House of Paine

tomasky sucks wind and maxify anti ross

on today's show:


the amerikan prostate 
strikes again ....

and see 
  super max
  take down
  a  proglodyte

   one   steve ross a roni 



===============================


first here's a beaut from 
prosttate central

by a mister tomasky 


clips  and comments 


"The Democrats are feeling upbeat these days,
 and why not? "

" the party might even take back 
the House or the Senate -- or both." 


"in the May issue of The Washington Monthly
 Amy Sullivan demonstrates that the Democrats
 have in fact become a disciplined and effective opposition party".


 Social Security 
 Davis-Bacon 
 Dubai ports deal

" the Democrats have dealt
the administration a series of defeats "

" More than that, the Democrats do have ideas; 
it’s just that no one bothers to cover them" 

"The party has discipline,
 a tactical strategy as the opposition,
 and a more than respectable roster
 of policy proposals
waiting to be considered 
should Democrats become the majority again"


" It’s quite different from, say,
 three years ago.
 But let’s not get carried away. 
There remains a missing ingredient --
 the crucial ingredient of politics,
 the factor that helps unite a party
 (always a coalition of warring interests),
 create majorities, 
and force the sort of paradigm shifts
 that happened in 1932 and 1980. 
It’s the factor they need to think about 
if their goal is not merely to win elections 
but to govern decisively after winning them" 


 

"What the Democrats still don’t have is a philosophy,
 a big idea that unites their proposals 
and converts them from a hodgepodge 
of narrow and specific fixes 
into a vision for society"


" Indeed, the party and the constellation of interests
 around it don’t even think 
in philosophical terms and haven’t for quite some time"

 "There’s a reason for this:
 They’ve all been trained to believe
 -- by the media, by their pollsters -- 
that their philosophy is an electoral loser"

". Like the dogs in the famous 
“learned helplessness” psychological experiments
 of the 1960s -- 


 But at the same time, let’s recognize
 a new historical moment when we see one: 

Today, for the first time since 1980,
 it is conservative philosophy
 that is being discredited
 (or rather, is discrediting itself) 
on a scale liberals wouldn’t have dared imagine 
a few years ago. 


An opening now exists,
 as it hasn’t in a very long time,
 for the Democrats to be the visionaries.
 To seize this moment,
 the Democrats need to think differently --
 to stop focusing 
on their grab bag of small-bore proposals 
that so often seek not to offend 
and that accept conservative terms of debate.
 And to do that, they need to begin
 by looking to their history,
 for in that history there is an idea
 about liberal governance 
that amounts to more than the million-little-pieces
, interest-group approach to politics 
that has recently come under deserved scrutiny 
and that can clearly offer
 the most compelling progressive response
to the radical individualism of the Bush era. 


* * * 
"For many years -- during their years of dominance and success,
 the period of the New Deal
 up through the first part of the Great Society
 -- the Democrats practiced
 a brand of liberalism quite different from today’s.
 Yes, it certainly sought to expand
 both rights and prosperity.
 But it did something more: 
That liberalism was built around the idea 
-- the philosophical principle -- 
that citizens should be called upon
 to look beyond their own self-interest
 and work for a greater common interest"

. 

This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance -- not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. 


"Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens 
that they balance self-interest with common interest"

" Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal
 because she or he somehow or another,
 through reading or experience or both,
 came to believe in this principle.
 And every leading Democrat 
became a Democrat because on some level
, she or he believes this, too." 

This is the only justification leaders
 can make to citizens for liberal governance,
 really:
That all are being asked to contribute
 to a project larger than themselves. 

In terms of political philosophy, 
this idea of citizens sacrificing 
for and participating in the creation
 of a common good has a name:
 civic republicanism. 



It’s the idea, 
which comes to us from sources such as 
Rousseau’s social contract 
and some of James Madison’s contributions 
to the Federalist Papers,
 that for a republic to thrive, 
leaders must create and nourish
 a civic sphere in which citizens 
are encouraged to think broadly 
about what will sustain that republic
 and to work together to achieve common goals.
 This is what Dad asked me to understand 
that day in our Granada. 


 

---------- selling civil equality ------------- 


"Johnson and his advisers knew, 
just as Hubert Humphrey down Pennsylvania Avenue
 in the Senate knew,
 was that desegregation
 would fail if the matter 
were put to the American people
 only in terms of the rights 
of those directly affected;
 it had to be presented as advancing
 the common good" 



"Today’s Democratic Party 
has completely lost connection
 with this principle"

"against this common good  tradition 
that posits sacrifice 
for larger, universalist purposes 
is another tradition that has propelled 
American liberalism,
 that indeed is what the philosophers
 call liberalism proper:
 from Locke and Mill up to John Rawls in our time,
 a greater emphasis on the individual 
(and, later, the group),
 on tolerance, on rights, and on social justice."

" In theory, it is not inevitable 
that these two traditions must clash.
 But in the 1960s, 
it was inevitable that they did. 
And it is clear which side has won
 the argument within the Democratic Party" 


* * * 
The old  common good liberalism
 got America out of depression, 
won the war against fascism,
 built the middle class,
 created global alliances,
 and made education and health care 
far closer to universal 
than they had ever been.
 But there were things it did not do; 
its conception of the common good was narrow 
-- completely unacceptable,
 in fact, to us today. Japanese Americans 
during World War II 
and African Americans pretty much 
ever were not part of that common good;
 women were only partially included.
 Because of lack of leadership
 and political expediency 
(Roosevelt needing the South, for example),
 this liberalism had betrayed 
liberal principle and failed millions of Americans.
 Something had to give". 

"At first, some Democrats --
 Johnson and Humphrey, for example,
tried to expand the American community 
to include those who had been left behind
. But the political process takes time,
 and compromise;
 young people and black people and poor people
 were impatient
, and who could blame them?

 By 1965, ’66, ’67, the old liberalism’s failures
, both domestically and in Vietnam
, were so apparent as to be crushing.
 A new generation exposed
 this “common good” as nothing more than
 a lie to keep power functioning,
 so as not to disturb
 the “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” 
that Herbert Marcuse described in 1964"

" the old liberalism, far from nurturing a civic sphere
 in which all could deliberate 
and whose bounty all could enjoy,
 had created this unfreedom.
 The only response was to shatter it" 



"The stance of radical oppositionism 
dissipated as the ’60s flamed out;
 but the belief system,
 which devalued the idea of the commons, 
held fast and became institutionalized 
within the Democratic Party"

". The impact on the party 
was that the liberal impulse 
that privileged social justice and expansion
 of rights was now, for the first time,
 separated entirely
from the civic-republican impulse 
of the common good. "

"By the 1970s, some social programs --
 busing being the most obvious example --
 were pursued not because they would be good
 for every American,
 but because they would expand the rights
 of some Americans"

"Liberalism, and the Democratic Party,
 lost the language of advancing the notion 
that a citizen’s own interest,
 even if that citizen did not directly benefit
 from such-and-such a program,
 was bound up in the common interest.
 Democrats were now asking 
many people to sacrifice
 for a greater good 
of which they were not always a part". 

 




"the rise of interest-group pluralism:
 the proliferation of single-issue
 advocacy organizations.
 All supported good causes,
 but their dominance intensified the stratification."

 

* * * 
"By 1980, Reagan had seized the idea of the common good"


". To be sure, it was a harshly conservative variant that quite actively depended on white middle-class resentment"


"The liberals had come to ask too much of regular people"



"Bill Clinton took several important steps
 to address this, 
and to recapture the notion of the common good."

" He was quite attuned 
to the sometimes heated academic debates 
of the 1980s that pitted liberalism
 against republicanism and the then-new school
 of thought called communitarianism"


." With some programs, 
Clinton strove toward a kind
 of civic-republican liberalism"

" AmeriCorps, his program of national and community service 
that has been a noble attempt to create
 a sense of civic obligation among young people"


" Here, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
 enters the story. 
The DLC did have its own conception of the common good;
 indeed, the DLC, along with the communitarians,
 introduced the vocabulary of “rights and responsibilities” 
as a way to restore a civic-republican impulse
 to Democratic politics."

" Adding that word “responsibilities” 
was seen by many liberals as racial code
, but, to be fair,
 the DLC also proposed, for example,
 an aggressive corporate-welfare program
 in the 1990s " 

"On balance,
 adding “responsibilities” 
was a useful rhetorical corrective.
 But in the real world,
 it ended up applying
 chiefly to poor black women "

"the corporate-welfare plans went nowhere"


". Why? Because what the DLC gave up on
, by and large, was government -- 
a belief in public-sector answers
 to large and pressing problems." 

"If the rights-based activists 
of the 1960s were guilty of defenestrating
 the idea of the common good,
 then the centrists of the 1980s and early 1990s
 were guilty of pushing too far in the other direction "

" the direction of a too-extreme
 reticence about state interventionism"

" and of trying to make the rights crowd 
just shut up."

" Also -- of dressing up small and innocuous proposals
 in the garb of world-historical significance"

" The common good was said to be waiting
 to be rekindled not in the idea 
that capital should be taxed 
just as highly as wages,
 or in large-scale investments 
in public infrastructure,
 but in the form of the V-chip"
. 

"For all his important successes,
 Clinton’s broadest appeal was to people’s self-interest;"
 "
“I feel your pain.” "



:


" What principle or principles unites them all
, from Max Baucus to Maxine Waters
 and everyone in between,
 and what do they demand that citizens believe?" 

As I’ve said, 
they no longer ask them to believe
 in the moral basis of liberal governance,
 in demanding that citizens 
look beyond their own self-interest.

 They, or many of them,
 don’t really ask citizens 
to believe in government anymore.
 Or taxes, or regulation --
 oh, sort of on regulation,
 but only some of them, 
and only occasionally, when something happens 
like the mining disasters 
in my home state earlier this year.

 They do ask Americans to believe 
that middle-income people should get a fair shake,
 but they lack the courage to take that demand
 to the places it should logically go,
 like universal health coverage.

 And, of course, on many issues 
the party is ideologically all over the place;
 if you were asked to paint 
the party’s belief system,
 the result would resemble a Pollock. 

At bottom, today’s Democrats
 from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs,
 and they demand that American citizens
 believe in only two things: 

diversity and rights. 


" It’s one of the transcendent victories 
of contemporary liberalism,
 in an era when victories have been few,
 to consecrate diversity as a societal end,
 a legitimate measure of a good 
and complete society. "



"I think back to 1995,
 when the Gingrich revolutionaries,
 and Bob Dole,
 wanted to pass legislation banning 
or curtailing affirmative action.
 Sharpening their knives, 
they went to their friends in corporate America:
 The time is right, they said;
 let’s scuttle these racial preferences. 
To their consternation,
 they didn’t have many takers.
 Corporate leaders said, well,
 we’ve spent a lot of time (and money)
 developing diversity policies, 
and they’re working rather nicely.
Congress was taken aback."

"The  republican revolutionaries dropped it"

 left it to the courts. These corporations were in fact making a common-good argument to the revolutionaries: Diversity has served us well as a whole, enriched us. And it’s not just corporate America: All over the country, white attitudes on race, straight peoples’ attitudes toward gay people, have changed dramatically for the better. These attitudes have changed because liberals and (most) Democrats decided that diversity was a principle worth defending on its own terms. Put another way, they decided to demand of citizens that they come to terms with diversity. So it can work, this demanding. 

On the question of rights, the story is more mixed. Liberals were chagrined, after 9-11, to see the percentages of Americans who told pollsters they were willing to sacrifice some liberties for security, and more recently that only a very slim majority thought warrantless spying was a bad idea. But even this narrative isn’t all bad. Majorities support all manner of rights, if with asterisks -- to an abortion under many conditions, to privacy unless you’re a terrorist, to a fair trial even if you are a terrorist, to free speech unless you’re inciting to riot. Americans are actually better about this than the French or the British, or just about anyone, really. Again, liberals (with an assist from the Founders) placed this demand on citizens, and a majority of citizens responded. 

But diversity and rights cannot be the only goods that Democrats demand citizens accept. For liberalism to succeed, they have to exist alongside an idea of a common good. When they don’t, things are out of balance, corrupted; and liberalism is open to the sort of attack made by Stanley Fish on The New York Times op-ed page back in February. Liberalism, he wrote, is “the religion of letting it all hang out”; its “first tenet” is that “everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.” 

This is preposterous, and the column drew many angry (and intelligent) letters. But unfortunately, I suspect that many Americans -- not just people on the right, many not-terribly-political people -- believe that Fish described liberalism precisely. Anything goes, man, because we don’t really think about how a given action affects the community; we just care about whether, in questioning that action, the community is trampling on the actor’s rights. We’re in an age today -- the age of Guantanamo, of withdrawal from the Geneva Conventions, and of illegal spying justified as executive necessity -- when rights must be guarded with special care. But to think of every mode of action in terms of whether it can be enshrined as a right is a habit of mind that can lead our fellow citizens not to take us as seriously as we want them to when we talk about these other very real infringements on rights. 

Liberals and Democrats of the 1960s had to abandon common-good conceptions in favor of rights and social-justice ideas when they decided that the older liberalism had failed on too many fronts and they could no longer delay the work of securing the full rights of those Americans who hadn’t had them. Their decision was necessary and courageous, even if some of them and their followers did spin off into radical and profoundly anti-majoritarian directions. 

But that decision is now 40 years old. And, yet, that mode of thought still governs much about the way the Democratic Party, its interest groups, and liberal activists think and act today. And many of those who don’t think and act this way, those Democrats who fight this brand of liberalism, have gone too far down the other road -- so chary of anything that smacks of the old-time liberal religion that they too readily embrace a new one so promiscuously ecumenical, so intent on proving that it carries none of that old baggage, that it makes room for things like voting for last year’s bankruptcy bill and supporting, still, the war in Iraq. Both roads are philosophical dead ends. They’re also political dead ends, the former potentially alienating moderates, the latter giving rise to indifference and disgust in the party’s base. It’s time for something new that stands a chance of reaching both of those groups. 


* * * 
The Democrats need to become the party of the common good. They need a simple organizing principle that is distinct from Republicans and that isn’t a reaction to the Republicans. They need to remember what made liberalism so successful from 1933 to 1966, that reciprocal arrangement of trust between state and nation. And they need to take the best parts of the rights tradition of liberalism and the best parts of the more recent responsibilities tradition and fuse them into a new philosophy that is both civic-republican and liberal -- that goes back to the kind of rhetoric Johnson used in 1964 and 1965, that attempts to enlist citizens in large projects to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits. 

Arguing for it is the only way that Democrats can come to stand for something clear and authoritative again. It’s not enough in our age, after the modern conservative ascendancy, to stand for activist government, or necessary taxes and regulation, or gay marriage, or abortion rights, or evolution, or the primacy of science, or universal health care, or affirmative action, or paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants, or college education for all, or environmental protection, or more foreign aid, or a comprehensive plan to foster democracy in the Arab world, or any of the other particular and necessary things that Democrats do or should support; it isn’t enough to stand for any of those things per se. Some of them have been discredited to the broad public, while others are highly contentious and leave the Democrats open to the same old charges. And those that aren’t contentious or discredited suffer the far worse problem of being uninteresting: They’re just policies, and voters don’t, and should not be expected to, respond to policies. Voters respond to ideas, and Democrats can stand for an idea: the idea that we’re all in this -- post-industrial America, the globalized world, and especially the post–9-11 world in which free peoples have to unite to fight new threats -- together, and that we have to pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future. 

The common good is common sense, and the historical time is right for it, for two reasons. First, what I’m trying to describe here is post-ideological in the best sense, a sense that could have broader appeal than what we normally think of as liberal ideology, because what’s at the core of this worldview isn’t ideology. It’s something more innately human: faith. Not religious faith. Faith in America and its potential to do good; faith that we can build a civic sphere in which engagement and deliberation lead to good and rational outcomes; and faith that citizens might once again reciprocally recognize, as they did in the era of Democratic dominance, that they will gain from these outcomes. Maintaining such a faith is extraordinarily difficult in the face of the right-wing noise machine and a conservative movement that, to put it mildly, do not engage in good-faith civic debate. Conservatism can succeed on such a cynical basis; its darker view of human nature accepts discord as a fact of life and exploits it. But for liberalism, which is grounded in a more benign view of human nature, to succeed, the most persuasive answer to bad faith, as Martin Luther King showed, is more good faith. All Americans are not Bill O’Reilly fans or Wall Street Journal editorialists. While they may not call themselves liberals, many of them -- enough of them -- are intelligent people who want to be inspired by someone to help their country. 

The second reason this could succeed is simple: the Bush years. By 2008, we will have lived through seven-plus years of an administration that has done almost nothing for the common good, that has unleashed the most rapacious social Darwinism we’ve seen in this country for at least 80 years, and that has catered to its interest groups far more, at once more obsequiously and more arrogantly, than even the Mondale-era Democrats did. Americans are, and will be, ready for something very different. 

Here, I can even offer some proof. A March 2006 research project by the Center for American Progress (CAP) asked 900 Americans of all political stripes a series of questions about the role of faith and values in public life. The numbers, shared with me and about to be released publicly, support the contention that Americans recognize the absence of a common good in civic life and yearn for some leadership that will do something about it. The survey asked respondents whether they agreed with a series of 12 assertions about American life today; 68 percent strongly agreed with the assertion that “our government should be committed to the common good.” This placed second only to “Americans are becoming too materialistic” (71 percent); it tied with “our government should uphold basic decency and dignity,” which is a similar sentiment, and it came in well ahead of such conservative chestnuts as “religion is on the decline in America” (41 percent) and “not enough Americans know right from wrong anymore” (46 percent). Respondents were then given an opportunity to offer open-ended descriptions of what the phrase “‘the common good’ means to you personally.” As with any open-ended poll question, answers were all over the lot, but the two most frequently volunteered answers used language that could have been plucked from this essay: “Good for all concerned/involved/more than individual” (20 percent), and “Good for the majority/not just for the few” (15 percent). One poll isn’t conclusive, of course; but this one strongly suggests a nascent sentiment that Democrats can tap into. 


* * * 
Two things have to happen before the Democrats will be able to do this. First, the way interest-group politics are done in today’s Democratic Party just has to change. I’m not the first to observe this recently -- indeed, momentum is gathering behind this view, although it’s still a long way from being a consensus one. In their controversial 2004 paper, “The Death of Environmentalism,” Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger blasted the environmental movement’s tactical narrowness and outdated intellectual frameworks. In their perceptive and passionate new book Crashing the Gate, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong rebuke liberal interest groups for a variety of sins, notably of feeling the need to endorse a few moderate Republicans for Congress even though those Republicans, while they might have acceptable records on issue X, Y, or Z, will go on to make Bill Frist the majority leader and Dennis Hastert the speaker -- and with that single vote, more than cancel out whatever nice things they do when nothing’s on the line. 

This kind of politics is shallow, it’s shortsighted, it’s anti-progressive, and it nullifies the idea that there might even be a common good. Interest groups need to start thinking in common-good terms. Much of the work done by these groups, and many of their goals, are laudable. But if they can’t justify that work and those goals in more universalist terms rather than particularist ones, then they just shouldn’t be taken seriously. Immigration policy can’t be chiefly about the rights of undocumented immigrants; it needs to be about what’s good for the country. Similarly with civil-rights policy -- affirmative action, say, which will surely be up for review one day again when a case reaches the Roberts court. As I noted above, when talking about Gingrich’s failure in 1995, there exist powerful common-good arguments for affirmative action. In addition to the idea that diversity enriches private-sector environments, affirmative action has been the most important single factor in the last 40 years in the broad expansion of the black middle class, which in turn (as more blacks and whites work and live together) has dramatically improved race relations in this county, which has been good, as LBJ would put it, for every American. 

The second thing that has to happen is that Democrats must lead -- the interest groups and the rest of us -- toward this new paradigm. Someone in the party has to decide to bust the mold. I dream of the Democratic presidential candidate who, in his -- or her -- announcement speech in August 2007 says something like the following: “To the single-issue groups arrayed around my party, I say this. I respect the work you do and support your causes. But I won’t seek and don’t want your endorsement. My staff and I won’t be filling out any questionnaires. You know my track record; decide from it whether I’ll be a good president. But I am running to communicate to Americans that I put the common interest over particular interests.” Okay, I said it was a dream. But there it is -- in one bold stroke, a candidate occupies the highest moral ground available to politicians: to be unbought and unbossed. 


 

It’s hard for groups to change, and they must be given a reason to do so -- a stake in a new paradigm and an assurance that their interests will not be tossed to the side. The answer is that, if Democrats are permitted to adopt a new philosophy and practice their politics differently -- and, if Democratic leaders rise to the occasion -- the prevailing situation in this country could change dramatically for the better, and that would benefit all their causes in the long run. I can’t sketch out the implications of the framework I propose for every policy issue -- those implications will be a matter of civic negotiation. But I can say that a new civic-republican liberalism can justify collective action far more powerfully and persuasively than anything the Democrats have done or said in a long time. Such arguments can be constructed on behalf of almost every single thing the party purports to stand for: health-care coverage for those without it, the need to protect the planet and take global warming seriously, energy independence, asset-building for African Americans and other disproportionately poor groups, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and more. Such rhetoric can surely be wedded effectively to core economic matters. Last month in these pages, my colleague Harold Meyerson wrote brilliantly about the crisis of the American economy [see “Not Your Father’s Detroit,” The American Prospect, April 2006] -- about the need for an industrial policy that addresses the flight of jobs, the health-care and pension crises, and the rest. If the Democrats, when addressing these concerns, sound like they’re offering one more sop to big labor, they will inaugurate the same old round of embittered cat-calling; if their proposals are rooted in notions of communal sacrifice toward a greater good in which all citizens will have a stake and a share, the terms of the debate are changed. 

There are potential dangers here and they should be noted. A too-aggressive common-good framework can discard liberty and rights; after all, Bush uses a conservative kind of common-good rhetoric to defend his spying program (he’s protecting us from attack). Democrats have to guard against this; a common good that isn’t balanced by concern for liberty can be quasi-authoritarian (“coercive,” as the political philosophers call it). Common-good rhetoric and action must be tethered to progressive ends and must operate within the constitutional framework of individual liberty against state encroachment. 

But there’s an awful lot of maneuvering room between where the Democratic Party is today and coercion; it’s the territory of civic deliberation toward a larger common interest, and there are positive signs that some are exploring it. In South Dakota, where legislators recently passed the country’s most draconian abortion ban, pro-choice advocates have done something very interesting. They decided not to sue. Instead they’re circulating petitions to hold a referendum on the law. The Los Angeles Times reports that “even in the most conservative corners of this conservative state, both Republicans and Democrats -- including a few who say they oppose abortion -- are eagerly signing the petition.” We don’t know that their effort will prevail. But we already know that using the political process in this way is a huge improvement over running yet again to the courts. In the long run, showing faith in this kind of democratically negotiated outcome is far better for liberalism. 

Some will say that asking Americans to look beyond their own self-interest and participate in a common good will fail, either because it failed before (the 1960s) or because such a request can succeed only in rare moments -- a time of war or of deep domestic crisis. But that isn’t what failed in the ’60s. The first half of the ’60s, the civic-republican liberal half, succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The second half, the half that ditched the common good, is what failed, and it failed for precisely the reason that it did so. And yes, it may be that the times when such appeals can work are comparatively rare in American history. 

But what if, as the CAP poll suggests, this is one of those moments? We are not in a Depression-like crisis, perhaps; but thanks to the efforts of the Bush administration we are on the precipice of several crises, and it’s not just liberals who recognize this. Many of our fellow citizens, bitterly disappointed by a leadership in which they had placed an extraordinary amount of trust back in September 2001, recognize it, too. 

The Democrats must grasp this, kick some old habits, and realize that we are on the verge of a turning point. The Democratic left wants it to be 1968 in perpetuity; the Democratic center wishes for 1992 to repeat itself over and over again. History, however, doesn’t oblige such wishes -- it rewards those who recognize new moments as they arise. It might just be that the Bush years, these years of civic destruction and counterfeit morality, have provided the Democrats the opening to argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality. If they do it the right way, they can build a politics that will do a lot more than squeak by in this fall’s (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises. It can smash today’s paradigm to pieces. The country needs nothing less. The task before today’s Democratic Party isn’t just to eke out electoral victories; it’s to govern, and to change our course in profound ways. I’d like to think they can do it. But the Democrats must become republicans first. 
 
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.  





-------------------------------------------------------------

My friend Steve Rose has a reprise of his thesis on "The Trouble with Class Interest Populism" on the website of the Progressive Policy Institute.

its intro follows:


------------------------------------------------

It is an article of faith 
among many liberal Democratic partisans
 that a significant percentage of people
 who vote for Republicans 
are willfully voting 
against their own class interests. 
They are being suckered
, the argument goes, 
by the Republicans' disingenuous appeals 
on issues of cultural morality 
and by simplistic calls 
for a less meddlesome government. 



How else are we to explain 
the "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon 
that has flummoxed the Democratic Party
 for two and a half decades now? 

Author Thomas Frank popularized 
this argument in his bestselling 2004 book,
 What's the Matter With Kansas? 
He starkly portrayed 
much of the country as being 
in the grip of "madness and delusion," 
sketching a twisted political landscape: 


"...of sturdy blue-collar patriots
 reciting the Pledge 
while they strangle their own life chances;
 of small farmers proudly 
voting themselves off the land;
 of devoted family men carefully 
seeing to it that their children 
will never be able to afford college 
or proper health care;
 of working-class guys 
in Midwestern cities cheering 
as they deliver up a landslide 
for a candidate whose policies
 will end their way of life."


At first, the syllogism 
at the heart of this argument
 seems to make a certain amount of sense:
 The Republican Party has traditionally been 
the party of capital 
and the Democratic Party has traditionally been
the party of workers.

 Most people are workers.
 Therefore,
 the majority of voters should be Democrats. 

Indeed, proponents of class-interest populism 
argue this amounts to a potentially decisive 
political advantage that Democrats
 are blithely ignoring on the misinformed advice
 of out-of-touch, inside-the-Beltway political consultants
 who encourage candidates to grovel cravenly
 for campaign cash from moneyed special interests.

 Moreover, say the populists,
 in the absence of a compelling economic message
 from Democrats,
a biased news media is failing
 to report the true,
 nefarious impact of Republican policies."

The core argument in the liberal case
 for class-interest populism
 is deeply flawed in at least two important respects.


" First, it has been well established
 in studies of voting behavior 
that people no longer choose candidates
 primarily on the basis of "pocketbook" issues,
 as they did when the New Deal coalition
 dominated national politics".


" Instead, now that the old working class 
has been subsumed into a broader middle class,
 voters tend to balance personal experience 
(such as the party identification 
of family and friends),
a sense of self-interest 
(however defined),
 and a concern for society as a whole"

. Second, even if people did vote 
primarily on pocket-book issues, 
the group that could reasonably
 be categorized as having a clear, 
class-based interest 
in voting for Democratic policies
 would comprise less than one-quarter
 of the population.

Authors like Thomas Frank 
have not noticed this
 because they tend to rely on isolated examples
 of workers' economic misfortunes
 -- anecdotes -- 
rather than a serious analysis
 of actual economic and demographic data. 

To be sure, middle-income voters
 have a legitimate beef
 with Republican economic policies.


The Bush tax cuts have been
 loaded in favor of the wealthy,
shifting the relative tax burden 
to the broad, working middle class.

 Over the last six years,
 wealthy Americans also have reaped 
a disproportionate share of the economy's growth
, while earnings for individuals
 in the middle have stagnated.

 Inflation is under control,
 but soaring health care premiums,
 out-of-pocket health costs,
 and rising college tuitions 
are eating up an increasing share 
of consumers' disposable income.

 As companies react to fierce global competition
 by shedding health and pension costs
, there has been a very real shift 
of economic risk to working Americans

 

Democrats, of course,
 must speak to these worries.
 different economic outlook 
than the blue-collar workers of yesteryear.
 Their outlook is more aspirational and less infused
 with class grievance or resentment.
 In the post-industrial economy, 
the great question is how government
 can equip workers with new tools for economic success,
 not how government can insulate
 them from the rigors of competition 
or restrain business power. 

Yet, class-interest populists
 cling to an outdated concept
 of workers' interests --
 a holdover from the New Deal-to-Great Society era,
 when a large blue-collar class 
was fight-ing for a fair share 
of the industrial economy's rewards.

 Today, most people work in offices
 or high-end service jobs 
and they believe their economic interests
 are more closely aligned 
with the companies they work for. 

Moreover, it is an occupational hazard
 of those with big hearts 
to overestimate the share of the population 
living in economic distress.

 That is easy to do with yearly income data 
because annual figures can be deceptive.
 Graduate students are likely to report 
very low incomes for a few years 
while they are in school,

 for example. But they should not be categorized with those in true economic distress, because their condition is only temporary. Workers who are not in school have fluctuating incomes, as well. It makes much more sense, therefore, to look at people's average earnings over a longer period, like 15 years. Analyzed that way, the data show that about 23 percent of the population can be categorized as having a direct personal interest in supporting the social safety net programs that most of the public strongly associates with the Democratic Party -- programs that help people living in poverty or just a few rungs above it. 

Democrats may protest the suggestion that they only stand for social safety net pro-grams for the poor; they may rightly argue that their whole social and economic platform is to the benefit of most Americans. But the hard truth is that most Americans simply don't perceive themselves to have class interests that strongly align them with one party or the other. That is, they don't believe that the direct, pocketbook benefits of either party's policies are so overwhelming as to outweigh all other political considerations. 

On a wide range of other issues, Democratic policies have unquestionably had a direct impact on workers' lives -- the 40-hour week, overtime pay, and sick leave, to name a few -- but most of those policies have long since become widely accepted. They go largely unchallenged even in Republican ad-ministrations, so the Democratic Party reaps little benefit for having championed them in the first place, even though it is still perceived to be the party of business regulation. The same is true for America's flagship retirement security programs, Social Security and Medicare. Both were originally Democratic policies, but like workplace standards, they have become such an integral part of the American social contract that voters do not definitively credit one political party for managing them better than the other. For example, even in the spring of 2005 -- when President Bush was energetically campaigning for a Social Security reform plan that the public overwhelmingly opposed -- pollsters typically only found a 10 percent to 12 percent advantage for Democrats over Republicans on the generic question, "Who do you trust more to handle the issue of Social Security?" And that Democratic advantage never rose from a plurality to a clear majority, because a significant percentage of those polled invariably said they did not trust either party. 



To prove the fallacy of arguments
 like Thomas Frank's definitively,
 however,
 we must first establish a valid definition
 of class interests,
 and then use that definition
 to calculate a realistic estimate
 of the number of people 
for whom Democratic policies provide direct,
 unquestionable benefits. 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------








 I commend it to all, along with his legendary "Social Stratification in the United States" poster, a copy of which hangs on my office wall. (Wait until the updated version is out.)

To stir the pot, I'll summarize the argument narrowly as a call to discount the importance of economic class interest in progressive, majoritarian politics. 



Rose's field is the empirical analysis of labor market data. He brings his considerable skills to bear on a demonstration of two main points. The first is that means-tested "safety net" programs with which "economic populist" is identified benefit less than thirty percent of the population. The second is that labor market regulation is not relevant to the expanding sector of the workforce -- those whose jobs do not entail heavy, low-paid manual labor, or jobs that require relatively less in the way of skill (in terms of educational credentials).

The upshot is that people are not voting against their economic interests. Nothing is the matter with Kansas. Politicians are not betraying their constituents for the sake of donations or because they are befuddled by elitist consultants.

Rose's classification explicitly excludes from consideration social insurance. He implies that there is a political consensus on these programs, hence they are not a source of competition between the parties. 

It's true that social insurance -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, Workman's Comp -- are broadly popular. It's also true that thus far Republicans have not been serious about gutting them. By not serious, I do not mean they would sincerely love to chop them up. I mean they have not been willing to risk anything politically.

From an ideological standpoint, there should be little doubt in which direction the G.O.P. policy vector is pointed with respect to social insurance. The fiscal crisis Republicans have hastened will provide a future opportunity, albeit a highly risky one.

There is a profound and broad class interest in supporting and expanding social insurance. I won't burden you with a rehash of the merits. Voting G.O.P., while they build their apparatus and lay (and lie) in the weeds, waiting for a better chance than 2005, is contrary to the interests of the many, well above Rose's income cut-off of $40,000 a year. 

Rose is also burdened by a narrow view of social interest. A social safety net is mostly beneficial to those with average annual incomes under $40K, but it is beneficial to anyone who approves of such a system. In other words, if out of altruism you like the idea, you benefit. Alternatively, class is not just the economic circumstances you end up with, it's also those you might have experienced but did not.

What might be called a narrow money-liberal-transfer frame of reference inhibits the view of public investment. I don't mean any old spending, but spending aimed at providing facilities and services that augment economic growth and are in insufficient supply from the private sector. The modern equivalent of nationalizing the railroads held by the old populists of the 19th century. An example is city governments setting up public broadband.

In short, by reducing populism Steve demonstrates its limited importance. In its place he offers an understanding of "middle-class aspiration." What this leads to is left to another article.

Aspiration is crucial. People want to get rich, or at least see a path forward, for their children if not for themselves. On average they have unrealistic expectations. Woe to the politician who dares to tell the truth on that score. 

Safety nets aside, social insurance -- more not less -- is a vital foundation for any such aspiration. So too is public investment. Other populist interests for another time are fair trade and democratic money. All of these facilitate financial solvency and earnings growth along a broad swath of the population, not just the bottom 30 percent. 

On all of these fundamental matters the post-labor, modernist, centrist Dems (Hi, Ed!) are weak at best. That's the trouble with the new America Third Way new Democratic network information economy Daily Kos hyper-partisan netrooted voices. (Have I left anybody out?) 

E.P. Thompson said something to the effect that class is not a group of people; it's a happening. 

Without class-interest populism, the Democratic Party isn't happening.