, not
political progressivism. You're confusing terms and concepts. It looks to me like you've read that prohibition was supported by progressivists in the early twentieth century and then assumed that early-20thc progressivism = contemporary progressivism; but this is really inaccurate. In fact, progressivism in the early-20thc was almost diametrically opposed to progressivism now; its values have totally shifted. It used to be about purity, temperance, and moral superiority. They saw government intervention as a way to purify the nation on its path to greatness (one element of this was eliminating the black vote). In many ways, progressivism in the early-20thc was a conservative movement.
By all measures, prohibition and the war on drugs were fueled by intensely reactionary conservative values, which we still find among the contemporary Evangelical movement nationwide, generally speaking.
Economically speaking, every president since Reagan has been neoliberal, which hardly translates into leftism or Marxism. You're being way too lenient with your vocabulary. There are protectionist and other forms of federal regulation on businesses, sure; but under the neoliberal order these are often guaranteed to secure business interests, not the interests of consumers or non-business owners.
How do you argue that the American right is the new left when modern economic policy in the U.S. awards private ownership? No one is taking property and distributing it to the masses.
On any realistic timescale by which nations are normally measured, we are in an approximately 100 year long left-wing period following the collapse of American laissez-faire. Post-Mao Communist China is the new right.
That's because it morphed into corporate left-liberalism, which exists to the left of Marxism.
Again, I think you're confusing/conflating concepts--in this case, economic leftism with identity politics, cancel culture, and other current variations of progressive thought. These things do not go hand in hand with Marxism.
There isn't a single factually incorrect component of my previous post btw.
Stringing facts together doesn't amount to an argument. You're picking minutiae and claiming they amount to a new thesis on U.S. history. The objection is that you haven't made a compelling case for anything because you're ignoring 99.99% of the picture.
Where do you get your information on history? I'm asking in all earnestness.
the right wingers on FB are getting in a tiffy over this one!!
