Abstract
The role of race in the right turn of US and British politics is pivotal. Race is above all a political symbol that has helped organize, at the ideological and cultural level, the rightward shift in policy formation associated with the Reagan and Thatcher eras and beyond. Attention to the symbolic construction and political uses of race helps remind us that shifts at the level of policy formation are not only about elite economic strategies or the failure of the Left. Rather, such shifts point to the importance of the symbolic and cultural dimensions of political conflict and change. It is in this regard that the New Right’s self-proclaimed revolutionary strategy to establish social conservatism as politically dominant assumes critical importance.
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Notes
Paul Weyrich, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedom in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives (New York: Delta, 1982) p. 115.
The most recent example of this scholarship is Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
For an example of the depiction of such a narrative, see Charles Moore, The Old People of Lambeth (London: Salisbury Group, 1982).
For more on the history of American conservatism see: George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
For an introductory survey of these theories, see Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
quoted in James Statman ‘Exorcizing the Ghosts of Apartheid: Memory, Identity and Trauma in the “New” South Africa’, (Washington DC: unpublished conference paper, International Society of Political Psychology, July 1995).
Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964)
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, pt III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)
For a useful introductory discussion of the concept of hegemony, see Robert Bocock, Hegemony (London and New York: Tavistock, 1986).
Such a conception of hegemony as a continual process of struggle is best illuminated in an article by: Stuart Hall, ‘The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
For an elaborated discussion of these ideas see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972)
and ‘Prison Talk’, interview by J.J. Brochier, in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980) pp. 36–54
Murray Edelman, ‘Category Mistakes and Public Opinion’ (unpublished essay, 1992).
Daniel Bell (ed.), The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955)
The Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 1964)
Crawford, Thunder on the Right p. 127.
Gillian Peele, Revival and Reaction, pp. 54–79.
Russ Bellant, ‘The Coors Connection’, p. 63.
Chip Beriet and Jean Hardisty, Capital Conservatives and Frontier Fascists: The Right-Wing in the United States (Boston: unpublished synopsis, n.d.).
Douglas Frantz and Michael Jonofsky, ‘Buchanan Drawing Extremist Support, And Problems, Too’, New York Times (23 February 1996).
David Rose, ‘Tory Links with BNP Highlighted by Defection’, Guardian (5 July 1986).
Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism, Racism and the New Right (Beyond the Pale Collective, 1986)
‘Approaches to Discourse, Poetics and Psychiatry’ (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987)
Frankie Ashton, ‘Feminism and the New Right’, New Socialist (March/April 1988) p. 26.
A. Sivanandan, ‘From Immigration Control to Induced Repatriation’, Race and Class (pamphlet no. 5, 1978) p. 139.
For elaboration of this distinction see: Clifford Geertz, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in David Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press, 1964).
For a discussion of this point, see the chapter entitled ‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’ in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power
For a discussion of the construction and uses of political leaders, see Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, pp. 37–65
for a discussion of the relationship between the spokesperson and the group see Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 204.
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© 1997 Amy Elizabeth Ansell
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Ansell, A.E. (1997). Race and the Right Turn: The Symbolic Conflict Approach. In: New Right, New Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13927-9_2
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