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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:02PM
So what is your point? It sounds like you think the US has some claim on jobs that never previously existed.
Let's review the thread. I quoted a paragraph where the author blames the decline of labor power on Democrats replacing a committee chair. That doesn't even make a little sense since the decline of labor power would only trivially be affected by such a change. But competition with developing world labor which works for a small fraction of the price? Bingo. Then some AC wag claims that only 15% of all US jobs "lost" (whatever that means since no context was given) were due to foreign competition and the rest was somehow determined to be due to automation. I merely noted that there's been a vast amount of job creation including much of those jobs which supposedly were lost due to automation.
My point is that there is a huge amount of clueless blame shifting here. US business CEOs didn't suddenly discover greed in 1970. Labor unions didn't lose power over decades because some political ally got kicked out of his posh chairman position. There was a huge shift in power once labor competition from the developing world set in. This was manageable in the 1950s and 1960s when it was only Europe and Taiwan. Japan's ascent upset the balance of power in the US between labor and business.
The simple truth is that US manufacturing output is up ~60% since NAFTA to the highest it has every been even while employment is down and that's because of automation. Employee efficiency increased 2.5x during that same time. That's your job killer and its only going to get worse.
The obvious rebuttal is why aren't they hiring more employees, if they're so valuable? Answer: because it's even more valuable than that in places like China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @11:02PM
> Let's review the thread. I quoted a paragraph where the author blames the decline of labor power on Democrats replacing a committee chair.
Oh look, callow only reads to find something to make non-sensical arguments about, not to understand. If you think the story was about a committee chair then you completely missed the point.
> The obvious rebuttal is why aren't they hiring more employees, if they're so valuable?
Lol, you are such fucking dumbass. Who said they are valuable? Why don't you buy 3 rolls royces, they are valuable aren't they? So what's your problem?
The only thing obvious is that whenever you open your mouth you don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about. Your understanding of the world is a joke. I mean come on, you cite the NIRA as major shaper of the current market when it was outright killed by the scotus within 2 years of enactment. Your entire worldview is defined by taking outliers and assuming they are the common case. You have zero sense of perspective or scale.
How many times does reality have you to slap you upside the head with your own idiocy before you realize your self-confidence is completely misplaced?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 04 2016, @04:13AM
How many times does reality have you to slap you upside the head with your own idiocy before you realize your self-confidence is completely misplaced?
Ok, what does reality have to do with your post?
I mean come on, you cite the NIRA as major shaper of the current market when it was outright killed by the scotus within 2 years of enactment.
Did I? I seem to recall citing it as an example of the absence of Jefferson-Madison qualities to New Deal strategy. And I pointed out the law got reversed. It's an example not a complete explanation of what's wrong for the past 80+ years. I find the accusation particularly bizarre, because I spoke of labor competition instead.
Your entire worldview is defined by taking outliers and assuming they are the common case.
You don't seem to get the point of an example. And for an "outlier", if the Supreme Court hadn't reversed it, we might still be living with the law today and a bunch of other stuff like it. FDR changed his strategy thereafter because he got effectively blocked by the Supreme Court (he even tried and failed to pack the court) not because the law was an "outlier".
There seems to be an unfortunate pattern to these AC accusations. Blatantly misrepresentations of what I wrote followed by clueless, low content commentary. But it's all "reality" so it must be good.