Contest time! What will they teach at UC Berkeley's new center for studying right-wing movements?

Will there be a "C Street for Dummies" class?

by Ken

Disclaimer. I don't read The Week. I'm not entirely sure I know what exactly The Week is, beyond its motto: "EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS."

[Insert your own joke here. (Why should I do all the work? Isn't it enough that I do my daily shift shoveling coal -- clean coal, of course -- to keep the blog going?) Feel free to share it in the comments section.]

However, somebody from The Week sent me word about the current version of their weekly reader contest, which concerns the new Center for the Comparative Study of Right-wing Movements, established this past February at the University of California at Berkeley with the mission:

to encourage and nurture comparative scholarship on right-wing movements in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and other regions of the world over the past hundred years. The Center is especially interested in supporting research that examines the diversity of right-wing movements and their respective emphasis on social and religious issues, nationalism and race, and economic doctrines. The Center promotes research, offers mini-grants, fellowships, and training opportunities to Berkeley students, publishes findings, and brings together leading scholars through conferences, colloquia, and other public events in order to engage in a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue on right-wing ideology, politics, and organizational forms and their likely directions in the 21st century.

Who knew? Well, no doubt, a lot of people, but not me. Just recently I wrote about the remarkable shelfful of books we've been vouchsafed on the rise of the Loony Right. Little did I know that one of our leading universities has already made the study of right-wing movements an academic program, within its Institute for the Study of Social Change, as part of "a major interdisciplinary research program: the New Metropolis Initiative," launched in 2004.

Here's how the ISSC describes the new center:

Center for the Comparative Study of Right-wing Movements

Right-wing movements are notably diverse. Various movements focus on social or religious issues, some on nationalism or race, sometimes with militaristic tendencies, others on economic doctrines. The most successful right-wing movements manage to assemble coalitions which include elements from more than one of these categories. For most of the twentieth century, the Right in the industrialized West, including such satellite areas as Latin America, had a transcendent issue, one which easily overcame the particular claims of individual movements and points of view, and created a unified lens through which the world was perceived and which directed action. This was anti-communism. So transcendent an issue was anti-communism in the twentieth century, it also united the Right with the major political parties and movements on the center-left, parties like the Democratic Party in the USA and social democratic parties in Europe. With the end of the cold war, anti-communism was spent as a unifying force. Pent-up for decades, particular right-wing movements now spun on to the political stage with centripetal energy. In a few cases, these groups have managed to find a basis for alliance and have come to power. Others have created chaotic international hot spots.

The mission of the Center is twofold: first, to identify these movements, flesh out their twentieth-century histories—how they aligned and how they survived—and at the same time isolate what is novel in the twenty-first century; and second, to develop and apply principles of how right-wing thought, ideology and organizational capacities operate to understand the state of the contemporary Right and identify its likely directions and successes. The Center will achieve this mission by encouraging and nurturing comparative scholarship on right-wing movements both in the U.S. and abroad during the 20th and 21st centuries. The Center will promote research, publish research findings, support graduate and undergraduate training, and host conferences, colloquia and other public events that bring together leading scholars to share new research and engage in interdisciplinary dialog related to this field of study.

THE CONTEST

So here's the contest The Week has come up with:

This week’s question: The University of California at Berkeley has a new department: The Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. What do you suppose this most liberal of universities will title some of the classes this department teaches?

How to enter: Submissions should be e-mailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Conservative Class’’ in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, Sept 29. The winners will appear Friday, Oct. 2 on the Puzzle Page of the magazine next week and at theweek.com/contest. Entries submitted as comments on this web page cannot be considered.

First Prize: One year’s subscription to The Week

So's you know what you're getting yourself into, here are the results of last week's contest, Dumb Update:

After hearing about the two Australian girls who fell into a storm drain and updated their Facebook status rather than dialing 911, we asked you to predict the next really dumb Facebook message. You texted:

FIRST PRIZE: Wondering why this idiot policeman is pulling me over.
Brett Cutler, Park City, UT

SECOND PRIZE: Car stalled on tracks. Loud whistle sound drowning out my iPod. Grrrrrrr.
Daisy Michael, Westminster, MD

THIRD PRIZE: My bungee cord just bro
Georgia Binns, Babylon, NY

[With lots and lots of HONORABLE MENTIONS, including:
* "Bad day—was kidnapped and am being held hostage. But at least the food is good! LOL"
* "You won’t believe this! Just been moved up to third most wanted on FBI list!"
* "Nailing my road test!"
* "OMG the smoke is sooooooooooooo thick I can barely see my screen!"
* "Just mauled by a bear. Everything going dark."
* "We’re undercover @ Tenth & State."
* "Colonoscopy is going well so far. You can link to the live video on…"
* "I am sooooo busy here at work"

Of course if you actually enter this week's contest, you may not wish to share your entry here before the deadline. This is something only you can decide.

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