Nicholas Lemann’s inaugural column at Tilting at Windmills is packed full of food for thought. It’s of particular interest to me because working at the Washington Monthly has compelled me to consider the magazine’s history and role in shaping the Democratic Party, and it’s a history that has often been at odds with my personal politics. Yet, I haven’t felt that way for quite some time. I think our views began to converge during the early Bush years and actually wound up close to the same place by the end of Obama’s first term. But this feeling of mine didn’t have much real content; it was more of a nebulous sense I had, before I read Lemann’s mea culpa:
If anybody asked me for a book to read that would capture the atmosphere around the Washington Monthly in the 1970s—other than articles in the magazine itself—I’d suggest Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism, which was published in 1969. This was an attack on liberalism from the left, by a prominent political scientist. Lowi’s scorn was particularly directed at what he called “interest group liberalism”—the takeover of the apparatus of government, such as congressional committees and regulatory agencies, by people who wanted some goodie or other and knew what to do to get it. The Vietnam War was raging, the cities were burning, and Washington seemed unable to address the country’s real problems. Interest group liberalism had to go.
The prospect of replacing interest group liberalism with something that was better targeted at the needs of the country, and also more effective, was deeply alluring. In those days we were about as distant from the heyday of the New Deal as the 1970s are from us today; you’d still see white-haired former aides to FDR (Joseph Rauh, Thomas Corcoran) wandering around the streets of downtown Washington. They had come to town to do good and had stayed to do well, and now it was time to sweep their old corrupted structures away and create new, purer ones. This was also the long-forgotten heyday of Ralph Nader as a super-respectable figure, who had an initiative staffed by bright young people aimed at reforming just about every department and agency of the government. Deregulating industries, using the power of markets to make government work better, embracing technology, targeting government social programs on people who really needed them, helping consumers rather than politically connected businesses, taking down trade barriers, reducing the power of the Democratic Party establishment and the labor unions, orienting government toward the public interest rather than toward interest groups—all of this was our dream.
I don’t mean to renounce these ideas entirely, but in retrospect they present a couple of problems. First, we had too much faith in the ability of people like us, smart and well-intentioned upper-middle-class (defined by family background, not by what the Monthly paid) Washington liberals, to determine what was and wasn’t a genuine social need. Our scorn for interest group liberalism led us to undervalue the process of people organizing themselves and pushing the political system to give them what they wanted from it. Second, we failed to anticipate the way that eliminating all those structures that struck us as outdated—the government bureaucracies, the seniority system in Congress, the old-line interest groups—would almost inevitably wind up working to the advantage of elites more than of the ordinary people on whose behalf we imagined ourselves to be advocating. The frictionless, disintermediated, networked world in which we live today is great for people with money and high-demand skills, not so great for everybody else. It’s a cruel irony of the Monthly’s history that our preferred label for ourselves, neoliberal, has come to denote political regimes maximally friendly to the financial markets. I’ve come to see the merits of the liberal structures I scorned in my younger days.
The Washington Monthly’s editor in chief, Paul Glastris, says he has a more sanguine view of the magazine’s impact on politics and government. As a newcomer who doesn’t know all the history, it’s hard for me to judge. As a broader matter, though, I think there are a whole host of areas where the takeover of the party by New Democrats in the 1990’s had unintended and often quite lamentable results.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, we can see Bernie Sanders sounding like a relic of the 1970’s.
“If I run [for president], my job is to help bring together the kind of coalition that can win—that can transform politics. We’ve got to bring together trade unionists and working families, our minority communities, environmentalists, young people, the women’s community, the gay community, seniors, veterans, the people who in fact are the vast majority of the American population.”
Because I came of political age in the 1990’s, I never fought the ideological battles of the 1970’s, and I’ve never understood the hostility to “interest group politics.” I come from the progressive grassroots, what Lemann refers to as “people organizing themselves and pushing the political system to give them what they wanted from it.” From the beginning, I was working in the inner city among people of color, and so it wasn’t difficult for me to avoid letting my “well-intentioned upper-middle-class” background give me the false impression that I knew the genuine needs of the underclass. I learned their genuine needs from them. And that made it painfully easy to spot myopia and condescension from the ivory towers of the white progressive movement.
It also taught me not to think of the progressive movement as a collection of discrete interest groups. I didn’t initially have much interest in trade unions, for example. But I quickly realized that they were doing the same work I was doing, organizing the underclass to vote, to get a higher minimum wage, better working conditions, safer streets, and a better safety net. Rather than thinking of the labor movement as a discreet interest group, I think of them as an essential partner.
To understand my thinking on coalition politics, it helps to read a recent column by Nancy LeTourneau, which discusses a speech that Bernice Johnson Reagon gave on the subject back in 1981. Here is part of what Ms. Reagon had to say:
“We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there…To a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up…
“Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition. You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home…
“It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world. And that we are here to stay and that anything that is here is ours to take and to use in our image. And watch that “ours,’ make it as big as you can…The “our” must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive. You must be sure you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an “our” that don’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it…
“There is an offensive movement that started in this country in the 60’s that is continuing. The reason we are stumbling is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about. And we got to vomit over that for a little while. We must just keep going.”
Coming as it did at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, the speech now seems prescient and poignant. Thirty-three years later, we are even less able live in “our space” with people who are just like us. The Republican Party seems to have evolved into a spasmodic protest movement against this reality. But the counterforce to this spastic and destructive hate movement is necessarily made up of all the people who are outside the Tea Party tent. Those are the groups that Sanders detailed, and a few more besides. To be successful, we can’t look at each other as a bunch of discrete interest groups with distinct things we want from government. For starters, job number one is to simply keep the lunatics at bay. But, fundamentally, we can’t stand as a strong enough counterforce unless we stand united.
Even then, progressives need to attract a broader swath of the electorate than just the people in the movement. That means we have to “vomit a little while” sometimes as we deal with Democrats who don’t share some of our values.
So, I think the Washington Monthly and I have converged to a meeting of the minds. First, that the Republican Party has devolved into a malevolent force and a serious threat to our country. Second, that an ascendant governing left has to have a big tent, and so-called “interest groups” need to be a big part of it. It’s just that the interest groups need to see themselves as part of a broader cause.
I’m not a member of even the majority of interest groups in the Democratic coalition these days, but they all seem like decent people using acceptable methods to worthwhile goals. I’m not going to agree with every member of Sanders’ coalition on everything but I’m happy to work with all these groups. I think I’m in the large majority on this.
Were things that different in the 60′ and 70’s when mainstream liberalism lost its moral authority and the county started to move to the right?
Things were a lot different. The left had a lot of energy but it was pulling it very different directions.
Just think about the Naderites fighting for privatization, free trade, and deregulation. Isn’t that Carter is remembered for least fondly by the left today?
Remember that Teddy Kennedy’s campaign against Carter was not all about vanity and family pride. He had a whole movement behind him.
I don’t think mainstream liberalism ever lost its moral authority.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/06/why-most-conservatives-are-secretly-li
berals/
The Republican Party knew then and knows now that liberal positions on the issues are popular all over this country. That’s why the Atwater zero sum, fear-based approach was to speak in code; to appear to strike a secret bargain with white blue collar then-Democratic voters that the GOP would keep the good stuff for “us” vs. the insurgent feminists, blacks,, and peace-mongering “them.”
The GOP couldn’t contain the grifters, plutocrats, and the corporatists though and, by gutting blue collar jobs, pensions, and health care security, has lost significant swaths of its white support outside the Slave States. Its class warfare is exposed for all but the most racist and/or dim-witted to see. But for the ignorant theocrats propping them up, I don’t think the GOTP could prevail anywhere with their anti-democracy, anti-Christian tax-cuts for the rich/everyone else is on their own policies.
If we stand united, how will I know whom I’m better than? How will I know if I’m more progressive than you?
Well, Davis, I thought the whole point of your sarcastic comments was to upbraid progressives for taking that attitude. Am I wrong?
This, like all of politics, is a zero-sum game. I can’t win unless you lose, and are seen to lose. It doesn’t really matter whom I beat. I’d prefer it to be Republicans, but I’m not picky.
I see what you did there.
That means we have to “vomit a little while” sometimes as we deal with Democrats who don’t share some of our values.
Like the Blanche Lincoln and Andrew Cuomo’s of the world?
exactly
If you are referring to the Affordable Care Act, for example, then the answer is ‘yes.’
Governors present a different kind of calculation. But, it’s easier to work with Cuomo than Pataki. The problem with Cuomo is he’s bad for the brand.
For the purposes of this discussion I wasn’t talking about the ACA.
The problem with Cuomo is he’s bad for the brand.
Which is the problem with Blue Dogs and idiots like HolyJoe. It’s the problem with Steve Israel recruiting reactionaries like Jennifer Garrison. I suppose you’ve noticed that Cuomo’s favorables are starting to tank. Geez, I wonder why!!
Let’s hope that the GW Bridge folly will end up being a twofer by taking down both Christie and Cuomo once a whole lot of the dirt at the Port Authority is exposed to light.
“Discreet” == “Careful and circumspect in one’s speech or actions, especially in order to avoid causing offense or to gain an advantage”
(I wonder why a common mis-usage like this pains me so much more when it comes from someone whose writing I admire?)
thanks for pointing that out. Fixed now.
The misuse of English stems from the fact that English is basically a misuse of a dozen other languages, all mixed together.
Phonics!
O/T
I want to say something. I’m sorry if this is way off topic.
Republicans hate the poor. A major part of their message is actually about punishing the poor. The lectures about “dependency” are really at bottom about saying it’s important for our value system to self-righteously punish and hurt the poor so we can uphold the supposedly divine justice of the “free market”, which tells us that a person’s value is measured by their net worth. This is why decrepit plutocrats can write op-eds about how they are being treated like Jews in Nazi Germany because they have received something less than the supine idolatry they feel is their due for being so disgustingly wealthy.
Hating the poor is obviously not confined to Republicans and is quite often a matter of bipartisan consensus. (I’ll note as an aside that Obama has explicitly embraced the message of the harm of growing inequality and appears to take the view that if he can’t accomplish much legislatively in the remainder of his presidency, he will at least make it his goal to help lay the groundwork for positive change on this issue in the future. For whatever that’s worth. I appreciate that, although in general I subscribe to the maxim that “the president is the last to know” in terms of engineering social change. What you can say for Obama is that, in general, if the message reaches him, he does listen). Books no doubt have been written about how the reality of poverty is systematically suppressed in our culture, leaving the field open for demonizing characterizations to flourish.
Not to get into an enormous topic which is the reality of class warfare in America, but the point I wanted to make is that hating the poor needs to be recognized as such. This occurred to me because I was talking about minimum wage with my wife, who doesn’t follow politics that much, and when I told her that Republicans of course oppose any increase to minimum wage, she asked why? And the first thing that came to mind, before even the fact that they think it hurts profits for the owners that they work for, is that “they hate the poor”. That’s the bottom line.
If we go back to Romney’s 47% comments, obviously he said them in such a way that was extremely hurtful to peoples’ perception of him. But in retrospect it seems to me that maybe people never quite snapped to what was so offensive in his comments. The response never quite coalesced around the central point. The phenomenon, as it were, never quite rose to thematic awareness.
I’ve started to think maybe this is a problem of language. The language of hating the poor doesn’t really exist yet. I’ve been trying to think of a word for hating the poor. The only thing I can find is “classist,” which is pretty feeble. Let’s look at racism. I think for the most part everybody, regardless of politics, has a basic understanding of what racism is, even if they are naively or cynically committed to denying the everyday reality of racism in America. When someone says “that’s racist”, the concept is readily available, even if there is disagreement about the facts. It seems that with hating the poor, the concept isn’t even really there.
I would suggest that the phenomena are quite similar. Of course, hating the poor is also a red herring in the class war, a way to divert attention from the fact that the majority of your money, whether in rents or from your precious tax dollars, actually goes to the real moochers, the top of the game Business School Takers who are standing behind the curtain, the Monopoly Capitalists with their private equity mergers. But then the same could be said for racism, homophobia, misogyny.
Another wrinkle is that fear of poverty would appear to be a major factor in the social psychology of individual consumption. In other words, I’m not poor if I can buy this smartphone or that flatscreen.
The civil rights movements of the last century are perhaps only a rough comparison in this case. But it seems like it might be helpful to start thinking about it in those terms. It’s hard to imagine a “pride” based movement about being poor. But that’s doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Far be it from me to limit social change to what I can easily imagine. I think that we need to develop a language for talking about this hatred of the poor that points out the way this hatred dehumanizes, and serves as a pretext for disenfranchising people. Maybe “poor” isn’t even an appropriate term. But I feel we need to start talking about this phenomenon in a way that points to the hatred and, more importantly, the ignorance that is driving it. Because it’s going on all the time. It’s there in many things that Republicans (and likely some Democrats) say on a regular basis. It’s like an unidentified background hum for many conversations.
To me it seems as if the demonizing view of the poor has a default superiority or prestige in our culture. I’m trying to be judicious here! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could start to turn the discourse around, start to talk about how poverty is not really any more a result of people’s choices or their “intrinsic self-worth” than their ethnicity or their sexuality? I mean, who really “chooses” to be poor?
The problem of course is that you get into the rhetoric of “personal responsibility”. I actually thing this is a rather delicate issue. From, let’s say, an existential perspective, personal responsibility is very important indeed. You’ve got to take responsibility for yourself and your choices. Hallelujah. But the reason this is the case has nothing to do with the political system you are living in. The whole point of truly accepting personal responsibility is that it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. You are you and you’re the only person who can be you. It doesn’t matter if you’re sipping mojitos on your personal Caribbean island or cowering in the dark in solitary. Nothing else matters. Somewhere along the line the notion of “personal responsibility” got mixed up with different notions of “freedom” and “liberty”. Not to get deep in the weeds, but I think those are fundamentally different concepts. “Freedom” as a political concept could never be an absolute. Personal responsibility however is an absolute, but it’s not a political concept. It seems as though the right wing thinkers have taken the absolute nature of personal responsibility and said that freedom, as guarantor of personal responsibility, must be absolute. Which is impossible politically, but in practice means that certain privileged classes get to be “more free” than others.
Political structures can neither encourage nor discourage personal responsibility. The myth that by punishing the poor we will make them “take responsibility” is just that, a myth. And if it did, we would have just as much reason to ask how setting up a winner take all system where a select few enjoy astonishing wealth and privilege, including broad legal immunity, is conducive to their cultivation or “personal responsibility” in the puritanical construction of the right?
Once we set aside this pernicious confusion about “personal responsibility” and the idea that “freedom” somehow requires never assisting anyone we don’t like ever; once we see that personal responsibility by its very nature is not something that government policy can ever affect one way or another, we are free to see that government policy can and has affected the general welfare positively or negatively. This is what all the talk about “dependency” is designed to obscure and cover over by positing some relationship between personal responsibility and economic success. What government should really be about has nothing to do with personal responsibility. What democratic government is about is the general welfare. Parties can differ about what that means, but the rhetoric of personal responsibility seems designed to obscure that entirely. That’s why Republican congressmen can actually act as though they are proud to be elected and then do absolutely nothing in office.
Now, I won’t say there is no relationship at all between personal responsibility and personal wealth. But there is certainly no necessary relationship. We can imagine a very wise, industrious, responsible mother of three who uses food stamps just as easily as we can imagine a sociopathic financial fraud trashing people’s life savings. So we need to disconnect the notion of personal responsibility from poverty. Just as we should disconnect it from wealth. The wealthy aren’t uniquely virtuous. And despite the fact that the super wealthy and super powerful have committed and continue to commit world-historical crimes against humanity and the planet, I don’t in general attribute that to them personally. It’s structural (the difference is that the crimes of poverty are vastly over-represented in our justice system). Poverty, like extreme wealth, isn’t a matter of morality or authenticity. Poverty is a social issue with political-economic implications. If we need to blame someone for poverty in general (or for income inequality that beggars the imagination) , the culprit is clear. It’s not poor people. It’s our political class. But we can’t see that until we can get past the irrational hatred of the poor, which has its own consequences in serving as a pretext for denying them their civil rights, and making their lives even harder.
My political consciousness goes back to the late 1950s. Most of my public and NGO work occurred during the 1970s. And in the 1980s, in trying to figure out how people who used love FDR started calling themselves conservative and loving Ronald Reagan, I found Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism irritatingly helpful in the same way that Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History is irritatingly helpful.
I think that the meaning of “interest group politics” has changed over the past 50 years precisely as a result of its analytical power and widespread influence in political science curricula in the 1960s. And that change obscures some troubling realities behind Poli Sci buzzwords.
My understanding of interest group politics was structural not process. It was how city machines organized their power to unite neighborhood interests and business-corporate interests in a way that sustained corrupt machines in power. The interests were vested in the outcomes of power that they could buy with money of delivered votes and the general public interest be damned. Also, the interests of folks who were not necessary to machine victory could also be easily ignored. And the interests of those in opposition were what were intentionally screwed.
The progressive movement of a hundred years ago arose in response to this form of interest-group politics and sought professional technocratic administration of public agencies and equitable distribution of public benefits. By the Truman administration, the New Deal agencies that survived, the civil service reforms, and the memory of technocratic operation of the war effort allowed that technocratic style of government to be the default. But patronage politics never died and interest group politics survived in figuring out how to remove the technocratic safeguards of equity and erect barriers to political opponents and economic competitors.
It was the failure of technocratic public service to respond to the civil rights movement and the juggernaut toward oblivion of the military-intelligence technocracy that caused the political movement of the 1960s. And brought to bear broad-based pressure on civil rights (not just those with a vested interest) and broad-based pressure to end the folly in Vietnam (over against those who had the most vested interest). One of those movements was co-opted and bought off (but with some significant gains); the other was ruthlessly ignored and suppressed (but with some paradoxical attempts at co-option and even the creation of a counter-constituency in sympathy to POW-MIAs). That is, they were treated by politicians in interest group terms.
On the domestic side, the War on Poverty and the Model Cities Program were intended to co-opt the civil rights movement, but the failure to deal with de facto segregation as a national problem or with the police brutality and impunity in minority communities caused rioting, which was suppressed. And patronage politics moved to have both of those programs to come through the offices of governors and mayors. So some critical technocratic programs got subverted into interest group patronage. Of course, the civil rights movement got smart and learned how to play the interest group game and begin to run its candidates for office. Those effects could be seen in Congress, state legislatures, and local governments all through the 1970s. Southern cities, for example got their first minority city councilmen and mayors. And in that, patronage started working for neighborhoods that had previously been ignored. But in other places, patronage opened the doors of public-private schemes to rip off the money and in some cases blatant corruption.
Another thread of thinking from the 1960s was citizen participation in the decisions that affect their lives. Technocratic programs had “citizen participation” activities that were to ensure that the proposed activities were at least unobjectionable and at best targeted local needs. Program funds started being connected to “documented results”, which were used for “performance statistics”. All of the bad behaviors you see with “teach to the test” started appearing in formerly functional public agencies. The innovation that the new programs were to encourage was suppressed because it was politically irritable for elected officials in one way or another or not politically advantageous enough. In addition, certain elected officials made sure that agencies were headed by ringers who were to ensure the failure of the agency’s mission. And then came the propaganda campaign against pointy-headed bureaucrats. Enter Reagan.
Which is where Theodore Lowi’s critique of how “urban renewal” became “Negro removal”, how desegregation was managed to increase white flight to subsidized suburbs, how Model Cities was a boondoggle for urban real estate developers, and how ordinary citizens were disgusted with what they saw as waste of their tax money (aside from the racial and “welfare Cadillac” overtones) was pointing to the failure of the “liberal” program.
When policy successfully changes, there is an alliance between a coalition of movemental political groups, a group of current or aspiring elected officials, and technocrats with knowledge of the particular issues and current working of the policy area who know what specifically to ask for and how it should be organized within current agency structures.
All of that is not organized as some grand coalition or party electoral movement. It happens higgledy-piggledy, but that process is what moved the New Deal and the lasting victories of the 1960s.
Which is why I find the sniping at Bernie Sanders to be a sour note. And the assumption of Ms. Inevitability 2016 to be disconcerting when it is the 2014 midterms that need the work. And the issues that turn the midterm elections need to be distinctively in the progressive directly if we are to avoid political catastrophe.
I don’t see that happening anywhere outside of the Moral Monday movement. And the positions of Democratic politicians as we move into the beginning of the midterm elections is particularly depressing.
Wow, a lot of long form blogging.
In my Comp Gov course, we talk about “interest group articulation” as a function of pluralism rather than machine politics. It sounds like the interest group governance of the machine era was primarily about rent seeking.
But interest group articulation is simply about issue and community advocacy. The problem of course being that this allows for money to crowd out the voices of the grassroot articulation in favor of astroturf.
Ideally, interest groups could fulfill Madison’s idea of faction to ward off the evils of party. But today, even our interest groups are essentially wed to a party, which makes it hard to speak of environmentalist Republicans. The sad thing is that we can speak of Pro-gun Democrats all the while knowing it won’t make a difference come November.
That is the main difference between the 1970s and now. Money is constraining the advocacy of what were pretty effective NGOs in DC; this is what Jane Hamsher has referred to as the “veal pen” in which NGOs which should be independent are forced by large donors to align with counter-productive legislation in order to maintain funding and access.
Between astroturfing phony interests and the influence of money in “veal pen” strategies, authentic articulation of interests has been corrupted.
Which is why something like Occupy Wall Street touched a nerve. It was beyond the influence of money. It articulated issues that the public was feeling and interests they had in solutions. But now the wash of money and media is closing that eruption, and money and military power has even found ways to corrupt movements like Occupy Wall Street.
Wow, this was long. Will it be on the test?
I saw two craven votes in the Senate this past week. The first was on the Justice Department nominee for the Civil Rights division and the other was on Gillibrand’s bill to fight sexual assault in the military.
I think most of this was out of sheer craven political calculus. Levin, I don’t understand his thinking, but fuck him, he’s gone. You can argue – persuasively – that their political calculation is wrong. I think that’s especially true with Gillibrand’s bill.
But since the nature of Congressional representation means that we need Senators from West Virginia and Montana and Louisiana and House members from purple or reddish districts, then you have to accept that some of the people in your coalition are going to annoy the crap out of you.
When Markos started Daily Kos, his mantra was “More and better Democrats”. But first you have to have the “more”. You have to tolerate Blanche Lincoln in order to have a Majority Leader Harry Reid. And you have to tolerate a Majority Leader Harry Reid in order for Sherrod Brown to pass legislation that you might really want.
That’s why the Purity Party never made a damned bit of sense to me. It’s killing the GOP right now. I hope it doesn’t infect the Democrats.
As one who was there, none of this resonates as true.
While it was not yet apparent to ordinary folks in the 1960s that working class unions (one of the backbones of the New Deal) were losing power (thanks to Taft-Hartley), strikes and picket lines were honored by the various so-called liberal interest groups. DC “liberal” intellectuals may not have been with the UFW or the Memphis sanitation workers, but ordinary folks were.
It wasn’t “liberal special interest groups” that destroy the left. It was those that had a vested interest in destroying the left that did it. It was a three prong attack. Discredit blue collar unions to make them disappear, play the race card, and keep women in their place.
There was a generational divide in the early years of the Vietnam War — but the gap had closed by 1968. And yet by exploiting racism, mocking feminism, and increasing the financial insecurity of white men, Nixon could win in a landslide after not having ended the war as he’d promised in 1968. The formula had been found — mock anything supported by a liberal interest group that could benefit everyone. (Back then nobody wanted burning rivers.) Preach it from the pulpits. (Pope John XXIII was dead.)
Quite masterful actually. Cut the tax on the wealthy by approximately two-thirds with the support of people with little to no tangible net worth.
And yet it was the “Hard Hats” that Nixon relied upon, because for a lot of the blue collar workers of that time, things like occupying the administration buildings at Columbia (to use 1968 as a theme) were an attack on their cultural preferences.
I think there was a BIG divide between the New Left of the ’60s and the working class, “ethnic” voters who made up the eventual Reagan Democrats.
“Nixon’s hardhats” were racists that were easily scared of anything. Including their children that were only “new left” wrt to issues of discrimination based on race, sex, and gender [democratic values that prior generations had refused to act on and correct] and subservience to the national security state that was taking a generation to SE Asia to destroy a country that had done nothing to us.
Saying you’re hostile to “interest group politics” was and is just a polite way of saying you’re hostile to democracy. The unwashed should just step aside and let well-connected Washington “liberals” run things, because they know better. That was the credo of the Washington Monthly types back in the day, and while I appreciate Lemann’s mea culpa, frankly it’s still a long way from being as abject as it should be.
Anybody who genuinely wants to help ordinary people get a fair shake must never forget Frederick Douglass’s famous words: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never dry and it never will.”
Never DID. Damn autocorrect.
Spellcheck is the spawn of satin.
As a Black man it has always been obvious to me and mine…