The popular success of the right in the US and France is not attributable to electoral strategy and good spokesmen; the right has benefited from the attrition of militant workers' organizations, because of which many poorer electors now relate to politics and society in a more individual way. Talk of choice, merit and the value of work appeals to them: they want to choose schools and where to live to avoid the worst conditions; they feel they have merit and are not rewarded for it; they work hard and do not earn much more than the unemployed or immigrants. The privileges of the rich are so remote that they are not concerned about them.
There is nothing new about this. In the US in the late 1960s, international competition and a fear of losing social status transformed Rooseveltian leftwing populism--optimistic, victorious, and egalitarian, with shared aspirations for a better life--into a rightwing populism that exploited electors' fear of being overtaken by those who were even poorer. That was the moment when the Republicans managed to introduce a new dividing line, not between rich and poor, capital and labor; but between people in work and people on welfare, between whites and ethnic minorities, workers and scroungers. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/halimi06082007.html
