A reader offers his observations of where we are today:
Others and I have posted quite a bit about this issue in other threads of the blog. In fact, I wrote at some length of the convergence of the Democrats and Republicans (or as a friend calls the two parties, the “Republocrats”; I like “Demonicans” myself). Rather than copy that post, I’ll lay out my view briefly:
1. The baby boomer Democrats became country club Republicans in all but name. (Remember when Jerry Rubin became an investment banker?) I find a lot of truth in E.J. Dionne’s discussion of this shift in his book “Why Americans Hate Politics”: He points out that the the internal dynamics of the Democratic party changed greatly when the baby boomers won major primary reforms in the early ’70s during the McGovern campaign. The rule changes greatly favored the power of the middle- and upper middle-class, college educated voters and began to dilute the more traditional blue collar powers. Thus, the Democrats started moving away for the left on economic issues and became more liberal on social issues, setting up the great defection of the blue collar voters to Reagan in 1980.
2. Union jobs became passe. Michael Moore explained in his movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” how the new middle class of the 1950s created a generation that had good schools, went to college, and abandoned the sorts of jobs that are traditionally unionized. Instead, the children of the auto workers and other blue collar parents became interested in white collar careers that traditionally were a bastion of GOP support. Families left the cities for the suburbs, owing houses, and taking up the lifestyles traditionally found among GOP supporters. We move to a “culture of contentment”, as J.K. Galbraith put it, which favors policies that protect individual wealth.
3. The intellectual left died in in the McCarthy witch hunts. As Chris Hedges points out in his book “The Death of the Liberal Class”, the 1950s took a huge toll on academics who sided with leftist views, leaving colleges and universities increasingly dominated by conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys. By the late 1960s, as Christopher Lasch points out in “The Age of Narcissism”, the left in America had become moribund.
I think history bears these observations out quite well. By the end of the Carter administration, the country had largely abandoned support for labor and social activism, and had become extremely focused on material wealth. The culture became dominated by a libertarian idea that we would all get along just fine if left to our own devices. The great stock market bubbles of the ’80s and ’90s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to prove that we could all get rich off of our investment portfolios and had no need for government outside of defense. During that time, the rise of Clinton and Gore and the new DLC cemented the changes that started in the ’70s. Obama carries that torch today, acting like a more like a progressive in the mold of Walter Lippmann than a New Deal reformer like FDR.
Slowly, people are realizing that we have lost our middle class and risk falling into a pit of crony capitalist corporatism. But we have not seen a real leader to show us the way back–yet. I can’t support the Demonicans; I’m voting Green this year to help support a move back from the brink.
I sympathize with all the feelings, but voting Green just gives a green light to Romney.
The soul of the Democratic Party still lives in the people, if only a brave few of the true leaders anymore, and it can be saved. But it will take work, and no illusions that changing a few bricks at the top of the pyramid will be all we need to proclaim a New Age.
Bill Clinton sold the soul of the Party years ago. We need to make it clear that we won’t keep voting Democrat out of a sense of nostalgia.
It wasn’t Bill’s to sell. We paleo-liberals took a calculated risk on a “double-southern strategy” because the straits were, as usual, dire. Even then the future looked a heck of a lot brighter, but the same thing happened to Clinton as happened to Obama — the base of the party forgot that we have elections every 2 years not 4. So it wasn’t soul so much as brains.
As disappointed as I am in the current administration, I remember the consequences of third party votes in 2000. Please stay within the Democratic Party and help us change it. The election is too close to give Mitt Romney the chance to appoint Supreme Court judges for life – who in turn change the rules of the game to permanently disenfranchise the poor and laboring classes.
Taft-Hartley did a lot to kill the left.
addendum:
Centrist Democrats like Hubert Humphrey voted to override Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartly and drive a dagger into the heart of organized labor.
Voting for the Green Party is not worth the time or the effort to even go to the polling place and only gains personal faction as no one else cares about the few that will vote Green. As much as one hates to say it, there is more to lose in this election than to gain. If Romney is allowed to win because you vote Green or not vote, you are voting for future Supreme Court justices in the same mold as Scalia and Thomas. That fact alone is the one reason that it is important to vote for Obama.
This is a lot of fearmongering. Sotomayor is certainly no Brennan or Douglas; so at best you’ll get another slightly-right-of-center justice. We can’t keep allowing our votes to be held at knife point any more. Obama won’t do much better than Romney, especially given the capture of the Senate by Wall Street. Better to have a fast crash now than a slow death.
Yes, we must vote for Obama. Otherwise, the consequences could be terrible: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/obama-romney-debate
But everything Greenwald mentioned came to pass already under Obama! The TARP, the retroactive immunity, the prison state, the elimination of our Bill of Rights protections, the crushing inequality. In short, we’re already at the point that those at the top play by different rules, and there’s no difference between Romney and Obama.
So, I suspect Greenwald was writing tongue-in-cheek.
Yes, he was writing tongue-in-cheek. Greenwald has been on the Democrat’s case for hypocrisy for at least three years now. He was very anti-Bush, and he supported Obama thinking that Obama would end the Bush-era abuses. Only rather gradually was he willing to see how Obama and the Democrats have, in fact, carried on, expanded and legalized Bush’s agenda. I give him a lot of credit for opening his eyes and, in fact, he has been instrumental in opening my eyes. I love his writing style because he has a very ironic way of drawing people in, thinking he’s pro-Obama, but in fact what he’s doing is pointing out how very similar Bush, Obama and Romney all are.
Thanks, Dienne. I got a bit confused for a moment, especially given the comments of those who are too afraid of Romney to see the electoral charade.
technical: Ms. Ravitch, this post needs an right after “brink.” so reader comments aren’t italicized. — quite agree with the reader-author here.
The part about McArthyism and the destruciton of the intellectuals reminds me of this article, which a regular participant on the Pelto blog shared. It is about the intellectual neutering and corporatization of higher academia:
http://www.alternet.org/how-higher-education-us-was-destroyed-5-basic-steps
Very interesting article; I think it describes the end game well. But the whole process has been going on for decades.
A technical comment: this post needs an right after “brink.” to fix the way everything downstream of that is italicized. I imagine you deleted it inadvertently, perhaps in the course of removing the author’s name. — I quite agree with what the reader had to say.
Diane – sort of off-topic, but after the debacle with the letters, I think we could all use a bit of a positive focus, if we can find one. It seems like every day I read about a new state or district falling prey to NCLB/RttT/charters/testing/privatization/etc. Is there any state which, as a whole, has steadily resisted the above? Are there any state level officials that you know of – governors or heads of state departments of education, for example, who are firmly against the above and firmly supportive of real public education? I know there are plenty of districts here and there, but it would be very heartening to find a whole state that’s not in Obama’s or Romney’s pocket.
Of course, if there are none, I’m going to be sorry I asked and even more depressed than I was/am over the letters.
We’re going to have to fight from the ground up: School boards, state office campaigns, letters to the editor, etc. Diane has certainly showed there are many people who are fighting to stop this, and with some success, but we have to write off Washington for now.
I know, unfortunately. But I just thought that maybe if there were one state that was doing it right we’d have something to model, and something to cite for comparison sake.
Unfortunately, the NCLB Act was legislation, and as far as I know, all states must comply or run the risk of losing serious funding.
The RttT initiative was not legislation. It was a carrot. So we must wait what might be another decade before we could assert that RttT was a failure (like we have with NCLB).
But here is where it can get really depressing. I believe that ultimately the RttT initiative will not come out looking nearly as bad as NCLB. I believe teachers will produce higher test scores by teaching to the test, or teaching THE test, or downright cheating (in rare cases). Administrators will continue to game the system. So test scores will go up, at least in terms of state-mandated tests. Of course, none of this means that kids are learning anything other than how to better take a test.
But here’s where it will get real hairy in a decade – PISA, TIMSS, NAEP, ACT, and SAT scores will be stagnant at best. These will be the only indicator that will truly reflect the effects of RttT, and I don’t see them improving too much.
So the question will remain, how long, and how many administrations of the aforementioned tests, will it take until RttT is viewed as a disaster. And will politicians be able to spin their way out of PISA, TIMSS, NAEP, ACT, and SAT outcomes by flaunting higher proficiency rates on state-mandated tests, such as what TN has done in their recent report involving an assessment of the first year of their new evaluation system.
Absolutely! And–start locally. Change begins with step-by-step events (such as forming more Parents Across America affiliates, electing the N.J. teacher and Glenda Ritz; state candidates such as Elizabeth Warren, local school board members, and changes within state NEA and AFT affiliates, resultant in state–then national–changes in union leadership and responsiveness) which, eventually, will produce the national groundswell needed to stop this madness!
Labor is going to have to form its own Party. I do not mean the sellout bureaucrats who presently mislead the labor movement. I mean new leaders from the rank and file who break with the Democrats and place the interests of the public, not the corporations, first with our own program and our own candidates.
These are excellent points, and succinctly written. Thank you for the book recommendations – I plan on looking into them.
An additional or perhaps alternate explanation for the right-ward shift in US politics is the increasing importance of $ in US politics. Ever since Washington’s time, a successful politician needed at least some $ to get elected. However, starting in perhaps the 1960s, TV began to so dominate the mass media that TV advertising became an absolute necessity in contested elections, particularly at the federal and governor races. TV advertising is very expensive. The ability to raise a lot more $ than your opponent became increasingly important. As the $-raising competition became more intense, candidates/politicians came under increasing competition to seek the support of the wealthy. For Republicans, this meant moving far to the right on economic issues. For the Democrats, this meant moving from the left to the center on economic issues and moving from the center to the left on social issues (in order to attract the financial support of the rich liberals — such as the Hollywood types — who were often far to the left of most Americans on social issues (i.e., abortion, gay rights, gun control, God-in-the-schools).
The importance of TV advertising in political campaigns was due — in large part — to the power of TV as a communication medium. However, it was reinforced by the decline during the same time period (1970 through now) of competing channels for influencing voters. Newspapers died rapidly throughout this time period — in the 1960s, most cities had at least two dailies and there was usually at least one liberal daily; today, most cities have only one daily (some now have no major daily newspaper) and many cities have no liberal-leaning daily newspaper. Membership in voluntary associations — social clubs, business clubs, sporting clubs, unions, church-related organizations — have declined with regard to both the percentage of the population involved in the organization and the importance of the organization in the individual’s life; accordingly, these organizations play a much smaller role today than they did 50 years ago in influencing a voter’s attitudes (creating a vacuum that TV has filled). The strength of family ties has similarly declined over these 50 years; an increasing percentage of children have gone off to college and an increasing percentage of adult children live far from their parents/relatives — trends that have lessened the influence that parents have on how their adult children vote (again, creating an influence vacuum that TV has filled).
Bottom line — TV is way more important in political campaigns than it was 100, 50, or even 30 years ago; TV advertising is very expensive; candidates therefore have to adopt positions on the issues that will attract the support of rich donors — with the result that Republicans and Dems will more to the right on economic issues and Dems will move to the left on social issues.
Good points. I think you can add them under the “wealth protection” point. The “culture of contentment” sees wealth as an end, and therefore gives money a political voice.
An interesting idea: Vote Romney–Avoid our invisible, crypto-fascist, corporatist state by bringing out the fascist monster we all can see and fight.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/12/america-on-the-cusp-of-fascism/
Yesterday I got a call from the Obama campaign to help out. I said, NO. I am voting for Dr. Jill Stein because my vote doesn’t count in OR, where the “pseudo-left” coast prevails. (I didn’t use those exact words.)
She wondered what President Obama could do to change my mind before the election. I said it would start with firing Tim Geithner and Arne Duncan.
I’d love to share this amazing short video of Dr. Jill Stein before she was arrested in NY before the last debates. But it looks as though it was taken down.
http://www.jillstein.org/mockumentary_debate
UNBELIEVABLE!!!!
In the few minutes, she spoke of the indentured servitude of young people with student debt–among many other things.
Jill Stein for President!!!