Beer nuts yum !
The late Abby Hoffman once observed that,"smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture has as much to do with the revolution as drinking milk and collecting postage stamps". I often think that sending email to left wing list-servs and blogging have as much to do with progressive politics as eating beer nuts and watching ESPN. This comes from someone who maintains three blogs and moderates 5 yahoo groups. I don't flatter myself that my writings or those that I help to disseminate are political action. Hopefully they are a call to political action. If you are reading this and instead of leafleting, marching, or registering people to vote, please, turn off the computer and GO DO SOMETHING!
Gabe
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Who Are We?
The Social Democrats, USA--Socialist Party of America is what remains of the legacy of the socialist party of Debs, Thomas, Randolph, Zeidler, Harrington, and Rustin. Anyone can claim this heritage, or some part of it, but the SDUSA--SPA is the only group actually running candidates as socialists / social democrats who intend to win and hence to govern as socialists. For too long socialist political activity consisted of running candidates for positions they had no hope of winning, just to raise the "red flag". This is not our socialist tradition. The Socialist Party of America of the early part of the twentieth century included twelve thousand office holders. In 1916, when Debs' health prevented him from running for president he made a serious bid to be elected to the US Congress. it should be remembered that Norman Thomas relieved nearly a million votes in 1932. This had a major influence on New Deal legislation as the Socialists continued to pose a serious challenge to the capitalist parties.
Even after the Party began to work within the Democratic Party in did not abandon independent political activity. Witness the candidacy of Richard Parrish for Manhattan Council. Parrish was a black trade-unionist. His nominating petitions were hand-carried to city hall by Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin. This was in 1964. The year before, Bayard Rustin had been the lead organizer for the March for Jobs and Justice. The March is best remembered for Dr. King's "I have a Dream" speech. It was the Socialist Party in the form of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Rochelle Horowitz who made the March happen.
The March for Jobs and Justice lead to the 1964 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. These were the first steps in eliminating discrimination in the United States. We now are engaged in another step. Barack Obama's candidacy will test how far we as a nation have come as regards private racism and discrimination. I believe Obama made a terrible error in not choosing Hilary Clinton as his vice-presidential partner. This error may well cost him the election. It reminds me a great deal of Fredrick Douglas' refusal to demand that the fourteenth amendment enfranchise women as well as black men. Women, of course, did receive the national franchise, fifty-five years later! Many women are justifiably upset that they worked so hard to nominate a women who may have a real shot at becoming president. Senator Clinton, for reasons I don't understand, also became the candidate of many working-class whites. I am not sure that Joe Bidden can capture that same vote for the Democrats.
That being said, as the party of Randolph and Rustin, we are bound to join this new struggle for jobs and justice, understanding that the election of Obama will bring no utopia. It is not clear that the Democrats will even support single-payer health care. We must respond as the Party of Thomas, Randolph and Rustin and embrace this new civil rights struggle. At the same time we need to remember that the Obama campaign is only a portion of the struggle. We need to use the Obama campaign to spread our message of social democracy within a broader Liberal-Labor coalition.
We need to remember that the Socialist Party was part of a broader Liberal Labor coalition. It was Socialist Party member Reinhold Neibhur who founded the Union for Democratic Action which became American's for Democratic Action. ADA was a self-defined, "anti-Communist, liberal" group. It was this liberal tradition of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that produced the Universal Charter of Human Rights. This fundamental document of the United Nations will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary this year. This is our tradition and we should proudly embrace it. We should also call upon the Democratic Party to embrace it. In the article I have attached to this message Michael Lind demonstrates that when the Democratic Party has stuck to the New Deal message it has won the presidency. Every time it wanders off this message it loses.
This makes Obama's candidacy problematic. While I believe it is clear to any serious observer that Obama was not influenced by the Communist Party USA nor the Maoist wing of Students for a Democratic Society, the Republicans will beat him with this dirty stick often and hard. The Republicans have already run messages on television connecting Obama to William Ayers, failed urban guerrilla. it is only a matter of time until the Republican Party or some scurrilous right-wing committee attempts to tie Obama directly to the CPUSA. As perhaps the only remaining ant-Communist left wing group we can have role in attempting to separate the Democratic ticket from the old Stalinist heritage of the CP and the new Stalinist heritage of the Maoist wing of SDS. We should remember that the old SDS began as the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, a group connected closely to the Socialist Party. Because SDS refused to adopt the anti-Communism of the Socialist Party it was easy for small Maoist sects to gain control of the organization. It is highly unlikely that a majority of members of SDS ever supported Maoism or urban terrorism yet that is the image with which SDS will be remembered. There is now a new SDS, those its connections to students is somewhat doubtful. Again a majority of members are likely to be anti-totalitarian. yet the organization could easily be captured if not by Maoist elements this time, certainly by non-democratic elements.
The Obama campaign allows SDUSA--SPA to spread our message of anti-totalitarian democratic socialism to a wide audience. We have a chance to reach out to the black community in a way socialists have not done in decades. In the same way we have a chance to reach out to disaffected youth and Organized Labor in a way socialists have not done in decades. Therefore, we should grasp this chance to reinvigorate the democratic left.
We invite your comments at http://democraticsocialistsforobama.blogspot.com/
Or message us at info@socialdemocratsusa.org or you can call us at (814) 410-2542, weekday afternoons.
In Solidarity,
Jaime Johnston, secretary Young Social Democrats, Young Peoples' Socialist League
Gabriel McCloskey-Ross, executive director, Social Democrats, USA-Socialist Party of America
The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority How Democrats can win big in 2010
and beyond -- by doing the opposite of what they're doing now. Think FDR-style
liberalism, not McGovern.
By Michael Lind
Aug. 15, 2008 | Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay
"Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature
changed." But 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. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968
liberalism by default. If we are really in a new era, then the next Democratic
Party will be as different and unfamiliar as the next Republican Party. Or so
Democrats should hope, if they're looking beyond the favorable circumstances of
this November -- if they want a lasting super majority and not just a bare
majority.
Both of the national parties today claim roots in the older eras of Roosevelt
and Lincoln. But I am 46 years old, and today's Democratic Party and Republican
Party are younger than I am. What happened beginning in 1968 was that one
two-party system -- let us call it the Roosevelt Party versus the Hoover Party
-- gave way to the present two-party system, which pits the Nixon Party versus
the McGovern Party.
Today's Democrats and Republicans bear little resemblance to the pre-1968
groups of the same name. The pre-1968 Republican Party was based in the
Northeast, Midwest and West Coast -- the very areas that are the base of today's
"blue state" Democrats. The pre-1968 Democrats were the old Jefferson-Jackson
alliance of white Southern Protestants and Northern urban Catholics, plus a big
chunk of Northern Progressives, many of them former Republicans. Today the
Republicans are a white working-class party based in the South and much of the
West with a libertarian Wall Street wing. The Democrats since the 1970s have
been an alliance of college-educated white professionals from the North and West
with blacks and Latinos.
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.
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. Progressives are
fooling themselves when they dismiss these as insignificant "wedge issues." What
can be more important than whether civil rights laws apply equally to everyone
-- even those wicked "white males" -- regardless of race and gender, or whether,
in an age of terrorism, the nation's border and immigration laws are enforced?
There is no democracy in the world today where a party that stood for ethnic
quotas that excluded the national majority or welfare benefits for illegal
immigrants would not be in political danger. (As I write, all of the major
European democracies except Britain are governed by parties of the right that
are more nationalist and populist than the left parties they have defeated. And
Gordon Brown isn't looking too hale either.)
Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic majority, despite defections by Southern
segregationists, wobbled on until 1968, 23 years after his death. 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. Before the Supreme Court federalized them, they were fought out
in state legislatures and city councils by the very same people who came
together on Election Day to send Democrats to Congress and the White House.
FDR's followers disagreed about Prohibition, but they agreed about the New Deal.
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. Bill Clinton to the contrary, the public clearly
does not think that "the era of big government is over." Nor does the public
show any interest in the laundry lists of teeny-weeny tax credits for this and
that that neoliberals love to propose, to appear compassionate without spending
real money. 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. I hear the riposte
already: "I'd rather move to Canada than share the Democratic Party with
those people!" But across the country there are lots of potential
Democratic congressional and senatorial candidates who would like to move to
Washington -- and might be able to, if social conservatives were welcomed to a
big-tent party defined almost exclusively by economic liberalism.
What's the alternative? The Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey has mused about a
"liberaltarian" coalition uniting social-issue liberals with free-market
anti-statists. Down with drug and sodomy laws -- and welfare and Social
Security, too! The problem with this as a Democratic strategy is that Mike
Huckabee conservatives who might be attracted to a Newer Deal greatly outnumber
Ron Paul libertarians in the electorate, if not on college campuses and in
editorial offices.
Anyway, the Democrats have already tried "liberaltarianism." That's what was
promoted by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only two presidents elected by
the McGovern Party. Both Carter and Clinton ran as New Deal-style liberal
populists, then, once in office, reneged on their campaign rhetoric and promoted
a mix of economic conservatism -- deregulation, balanced budgets -- and social
liberalism. 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. The 1990s
neoliberal synthesis of Rubinomics and racial preferences, a version of
"liberaltarianism," is popular in corporate boardrooms and newspaper editorial
offices -- but deeply unpopular in Main Street America.
Under pressure from the voters, today's Democrats, including Hillary Clinton,
have recently and in some cases reluctantly repudiated Rubinomics for more
popular ideas about public investment and expanding the safety net. That's a
step in the right direction. 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. Conversely, Rubin Democrats and other economic
conservatives should be invited to join Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth
in a free-market deficit hawk party, which no doubt would prove to be as
ineffectual and isolated as the Herbert Hoover Republicans during the New Deal
era.
If Democrats don't create a new Roosevelt Party, the Republicans over time
just might. In their recent insightful manifesto "Grand New Party," Reihan Salam
and Ross Douthat call for the GOP to adopt activist government on behalf of the
working class, while remaining a socially traditional party. That formula --
more Gaullist than Thatcherite -- has worked recently in Germany, France and
Italy. It might work here, unless Democrats forestall the possibility by
reaching out to Sam's Club Republicans.
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.
If Barack Obama is elected in November, he will have a choice. It would be
easy for a President Obama to be the third president of the McGovern Party,
following the examples of Carter and Clinton once in office by rejecting
expensive New Deal-style public investment and middle-class entitlement
expansion in favor of a neoliberal program of deficit reduction, dinky feel-good
tax credits, equally symbolic Green initiatives and robust defenses of
affirmative action for amnestied illegal immigrants. Or he could try to be the
first president of a new party that is also called the Democrats, a party that
would combine post-racial universalism in public policy with intelligent
government activism to promote technology-driven economic growth and
middle-class economic security.
If he were elected and made the right choice, there would be no need to call
the successor to the McGovern Party the neo-Roosevelt Party. It would have a
name of its own: the Obama Party.
Even after the Party began to work within the Democratic Party in did not abandon independent political activity. Witness the candidacy of Richard Parrish for Manhattan Council. Parrish was a black trade-unionist. His nominating petitions were hand-carried to city hall by Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin. This was in 1964. The year before, Bayard Rustin had been the lead organizer for the March for Jobs and Justice. The March is best remembered for Dr. King's "I have a Dream" speech. It was the Socialist Party in the form of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Rochelle Horowitz who made the March happen.
The March for Jobs and Justice lead to the 1964 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. These were the first steps in eliminating discrimination in the United States. We now are engaged in another step. Barack Obama's candidacy will test how far we as a nation have come as regards private racism and discrimination. I believe Obama made a terrible error in not choosing Hilary Clinton as his vice-presidential partner. This error may well cost him the election. It reminds me a great deal of Fredrick Douglas' refusal to demand that the fourteenth amendment enfranchise women as well as black men. Women, of course, did receive the national franchise, fifty-five years later! Many women are justifiably upset that they worked so hard to nominate a women who may have a real shot at becoming president. Senator Clinton, for reasons I don't understand, also became the candidate of many working-class whites. I am not sure that Joe Bidden can capture that same vote for the Democrats.
That being said, as the party of Randolph and Rustin, we are bound to join this new struggle for jobs and justice, understanding that the election of Obama will bring no utopia. It is not clear that the Democrats will even support single-payer health care. We must respond as the Party of Thomas, Randolph and Rustin and embrace this new civil rights struggle. At the same time we need to remember that the Obama campaign is only a portion of the struggle. We need to use the Obama campaign to spread our message of social democracy within a broader Liberal-Labor coalition.
We need to remember that the Socialist Party was part of a broader Liberal Labor coalition. It was Socialist Party member Reinhold Neibhur who founded the Union for Democratic Action which became American's for Democratic Action. ADA was a self-defined, "anti-Communist, liberal" group. It was this liberal tradition of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that produced the Universal Charter of Human Rights. This fundamental document of the United Nations will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary this year. This is our tradition and we should proudly embrace it. We should also call upon the Democratic Party to embrace it. In the article I have attached to this message Michael Lind demonstrates that when the Democratic Party has stuck to the New Deal message it has won the presidency. Every time it wanders off this message it loses.
This makes Obama's candidacy problematic. While I believe it is clear to any serious observer that Obama was not influenced by the Communist Party USA nor the Maoist wing of Students for a Democratic Society, the Republicans will beat him with this dirty stick often and hard. The Republicans have already run messages on television connecting Obama to William Ayers, failed urban guerrilla. it is only a matter of time until the Republican Party or some scurrilous right-wing committee attempts to tie Obama directly to the CPUSA. As perhaps the only remaining ant-Communist left wing group we can have role in attempting to separate the Democratic ticket from the old Stalinist heritage of the CP and the new Stalinist heritage of the Maoist wing of SDS. We should remember that the old SDS began as the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, a group connected closely to the Socialist Party. Because SDS refused to adopt the anti-Communism of the Socialist Party it was easy for small Maoist sects to gain control of the organization. It is highly unlikely that a majority of members of SDS ever supported Maoism or urban terrorism yet that is the image with which SDS will be remembered. There is now a new SDS, those its connections to students is somewhat doubtful. Again a majority of members are likely to be anti-totalitarian. yet the organization could easily be captured if not by Maoist elements this time, certainly by non-democratic elements.
The Obama campaign allows SDUSA--SPA to spread our message of anti-totalitarian democratic socialism to a wide audience. We have a chance to reach out to the black community in a way socialists have not done in decades. In the same way we have a chance to reach out to disaffected youth and Organized Labor in a way socialists have not done in decades. Therefore, we should grasp this chance to reinvigorate the democratic left.
We invite your comments at http://democraticsocialistsforobama.blogspot.com/
Or message us at info@socialdemocratsusa.org or you can call us at (814) 410-2542, weekday afternoons.
In Solidarity,
Jaime Johnston, secretary Young Social Democrats, Young Peoples' Socialist League
Gabriel McCloskey-Ross, executive director, Social Democrats, USA-Socialist Party of America
The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority How Democrats can win big in 2010
and beyond -- by doing the opposite of what they're doing now. Think FDR-style
liberalism, not McGovern.
By Michael Lind
Aug. 15, 2008 | Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay
"Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature
changed." But 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. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968
liberalism by default. If we are really in a new era, then the next Democratic
Party will be as different and unfamiliar as the next Republican Party. Or so
Democrats should hope, if they're looking beyond the favorable circumstances of
this November -- if they want a lasting super majority and not just a bare
majority.
Both of the national parties today claim roots in the older eras of Roosevelt
and Lincoln. But I am 46 years old, and today's Democratic Party and Republican
Party are younger than I am. What happened beginning in 1968 was that one
two-party system -- let us call it the Roosevelt Party versus the Hoover Party
-- gave way to the present two-party system, which pits the Nixon Party versus
the McGovern Party.
Today's Democrats and Republicans bear little resemblance to the pre-1968
groups of the same name. The pre-1968 Republican Party was based in the
Northeast, Midwest and West Coast -- the very areas that are the base of today's
"blue state" Democrats. The pre-1968 Democrats were the old Jefferson-Jackson
alliance of white Southern Protestants and Northern urban Catholics, plus a big
chunk of Northern Progressives, many of them former Republicans. Today the
Republicans are a white working-class party based in the South and much of the
West with a libertarian Wall Street wing. The Democrats since the 1970s have
been an alliance of college-educated white professionals from the North and West
with blacks and Latinos.
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.
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. Progressives are
fooling themselves when they dismiss these as insignificant "wedge issues." What
can be more important than whether civil rights laws apply equally to everyone
-- even those wicked "white males" -- regardless of race and gender, or whether,
in an age of terrorism, the nation's border and immigration laws are enforced?
There is no democracy in the world today where a party that stood for ethnic
quotas that excluded the national majority or welfare benefits for illegal
immigrants would not be in political danger. (As I write, all of the major
European democracies except Britain are governed by parties of the right that
are more nationalist and populist than the left parties they have defeated. And
Gordon Brown isn't looking too hale either.)
Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic majority, despite defections by Southern
segregationists, wobbled on until 1968, 23 years after his death. 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. Before the Supreme Court federalized them, they were fought out
in state legislatures and city councils by the very same people who came
together on Election Day to send Democrats to Congress and the White House.
FDR's followers disagreed about Prohibition, but they agreed about the New Deal.
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. Bill Clinton to the contrary, the public clearly
does not think that "the era of big government is over." Nor does the public
show any interest in the laundry lists of teeny-weeny tax credits for this and
that that neoliberals love to propose, to appear compassionate without spending
real money. 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. I hear the riposte
already: "I'd rather move to Canada than share the Democratic Party with
those people!" But across the country there are lots of potential
Democratic congressional and senatorial candidates who would like to move to
Washington -- and might be able to, if social conservatives were welcomed to a
big-tent party defined almost exclusively by economic liberalism.
What's the alternative? The Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey has mused about a
"liberaltarian" coalition uniting social-issue liberals with free-market
anti-statists. Down with drug and sodomy laws -- and welfare and Social
Security, too! The problem with this as a Democratic strategy is that Mike
Huckabee conservatives who might be attracted to a Newer Deal greatly outnumber
Ron Paul libertarians in the electorate, if not on college campuses and in
editorial offices.
Anyway, the Democrats have already tried "liberaltarianism." That's what was
promoted by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only two presidents elected by
the McGovern Party. Both Carter and Clinton ran as New Deal-style liberal
populists, then, once in office, reneged on their campaign rhetoric and promoted
a mix of economic conservatism -- deregulation, balanced budgets -- and social
liberalism. 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. The 1990s
neoliberal synthesis of Rubinomics and racial preferences, a version of
"liberaltarianism," is popular in corporate boardrooms and newspaper editorial
offices -- but deeply unpopular in Main Street America.
Under pressure from the voters, today's Democrats, including Hillary Clinton,
have recently and in some cases reluctantly repudiated Rubinomics for more
popular ideas about public investment and expanding the safety net. That's a
step in the right direction. 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. Conversely, Rubin Democrats and other economic
conservatives should be invited to join Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth
in a free-market deficit hawk party, which no doubt would prove to be as
ineffectual and isolated as the Herbert Hoover Republicans during the New Deal
era.
If Democrats don't create a new Roosevelt Party, the Republicans over time
just might. In their recent insightful manifesto "Grand New Party," Reihan Salam
and Ross Douthat call for the GOP to adopt activist government on behalf of the
working class, while remaining a socially traditional party. That formula --
more Gaullist than Thatcherite -- has worked recently in Germany, France and
Italy. It might work here, unless Democrats forestall the possibility by
reaching out to Sam's Club Republicans.
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.
If Barack Obama is elected in November, he will have a choice. It would be
easy for a President Obama to be the third president of the McGovern Party,
following the examples of Carter and Clinton once in office by rejecting
expensive New Deal-style public investment and middle-class entitlement
expansion in favor of a neoliberal program of deficit reduction, dinky feel-good
tax credits, equally symbolic Green initiatives and robust defenses of
affirmative action for amnestied illegal immigrants. Or he could try to be the
first president of a new party that is also called the Democrats, a party that
would combine post-racial universalism in public policy with intelligent
government activism to promote technology-driven economic growth and
middle-class economic security.
If he were elected and made the right choice, there would be no need to call
the successor to the McGovern Party the neo-Roosevelt Party. It would have a
name of its own: the Obama Party.
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