Peter Beinart’s take on Alterman’s piece is kind of interesting. Two things stuck out for me. The first was this:
It’s true that the filibuster is used more often today than during FDR and LBJ’s time, but back then, conservative committee chairman often kept progressive legislation from even reaching the Senate floor.
He’s right about that and it’s something I’ve kind of overlooked when writing about that era. Because the geographic anchor of the Democratic Party was in the South and the Republican Party was so weak down there, southern senators tended to serve for life. They had the most seniority and so they held most of the important gavels. The effect of that is hard to see from our vantage point because we’re looking for the absence of something. It was easier for the upper chamber to be collegial when the Democrats that truly wielded power were pretty damn conservative. That’s why the filibuster lay mostly dormant and also why the one issue that did arouse it was civil rights for blacks.
The second thing I found interesting about Beinart’s views was this:
The more fundamental difference between the Obama era and its New Deal and Great Society predecessors is this: Back then, progressives did not define the left end of the political spectrum. In the 1930s and 1960s, America featured honest-to-goodness alternatives to capitalism, home-grown radical movements that scared the crap out of the American establishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into arms of reformers like FDR and LBJ. Because our entire ideological spectrum has shifted right since communism’s collapse, reforms that once looked like centrist compromises now look like the brainchild of Chairman Mao.
In the 1930s, some of America’s most prominent intellectuals saw communism as a serious alternative to Depression-era capitalism. (One reason so many writers and artists got in trouble during the McCarthyite scare of the early 1950s was that so many had flirted with pro-communist groups during FDR’s presidency). And while American communism never became a mass movement, the Depression years birthed home-spun assaults on capitalism that were almost as frightening.
The failure of communism might have made the left more reputable in this country, but it’s basically had the exact opposite effect. Terrorism replaced communism as the justification for the national security state, and any semblance of radical left in this country withered away. As things stand now, when a Democratic president proposes the Heritage Foundation’s 1993 health care plan, he’s a socialist.
If there were reds fulminating on Obama’s left with the same degree of passion as the Tea Partiers, his agenda would be more appealing to frightened businessmen. The thing is, that’s not happening and it’s not something you can plan. I think those types of movements need to be funded by some entity and they require a degree of auto-catalysis. I don’t know exactly why current economic conditions are not leading to unrest on the left, but I think television has a lot to do with it. And I don’t just mean how politics are presented on teevee. I mean mainly that people are stunned lazy by non-political entertainment.
Whatever the case, the left is smaller in this country than it used to be, and it doesn’t have room to break up into factions and still stay in power. So, I don’t see Beinart’s analysis as wrong, but I don’t think it’s too helpful.
