Democratic Socialism vs. Right Wing Barbarism

Related to the theme in the last post is a historical review in a piece in Salon that looks at the way in which progressive policies - democratic socialist policies, if you will - save America from the fate that befell Europe in the 1930's and 1940's.  Sadly, since the Reagan era, the very policies and political norms that made America great socially and economically have been seriously eroded - mostly because of policies pushed by the right/Republicans and too often acquiesced in by Democrats.  The solution to America's funk and the economic stress faced by more and more Americans is not Donald Trumps calls to fascism, but instead more progressive policies that can undo the damage wrought on the middle and working class.  Here are article excerpts: 

About a year after the launch of both Sen. Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, it’s easy to conclude that the anti-establishment backlash of 2016 was somewhat inevitable. The incredulity that many in the establishment felt when these two candidates first climbed the polls and took their respective primaries by storm has passed, and now that Trump has locked up the Republican nomination, nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility (including, terrifyingly enough, a Donald Trump presidency).

Both Sanders and Trump have tapped into a widespread discontent with the political system, as well as a decline in economic prospects that many Americans have experienced since the Great Recession. But while the media has labeled them both “populist” (which is fair enough, populist can be an ambiguous term), the two candidates have diametrically opposed worldviews, with very different solutions (And I’m being generous by suggesting that Trump actually has any kind of real solutions).

Sanders is a democratic socialist, Trump is a right-wing nationalist (although some mainstream commentators have simply gone with “fascist”). The one thing that they do have in common, however, is that they are both leading revolts against the neoliberal status quo, which has prevailed for the past several decades.

The neoliberal era began sometime in the 1970s, following what is commonly called the Keynesian era, i.e. the post-War period (1945-1970s), which saw unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the West, along with the spread of Social democracy in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. During this period, the capitalist system became gentler and friendlier towards the proletariat, which was not an accident.

By the time Keynes published his epochal book, Hitler and the Nazi’s had destroyed Germany’s short Democratic experiment, while Stalin had attained autocratic control in the Soviet Union. The capitalist system was being threatened from both sides, and its volatility and excesses had made it vulnerable to radical movements and revolt from below.

Keynes wanted to save market capitalism from itself by curbing its inequities and limiting the instability of the business cycle to help stave off extreme political movements that were threatening its very existence.

And in America and Europe this is exactly what Social democracy did. FDR’s New Deal rejected laissez-faire capitalism and promoted a mixed economy with strong labor unions and safety nets, which helped avert radical movements — particularly from the left. Economic inequality steadily declined during this period and wages increased proportionately with productivity. The proletariat became the middle class, and capitalism became an economic system that promoted widespread prosperity (of course, in America, minorities — especially African Americans — were largely excluded from this prosperity for decades). There was no longer any need for radicalism, and right-wing extremists were pushed to the fringe of the GOP (Dwight Eisenhower was the first Keynesian Republican).

Economic deregulation, corporatist trade deals, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, welfare reform, union busting; these reactionary policies were embraced to an extent by both parties, and as the Democrats shifted to the right, the Republicans went even further.

Since this era began, labor unions have been decimated, while corporations have acquired unprecedented economic and political power. This is the direct opposite of what happened in the post-war period, when labor unions and workers managed to secure great political power and stand up to their employers, i.e. capitalists. Not surprisingly, the majority of workers have seen their wages stagnate during this period — even as productivity has increased rapidly — while the top one percent of income earners have seen their compensation surge. Additionally, since the recession, the top one percent of earners have received the majority of economic gains. 

Now, some may be thinking: what does this all have to do with the 2016 election?  . . . . Donald Trump has ridden a wave of right-wing populism that is reminiscent of another popular movement of Keynes’ time. In his widely shared column in the Washington Post, “This is how Fascism Comes to America,” Robert Kagan describes Trump’s strongman appeal, which is frighteningly similar to the appeal of 20th century fascist leaders.

[R]ather than offering real solutions, Trump has employed the same kind of scapegoating of minorities and foreigners that fascist leaders once used. Even on trade, instead of directing his rhetoric at the real foes — i.e. corporations and their incessant drive cheap labor and intellectual property expansions — he has gone after foreign countries and their impoverished citizens, who are exploited by American corporations.

History seems to be repeating itself, as it is apt to do. Over the past 40 years, the capitalist system has reverted back to being a highly unequal and unstable economic system, engendering widespread discontent; and in the wake of the Great Recession, both the left and right have made a political comeback. Neoliberalism has failed, and is now facing widespread revolt. The election of Trump is a terrifying prospect, but even more terrifying is the neo-fascist — otherwise known as the “alt-right” — movement that he has helped create.

Eighty years ago, Social democracy provided an alternative to the volatile and exploitive system of laissez faire capitalism, and warded off extremist politics; . . . . today’s era may require even more radical solutions (especially when considering the existential threat of climate change). But it seems clear after 2016 that neoliberalism is no longer viable for the long term health of America.

Today's GOP: Anatomy of a Racist Revolution

Since the days when I grew up in a Republican family and then served on the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for eight years, two steady trends have taken control of the party: (i) the rise of the Christofascists and the religious extremism they embody, and (ii) increasing overt racism.   True the GOP appeals to racism are often coded and in dog whistle form, but the under current has grown steadily.  In my view, the two trends are intertwined because the bulk of the Christofascists trace to the Bible Belt where for so long fundamentalist religion and racism/segregation went hand in hand.  A piece in Salon looks at the rise of racism in the GOP as a matter of policy even as it has become more coded.  The end result?  The GOP encourages most whites to vote against their own best interests by playing to racial prejudice.  Here are highlights:

How did this happen? It is certainly not because less of the population now benefits from these programs — the middle class has actually weakened since that period, and unemployment insurance and Social Security are today as important as ever. Nor is it because much of the working class woke up one day and decided to turn their backs on a system of government that had helped them achieve a better lifestyle. The reason is much more insidious than that.

The rise of modern conservatism can be traced back to the mid-sixties, as a reaction to the Civil Rights movement. In the south, the New Deal had been wholeheartedly supported by the Southern Democrats, and as Eisenhower’s quote reveals, the Republican party could not fight the movement without risking major political losses — until the federal government decided to step in on civil rights issues in the South, that is.

1964 was a pivotal year for the rise of modern conservatism. This was, of course, when the Civil Rights Act passed, and outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and ended the racial segregation that had existed for so long in the South. To southerners, this was an enormous betrayal by the Democratic party, especially from President Lyndon Johnson, who was himself a Southern Democrat. The federal government had overstepped in many minds, and this was an opening for the small government conservatives to once again capture the minds of common working class people.

In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.

Of course, this racial force is more unconscious today than it was when the Southern Strategy began, just as the language has changed over the years. In a candid and originally anonymous interview, Reagan’s 1984 campaign director Lee Atwater described how racial language became more coded over the years:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “n***er, n***er, n***er,” Said Atwater, “[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘n***er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Today, while there is no doubt that a large part of the population remains willfully racist, a great number of people have also become unconsciously so, buying implicitly into stereotypes about Black Americans as dependent and lazy; and thus determined to stop social programs and limit the federal government’s influence — even if it is not to their own benefit. In a sense, much of the middle class population has been hoodwinked into voting for the interests of the top one percent because of their own unconscious prejudices.

It is hard to claim that racism is not involved with the current backlash against Obama. The fight against the originally centrist Obamacare is based on the fears that have been embedded in so much of the population today. It is a fear of the federal government — a fear that Thomas Jefferson once had, before his views seemed to become more pragmatic when elected president. The key word here is fear; modern conservatism is based on this this unpleasant emotion — an emotion that tends to induce irrational thinking. And what is more irrational than voting against your interests?

How Corporate America Invented "Christian America"

I often blame the so-called GOP establishment for empowering the Christofascists who have become a metastasizing cancer in the GOP and society as a whole, but a piece in Politico places some of the blame for this toxic influence on corporate America.  The piece traces the begins of this sickness in American society back to the 1940's and corporate America's desire to role back and/or restrain New Deal policies and regulations, something we see Republicans and vulture capitalists like the Koch brothers still doing today.  When looked st from this perspective, by allowing the Christofascists - who place greed and a desire for special rights over the Gospel message - the corporate America found an ally in the worship of self-interest over the common good.  Here are article excerpts:

In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers . . . Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention’s end: Reverend James W. Fifield Jr.

Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. Addressing the crowd of business leaders, Fifield delivered a passionate defense of the American system of free enterprise and a withering assault on its perceived enemies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Decrying the New Deal’s “encroachment upon our American freedoms,” the minister listed a litany of sins committed by the Democratic government

It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifield’s audience of executives was stunned. Over the preceding decade, as America first descended into and then crawled its way out of the Great Depression, the these titans of industry had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nation’s downfall. Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation.  They just needed to do one thing: Get religion.

Fifield told the industrialists that clergymen would be crucial in regaining the upper hand in their war with Roosevelt. As men of God, ministers could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest. 

It was a watershed moment—the beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Fifield and like-minded ministers saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined, and argued that spreading the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. The two systems had been linked before, of course, but always in terms of their shared social characteristics. Fifield’s innovation was his insistence that Christianity and capitalism were political soul mates, first and foremost.

Before the New Deal, the government had never loomed quite so large over business and, as a result, it had never loomed large in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between Christianity and capitalism.

[Fifield] and his colleagues devoted themselves to fighting the government forces they believed were threatening capitalism and, by extension, Christianity. And their activities helped build a foundation for a new vision of America in which businessmen would no longer suffer under the rule of Roosevelt but instead thrive—in a phrase they popularized—in a nation “under God.” In many ways, the marriage of corporate and Christian interests that has recently dominated the news—from the Hobby Lobby case to controversies over state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—is not that new at all.

For much of the 1930s, organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had been searching in vain for ways to rehabilitate a public image that had been destroyed in the Great Depression and defamed by the New Deal. In 1934, a new generation of conservative industrialists took over NAM with a promise to “serve the purposes of business salvation.”

Ultimately, though, industry’s self-promotion was seen as precisely that.  . . . . Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt took his shots. “It has been said that there are two great Commandments—one is to love God, and the other to love your neighbor,” he noted soon after the Liberty League’s creation. “The two particular tenets of this new organization say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor.”

When Roosevelt launched the New Deal, politically liberal clergymen echoed his arguments, championing his proposal for a vast welfare state as simply the Christian thing to do. The head of the Federal Council of Churches, for instance, claimed the New Deal embodied basic Christian principles such as the “significance of daily bread, shelter, and security.” When businessmen realized their economic arguments were no match for Roosevelt’s religious ones, they decided to beat him at his own game.

It all fits the picture we see today and perhaps the hijacking of the GOP wasn't based on short term cynicism after all, but rather was a piece of a longer term plan that commenced decades ago.  Now, however, the GOP seems to have lost control of the Frankenstein monster it created.

Right Wing’s Worst Nightmare; Renewed Democratic Populism

A certain portion of the GOP base will seemingly forever remain racist, religiously extreme and utterly self-centered and driven by greed.  But other portions of the GOP base might be swayed to shift their political allegiance if the Democrat Party can successfully rediscover its former populist appeal.  At least that is the premise of a piece in Salon that notes the stirrings of a new populism such as that preached by Elizabeth Warren.  The biggest obstacle to such populist message is the huge amounts of money that would be oligarchs like the Koch brothers and others who want a new Gilded Age will throw in opposition to policies that might assist the working and middle classes rather than favor the most rapacious of the wealthy.  Here are article excerpts:

Elizabeth Warren’s rock star reception at Netroots Nation came as a surprise to absolutely no one, but not so her popularity as a draw for red state Democrats running for Senate, like West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant or Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Yet, there shouldn’t be anything surprising about Warren’s broad economic populist appeal. It was, after all, the foundation of Democratic Party power from 1932 through 1968, a period in which Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections and controlled both houses of Congress continuously with only two brief blips in 1946 and 1952. It was a period of single-party dominance unmatched by any other in U.S. history, except for the First Party System, which the Democratic Republicans dominated so thoroughly from 1800 on that the opposition Federalist Party eventually just disappeared.

The New Deal era may have been a long time ago, but its political basics remain as popular as ever — as seen in programs like Social Security and Medicare,  . . . . . What’s been lacking in recent years is the political leadership and infrastructure to tap into that popular sentiment, which is just where Elizabeth Warren comes in.

First, the Democratic coalition is larger than the GOP coalition — Republicans have won just one presidential election since 1988 with more than 50 percent, Bush’s reelection in 2004 … the closest reelection since Woodrow Wilson’s in 1916. Their current House majority is built on pure gerrymandering — House Democrats got half a million more votes than Republicans did in the last election. Republicans can keep up only by keeping Democratic voters down. They cannot compete on a level playing field. Voter suppression, political intimidation, mud-slinging that turns people off to politics completely, these are overwhelmingly Republican weapons of choice, because the two coalitions are not equally balanced. Smaller, off-year electorates favor Republicans. If everyone votes, Democrats win consistently. That’s not a sign of two equally large political coalitions.

Second, the Republicans are more ideologically extreme, dogmatic and uncompromising, as well as being far more reliant on long-range deep-pocket funding to shape the political landscape/battlefield. This combination makes them tactically strong, at the cost of being strategically vulnerable, but only if Democrats are willing to challenge and change the way that politics is played. The Democrats’ numerically dominant big-tent, loose coalition, on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand approach makes it child’s play for the Republicans to engage in tactical divide-and-conquer games, primarily because Democrats have taken their eyes off the ball, the underlying populist economic vision that appeals to virtually all elements in their coalition—and many Republicans as well.

Putting Warren on the ticket in 2016 — either in the top spot or as vice president — would help Democrats take maximum advantage of the first asymmetry, and overcome the disadvantage of the second one. And that’s not just my own pet theory. We have a solid set of polling data from 2008 to support this view (presented and analyzed here)

There’s a strong probability that Hillary Clinton will be elected president in 2016. The GOP field is a mess, and the media’s desperate attempts to revive corpses like Chris Christie and Rick Perry only makes the picture even clearer. But the attacks on Clinton will surely escalate exponentially, putting the prospects of a landslide in doubt, no matter how inadequate the GOP candidate turns out to be. The Edwards record from 2008 strongly suggests that Warren as V.P. could help to ensure that landslide — and with it, a workable Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, even despite the intense GOP gerrymandering that currently has the House paralyzed.

What happens after that will be crucial, of course. If, like Obama and her husband before her, Clinton tries to “move to the center” and spurn her party base, then the 2018 midterms will be yet another disaster, and political gridlock and dysfunction will continue in the years ahead. The Ron Brownsteins of the world will be “vindicated.” But if Elizabeth Warren does have some influence, if Clinton does learn from past Democratic mistakes, then maybe, just maybe, we could see America break with its recent history of almost 50 years dominated by divided government and return to a more traditional, more functional political pattern, in which one party — and its vision — dominates for a period of decades, and the other party survives by adapting to the world that the dominant party has created.

Is the premise of the piece correct?  I'm not sure, but the concept is worth exploring and gets to the heart of the Democrat need to make inroads with those who vote Republican even though the GOP's agenda is truly against their best interests. 

How Racism Caused The Government Shutdown

I grew up through high school in Central New York State (Syracuse area) and did not come to Virginia until I started going to college at the University of Virginia literally only a few years after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving v. Virginia.  At the time, in many ways I felt like I had moved to a foreign land, especially on issues of race and how blacks were treated.  Thankfully, over the last 40+ years, things have changed in many parts of Virginia and other parts of the Deep South.  But in other areas of the South, things have changed very little.  Visit Martinsville, Virginia and many parts of Southern states ranging from Alabama to Kentucky, and the mindset has changed little from that evidenced by far too many whites displayed in the book and movie, The Help.  What does this have to do with the GOP's forcing of the federal government shutdown?  A lengthy piece in Think Progress (it is worth a full read) lays out the case that racism - and not just against Barack Obama - that underlies the behavior of today's GOP which has become a party dominated by reactionary Southerners.  Here are highlights:

This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.

I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.

The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.

In 1938, Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC) filibustered his own party’s bill. Well, part of his party — Northern Democrats, together with Northern Republicans, were pushing an federal anti-lynching bill. Bailey promised that Southern Democrats would teach “a lesson which no political party will ever again forget” to their Northern co-partisans if they “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro:”

Just as when the Republicans in the [1860s] undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro, we resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond measure; we hated it more than was right for us and more than was just; we hated it because of what it had done to us, because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that same policy destroyed the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by the Democratic party will destroy the Democratic party in the South.

Bailey’s rage at the affront to white supremacy was born of surprise. Until 1932, the South had dominated the Democratic Party, which had consistently stood for the South’s key regional regional interest — keeping blacks in literal or figurative fetters — since before the Civil War.

But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history.
[T]he New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, “the GOP’s ties with chambers of commerce, manufacturers’ associations, real estate groups, farm lobbies, and other organizations opposed to the increased government oversight of private enterprise that would come with fair employment and other civil rights legislation encouraged the GOP’s drift toward racial conservatism.”

Republican economic libertarianism, together with its gradual embrace of traditionally Southern “states rights” arguments to as weapons in the war on the New Deal, set the stage for the eventual white flight from the Democratic Party.

And Southern Democrats, without whose votes the New Deal never could have happened, were willing to sacrifice their commitment to economic liberalism on the altar of white supremacy.
Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and likeminded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.

But the Dixiecrats weren’t ready to migrate en masse to Party of Lincoln just yet. Something needed to happen to make the Republican Party shed its commitment to leading on civil rights wholesale. That “something” was the rise of the modern conservative movement.

[I]t wasn’t until Barry Goldwater and the rise of the modern conservative movement that this marriage was formally consummated. Goldwater lost all but six states — Arizona, his home, and five Deep South states. It was the first time the GOP had prevailed at the presidential level in the South in the party’s history. Republicans have held the South since..

By the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick  . . . 

These “rights” included “the ‘right’ to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the ‘right’ to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps, most important, the ‘right’ to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government.”

Kruse traces this language through white resistance to desegregation from the 40s through the 60s, using a detailed examination of “white flight” in Atlanta as a synecdoche. In the end, he finds, “the struggle over segregation thoroughly reshaped southern conservatism…segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the tax revolt, and the privatization of public services.” The concomitant rise of the modern conservative movement and the civil rights movements’ victories conspired to make Southern whites into economic, and not just racial, conservatives.

The more politically active blacks became, their data suggest, the more whites flocked to conservative Republicans as a counter. So from 1964 on, conservative white Southerners voted against Democrats at the presidential level. But the en masse formal switch in party identification until Reagan.

We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default.

So we can draw a tentatively straight line between the last 80 years of racial politics and this week’s political crisis. Aside from being an interesting point of history, what does that tell us?
First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history.
Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today.

One 2005 study that measured racial animus found that Southern whites were “more racially conservative than whites elsewhere on every measure of racial attitudes ordinarily used in national surveys.” And Obamacare is a racially polarized issue. Brown University’s Michael Tesler found, in 2010, that there was an astonishing 20 point higher racial gap on health policy in 2009 than there was in the early 90s. In Tesler’s experiments, subjects’ responses to statements about health policy were “significantly more racialized” when the statement was attributed to President Obama than President Clinton. So it’d be implausible, to put it mildly, to say that modern racism has nothing to do with the shutdown fight.

As someone  who has lived in the South for 40+ years and who spent close to a decade involved in the Republican Party, I believe this analysis is 100% on point.  Racism and religious extremism - these folks STILL use the Bible to justify segregation - are indeed the under currents that have driven the GOP to its current insane state.  Having a black man in the White House has only made the extremism and racism bubble to open view more fully.