This is one of the most puzzling questions of our day.
Rachel Levy asks it in all sincerity.
How can the Democratic Party embrace individuals and groups that are working to elect Republicans? Why does it embrace individuals and groups that are actively working against unions, immigrant rights, gays, and public education?
Can anyone explain it? Is the tent so big that Democrats support those who support Republicans?
I don’t get it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THis is why teachers are losing. What does this have to do with academic excellence?
The ship is sinking and social justice prevails.
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MOM–Get a new brain or stop trolling. This post has quite a bit to do with education.
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Ditto moosesnsquirrels. Also, why don’t you get a new screenname – do you realize how offensive your current one is? Even though this is a blog for teachers, quite a few people who post here are moms (including many who post as teachers). To imply that anyone who doesn’t agree with you don’t have a brain is just an ad hominem attack, which says more about you than about anyone else.
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MomWithNoHeart:
THERE IS NO SOCIAL JUSTICE when 80% of the population holds only 7% of the wealth and when the top 1% buys the education legislation of their choice, from politicians on both sides of the aisle, rendering the two parties virtually indistinguishable.
Teachers have the brains to recognize that politics has already dominated education way too long, when cities like Chicago have 87% of children attending public schools living in poverty AFTER 17 years of mayoral controlled education reform. AND teachers have the heart to want to change this travesty of justice.
When it’s politics that’s driving education and the country has been taken for a ride this long, educators who are not morally bankrupt know they have no choice but to address it and to SEEK social justice.
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It was not teachers who turned education into a contentious political battle ground, but non-educators, who are the furthest from children in classrooms, bent on replacing democracy in education with dictatorships, fueled by their crony corporate capitalist sponsors, at the expense of America’s children. For decades, teachers played the hand they were dealt by accepting federal, state and local mandates, and now they are rising up against the tyranny.
BTW, your brain is not working at full capacity if you think education is only about academics. A well rounded education promotes competence in non-cognitive areas as well, which can in turn improve cognitive functioning, since growth in different developmental domains is inter-related.
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It’s called Neoliberal/ Free Market fundamentalism, and both parties have been captured by it.
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Other 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.
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Excellent analysis, R&B!
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It’s also called kissing corporate tush. A big smoocherino to Gates, Broad, the Waltons, Dell, DeVos, etc., ….cha ching $$$$$. Apologies for being vulgar.
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Politician, Reform Thyself.
P.S. And get the heck out of our faces until you do …
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Plain and simple these are Democrats that are corporatist. It’s money first learning last especially when it comes to a group of people that are not expected to do anything but vote for them. The question the corporate democrats ask. Where are they going surely they are not voting for republicans. It’s all about the money. All you have to do is look at who is getting seats on these boards. It’s usually people with money so party doesn’t matter. Everybody has a price and it includes corporate Democrats.
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To quote Caberet: It’s…Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money
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Seriously, the spectacle of corporate owned politicians, media moguls, media minions, and armies of business ethics dropouts lecturing educators on how to do their jobs has become too absurd to bear any longer. If politicians, journalists, and financial finaglers want to reform something, tell them to start with their own Augean stables. They have zero, absolutely zero credibility when it comes to lecturing others.
I realize that teachers are taught to be polite — to gently coax the minds of ignoramuses with the slyness of Socratic methods so subtle that the ignoramuses in question never have a clue who’s teaching who — but this is getting ridiculous. Teachers have been polite to a fault and far too subtle for the good of their own profession. It’s time to try another tack.
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Greed blurs political lines.
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The only thing I would add to moosensquirrel’s excellent summary is that party politics is all about the money. Politicians don’t get elected unless they get it, and that means they have to cozy up to those who have it, and those who have it are dominated by a neoliberal free-market mindset that aligns more with Republicans than working folks.
It’s been a long time since insider national Dems looked at labor and working people as their base. National Dem leadership, like the Republicans, differentiate themselves primarily on cultural issues–abortion and gay rights being currently foremost–and otherwise converge with Republicans on economic issues.
The Dems are like the Whigs of the late 1840s and early 1850s. They’ve lost their moral compass and are dominated by expediency-driven hacks like Rahm Emmanuel. It won’t change until ordinary folks get fed up enough and either reform the Dem party from the bottom up or, like the abolitionist Whigs and anti-slavery Dems of the the 1850s form a new party, but if the issue was slavery then the uniting issue now has to be economic fairness. In order to do that people have to agree to disagree about cultural issues and unite around the issues where they have common ground.
We give too many Dems a pass because they are politically correct on hot-button cultural issues.The effect otherwise of letting these issues dominate our political discourse is to keep ordinary Americans arguing in the front parlor about abortion, the war on Christmas, or whatever, while these elites from both parties sneak in the back door and rob them blind.
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Years ago this was called the “BLOB”. Perhaps this why INDEPENDENTS have increased in numbers and will be critical in November.Vote RIGHT and we may slow down things a little. Vote Left and see what full steam ahead really means. Choose carefully.
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