To begin with, Mike's intro continues:It doesn't address the pacifying and trivializing effect of TV on politics, for example, or the white working class reaction to the changes society was going through. But I think it does give some interesting thoughts on what went wrong. Anyone who lived through the 1960s can tell you that TV by itself does not have a pacifying and trivializing effect on politics. But I know what Mike was talking about. And precisely because it wasn't the technology per se, it's a good idea not to go down that path here.
But the white working class is something else. There can really be little doubt that the conservative movement is based largely on resentment, and the key resentment it is based on is racial--even to this day. That's reason #1, 2 and 3 that the South is solid Republican at the presidential level, while it used to be Democratic. And without the Solid South, we'd be in the final 2 years of the Gore Administration. (Don't worry, Joementum would still be a terrible campaigner. No way he'd be elected President in 2008.)
Anti-feminism and homophobia play a much more overt role these days, for the simple reason that old-style overt racism is no longer socially acceptable. But one look at the electoral map reminds us of where the bedrock of resentment politics lies.
The first part of Mike's analysis can be encapsulated thus:
The assumptions of taking for granted that you are a majority
As a result of 40 years of policy and electoral success, Democrats became complacent in a number of ways:
• Becoming defenders of the status quo.
• Intellectual laziness.
• Protecting incumbents was more important than building the farm team or shaking things up.
• [Not] Building for the long term.
• No urgency about institution building or ideological coherency. All this is true. But there's more. Here's a few of the most salient additional points that need consideration:
(1) Limits of the American Welfare State. For all the accopmlishments that Mike cited in his post (Social Security, labor law reform, progressive taxation, backing and financial services regulation, the GI Bill the Marshall Plan, civil rights legislation, Medicare, Medicaid, OSHA, and EPA), America has the smallest and most fragmented welfare state of the advanced industrial nations.
We still lack universal health care--which Germany introduced back in the 1880s. So "behind the curve" is putting it mildly. But we also lack any sort of family support--paid family leave, paid childcare, etc. We also have much more dependence on means-tested programs than other countries. The bottom line on this is the old saw, "Programs for poor people tend to be poor programs." In the name of being less expensive, they end up costing a lot more to administer, and they breed considerable resentment. Finally, programs are administered by federal, state and local government, creating additional fragmentation and disparities.
In short, the accomplishments, while considerable in an American context, left much to be desired objectively. Failure to recognize this was part of what contributed to both the complacency Mike wrote about, and to an ongoing conflict between insiders and grassroots activists.
(2) Limits of American Liberalism's Governing Power. In terms of new legislation, The New Deal ended in 1938. From then until 1965, a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats (known as the conservative coalition) prevented any major new liberal legislation from being passed. The sole exception was the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which had support from liberal and moderate Republicans. Democrats only had two years of a solid liberal majority in which to pass the most progressive Great Society legislation. This relatively limited window of a clear liberal majority in Congress is directly related to the limited and fragmentary welfare state, as well as to the fragmentary nature of other liberal accopmlishments, such as environmental protection.
(3) The Weakness of American Labor. America is the only advanced industrial country never to have had a leftwing party in its national legislature. In international terms, the Democratic Party is a centrist party. Leftwing parties are traditionally parties of labor. But in America, labor has never had a party of its own that has served in Congress. Within the Democratic Party, labor's power has always been relatively subordinate. The regressive aspects of the Taft-Hartley Act--passed over Truman's veto--were never repealed by the Democrats in subsequent years, even when they had commanding majorities, as they did most prominently in 1965-66. While labor was able to enjoy a long legacy of its peak of strength from the late 1930s through the 1960s, it did not consistently advance it's own distinct agenda in the political realm, nor did it continue expanding its organizing efforts to raise, or even maintain the level of workplace unionization.
(4) The Impact of Post-Materialism. Attaining a certain level of affluence has the effect of producing a change in value-orientation that has been observed world-wide in data collect by the World Values Survey [wikipedia entry]. Researcher Robert Inglehard has been the leading theorist connecting this data to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Generations raised in a condition of material affluence tend to prioritize individual improvement, personal freedom, participation in government decisionmaking, and environmental protection. Sound like the 1960s? You betcha! And the '60s were a worldwide phenomena--at least among the more affluent countries.
The combined effect of 1, 2 and 3, however, meant that in America, post-materialist values were more likely to be expressed in ways that brought them into conflict with materialist heritage of previous liberalism that had made the emergence of post-materialism possible. Thus, for example, post-materialism in a strongly-unionized culture would tend toward expression in terms of increased rank-and-file activism, more democratic decsion-making, etc., while post-materialism in a weakly-unionized culture would often be expressed in hostiity, or at least indifference, to unions per se.
In America, the coming of post-materialism in the mainstream white culture coincided with the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent rise of Black Power. Without a strong progressive instutional framework to support it, the white middle class was particularly ripe for reactionary appeals.
Summing Up
The list above is merely exemplary of a few factors that need to be considered. I haven't even touched on the different factors that have created a strong tension between insider and grassroots progressives. But what I hope these points can serve to do is highlight the fact that insider progressives were never in such a secure and unified state to begin with. And Democrats (hardly the same things) were perhaps more secure, but certainly no more unified.
Why does any of this matter? Good question. The lessons that Mike drew are certainly valid in a striaght-forward operational sense. But if what I'm saying is true, then three things follow:
(A) The lessons are necessary, but not sufficient. Of course, Mike never said otherwise, so I'm not criticizing him. Rather, I'm addressing a dynamic. Insider resistence to change is massive. The needed change Mike points to is real. But if it's considered in isolation two dangers arise: (1) Among those advocating change, the tendency to treat the lessons as panaceas, forgetting the other work that needs to be done. (2) Among those resisting change, the use of other factors to discredit the importance of the lessons Mike points to.
(B) The lessons need to be understood in terms of the times (past, from which they are drawn), and applied in terms of the times (present and future, when they will be implemented). One of the persistent problems of insider politics is the focus on what's legislatable. This focus is absolutely vital in order to get anything done. But it often leads to myopia with respect to the larger historical and institutional contexts in which politics plays out. I am not suggesting that there is a short list of outside factors that need to be added to the above analysis. Rather, I am suggesting that we need to think about structuring an openness to continual input about these larger contexts which may not have any immediate legislative consequences.
(C) The problem was not simply what insiders did wrong, or failed to do right. It was the very nature of how inside and outside were constructed.
Conservatives and progressives have very different ideas about how they should be constructed, and progressive ideas are both more dynamic and more varied as well. Hence, conservatives can work from common frameworks under top-down centralized control much more readily than progresives can. We cannot simply copy them. Rather, we need to find our own ways, consistent with our values, to do the things that conservatives do, while doing other things as well.
In particular, we need to synergize the building of effective political strucutres with systemic openness--to people, information and ideas. We need structures that are highly permeable, so that they are maximally responsive to the larger environment, to the grassroots as well as the larger historical forces and factors that such as those I touched on above. And so that people can become insiders more easily, and then step back outside again.
If all this seems a bit vague, if tantalizing, then good. I don't pretend to have the answers. I just want to extend the conversation. |
STATE BLOGS
