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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @11:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @11:27PM (#422292)

    The signature legislation of the past eight years was Obamacare.

    Which even major players in the Libertarian Party favored because:

    Namely, it frees more Americans to take better jobs without worrying about losing the health care plan they had in their old jobs. Worker mobility is one of the things that reliably fuels free enterprise, and workers will be more mobile under Obamacare than they would be under Romney’s semi-dismantled version of it.

    And as noted elsewhere, individual liberty somehow doesn't extend to ownership of fire arms.

    Its telling that Bernie Sanders was stronger at protecting gun rights than the Republican nominee for President.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @04:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @04:00AM (#422365)

    This is pretty revisionist.

    Some people in the libertarians like some aspects of Obamacare. To declare that they liked the whole thing is simple fabrication.

    Libertarians want insurance to be optional, not mandatory. They want it to be offered in good faith, sure, and generally could agree on some regulation of risk pooling (insofar it is relevant to acting in good faith) but whole segments of the law were completely unpalatable from the libertarian perspective.

    Moreover, the law itself violated many of the general libertarian precepts on lawmaking. It's huge, complex, leaves vast fields open to regulatory rule-making (rather than being clear at the time of passage), and generally violates the idea that the average person should have a clear idea of what the law actually says.

    It also added all sorts of taxes on things like medical equipment that were in no way supported by libertarian approaches, and its attempts to dictate to the states were not libertarian hot topics.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 04 2016, @04:18AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 04 2016, @04:18AM (#422371) Journal

    Which even major players in the Libertarian Party favored because

    Bullshit. Can't you at least work some porn into your fantasies, if you're going to do this?

    Namely, it frees more Americans to take better jobs without worrying about losing the health care plan they had in their old jobs. Worker mobility is one of the things that reliably fuels free enterprise, and workers will be more mobile under Obamacare than they would be under Romney’s semi-dismantled version of it.

    There's so much unconstitutional baggage attached. No way libertarians would support the law with mandatory fines to workers for not having health insurance or employers for not providing it.