Likening the rightward shift in American politics over the last 40 years to the winds of a hurricane, outspoken progressive Donald Cohen addressed an audience of about 50 at The Center’s monthly Community Coalition Breakfast on March 16.

“When you’re in the middle of the hurricane, it’s difficult to tell which way the winds are blowing, but when you pull back thousands of feet above, you can see the progression of the hurricane in a general direction,” he said. “Likewise, despite the occasional back and forth, there has been a general shift to the right in American politics.”

Cohen, co-founder of the left-wing think tank Center on Policy Initiatives, spoke to the crowd about the political turnaround that the conservative right has gone through from the time of the 1964 presidential election, when the Democratic Johnson handily defeated the Republican Goldwater, through the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, to today’s neo-conservative White House administration.

“I want to talk about three things this morning,” Cohen said. “The rightward shift of American politics in the last 40 years [and] how that came to be, and how a city like San Diego fits into that, and finally what it says about the work we need to be doing together to promote a progressive region and progressive nation.”

Cohen described three effects the shift to the right has had on U.S. politics: the growth of poverty and unemployment as a result of the repeal of New Deal legislation, the resurgence of hate and discrimination as a political strategy, and the demonization of core liberal ideas about the role of government, economic policies and unions.

“This wasn’t an accident,” Cohen said. “This was a conscious program and strategy of real people. It was a program of building infrastructure, promoting core values and using wedge issues to shift the American political landscape.”

The success of this strategy had a profound effect not only on general elections, but on Republican primaries as well, Cohen said. “Basically what the conservative movement has done is to take over the Republican Party and move the moderates way to the right,” he said. “You cannot get elected as a moderate Republican anymore.

“There was an unrelenting assault of these core ideas: government is bad, unions are bad, poor people deserve what they get, special rights are undemocratic,” he added.

He said that one of the keys to conservative success was in their use of language. “They did better on language than our side did,” Cohen said. “They stole words like responsibility, family and faith. They just stole words and used them, and used them well, quite frankly.”

Wedge issues were another successful strategy, Cohen said. Immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage were all used as wedge issues to build the conservative coalition and ensure success of their candidates. Most recently, same-sex marriage has been used by conservatives to push their agenda and get out the vote. In 2004, initiatives banning same-sex marriage were placed on the ballot in 13 states, which was a key strategy in getting their core constituency to vote in record numbers.

“By all accounts, Bush should have lost,” Cohen said. “We can say whatever we want about John Kerry and his strength as a candidate, but the reason Bush won was because of the strength of this movement they built. They won Ohio because they turned out more people than we did.”

The success on the national level has led to a trickle-down effect of the conservative strategy and the funding of conservative, grassroots organizations at the local levels. According to Cohen, the metropolitan level is where progressives must fight the conservative tactics.

“If you look at it in a partisan way, it’s not ‘red states and blue states.’ That’s not the divide in America,” Cohen explained. “It is red rural areas and suburbs, and blue metropolitan areas. Every city of more than 500,000 people in America, no matter what part of the country, voted for Kerry.”

Cohen’s advice for San Diego liberals was to remain focused on long-term goals and not to rest after the victory in the 2006 elections.

“We have to realize that this is a long-term fight for the soul of a nation,” Cohen said. “One election is not going to change that.”