In 1981 Ronald Reagan submitted for head of the National Institute for the Humanities Dr. Mel Bradford, a neoconfederate, George Wallace supporting paleoconservative in the southern agrarian tradition. He compared Lincoln to Goebbels and openly disparaged the study of non-white and non-Christian history. His nomination, to the somewhat obscure post, triggered a firestorm within the conservative movement. Many prominent thinkers associated with fusion conservatism or neoconservatism were outraged and openly called on the selection of an alternative candidate who did not hold neoconfederate views and a propensity for antisemitism.
These included George Will, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce, and William Simon. The conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation boldly proclaimed his nostalgia for the confederacy as ‘un-conservative and un-American’ and demanded the selection of a different nominee. Backing down due to this pressure, Reagan eventually selected William Bennett instead. A schmuck to be sure, but a schmuck within the norms of American political life. White Nationalism was not embraced by mainstream conservatism back then.
Today is different. If the Iraq War didn’t already teach us this already, the rapid normalization of Trump and his racist cronies should show us that the media will always roll over and be pushovers when it comes to confronting power. Always. Every single damn time. And too many of these #NeverTrump conservatives have found ways to make nice with their Vichy Conservative comrades, since after all, the victor now controls the spoils.
I agree with Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders that class based rather than strictly identity based politics is the way for progressives to move forward in the wake of this stunning upset. I also agree with them that we should never waver or hesitate to call a spade a space, or a crypto Nazi a crypto Nazi. Steve Bannon is beyond the pale of acceptability in any era. The fact that this was clear to conservatives and the mainstream press in 1981 and abandoned in our own time is proof that we cannot rely on the press or Trump’s intraparty adversaries to do the hard work for us. We have to be vigilant ourselves.
wrought by the Republican Party has been the destruction of political norms. I forgot what writer has been working on this, but he calls out Newt Gingrich for starting a lot of it in 1994 by shutting down the government and impeaching a president who did something too many politicians (including himself) have been guilty of.
Then there was Bush. Suddenly, military service didn’t matter and dodging the draft was okay. It was also okay to be (apparently) stupid. Cheney and his freakshow might have brought the government down, if Comey and others weren’t there to oppose them. It was okay to make up stuff to get us into a war they wanted. Oh, and those debts and deficits, they only matter when a Democrat is in office.
During Obama, things really started to take off. It was more important to block him and keep power than to allow people to vote or admit he was elected. Reality went out the window. The craziness we’re seeing now is an extension of birtherism. Alex Jones and Steve Bannon are in the door, and they’re serving far right ideology with a pinch of reality. And people are sucking it up.
The modern GOP has been an abject disaster for the country. Unfortunately, it looks like it will reach an apotheosis before it gets better.
…I have to push back a bit on your point about lack of military service and draft dodging. Clinton got knocked for that too, but I don’t think that in itself was disqualifying for either Clinton or Bush.
Bush didn’t. Neither did any of his chickenhawk confidantes.
I don’t know if you’re too young to remember, but Democrats were criticized for being “weak” on defense. Military service wasn’t always accorded the respect it is today either. When the Iraq War was being pushed, those of us who opposed were accused of not supporting the troops. One of my favorite phrases to describe us was “surrender monkeys.”
Only in the sense that people who were already convinced that they didn’t like him, found a reason not to like him. Pretty much the same as the criticism of Bush– in neither case did it do sufficient harm to cost them an election.
Not a literal price, but he was given less breathing room on military matters. Democrats often are, because … well no reason really.
Whether fairly or unfairly, in the wake of Vietnam. And I think that by the end, he had the same breathing room that Bush and Obama had, which is considerable. That said, this is really neither here nor there.
I’m not going to quibble over political tactics. I don’t have any sourcing besides my experience, which may not be that authoritative.
Lacking military experience was a strike against a candidate and part of the GOP narrative against Democrats.
When a multiple decorated war hero was tarred and feathered as a turncoat by the guy throwing back Lone Stars to protect Alabama from Hanoi. It’s definitely a real thing. Was in this election too.
…and rereading the sentence in question I see how I could have interpreted it differently.
That was a saying prevalent in the early 70’s, predicated on the notion that only the hardened cold-warrior, Richard M Nixon had the cajones to forge just and righteous diplomatic ties with China. Democrats were either too weak or too in love with communism to do it.
Even more to the point, Ronald Reagan, former New-Deal Democrat, pointedly embraced McCarthyism and left the Democratic party largely upon cold war grounds. That the Democrats stood against McCarthy and for the rights, even of communists, was used, with varying degrees of success, as a knock against them and their
Clinton got dinged pretty harshly for his deferments in the election, though for the republicans that was a twofer, since he received the deferments to attend an elite university. if the same standard had been used against George W Bush, he’d never have been President. More importantly, Clinton’s lack of military service was used to push back on specific policies, most keenly resulting in “don’t ask, don’t tell” in his first term and various kerfuffles over military intervention in Kosovo in his second. In ’96 the GOP ran Bob Dole, an actual soldier who harped on “Democrat wars” started that the Republicans had to finish (specifically alluding to Korea and Vietnam).
In the middle of Clintons tenure, coincident with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, Al Franken wrote two books, one called “Rush Limbaugh is Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” Both books pointedly made fun of ‘chickenhawks’ and draft dodgers. I forget which one, precisely, had an entire chapter from the point of view of five or six of the chickhawks being led into battle by Ollie North. Funny stuff.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how upended and turned in on itself the 2004 narrative was. John Kerry voluntarily went to Viet Nam, was shot at, shot back, bled, led and returned and was accused of lying about his service. George Bush clearly dodged all of that, even the accusations of clearly dishonorable conduct. He was assigned a lame substitute duty and dodged even that… The fact that George Bush didn’t pay a price for not doing it at all, at the same time John Kerry was vilified with lies accusing him of having done it dishonorably… actually beggars the imagination. That this was not long after Bush had launched an aggressive war of choice is probably the seed that allowed the bottomless absurdity of Trump to prevail so recently.
In fairness, you neglect to mention how John Kerry became a public figure — as leader of “Vietnam Veterans Against the War”. Mr. Kerry, on his return, became a celebrity because of his high-profile — and desperately needed — opposition to an immoral war. I encourage everyone to watch this clip, and to pay attention to crowd as the camera pans it. This was no staged protest with a few dozen people carefully positioned near the camera for a photo-op.
Also, for the record, he was not the only one throwing away medals.
In my view, this is the reason for the Swiftboat lies. The right wing has always preferred liars, cheats, drunkards, and bigots to principled men and women who speak the truth — and has always been eager to lie, cheat, and everything else to bring them down.
He was an authentic war hero who was one of the few sons of privilege who signed up to go to that war while many Fortunate Sons, including one from Midland, got out of it. Then he had the courage to protest the immorality of the war when he came home, something other vets like Kerrey and McCain didn’t do.
His mistake was not hitting back hard and picking a bad Veep. He would’ve been a great president, and I wish my 16 year old self wasn’t so crestfallen about Dean to realize that.
He’d make a great Governor too. Jerry Brown is a model of the elder statesmen coming back and being bold. I just don’t see him beating Baker and would rather he retire and teach foreign policy at local colleges. If Trump was smart he would ask him to stay on, as I would’ve hoped President Clinton would’ve done.
One of the more interesting developments, starting in the 1970’s was the successful efforts of Right-wing intellectuals to reverse-engineer the Communist Party of the 1930’s. One example is here. On the electoral side of things, Newt Gingrich (among others) realized the utility of using Saul Alinsky’s tactics to demonize opponents.
Coupled with Grover Norquist’s direct-mail tactics (derived from the 1972 McGovern campaign), and in the context of the Democratic abandonment of locally-embedded field, this created a dynamic in much of the country where the only grassroots political structures were right-wing.
In short, the Republican Right was the only force filling vacuums on the ground.
What is interesting is that the Republicans did not conceal this. In Boston, for example, the head of the Republican City Committee held regular events, wherein various Right luminaries would talk tactics strategies, and goals. These events were open to the public.
Because the premise was the dispassionate pursuit of obtaining and enhancing power, there was no need to be consistent: any approach would do; whether honorable or not (or conservative or not), so long as it could be framed as anti-elitist and achieved its political goals.
Per Orwell, the purpose of power was power.
The Achilles heel of the movement was its pseudo-populism, which created the opportunity for Trump to mount a hostile takeover.
Long story short, we now have a Right Leninist movement now going through a late Maoist phase, with Trump as Madame Mao in drag.
Nothing conservative about it.
Link:
The anti-communists of the 1950s must be rolling over in their graves right now.
Thanks for the link.
Yup, Today’s Republican Party is best understood as “Orthodox Capitalists”.
n/t
The conservative defends existing institutions because their very existence creates a presumption that they have served some useful function, because eliminating them may lead to harmful, unintended consequences, or because the veneration which attaches to institutions that have existed over time makes them useful for new purposes.
The orthodox defense of institutions depends on belief in their correspondence to some ultimate truth, the conservative tends more skeptically to avoid justifying institutions on the basis of their ultimate foundations.
Jerry Z. Muller
Now, listen to how Republicans defend free markets and unbridled capitalism despite their failures, and understand why I call them Orthodox Capitalists.
Bannon specifically called himself that and is promoting that. The barbarians aren’t st the gate, their in the castle eating off the China.
Simple, to the point, and honestly, where we need to go.
There is not, nor should there be, a dichotomy between “class-based” and “identity-based”. That really is the fundamental argument I have with you.
If we mount a class-based counterattack that succeeds, and women still earn 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, blacks still suffer more than whites, other minorities are still at the back of the line, etc., then we have won nothing.
The civil rights movement in during the 1960s was sexist, even while fighting racism. Black leaders have been notoriously anti-Semitic.
We must mount a class-based counterattack. Absolutely. That class-based counter-attack must also just as passionately defend our sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers. It must just as passionately remind us that black lives matter.
When we mount our class-based counterattack, we must celebrate, rather than attack, laws that demand that women receive equal pay for equal work. We must march in sympathy with blacks who are oppressed and with immigrants who are abused by employers.
We must create a welcoming hearth to those who advocate for all those groups, rather than always responding “what about white men”.
We must fight for ALL the 99%, rather than just our particular segment.
Except for Bob Neer apparently, nearly every single poster here believes in this message and every Democrat left in Congress.
Since you demand identity based politics, where do I fit in your Democratic Party? I see you have no outreach committees that describe me.
Somehow I knew and expected this to be your response.
The answer to your question is so simple that I wonder why you ask it.
The “box” I put you — and me — in is “member of the 99%”. It has various other names:
– Victim of decades of class warfare
– Struggling worker doing the best we can to provide for those we love
– Scared shitless by the shit going down around us
I don’t need an “outreach committee” and, I suggest, neither should you.
He was an authentic war hero who was one of the few sons of privilege who signed up to go to that war while many Fortunate Sons, including one from Midland, got out of it. Then he had the courage to protest the immorality of the war when he came home, something other vets like Kerrey and McCain didn’t do.
His mistake was not hitting back hard and picking a bad Veep. He would’ve been a great president, and I wish my 16 year old self wasn’t so crestfallen about Dean to realize that.
He’d make a great Governor too. Jerry Brown is a model of the elder statesmen coming back and being bold. I just don’t see him beating Baker and would rather he retire and teach foreign policy at local colleges. If Trump was smart he would ask him to stay on, as I would’ve hoped President Clinton would’ve done.
…both in terms of the national Democratic Party and its institutional Massachusetts variant.
As structures, the committees you cite are internal power bases, not outreach mechanisms. As such, they have little name recognition (and less credibility) on the ground. As a rule, and there are exceptions, members of the outreach committees in the State Democratic structure have roughly the same relationship to sweat-equity outreach that a vampire has to a crucifix.
To paraphrase James Michael Curley, the outreach committees are invincible in peace; invisible in war.
This is not exactly unknown to Democratic legislative leadership; hence their general priorities involve incumbent protection under the accurate assessment that Massachusetts is not a one-party state, it is a no party state. The Party affiliation of, say, the Governor is a matter of supreme indifference because it’s irrelevant to getting stuff done on Beacon Hill.
If, on the other hand, you can identify twenty people who agree as you do, live in geographic proximity to each other, have a work ethic; and have credibility in their immediate neighborhoods, you can build something in your back yard.
You’d be surprised what you can get done…
Simple? Yes. To the point? What point?
“Class” is an even more abstract notion than “identity” and is, in no small part, based upon identity. They are both ways of segregating people into interests and impulses. Inherent, therefore, in both ‘class’ and ‘identity’ is the notion of ‘separate but equal’ which I find rather odious.
Regardless of race, gender, or any other identity based system. It means we are all together, one tribe, not a collection of tribes.
… A lot of my (and your) ‘wealth’ (such as it is) is because I’m male and I’m white. Much of ‘poverty’ is oppression, and that based upon identity: blacks and hispanics are at the mercy of whites. A white man will give a job, a loan and a hand out more readily, more speedily and more cheerfully, to another white man merely because he’s white. A black man has to jump through three times as many hoops and still not get the job, the loan, the hand-out…. And they have to accept the subtle arrogance of the ‘color blind’: those who’ll ‘overlook’ the unfortunate fact of his skin tone in order to pat themselves on the back for their own magnanimity.
On the other hand, a white man will gladly accept his own poverty if it comes with someone darker and poorer than he that he can look down upon. Some would rather wave the confederate flag and spit in my face before accepting the hand I’ve offered.
In fact, white people will vote for an honest-to-god orange clown before they’ll vote for a woman or someone who wants to help women.
The problem isn’t the Democrats handing out goodies or favors on the basis of ‘identity politics’ it’s that the oppression from which poverty derives is exactly and precisely because of identity politics.
What outreach do we have in our state party for poor whites? What entrance do they use to get into the tent? Women use the women’s entrance, GLBT’s use the GLBT entrance, Hispanic and blacks have their entrance. All of the aforementioned are assigned committees and outreach campaigns, all based on identity. So as a poor white male, I’m lost. I have no entrance, no committee and no one is reaching out to me. Guess I’ll have a look see at that fella with the red ball cap who is waving to me.
…And I use that word. ‘indulging,’ rather deliberately.
The underlying premise of your argument is zero-sum: that if assistance is given to women, to blacks… whether the benefit of any largesse is hispanic or LBGT or anything other than white… I must be excluding whites, no matter the size of their bank account.
That’s a white perspective entirely dominated by identity. That’s the world we live in. A world in which “White Lives Matter” is the dominant theme. But you would rather we not reply to the world we live in, but to some abstract world in which ‘class’ is more important…?
If the generic white person has legitimate anger over jobs lost, perhaps homes foreclosed, and the general economic malaise we’ve all experienced shouldn’t the black person be absolutely livid over black males being shot in the street on the flimsiest of pretexts? White people have lost homes because of the largely incompetent financial sector. If their anger is legitimate on that score then why no rage over blacks who were denied homes to begin with on the deliberately oppressive practice of ‘redlining?” There is no rage over that. White Lives Matter.
White anger, according to you, is a more legitimate anger than black anger. Welcome to the party.
Why not, when there is outreach for other identities?
…I’m reaching out to you right now.
It’s not, however, my fault that my outreach has to take the form of “Stop oppressing other people and stop trying to justify that oppression with your overly entitled anger and hypersensitivity.”
You are right about the need for outreach to working-class white voters, but wrongly assume that the Democratic Party assumes accountability to working class blacks, Latinos, Asians, or white women. To the degree that such people exist within the Party and its campaigns, it’s to serve as backdrops to mailers and video spots.
A few – never from the neighborhoods – even get to staff campaign offices.
It’s simply not within the frame of reference of Democratic organizations (with exceptions) to acknowledge these issues internally, much less address them.
There is no real outreach for poor or lower-middle income folks on the State Committee. Anybody with an income of under $100,000 is expendable.
… and they are being expended, particularly within metro Boston.
The outreach for the various nomination and issues convention can be boiled down to two words: open bar.
“the Democratic Party assumes accountability to working class blacks, Latinos, Asians, or white women” You added working class The Democratic Party, as operated by the professional elite,reaches out to minorities but only in social/legal terms, not economic. Now they will tell you that those social/legal areas will (and sometimes do) link to improved economic status for some, but that is not the intent of the assistance. There are more and more black speakers who are questioning the blind allegiance to the party by black voter who may be realizing that they, like the rest of us laborers, are not really getting our share of the bounty.
…because I largely agree with you.
I was trying to say that, outreach groups notwithstanding, the Democratic Party’s elites don’t care about working class people of any race or gender, and that the outreach groups are purely cosmetic and mostly absent from any constructive work in their respective communities.
As a result, an outreach group within the Party would be purely cosmetic.
However, given the almost total lack of organizing within blue collar communities, opportunities exist to create political power outside the formal Party structure.
Your comment about “blind allegiance” hardly controversial. It is conventional wisdom at the black grassroots level, and has been for decades. Black voters are acutely aware that they are being shafted, and there is more cross-racial communication about this (alas more at the job sites than at the union hall) than you might think. The sentiment in black neighborhoods is more anti-Republican than pro-Democratic. The problem is that the operative choice in today’s political climate is to vote Democratic or not vote at all. The fact that many black voters in swing states chose the latter is the principal reason Clinton lost.
For what it’s worth, while I consider that choice not to vote to be self-defeating, it was not illogical.
My only point is that people have to organize proactively – irrespective of race – on their own collective behalf, because the Party is not gonna do it for you.
I think we ought to ditch all the “outreach groups” and consider us all as one. Maybe we ought to have outreach by district. I’ve tried to see how minorities have made out under Obama but was overridden with reports about Trump’s comments. In short, the only people who rebounded fully (and more) from the recovery were the banks, you know, the people who can afford to pay a candidate $225,000 to speak before them.
Fight for the poor.
What, exactly, is the difference between “fighting for the poor” and “fighting for the poor whites”?
Its utter simplicity is what makes the constant whining so objectionable.
All we are saying is fight for the middle class should rhetorically be the top priority. Saying the system is rigged and proposing policies that return the power to the people. Hillary ran on that message but she also ran on eighteen other messages and 49 different slogans throughout the campaign so it got muddled. She also was the beneficiary of that system as a 30 year Washington insider. A good message, muddled by bad ones, with a flawed messenger marred by a fatal mixture of own goals and completely unfair scrutiny.
Kamala Harris shows how we fight for the disenfranchised everywhere which includes blue collar workers in coalition with black lives, Latinos, women and our LGBTQ friends and neighbors.
You ask what I am fighting.
Here is what I am fighting:
I am fighting against the assertion that our party only matters when it directly benefits ourselves. I am fighting against the allegation that the only way to “return to our roots” is to explicitly pander to angry white males.
I reject the premise that an “outreach committee” has to target me, and in so doing promise to support and pander to whatever biases and prejudices I bring to the table, while asking nothing in return.
why there is an outreach for women, but not men in the state party?
why there is an outreach for blacks, but not whites in the state party?
I’ll tell you what I think.
We’ve painted ourselves into a corner by accepting identity politics as an excuse why we can’t accept class politics because we’re too attached to the wealthy class (the money HAS to come from somewhere…) and we can’t speak to class.
Limited to that, it would be rather awkward to have a white outreach or a men outreach because the same people who tell us that the money HAS to come from somewhere, will call such things racist and sexist.
It is men, and not women, who are running things. “Reaching out” means for one group, already on the inside, to ask another to come into the place they have previously been forbid. You can’t reach out to someone who’s already on the inside.
Because, it is whites, and not blacks, who are running things. “Reaching out” means for one group, already on the inside, to ask another to come into the place they have previously been forbid. You can’t reach out to someone who’s already on the inside.
Just how many times do I need to repeat this? I will. However many times it takes.
as a white male, how come my health insurance sucks and at the age of 61, I am working part time for $12 an hour with no benefits….and until I got laid off last year, my annual earnings, like the majority of people in my demographic, were flat for 45 years?
I’m running things? Yes, if you insist on playing identity politics, people who LOOK like me are all in the same stereotyped basket.
However if we play class politics, well, we’re going to piss off the wealthy class and “the money HAS to come from somewhere…”
Because you took your eye off the ball.
Because during the Reagan Era, you and white males like you helped dismantle the government that was protecting you. Because during the Bill Clinton administration, you and people like you attacked Hillary Clinton and killed her first attempt at universal health care.
Because you and people like you didn’t give a rat’s ass about discrimination, scapegoating, exploitation, and everything else so long as it was happening to somebody else.
I’m sorry, but you and people like you WERE running things, and you’ve found out too late that you were wrong. You’ve learned, too late, that the one percent is just as contemptuous of you as they are of all those people that the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world love to bash.
Just like all those Donald Trump voters who so desperately sought “change” will learn that they made the worst possible choice.
That’s why all this is happening to you.
There is an outreach for women, but not men, because women have been marginalized in our party for, well, for ever. There is an outreach for blacks, but not whites, because blacks have been marginalized in our party for, well, for ever.
I already know what you think, you’ve repeated it hundreds or thousands of times here. Such repetition doesn’t improve your argument.
The party does not have outreach to white men because white men have benefited from the racism and sexism for, well, for ever.
Once again you spread lies about me. I wrote, on this very thread, that I agree with you that we must fight against class warfare. I’ve been saying that for years here, since long before you arrived.
We need to reach out to women, blacks, and other minorities because we have discriminated against them. We do not need to reach out to white males because they have benefited from that discrimination.
ALL of us need to fight against the one percent.
None of this is hard.
in a revenge move is what you advocate? How’s that working out? Let me see….maybe I’ll ask Governor Baker or President Elect Trump…
You’re just lying now.
It’s not what I’ve ever written, and you’re just lying about me.
Just calling you out for what you say.
We have one for women, but not men because there was time when women were marginalized and men were not, so not you want to turn the tables.
And let’s not ever forget your willingness to sell out to the wealthy class because as you put it,
You can’t really fight a class war for the poor when owe your soul to the rich. All you can do it talk, talk, talk….