Here is something Thomas Frank wrote back in March 2004:
There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left, when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favor of stronger labor unions, a regulated economy and various schemes for universal economic security. Back then the Republicans, who opposed all these things, were clearly identified as the party of corporate management, the spokesmen for society’s elite.
Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti-intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness.
We’re all familiar with this. The latter paragraph explains the success of George W. Bush as a politician. But Bush’s brush-clearing populism was something qualitatively different from real right-wing populism. You can see Bushism’s uneasy fit with real right-wing populism by looking at its Wiki definition.
The strategy of right-wing populism relies on a combination of ethno-nationalism with anti-elitist populist rhetoric and a radical critique of existing political institutions.
Right-wing populist parties and movements differ from many far right parties in that they accept representative democracy and disavow violent political tactics. They are considered radical because they oppose the current welfare state and the present political system; right-wing because they oppose aspects of social democracy and have traditional policies on immigration; and populist because they appeal to the fears and frustrations of common citizens. These parties and movements sometimes distinguish themselves from the traditional Right by their support for social welfare programmes, gender equality, gay rights, and separation of church and state. These parties often present themselves as the defenders of traditional liberal ideas. Other RRP parties wish to preserve the dominance of the Christian values as a means of preserving the national culture.
There are some contradictions in that definition, but it’s pretty clear that Bush didn’t offer a radical critique of existing domestic political institutions. He actually advanced fairly reasonable (pro-business/anti-populist) immigration policies. He expanded the welfare state through the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and the role of the federal government in education through No Child Left Behind. Bushism was radical, but its radicalism came mostly from its disdain for the post-war consensus on collective security and international institutions. On the domestic front, their radicalism was not so much on social policy as on how they went about their business. They hired wholly unqualified people filling the bureaucracy with hacks and cronies, they politicized the judiciary, and they let national security concerns upend the consensus on how our entire system of justice functions. They were radical in many respects, but not so much in a populist way.
They weren’t consistently conservative in the traditional sense and they weren’t consistently populist in a radical sense. But the Tea Party Movement is definitely populist in the radical sense. The Tea Partiers are offering a radical critique of existing political institutions. They are fueled by xenophobic and traditional Christian cultural concerns. They are literally common citizens expressing their fears and frustrations. Perhaps ‘critique’ isn’t the best word to describe what they’re offering. Their message is more inchoate than articulated. But it’s genuine populism of the right-wing variety, and it has a certain level of potency.
Learned observers are still divided about whether the Tea Parties signify a new energy on the right or are more an indication of the right’s collapse. But one of the things that makes them dangerous is that there is no counterpart on the left. What’s gone is this:
There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left, when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favor of stronger labor unions, a regulated economy and various schemes for universal economic security. Back then the Republicans, who opposed all these things, were clearly identified as the party of corporate management, the spokesmen for society’s elite.
Right now, the left is looking at the Democratic Party and asking why they are too much resembling the party of corporate management. But I think this is an anachronistic way of judging where we stand politically as a nation. We have a two-party system that is driven by the first past the post winner-take-all federal elections that were created by our Constitution. But one-party proved unworthy of support during the Bush years. No elite element of our society, from the scientific community, to the intelligentsia, to the business community, to the military and intelligence community, to the federal bureaucracy were able to support the Republican Party by the time Bush’s presidency ended. The rise of Palinism only made matters worse. The Democratic Party ceased being the party for the left and became the party for the entire Establishment. Outwardly, Obama campaigned as a traditional Democrat, appealing to traditional Democratic constituencies. But, in reality, he took on the job as savior for the entire system, which was literally failing so badly after September 2008 that the whole world was feeling the strain.
It became obvious even before Obama took office that the left was confused about the direction Obama was moving. They had hoped that he would bring radical change, and radical change in a consistently leftward direction. But his mission wasn’t to satisfy a laundry list of progressive desires. His mission was to keep the teetering edifice of global American power from collapsing. This naturally put Obama in the awkward position of defending and protecting many elements of the American system that rightly deserved their comeuppance.
The problem is that the Democratic Party has a bigger responsibility right now than to enact this or that policy. The Democratic Party is the only organization standing in this country that can be trusted to serve the interests of business or labor or the big guy or the little guy. Their job is to fill the void left by the intellectual collapse of America’s right as well as to represent their traditional constituencies. Above all, it is their responsibility to keep the Republican Party out of power.
And, the breadth of this responsibility makes it impossible to do several things that need doing. First, they must simultaneously represent elite financial interests while reforming and regulating them. They must protect our intelligence and military institutions at a time that they should be held to account for their performance under Bush. And, politically, they must find a way to channel populist frustration during difficult economic times when they are still trying to keep the Bretton Woods system running.
I’ve only scratched the surface here. But I think these ideas help explain the way the Democratic Party is behaving, why the left is frustrated, why the right is having some success with a populist message, and why the left is having trouble responding.
Rather than go on, I’ll save other ideas for the comments.
It seems Dems “ceased being the party for the left” long before Bush’s total collapse; nevertheless, it’s clear that they represent the establishment, the status quo, or the system more than ever now, quite possibly due to the failures of Bush, and its consequent vacuum.
But Dems have a lot more latitude to operate than merely continue Bush foreign policies or merely “representing” institutional domestic policies.
Even the Kansas Fed chair thinks the big banks need to be “dismembered.”
The Democratic Party is the only organization standing in this country that can be trusted to serve the interests of business or labor or the big guy or the little guy. Their job is to fill the void left by the intellectual collapse of America’s right as well as to represent their traditional constituencies.
Couldn’t FDR have said the same thing? And he did a lot more than Obama would even dream of doing.
FDR did a lot more by January 1934? Reread your history please. While you’re at it please also compare the composition of the Senate while we are at it. If the Dems pick up 9 seats in the Mid-terms (not gonna happen) like they did in 1934, then we can talk about real comparisons with FDR.
I didn’t say he did it by 1934. Do not put words in my mouth! FDR moved the conversation a lot further left than Obama is even willing to consider. You can complain that Obama doesn’t have the numbers in the Senate that FDR did, but that is a cop out. Just look at what Obama has considered a priority. He’s now trying to sell the unions on the tax on “Cadillac: health care plans instead of a tax on the rich. Why do the middle class have to get taxed more than a turd like Pete Peterson? And why is Obama kissing up to a scum like that to begin with? Obama is loath to spend much in the way of political capital. And speaking of Obama and FDR, why does he want to repeat FDR’s mistakes?
Harold Meyerson talked about this recently:
Thanks for that… I missed that Myerson .. but then it does fall .. at least partially on Obama .. because he isn’t activating that list .. not to the extent it should … but of course the country has changed .. and the question is … how do we get the same effect those movements got
OFA calls me several times a month asking me to knock door, man tables, and make calls. Do they call you? Do you answer?
I agree he could use OFA more, but it’s not like they aren’t working for health care reform. They’ve been working all year.
What you say about the history of FDR makes me think that much of the activist base appears to have thought that Obama would be more of a change-agent, and never really embraced their own role. Although looking more at OFA, I am really not that sure any more. All throughout the campaign the media and pundits consistently missed a lot of the real dynamics of the race. I think that might be happening again. There’s a lot going on under the surface here (which is really part of the design) and I’m pretty conflicted about the meaning of it. I think that I need to understand OFA and it’s place in the larger structure of the activist base.
I think your analysis covers about 80% of what’s going on. But I’d attribute the other 20% to the selling of democratic votes to traditional foes (big business, antilabor, anti-immigration forces) in exchange for campaign contributions. It’s not only because the party is stuck with the bill and trying to be responsible. We do have a lot of bad apples in our own party (Steny Hoyer, anyone??)
Why has the right been so successful with their anti-intellectual strategy? Because they’ve been seeding those clouds for years. On nearly every ballot I’ve voted on in California it seems there’s some measure to “improve” education, which almost means to defund education. By reducing the intellectual capacity of the electorate, the right has successfully grown their base beyond just the rich and protestant.
I think the Left’s biggest mistake is assuming that the most honest, rational argument will win out. FAIL. The simplest, clearest argument will win, and the facts may have little to do with it. Until we realize we have to use the same appeals to emotion, instead of reason, to get our points across, we will continue to misunderstand why, although we win some battles, we still lose the war.
well, I attempted to explain that 20%. The elite institutions have nowhere else to go. We’re not talking about chipping away at their advantages, we’re talking about keeping those institutions standing and functional.
And the elite institutions survived the New Deal .. right? .. and they survived the Eisenhower years(which had way higher tax rates on the rich) .. so Obama should play hardball with them .. knowing they’ll find a way to survive
That would presume that Obama wants to play hardball with elite institutations.Whatever he is playing, it does not represent hardball.
There’s a number of ways I could jump in here but the first thing that comes to mind is The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Voters, by Stephan Kull and PIPA.
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqRealities_Oct04/IraqRealitiesOct04rpt.pdf
I agree with you Lisa, we’re not dealing a political landscape in which conservatives and liberals place the same value on truth, but I disagree with you somewhat in viewing it as a learned phenomenon, even though it is in part.
Political attitudes are not symmetrical. Progressives can frame issues as adeptly as the right but the simple fact is that a disproportionate share of the paranoiacs in Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics are now on the right. It’s not simply a matter of effective communication; the quality of the message changes from right to left. And the coalition shift that started in the 60s has ultimately produced a rightwing coalition that feeds itself disinformation and recycles this disinformation through “incestuous amplification,” which exaggerates this process of myth building.
I was contemplating the subject of motivated cognition recently in regards to certain periods in our history. What struck me previously about periods such as the ~1870s (and later) and the 1930s was the ability of people to alter reality. It’s easy to understand the need to escape that existed during the Depression, which led to Busby Berkely films. And it’s easy to understand the false consciousness of latter 19th century workers who blamed themselves for economic turbulence and turned their anger inward. These are fairly well known attitudinal dynamics, but they are transient effects and they don’t adequately account for the Tea Partiers’ attitudes.
Periods such as the 1850s, with the rise of the No Nothings, and the 1930s in Germany, with the rise of the National Socialists after the collapse of the Wiemar Republic, are better analogies of what we’re currently witnessing.
What I’ve noticed recently is the need to validate certain elements of conservative belief. These elements are more symbolic than concrete, and take the form of a strong desire to believe. Thusly, the complaints against Obama for purportedly not taking the war on terror seriously are more projection than reality. And the birther movement’s desire to de-legitimize Obama is necessary since no black man could be a legitimate authority figure to rightwing authoritarians. There is a strong need to alter reality to comport with a preexisting mindset. Just as stabbed-in-the-back allowed Germans a way of rationalizing their situation, the newly shrunken right provides fertile ground for growing new myths.
Their job is to fill the void left by the intellectual collapse of America’s right
What intellectuals were they? Buckley, Jr.? It doesn’t take intellect to want to turn back the clock to the time of Andrew Jackson(or before).
The other thing I forgot to mention … is the lesson pretty much everyone learns early on .. you can’t please everyone .. it’s just damn impossible .. so Obama has to chose who he’s gonna disappoint .. and right now .. it doesn’t look good(especially picking people like Bernanke and Geithner)
“Their job is to fill the void left by the intellectual collapse of America’s right as well as to represent their traditional constituencies.”
I have to go along with Calvin Jones here and ask ‘What intellectual collapse of America’s right?’ I would concur that there was a public relations collapse of America’s right in that the number of people outside the South who believed the right ought to be governing shrank to insignificance at the end of the Bush II years. But to say that there was an ‘intellectual collapse’ of the American right’ gives the American right more credit than they ever deserved. The ‘intellectual collapse’ came on the American left.
Here’s what I mean: even during the peak years of the Reagan right-wing resurgence, there was no American intellectual right. The right had no frank new ideas about governing better or more effectively for the benefit of the people of the United States or for the long-term success or even maintenance of the American state on the international stage. The innovations were all on the public relations side and had to do with getting power and keeping power. All of the rhetoric about freeing markets and fighting terrorism were cloaks to conceal the enrichment of the already-rich and the destruction of the rule of law.
All of this has been visible for decades now. The right “freed the marketplace” (and the left helped or stood by silently) – and the productive basis of the American economy shrank and shrank, impoverishing and destroying small and medium-sized American business and impoverishing the people who worked there. The right spent trillions and trillions on bullets, beans and bandages in a never-ending series of wars (again with the help or silence of the left), but the United States’ economic, moral and diplomatic standing collapsed. All of this is and has been in plain sight for years. And the left has had nothing substantive to say about it.
The governing left has chosen – and still chooses – to engage the right’s “new ideas” on a reactive basis, as if there were something serious and substantive there at all. There isn’t and there never has been. But this is how and why we have President Obama selling health care reform as a cost saver rather than as a public good long denied the American people. This is why Obama and Steny Hoyer are saying that 2010 is the year of fiscal responsibility and budget balancing, when economists (in contrast with economic apologists dressed up as economists) are saying that this is the road to economic disaster.
The intellectual left, which should have been developing the basis of our engagement with the empty right, has been wandering in the wilderness. Without going into the big long explanation which is required, here are what I see as some of the main reasons for and elements of these lost decades on the intellectual left.
First, post-modernism has severely undercut the formerly firm bonds between scholarship and Anglo-American empiricism. Yes, empiricism has its limits, but no, it should not be discarded in favor of – of what? – an attitude of criticism? Reality is still reality, and admittedly limited but important parts of it can still be demonstrated or reasonably inferred AND THEN MADE USE OF FOR THE BENEFIT OF SOCIETY. This is a crucial discussion which needs to take place, and I hope IS taking place somewhere in the Anglo-American academy. I don’t know, because I haven’t been inside the academy for a decade now, but it wasn’t taking place then. Suffice it to say that discarding empiricism – throwing the baby out with the bath water – has a huge range of knock-on effects, including disrespect for science and engineering where the United States was long a leader, ignoring serious economists as being just one set of opinions among many and thereby inviting further economic disaster, ignoring the manifest lessons of the past and thereby, for example, pretending that ‘freeing the marketplace’ from government restraint is a serious intellectual as opposed to merely rhetorical position, and disrespect for the rule of law because – hey – juries sometimes make mistakes.
Secondly, a lot of important positions in the economy have become isolated from society under the guise of “professionalization” to socially disastrous effect. Professors, journalists, business people have become series of closed circles which require rites of passage to be admitted, and once inside are primarily responsible only to each other and are barely answerable to society. For example, reporting is, at its base a craft like carpentry: the job must be performed to a certain specification within a reasonable period of time. Theoretically, and historically, it can be performed by any high school graduate who did well in English composition, can find out who, what, why, when, where and how about a story of interest and utility to the broader public, can confirm it with one other reliable source, and is willing to be paid a low wage for the work. Now reporters, especially at the more important news organs, must attend journalism school and meet vague and floating standards set by the “profession” – i.e. look over their shoulders and not get too far ahead of the pack if they want to “earn” their now-large salaries. Social “science” professors publish tiny treatises on tiny subjects which are read by tiny audiences for the benefit of themselves. Business people get MBA’s where they learn “truths,” most of which have been proven empirically wrong by recent events, and pretend to benefit their shareholders while in fact getting what they can in the short-term with disastrous long-term consequences for American business.
There is considerably more, but let me get to what I see as some of the causes for this disconnect and bankruptcy on the intellectual left and among the pseudo-professions. As with nearly everything in present-day American intellectual and cultural life, this grows out of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Pretty much all smart people in the 60’s and 70’s saw that the System – based in empiricism, a productive economy, and the rule of law – had many, many flaws. How could it have continued to ignore such an obvious social crime as institutionalized racism for centuries? How could such a disastrous war have been started and then continued long after it was obvious that it was a disaster for our society? Almost everyone came to the conclusion that the System was broken and should be discarded.
On the right, smart and often cynical people drifted into fascism, which is not an intellectual system, but aristocracy hiding behind an opportunistic rhetorical approach. I am not going to trouble anyone by defending this proposition further right now. Suffice it to say that present-day American “conservatism” is in fact fascist almost in its entirety, which is why their constant intellectual hypocrisy bothers them not at all.
On the left, the conclusion that the System was a failure led largely to a retreat from politics-as-benefit-to-society altogether, and an embrace of self-serving which benefits the right and has given it strength it has not earned by any intellectual innovation. This retreat’s main product has been silence on the left.
Among those on the left who persisted in trying to discover an intellectual basis for erecting a new System, there was a rejection of orthodox Marxism-Leninism and an attempt to embrace a “smarter” more “scientific” Marxism of various stripes – Gramsciist, Trotskyite, material-culturalist, etc. Throughout the ’70’s and into the ’80’s, academic leftists struggled to nail down the scientific truth underlying Marxism. I will not be fair to these well-intentioned people, because I had already become intellectually separated from them by this time. The long and short of the story is that “scientific” Marxism turned out not to be a science, whereupon, once again, the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Henceforward, we would all be cast adrift in the wilderness of onanistic post-modernism, (many important roots of which are found in fascism).
How the hell did the left, academic, professional and quotidian, become so separated from the reality that the well-intentioned intellectual is meant to serve the common people and the broader society? My basic answer is that it was the impatience of youth. Those of my Boomer generation came to the conclusion that the System as it stood in the ’50’s and early ’60’s had failed beyond possible repair and reformation before THE RESULTS OF ATTEMPTS TO REPAIR AND REFORM IT WERE IN. We let the racism of a lot of common folk convince us that the common folk were inherently and irremediably racist, rather than the acculturated products of a heretofore racist society – big difference. We let the warmongering of the leadership of most labor unions convince us that the union movement and the entire working class was hopeless, rather than reacting as patriots to a situation – war – which had up until that time been about patriotism, rather than corruption and stupidity. We thought we had failed working through the System, and so we abandoned the System in favor of a mess of potage.
But ask anyone on the right – we on the left won what they call the “Culture Wars” of the ’60’s and ’70’s. Through the political system, we made the entire society admit that excluding people of African ancestry was wrong and stupid and made society take concrete steps to accept African-Americans into the middle of our society. Racism is not dead, but it is dying, and we have an African-American president to demonstrate that fact. We ended a massively stupid and disastrous war which the military-industrial complex did not want to end, and we did it through the System.
The ’80’s and ’90’s were a Conservative Moment, to misapply C. Wright Mills’ phrase, not because people calling themselves conservatives had seized the initiative in a fit of resentful pique, but because it was precisely the moment when the intellectual left should have recognized how valuable and workable the System was – how empiricism, a productive economy and the rule of law served society in the long run, and how their destruction would lead to the disastrous consequences we now see before us.
Your comment would make a fine diary on its own, and it contains the seeds of several more. Hint, hint.
In the late seventies I was drinking in a tiki bar out towards the beach on Geary Blvd in San Francisco with a coworker at the VA Hospital. He had finished his masters and was taking a job in the State Department.
We were getting into the cups and talking broadly about politics and I made a joke about how Communism wasn’t so bad if only their bureaucrats had a sense of humor. It was a drunken off-hand remark. My friend got serious and said, “Some people think that maybe the Nazis weren’t so wrong.”
I don’t think that he was condoning the rounding up of Jews and gays. I think that he was talking about the philosophy of fascism: the merging of business and government. I’m sure if I pressed him he would have said that the death camps were wrong, but the arrangement between government and business was the correct way for a state to run.
That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard. Someone who was very intelligent, who was going into an important government agency, and who I knew and who was a reasonable (if politically conservative) guy, was promoting fascism.
When he went into the State Department I got the distinct impression that he was working for the CIA in some function. I lost touch with him over the years.
Fascism functions on two levels. On one level the government is the handmaiden for corporations. On another level fascism offers various explanations for the resultant social dislocation to the people not profiting, or suffering, from the cozy arrangements of the powerful. Those explanations include blaming minorities, communists, socialists, etc. Solutions are often patriotic slogans and foreign aggression when it serves the interests of the elite.
If the Republican Party does not serve the corporate state well enough and the Democratic Party must assume that role too, then the Democratic Party, which gets its votes from the working class, is facing an impossible role. It will be working against its constituency. Which means that it will fail electorally. Which means that soon the Republicans, who are selling reactionary fascist mythologies, will be back in business again, or a new, more radical version of fascism will be offered up to the American public for purchase. And you don’t have to be dumb to buy it.
this is a pregnant post.
I will note one apparent contradiction.
You seem to argue both for and against rule by experts and both for and against the virtues of the American System.
That doesn’t surprise me. I have the same ambivalence.
I want to believe in the inherent goodness of our system, and I understand and share the impulse to protect and reform it. But I also see failure and collapse on every front, and have trouble believing sometimes that it is worthy of protection and reform.
To follow up on your answer. What has Obama done to try and reform things? Appointing Geithner and Bernanke is not the actions of someone who wants to reform the system. And before anyone says they are the best people for the job right now, I say bullshit!! Why not Stiglitz for head of the Treasury or the Fed? Or what about Galbraith(and no .. not the one in trouble re: Afghanistan/Iraq .. the other one)? Or find a way to let Buffet run Treasury from Omaha(because he wouldn’t do it any other way)
Geithner and Bernacke are there to keep the system from collapsing. I have already said more than once that Geithner has served his function and ought to be replaced by a reform-minded secretary. But we ought not underestimate the success he had in staving off a total collapse.
But anyone could have done what he(and Bernanke) have done … they’ve just shoveled cash out the door to the banksters .. even you could have done that, Boo!!
Uh, no…
I couldn’t do that because I have no experience or expertise in high finance. I would not inspire the requisite amount of confidence either.
Not really. A lot of what was done was not conventional, and they were techniques that came from the NY Fed. Many people might have not implemented them due to them being so different than conventional wisdom. He used them without hesitation, and that’s not something many other people might have done.
See here:
http://www.wbur.org/2009/08/25/krugman-bernanke
This is why the left annoys me when it comes to banking and finance; they’re so utterly ignorant about it. It’s probably why Alan Grayson sounds like a tard whenever he questions Bernanke (Matt Stoller). I like having our people on the inside influencing policy like Stoller, but please know what you’re talking about before doing so.
Not that I support Bernanke’s reappointment. I’m kind of indifferent. I don’t support it, but I don’t oppose it, either.
Thanks for your assholish condescension. You have no idea what anyone else on the left(or readers and commenters on this blog) knows of finance. Glad to know that you are all knowing about the subject though. I suppose you do realize that Jim Bunning(despite being a complete jackass) asked in writing questions of Bernanke that were supplied by a very knowledgeable blogger(The Cunning Realist). and that Bernanke stonewalled and gave nonsensical answers.
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In the sixties when I was in college, the true battle against the Communists was explained as a war of economics. A sound economy would be decisive to defeat Communism as political tool and its communal economics. Looking back to the years of the Great Depression and the policies of FDR, Keynanism was the answer for governments to set its fiscal and economic policy. World War II created the opportunity for America to shine in the world with great achievements on the battleground, an accomplishment made possible by U.S. manufacturing and large work force including women. This changed society forever and other nations crawled back up from de devastations of war in Europe with investment policy supported by the Marshall Plan. It took 25 years to get the economy in Europe moving forward and Germany as a leading nation. In the Far East it was Japan followed by South Korea and Singapore to impress with manufacturing and an economic boom. The Vietnam War had a negative result for U.S. politics and the economy. The Middle East turmoil with two wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors caused the oil embargo of the West and a stronger OPEC with permanent higher prices for the commodity.
The political failure of the Carter administration to deal with the rise of Khomeiny and especially the inaction to deal with the American hostage situation in Tehran, led to a political shift in power. The Reagan administration used the fiscal and economic principles of Friedman. In the U.K. the rise of the Conservatives under Margareth Thatcher created a strong political and economic bond. During these two decades there was political turmoil in Central- and South America to deal with. The military junta in Argentina had conservative support of the U.S. and the U.K. until the Falklands War. Same with other dictatorial regimes, Iraq and Saddam Hussein got all support to wage a cruel war on Iran including gassing of its population. The entry into Kuweit upset Thatcher and Bush on an afterthought, leading to the first Gulf War.
However, what is the impact of party politics on the financial and economic might of international corporations, especially the combination of industry and the military complex. In my conception, politics on national and international scale is bound by conservatism. To realize change is just about impossible. The Clinton years were in reality a continuation of Reaganomics: Friedman principles of liberal economic policy and deregulation. In the U.K. Tony Blair disavowed the social principles of his Labor party and moved to the (far) right. The conservatives were forced out of the political spectrum and became a minority party.
The U.S., Great Britain and Western European nations all moved to the same economic principles of Friedman with support of Fed president Alan Greenspan. The West saw the collapse of the technical boom in 2000-2001, the housing boom collapse followed by the financial markets and the banking system.
A great experiment in the laboratory of a small nation Iceland can be seen, see my diary Iceland the Poster Child for Neocon Fiscal Policy.
In the European Union, the United Kingdom has been and is a dissonant. The arrogance of the lost colonial empire, the preference for a strong political and economic Atlantic Union with the United States, leaves the Brits as the odd man in Europe. There will always be a tug of war with France and Germany to gain political weight on decisionmaking and EC policy. Sarkozy was burnt by Merkel (and Obama) and presently seeks out Gordon Brown as a political ally. France used to be a close ally of Germany in the EEC as both belonged to the original six nations.
Economic might leads to political power as can be seen with a financial strong China possessing the largest U.S. dollar reserves. Their unprecedented global investments in Iran, Sudan and African nations, Venezuela and many South American nations. On the stage in Copenhagen, China imposed its political clout and determined the policy for 2010 … and beyond? Don’t look back, the world will never be the same. Support the administration you have, with Republicans in the majority my advise would be: emigrate.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Thinking about it, Oui, thinking about it. New Zealand is looking better than ever. If one is on the Titantic and there is a chance to get off, then, one must jump ship. I think the corporate hold on vital organs of this culture – industry, mass media, government, entertainment, religion – is too strong to break. Hence, departure is the only answer for a person like myself.
Oui: “The political failure of the Carter administration to deal with the rise of Khomeiny and especially the inaction to deal with the American hostage situation in Tehran, led to a political shift in power.”
I don’t discount that there was a failure, but blame shouldn’t be placed on Carter. He relied on the CIA for guidance and the CIA did everything to put him in a bad position.
Then there was the “October Surprise” where emissaries from the Republicans (and U.S. intelligence) were negotiating with the radicals to delay the hostage release until after the elections. ABC brought on “Nightline” which functioned as a daily anti-Carter propaganda source. Damn, even Ollie North was part of the military planning and coordination of the failed hostage rescue plan.
Essentially, certain segments of the state (the military, the CIA) were already so aligned with the Republican Party and its constituents in 1980 as to commit treason in order to favor them politically and influence an election.
+++
As a side note, the current ruling group in Iran were, back in the Carter days, the people who were working with Carter to free the hostages. The radicals who wanted to hold the hostages until after the U.S. elections are now the “democratic opposition”. (Read Robert Parry on this.) Considering the side that the CIA is on and all the reporting, I would say that those old business partners are still in business.
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Editor’s Note: Part 3 of our series about the “Original October Surprise” of 1980 addresses the troubling question of whether disgruntled CIA officers collaborated with their former boss, George H.W. Bush, to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations – and thus changed the course of U.S. political history.
Original October Surprise
Carter just received recognition for the peace talks between Begin of Israel and Sadat of Egypt. Sometimes, when the United States is under attack, you have to be more decisive. The attack on the U.S. embassy and hostage taking was an act of war and should have been dealt with in military fashion once negotiations in the short term failed. The failures of the U.S. in the Vietnam War were seen as weakness throughout the world. The “rescue mission” in Iran was late and ill conceived, meant to fail. I personally thought the hostage issue a grave matter that needed to be resolved in a matter of weeks. A strict deadline should have been observed. The 70’s witnessed a serie of horrible trafedies due to terror attacks and hostage taking. A soft response leads to a continuation of such acts. Olympics Munchen 1972 – Baader Meinhof group – Achille Lauro – PLO & affiliates plane hijacking – Moluccans school and train attacks – French embassy The Hague.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
So we’re back to the future – I’ll wait for the split…
I have two questions about this:
Which Tea Partiers exactly are you talking about?
There are at least these strains of people labeled as “Tea Party”: the original Dick Armey-FoxNews astroturfed Tea Party created by Freedomworks and promoted on FoxNews and by conservative talk show hosts; the Ron Paul small government, libertarian folks, who showed up to heckle Bob Inglis (SC-04) a conservative Republican; the neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate folks now coordinated by Dale Robertson, who have been the most photogenic; the LaRouchies, who created some of the more professionally done anti-Obama signs; the independents, in a wide swath of the political spectrum that runs from way left of the Greens to way right of Ron Paul who have some serious and radical questions about establishment business and politics and who participate in a variety of political movements, or none at all.
What exactly is the “radical critique of existing political institutions” being offered by the Tea Partiers?
Fact is, I see many different and contradictory critiques. Charges of “socialism”, “nazism”, “fascism”, “communism” don’t, in my mind rise to the level of being a critique.
I acknowledged that ‘critique’ wasn’t the best word to describe them and that their agenda is unarticulated.
Good post. But, where does money from corporations fit in your analysis? These elected officials vote in the interest of the corporations that pay them.
If you look, you’ll see that the GOP is operating on a shoestring. Corporate America hasn’t exactly abandoned them, but they’re definitely a second cousin these days. The Democrats have won almost every suburban/financial sector district in the country over the last two election cycles.
Of course they have. Because they have shown themselves, through the Blue Dogs, willing to play ball. The Wall Street money boys don’t give two shits about things like gay marriage or abortion. The money boys can also see the Republicans have gone off the rails and are unreliable. And they know they can co-opt enough of the Democratic Party. And now that the Democrats control the Presidency and Congress, Republican fund raising efforts are going to suffer. The only sure rain-maker they have is still Dubya. So what does that tell you? Michael Steele might be pissing off GOp’er donors, but that is small potatoes.
A couple of quibbling notes:
As an unfunded mandate “No Child Left Behind” had the Christianist (and many other conservative “populist”) interests’ covered in that the effect of strangling the funding of public schools was the direct result and, most likely the desired result as intended. Very radical.
And this:
Only if you are a Democratic party politician or supporter expecting election victories with a blatant disregard for the effects of the actual policies.
The fastest growing segment of the population, be they left or right unaffiliated voters, are not. It may seem prudent in some ways even to some unaffiliated. But it will never be from the perspective of what results. Because, as their recent policy actions have shown, they shown no responsibility to the people at all. They are playing to the corporations and disregarding the real solutions and it shows.
remember that Kennedy crafted the NCLB bill. It wasn’t radical at all. The fact that they double-crossed Kennedy and underfunded the program led to it being incredibly unpopular, not that a laser focus on testing was going to be popular anyway. But it wasn’t “conservative” to expand federal oversight and control of public schools.
Unfunded, it was a conservative agenda and radical. The fact that they double crossed Kennedy there on what would seem like a good thing is enough smoke to find a fire, IMHO.
And the fire was the result we did witness. It strangled the funding of a public institution. Public Schools were in a world of hurt from it.
A great writeup and informative, nonetheless, BooMan. But I am always “just sayin'” even when it is kind of nitpicky. lol
“But one-party proved unworthy of support during the Bush years. No elite element of our society, from the scientific community, to the intelligentsia, to the business community, to the military and intelligence community, to the federal bureaucracy were able to support the Republican Party by the time Bush’s presidency ended. The rise of Palinism only made matters worse. The Democratic Party ceased being the party for the left and became the party for the entire Establishment. Outwardly, Obama campaigned as a traditional Democrat, appealing to traditional Democratic constituencies. But, in reality, he took on the job as savior for the entire system, which was literally failing so badly after September 2008 that the whole world was feeling the strain.”
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. For one, I think both parties are, in power, de facto proxies for the “establishment” and have been for at least 40 years. The continuity in foreign and monetary policy over that time is too great to conclude otherwise. Yes there will be differences, but the basic project of neo-liberalism and american imperialism remains unquestioned. Secondly and more importantly, I don’t believe that the establishment gave up on the republican party because the Bush administration was a flaming real-world catastrophe. To the extent they gave up it was because they could see that the most credible imperial manager was going to come from the democrats, and they knew that there would be smooth continuity. In other words, there was strictly a political shift because politically Bush had wrecked daddy’s car. If somehow the financial sector hadn’t imploded until early this year and a better republican candidate then McCain had pulled out a victory (let’s face it, McCain sucked), the establishment would be quite happy to do business with the new republican administration, no matter how crazy, because politicians don’t get to be president unless they have long since made peace with the establishment.
At times I almost wish McCain had won, thus allowing the full bankruptcy of the republican party to sink deeply into american consciousness. But now I realize that no matter how bad his administration were, the establishment would line up behind him, compel the protection of their interests, and maintain their general indifference to everything they couldn’t sell or outsource. At the same time, of course, corporate media would treat this new low point as the new normal, although I don’t know how much corporate media really matters now.
I am basic agreement with this, although I don’t view ‘American imperialism’ as you define it to be unambiguously bad. It would be easy to misinterpret what I mean by that. What I mean is that if you look at the performance of America in the post-war period, we pretty much created all the things we’d like to preserve and strengthen (or reform) as well as some pretty nasty legacies we’d like to do away with (the Saudi regime, the MIC’s undue influence, an unexamined foreign policy that is costly and causes significant blowback, an irresolvable situation in Isreal/Palestine).
To what degree do you want radical change, and in what areas? In some, like energy usage, Obama understands. In others, like our forward military-basing structure, he doesn’t.
But for good or ill, his job right now is set things on a stable path (on Wall Street, the budget v. economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, our justice system) much more than it is to take a populist pitchfork to those institutions and issues. A lot of people want the Establishment to get their comeuppance for leading us into winless wars, blowing up the budget, perverting our justice system, and blowing up the economy. But Obama is try to operate on a body that is in critical condition. He will use a scalpel, not a hammer. And, temperament aside, he leads a party that wants it this way, for the most part, and faces an opposition that places a narrow constraint on available alternatives.
The problem, as I see it, is that the patient appears terminal.
Thank you so much for your intelligent reply. You’re right that my use of “imperialism” is sloppy. I can see the sense in your argument, though I don’t agree with all of it. You are absolutely right that it does no good to seek “punishment” or some such thing for the elites which have brought us to this crisis. The point is to guide our society to a just and sustainable mode of existence. And Obama has at least made a plausible case that this is his framework. I certainly hope Obama is trying to gently roll us down the de-cline of invetitable economic dislocation. I suspect that more drastic measures are needed anyway, that in fact we may need to saw off this or that limb. In other words, I suspect Obama may not have yet learned the tragic determination of Lincoln, despite the expertly dramaturged wiff of the Lincoln-esque in candidate Obama.
I am stone cold crazy. I am not stupid or blinded by any racial, religious, political, creed or intellectual beliefs.
I see the author of this essay as a total fool. Well educated but a fool. If the author in any way, shape or form thinks that there is a difference between the republican/democrats and the democratic/republicans, he/she is crazier than I am. There is one party. The party of the oligarchs and until they are assigned their horrible responsibility for the decline of the american people through their sheer greed, there will never be a republic in america.
My major quarrel with Joseph Stalin was that he killed irrationally. The number of members of the Politburo descended from the former Tsarist aristocracy when the Soviet Union broke up, proves conclusively that he did not kill enough of the right people and way too many of the wrong people.
The great shock in China after Tienanmen Square was when their politburo discovered just how many of their children, grand children and great grand children had died. How many of the prisoners were not from the proletariat but from the “favored.” That is why the great swing to capitalism. Their descendants died saying you old are wrong. When your beloved son who was a college professor and a grandfather dies protesting your policies, you do have to rethink.
your problem with Stalin is that he didn’t kill enough of the right kind of people? Kind of makes it optional to defend myself.