Crossposted from the Big Orange
Sometime in late November or early December, on my long ride to work in the warehouse, I listened to a speech by Paul Krugman, to the California Commonwealth Club, podcast by the Australia Broadcasting Company’s Radio National (mp3).
One part of the speech that struck me was:
A bigger issue, which I do worry about, is if we do have a Democratic President, will he or she actually follow through? During the gilded age, and we are living in a second gilded age, the only Democrats who got anywhere near the White House tended to be what were called at the time Bourbon Democrats. They were Democrats who were very nearly as much in the pocket of the robber barons as the Republicans of the time. Not quite, but very nearly. And so I sometimes say that we hope we’re about to elect another FDR. We might be about to elect another Grover Cleveland, which would be deeply disappointing if that’s what happens.
This is something other than a Lazy Quote Diary (though I sometimes greatly appreciate a good LQD) … so some quotes, but also some ruminations, below the fold.
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Krugman’s Thesis
This speech seems to be presenting Krugman’s thesis from A Conscience of a Liberal (I say seems to be, since I had much more time for listening to audio podcasts than I had for reading books over the last month).
In any event, the thesis of the speech is that the extended period of “movement Conservative” political domination that we have been passing through rests upon a fundamental divorce between politics and policy. And, courtesy the Australian ABC Radio National, I have a transcript of their program which aired the speech (click on “Show Transcript”).
The politics of this political domination has been, in a word, race:
All right. When I looked in some detail at the political history, it turns out that although there’s a chapter entitled ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’, it turns out that the core of it, although national security clearly swung the 2002 and 2004 elections, and actually the moral value stuff much less important. The enduring source of the ability of a Movement Conservatism to win elections has in fact not been that, it has been race. The centrality of race to the American political story was not something I expected to find when I began working on this book, but it just becomes overwhelmingly clear once you start to do the work.
So let me give you a story and a statistic. The story is this: when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he turned to Bill Moyers, who was then his aide, and he said, ‘We’ve just given the South to the GOP, for my lifetime and yours.’ … And that appears to actually have been right. And so if you look to an extraordinary extent, what has happened in American politics can be seen as the success of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, once you take account of just five words: Southern Whites started voting Republican. There isn’t much left over to explain.
So here’s my statistic. From Larry Bartel in the Politics Department at Princeton, we all know that white males have turned on the Democratic party, have left the Democratic party, and there’s a whole list of reasons given for that. But it’s not exactly true unless you add an additional word, which is, it’s really just Southern White males who have left the Democratic party. All the stories you’ve heard about alienated, working-class voters in the country, once you take account of the great southern switch, there’s nothing left to explain, nothing much happened. The stories you’ve seen about evangelicals are very largely, not entirely but very largely just about the Southern switch, because there are a lot more evangelicals in the South. Almost everything else boils away.
Does that mean that the architects and practitioners of the “Southern Strategy” did so in order to achieve racist ends? Krugman argue that, rather, they did so in order to achieve an intrinsically unpopular end, which is rolling back the New Deal … which, of course, entails the elimination of the bulk of the Great American Middle Class.
And Krugman reminds us that the emergence of the Great American Middle Class was not a long unfolding process, but rather a deliberate result of American policy over less than a decade:
The first is that the middle-class society I grew up in did not evolve gradually. You might think that there was the era of the robber barons and then gradually America turned into the America of Ozzie and Harriet, whatever. That it gradually evolved into this middle-class society. That is not what the data or the available stories tell us. What they tell us is in fact that as far as we can tell, the Gilded Age lasted right through the 1920s. America on the eve of the New Deal was very nearly as unequal as it had been in the 1890s, and that the middle-class relatively egalitarian society was created in a very short period of time, between the late 1930s and the end of World War II. The economic historians call it ‘the great compression’, as the income differences got compressed. And it’s as important a story about 20th century America as the Great Depression, which we all know about, that was much less told. And you look at what happened and it was the Roosevelt Administration through a whole set of policies, but all of them equalising; much higher tax rates on the wealthy, higher corporate tax rates, a pro-union organising environment, so you had an explosion in union membership, tripling of the share of the workforce, the minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, all of these things. And then the process accelerated because during World War II there were extensive government controls on the economy, which were used in a way that tended to equalise incomes. All this created a middle-class society in a period of not more than about seven or eight years.
Now you might have thought, Well OK, but that’s all artificial, especially the stuff during the war, so it would go away as soon as peacetime returned. But it didn’t. It turns out that once you create institutions, norms, expectations of a relatively equal society, it tends to persist. So the income distribution is relatively middle-class society that was created by the New Deal, persisted for more than a generation after World War II.
And yet, it finally has started to come apart. And why? The same way is started … through deliberate government policy:
Governor Alquist [sic: Norquist], Americans for Tax Action, we like him in a way. Somebody pointed out that Governor Alquist is sort of like a James Bond villain, who explains at length his evil plans, and so we like to quote him. The quote everyone uses, the one about getting the government down to the size where you can drown it in your bathtub. But the one I always liked is when asked what he wants, he said he wants to get America back to the way it was before Teddy Roosevelt and the socialists came in. So, undo the 21st – OK.
But we’re not talking about some crank, we’re talking about somebody who actually until last November, was part of the Republican process of vetting people who got lobbyist appointments. You know, a central part of the whole mechanism.
That’s Teddy Roosevelt … not Franklin. The Republican Roosevelt went too far, for Movement Conservatives, with his trust busting and food safety regulations … and if you start with Teddy Roosevelt being a Pinko, then never mind FDR and Social Security … well, obviously that’s deep, deep red.
We Need a Fighter
However, keep in mind that the policies themselves did require subterfuge to push through. They were not won honestly … the fight to persuade a majority of people to roll back the clock to the turn of the Nineteen Naughties was never fought … so it was never won.
And the fruits of the New Deal … the Great Compression that led to the Great American Middle Class … they remain popular with the majority. Not just a slender majority of “those who have the right to vote but do not tend to exercise it” … but popular among a majority of the actual electorate.
And, just as Krugman argues, the politics of race that the “Movement Conservatives” have used to gain power to implement fundamentally unpopular economic policies are coming up against a trend … the waning of the influence of race on individual attitudes. We can debate all we want “how strong” attitudes to race are at some particular point in time, but there is little doubting that in relative terms, its influence is weaker today than it was two decades ago … and if we remember what close things the last two elections were, marginal changes can be critical.
And to that we must add a phenomenon of the moment … that is the wrecking ball that is the final years of the Bush administration, who seem to all be reciting in unison, “after us, the flood”. And the Republican Party has trapped itself, with “The Base” spoiled by the years of the “majority of the majority” rule, so now the Republicans are trapped, by fear of being primaried, into backing the position of “the majority of the minority”.
And then we have to add to that the longest lasting consequence of the election of 2006 … the extra-ordinary partisan tilt of the Senate cohort of 2006. That is a gift that keeps on giving for two further sessions of Congress … which means that the political opportunity is there to rake an obstructionist minority in the Senate over the coals in the upcoming session of Congress, and reap the rewards in time for the 2010 cohort to vote alongside the 2006 cohort.
But that cannot happen unless there is a President ready, willing, and able to fight. I am perfectly happy to listen politely if you wish to argue that Senators Clinton or Obama represent the best combination of being ready, willing, and able to fight. However, to my mind, John Edwards represents the strongest combination of the three.
“Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man”
And this is of course why they say, “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. FDR was only FDR because of his background, then his experience in fighting the paralysis caused by polio, in the context of the crisis facing the nation at that time. Lincoln was only Lincoln because of his background, and his deep convictions, in the context of the crisis facing the nation at that time. Washington was only Washington because of his background and his character, in the context of the crisis facing the emerging nation at that time.
And we also all too easily forget all the others who did so much in the environments that they fostered to help pursue the visions that they had.
I personally don’t look on John Edwards as “another” Washington, Lincoln, or FDR … but then the challenges we face are quite different in character, again.
In the end, the strongest challenge that John Edwards faces is us. If we are afraid to fight, he can rally us to fight all day and all night, and it will be to no avail. If we are confident that a Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat, is the best we can get, a Grover Cleveland will be the best we can get. If we quail in fear that the Republicans will run on continued war and win, so we better try to run on continued war but more competently executed … then continued war is what we will get.
So, as I said, I am happy to listen politely to arguments that Senators Clinton or Obama are ready, willing, and able to lead the fight. However, if the argument is that we shouldn’t fight, because we cannot win, so we have to knock on the gate and politely ask to enter … well, the hell with that. I’ve been seeing the Movement Conservatives playing this BS game since my first Presidential election, in 1980, and I’m raring to have a go at kicking those damn gates down.
