Peter Beinart’s take on Alterman’s piece is kind of interesting. Two things stuck out for me. The first was this:
It’s true that the filibuster is used more often today than during FDR and LBJ’s time, but back then, conservative committee chairman often kept progressive legislation from even reaching the Senate floor.
He’s right about that and it’s something I’ve kind of overlooked when writing about that era. Because the geographic anchor of the Democratic Party was in the South and the Republican Party was so weak down there, southern senators tended to serve for life. They had the most seniority and so they held most of the important gavels. The effect of that is hard to see from our vantage point because we’re looking for the absence of something. It was easier for the upper chamber to be collegial when the Democrats that truly wielded power were pretty damn conservative. That’s why the filibuster lay mostly dormant and also why the one issue that did arouse it was civil rights for blacks.
The second thing I found interesting about Beinart’s views was this:
The more fundamental difference between the Obama era and its New Deal and Great Society predecessors is this: Back then, progressives did not define the left end of the political spectrum. In the 1930s and 1960s, America featured honest-to-goodness alternatives to capitalism, home-grown radical movements that scared the crap out of the American establishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into arms of reformers like FDR and LBJ. Because our entire ideological spectrum has shifted right since communism’s collapse, reforms that once looked like centrist compromises now look like the brainchild of Chairman Mao.
In the 1930s, some of America’s most prominent intellectuals saw communism as a serious alternative to Depression-era capitalism. (One reason so many writers and artists got in trouble during the McCarthyite scare of the early 1950s was that so many had flirted with pro-communist groups during FDR’s presidency). And while American communism never became a mass movement, the Depression years birthed home-spun assaults on capitalism that were almost as frightening.
The failure of communism might have made the left more reputable in this country, but it’s basically had the exact opposite effect. Terrorism replaced communism as the justification for the national security state, and any semblance of radical left in this country withered away. As things stand now, when a Democratic president proposes the Heritage Foundation’s 1993 health care plan, he’s a socialist.
If there were reds fulminating on Obama’s left with the same degree of passion as the Tea Partiers, his agenda would be more appealing to frightened businessmen. The thing is, that’s not happening and it’s not something you can plan. I think those types of movements need to be funded by some entity and they require a degree of auto-catalysis. I don’t know exactly why current economic conditions are not leading to unrest on the left, but I think television has a lot to do with it. And I don’t just mean how politics are presented on teevee. I mean mainly that people are stunned lazy by non-political entertainment.
Whatever the case, the left is smaller in this country than it used to be, and it doesn’t have room to break up into factions and still stay in power. So, I don’t see Beinart’s analysis as wrong, but I don’t think it’s too helpful.
Wow. Tim Wise kicks ass.
He certainly does. I first became aware of Mr Wise during the election campaign. I didn’t see him on local/national news, I heard him my the nationally syndicated urban radio programs like The Tom Joyner Morning Show. Every since then, whenever I hear that Tim Wise is gonna be on that morning TJMS, I make sure to listen. Cause Tim Wise may be a white guy, but he certainly writes more eleoquently, and honestly about race relations in modern America, armed with facts and figures, not just innuendo, than many of the white progressive blogosphere and media elite does.
BTW, Tim Wise is planning to write a piece on left/liberal racism, that should be available soon. I can’t wait to read that one.
I disagree with you on, well just about everything, but this:
…is almost certainly true. television, like the internal combustion engine, is a paradox, simultaneously one of the best and worst things that was ever invented.
People just don’t pay attention until they get the pink slip. Until then it is consumerism. There are lot of people who actually listen to and follow a life of commercialism. They kept the economy going until, well, the pink slip.
There problem with American politics is not a shortage of parties, but a shortage of labels.
Then, as now, there are at least three parties in the Senate, from which a governing coalition is from time to time is cobbled together.
There are:
(There used to be Republican Senators who are Democrats — Javits, Brooke, Hatfield, Pell, Stafford — but no longer.)
(There used to be Republican Senators who are Democrats — Javits, Brooke, Hatfield, Pell, Stafford — but no longer.)
Don’t forgot Fightin’ Bob LaFollette … he’d be a certified DFH today … back in his day .. there were such things as Progressive Republicans
Is that Pell, as in Pell Grants?
Yep. And he insisted that prisoners be eligible for them, because education was the best weapon against recidivism.
He was a former Foreign Service Officer, spoke four languages, and wrote the bills establishing the National Endowmwents for the Arts and Humanities.
Claiborn DaBorda Pell, Socialist cadre — via St. George’s School, Princeton (Colonial Club) and Columbia.
Read his bio, and ask yourself, “Could this man get on the RI GOP primary ballot today?”
Pell was a good senator. He was hardly a Republican though. As it says in the biography, he was elected as a Democrat (and I had the pleasure of voting for him thusly).
I think Beinart’s absolutely right and absolutely relevant. I’ve been ranting for some time that the only way we have a prayer of getting the fundamental and necessary changes we need is by scaring the crap out of the American establishment. Name any change in our history, and that’s how it came about.
Nibbling around the edges just won’t cut it. But without a radical left pushing and constituting a credible threat, we can’t expect any incumbent president to do much more than nibble. Those of us who believe the only change that can allow our social and species survival is revolutionary change find Beinart’s analysis ultimately helpful. The left in this country is not only smaller, but less productive than it used to be. The only ones really challenging the rulers more often than not have nothing but tired old doctrinaire marxish slogans. We need to do much better, and fast.
Say whatever we may, without FDR and LBJ, where would we be today. I am speaking of course about the liberal-socialists among us. Is it possible to believe that BO will become another one of them?
We’d be a darn sight better off actually had JFK gone with just about anyone other than LBJ. WIth Humphrey or Symington taking over, no Vietnam, no public dissatisfaction with/backlash against major gov’t programs to help those in need because the programs would have been adequately funded and run (instead of the Dem prez paying most attention to an unnecessary war), no groundwork laid for the conservative ascendancy beginning with Nixon. Johnson really poisoned the political and social well in this country with his war and his lying, and paved the way for Nixon and Watergate and the lousy inflationary problems of the 70s.
Yes, I really hope Obama doesn’t become another LBJ.
FDR or JFK are the ones to aspire to, Kennedy being our last true liberal president.
Alas, so far he’s only achieved in Clinton moderately-successful small-ball manner, while coming dangerously close to disappointing in the Carter mode. Admin is still only 18 mos old, however, and the jury is still out.
Far be it from me to defend LBJ on the Vietnam War.
In fairness to him however, he inherited JFK’s foreign policy and his advisers.
Johnson deserves real credit for the Great Society legislation—in particular the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. He understood the issues, and the Congress, far better than Kennedy ever did.
In Rick Pearlstein’s “Nixonland”, he places great weight on legislation like the Fair Housing Act for breaking apart the Democratic coalition in the North.
As for 1970s inflation, that had more to do with OPEC and the oil shocks than it did Johnson’s Vietnam spending (which he at least partly paid for with a surtax).
Yes he inherited such and such, but it was his decision to keep them on — LBJ after all was now president, and famously had his own way of doing things. But the real story there, only recently being fleshed out in the historical record, is how LBJ came into office with an already determined mindset to escalate, doing a 180 on JFK’s withdrawal policy, which he derided in a February 1964 phone call to SecDef McNamara, a holdover Kennedy advisor who, since Nov 1961, and always loyal to the wishes of the president, had been advising along the anti-combat troop lines Kennedy had established by then. McN of course then switched back to a pro-escalation stance once Johnson’s views became clear in ’64.
That’s a picture of the president, not his advisors, actively driving policy. LBJ was hardly a passive player in the VN matter.
As for domestic legislation, Johnson had a major F-1 or 2 wind at his back following the assassination — enough to get (largely Kennedy’s) CR passed before the election. After Goldwater and the landslide, he had an F-3 or 4 hurricane force behind him with the more liberal Congress and 61% of the public having rejected the far-right philosophy. With a now 2-1 Dem margin in Congress, and working liberal majority, well, you didn’t need to be a genius to get legislation passed.
And there’s just no basis for your assertion that LBJ “understood the issues” better than Kennedy. Johnson understood the legislative game very well, how to scheme and wheel and deal, but on the substance of the bills Kennedy was his better (as was Humphrey).
Re VN spending, Johnson waited more than two years, after being warned in 1965 that new taxes would be needed to pay for it, to go to Congress for a surtax — just as the pres’l election season was getting started and Repubs were in no mood to deal, and much too little and too late by that time to fully account for all the inflationary and disruptive factors that had taken hold in the economy because of Johnson’s guns and butter approach.
Re Pearlstein, would like to see his full analysis before commenting.
Forgot to mention re massappeal’s statement, or implication, about LBJ being sort of at the mercy of Kennedy advisors on Nam: in Johnson’s post-presidency chats with historian Doris Kearns, he singled out two advisors he liked best above all others (his or the ones he inherited).
Who were they? Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow.
Both of them confirmed, dyed-in-the-wool hawks on VN — early hawks and late hawks, never wavering from their rigid interventionist stance. Rusk was kept on for the rest of Johnson’s time in office of course. Rostow was brought back as nat’l security advisor after Kennedy holdover McGeorge Bundy was eased out (for his increasing discomfort with Johnson’s failure to fully square with the public about his escalatory actions in Nam). Kennedy, by contrast, had done the opposite with the ultrahawkish Rostow — sent him out of the WH-nat’l security loop and over to a position at State, where only Rusk, and not the president, would have to read his awful interventionist-minded memos.
These are the people Lyndon wanted advising him and whom he respected, not the McNamaras and Clark Cliffords and Bundys who were more nuanced and sophisticated and who eventually (the first two) turned against Lyndon’s War.
Says all you need to know, right there, about Johnson’s rigid, one-track mindset in the VN matter.
I don’t get it about JFK. His list of accomplishments would be generously described as sparse. The moon landing did rally the country and have some tech side benefits, but was essentially a very costly PR ploy and motivated by Cold War bullshit. Bay of Pigs. “Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place”. He was very much the Cold Warrior and his domestic achievements didn’t amount to a whole lot compared to what Obama’s done. He was very likable and made us feel better about ourselves, and he hired some great speechwriters.
What did he do that makes you see him as great or especially liberal?
Some interesting history that seems especially relevant today.
Dave, your anti-Kennedy take sounds like the Kennedy-hating Chomsky ca 1993.
Since then, there has been plenty of published material, using fairly recently released admin docs previously classified (for far too long), along with further analysis and interviews with insiders, to discredit Chomsky et al’s cynical take.
Some accomplishments:
It’s not an anti-Kennedy take. I just think he’s overrated on the basis of his popularity (which is an important asset) and the whole “Camelot” mystique. You think he’d have done things one way, I doubt it. We could argue what might have been forever without any way of really knowing. Bottom line, I think had he lived he’d have ranked somewhere in the upper middle among presidents. Now, Bobby might have been a whole nother story.
On what Kennedy had planned re VN (no longer a very speculative “what might have happened”, imo, given the fuller record now) I’ll again recommend several recent books all of which worked from the recently declassified record:
. JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass (deals with Kennedy behind-scenes political maneuvering and documented VN policy plus JFK-Khrushchev attempt post-Cuba towards détente; also Kennedy overtures to Castro on new beginning in ’63)
. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in VN, Gordon Goldstein (partly the memoir on VN Bundy would have written had he lived long enough to finish it)
. JFK and Vietnam, by John Armstrong (first major scholarly book to use recently declassified Kennedy FP documents)
All major players (except Rusk) in Kennedy’s nat’l security chain — McNamara, Bundy and the Chair of the JCS Gen Taylor — all later said, in their own way but basically in agreement, that Kennedy would not have escalated in Nam as Johnson did. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said same. As did Senator Wayne Morse, with whom JFK had a discussion on VN just a few days before Dallas. John Kenneth Galbraith, whom Kennedy had sent to Nam for fact-finding, knowing his antiwar position, agreed JFK would not have sent in combat troops, according to son James.
Re other areas for a 2d Kennedy term, basically see the Douglass book above plus RFK’s oral history interviews (published in book form in the 1980s as Rbt Kennedy In His Own Words). Among the plans JFK had for a 2d term:
. Advisors all out of VN (or substantially) by end of ’65
. End of Cold War (Sergei Khrushchev confirms this was his father’s goal working with Kennedy in the improved post-Missile Crisis atmosphere, and SK says it was doable)
. Joint US-USSR Moon Mission
. New, relaxed relations with Castro
. Recognition of Red China
. New SoS to replace Rusk
. Bobby possibly to head CIA ?
. Major anti-Poverty program
. JFK’s major 1st-term domestic legis (Medicare, Civ Rts, Taxes and reform) to have an “18-month delivery” (predicted by JFK in mid-1963).
Impressive list, and not unreasonable to anticipate accomplishing much of it given that Kennedy was going to get roughly the same landslide as Lyndon got against Barry in ’64, with the RW soundly defeated and a strong liberal majority having come to Congress.
Why he was popular with a lot of Americans. He backed Khrushchev down in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Grief over his assassination.
Why he was popular with minorities. He backed up federal judgments with National Guard troops.
Why he was popular in Appalachia. In 1963 he created the Appalachian Regional Commission that rolled out billions of dollars in aid to create better transportation, healthcare services, tourism jobs, and alternatives to coal mining in Appalachia.
“If there were reds fulminating on Obama’s left with the same degree of passion as the Tea Partiers, his agenda would be more appealing to frightened businessmen.”
Isn’t this overton window stuff? I thought you poo-pooed that?
Also, where do I sign up?
Just curious what you think of this Mike Lux post at Open Left, given your comments about progressives of late:
http://bit.ly/9gMC3x
Well, if you have read carefully, you’ll notice that I’ve said that it doesn’t matter what’s in his heart particularly, because what’s driving his policy is mathematics. Did he just strip a $17 billion bank fee out of the Wall Street reforms because he wanted to? No, he did it to win Scott Brown’s 60th vote for the bill.
Now, even though the truth in the debate over Obama’s soul is not very important, the fact that a lot of (mostly white) online progressives have formed an aggressively adversarial, antagonistic, and deeply cynical relationship with the president is a problem.
Mike Lux wrote a good column but he’s so deep in the muck of this cynicism that he fails to mention that Obama is overwhelmingly popular with the bigger half of the progressive community that is non-white. He doesn’t discuss the threat from the Republicans or the upcoming midterms at all. His eye is completely off the ball. And he’s leading his readers astray because he’s living in a fantasy world where the only threat that exists is that some progressive legislation might not pass Ben Nelson’s sniff-test.
But I do read what you write carefully, everyday. I basically saw Lux’s post as a perhaps too subtle critique of some of the other bloggers at Open Left, particularly Paul Rosenberg, who waste a lot of ink complaining that Obama isn’t a true progressive.
I think Lux, like a lot of progressives, believe that senators like Nelson have power because they hold out on bills until they get what they want, which means watering the bill down as much as possible, and if progressives did the same, we’d get a better bill. But, they don’t seem to realize that Nelson gets his power because he can simply join forces with Republicans.
There seemed to be an understanding of this at Open Left during the Bush years. I don’t remember if it was Chris or Matt who said it, but after Democrats won the Congressional elections in 2006, one of them said something to the effect that there was still a conservative majority in Congress, even though Democrats had won a majority in the House. Basically, the same group of Democratic congressman who joined forces with the Republicans back then, are doing so now, made worse because of the filibuster rule in the Senate.
The fact that Lux even mentions a possible 2012 primary challenge(!!) to Obama should tell you how distracted and off the mark he is. I realize he’s not currently endorsing such a challenge, but (aside from the fact that idea being disastrously stupid) it’s completely and utterly irrelevant right now.
Comments like that, plus the recent daily addition of Paul Rosenberg and the return of David Sirota, I think have really turned me off Open Left for good.
Which explains why LBJ’s stripping Strom Thurmond of his committee chair (I believe it was the Armed Services Committee) caused Thurmond to switch parties. LBJ was punishing Thurmond for campaigning for Barry Goldwater. And why it was a big deal. Thurmond came back as a Repubican as chair of that committee when Republicans held the Senate.
And why maybe the reason that Lieberman was not similarly stripped of his committee chair is that he is not expected to win re-election and be chair for life. That means that the politics of the moment can take precedent.
Notice that the same dynamic is playing out on the Republican side. Southern Republicans elected for life. So the blockage occurs on the floor instead of committee. Converting the South into a competitive two-party political culture in which politicians were not guaranteed to be serving for life is the antidote to this if the filibuster is not substantially changed in the next Congress.
Pres Johnson acting as majority leader and dictating to Mike Mansfield who should chair committees? Cite?
I think the 1964 CR bill (passed just a few months before his switch) amounted to the last straw for Thurmond, who as you know was already quite mavericky, as with his 1948 Dixiecrat run against HST and his personal filibuster of the rather toothless 1957 bill that Lyndon had wanted to look more liberal for the 1960 pres’l race.
(Thurmond, in any case, would get revenge against the Dems and Lyndon for civil rights and whatever else, when in 1968 he led the senate effort to block LBJ’s crony Abe Fortas from being elevated to Chief Justice.)
Re filibusters and blockage in committee, it should be noted again that it was ML Mansfield’s decision, according to the record I’ve seen, to forego putting the bill before segregationist John McClelland’s (D-MS) Jud’ry comm’ee and instead begin the process directly from the floor, which was the crucial factor in that bill’s passage.
It is true that Thurmond swung in support of Goldwater as a result of the passage of the Civil Rights bill of 1964. But he remained a Democrat until after the opening of the new Congress in 1965. I’m not sure that LBJ needed to dictate to anyone. Folks back then understood party unity and Thurmond’s actions had to be punished. They could have tossed him out of the party. Instead, they stripped him of his chair. He took the hint.
I think that one of things going on is that the most segregationist Southern Democrats thought they had assurances from LBJ in 1960 that Kennedy would not threaten segregation. And for Johnson to push through the Civil Rights act himself and boldly was the final break. But until the old generation of Southern Democrats died or were defeated by Republicans, Thurmond was the only Senator who switched.
that’s because, for them, the only thing worse than a northern Democrat was a southern Republican. They certainly didn’t want to become one.
Bingo.
John Tower and Jesse Helms began making it respectable for all the Dixiecrats to move over during the Nixon years, but Republicans did not have a lock in the South until the Clinton administration and the 1994 election.