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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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday November 03 2016, @03:18PM
Yes they did: Between September 2009 and February, 2010. They started out in January 2009 with a 55-vote majority, and had 2 friendly independents (Lieberman and Sanders), and a disputed seat from Minnesota. Between January and September, Arlen Specter switched from Republican to Democrat, Al Franken was seated, Robert Byrd was in and out of the hospital, Ted Kennedy died, and Massachusetts sent Democrat Paul Kirk to replace him. That gave the Democrats a 60-vote majority once Kirk was seated, with Byrd's vote.
During that time, they managed to pass only 4 major laws:
- Defense spending
- Expanding the definitions of hate crime to include acts targeting GLBT and disabled people.
- Extending unemployment benefits for a few more months
- A federal budget
That's it. They had a 4-month window of opportunity, and did basically nothing with it. What they could have done, and would have done had they really wanted to pass their stated agenda, is have dozens of laws waiting in the wings to do the things they said they wanted to do, and as soon as Kirk was seated just start passing things and signing things as quickly as possible (dragging Robert Byrd in if necessary). Had they done so, those few months might have become legendary in the way FDR's first 100 days did.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @03:28PM
That's it. They had a 4-month window of opportunity, and did basically nothing with it. What they could have done, and would have done had they really wanted to pass their stated agenda, is have dozens of laws waiting in the wings to do the things they said they wanted to do, and as soon as Kirk was seated just start passing things and signing things as quickly as possible (dragging Robert Byrd in if necessary). Had they done so, those few months might have become legendary in the way FDR's first 100 days did.
It's worth noting that they might even been able to break the Republican Party's unity with this. The occasional bribed Republicans would both serve to stir conflict in the other side and pad the numbers so that Democrat holdouts would have less bargaining power.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 03 2016, @04:33PM
That's a good point. It does rather indicate that neither party has much interest in doing what they actually campaign on.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @03:32PM
Kirk was a placeholder until Massachusetts held the special election to replace Kennedy - which of course would be another Democrat, right?
Wrong. Martha Coakley ran an incompetent campaign, and Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill the vacancy for the remainder of Kennedy's term.
Not much can get done in a tight time window in the US Senate. The rules are set up so that legislation and other matters can be tabled almost indefinitely. Ask Merrick Garland.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @04:06PM
The rules are set up so that legislation and other matters can be tabled almost indefinitely.
Not if you have 60 votes. They did at one point and they failed to use it effectively.
(Score: 4, Informative) by number11 on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:29PM
True. Obama badly wanted to be the one who brought everyone together, so he kept trying to negotiate with the Republicans instead of stomping them. Though in truth, there weren't 60 reliable votes, a few Dems (and people like Lieberman) were effectively Republicans.
This turned out to be a mistake. The Republicans were not going to negotiate in good faith with any sort of unity. Their extreme right had effective veto power. The only way they could unify was to be obstructionist.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:21PM
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:03PM
Yes, as we all know passing a budget is so easy the government has never shut down over it.