Employers will always be outnumbered by employees. And there will always be certain areas where their interests simply do not overlap. In the American system, where we really are stuck with two parties, it’s not healthy for one party to represent employers and one party to represent employees. And it actually doesn’t quite work that way. For the Republicans, they have to overcome the problem that employers are badly outnumbered. That is why they use religion and patriotism and xenophobia and race-resentment, and some regional resentment, and anti-elite rhetoric and entertainment to lure workers onto their side.
For the Democrats, there are two problems. The first is that employees have a lot less money than employers. They can try to make up the difference with small donations, but it’s a lot more work and it isn’t always enough. Second, and related, the Democrats are not trying to be a worker’s party. They aren’t anti-business. They aren’t anti-capitalism. They aren’t interested in simply taking the unions’ agenda as their own. It’s true that the Republicans make those claims, but they are not true. There are minor parties in this country that unapologetically pursue the workers’ interests, but the Democratic Party can be better understood as the party of the New Deal. And the New Deal was a compromise between workers and employers that served as a middle ground between communism and fascism. It won its political support from an unlikely coalition of immigrant city bosses, progressive-minded intellectuals, and Jim Crow-supporting Southern plantation owners and businessmen.
The system worked pretty well (if you didn’t happen to be black) because it didn’t pit workers against their bosses. It created a system of arbitration and conflict resolution that served both sides pretty well. And it allowed the country to move at a slow and steady pace toward progressive reforms for blacks and women and gays who had all suffered severe discrimination at the beginning of the process.
Things are breaking down now, though. It’s probably the result of 30 years of Reagan conservatism eating away at the project. When Mitt Romney starts telling employers to intimidate their workers and ask them to vote Republican, we’re back to the days before the New Deal when owners could use the police to break up worker strikes and fire anyone who expressed a political opinion they didn’t like. What is going to happen is that workers will become radicalized, too. That consensus that America is a hybrid country that is neither corporate/fascist nor communist/anti-business will break down and you’ll start to see workers embracing a hard-edged socialist attitude.
You can see the seeds of this in the growing income inequality in the country, and in the Occupy Movement. The problem is that our elites have been failing us, badly, and people are increasingly giving up on the consensus. On the right, they just don’t want to pay to sustain this country anymore. On the left, they can’t take much more erosion of the middle class.
You can say whatever you want about President Obama, but he’s running things how they were designed to be run. He hasn’t failed anyone who understood the hybrid system and wanted to see it propped back up and run by competent people. He’s the best hope for the kind of country we grew up in continuing on with slow improvements. The way Romney behaves with his 47% comments and setting bosses against their employees, he’d destabilize everything. Maybe you want that. I don’t.
Pretty good summary. And it more or less is how I’ve evolved in my political thinking. I wasn’t always anti-capitalist, like you, I didn’t “want that.” But these assholes have proven time and time again that they cannot be compromised with, that they will overreach, and they will break their promises based on the compromises made at the first chance they get.
Ditto.
I never set out to fight a class war, but these people launched a Pearl Harbor against the middle class, the New Deal, the unions after the 2010 elections. What choice do we have, but to fight back?
I think it funny how these people always try to make Obama out to be a “thug”, but this family is fully of thugs.
The Romney family are all just so classy ain’t they.
Imagine the outrage if Michelle O, or Michelle’s brother or Barack’s sister had said the same in an interview after that first debate, even in jest? Wingnuts would be screaming wouldn’t they.
WHOA: Tagg Romney says he wanted to take a swing at President Obama (audio + brief transcript)
byMike NellisFollow
Millions wanted to do that to Romney and “thats not a question its a statement”. I have never seen such absolute disrespect of a president by a candidate. Obviously his sons are as unbalanced as the old man. His Mormon prejudices and his sense of entitlement combined with the insane rhetoric of the Repug party is very dangerous. They are on a very slippery slope and we stand at the bottom. Get ready.
I started out as a traditional conservative in the 60’s. Bit by bit I became aware of the sham that is conservative philosophy. Finally, I thought as you do and officially joined the Democratic Party in 1992 and volunteered for Bill Clinton. I still have his campaign promises in my bureau drawer. He achieved half and made a creditable attempt at the others. Then after 2000 I became radicalized more and more, joining Dean for America in 2004. Since then, I have been so disgusted with the Democratic Party that I am considering socialism. Should I care if I can own stock?
I don’t think the New Deal is relevant anymore. It was 80 years ago and times and the economy and the populace have changed. We need a new New Deal.
Barack Obama is better than Mitt Romney. That is absolutely true. But he is still going down the wrong path, just not as fast as the (other) Republicans. I really believe this will all end in revolution. FDR was indeed a traitor to his class but by doing so he saved his class from revolution. Those Bible pounding Republicans should pause and consider something they taught me in Sunday School, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” They have a lot of sins to remit. I’m not advocating violent revolution, but I am predicting it.
I guess you and I think differently. I think Obama’s laying the foundation to make it far easier to move this country to the left in the near future. I don’t think he’s on the wrong path on 80% of the issues.
Very differently. While Obama is fine on social issues, economically he is a neo-liberal, moving this country rightward.
Obama despises Liberals. He has said so through his White House spokespeople. He thinks Left is the wrong path. He keeps inching Right while Romney would hurtle Right.
No, he despises a tiny set of left-wingers who have an outsized microphone on the internet.
Only a vanishingly small segment of this country’s liberals fit the category of the Professional Left.
I used to want destabilization, but I don’t want it now. Once I took a good hard look, I realized that the Republicans or rather their wealthy interest would win any kind of confrontation.
Picture this: The rich build fortress communities for places to live and play and sometimes work. Most of this is done electronically. They use their money and the latest technology to seize the resources they need to prop up their lifestyle. Outside are the rest of us, with few job prospects (thanks to technology) and suffering in an environment degraded by rapacious capitalism. But if we try to change the system the wealthy use it legally to stop us. If that doesn’t work they resort to force which works thanks to technology (omni-surveillance, drones both land and air, neuro-science to dispense chemicals or electrical signals to provoke responses in the brain) and then either use their money to avoid consequences or there simply are none because the government is too weak to stop them or too captured to stop them. Meanwhile certain workers for the rich are protected and will fight against their class because they get to live in a kind of middle-ground periphery as the buffer.
Eventually, those of us on the outside will die off and the problem goes away.
is the indispensable alternative to revolution and reaction. At its worst liberalism is a temporary place holder to extremism like the provisional government after the fall of the Czar in 1917 before Communism’s ascendancy or the Weimar Republic in Germany when it preceded National Socialism.
What’s scary about our country in this moment in time is that Obama whether he wins or loses may be the last finger in the dike before the tsunami that comes next.
What makes Obama’s position even more fragile is that his political survival required he be co-opted by some of the same institutional forces that has disintegrated the consensus you described above. When that consensus was stronger such compromises could be more easily finessed as Clinton demonstrated. But not anymore. The stability we were taught in Social Studies class way back when is long gone and Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.
Obama is a good man and I hope he wins but through no fault of his own, win or lose his ability to stem the tide is fragile. Romney of course would unleash a tsunami immediately. Alas, that is America’s choice in 2012.
Elections have become very stressful because we now have to have a democratic president just to hope to retain a country that is recognizable as the country we grew up in.
SaboKitty
One Big Union
Or One Small Kitty
O/T but the right wing ankle biters are FURIOUS about the Benghazi stuff. I don’t know who is going to win the election but I have a strong intuition Romney isn’t going to win by making Benghazi the centerpiece of his campaign. Mostly because no one not neck deep in Fox news give two shits about a forensic examination of GWOT terminology in post attack public statements by Administration officials. This is basically their Jeremiah Wright attack at this point. Some of these clowns seem to think that obsessively talking about Susan Rice (who no one knows) is helping their side.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that she is a black woman in a position of influence.
Outstanding analysis, but the date at which it started unraveling was 1964 (or 1963) and really hit the skids with the Nixon administration. It has been an almost 50 year process based on taking a lot of the benefits of the consensus for granted. Democrats were never as unified on what to do as the Republicans were about their agenda. That reflected the revolution in the Republican party from a big tent party to an ideological party (essentially a parliamentary) party, which was in part the result of William Buckley’s Anglophilia.
But before we can move forward, even with Democrats in power, we have to reverse some of the institutionalization of a police state that Woodrow Wilson started and Bush put on steroids. And a national security state that is consuming the future economy of this country. And that is why what Obama says about foreign policy in setting the mandate should he win is so very important to the future of domestic policy in this country.
The left has also never dumped the amount of money into political and media infrastructure that the right wing has. We’re still at least 20 years behind in most of it. We laugh about wingnut welfare, but I suspect Booman would have a nice, well-paying gig rather than a site supported by paypal if he were on the right.
That suggests the JFK assassination might have been a factor. Cause or consequence?
Historians will debate this forever. But the confluence of the civil rights movement’s increasing momentum and the assassination tipped something.
And I very well remember in my high school class in South Carolina on November 22, 1963, being shocked that I could hear cheers when the the principal announced “The President has died.”
I was going to place the pivot point at 1968. In that year two men, perhaps the two best spokespersons for the progressive movement since FDR, were assassinated within months of each other. Imagine where we might be if RFK had gone on to win the nomination and the election. Or if MLK had lived to top the I Have A Dream speech.
But after reading your exchange with Sean, I can see how November ’63 might be considered the first shot in a collective hit job that is still going on. If anyone but LBJ had been sworn in that day, things might have gone south a lot faster than they did. Johnson got a sympathetic bump after the assassination much like W did after 9/11. And the Master of the Senate knew how to play it for all it was worth. Perhaps that’s why he decided not to run in ’68. He would have seen the shift coming before almost anyone else.
But before we can move forward, even with Democrats in power, we have to reverse some of the institutionalization of a police state that Woodrow Wilson started and Bush put on steroids. And a national security state that is consuming the future economy of this country.
We need a clean end to the war against al Qaeda, a recognition (when it ends) that it is actually over, and we can go from a war footing to peacetime, a return to normalcy.
This means recognizing it is a war, which came into existence when Congress invoked its war powers, and will come to an end – not merely a set of heightened security procedures.
It will come to an end when Congress exercises its war powers again. And it’s ability to reorganize the executive departments.
Non-state actors cannot be dealt with through the framing of war, even when they commit mass murders. It always was an international criminal operation. Pretending it was a war made the whole response tremendously more expensive than need be and created a whole raft of Constitutional issues relative to domestic freedoms and Presidential power that have to now be walked back. We cannot continue to have the military and law enforcement take sides in essentially political debates about the future of the country nor have innocent people be constantly treated like criminals. We could start today by dismantling the airport security checks and getting rid of mass porno-scanning equipment.