Author Archive
Winner-Take-All
January 3, 2011 | 
Author Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
My fellow political scientists frequently eschew actual involvement in policy debates and political conflict, preferring, like Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinsky’s Being There, to watch. But Hacker and Pierson, distinguished political scientists (Yale and Berkeley, respectively), launch themselves forcefully into political engagement with this well-documented analysis of how the United States government, since the 1970s, has systematically enriched the top one percent of the country at the expense of everyone else, and especially at the expense of the middle class.
Hacker and Pierson show how big business interests, alarmed at such new liberal initiatives as the Environmental Protection Act (actually passed under Nixon), ratcheted up their national organizations, the more effectively to defend their common interests in national policy debates. In addition to mounting far stronger and more sophisticated lobbying, these interests created and funded think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, designed to challenge the liberal conventional wisdom of the New Deal and Great Society and replace it with an explicitly conservative, free-market-oriented way of thinking.
Among the victories of this newly assertive big business sector was the spreading deregulation of the economy, starting with the airlines in the 1970s, and culminating with the deregulation of banking at the end of the 1990s. Also, of course, the idea of supply-side economics was a direct product of the new conservative knowledge industry, and led to the Reagan and Bush tax cuts focused on the upper income levels (income, inheritance, capital gains taxes all went down, with the richest getting by far the most benefit).
The mass base for this counterrevolution was provided by the cultural conservatism of Reagan, George W. Bush, and other prominent conservatives like Newt Gingrich. In particular, evangelical Christians (most of whom have average or below average incomes) were successfully mobilized for the Republicans on the basis of abortion and other social issues that tended to drive a wedge into the old Democratic coalition.
Simultaneously there was a major assault on organized labor, the principal organized mass base of the Democrats. When Republicans have controlled the presidency, regulations intended to protect labor unions and the rights of workers, have been ignored or reinterpreted. With Democrats in power, an equal push-back has not occurred because the Democratic Party long ago ceased to be primarily a labor party. The result: labor is today but a ghost of its former self.
Carter, perhaps inadvertently, helped to start the conservative counterrevolution. Clinton largely accepted it. And Obama, so far, has done little to turn it around. The new health care law certainly promises to provide better access to the least fortunate and the middle class, but the compromises needed to pass it safeguarded the fundamental interests of those at the top. Much the same can be said of the new financial regulation law: those who made big bucks while sending the economy into the tank are largely allowed to keep doing what they were doing.
The fundamental point of the book is that the present pattern of accelerating inequality is neither inevitable nor natural: it is political. It was the result of long-term, systematic organization in defense of the interests of big business and the wealthiest segment of the society. By analogy, they argue that the left needs to see its task in the same light, as a major, systematic, long-term effort at multiple levels, aimed at returning to a much more egalitarian society.
They are correct, of course, but not completely. Political struggle can bring change in the other direction. There is no other way to bring it about. But political struggle happens within the larger structure of an economy that inherently privileges those with capital over those without it. As long as that remains true (as long as we have a capitalist economy), advocates of more equality and more democracy will always be playing defense.
Posted in 
The False Ideology of a Neutral Center
On a side note, I never know how much politics or “political economy” (the broader interrelated questions of fairness, governance, philosophy, and values) to put on FB. I have often said, and should write more about the double-edged sword of FB- it is based on network growth and inter-connectivity, but the broader a network becomes, the more limited it’s uses. At the extreme, FB will become an on-line version of Lake Wobegone nomrs: to avoid unsettling anyone, only discuss the weather in polite company.
Anyway, Matt Miller, the host and apparent “arbiter” on Left, Right and Center (a great show even if it is made by the communists socialists Nazis at NPR,was on a tear about the need for a new label for “radical centrists.” He made his version of a passionate plea for now being the time for a brave new “third way” politics (was he around during the 1990s when Blair and Giddens did this? and, um, that US president, named, um, Clinton?)
Matt Miller makes some good points, sometimes. But I find he often starts where much of the “mainstream”media seem to: that the excesses of left and right are always there, always misguided, always driven by ideology over facts and therefore the only hope for progress comes in some third way. Even as his OWN SHOW has left and right weaving in and out of agreement on issues like the Fed, China, and Afghanistan, he cannot let go of the animating narrative of his life.
Sometimes the “very” left is simply correct. For example, there is growing wealth and wage inequality in the US, and tax policies have much to do with it. Or, the distortions in health care of the US compared to other comparable societies is due to all the money that flows to the various sectors of the Health-industrial complex. No amount of compromise with the right can make those critiques go away.
Rarely, the “right” is correct. Ron Paul wants to audit the Fed. I am with Bob Scheer on this one. The Fed as it has become run is a distortion of democracy in our economy. I can agree with some critiques of changing or weakening values in US society, although I won’t agree with solutions or causes, probably.
So, I would rather Miller’s idea of a radical center be more of arbiter between right and left than always elevate its (false) sense of being above the messy fray by being aghast at the ideology around it. There is no non-ideological center…
MacNamara’s Memoirs
I live in a small town, where,
In my backyard, grackles attack
Squirrels along the telephone wire,
Guarding their nests. Elsewhere,
MacNamara’s released his reflections.
In this town, three or four men,
Whose eyes never seem to see,
Live, too, always on Market Street.
Viet Nam veterans. No jobs for them,
Who once saw or did too much.
They wander past the shops or lounge
Against the drugstore, silent,
Listless, half-lost. Some days one
Wheels a bicycle, never rides it.
The bombs all dropped, what can one say
To Robert MacNamara this spring
Except: come visit our town,
The grackles might interest you.
Karl Patten
From Touch: Poems
Commentary:
There is very little to say about this poem. Many will remember that when Robert MacNamara published his Memoirs, he, who had such a major role as Secretary of Defense in promoting the war in Viet Nam, had very little to say about the consequences of that disastrous war, not merely about the millions of dead and wounded Vietnamese, but of the massive number of American casualties, including the thousands of American soldiers who survived but returned home broken in body and spirit.
I was angered by MacNamara’s book, but it took the very low-key tone of a few local images to express my anger, and, in fact, rather graciously extending a visit to our small town to him. He never came, as far as I know.
P.S. Is it simply another example of American hypocrisy in high places that we denominate our war office the Department of Defense? Surely it should be called the Department of Offence, for it only offends other people – and us. Long ago, it was know as the War Department, surely more honest a moniker.
Deficit Commission
DEFICIT COMMISSION:
Keynesian by Default
John Peeler
The co-chairs of the President’s Deficit Commission, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, have been greeted by a predictable chorus of boos from both ends of the political spectrum as they set forth their recommendations for controlling the deficit. They gore the sacred oxen of both sides. For example, they propose to extend the retirement age and reduce benefits for younger beneficiaries of Social Security. They advocate major cuts in virtually all federal programs, including health and education. They call for eliminating such popular tax breaks as the mortgage deduction. All of these proposals and more are sure to elicit outrage from liberals.
At the same time, Bowles and Simpson make other proposals that will be anathema to conservatives, such as letting ALL the Bush tax cuts expire while enacting a sweeping tax simplification. They would apply the same knife to defense expenditures as to other parts of the budget. These ideas go directly against the current Republican orthodoxy that the deficit can be brought under control purely by cutting domestic discretionary spending and (paradoxically) extending the tax cuts for everyone, including the richest. Conservative Republicans just won’t accept such a frontal assault.
The Commission as a whole is unlikely to produce a consensus around the Bowles-Simpson proposals. Either the final report will be substantially watered down, or various minority reports may be produced. Either way, Congress is not likely to be asked to act on Bowles-Simpson. If Congress were confronted with these proposals, it is highly likely that they would die in Congress. The fact is, neither liberals nor conservatives, neither Republicans nor Democrats have the stomach for the major sacrifices that Simpson and Bowles are calling for, and it’s not at all clear that the public in general is ready either.
What Simpson and Bowles have done, nevertheless, is to make clear how huge is the task of bringing the deficit under control, and to make the argument that, in the long run, we must control the deficit or face ruin. They expose both the hypocrisy of the Republican posture and the rigidity of some Democrats. In the long term, the deficit really is a big problem that we have to get under control.
What they don’t do (and were not charged to do) is address the question of whether now is the time to address the deficit. Most mainstream economists argue that with the economy stagnant, we ought to have more government spending now, and wait to address the deficit until the economy improves. Right-wing economic advisers to the Republicans reject this, denying that such government spending has ever been effective in ending a recession. It is a revolt against Keynesianism that has framed the conservative Republican response to this recession.
Here is the paradox: confronted with this bitter package, the political system will freeze. It won’t be able to produce any significant painful steps over the next two years, at least. There will probably be agreement to extend the tax cuts, either for a limited term, or permanently. There will be no agreement about Social Security, Medicare, revisions in the healthcare reform passed last year, or other social programs. There will be no significant cuts to the defense budget. We will continue to have the government spending a lot more than it takes in for at least the next few years.
We will get a rough, unsystematic Keynesianism. Paul Krugman argues for a larger and more thoughtfully designed stimulus; we won’t get that, but we also will not see the kind of massive reduction in government spending that conservatives advocate.
It is often forgotten that Keynes also advocated reducing government spending (running a surplus) in prosperous times, as happened during the Clinton years. And perhaps in better times it will be easier for politicians and the public to swallow the pills that are offered today by Bowles and Simpson.
Election 2010
Not a Post-Mortem:
Checking Debris After a Big Wave
John Peeler
After two straight electoral victories, the Democrats took a major hit on November 2. It’s important for Democrats to keep in perspective that it was bad, but could have been worse. And Republicans should (but probably won’t) remember that an election victory doesn’t mean blanket endorsement of their most sweeping demands. The next two years will be different, but hardly more pleasant.
The Republican takeover of the House was largely a matter of taking back the seats they lost in the last two elections, many of which are either majority Republican or conservative enough to have voted for McCain in 2008. A few senior Democrats went down, but mostly in conservative districts. The GOP majority will not be as large as the Democratic majority in the last Congress.
In the Senate, the Democrats managed to hold onto the majority by defeating Tea Party candidates in Delaware, West Virginia and Nevada, holding Barbara Boxer’s seat in California, winning in Colorado and possibly winning (too close to call at this writing) in Washington. They came close to winning the Senate race in Pennsylvania in a year when Republicans won the governorship and control of the legislature. But Republicans will be well-positioned for further gains in 2012, as the majority of Senate seats up that year will be Democratic.
Republicans also gained ten governorships and made significant gains in state legislatures, but failed to defeat Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Martin O’Malley in Maryland, lost to Jerry Brown in California, and came in third in the Colorado gubernatorial contest. The Republican nominee lost to former Republican Senator (now Independent) Lincoln Chafee for Governor of Rhode Island. Mark Dayton took the governorship of Minnesota after the departure of the ambitious Tim Pawlenty.
The Tea Party and Sarah Palin had a decidedly mixed day. Rand Paul won, as did some other Pallin endorsees, but as noted above, they also took some major defeats and may have cost the GOP control of the Senate. Palin faces a major humiliation if, as expected, Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign defeats Palin endorsee and Tea Party candidate Joe Miller.
It was, in short, a big wave, but not a major tsunami.
Obviously the poor state of the economy was the major driver here: if the recovery were energetic enough to be perceived by voters, Republicans and Tea Partiers wouldn’t have had much of an audience. Instead, many people paid attention to the new conservative orthodoxy of reduced spending and balanced budgets as the road to economic recovery. Anti-Keynesianism, once regarded as completely crackpot, is the new orthodoxy.
In this environment of overwhelming concern for the economy, the Tea Partiers managed to contain the more bizarre elements of their movement, and thus avoided in most places scaring off moderates. Moderates in fact swung decisively to the GOP. Presumably they will want to keep the Republicans on a fairly short leash on issues like repeal of the health care law, where polls show support for most elements. Many moderates are deeply impatient with extreme partisanship and gridlock in Congress (that’s a major reason why so many voted for Obama, who promised to get past all that). They may have little tolerance when the Republicans continue to score political points with their base at the expense of negotiating deals with Obama and the Senate Democrats.
Race, ethnicity and immigration were not the dominant issues this time, but the white population (particularly men) tilted heavily to the Republicans. White folks still matter! Blacks and Hispanics, as expected, went strongly for Democrats, but couldn’t overcome the Republican wave. Women split evenly, erasing the Democratic tilt of women in recent years.
Many of the defeated Democrats were Blue Dogs or others on the right wing of the party. Being relatively conservative may have helped them win elections in 2006 and 2008, expanding the Democratic base into Republican territory. But it didn’t save them when the tide turned and the GOP came after them.
The election is inevitably being interpreted as a rebuke to President Obama, and deservedly so. But Obama’s poll ratings throughout the campaign were only slightly negative, and were closing on break-even at election time. Republicans could easily alienate many voters if they appear to be focused exclusively on Mitch McConnell’s declared goal of making him a one-term president.
Advice to Obama: Republican overreach: wait for it.
Obama and congressional Democrats do deserve a rebuke from Democratic partisans for failing to deliver a health care bill that voters could understand and support, for presiding over a Congress that was utterly dysfunctional, and for failing to engage fully in the politics of defending themselves against relentless and often unfair Republican attacks.
We hoped Obama would be a new Roosevelt. Now the only question is whether he will be Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.
Labor Day
submitted by Joe Detelj
Cancer is a metabolic process of undifferentiated cell division. Ultimately, growth of the tumor is limited by the death of the host organism. Growth of GDP as an index of undifferentiated economic growth is widely held to be a measure of social health and well being. We are more fully served by the biological insight and are at a minimum, misguided by the creation of the orthodox economist whose self serving conclusions are the necessary product of unreal assumptions.
But, faulty algorithms aside, growth, the gospel of entrenched public policy has collided with the real world of six billion humans; finite resources, in particular cheap and easily extracted fossil fuels; climate change; and the metastasized social inequality embedded in the DNA of capitalism. Clearly, we are at a profound point in our history. Species extinction, in particular our own, has to be considered a possibility. Issues of equity, justice, and a sustainable mode of production compel a need for a more democratic, decentralized, and biologically based economy. This will not be easily accomplished. The dominant political climate is characterized by fear and denial, paradoxically, based on a recognition of the current state of affairs and a general inability to imagine a solution. There is nothing more urgent than the need to seriously begin a conversation relative to what fundamental changes need to be implemented and what will a more appropriate social order be like.
The choices being offered by the usual suspects are not exactly comforting. One wing of the Party is seeking an acceleration of deregulation and the continued privatization of all public goods. . The other wing is seeking to moderate the mechanisms of destruction that precipitated the crisis and is only willing to make changes on the margin, all the while the rants and raves of the lunatic fringe decry a drift toward socialism. While it must be admitted that risk and costs have indeed been socialized for finance capital and transnational corporations, too-big-to-fail, profits have clearly remained in private and limited pockets, and that is the root cause of the problem.
If there ever was a fable for our time it is Humpty Dumpty, for all the king’s men and women are unable to put Humpty together again limited as they are by imagination, vested self interest and the courage to redistribute even a modicum of the obscene concentration of wealth the is the dominant feature of our gilded age. A recent AP story in our local newspaper featured a Labor Day(which is May1 in most of the world, pardon the digression) article that presented a bleak future for American workers .It was, incidentally, the catalyst for this response. It presented the continued demise of the middle class, that is, those workers paid a wage above subsistence, and the establishment of a two tiered work force consisting of highly skilled more richly compensated workers supported by an army of low paid service workers. The options we are to accept seems to be computer science or Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, or Pizza Hut with no room for a skill set in between. This is the service economy that was promoted by the usual suspects as the envy of the world.
We are truly living a paper economy with any real substance being off-shored as fast as the masters of the universe on Wall Street can click their mouse. It is however, entirely within our power to initiate a more viable alternative. While it is unlikely that we have a complete blueprint for the democratic and sustainable social order that we will need to create amid the ruins, there are concrete policies that can be implemented as transitional steps that will facilitate the process. Historically, the period from the end of the second World War until the early 1970?s was received as a golden age of sorts. It clearly was the economic highlight for the vast majority of Americans. Admittedly, the period suffered serious imperfections, but it was for most a prosperous time. Workers wages and corporate profits were simultaneously rising. The Treasury enjoyed trade and domestic surpluses. Union membership was approximately 40% of the workforce. The tax code pre Reagan consisted of a marginal rate of 91% and wealth was more equitably distributed than at any other time in our history. It was accepted morality that a progressive income tax and high inheritance taxes was not just fair, but actually sound public policy. A necessary starting point for popular demand that offers a concrete and specific solution to our present malaise must be the reinstallation of a progressive income tax and the prosecution of off-shore tax havens whose existence has allowed the wealthiest corporations to pay little or no taxes. Presently, half of all international trade transactions are processed through these sheltered accounts whose sole purpose is to evade any contribution to the public welfare. The real, not imagined cause of the current deficit lies in the tax code.
If we are to ever provide the infrastructure repair and replacement for our bridges, roads, water and sewer treatment plants, and schools, to illustrate a few options, we need to abandon WTO and return to a trade policy that nurtures domestic industries and ultimately self-sufficiency to the degree that is practical and equitable. Free trade is not fair trade. If a decentralized, environmentally sound infrastructure, the green revolution, is to replace the toxic petroleum based, centralized economy, then selective tariffs and tax policies whose benefits have been promoted by such distinguished radicals such as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams need to be reintroduced.
And lastly, in light of the most perverse Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott, the Citizen United case, advocacy and action must be directed at enforcement of the anti-trust laws currently on the books and not enforced. Ultimately, at the core of the political corruption, the disenfranchisement of our citizenry, the environmental degradation, and the endless wars to ensure the peace, lies the insatiable need for finance capital and transnational corporations to squeeze blood from a rock, to in effect, get bigger and bigger until eventually only a few merged, mega-entities, and a desolate planet with a ravaged populace remains. Numerous small firms, a more competitive landscape, scale appropriate to community influence, and cooperative ventures are all desirable alternatives that can fill the void left in the wake of Wal-Mart like concentrations.
A reconstruction is over due. If we, the vast majority, are reasonable to seek a better tomorrow and a legacy worth leaving then the modest, concrete, and achievable modest proposals suggested here, which are by no means novel, but rather a rediscovery of proven past practice are real possibilities for a popular movement of change. We have no need for change that requires belief as its only ingredient, but change that embraces caring, commitment, and a challenge to the status quo.
Still the Age of Reagan
Still the Age of Reagan:
Long Waves in American Politics
John Peeler
Not every big wave transforms the landscape. The one we are now experiencing (many Republicans riding high, many Democrats wiping out) is largely a result of short-term conditions such as a stubbornly bad economy, and some questionable decisions by the Democrats in power. Moreover, the resurgence of the Republicans after successive Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 is to be expected in what remains fundamentally a two-party system. The small but decisive minority of swing voters, after all, will swing.
But why weren’t the elections of 2006 and 2008 markers of a durable shift that would have put liberal Democrats in a dominant position like they last held in the mid-1960s? I suggest that as bad as things are, economically, politically, socially, they are not bad enough to permanently shift the way we think, to force changes in what we consider to be common sense. Such a fundamental reshaping of the political landscape has occurred only a few times in our history.
The classic case of such a shift was the political transformation wrought by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Before 1933, a broad consensus supported free market capitalism with minimal government intervention. Republicans were the dominant party, but most Democrats supported the consensus. Indeed, such dissent as there was came more from Progressives within the Republican Party than from Democrats. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat elected with a minority of the vote in 1912, did embody some of the features of the Progressive movement, but on the whole the Democrats, based in the segregated South and the immigrant-filled northern cities, was not a notably progressive force.
Roosevelt got credit for saving the country from the worst depression in its history, and he did it through a massive expansion of the government’s role in the economy and society. For the next thirty years, until Johnson’s Great Society programs of the late 1960s tackled the unfinished business of the New Deal, it was common sense that the government ought to actively address social injustice, to improve the lot of the least fortunate among us, especially African Americans and other racial minorities. When the Republicans controlled the government under Eisenhower (1953-1961), they worked within this broad consensus, the common sense of the Age of Roosevelt.
We can discern several previous periods when a particular mode of thinking predominated over decades. The Federalist period began with the Constitutional Convention of 1787, revolved around the idea of a propertied elite governing with the consent of lesser citizens. The long Jefferson-Jackson era affirmed that the common man was as good as the wealthy elites. The opposition, centered on urban and commercial interests, devolved from the Federalists to the Whigs. The latter held the presidency on several occasions, but could never upset the fundamental presuppositions of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian order.
The Civil War fractured both major parties and cleared the way for the Republican Party to gain dominance. Initially, the Republicans drew their identity from the War itself and the crusade to save the Union and end slavery. That Civil War Era lasted until the end of Reconstruction in 1876. Thereafter, Republicans continued to be the normal governing party, but they were increasingly identified with emerging urban industrial interests. The Gilded Age arguably lasted all the way to Franklin Roosevelt, notwithstanding the Progressive challenges to the industrialists under both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
The Age of Roosevelt, then, was a major departure from the common sense of the Gilded Age, precipitated by the Great Depression. Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy can now be seen as marking the beginning of a conservative insurgency that rejected the common sense of the Roosevelt era, and pushed for a return to the old verities of a small state and a free market. Were it not for Nixon’s folly in the Watergate affair, his administration might have marked the beginning of a new conservative era. As it was, we must see the 1970s as a period of transition, when Democrats could still believe that they remained the normal majority and liberalism remained the common sense. That illusion ended with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Reagan forthrightly rejected the central verities of the Age of Roosevelt and promulgated instead a new conservative orthodoxy of small government and free enterprise.
We are still in the Age of Reagan. Notwithstanding the many shortcomings of both Bushes, we still live in a time when most voters think it makes sense that government spending in a major recession makes things worse. Both Clinton and Obama have had to deal with that conventional wisdom, so completely contrary to what was common sense in the Age of Roosevelt.
What will it take to end the Age of Reagan? One ingredient is a crisis worse than what we are experiencing now. When the newly emboldened, militantly conservative Republicans recapture control, perhaps they will provide us with that. A second ingredient is a commitment of progressives to a long-term strategy of both organizing politically and challenging the conservative conventional wisdom, again and again, for however long it takes. We thought we had the third ingredient in Obama: a leader like Roosevelt or Reagan who can crystallize the issues and inspire the majority to see the world anew. We still have some time to wait.
Go Figure
GO FIGURE:
Elections in the World’s Greatest Democracy
John Peeler
If the polls are not egregiously off-base, the Democrats will take a drubbing in next month’s midterm elections. They might lose control of one or both houses of Congress, as well as multiple gubernatorial and state legislative races. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_10052010.html?sid=ST2010100500023, forty-three percent of likely voters said they would vote Democratic and forty-nine percent Republican. This is a slight improvement for the Democrats. Similarly, fifty percent of respondents expressed approval of President Obama’s performance, as against forty-seven expressing disapproval. This, too, is an improvement.
And yet, on measure after measure, the majority of respondents have more confidence in Democrats than Republicans. Although Congress as a whole is held in such bad repute that child molesters may be more popular, Democrats in Congress are rated better than Republicans. When asked which party will do better in coping with the main national problems, Democrats come out ahead, 42 to 38 percent. Democrats have the edge on the economy, health care, Afghanistan, and helping the middle class. Republicans have a significant edge only on taxes, and their lead has shrunk. Democrats have worked themselves into a virtual tie with Republicans on dealing with the budget deficit. On the other hand, Republicans were long at a disadvantage on immigration, but now are in a tie with Democrats.
Specifically on health care reform, the public appears evenly split, with 47 percent supporting and 48 percent opposing the law. But most of the opponents are strongly opposed, and they outnumber the strong supporters, 35 to 26 percent. Forty percent of respondents would support an effort to repeal the health care reforms, as opposed to 47 percent who support those changes.
Substantively, then, the Democrats appear to be in a strong position. Thirty-three percent of respondents call themselves Democrats, twenty-three percent Republican, and thirty-nine percent independent. Slightly more independents admit to leaning Republican than Democrat. More people oppose the Tea Party movement than support it (40 to 47 percent).
Yet, 71 percent of respondents are unhappy about the way the federal government works, and 90 percent feel negatively about the state of the economy. More than 2/3 think that federal spending on economic stimulus has been wasted. Only 21 percent call themselves liberals, as against 34 percent conservatives and 43 percent moderates.
In short, Republicans stand to win an election even though more voters oppose their ideas than support them. What’s going on?
I suggest two interlocking factors. The first and most obvious is that “It’s the economy, stupid!” Submerging all the areas of agreement with Democrats is the reality of a stubbornly weak economic recovery. If Clinton could get voters to go against an incumbent George I on the basis of an economy far stronger than what we have now, it is scarcely surprising that the incumbent Barack Obama and his party are going to pay for the worst recession since the 1930s. And that’s true even if it means putting into power a crew that most voters don’t trust to make things better.
That leads to the second, less obvious explanation. Our democracy offers the voter only the bluntest of clubs with which to send messages. If we are unhappy with the state of public affairs, the system doesn’t allow us to vote for or against particular policies. The people don’t decide policy. They decide who is to make policy and rule over them. They have two meaningful choices: those who are in power and those who are not. So if voters are unhappy, they can only register that at election time by voting against the Ins, even if thereby they guarantee that things will get worse.
If we had proportional representation in Congress, at least we could vote for parties that came closer to representing what we really think, and let the multiple minorities hash it out in the parliament. But we don’t have that, and minor parties like the Libertarians or the Socialists never have a chance to break through. We are stuck with a Democratic Party that has to bridge from Blue Dogs to Barbara Boxer. No wonder it’s incoherent even with strong majorities in both houses and a strong mandate for the President.
The Democrats’ best chance to limit the damage is to get voters to focus on why a Republican victory will actually hurt the values and interests that voters care about. And obviously, turn out their supporters!
The Man from St. Malo
The Man from St. Malo
Think on it – how
many buildings
made – how many roads
laid bridges balanced fence posts
dug and strung how
amazing what we have
done.
Amazing
too all those we’ve trained
and killed and eaten all the noise
– fireworks rockets bullets
bombs – not much left
undone.
Boy what fun.
Hasn’t it been a good run?
I wonder if the man
from St. Malo ever thought
it would end, ever thought this
river taking him into that
new world would just
stop.
Commentary: I remember being moved as a young teen by the depiction of the explorers who came from Europe to the “New World.” The Man from St. Malo, a fictionalized account of one of these explorers – Champlain I believe – came to me as I considered the latest news of the collapse of the ecosystem that we are currently witnessing. His dependence on the river to navigate what he perceived as a new world seemed an appropriate metaphor for our current plight.
Nasty and Brutish
Nasty and Brutish:
Why Are Politics So Ugly Right Now?
John Peeler
The twenty months since Barack Obama’s inauguration have been marked by extraordinarily intense and venomous confrontation between the majority Democrats and the Republican opposition. Scurrilous rumors have been propagated about Obama himself: he’s a closet Muslim, he wasn’t born in the United States, he hates white people; the list just goes on and on. The prolonged battle for health care reform saw near-unanimous Republican opposition, including the deliberate distortion of the plan’s provisions in order to frighten senior citizens and others. It has been an ugly time.
The political climate, however, has been increasingly contentious over the last half century or more. We can remember the intense hostility provoked by the brash conservatism of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Many were as convinced then that Bush was subverting the constitution, as others make the same allegation now about Obama. Who can forget the prolonged Republican crusade against Bill Clinton, culminating in the failed attempt to remove him from office via impeachment? Recall the rancor surrounding Reagan’s Central American policy, including the Iran-Contra scandal that crippled him in his second term? The impeachment and resignation of Nixon can be seen as one of the roots of Republican resentment. Remember the late sixties and early seventies: the antiwar movement, the Black Power movement, civil rights agitation? When John Kennedy was assassinated, how plausible it was to think that Texas segregationists were behind it. And what about Joe McCarthy and his acolytes like Richard Nixon, accusing Democrats and government officials of Communist subversion?
So it’s been going on for a long time, but it really has gotten worse. McCarthy, after all, was repudiated, while today, purveyors of scurrilous accusations have millions of adherents. The civil rights movement really did succeed, at least at the legal level. Nixon’s impeachment had the support of a considerable number of Republicans. Democrats could have impeached Reagan over Iran-Contra, but did not, perhaps because they wanted to avoid further polarization of the country. Clinton, after suffering the humiliation of losing both houses of Congress in 1994, actually worked with the Republicans on a major welfare reform bill (before the Republicans turned around and tried to remove him). Even George W. Bush benefited from substantial Democratic support for his invasion of Iraq, and managed to get along with a Democratic Congress his last two years. The level of venom in Obama’s first two years is probably the worst that we’ve seen, but it’s not unprecedented.
Why is it so ugly? I suggest four reasons. First, there is real and widespread unhappiness with the state of the economy, the perfidy of Wall Street, bank bailouts, and government deficits. There is impatience with the weak results of government efforts to stimulate the economy. People are, in short, angry, and inclined to take it out on the party and president in power.
Second, people know that the country is in a bad way, and think that it will get worse. But there are sharp disagreements on what to do about it. Conservatives and Republicans are convinced that the answer to all problems is smaller government and lower taxes. Liberals and Democrats want stronger government to protect the public interest against self-serving big corporations. And moderates are just uncertain, but wish everyone could just get along. Many moderates voted for Obama because he promised to end the extreme partisanship that had characterized the Bush years.
The third point follows from the second. There is a real polarization of ideas that is more extreme than we have seen in a century. President Obama’s futile efforts at conciliation notwithstanding, there is little room for compromise between conservatives and liberals today. What we get instead is the deadlock produced by the constitutional checks and balances of our political institutions, where each side can block the other, and each can blame the other.
Finally, in the last twenty years, and in the context of the preceding three conditions, we have seen the emergence of a take-no-prisoners political style, particularly on the Republican side (e.g., the Tea Party movement) that thrives by mobilizing the most intense and extreme partisans, and that denies the fundamental legitimacy of their opponents. These are the people for whom Obama’s victory signified the subversion of America, and that is why they speak of “taking our country back.”
Is there a way out of this? I don’t see one in the short term. The fever has to run its course.