The effort to bring "gender studies" into this demonstrates the limits of that kind of approach. Bristol spoke the obvious and then had to recant it. Amy is the one labelling her a "slut". No one else here has done that and really no one else anywhere. She wound up like a great many teenaged girls, pregnant. Levi is a fairly unlikely stud. He's never really come across as anything other than a fairly ordinary blue collar kid, even with the help of handlers. He's doing what Sarah Palin has done (making money and putting himself out there) and frankly her use of him and Bristol as props is the root of all this, which ahs to do more with ordinary retail politics than genderized, watered down Marxism. His criticism is hardly the criticism of "working mothers", it's his criticism of Sarah, good bad or otherwise. His mom is aworking mom (albeit recently in the illegal pharmaceutical biz) and presumably he has some idea of what that's like. No one thought of him as a stud (Todd seemed more likely to get that brole) until the shirtless pics of him changing the baby's diaper surfaced. If this is all so distatsteful, why all the attention to gory details--Benfer is no better than Gail Collins or the even more uptight Ruth Marcus. Just admit you like watching the train wreck and let it run its course.

It's no surprise that the geoegraphic base for this "movement" is in the South and that the backing comes from wealthy business interests and people like the Coors family. The South has always been Feudalistic in its social and economic makeup, as well as in its political order. Many of the Whites came as indentured servants. Almost all of the Blacks came as slaves. The disenfranchisement of Blacks served to give "a bone" to poor whites (someone else was lower on the totem pole) and can be seen as a way of preventing the formation of grassroots movements directed at the wealthy and powerful. Instead, they have played Black & White off of each other for hundreds of years. The same dynamic plays itself out with Right wing financiers and their minstrels like Beck and Limbaugh. the Southern power structure wa sable to minimize the penetration of unions in the South by labeling them Communist, etc. and pointing out the support for equal wages for Blacks among CIO unions.

There have been various strains of conservativism in the past (e.g., Taftian isolationism, McCathyite anti-Communism), but what endures is a conservative philosophy that is essential neo-Fedual at ist core. One of things that turned me off to living in the South, even in supposedly moderate/progressive Atlanta, was this Feudal undercurrent. There is an absence of secular grassroots organizations and a general wussiness around authority. Instead, one gets the kind of passive aggressiveness that annoys people perceived to be in advantaged positions, but is ineffective in changing social institutions.

The civil rights movement was the one real threat to this, but the existing Black middle class did much to co-opt the gains that should have gone to a broader range of people who made far greater sacrificies than those who acted as historic go betweens for poor Blacks and the White power structure. Condi Rice is the perfect example of someone from this caste and her entire career is refelective of this.

The agenda of this astroturf grassroots has never been very well articulated by liberals. Either one gets something overwritten like Glennn's critique today, which reaches a limited audience or nothing at all. the fragmentation of liberal organizations into single issue groups also contributes to this. there is no organization that has taken on the issue of what the Right really represents. Organizations like PFAW or SPLC should be addressing this, but they narrow their focus for reasons that are not entirely clear (concern with offending rich donors?). Countering the wingnut narrative and exposing its Feudal roots won't help much in the South, where that slave mentality has endured, but it would make a difference elsewhere and could help unite liberal groups in a much more constructive way than has happened in the past.

There were abduction and murder stories when I was growing up in the 60s. they were probably suburban myths, but they kept kids from going with strangers. the vast majority of "disappearences" are part of a custody battle. The stranger lurking in the bushes is a myth. The sidewalks actually would be safer if people went back to using them. I walked a mile to elementary school and half again as far to junior high--even though a bus was available, a great many kids walked instead. I used to occasionally pet sit for a colleague in the suburbs. I was always amazed that, on a pleasant summer night, in a neighborhood with a park and aball diamond, that I never saw children playing outside. This was in a child-filled neighborhood, sheltered from thoroughfares by said park and a tangletown street pattern. The idea that something "bad" would happen there is the kind of deluison that makes think suburbs have gone from being havens to something pretty unlivable.