and the regressive becomes set in concrete.
Power and money is what gives rise to progressive actions by “the people” and power and money is what destroys the progressive intent and flips it..
A California example – the direct democracy initiative process: A hundred and ten years ago in California:
The entire state government had for decades been under the control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Bribery was the accepted method of doing business in the state capitol.
That was the degree of power that inspires today’s version of oligarchs.
Realizing the hopelessness of dealing with the current officeholders, Haynes and other reformers began a campaign to get rid of them and remake state government from top to bottom. In May of 1907, they founded the Lincoln-Roosevelt League of Republican Clubs, and elected several of their candidates to the state legislature.
That was Step One. Elect a few “better officeholders.” (Generally about the limits of liberal/ progressive thoughts and actions for the past thirty or so years.)
Step Two. Need more “better officeholders.”
Once elected, these legislators worked for a bill to require the nomination of party candidates through primary election rather than the backroom deals of state party conventions.
That was in 1910. When US Senators were still selected in “backroom deals.” More than half a century before Presidential nominees stopped being selected in smoke-filled backrooms.
Step Three: Taking back the legislature
The bill passed, and the League’s 1910 gubernatorial candidate, Hiram Johnson, ran in the state’s first primary election. Johnson won the primary and the general election and swept dozens of other reformers into the legislature on his political coattails.
Step Four: Doing what they were elected to do (Or what’s the point in getting power if not to use it?)
Johnson and the new Progressive majority in the legislature made the most sweeping governmental changes ever seen in the history of California. Among these were the introduction of initiative, referendum, and recall at both the state and local levels. Voters ratified these amendments in a special election on October 10, 1911.
In 1912, there were five titled initiatives and four qualified for the ballot. The one that failed to qualify was to abolish the death penalty.
In 1914, there were 21 titled initiatives and 12 qualified for the ballot. One of the qualifiers was Proposition 44: Minimum wage (page 29) –
Authorizes the legislature to provide for establishment of a minimum wage for woman and minors, and for comfort, health, safety, and general welfare of any and all employees; …
In the argument for passage, it was noted that wages for girls and women at that time were better in California than in older industrial states and that 60% earned $9/week or more. The funding and support for and against would be familiar to us today even if the arguments on both sides were slightly different. For example, the advocates cited an expected wave of new cheap labor to flood the state when the Panama Canal opened and therefore, existing CA workers needed wage protections.
It failed. And the beat goes on.
Forty years on and the forces for ill didn’t quite have their act together:
One of the highest stakes initiative campaigns in terms of campaign spending was in 1956, over a struggle over changes in the state regulation and taxation of oil and gas production. Proposition 4 that year was sponsored by a group of oil companies that sought to make their business more profitable, and opposed by another group of oil firms that preferred the existing system. Campaign funds spent by both sides totaled over $5 million. Proposition 4 lost: California voters, inundated with conflicting claims about a complex measure, took the cautious route and voted “no.”
Two years later:
Almost as expensive was the gargantuan 1958 labor-capital conflict over a “Right to Work” (open shop) initiative sponsored by employers. This battle ended in a double defeat for employers: not only did voters decisively reject the initiative, but the opposition campaign mobilized Democrats and union members to vote in droves, resulting in the election of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr., the first Democrat to occupy that office in 16 years.
Imagine that. California voters way back in 1958 were smarter and savvier than Wisconsin voters in 2014. Maybe folks in Wisconsin are wearing too much cheese on their heads.
Alas, those smarts didn’t last. Along came Proposition 14 (1964):
Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.
(Sound familiar? Proposition 8 (2010) and IN RFRA (2015)? Fortunately, the CA Supreme Court and SCOTUS ruled Prop 14 (1964) as unconstitutional. But why do we have to spend so much time on this shit again and again?)
Corporations and the big money folks finally got their act together with Proposition 13 (1978. Democrats/liberals/progressives then wandered in the wilderness for the better part of the next thirty years. And so far don’t seem to get that thing about taking full advantage of power when you get it. If nothing else, that’s one lesson that Republicans fully absorbed a hundred years ago.
The CA initiative process, as it currently exists, (authorized killing of gays makes the IN RFRA look like weak tea) and Proposition 13 (1978) must die. Right along with Charlie’s Pierce’s observation that The Iowa Caucus Must Die. (more on that in II)
This is a worthwhile summary.
It seems to me that the initiative process in California has not worked as well for the liberal/progressive movement after campaign finance laws became loosened to the advantage of plutocrats. This accelerated after those plutocrats figured out that spending obscene amounts of money to buy elections is often an investment that can make them dollars on the penny.
What has often happened recently is popular initiative proposals such as 2014’s Prop 37 and 2006’s Prop 87 easily get on the ballot and poll well initially, but are swamped by tens of millions of $ of horribly misleading ads. Alternatively, regressive and poor policy initiatives such as 1978’s Props 6 and 13, 1994’s Prop 187, 2008’s Prop 8, and the very many Propositions which have attempted to take away Unions’ political power and teenage girls’ reproductive choices, have gotten on the ballot and either passed or nearly passed after a huge, resource-consuming fight because massively funded campaigns by the regressives have disguised the poor morality and bad policy of these Props.
Finally, I’d end by responding to this:
“Corporations and the big money folks finally got their act together with Proposition 13 (1978. Democrats/liberals/progressives then wandered in the wilderness for the better part of the next thirty years. And so far don’t seem to get that thing about taking full advantage of power when you get it.“
“…wandered in the wilderness…” overstates it a bit. Californians began electing Democratic Party majorities in 1996, and those majorities turned into supermajorities in 2012. This fits awfully tightly into the frequently stated premise that Prop 187’s explicitly racist and partisan appeals have created durable damage to the State GOP*.
As far as “…taking full advantage of power when you get it”, this misunderstanding of Legislative governing rules is persistent, which is a damn shame. Sure, the Dems have had majorities in the Legislature for nearly 20 years, but for almost all of those years they needed a few Republican votes to pass the yearly budgets because of Prop 13-installed rules requiring supermajorities to pass budgets and increase revenues. The GOP Senators and Assemblymembers began extracting ever more absurd prices for those increasingly few votes needed to pass a budget each year of the 2000’s, and they remained completely unwilling to budge on revenue.
With the political illiteracy and regressiveness of the Schwarzenegger Administration added to the dysfunction, this meant that regressive policy demands were in COMPLETE control of the budget negotiations of that decade. Progressives and others who claim that Obama and the Dems had full control of the Federal budget in ’09-’10 have similarly mistaken interpretations of reality.
Even the first State budget cycle of the current Jerry Brown Administration saw more preposterousness as Jerry went to extreme measures to cut deals with the four Republican Legislators needed to pass a reasonable budget on time. Neither happened; the budget was late and the intransigent GOP’ers finished off the evisceration of the General Fund, which was slashed by many, many tens of billions of dollars during these years. I believe the budget was cut by over 33% in pure dollar numbers during the decade, even without adding the inflation rate and population growth.
*The damage the GOP did to their ability to gain support from the growing Hispanic voting bloc is not the only explanation for these decades of Dem dominance, though, and the CRP could begin helping their candidates gain more Hispanic votes tomorrow by repudiating the Party’s racist platform and rhetoric, but the Party base and not a small amount of their Legislative Caucusmembers really are racists and/or support policies and rhetoric which attack minorities, so that seems difficult for them to pull off.
Worthy contribution, but not sure the details you add change my argument. When it takes a super-majority to get the toughest things accomplished, it’s the the date a super-majority is elected, and not the date of winning a majority, that’s important. Also, there were sixteen years between being in a majority and super-majority position. Sixteen years is almost a generation.
Should have more specifically cited the date Democrats achieved a super-majority for when they could exercise power — and my criticisms applied to the conservative (and reactionary) tilt of Brown who are doing enough of the corrective actions needed after forty years of mismanagement.
Unfortunately, due to the horribleness of the State Republican caucus in the last 20 years, it has increasingly taken a supermajority to get ANYTHING done, not just the difficult things. And, because of Prop 13, the Republicans were able and willing to control the entire budget process even when they only held 38% of the Legislature. It cost their Party dearly, but they got something out of it.
Yes, we could discuss the Mod Squad in the Dem caucus in the 2000’s, and Governor Brown now, and the new attempt by billionaire libertarians to buy control of the CDP. The last particularly worries me.
But we need to deal with the fact that we have ideological cleavage now. The most conservative member of the Legislative Democrats is more liberal than the most liberal member of the Leg Republicans. That’s true of Congress as well. It’s true of the POTUS candidates.
This wasn’t true in the past; it is now. Clear-eyed perspective is valuable. This doesn’t mean that I want us to be ignorant of Bill C.’s signing of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and welfare reform, or Obama’s pushing to get TPP Fast-Track passed. These really are horrible, and do not represent what the Democratic Party should be.
To bring it back to California, though, just imagine what we would have experienced this decade if we had a Governor Whitman. As displeased as I am with Jerry, would Meg have slammed away at the bully pulpit to get Californians to vote to tax themselves with a Proposition which weighed very heavily on the side of taxing the rich?
While the distance between evil and lesser evil doesn’t seem to have changed much over the decades, it’s not only tiresome having vote out of the fear of evil but disturbing to acknowledge that today’s lesser evil may be close to what was evil in the past.
Some days “eat, drink, and be merry” seems like the better alternative to being a leftie Sisyphus.
Well, I would disagree that, for example, the ACA represents something created by an evil group of people or political Party. Imperfect as it is, the ACA is meeting a number of very important policy objectives, has helped tens of millions of Americans improve their health, saved millions from bankruptcy, deprivation and needless pain, literally saved a whole lot of lives, helped make Medicare much more sustainable, and is on pace to reduce future budget deficits. It is not single payer, yet these attributes remain.
Those outcomes aren’t evil in any generation.
Didn’t the health insurance exchange component of the ACA begin January 2014? Not going to dispute that millions of people now have private health insurance or Medicaid that they didn’t have before. However, evaluations of the aggregate health benefits and costs based on fifteen months into the program are way too premature. A minimum of three years in operation of any program are needed before the first assessment can be made. Particularly for a program that’s as large and complex as the ACA with a huge number of moving parts.
There is nothing integral to the ACA that tackles the sustainability of Medicare. And it can’t be credited with reducing the average annual beneficiary cost inflation rate as reported by HHS:
There are many reasons why the inflation rate for health care costs began to decline in 2009. Primarily, a major recession. As most people are still struggling financially, health care spending should continue to increase at a slow rate than in the period from 1989-2008.
We won’t see the annual report on Medicare for the first full year after implementation of the ACA for a few more months.
My optimistic assessments, your pessimistic assessments, and anywhere else along the judgement scales still get us to an unavoidable “not evil” conclusion.