The percentage who chose Reagan because he was a “real conservative” dropped to 4%, while 70% of all voters with an opinion on the matter opposed Reaganite legislative programs, and public opinion studies showed a continuation of the steady drift towards a kind of New Deal-style welfare state liberalism on the part of the general population. In 1984, despite vast attempts to get out the vote, the totals increased by 1%. Polls in 1980 revealed that 11% of Reagan voters chose him because “he’s a real conservative” - whatever that term is supposed to mean. In his 1980 triumph, presidential historian William Leuchtenberg observed, “Reagan, far from having won in a landslide, got little more than a bare majority of the popular vote and only 28% of the potential electorate, and exit polls showed that the vote was not “for Reagan” but “against Carter,” who had in fact initiated the policies that the Reaganites took up and implemented, with the general support of congressional Democrats: accelerating military spending (meaning, in particular, the state sector of the economy) while cutting back programs that aid the vast majority. Most of this, we also heard just ten years ago, when Reagan was elected by a 2-1 vote, the second “conservative landslide” in four years. Still, independent minds - including any authentic conservatives who might be located in the outer reaches of the political arena or intellectual world - can refuse to be swept up in the fashionable currents and use terms with their actual meanings to describe what is happening, and why. As Orwell predicted, this achievement has undermined the possibility even of talking sensibly about what is happening in the world.
One of the great achievements of contemporary ideological warfare has been to debase the terms of political discourse so thoroughly that such statements as these are not entirely false, if we keep to what has become conventional usage.
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They will restore “family values,” ridding us of “the excesses of the welfare state” and the other residues of the failed “big government” policies of New Deal liberalism and Johnson’s “Great Society.” By dismantling the “nanny state” they will succeed, where the Democrats have failed, to achieve the shared goal of all elite and leadership elements: to “create jobs for Americans” and win security and freedom for the “middle class.” And they will take over and successfully lead the crusade to establish the American Dream of free market democracy, worldwide. The victorious Gingrich army of well-trained, well-funded “conservatives” call for a Contract with America that will finally “get government off our backs” so that we can return to the happy days when the free market reigned. The elections of 1994 are described as a “political earthquake,” a “triumph of conservatism” that reflects the continuing “drift to the right” on the part of the American population. Rollback Noam Chomsky Z Magazine, January-May, 1995
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