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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the when-times-are-forced-to-change dept.

When trying to understand the two bad choices we have now, it can help to look into the past at where they came from. In this article, Matt Stoller at The Atlantic provides a deep dive into a transformation the Democratic party underwent in the late 1960s onward. In it we see how the Democrats morphed the anti-big-business politics that had powered it for over a century into the big-government politics that define the political conversation today.

Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman [ed: links mine], it was democracy or concentrated wealth—but not both.

[...] The story of why the Watergate Babies spurned populism is its own intellectual journey. It started with a generation of politicians who cut their teeth on college-campus politics. In their youth, they saw, up close, not the perils of robber barons, but the failure of the New Deal state, most profoundly through the war in Vietnam. "We were the '60s generation that didn't drop out," Bob Edgar, a U.S. representative from the class of 1975, told me. The war in Vietnam shaped their generation in two profound ways. First, it disillusioned them toward the New Deal. It was, after all, many New Dealers, including union insiders, who nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and who supported a war that killed millions, including 50,000 Americans their age. And second, higher education—the province of the affluent—exempted one from military service, which was an explicit distinction among classes.

[...] By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, [Democratic strategist Fred] Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as "a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote." The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites.

[...] By 2008, the ideas that took hold in the 1970s had been Democratic orthodoxy for two generations. "Left-wing" meant opposing war, supporting social tolerance, advocating environmentalism, and accepting corporatism and big finance while also seeking redistribution via taxes.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:29PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:29PM (#422045)

    I was taught that the New Deal was a bunch of "throw it on the wall and see what sticks" legislation. NIRA was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935, so obviously it didn't stick. Not every law in the New Deal was ideologically consistent, but when you look at only the laws that stuck around through near-future Congresses and the Supreme Court, the "classic Jefferson-Madison approach" won out.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:44PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:44PM (#422052)

    That is absolutely correct about FDR's general approach. The key factor was that (a) the economic situation was quite desperate, and (b) the received economic wisdom of the time had been exactly what Herbert Hoover had done. Which famously didn't work.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:51PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:51PM (#422058) Journal
    That's like claiming modern Nazis in the US are strictly free speech advocates. Because the only consequence of their ideology and activities has been an opportunity to defend their speech from various impositions on free speech.
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @04:22PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 03 2016, @04:22PM (#422100) Journal
    As to your subject title, New Deal advocates are not the US Government.