An interesting article in Salon, by Michael Lind, tells, “How Democrats can win big in 2010 and beyond — by doing the opposite of what they’re doing now.” Prior to 1968, Lind says, the two party system consisted of the Roosevelt Party and the Hover Party, but since 1968, the two party system has been the Nixon Party and the McGovern Party.
Lind writes, “Beginning with its namesake, George McGovern, in 1972, the McGovern Party has been trounced repeatedly by the Nixon Party, not because of its economic agenda, which the public actually prefers to the alternative, but because of its unpopular stands on issues like race-based affirmative action, illegal immigration, crime and punishment, and national security.”
He says, “There is no doubt that at some point between 2004 and 2008 American politics changed. It is clear to everyone, not least conservatives, that the era of right-wing hegemony that began with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 has come to an end.” Excerpts from the article:
“Between 1932 and 1964, the Roosevelt Party won seven of nine presidential elections, losing only in 1952 and 1956. Between 1968 and 2004, the Nixon Party won seven out of 10 presidential elections, losing only three times, to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Was this because red-state Rooseveltians were won over to supply-side economics, while blue-state blue-bloods suddenly became enamored of abortion rights and separation of church and state? No. Today’s red-state Republican children of New Deal Democrats still like Social Security, and the Republican grandparents of today’s blue-state Protestant Democrats were in favor of birth control — for the Catholics, in particular. The values of these voting blocs didn’t change. The issues that defined national politics changed. …
“The Roosevelt Party ran on economic issues, and didn’t care whether voters were in favor of sex or against it on principle as long as they supported the New Deal. The McGovern Party, by contrast, has made social issues its litmus test. Economic conservatives have had a home in the McGovern Party, as long as they support abortion rights and affirmative action, but social democrats and populists who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action are not made nearly as welcome. …
“FDR was able to assemble his coalition only because social issues did not divide his voters. Nobody ever asked FDR or Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson their views on contraception, or abortion, or censorship. Not only were those issues not central to the message of the New Deal Democrats, they were not even national issues. …
“In fact, the majority of Americans, including many social conservatives, never ceased to support New Deal policies, which from Social Security and Medicare to the G.I. Bill have remained popular with the public throughout the entire Nixon-to-Bush era. Consider the results of a June 17, 2008, Rockefeller Foundation/Time poll. When “favor strongly” and “favor somewhat” are combined, one gets the following percentages for policies favored by overwhelming majorities: increase the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living (88 percent); increase government spending on things like public-works projects to create jobs (86 percent); put stricter limits on pollution we put into the atmosphere (85 percent); limit rate increases on adjustable rate mortgages (82 percent); provide quality healthcare to all, regardless of ability to pay (81 percent); impose higher tax incentives for alternative energy (81 percent); provide government-funded childcare to all parents so they can work (77 percent); provide more paid maternity/dependent care leave (76 percent); make it less profitable for companies to outsource jobs to foreign countries (76 percent); expand unemployment benefits (76 percent).
“Note that almost all of the policy proposals that excite the American public are exactly the sort of old-fashioned, “paleoliberal” spending programs or systems of government regulation that are supposed to be obsolete in this era of privatization, deregulation and free-market globalization, according to neoliberals and libertarians.
“The public wants the middle-class welfare state to be rounded out by a few major additions — chiefly, healthcare and childcare — and the public also wants the government to grow the economy by investing in public works and favoring companies that locate their production facilities inside the U.S. There, in a sentence, is a program for a neo-Rooseveltian party that could effect an epochal realignment in American politics.
“A Newer Deal party that ran on this economic agenda could attract Southern Baptist creationists as well as Marin County agnostics. …Had Clinton been interested in restoring the Roosevelt coalition, he would have veered left on economics and right on cultural issues. Instead, under the influence of Robert Rubin, Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which dismantled many firewalls between investment banks, securities firms and commercial banks that the New Deal Congress had put in place, inadvertently contributing to the economic disaster we are now experiencing. Instead of opposing race-based affirmative action in favor of universal programs open to economically disadvantaged whites, Clinton said he would “mend it, not end it” and then forgot even to mend it. …
“A big reason that the Democrats won back Congress in 2006 and are likely to keep it in 2008 is nominating and electing socially conservative economic populists like Heath Shuler. More progress. But to create an updated version of the New Deal, the Democrats have to treat economically liberal social conservatives as equal partners, with their own spokesmen and leadership roles in the party, not just as a handful of swing voters brought on reluctantly at the last moment….
“Unfortunately, the upper-middle-class left, with its unerring instinct for political suicide, is probably incapable of seizing the moment and bringing more Baptists and Catholics into the Democratic Party, because it has developed an almost superstitious distaste for religious conservatives. This might make sense if the religious right were still a menace, as it was a generation ago. But with the exception of state referenda and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, religious conservatives have lost one battle after another, from failed attempts to promote creationism on school boards to the doomed effort to repeal Roe v. Wade.
“There would have been no Progressive Era without the followers of William Jennings Bryan and no New Deal without the support of ancestors of many of today’s Protestant evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics. Social conservatives, having lost the culture war, should be offered not only a truce but also an opportunity to join a broad economic campaign for a middle-class America, as many of them did between 1932 and 1968. When pro-choicers and pro-lifers unite in cheering the public investment and living wage planks at the convention of the neo-Roosevelt party, we will know that the political era that began in 1968 is truly and finally over.”
From, “The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority,” written by Michael Lind, appearing in Salon.Com
Nice to see Michael Lind still around.
Lind is an apostate
Lind used to be a movement conservative, but then broke with them, partly over the influence of the religous right (which is interesting considering his final paragraph).
He discusses his break in his polemic “Up From Conservatism”, which was published in the late 1980s, during the heyday of the right. The book illusrates Linds commend of political history, which he shares with another right apostate Kevin Phillips.
Lind went on to write some usefull books. One of the best was a reader compiled by him, “Hamiltons’ Republic”, which makes a convicing case for a statist thread running through US political thought and policy, which is contrary to conservative spin on history, labling statism ‘socialism’.
This essay reflects this thinkng. And in some ways he reminds me of Thomas Frank, who also says that the Democrats’ giving up on economic populism lost them the blue collar/non-college educated vote).
I guess where Lind differs from Frank is that he seems willing to jettison the social justice tendency within the Democrats to play to the prejudices of the great unwashed. Or maybe just downplay it? I think his mission accomplished POV on the culture war really is a lot like Bush saying the same thing on the deck of that aircraft carrier…that the culture war is far from over.
I also think his problem is that when he see’s the Democrats as party of the little guy, he doesnt recognize that this could mean more than just the economic little guy.
What he talks about, though, was being discussed in left wing gay circles. I know it was an agenda item with the more lefty NGLTF when i went to one of their conferences, how to build coaltions across class, race, and gender lines as a sort of “patchwork majority”, particularly with the labor movement.
This article seems oversimplified. Democratic presidential candidates didn’t decide that social conservatism issues, about race, sex ,gender religious authority and war were more important to the blue collar voter than economic issues in 1968 and since. The blue collar voters decided that, in part because of disturbing and tumultuous events such as the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam war, Vatican II and the coming out of gays. In addition you had the end of postwar US economic hegemony, deindustrialization, and the decline of labor unions which put the blue collar voter at economic risk. Add the rise of money in politics which soom priced them out of the political market. Culturally a lot of this is described as “the sixties” and the Bush elections can be seen as an attempt to vanquish the sixties, with Bush narrowly winning but seemingly being vanquished himself.. But it has been 40 years since 1968 and the percentage of voters who remembers and yearns for the good old days before the sixties becomes smaller than those for whom life has always been after the sixties. A question is whether Obama will get enough voters who do not want to fight over the sixties in order to make a generational change.
Perhaps a bigger question about the blue collar voter is whether they remain priced out of the political market by the affluent whose campaign contributions define the limits of what is acceptable in the political process. All the fund raising between McCain, Obama and Clinton reflects various views within competing communities of economic affluence. No one gets to a point where Blue Collar votes matter without having raised millions from affluent constituencies, which then gets you taken seriously by the media. Some of those contributors will have to want to make America a better place for people of modest means, or else the latter will be abandoned by Democrats and Republicans alike, other than perhaps some symbolic stroking valuing them. Right now many people of modest means think that the best thing America has to offer them is a chance to serve in war, even though that often leads to injury and death for many.
The other issue is that both parties have been too busy serving the rich to offer up the kind of supports for economic security and upward mobility that whites and minorities of modest means would both support. And it is arguable that Roosevelt and the New Deal dealt with a national economy while today we have a global economy and our blue collar workers compete for jobs with impoverished people all over the world who are used to living on much less. Plus the thirties was hardly a paradise, but a time of poverty, suffering, lynchings, the dust bowl and foreclosures that put today to shame, among other things. Some will say that we have had a wartime economy ever since, that military spending is our New Deal, and that occasional wars like now are the price we pay for the affluence that we do have. And that there is much less solidarity among the poor and people of modest means than among the rich, much less identify with the poor and much more acceptance of privilege. Accordingly culture wars and class wars are not over, but are constantly changing. Immigration has gotten bigger, abortion may have gotten smaller, and race/class based behavior issues are always with us. The larger issue with culture wars is how much are they worth fighting. With the economic issues it may be how is it possible to fight them.
Democrats (and working-middle class Americans) definitely need the kind of Newer Deal that Michael Lind proposes. Both parties have been playing culture war games for decades as corporate interests have tightened their grip on this country.
The impact of globalization and unregulated free markets has touched the lives of not only displaced blue collar workers but also created a great deal economic insecurity among white collar types too.
If Democrats are willing to allow for a diversity of opinion within the party on social issues then it is far more possible to unite the working-middle class to defend their economic interests. As Lind points out, the base of a political party can shift greatly over time. The kind of widespread economic anxiety that we have in this country is the stuff that party realignments made of.