I have a long-standing interest in trying to integrate what I see as the most positive aspects of the populist and the progressive traditions, which have all too often been at odds with one another, or at best been deeply disconnected. One manifestation has been the promotion of some voices who don't necessarily get along too well, even though I find something valuable in all of them. On the populist side, I've promoted diaries by John Emerson and educationaction. And on the progressive side, I've promoted Nancy Bordier's work on her interactive voter choice system. Here's a diagram Nancy sent me this week as part of her correspondence, and I thought it was particularly useful for crystalizing some concerns I have--and that it might help others as well in making her ideas more tangible. My comments/questions are on the flip.
Last week’s post, “What is Populism and Why are Democrats Afraid of It" set off a heated but productive discussion. This week I’m basically just expanding, clarifying, correcting, and even repeating what I said there in the comments.
WHAT IS POPULISM?
“Populism” is the code word within the Democratic Party, and it's something that most wonks and pros oppose. When Democratic pros talk about populism, they normally take the worst examples (e.g. Glenn Beck) as typical. This attitude toward populism is entrenched in Pol Sci 101, and many or most normally well-educated people blindly accept it. Democrats depend heavily on interns and low-paid staffers -- usually well-off kids from elite schools who can afford to work for nothing, Some of these interns go on to become party pros, perpetuating the anti-populist bias as well as the accompanying incomprehension of and disdain for people of the middling sort.
I define populism as participational politics by ordinary citizens, working either inside or outside the major parties but almost always against the party leadership, which opposes big business and finance in the interests of the majority and which proposes specific policies to that effect. Between 1870 and 1940 groups of this type (including farmers’ groups and unions) provided most of the progressive energy in American politics, but since about 1950 the Democrats have shunned populism in favor of nonconfrontational "win-win" politics: “a rising tide lifts all boats”. At the same time, many rank and file Democrats have populist sympathies, and these voters are contiunually baffled and angry when the Democrats end up supporting business rather than the common interest.
Michael Moore's latest film and Alan Grayson's "die quickly" speech in the House have revived interest in an old question: What is populism, and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?
Populism is politics which opposes wealth and power in the name of the common folk. It takes both left wing and right wing forms and sometimes degenerates into bigotry and attacks on minorities. Populism can be faked, and that is being done right now - e.g., Limbaugh and Beck. Populist appeals can be made by spokesmen for special interests who have no intention of fulfilling their democratic promises, but who are just opportunistically faking populism as part of an attack on some enemy. (As I never get tired of saying: Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real).
Since the Fifties the Democratic Party, whose populist wing was critically important during the New Deal, has avoided and repressed populism. Individual populists such as Paul Wellstone have occasionally been elected, often in defiance of the party machine, but they have never had much influence in the party. The Democratic strategy has been cooperation with big business, and their slogan has been "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- "win-win" solutions where everyone wins and nobody loses. This worked pretty well until about 1970, when business started to pull away from the deal, and since that time it's been mostly downhill for the Democrats, for labor, and for the average American.
When they made their deal with big business, the Democrats became a wonky party of technocrats and expert administrators who balanced all the various interests and came up with the answer which was best for everyone, and they distanced themselves from their earlier party-of-the-common-man pretensions. Rather than to represent the majority of the electorate, they increasingly defined their constituency as a hodgepodge of special interest. Political parties inevitably do represent plural interests, as the Democrats certainly had done ever since the Civil War, but the post-Fifties Democrats made a fractionated constituency a deliberate goal and did everything they could to avoid majoritarian appeals and to marginalize majoritarianism within the party.
As part of this transformation of the party, the Democrats needed to misrepresent populism. Since then there's been an almost unmixed stream of slanders coming from both parties, until by now anyone counts as a populist as long as they're abusive, ignorant, racist, and dishonest. (The Nazi David Duke sometimes calls himself a Populist, and he was allowed to get away with it). Almost everyone comes out of Pol Sci 100 knowing that the Populists were bad guys, and the Pol Sci 101 attitude is pervasive among party leaders, wonk staffers, and a big chunk of the Democratic electorate.
However, during most of the period since the Civil War, however, progressive energy in this country has mostly come from movements of the Populist typeworking outside the parties or against the party leadership: Greenbackers, Progressives (three kinds), Socialists, Farmer-Laborites, Nonpartisan-Leaguers, and independents -- to say nothing of unions, farm organizations, and civil rights groups. (Martin Luther King's movement was essentially populism, albeit minority populism).
Below I will sketch the history of the Democratic Party in its relations with the Populist Party, small-p populism, and the various sorts of progressivism during the period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1950s, and suggest that many of the problems the Democrats have now can be traced back to the redefinition of the Democratic Party that took place at the end of this period.
(There are very good reasons for some to feel thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party right now. Rather than infighting among progressives over this, I'd like to see us think creatively about ways people can work creatively outside the box that others would put us in. I'm working on a diary about this myself, so I was pleased to see this one as a natural part of the same general conversation. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Like almost everyone here, I have frequently asked myself why the Democratic Party tends to be so worthless. even though many individual Democrats are pretty good.
The answer is this: Loyalty is always punished, and betraying the voters is what political parties are for. The Democratic Party is not us. The Democratic Party is a billion-dollar hierarchal bureaucracy made up of careerists with axes to grind. For them we're just a resource. It's our job to learn to deal with them; they've already figured out how they're going to deal with us.
Supporting a candidate or joining a political party is not like falling in love or finding Jesus. It's like making a high-risk, high-stakes business deal with someone who cannot entirely be trusted. You have to keep your eyes open and protect your leverage -- once you've lost your leverage, you've lost everything. Liberals can beg and whine forever, and all Rahm will ever do is laugh. We need to learn deal with Rahm (and Obama) as coldbloodedly as they deal with us.
No one should ever be surprised, shocked, hurt, or heartbroken when a Democrat doublecrosses them. That's what politicians do. Being doublecrossed the same kind of thing as losing a hand of poker. You should figure out what, if anything, you did wrong and get ready for the next hand.
I just got back from a trip to Oregon, Washington State, and Montana. A little bit of work (4 book events, a lunch w/Ron Wyden's Chief of Staff, meetings and discussions with various progressive-minded folks in each state) and a little bit of play (a glorious long weekend in Glacier National Park). I was relieved and delighted to get out of DC and spend time with real people on the ground who are working to make things better, but also frustrated (as I always am) by how big the disconnect is between the activists on the ground and the politicians in DC. From the stories I heard in Montana, for example, it is clear that now that Max Baucus was re-elected last year, he could truly care less about what the good people of Montana think should be done on health care. He is spending far more time meeting with (and raising money from) health care lobbyists than he is in actually listening to people back home, and the frustration of these folks back home is palpable.
But I did come away very encouraged by the healthy kind of progressivism I saw in those states. Having grown up in Nebraska, it's a brand of politics I relate to very much: a healthy fusion of progressive libertarianism and populism.
There is, of course, a dark side to both of those things. Right-wing populism of the kind that the teabaggers, Limbaugh and Palin practice can turn racist, xenophobic, and ugly really fast. And reflexively anti-government libertarianism would lave us handicapped by a lack of investment in badly-needed public capital (schools, infrastructure, etc.) and defenseless against the rapaciousness of unrestrained big business interests.
A blend of the best of libertarianism and populism, as practiced by the kinds of people I was talking to out west, is in my view progressivism at its best. From the libertarian side of things, you get a healthy skepticism of government and authority, and a rejection of fundamentalist religion's over-reaching into our personal lives. From the populists you get the equally strong skepticism of big business, and a push for government to take on the wealthy and powerful. That fusion makes for compelling politics, and is the reason that the Western states have been moving more and more towards the Democratic coalition in recent years.
Every time I go out west, I feel drawn to the region. The combination of the people and the mountains may get me out there for good one of these days.
Last weekend, we had a very interesting discussion about Nancy Bordier's web-based tool gor bottom-up self-organizing. In the course of the discussion, perhaps the most fundamental questioning of the whole concept came from educationaction, here, for example. Although they come from very different directions, I regard both Nancy and educationaction as valuable contributors to our community, and I wanted to make a few comments that I hope will help enhance the value of their different perspectives, by stressing how they both contribute in different ways.
This is especially timely in that we're going to be running a diary by educationaction on the front page this coming Friday, 11 AM EST, with a special guest appearance by Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, which the diary builds upon.
There are two big-picture comments I want to make. First, I think it's fair to say that Nancy represents a strain of thinking generally associated with the progressive tradition, while educationaction reflects the populist, working-class critiques of that tradition. This is a long-standing debate in American politics, which shows no signs of going away anytime soon, and so it's frankly ridiculous to expect any two individuals to rush things along. What we can hope to do is find and focus on the more fruitful results from this tension. Second, I think it's crucial to remember that none of us is grand generals in charge of vast armies. We're talking in the trenches here, lucky if we command the next sentence that comes out of our mouths, so that it doesn't turn around and bite us.
Thus, educationaction raised a number of concerns that he had about what Nancy hadn't done in the process of developing her concept. And while I agreed in the abstract, and felt it was important to have him draw attention to these things, I also felt that it was important to realize that, like most of us on the left side of things, Nancy is working with very limited resources, without any sort of far-sighted institutional support.
(Speaking of populist backlash, apparently Wall Streeters think there is too. - promoted by Mike Lux)
I hate the phrase "jobless recovery". If people are not getting decent employment, there is no such thing as a recovery. It doesn't matter if corporate profits go up, if the Dow Jones rebounds, if Goldman Sachs honchos got record bonuses, if the Gross National Product rises. What matters is whether regular folks are feeling any difference in their lives. And when you hear the phrase "but jobs are a lagging indicator", let's be clear: that's just another way of saying trickle-down economics.
About 20% of adult Americans are either officially unemployed, have given up looking for work, or are involuntarily working part-time or at temporary jobs. As long as that stays true, we can be very clear about what the consequences are:
Foreclosure rates will keep going up, and housing prices won't start to recover
State and local government will continue to be broke, and the federal deficit will continue to rise
Our manufacturing base will continue to be in desperate shape
In other words, our economy- the real economy- will not start getting better. I know that the big banks' executives will be getting huge bonuses, and I'm sure they will be spending that money around like manure, making things grow and all that. But the real economy will not be getting any better.
I hope the President understands that, and understands very keenly how much his fate is tied to real people getting real jobs. His political project will be dead in the water unless the real economy- not Wall Street profits, not the stock market, but real jobs for real people- starts to get better reasonably soon.
The American people like President Obama so far. They know he inherited a big mess, and they know he's working hard to fix it. They are willing to be patient for awhile. But they don't want to be the ones who are the lagging indicators.
There are some very specific things our government can do to create jobs: invest a lot more in infrastructure projects and green jobs, for example. Give the same kind of help to emerging industries that virtually every other industrialized country does. Negotiate tougher with China on currency manipulation. This ain't rocket science, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later.
There is a populist backlash brewing in this country. Folks are going to blame somebody for this economy. I would personally rather it be the banks than President Obama, but that will only be the case if President Obama is making real progress on jobs.
In response to the weekend's murder of George Tiller, MSNBC's lead thought this morning was that the "culture wars" have returned.
Not to always be the irritating know it all sitting in the first row of class or anything, but I have news for MSNBC. The culture wars never left American politics. In fact, they will always be with us. We are never going to enter a period as a nation where our cultural differences fail to have an impact on our political choices.
While I do agree that (1) MSNBC was being foolish, (2) the "culture wars" never went away, and (3) cultural differences will always have a substantial impact on our politics, I think history shows quite clearly that there are ways to mitigate the intensity of such conflicts, which have varied considerably in their intensity over the course of our history. Thing is, though, the Versailles CW is (wait for it...) wrong once again on both where this comes from, and how it might be overcome.
What's more, it's not always a good thing to calm the culture wars. Gaining equality for despised and disempowered groups has regularly required that the culture wars heat up, not cool down: freeing the slaves, winning women's rights, ending racial discrimination, gaining social acceptance for every major wave of immigrants, winning equal rights for gays and lesbians--all these struggles have been held back by the insistence on social peace, and only advanced when people were willing to risk intensified social strife, which now goes under the rubric of "culture wars".
This gives rise to a simple observation: as a first approximation, there are three favored ways to end the culture wars:
(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by pushing for equality. (The problem is those people.)
(2) Progressives believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. (The problem is lack of "liberty and justice for all.")
(3) "Responsible" centrists believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.)
Pity the Grand Old Populists. One day the Republican grandees are railing against President Obama's Treasury secretary for standing by while AIG gave bonuses to the traders who helped to wreck the economy. Then the memo comes from GOP Central that they are opposed to the Democratic move to claw back those hateful bonuses with a 90% tax. It appears that Republicans and their ideological mentors hate tax increases a lot worse than they hate nameless greedy insurance company executives.
But Wall Streeters really resent it when we rubes stick our noses in their doings. They were alarmed when the House, with 85 Republicans joining the Democratic majority, passed a bill that would slap a 90% tax on bonuses for executives of government-rescued corporations whose family incomes exceed $250,000.
It's incredible. Just as 20,000 viewers signed an open letter to CNBC telling them to listen to Jon Stewart and hold Wall Street accountable instead of mindlessly repeating Wall Street talking points, NBC doubled down.
This morning, Meet The Press host David Gregory repeated what CNBC's Erin Burnett has been saying all along: The public is ignorant. If only the simpleton public understood what the Wall Street "experts" understand, we wouldn't be so populist and angry. See for yourself:
In these economic times, NBC needs to stop blaming the public and instead focus like a laser on holding Wall Street accountable. David Gregory, instead of calling the public stupid, how about saying on the air that there are, in fact, no "best and brightest" at AIG worth giving bonuses to if they threaten to leave?
That being said, CNBC is still the center of the fight to get the media to do their job. If we can get CNBC to truly start holding Wall Street's feet to the fire, that will have ripple effects throughout NBC and the entire financial news industry.
You can join leading economists, journalists, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and over 20,000 members of the public in signing the open letter to CNBC here.
Dear moguls, magnates, captains of industry and masters of the universe,
Lately, we've noticed some media chatter over the notion that you might "go Galt" in response to the recent leftward political drift and the increasingly populist demands of the disgruntled public. Going Galt entails following the example of John Galt, the romantic, individualist hero/businessman of Ayn Rand's best-seller, Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Galt decides to withdraw from the world in order to deny an ungrateful society the fruits of his creative genius. We think it's a great idea.
The truth is, we never deserved you. Please go. We never deserved your visionary leadership in the manufacturing, transportation and energy sectors, your inventive ability to devise new, arcane financial instruments, your wonderful political lobbies and their committed advocacy for sound policies in the realms of health care, education and foreign policy. We never deserved any of it.
We tried, half-heartedly, to show our appreciation by rewarding you with massive tax cuts, subsidies for your industries, grants for your research departments, and multi-billion dollar no-bid government contracts. But apart from those meager contributions, it was really your entrepreneurial spirit that earned you your first, second and third yachts, your helicopter and your diamond toilet bowl.
So teach us our lesson and leave. Let our economy devolve into a primitive bartering system where ten chickens will be worth one goat and two goats will be worth one i-Pod . Meanwhile, you can eat, drink and make merry in your secret Xanadu.
Please, follow the John Galt model as faithfully as possible and vanish without a trace. Leave your properties, art collections and, especially, your liquor cabinets intact. We, the hoi polloi, will now be burdened with the responsibility of managing your holdings and disposing of your estates as best we can.
We only ask that you pack your bags and spirit yourselves to your top-secret pleasure dome before we take the trouble of raising the scaffold, unpacking the guillotine and sharpening the blade. It's such a pain.
Sincerely,
The Rabble
P.S.: Please take any and all copies of Ayn Rand's fabulous novels with you. We don't deserve them either.
One of the main pillars of Republican thought is that LBJ's spending on social programs and his relatively modest federal deficits caused the hyperinflation and economic stagnation of the 1970s and early 1980s. The problem with this theory which largely goes unopposed is that the much larger deficits of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Georhe W. Bush stubbornly failed to cause inflation. LBJ managed to produce a b udget surplus in his last year in office, as well. I f federal deficits cause inflation, this record makes no sense.
In fact, I patiently waited for Regan's deficits to run into hyper inflation and lo and behold, we never had it. The same thing held with George W. Bush. Were larger Republican deficits kept in check by complicit bankers and Wall Street types or was there something else at work here. Well, it turns out that price inflation remarkably correlates with rise in oil prices rather than with federal deficits. Following the Arab-Israeli War OPEC applied an oil embargo to countries considered friendly to Israel. prices zoomed from $3 a barrel in 1971 to over $12 a barrel and the prices at the gas station went above $1 per gallon. A scond shock followed with the Iranian Revolution (1979-80) and the Iraq-Iran War which mostly cut off Iranian exports until Iran started winning in late 1981 or 1982. By 1981, oil prices rose to $35 a barrel.
Reagan exacerabated hyperinflation and stagnation by secretly supporting Iraq as retaliation of the hostage crisis. It was Dick Cheney who first armed Saddam Hussein while working for reagan. But Reagan got the politically credit by deliberately engineering a steep recession (10 straight months with unemployment over 10%) which broke the back of both our own economy and oil demand. Future deficits, which were huge, were paired with falling oil prices (and therefore) falling or stable cost of living stats. This economic malpractice tranferred the blame from the Nixon-Ford era to LBJ and "social programs." Social programs were tarred and feathered semi permanently while the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts were deified. Only the tax cuts really didn't produce much growth and the social spending does not appear to be the real cause of infalation. Nonetheless, this is politically effective and has seeped into conventional wisdom.
Note: Damn! I TRIED to get this up before David weighed in. At least you should know that I haven't even read his diary yet.
As nautilus1700 notes in quick hits, Nate Silver has posted a response to David, which I'm certain David will respond to. But I wanted to try and slip in first to maybe spur another branch of conversation. I feel I've got a bit of a stake in this, since I began writing about two contrary notions of progressivism quite a ways back.
When it comes to telling a story that you want people to understand and connect to, nothing beats hearing the words of other people. I can pontificate, theorize, and analyze all I want, but to simply read the stories of people who are in the trenches, being affected by the issue, drives the point home.
In the case of the ongoing campaign to force Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein to clean up the conditions and improve the standards of the Atria assisted living chain, I wanted to take a moment and share some more stories from people affected every day by the decisions Wasserstein is making...everyday people like you and I who are in tough spots and being forced to make tougher decisions because of Wasserstein's greed. Read on.
But those who are surprised (shocked!) often seem to fundamentally misunderstand what electoral politics is about. You can only be this upset about someone's actions if you don't understand what it means to elect a democratic president--if your expectations were unreasonably high in the first place. As kanzeon points out above, treating the Obama election like a "movement" is a real mistake.
IMHO, a significant proportion of the lefty blogosphere seems not to understand what electoral politics is and isn't likely to accomplish. This is extremely problematic, threatening hopes for building a strong movement for real social change in this country.
(A bit lengthly, but, as usual, will make you think. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Progressives tend to genuflect before "democracy." If "the people" are to be involved, if there is to be a "grassroots" effort, the assumption is that a process of inclusive democratic decision-making has been followed.
As I have noted before, the progressive vision of a world fully driven by egalitarian democratic participation is a dream, a fantasy. The truth is that democracy is expensive. Extensive resources are required every time one seeks to involve large numbers of people in decision-making. Only very privileged people could think that this could happen on a continual basis. Historically, poor people's movements have been much more hierarchical than progressives (including many progressive scholars and historians) have imagined.
Of course, democratic participation is critically important. In labor unions and elsewhere, working-class propensities for hierarchy have too often resulted in clearly non-democratic, and even authoritarian regimes. Given pragmatic limitations in resources, then, community organizing groups must choose carefully those moments when robust democratic participation seems required, and when it seems less important.
In this diary, I explore the implications of the "cost" of democratic participation for community organizing.
The NYT's Elizabeth Bumiller today writes about America's ambivalent fascination with the elite class.
She manages to avoid the source of the problem. Americans celebrate achievement and merit. It's the contempt for democratic practices and the presumption of superiority and deserved power that threatens the egalitarian promise of American democracy.
Tom Wilkinson's characterization of Jim Baker in HBO's docudrama about the 2000 Florida election theft, "Recount," perfectly illustrated the contempt. Democracy was the last thing on Baker's mind. Wilkes didn't exaggerate, either. He got something else right, too. It was the doubt in Baker's eyes after he'd pulled off the George W. Bush Florida gig. Just like the real Jim Baker, he had a worried stare. Bush, he knew, might betray the awful truth of an elite class so out of touch that the entire class might be threatened.
That is, in part, what has happened. The nation is asking questions about its elite.
As Bumiller tells the story, it's all about appearances. Your typical wealthy Harvard graduate, who entered the school on legacy not merit, needs to demonstrate some concern for the middle class and poor. And when it's lifted out of reality and made virtual, even a mixed-race, authentic up-from-the-bootstraps candidate like Barack Obama can be labelled "elite." And a Wellesley grad like HIllary Clinton can present herself as an beer drinking, ice-house proletarian.
Here's a suggestion for Ms. Bumiller. Be a pragmatist. Look at the results of the phenomena. The nation's democratic institutions are imperiled by an elite that believes their merit (earned or just pretend earned) makes authentic democracy at best an annoyance (Cheney during the 2004 debates) and at worst a misguided political theory that gives power to people who don't deserve it as much as they do.
"The reason I am here tonight," Edwards declared, "is the voters have made their choice and so have I."
snip
"When this nomination battle is over, and it will be over soon, brothers and sisters," Edwards said, "we must come together as Democrats and in the fall stand up for what matters in America and make America what it needs to be."
John Edwards, throughout this primary season, has first and foremost been a populist. Sometimes that means standing in front of folks, meeting their gaze with a clear-eyed vision of what needs to be done to help people in this country and abroad. Sometimes it means talking and leading.
And sometimes it means listening.
John Edwards has done a lot of listening these past few months, and that led him to where he was tonight, under the glare of white lights in front of news cameras, the subject of countless pundits making countless predictions and counter-predictions.
On Wednesday, Matt wrote a diary, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party", that got quite a bit of notice, not just here, but elsewhere across the blogosphere. Mike and Chris both weighed in to compliment Matt and add a few thoughts of their own.
But I called it "A Rather Strange Post", and the time has come to elaborate further on why I said that--not so much focused on what Matt said, but on what he's describing, and the challenge of making sense of it.
Matt set up his post by saying:
Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
He went on to talk about "Voter Registration," "Obama Organizing Fellows," "Money: MyBarackObama.com," "Field: MyBarackObama.com," and "Message and Politics: MyBarackObama.com." A recurrent them throughout the post was how Obama had managed to centralize power, while largely ignoring and/or marginalizing (other?) progressive groups and constituencies.
I only took on part of my concerns in my comment, the heart of which was questioning Obama's non-partisan schtick:
Like it or not, the aspiration to create a non-partisan politics is at odds with the very structure of our political institutions, from the winner-take-all single-member districts that define most of the legislative bodies in the country, to the electoral college. Also, like it or not, where one party systems do exist, the result is invariably tyranny.
There are, of course, powerful yearnings to be free of partisan strife. There are also powerful yearnings to eat so much ice cream that your [sic] burst.
I got deeper into historical specifics in responding to Chris's post when I wrote:
A Return to the Failed Policies of the Early 1900s
As I wrote several months ago--Obama is an early-20th Centrury progressive, not a post-Vietnam one. The former focused a great deal on process, and trusted that substantive equity would naturally follow. The downside of this is that these policies have already been shown to fail.
I'm not saying that they didn't do anything good. But I am saying that they were inadequate to the scope of the problems they faced, which meant that they failed in the long run--if not sooner.
Time to flesh this all out, in hopes of encouraging a more enlightened debate.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
