The Bipartisan Illusion

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Sep 12, 2009 at 10:30


Once upon a time, bipartisanship was not an illusion.  It wasn't a panacea.  It wasn't the key to getting most things done.  But it was a good bet that if something needed doing, there would be at least some bipartisan support.  In most cases, it just wasn't that hard to get. And that very fact meant that it wasn't a constant fetish, the way it is in Versailles nowadays.  One reason for that was that the two parties had a non-trivial amount of ideological overlap, which is most consistently mapped by first dimension of the DW-Nominate scale. In those days--the first eight years of the 1960s, for example, here's what overlap in ideology in the US looked like:

In sharp contrast, here's the disappearing ideological overlap in the Senate the first eight years of the 2000s:

BTW, that's no overlap at all in the last two congresses before Obama took office.  So the idea of getting "bipartisan support" as a prerequisite and a priority for any piece of legislation in this sort of political environment is nothing short of crazy.  It is, in effect, a unilateral surrender of the majority to the minority, so long as the minority holds its ideological ground.  And that is precisely what we have been seeing since Obama took office last January.

Paul Rosenberg :: The Bipartisan Illusion
We can get a vivid picture of the shifts in polarization over time from the following graph, from a webpage about DW-Nominate scores and polarization that summarizes high-points of the book, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches by Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal:


[Click to Enlarge in New Window]

Dramatic as the above chart may be, it's not quite the same as seeing how that translates into an ideological overlap between the two parties--or the lack thereof.  Which is where the charts at the top of this diary come in.  They take the more abstract measure of ideological distance between the parties, and show what it means in terms of positioning the members as a whole in any one session. Larger, easier-to-read charts of the individual congresses can be found below.

But we don't have to content ourselves with looking at graphs, either.  There's a third way we can grasp how things stand now compared to the past using the same underlying data.  We can derive a fairly helpful rough metric--a single figure--to indicate the degree of bipartisan overlap. To do so, we simply count the total number of pairs of Democratic and Republican senators in which the Democrat is more conservative than the Republican.  (This is an imperfect measure, since can have senators serving partial terms getting counted fractionally more than they should, but the imperfection is relatively minor.) If we do this, we come up with the following table:



Congress    Pairs
  87:        192
  88:        163
  89:        125
  90:        153

  107:         5
  108:         4
  109:         0
  110:         0

Zero is lowest value possible.  As completely polarized as you can possibly get.


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The Bipartisan Illusion | 50 comments
Interesting (4.00 / 1)
It appears that most of the movement from then till now has been with the Dems.  As an engineer I can't help but notice that the dems have increased their process capability (Cpk) by reducing their "variation".  So again we have to ask "Why can't they get any done?"
Good Question (4.00 / 5)
My answer--which I've stated elsewhere before--is that the conservative movement has done something unprecedented in US history: it's created an infrastructure outside government structures that has had a profound impact despite not being able to realize true electoral success.

This is largely because the wealthy elites like the bargain it offers.  If they didn't, they could readily do as much to crush it as they've done to crush progressive movements, up to and including labor.

The Senate is very much a direct instrument of elite will, and so its membership is more or less permanently at odds with what the people who elect it.  As such, Baucus is a perfect exemplar.  He's elected by the people of Montana, but he actually represents the very industries he supposedly "regulates".

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
More concentrated (4.00 / 1)
Republicans in recent congresses have been more concentrated than Democrats.  Many of the most liberal Republicans have either converted (Jeffords, Specter), retired (Voinovich,Boehlert,Ferguson) or been defeated (Chaffee, Leach, Shays, Morella).

The most interesting trend is that new Republicans added of late have been incredibly conservative.  Indeed, far more conservative than either the member they replaced or the membership of their party.  New Democrats have been overwhelmingly at the Blue Dog edge of the spectrum, particularly in the House.  Again, this is not representative of the membership and is a swing to the right.  Of course, the switch from moderate Republican to Conservative Democrat is still a switch to the left although Himes for Shays is far less than what people expected.

Every once in a while I calculate the leanings of newish members.  We have enough votes out to do this while including the class of 2008.  Progressive Punch, btw, shows a wide spread for some of these members who are reliable votes overall but terrible in the crunch.  I mean really terrible.  I think they game the system.

Time to crunch data, Paul.

[ Parent ]
Ah Yes, Capn Crunch! (4.00 / 1)
This is just the latest phase in a decades-long phenomena.  The political class moves farther and farther to the right, with only the most tangential relationship to the electorate.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
The Phony Search for Bipartisanship Derives from Obama's Effort to Camouflage His Caving in to Corporate Interests (4.00 / 3)
Whenever the two major political parties and their espoused ideologies are compared to each other, the picture is incomplete if the corporate interests that finance both are left out.

The ideologies the parties and their elected representatives espouse, and any divergence between them, is just window dressing compared to their subservience to the corporate hands that feed them.

Obama's phony search for bipartisanship on health care reform is just an effort to camouflage his caving in to the interests of the private insurance industry that is dictating the terms of health care reform legislation.

As the record shows, he and his Democratic fellow travelers in Congress have spent the past four months in intense, direct negotiations with lobbyists for the industry, from which they have excluded the representatives of the emerging progressive majority.

The result is a plan that will force all Americans to buy private insurance, the total opposite of what all the other advanced industrialized countries provide their citizens.

What the plan will do, of course, is inflate the bottom lines of the insurance companies, which have made minor concessions in exchange for having the government force the vast majority of the 50 million uninsured into their clutches. What it will also do is increase the share of GDP that the private insurance industry diverts into its coffers, in a total sell out of Obama's originally stated goal of reducing the overall cost of medical care in the U.S.

The Republican Tom Delay and the Republican-controlled Congress during the Republican Bush administration did the exact same thing of kow-towing to the private insurance industry (in exchange for campaign contributions) when he let the private health care industry write the legislation for Medicare Part D, from which they reaped huge profits amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Yes, during his speech to Congress last week, Obama made rhetorical gestures to pump up emotions and give the appearance that he cares about the victims of the private insurance industry.

But these gestures were all the more revolting when you realize that his contorted plan will force Americans to pay upwards of one third more for their health insurance than countries with single payer systems. Obama's plan is also all the more revolting when you realize that it will confer financial windfalls on the private insurance companies by forcing 50 million Americans to buy private insurance.

Worse still, the fact that he and his Congressional fellow travelers have winnowed down the "public option" into a publicly subsidized dumping ground for those who are too poor to be forced to buy private insurance is nothing less than a sacrilege.

"Bipartisan" support for this travesty shows how far the nation's lawmakers and president have taken our government from anything that remotely resembles a democracy that provides for the common good.

Personally, I was shocked that Obama had the gall to get up in front of the nation to advocate a plan that is so perverse. But that's Obama for you.

Both parties and their elected representatives are moribund predators that continue to exist because of the stranglehold they currently hold on electoral processes.

Fortunately, their days are numbered, now that the emerging progressive majority has begun to appear on the horizon.

Nancy Bordier is the author of Re-Inventing Democracy: How U.S. Voters Can Get Control of Government and Restore Popular Sovereignty in America. The book can be read free online by clicking here.

A prototype website illustrating how the Interactive Voter Choice System works can be accessed at Citizens Winning Hands.


I agree with everything you (4.00 / 3)
have to say except for the prediction of their days being numbered.

If there's a progressive majority on the horizon, you must be standing on Mt Everest. Most Americans are clueless.

[ Parent ]
See the following (0.00 / 0)
[ Parent ]
We've been around on this before (4.00 / 2)
The CAP is a mainstream Democrat organ. It uses support for Barack Obama as evidence that America has become more progressive. But Open Left people are mostly asking why Barack Obama isn't progressive.

There's been a very mild nudge left, but Obama is still a centrist. Part of his electoral appeal was an absurd bipartisanship, and a promise to unilaterally bring to an end the nastiness of American politics.  

[ Parent ]
Half And Half (0.00 / 0)
I think there's been a more significant move left, but Obama is coopting the sentiment for a more conservative agenda.  It's the lack of a coherent progressive vision to embody the shifting sentiments that's the real weak point for us.  That's what makes Obama's cooptation so much easier for him.

But, OTOH, the potential really is there for something more.  And what's needed to realize it is movement-building, which is a damn sight less glamorous and a damn sight harder than going off and founding a splinter third party.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
As You Know, I Question Your assumption (0.00 / 0)
that any third party is by definition a "splinter".

In any case, I believe that the Interactive Voter Choice System is going to greatly diminish the importance of parties by enabling voters to create winning voting blocs at will, inside or outside existing parties, or in the form of permanent or ad hoc new parties.

To explain this potential better than I have before, I am hard at work on the "Progressive Voter's Party-Building Manual", in which I hope to provide convincing illustrations of how progressives can use the system to get control of electoral processes, whether they use the tool to work within existing political parties or create new ones.

Here's an excerpt (subject to future edits):

"The tool enables voters to build policy-centered networks, coalitions, winning voting blocs and even political parties around shared policy agendas. Via a new genre of Web 2.0 social networking website, the system enables voters across the political spectrum to determine their policy priorities across the board and set the nation's policy agenda for the first time in history. It enables them to use their networks, coalitions, voting blocs and parties to get control of candidate nomination and election processes, as well as legislative processes.  

"They can use the tool to work inside and outside existing political parties. Or they can use it to build their own permanent or ad hoc political parties that bring together unlimited numbers of voters across the political spectrum around shared policy agendas and candidates who pledge to enact their agendas into law.

"This capability enables voters to define their policy priorities free of the ideological constraints, assumptions and conflicted interests of established political parties and party-backed candidates who receive the lion's share of their funding from wealthy individuals and corporations.

"The tool will not result in the fragmentation and splintering of the electorate. It is built around a sophisticated, mathematically-based consensus-building mechanism that uses statistical techniques to identify which voters' policy agendas are similar and put voters with similar agendas in touch with each other.

"The tool makes it technically and politically feasible for any number of voters within self-organizing policy-centered networks, coalitions, voting blocs and political parties to use its consensus building tools and services to build shared policy agendas and use them to nominate and elect candidates who will enact their agendas into law.

"Because the consensus-building mechanism is mathematically-based, there is no inherent limit on how many voters using the solution can decide to group themselves within a single network, coalition, voting bloc or political party.

"To increase their numbers to the levels required to win elections, voters can use the tool to continuously build consensus among ever great numbers of voters around shared policy priorities. They can even use it to cast electronic votes to determine which policy agendas and combinations of priorities attract the highest numbers of votes. They can keep refining their agendas until they have enough votes to win primary and general elections."

               

[ Parent ]
Third Party's Aren't Splinters By Definition (4.00 / 1)
They either are or are not splinters by results.

But there is an overwhelming mass of empirical data that you simply refuse to acknowledge.  Until things change much more profoundly than they have so far, there simply is no opening for a third party to become more than a splinter.

Now, I happen to think that your invention could be very helpful in movement-building, and that in turn could help lay the groundwork in case things change in the next few years--and things changed pretty rapidly in the 1850s, so that's a real possibility for the future, not today.  But there's absolutely no basis for thinking that your invention or anything else can simply make the entire past history of American political parties irrelevant.

Miracles are possible--but only for those who understand the limits of the possible much better than those around them.... not much worse.  These are the folks who understand where those limits can be pressed, what it will take to press them, and what may be possible when they give.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
In order for one case to be predictive of another case (0.00 / 0)
the relevant constants and the variables have to be the same for both cases.

Since the constants and variables of failed third parties in the past will not be characteristic of third parties created by users of the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS), I do not believe you cannot predict on the basis of past failures of third parties the failure of future third parties they may opt to create, whose constants and variables will differ from those of failed parties in the past that were unable to create consensus within their ranks or grow their numbers to winning levels.

I disagree with you that I am refusing to acknowledge empirical data describing the failures of past cases of third parties. They are what they are, failures.

What I am refusing to acknowledge is that this empirical data can predict the success or failure of a yet-to-be case, in this instance, a third party whose constants and variables are dissimilar to those of failed cases in the past.

On a more harmonious plane, I am pleased that you and I agree that IVCS could be

very helpful in movement-building, and that in turn could help lay the groundwork in case things change in the next few years--and things changed pretty rapidly in the 1850s, so that's a real possibility for the future, not today.

What I surmise is that the "today" you talk about is going to blend quite rapidly into a very immediate "future" once Obama and his fellow travelers in Congress shoot down the public option and create such a revolt within the emerging progressive majority of voters and activists that they take direct action to get control of government.

When this occurs, the Interactive Voter Choice System will be there for them to use in quite a revolutionary way. While they alone will decide how they want to deal with the nation's moribund major parties, I predict that they will make short shrift of both and greatly diminish if not eradicate their influence and sway over U.S. electoral and legislative processes.  


[ Parent ]
Go to the data, not the interpretation (0.00 / 0)
While you may not agree with the interpretations of the Center for American Progress, if you go to the data itself on which they base their interpretation, you can glean important information.

I would not dismiss the data out of hand because you do not like the political posture of the institution.

If I may be so bold, I would like to suggest that interested folks have a look at the following chapters in my book. They include references to the work of Winograd and Hais on the leading role that progressive Millennials are likely to play in spearheading the emergence of the progressive majority of U.S. voters.

Part III. How U.S. Voters Can Get Control of Government

Taking Over

Enter the Millennials

Spearheading the Realignment

Re-Inventing America

Re-Inventing Democracy

Obama's Pre-Election Web Strategy  

Obama's Post-Election Web Strategy

Transforming Web 2.0 Social Networks into Political Networks

The Interactive Voter Choice System

Nancy Bordier is the author of Re-Inventing Democracy: How U.S. Voters Can Get Control of Government and Restore Popular Sovereignty in America. The book can be read free online by clicking here.

A prototype website illustrating how the Interactive Voter Choice System works can be accessed at Citizens Winning Hands.  

[ Parent ]
Why a third party? (4.00 / 1)
Suppose I grant the CAP argument. Why does this show that we need a third party, instead of showing that progressives can take over the Democratic Party?

It isn't a question of whether or not "the Democrats" are good people. It's about whether it's more practical to take over an existing party structure, state by state, than to beild a third party from scratch. It's not about the Democrats at all, it's about the rules of the game that are in place.

[ Parent ]
It is necessary, I think, to keep pointing out that the two major parties are not immutable fixtures on our political landscape (0.00 / 0)
and that they have stacked the decks so that progressive insurgents have little chance of winning.

The CAP data only show that a progressive majority of voters is emerging.

Nothing I have said or CAP has said that I know of uses this data to suggest that it shows the need for a third party.

I do not know where you got this idea. Where did you get it?

All I have said is that the stranglehold that corporate interests have over the financing of both major parties and their candidates, plus the built in obstacles to insurgent candidates, makes it very difficult for progressive insurgents to get elected inside the Democratic Party.

I have not said it is impossible. I have only said that with the Interactive Voter Choice System, progressive voters can decide for themselves whether they want to work within the Democratic Party or outside it, possibly in third parties they create.

My view is that with Obama in control of the formal machinery of the Democratic Party, and corporate special interests in control of much of his agenda, it may well be impossible for the emerging progressive majority to get control of either the party or its nominating process or the results of elections its contests in the near future.

A third party may be an effective alternative if this proves to be true.  

[ Parent ]
The decks are stacked against third parties too (4.00 / 1)
Building a national party from scratch is extraordinarily difficult. I don't see why people seem to think that it would be easier than taking over the Democratic party state by state (which would  be damn hard and damn slow.) Perot spent $60 million to get 19% of the vote. His party also had no real political content except deficit-hawkishness.

Building a party in a single state is by no means easy, but I don't oppose that. That can work. One problem with a national progressive party is that it would be a lost cause in the areas of the country where the Democrats are too progressive. You'd almost have to run the table of imaginable states in order to even contend in a Presidential election.

Many of the reasons why third parties have failed in the past are still with us. One is getting people to gamble their vote on a long shot, one is institutional barriers, and a big one is the difficulty involved in building a national organization from scratch.  

[ Parent ]
I Think We're Fighting A Losing Battle John (0.00 / 0)
We're trying to reason with folks who are true believers.  Anyone amenable to rational argument is not going to try to build a national third party in the first place, for reasons you know--and have reiterated---all too well.

Unfortunately, we're just as irrational are they are, and we keep arguing with them as if rational argument could do the trick!

I should know.  I've got another diary in the works.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Self-Identifying Democrats are only 33% of the electorate (0.00 / 0)
My take is that progressive Democrats who are sticking with the increasingly unprogressive Democratic Party and its elected representatives would jump ship and join a genuinely progressive party in which voters use Interactive Voter Choice System to determine its platform and policy agenda and select its nominees.

When you add in the progressive portion of the 39% of the electorate who identify themselves as Independents or unaffiliated, a progressive party is going to approach the 50% mark.

People who realize that the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House have done them in on the bailout and health care reform will have no trouble seeing that their interests will not be defended by the Democratic Party.

It won't be a gamble to vote for progressive candidates running on the lines of a genuine progressive party but the only realistic option.

Building a national organization from scratch will not be so difficult given that a growing number of membership-based progressive advocacy groups have field operations up and running in every congressional district.

With the Internet, grassroots mobilization does not require the labor-intensive ground operations it once did. Same can be said for collecting the signatures required to get insurgent candidates on the ballot. Interactive Voter Choice System can help carry out this function in terms of identifying likely signatories and getting folks to bring the petitions to them.

[ Parent ]
So? (0.00 / 0)
Self-Identifying Democrats are only 33% of the electorate

This has been a broadly representative state of the dealigned Sixth Party System.  It was less obvious toward the beginning, when many Southerners still called themselves "Democrats" even though they never voted for Democrats for President, and increasingly voted for Republicans for House and Senate.

If this had been a sudden development, then it would certainly signal a political opening of some kind.  But it's not.  Since it's characteristic of an entire party system, it needs to be analyzed as such.

My take is that progressive Democrats who are sticking with the increasingly unprogressive Democratic Party and its elected representatives would jump ship and join a genuinely progressive party in which voters use Interactive Voter Choice System to determine its platform and policy agenda and select its nominees.

And my take is that you don't have a scrap of evidence to support this claim.  Much less a clue as to how you'd get them to do this.

Liberals are actually a larger percentage of registered Democrats than they were a generation ago. Why should they leave the party now, rather than organize themselves more effectively to take it over?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
You don't have a scrap of evidence to refute the claim either (0.00 / 0)
except your invocation of historical data whose current relevance is more than dubious.

Morever, I find your statement

"much less a clue as to how you'd get them to do this

puzzling. Do you really stand behind this affirmation despite everything I have written about the Interactive Voter Choice System?

If so, I suspect you may be transitioning from an open to a closed mind.

To the substantive point at issue, the manner and degree to which the Democratic Party is shafting progressives and is putting up obstacles to getting genuine progressives elected is more than enough motivation to get them to jump ship.

[ Parent ]
Warranted vs. Unwarranted Leaps (0.00 / 0)
Nancy,

(1) You're the one who is making sweeping claims about political behavior that's never been seen before. Ergo the burden of proof is on you.  I'm making arguments based on historical precedent, and so the assumption is that future behavior will be consistent with past behavior.  Without that assumption, no social science reasoning is possible, so it's a pretty minimal assumption on my part.

(2) Merely having an innovative technical device tells us nothing about how it will be used in practice.  Alexander Graham Bell, for example, never conceived of the telephone as a consumer device.  So it's quite possible that your invention will surprise you as well.

I'm quite sure it has real potential to make a major difference, and I encourage you to keep working on it.  But I'm just much less certain about how it will turn out, and think that it's much more likely to depend on interactions with outside forces that you seem uninterested in examining.

(3)

To the substantive point at issue, the manner and degree to which the Democratic Party is shafting progressives and is putting up obstacles to getting genuine progressives elected is more than enough motivation to get them to jump ship.

And yet, they've been shafted even more seriously in the past, with much less to lose if they left, and still they did not.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
McKinley, occam (4.00 / 1)
Lest we forget, Obama was adamant about wanting an American system, not a French or Canadian one (never mind Asian).  Besides, McKinley rises some 18,000 feet from a 2,000 foot base to 20,000 feet.  Everest rises to 29,000 feet but the base is higher so there is not much difference in the base to peak increase.

The Depression really shook out the Republicans for a while and got six years of major change.  The Panic of 1893, otoh, replaced Corporate Democrats (Cleveland, he who used federal troops to put down a strike)with Corporate Republicans (McKinley).  I like the first route, myself.

Totally o/t but six years ago we rented a small plane from Anchorage to fly over Denali.  It was a 2 hour 45 minute trip but absolutely awe-inspiring.  The mountain has it all over the President.  The two unforgettable items from that trip were Denali and four hours spent 100 yards from assorted Kodiak bears/grizzlies many over 1,000 pounds.  You think Max Baucus is tough....

[ Parent ]
if you're talking healthcare (4.00 / 2)
when Taiwan wanted to do national healthcare, they did it with an American system. A single payer system. Medicare, I think they call it.
[ Parent ]
Well, You See (4.00 / 1)
Versailles gives a whole different meaning to it when they quote Langston Hughes, "America was never America to me."

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Obama baffles me (4.00 / 1)
I've never supported bipartisanship, but it's seemed to me that ever since Gingrich (followed by DeLay/Armey/Hastert) took over the House in 1994, the fallact of bipartisanship should have been obvious to everyone. Gingrich was pretty upfront about his intentions and plans.

Some things I can understand by bipartisan corruption -- same sugardaddies for both parties (and for most media too). But why Obama? I'm reluctant to conclude that he's purely and simply been bought off. He really seemed to believe that he was going to change things by his absurd, braindead bipartisan method.

One thing I keep coming back to is the schools. Nice liberals in college get a full dose of Orwell, and maybe Gandhi and Camus, warning them never to become political hacks but to always think about the human qualities of their adversaries. What conservatives get is Bible reading explaining that Satan works through the Democratic Party, and wonky lessons in effective dirty tricks.

I've also been increasingly appalled as I've learned more about the Democratic Part intellectuals of the Fifties and early Sixties (Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Lipset and a few others, but also Schlesinger and Galbraith). They had just purged the party of Communists, many of whom were not party memebers, and were vigilant about any eruption of Communist-like ideas. They also opposed the idea that the Democratic Party should stand for any group (e.g., labor or the common people). They wanted the Democrats to govern as centrists, balancing the various groups rather than advocating for some of them -- not even advocating for the majority. And they were extremely suspicious of popular movements of any kind, and the outcomes of the civil rights movement only made them more so.

The cool, elitist, win-win, above-the-battle consensus  method hasn't worked since 1968 (and in fact, LBJ was willing to fight), but it's still entrenched in the party and in the shools.  I'm convinced that the Democrats see a major part of their role as keeping the left down, and that they are willing to take an occasional defeat while doing so.

And Obama too, it seems. You get the impression that he formed his game plan many years ago, that he sincerely believes it (it's actually party orthodoxy of a sort), and that he'll never let anything that happens in the real world knock him off the mark.

Interesting ....very interesting (4.00 / 2)
And here I was told during the primaries that one of the reasons dems should never let another Clinton get elected was that it was the Clintons who personally caused the hatred of the dems, and the inability to come together and get past the hatred was due directly to the right's intense hatred of Hillary.

Of course, I tried to explain that whether one was for Hillary or Obama, who in my opinion were not very far apart on most issues (except the Iraq vote, but then Obama did not represent NY)in the long run, it would not matter as far as the right is concerned.  Their hatred would continue to build.  I believed it then. I believe it now.  

I just always thought/hoped Hillary had already learned the hard way that the right was never going to support anything the dems brought forth any way.  And I was fearful that Barack believed he could change the hate.  

[ Parent ]
Regarding The 50s (4.00 / 1)
You can add a whole new dimension to that with Carol Polsgrove's book, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement.

Publishers Weekly:

In the decade after Brown v. Board of Education, "white intellectuals, in the North and the South... having helped for so long to keep Negroes apart and below... were faced with the challenge of racial equality," asserts Polsgrove (It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties). In this disturbing book, she shows them to have been "fearful, cautious, distracted, or simply indifferent." Based on interviews and archival research, she indicts not only prominent novelists and thinkers, including William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt and even the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr ("none better exemplifies the caution that northern white intellectuals... displayed toward desegregation"), but also their editors (who were "more interested in southern whites' responses to the Negro challenge than in what Negroes had to say") and the media, which "at a time when national magazines ought to have been leading the way to change... opened their pages to those who resisted it."

Many of the best-known African-American novelists, cowed by "the emotional and political atmosphere of the McCarthy days," fare little better than their white counterparts in Polsgrove's hands. Only a few heroes emerge from her portrait: Lillian Smith, Kenneth Clark, Lawrence Reddick, James Silver, and most importantly, James Baldwin. Polsgrove concludes her accessible and disturbing account with a thought-provoking broadside against contemporary American intellectuals, who she thinks "have abandoned their responsibility even more completely" than those in the 1950s and 1960s and whose "publishing industry has moved farther and farther from any sense of obligation for the social enterprise." (May) Forecast: A wide range of periodicals (and their editors) from major weeklies and monthlies to small journals take a thrashing here. Polsgrove could set off a firestorm if she doesn't get the silent treatment.

It's a really fascinating read in itself, and it really can help sharpen your antennae to what's really going today, too.  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
In 1963 (4.00 / 1)
I remember reading the New York Times in 1963 with some friends my age (16). This was the culminbating period of the civil rights movement -- civil disobedience, the sitins and the freedom rides. It was all still completely nonviolent and Gandhian.

The people who canonized Martin Luther King later on were very, very doubtful about him then. "Isn't deliberately provoking violence itself a form of violence".

At that time, most nice liberals didn't really want to oppose the movement, but they were still more reluctant to support it. "They're moving too fast" was the slogan, as though gradual progress were being made. (In fact, movement was backward from 1865 to about 1920, and there was little or no progress between 1920 and 1948.)

Jennifer Delton's "Making Minnesota Liberal" describes  the origins of Hubert Humphrey's introduction of the Civil Rights plank in 1948. Basically, Humphrey was the head of the until-then reactionary and weak Minnesota Democratic Party. The radical Farmer Labor Party had run the state 1930-1938, but it had fallen on hard times, and the two parties merged. Civil Rights was the issue Humphrey used to convince the F-L rank and file that he wasn't a reactionary like most of the national Democrats.

[ Parent ]
Humphrey's Act (0.00 / 0)
Was good enough for my parents.  They didn't trust JFK, even though Sorensen impressed them when they met him, years before Kennedy ran.  And since they didn't trust JFK, I remained somewhat distant and skeptical myself.  And since I see Obama as a lot like Kennedy....

Funny how that works.  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Paul, we've been over this before (0.00 / 0)
I know, but apart from some very superficial similarities (great speechmaking ability, well educated from elite schools), Obama has yet to show he's quite in Kennedy's league, either in supreme political smarts or in acting boldly by bucking the power establishment in FP or by acting wisely and sanely in averting all-out war.

I'd like to see O accomplish something besides half-loaf economic measures and what looks to be a third-loaf health care bill, and let's see him go against the establishment grain and act wisely in Afghanistan (no more troops, begin withdrawal) before I will put him close to Kennedy territory.

Until then, Obama is just a very likable, smart, charismatic fellow this Dem is rooting for to be the sort of transformational president for change he promised in the election.  So far, it's been more incremental Clinton than bold JFK ...

[ Parent ]
I'm Not Saying Obama Is Another JFK (4.00 / 2)
For one thing, Kennedy came from a powerful political family with a great deal of collective self-confidence, and poltical connections that just didn't quit.

Obama sure could use some of JFK's moxie and independent spirit, that's for damn sure.

But there are strong similarities nonetheless.  For one thing, despite JFK's willingness to disregard his military advisers, he never did try to systematically replace them with folks who better reflected his thinking.  If he had done that, then perhaps LBJ wouldn't have gone into Vietnam after Kennedy was assassinated.

So I tend to see them like similar notes in a different register.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Most of this is for another (0.00 / 0)
thread for sure, but on JFK and his FP/military advisers, there were so many advisors across the board in FP/military matters giving bad or poorly thought-out advice (recall his famous statement to Amb Galbraith visiting the WH just after the Missile Crisis -- JFK:  "You wouldn't believe all the lousy advice I was getting") that it would have technically taken a wholesale housecleaning of virtually his entire nat'l security apparatus in order to begin to correct the dismal situation.  And even then, he couldn't have been guaranteed that the replacements wouldn't have had another set of major faults.

As for the LBJ succession, the evidence shows that w/n 2 days of taking office, Lyndon, already naturally inclined as a hawk (Mansfield:  "He was a Texas Texan, with an Alamo attitude") was moving to escalate, or as he put it "not lose", over in VN.  The Kennedy FP advisor holdovers Johnson requested to stay on have gotten plenty of criticism over the years, but ultimately it's the president who sets the mood and makes the final decision -- HST's The Buck Stops Here.  

And it was Kennedy advisors like McGeorge Bundy and McNamara who, imo, merely told the opinionated and not stupid Lyndon what they thought, or knew, he wanted to hear.

Later, after leaving office, it was quite telling that Lyndon Johnson, while lamenting he'd kept on MacNamara and Bundy, was energetic in his praise of SoS Rusk.  Dean Rusk -- an early and consistent VN hawk who to the end of his days (unlike Bundy and MacN) never regretted our insane and tragic venture over there ...  

[ Parent ]
You Should Read A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam (0.00 / 0)
Publishers Weekly:

Mann, a former Senate aide, puts Senate-president politics at the center of this masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam, which began with Truman's commitment to support the French in the wake of charges of "losing" China to the Communists. Many of the senators who attacked the Truman administration were isolationists who voted against the realistic anti-Communist institutions such as NATO and the Marshall Plan.

Yet such contradictions mattered little, as the Democrats' disastrous political defeat in 1950 and 1952 convinced them to never let another "loss" be blamed on them. The twin strands of ideological surrealism and political realism interweave throughout Mann's account in various forms, illuminating the persistent patterns and underlying motivational logic of presidential lies and congressional acquiescence. Eisenhower promised to end Truman's containment policy, but he delivered the Korean armistice and refused to fight in Vietnam. Two major congressional resolutions authorizing use of force led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson promised "no wider war" while escalating for fear of "losing" Vietnam. Mike Mansfield - the Senate's foremost Asia authority, as well as majority leader - opposed America's deepening involvement, but his concept of his institutional role made him publicly loyal to Johnson's policies, which in private he strove mightily to change. Each participant responded distinctively to fundamental contradictions, brilliantly elucidated by Mann's highly nuanced account of presidential policy and the tortured evolution of Senate opposition. This book's unique perspective in illuminating Congress's role in the Vietnam War should permanently alter and deepen our understanding of that conflict.

And American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War

Publishers Weekly:

This masterpiece of governmental history locates the roots of the Vietnam War not in the Johnson or even Kennedy administration, but back in the military policies of the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower and his advisors took an aggressive attitude--including an openness to using nuclear weaponsAtoward communist advances anywhere, "especially in Southeast Asia," Kaiser finds. Neutralist, nonaligned governments in emerging nations, such as in Laos, were treated as enemies; Kennedy was more open to nonaligned governments and more interested in d?tente than in war. But the positions of the Eisenhower administration were entrenched institutionally among both civilian and military advisors in the State and Defense Departments. Drawing on a host of documents from recently opened government archives and tape recordings of White House meetings, Kaiser offers voluminous and meticulous evidence that Kennedy repeatedly rejected, deferred or at least modified recommendations for military actionsAmost notably in Laos.

Misled by aides into thinking we were winning in Vietnam, even after Diem's overthrow, Kennedy never aggressively redirected policy there. President Johnson, less skilled than Kennedy in foreign affairs, readily reverted to Eisenhower's narrow policy framework, despite the emergence of critics among his advisers whose thinking echoed Kennedy's. Kaiser repeatedly says they ignored problems they couldn't solve and failed to heed clear evidence that their assumptions were flawed, making defeat a foregone conclusion. This is a commanding work that sheds bright light on questions of responsibility for the Vietnam debacle.

Kaiser's a bit too sympathetic to Kennedy for my taste, but gives you more than enough material to come to your own conclusions.


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Thanks for the recs, Paul. (4.00 / 1)
I read the Kaiser book when it came out earlier this decade and found it very instructive overall, especially as DK was willing to go against the mainstream in re Kennedy and VN as he considered many recently declassified docs that hadn't been available to a prior group of rather hardened Kennedy-skeptic VN authors.

On the Mann book, I know you recc'ed it a while back, but a check of my local library didn't turn it up, and right now, already vastly overbought on the book front, I've had to impose a buying freeze.  

Sad too about the Mansfield situation -- early and consistent antiwar advocate, in his area of academic expertise, yet finding himself in the very tough situation as ML feeling he had to publicly back Lyndon.  Towards the end of his life he expressed deep regrets about his covering for Johnson on the war in most major public pronouncements.  

Doubly tragic I suppose because Mansfield (along with his even more opinionated wife Maureen, who detested LBJ) had a less than warm relationship with Pres Johnson.  

[ Parent ]
Similar notes in a different register (0.00 / 0)
Good one. Kinda like "variation on a theme"? And is there a theme (or several)?

I'm inclined to think that there are a few over-riding themes, but we may be trying to map a standard register into an atonal one. The notes look similar, the progression familiar, but somehow it doesn't add up to a harmony (which we'd recognize as Kennedyesque - something to sing along to). At least not yet.

I think you'll find  the analogy even closer in the world of programmatics. it's just that the Obama program - with all its sub-routines hasn't been completely mapped out yet. For all we know, your contribution is  key.

I rather liked the post theme too. And I agree that the Nancy Bordier variation is a distraction. Though, in a completely polarized world, it's an increasingly tempting one - and fraught with danger.

[ Parent ]
In the meantime (0.00 / 0)
I'd argue Kennedy was the most conservative Democrat to hold the White House since before the Civil War. Funny that.  
[ Parent ]
Well, if your take on the cautious white (0.00 / 0)
liberal mood in 1963 is reasonably accurate, JE, then it's all the more remarkable and politically courageous that a white Northern liberal like Pres Kennedy, very narrowly elected, put his political fortunes on the line, big time, by introducing that strong CR bill in June 1963.  

As for HHH, I applaud him for his floor manager hard work (more influential overall than LBJ in deciding the final outcome, imo) on the 1964 CR bill, the one originating with JFK.  No one, possibly excepting ML Mike Mansfield, did more to bring MinLeader Ev Dirksen over to the CR side, thus enabling cloture to finally be invoked.  Humphrey was a good guy and true liberal, even though later he partly ruined his rep when he stayed to close to his master Lyndon on Vietnam.

[ Parent ]
This is inside baseball about Humphrey (4.00 / 2)
But Humphrey's support of the Vietnam War was no surprise. By purging its left, the DFL Party he led defined itself almost at its inception as a cold war liberal party .

As far as Kennedy goes, after some hesitancy he and Johnson ultimately responded well to pressure. My point is that by and large, major-party leaders only do the right thing in response to outside pressure. Roosevelt was the same way (he started out fiscally conservative), and maybe if we keep the pressure on Obama will turn out OK too.

The question isn't really whether Obama is a good guy or not, but whether he can be made into a good guy. I actually haven't quite given up yet, though the signs are bad. But is at some point in the future Obama does the right thing, it will be because people were doubting him -- not because people were trusting him.  

[ Parent ]
The Signs May Be Bad (4.00 / 2)
but realistically, the progressives in Congress and elsewhere have only just now woken up to the fact that they need to pressure Obama.  Much depends on where they go from here.  If we can hold together, things could really turn around, and Obama will end up looking like a great president, in spite of himself.

BTW, I think it's a tad unfair to put in that FDR was a fiscal conservative.  At the time he came into office, there really wasn't any other theoretical framework available.  His policies as governor of New York were clearly more progressive than other alternatives on the national stage, so his further evolution was not as surprising as some make it out to be.  Of course, it was anything but inevitable, as the course of the First New Deal showed.  The dude was complicated.  Obama's almost the opposite--a minimalist.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well JE, on your HHH and VN assertion, (0.00 / 0)
it wasn't a question of him being some Cold Warrior Liberal or true believer in Ike's Domino Theory, as Lyndon was to the core.  

Actually, early in 65, as VP, HHH directly questioned Johnson's decision to escalate -- indicating he was not the reflexive typical cold warrior Dem not uncommonly seen back then.  Of course, for speaking out plainly, Lyndon reacted harshly (as he usually would) by not consulting Hubert on Nam for at least a year.  Humphrey eventually learned his lesson, and conformed his VN views to those of his boss, and later in 68 being unable to fully free himself.  

But on Nam and related, HHH's hawkishness in those years of escalation and ongoing insanity in VN had more to do with his pliable personality and instinct for political survival v-a-v a president demanded the most unequivocal and overt displays of personal loyalty.

[ Parent ]
The Credit Goes (4.00 / 1)
to the civil rights movement itself, which made inaction impossible.

Above I wrote:

Miracles are possible--but only for those who understand the limits of the possible much better than those around them.... not much worse.  These are the folks who understand where those limits can be pressed, what it will take to press them, and what may be possible when they give.

I had several folks in mind when I wrote that, but chief among them was A. Phillip Randolph, father of the March on Washington.  Without that, there would have been no bill--or at best only a token one.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Here we agree, PR. (4.00 / 2)
Both in 64 for the first CR bill then in 65, both times it was the major public/media focus on the CR movement, led by MLK and his SCLC, which galvanized support for the cause.  

Helped I might add, or at least certainly not hindered, by a semi-honest MSM of the time which didn't daily and hourly allow on their airwaves the voices of hate and oppression and falsehood and insanity we see today on teevee and RW talk radio.  The corp media actually covered the major marches, giving them coverage worthy of the turnout, and didn't help spread anti-CR lies from the Right.

Alas, the proponents of health care reform today have not been concentrated in one major visible group but instead have been diffuse and mostly not as effective in rallying support to the cause as they could be.  

Also, unlike with MLK of 63-5, there is no one charismatic and sympathetic reform figure to carry the health reform banner.  Obama being neither a JFK nor an MLK ...

[ Parent ]
Fair coverage (4.00 / 1)
The MSM had less options.  The kind of coverage now used would have threatened their licenses under the Fairness Doctrine.  That hammer was frequently mentioned in newspaper stories of the time with segregationist TV stations clearly threatened.

I have seen the promised land and I know that Fairness with some guts in enforcing it does miracles.

[ Parent ]
The mandarin imperative (4.00 / 3)
It wasn't communism they feared, it was democracy, which they equated with chaos. It never occurred to them that in doing so, they were merely the latest exponents of an ancient -- and dishonorable -- tradition. How do I know this?

Well, I read Daniel Bell's book, for one thing, which to me seemed the most acute sort of embarrassment in the purely intellectual sense, and convinced me more than any of the others you mention that this whole idea of post-ideological stability was DOA. No matter what they called it, it was clear to me that the real goal of their pacification program was lock the entire body politic into the service of their own privileges.

The only personal encounter I recall was with the administration of UC under Clark Kerr. Like Mario Savio, the very first thing I learned from the that conflict was the limitations of noblesse oblige. To this day, I'm aghast at the stupidity of those who at the time were widely considered to be the smartest people on the planet.

From there, of course, we've gone steadily downhill.  Obama is no more, for some of us, than a bit of weird nostalgia, like seeing someone with a button on the back of his shirt collar, or a skinny tie. Watching him pose as the Leader of the Free World, is nevertheless acutely painful at times, as is often the case with combat flashbacks, and incidents of déjà vu generally.

[ Parent ]
If there is no overlap (0.00 / 0)
And all Democrats are to the left of the most liberal Republican, perhaps the term DINO gets tossed around a bit too much.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both
Not Exactly (4.00 / 1)
If someone regularly defects when they're needed most, they may still be to the left of every Republican, but nonetheless  help defeat the wishes of the Democratic base.

That's a good-enough definition of "DINO" for me.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
No, because the right wing Democrats (4.00 / 5)
go against their voters, e.g. in voting for bankruptcy "reform".

A more basic tactical point than "bipartisanship" is this: The best two ways to BUILD the Democratic Party's base of VOTERS would have been to (a) pass the Employee Free Choice Act or some other bill that makes it easier to form labor unions; and (b) pass real healthcare reform that takes the profit out of health insurance, so that people don't have to die so that Cigna's stock goes up.

So if you're trying to "lead" the Democratic Party, one would think you'd understand these basic points. If you're thinking big about a "permanent Democratic majority" (as Rove was thinking about permanent GOP majority), you would play it this way.

But the Democratic Party is now being led by small-time thinkers, who in fact don't really care all that much for progressive goals. They're already pretending they never heard of EFCA in spite of so many campaigns having been run on that issue; and Obama is willing to discuss any and all ideas about healthcare except single payer. (Not to mention that on the subject of the terribly unpopular so-called "war on terror" the Democrats are infinitesimally to the left of neoconservative)

We get more proof every day that the first part of Nader's prediction is going to come true: Things are going to get worse. (The second part of his prediction, that things are going to get better, I see no evidence of)

[ Parent ]
Um (0.00 / 0)
The administration has dropped the term "war on terror" and I've heard about five references to EFCA in the past week from the President, Tom Harkin and others.  
[ Parent ]
oh goody (4.00 / 2)
they renamed the whole dropping-bombs-on-poor-peoples-weddings thing to something else.
[ Parent ]
Problem Solvef! Next Up: Rename "Disease"! (0.00 / 0)
And health care will be solved, too!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
The Bipartisan Illusion | 50 comments
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