Fiona: You may be interested in Thomas Frank's
The Wrecking Crew. His specialty is going through the pamphlets, think tank effluence and rhetoric of the business class and conservatives generally.
One Market Under God was an amazingly humorous look at business thought in the 90s, as spoken by business and the media during the dizzying days of the 90s (and of course he links this to earlier periods, apparently there's a book from 1931 or so called
Oh yeah? which takes all the pie-in-the-sky talk of the 1920s business talk and then contrasts that with what was happening in the depression.
Seems to me we've come full circle.
In any event, I've just got past the part in
The Wrecking Crew where he's spent a good amount of time analyzing the "fifth column" myth of the American movement conservatives, peddled through campus youth organizations run by starry-eyed dreamers like Norquist and Abramoff, and through the flagship publications of the movement and repeated by their ideologically compatible politicians. In any event, its an interesting line of thought in America and nothing altogether new, it has morphed to fit the times. After all, there were "red scares" at the beginning of the 20th century as well.
Its definitely a notable tradition in America and we can see how easily it went from believing that the Kremlin was controlling the American mind through liberal professors and liberal media and liberal hollywood, to believing that these same facets of America are now "sympathetic" to terrorists. Even if not consciously sympathetic, they may still serve the same ends, playing the role of "useful idiots" for the Kremlin... er.. Osama...
Well worth a read anyway, Frank has a knack for humour!
EDIT: another writer that has some useful commentary on the "fifth column" and "stabbed in the back" myths is Michael Lind, "up from conservatism" would be a good companion book to Frank.
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