In 1964, conservatives were out of power. They coalesced around Goldwater, and all of their successes seem to follow from that campaign. We forget now, but before Goldwater (and during), “conservative” was an insult. He rallied them around their issues.
When conservatives are in power, their issues fall by the wayside. Let me be the millionth person to point out that deficits are only important when Democrats are in power.
But we shouldn’t overstate that. They used issues to motivate their movement. Now they use a variety of tools, including holding on to power and hating us.
However, there are true, hardcore conservatives out there, and they are up in arms that six years of Republican control of Congress hasn’t reduced spending. They’re furious that the party hasn’t lived up to its rhetoric. Many of these people led to Trump, because they wouldn’t listen to old news guys like Graham.
We need to think about our core issues. The biggest, I think, is jobs (not the “economy,” jobs).
The second biggest is homeland security.
The third biggest is infrastructure. If you’re allowed to telecommute, have you ever hesitated because you think the T won’t work? I have. Now imagine you don’t have the option to telecommute.
“Income inequality,” as we’ve come to call it, is not the issue. The real issue is employment, or underemployment, and therefore social mobility.
Houses cost too much, at least here. College costs too much. We can’t fix that, but we could do a lot to improve the public colleges. The proverbial family of four is struggling to have a comfortable standard of living.
Quality of life is an issue. Travel is a hassle; we need to look at the security apparatus we uncritically adopted 15 years ago (during a time of crisis, and with an architecture led by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Joe Lieberman as our sole voice).
Guns are an issue. We can argue over what to do, but we can never forget that basic public safety is at risk.
The Global War on Terror is also an issue, but it’s one that we can’t really focus on when we’re out of power.
Add anything you like — but the point is that we focus on stuff the government can control, and we force the Republicans to address them. We can even share the credit if we have to, because the issues are what matter.
In short, we will make government work. And our base will see the improvement, and the effort will feed itself. A focus on issues will help us recruit committed candidates.
I think you left out the most important aspect of the compelling story of the ascendancy of Goldwater-style conservatism.
After Mr. Goldwater’s historic defeat, conservatives did NOT spend the subsequent election cycles trying to win at the national level. They instead purposefully and explicitly worked at local levels. They created clubs on campuses. They formed alliances with sympathetic local religious leaders. They put conservatives on school committees, town councils, and zoning boards. They built a cultural movement, and correctly wagered that political dominance would follow. It took SIXTEEN years for the conservative movement to elect a conservative president (Ronald Reagan). The culture they built has dominated US politics since then (for better or worse).
I further note that Mr. Goldwater lost the 1964 popular vote by a landslide — 42.9 M to 27.1 M. That’s SIXTY ONE percent to thirty nine percent — that’s a DELTA of nearly a third of the votes cast. Hillary Clinton, in stark contrast, won the popular vote by significant and growing margin. Whatever learnings we draw from this election, we need remind ourselves that Hillary Clinton’s defeat was qualitatively and quantitatively different from Barry Goldwater’s.
Wealth inequality (as opposed to income) is the driver for pretty much every other issue you cite. Throwing political capital at “jobs”, while ignoring wealth concentration, is treating a severed artery with a band-aid. The patient will die.
You failed to mention climate change. There is strong evidence that it is already too late to stop some of the worst impacts — we are already past the tipping points identified by at least some of the scientific community. All indications are that we will spend the next 4-12 years doing exactly the wrong thing, even while there is growing evidence that we have understated the timeline of both Arctic and Antarctic changes.
When we invest in “infrastructure” — especially underground infrastructure — we plan on timeframes of decades or centuries. Today’s MBTA relies on infrastructure designed well over a century ago.
In that timeframe, virtually every coastal city in the US is likely to be inundated by rising sea levels. Not just during storm surges, but all the time. What happens to America of 2116 if today’s downtown areas of Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Miami (chosen somewhat arbitrarily) are under ten to fifteen feet of seawater?
I do, nevertheless, agree with the argument you present. It is issues that matter.
The one additional bed-rock principle that is unsaid in your thread-starter is the importance of changing our “post-truth” culture back to one that is based on facts, reality, and rationality. The only way that a “focus on issues” will lead to constructive change is if that focus is grounded in truth.
We have just elected a president who asserts that climate change is a hoax, even as the flood of alarming data (pun intended) accelerates. We have an electorate that is unwilling or unable to understand the basic science involved (primarily conservation of energy), basic science that has been settled for more than century. Our electoral decision to endorse the crazy idea that climate change is a hoax is as ignorant and stupid as voting to make the sun stand still in the sky, and setting public policy based on the assumption that the sun will then do so.
We must rediscover a way to guide public policy towards issues based on truth, rather than emotion or — even worse — sheer might.
I’m talking about more basic stuff than centuries. More like maintenance of existing roads and bridges that aren’t going anywhere for a while.
The impact of the Antarctic ice shelf collapse is estimated by many to be an average sea level rise of ten feet within one hundred years. It could come sooner than that.
We just invested about $15 B building a subterranean highway system under Boston that is already at risk of flooding in major storms. I think that decisions we make today about the maintenance of existing roads and bridges ought to take the reality of climate change into account. Our older neighborhoods are built around roads that were laid out a century ago (1916 wasn’t so long ago!).
Washington Square, Brookline, circa 1900
Will our progeny be able to reap the benefits of our actions the way current residents of Washington Square enjoy the decisions made a century ago?
Bit I would step lightly, at least at first, because the economic pain is the clear and present danger.
n/t
Indications are that we may have to make significant changes in where our roads and highways are located. This, in turn, implies significant changes in zoning, real estate values, and a host of other things.
If we do it right, we can create hundreds of jobs in planning, environmental assessment, construction, and a host of other things.
I think the key is to do it right. Part of that is to take a hardnosed look at the realities of what climate change already means and what our proposed policy changes are likely to imply.
the American Society of Civil Engineers rates our roads, bridges, water works, railways, airports, seaports, sewer systems, public buildings — are you ready ?
D + . That’s right. Pathetic.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Unemployment is under 5%. 95% of us have jobs. So our “issue” is going to be getting jobs for the 5%?
Please, try again.
Are you confident that your kids will get the job of their choice?
Are you confident you could leave your job and find another one within, say, two months?
Is your company/office/wherever fully staffed, or understaffed? If it’s understaffed, are the existing employees expected to pick up the slack?
Is the unemployment rate 5% in every state?
But let’s not make this about me or my kids.
FDR said it best back in 1932
What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security–these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.
We have jobs/work.
We need security and that will require higher wages, a stronger safety net, and a tax structure that prohibits the massive accumulation of wealth via other people’s money and other people’s labor.
Remember, American “Runs on Dunkin” …..where the CEO makes $4,800 per hour and the workers make $8 an hour.
If we are NOT willing to address that and change it, we will not win the White House and do not deserve to win.
I’m glad you like your job; I’m just trying to make the point that not everyone does, and most people don’t have easy mobility.
The only reason I love my job is that I’m semi-retired. I was very lucky to have saved a few bucks over the years so that when I lost my full time gig at the age of 61, I am able to get by on a part time low wage job that will tide me over until I am ready to fully retire, which may be in four to six years from now, depending on how things go. I just work now more because I want to, not because I have to.
Of course, I had the misfortune to enter the work force in 1973 which many economists will tell you, was the last year that the sustainable working class (AKA the Middle Class) was expanding. Looking back on my W-2 tax records over the years, my wages stayed fairly flat (adjusted for inflation) over those years. And my experience is typical of people my age.
I never felt secure in any of my jobs. I never felt that I had any real rights. I never felt that any company I worked for was loyal to me, cared about me. I was just a cog in the wheel, replaceable at any moment.
During the same time we all watched as a few individuals reaped enormous profits and eventually, bought our political system. There is very little security left in this nation, and there seems to be little interest in building it back up. That’s a shame.
with The Precariat?
It’s right up your alley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
Atrios makes the point better than I do. Even people with good jobs are struggling.
To paraphrase George Carlin, the only reason we have the poor in this nation is to scare the shit out of the middle class and keep them in line, leaving the wealthy class in power.
Ah, hell, never mind. Liberals will never give a serious d*mn about education, no matter how universal or important that issue is. That much I’ve learned in the last 10 years. They outsource it to educators and their unions.
n/t
Who was the last candidate to run on education? Our “Education President” George W Bush.
How many education questions were asked during the interminable Democratic primary debates? Zero.
Aside from universal preK, I can’t remember anything Hillary said about education. Heck, I remember Trump’s education policy with more clarity.
…about outsourcing to educators and unions as an ironic complaint. In other words what you really meant was something like, at least liberals understand that educators and unions should be key players in formulating education policy, unlike conservatives who reduce students to test scores and want to run schools like a business.
What I meant was, liberals don’t understand education, and figure it’s not their problem to learn about it. They rely on unions to fetch them the votes they need, and the funds they want. In return, they implement Republican-lite policies — Obama’s and Bush’s education policies were indistinguishable — and expect Americans who care about education to thank them for it. Their love for testing is identical.
Democrats could win by making K-12 education a centerpiece of their platform. They have chosen to ignore the issue entirely.
How is this true? I agree with you that Democrats and Republicans have similar approaches on education, but how exactly would we differentiate on it?
I also agree that we take teachers’ unions for granted … but honestly I don’t see that changing any time soon.
I think we already own this one.
We own it by default JimC simply because Arne Duncan and John King are demonstrably the lesser of the two evils compared to Betsy DeVoss and Margaret Spelling. Duncan and King will kill public education via death by a thousand charters, I mean cuts, while DeVoss openly will privatize the whole damn thing.
Duncan and King recognize teaching actual science in so far as it’s a means to an economic end of training smart workers to compete with China while the Spellings and DeVoss are ideologically oriented towards teaching junk science that protects the fossil fuel industry and the ever so sensitive religious right and it’s scientifically and biblically false belief in creationism.
Duncan and King are better since they want to raise some taxes to fund their charter experiments while the other side believes cutting education funding will somehow lead to better outcomes.
There is no party advancing a progressive education agenda. One that ensures every child can attend a Dewey style school that values experiential learning and Socratic discussion over rote memorization that teaches to the lowest common denominator on a standardized test. The Obamas and Emmanuels paid up the wazoo to send their kids to Chicago Lab or Sidwell just like Patrick and Gabrielli went to fancy progressive schools here in the hub. The elite know a good education is one that encourages creativity, discussion, and civic engagement. They just have no interest in expending the money and resources that other developed democracies do on actually educating their children.
A truly federalized education ministry like those in the social democracies of Europe would eliminate once and for all the property tax disparity and end the insanity of local control over curriculum whereby Kansans can’t learn about Darwin or Texans read textbooks they use euphemisms for slavery. Or my wife’s suburban Chicago high school can ban the teaching of “I know why the cage bird sings” because a few loud parents are apparently enough to overturn academic freedom in most parts of the country.
No Democratic politician, not even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders made a Diane Ravitch or Finnish style K-12 education the center piece of their agenda. And doing so would actually win over a huge number of conservative parents. The crunchy Shady Hill parents and conservative BC High parents are abandoning public schools for the same reason. They hate standardized tests, Common Core and teaching down.
You really DO need some rote memorization before getting into more substantive discussions and problem solving. I see way too many kids who clearly haven’t drilled their times tables before moving on to fraction arithmetic and don’t even get me started on basic historical facts, persons, and dates. You need testing for everyone to get on the same page and to tell some students that until you master this, hither shall you come and no further.
I’m anti-teaching to the test and the lowering of standards that comes with it. It’s a given you can’t have a substantive discussion about the Columbian discovery without knowing “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and establishing a baseline of knowledge from which to derive analysis and criticism.
My experience with MCAS, particularly at the high school level, was that the entire school stopped what it was doing to focus on math and language arts at the expense of other subjects and that even history and science teachers were pressured to link lesson planning to MCAS rubrics.
And it just wasn’t a hard test, it really lost those of us who were bored by the material while confusing students at the middle and lower performance tiers. It made none of us love coming to school or engage with the material and one another. And it’s the opposite of college, if we really want college preparation to be the focus of secondary education than it’s about creating a self directed learner capable of writing analytically and critically engaging with texts not adhering to a more basic rubric of summarization.
…that teaching to the test is a problem, and there are from my experience other ways to go about it.