The American political system is nothing if not complicated and so too are the reasons for its myriad points of democratic dysfunction. Some are endemic to our constitutional regime and all but impossible to address save by the extremely cumbersome (and profoundly unlikely) prospect of amending the Constitution. Others are the result of a corrupt capital culture that likes it that way and has little incentive to change. Many are the result of the peculiar commercial and ideological structure of our media, which not only frame our political debate but also determine which issues will be addressed. A few are purely functions of the politics of the moment or just serendipitous bad luck. And if we really mean to change things, instead of just complaining about them, it would behoove us to figure out which of these choke points can be opened up and which cannot. For if our politicians cannot keep the promises they make as candidates, then our commitment to political democracy becomes a kind of Kabuki exercise; it resembles a democratic process at great distance but mocks its genuine intentions in substance. (Eric Altterman)
Read the entire article if you want a pretty good summing up of the scope of the crisis that underlies almost everything I write here. But while it's a lucid exposition of the nature of the illness, It's weak in the classically liberal sense when it comes to ideas for a cure. It boils down to this:
Indeed, with regard to almost every single one of our problems, we need better, smarter organizing at every level and a willingness on the part of liberals and leftists to work with what remains of the center to begin the process of reforms that are a beginning, rather than an endpoint in the process of societal transformation. As American history consistently instructs us, this is pretty much the only way things change in our system. Over time, reforms like Social Security, Medicare and the Voting Rights Act can add up to a kind of revolution, one that succeeds without bloodshed or widespread destruction of order, property or necessary institutions.
Good luck with that.
Here's the problem. It's becoming clearer to me that the period 1932 to 1980, the heyday of American social democracy, was possible only because the combined crises of the Great Depression and World War II convinced most Americans, otherwise resistant to the idea, that their government was a force for positive change. The people on the far right were always there in the background, but they weren't taken seriously because the consensus accepted that Big Government, for all of its problems, was a net good.
That changed in the seventies, and while the reasons for it are multi-layered and complex, it comes down to two things. First, as in all societies at all times, people who have wealth and power want more of it, and they use their wealth and power to get it. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything, and if you think that America is somehow immune, you are delusional. Libertarianism is the ideology that justifies this trend toward concentrating wealth and power, and it resonates with traditional American ideas about self-reliance and rugged individualism, and those Boomers who have achieved a level of success and affluence tend to see themselves as embodying those traits and those less affluent as lazy and dependent. This is delusional thinking on so many levels, but nevertheless it a powerful theme in the American mindset, even among moderates.
Second, many Americans in the Boomer generation who grew up with traditional social values felt that the country was losing its moral compass as it embraced in the sixties and seventies the agenda of blacks, feminists, gays and lesbians. Alterman never addresses this problem. Insofar as the Democrats, and the politics in Washington associated with Democrats, were identified with these movements on the cultural left, these conventional thinking Main Streeters no longer felt identified with the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. They saw it as the party of the Other–the weirdos, as un-American.
This disaffection was shrewdly exploited by the Libertarian Right, which has hated all along what happened to the country since 1932, and as Alterman recounts, has been wildly successful in promoting its let's-get-back-to-the-Gilded-Age ideology. This played well on Main Street because of its reflexively individualist mindset, and because as the Boomer generation took over, it had no memory of the Depression and the War, and was easily swayed by this Libertarian assault on the New Deal that fit well with their increasing discomfort with how white people were losing their grip in defining what it means to be an American.
I think this anxiety about white people losing their grip is not adequately understood by Liberals as a key element in the country's moving away from the New Deal consensus to the embrace of Reagan, the early Bush, and others on the Right. Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News are all extreme expressions of this anxiety, but many Americans who see themselves as moderates "feel" it, and sympathize with it. It's not about the economics. If anything, economic anxiety just aggravates the underlying identity anxiety.
And this is where Liberal analysis and tactics are so weak, and why we have little reason for the problems Alterman describes so well to be solved by the kind of Liberal activism typified by MoveOn and others. They understand what they are up against when it comes to the problems posed by Big Money, but not the problems posed by developing a broad-based political movement. Alterman talks about the Left working with what remains of the Center, but does he really understand what that means and what it would require?
P.S. This exchange between Matthews and Halperin suggests how Dems are the party of out-of-touch weirdos. These Dems just don't get it . . .
Matthews: Well you know we hear these stories like I do Mark, we all
hear them that say the president doesn't have any warmth for Israel, you
hear that he doesn't have any warmth for business people generally.
He's sort of a liberal, a progressive you know, he's for the third
world, you know he looks out for the Palestinians, he looks out for poor
people. He doesn't have any sympathy for rich guys. But you know, in
the Democratic party you've got to get your money from these guys. You
have to make friends with them personally. You and I know this. You make
personal friendships. Is that the conflict here? He's asking these
people to be traitors to their class basically and they're tired of it.
They don't want that part anymore.Halperin: They think he should be
wearing a beret and standing off playing hackeysack…Matthews:
What does that mean?Halperin: check with the junior staff there,
that's what they play during the breaks. (Hardball interview; h/t Digby)
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