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Let's Get Swampy Y'All: Tony Joe White, "Polk Salad Annie"

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sagehen8/30/2018 9:44:07 am PDT

re: #382 HappyWarrior

I really don’t think there’s any one event but a series of events that leads us to today. Perhaps the Genesis is ultimately in the 30’s with the fear and lies spread about the New Deal by the old right. I don’t know.

I think the 1930’s version was thoroughly discredited by WWII and the Nazi’s. All the adult men of that generation saw with their own eyes, and everybody else saw photos and film, what the camps and survivors looked like, the Nuremberg trials, etc.

Then in what we like to call the Civil Rights Era (more accurately known as the early television era, because Civil Rights activists had been pushing these same issues for generations already), non-Southern Americans saw on their nightly news what had previously been abstractions and theoretical ideas they’d until then been able to choose not to know about — and it looked way too Nazi for anyone’s comfort.

The Right wing had to start all over really during the Vietnam era and shortly after, and build from there. It took eliminating the draft to separate middle-class and poor whites from all the other liberal interest groups.