All posts tagged New Deal

A Pep Talk, Mostly To Myself

A thoughtful reader and I exchanged thoughts on our present political situation. His last response made me think about how weary Tr-mp and Tr-mpism can make us. My reply:

Michael,

I’m sorry you feel the way you do.

I can only tell you my response to all we have seen and are seeing, a response that often fluctuates between despair and anger. There are days when I confess I just don’t get what’s going on and why it’s going on, and I begin to really consider the fact that we are doomed, or at least so grievously wounded that recovery is doubtful, or at best a long, long way in the distance.

Other days I just get pissed. I get pissed at Republican leaders and others in Congress who should—and most of them do—know better. Some are cynically using fear and ignorance to make their cruel ideological dreams come true. Some are paying back their wealthy donors. Some are hiding from Tr-mp cultists who might demand primary challenges against them next year. Most of them are cowards. Most of them are, as the current “healthcare” bill demonstrates, immoral politicians. Trading American lives for a tax reduction for wealthy people is indefensible. Except we see it defended every day, in some form or another. That tends to generate a lot of anger inside me.

So, as optimistic as I have been since I began this blog early in 2009, that optimism has taken a major hit. But, and I don’t want to overstate this, there is some hope out there. Polls are showing not only that Tr-mp is relatively unpopular outside his cult following, but that the GOP “healthcare” plan is wildly unpopular. And polls are showing a wide preference for Democrats to lead Congress next time. Add to that the fact that Democrats have overperformed in all the special elections recently. That’s not enough to, on an hourly or daily basis, overcome all the despair and anger I sometimes feel, but it helps. Well, it helps me at least.

The bigger picture is that more people voted against Tr-mp last year than voted for him. And people forget that Hillary Clinton, whatever you think of her, received more votes than any white candidate in history. And that was after fairly unprecedented attacks, from the right and from the left, from the Russians and from Russia-friendly Americans, on her integrity and decency. Her ideas and policy proposals, many of them innovative, were drowned out by all those attacks.

You said,

My instinct say that Democrats must do something different, something to disrupt this cycle. We’ve entered a domain of sameness that is deadly to real thinking and new ideas.

I guess I don’t agree with that. I also don’t agree with people who say the Democratic Party has to undergo some kind of fundamental change. We are who we are. And who we are, at least today, is a party of people who are outraged at what Republicans want to do to the country. We are outraged at the lack of compassion for those who need it. We are outraged at the fact that working class people in this country are barely making ends meet, let alone achieving what we now laughingly call the American Dream. And we are outraged that all this is happening while billionaires are, directly and indirectly, running the show.

We are a party who, yes, wants to redistribute some of the wealth in this fabulously wealthy country. We don’t like to see a small number of rich donors control our collective future, which means they have much control over our individual futures. We don’t want to see sick people go without care. We don’t want to see poor people—men, women, and children—go without food. We don’t want to see working people hopelessly struggle to own homes if they want to and send their kids to college if they want to go. And we want assurance that as we age, we won’t be forgotten—if we didn’t go to a great college, or go to college at all; if we didn’t manage a hedge fund or any fund beyond the one that kept food on our tables; if we didn’t own a successful business; if we didn’t win a state lottery; if we weren’t born rich.

You see, I just don’t think this “domain of sameness” that you hear, from me and other Democrats, is “deadly to real thinking and new ideas.” I think it is essential to hold on to who we are as a political party. I think it is crucial that we continue to emphasize compassion. I think it is necessary to keep reminding people that a society of cynical and selfish people is not a society at all.

Now, I think it is fair to say that most Republicans, as hard as it may be to believe right now, want to live in a decent society. I say that with the understanding that you have to see them in isolation from their party-tribe to accept my claim. Once they get together as a group, once they put on their Sunday Republican garb and listen to ideological preachers indoctrinate them with nonsense like trickle-down economics, something happens to them. We’ve all seen this phenomenon. Growing up we knew people who were decent and kind enough when we met them one-on-one, but once they got around a certain group of their peers, the dynamics changed. They treated us differently. They embraced the spirit of the group. I think that’s what we see at work today. Yes, there are deplorable Americans who are beyond redemption. And that number seems to be shockingly large. But I continue to hope, perhaps imagine, that the deplorables are not a majority of the Republican Party. We will soon see.

In the mean time, we know that the deplorables are not a majority of the country. Not even close. They can only define us as a people if we allow them to define us. As of right now, I’m in the fight to not let that group of deplorable Americans, or even those non-deplorable Republicans who reflexively support the harmful policies of their leaders, define who we are as Americans. If I, and those who are fighting this fight, lose that definitive struggle, then we are truly doomed.

That fight, that need to fight, is why we cannot give in to despair or anger or any other counterproductive, if understandable, emotion. I’m not saying I’m not tempted to give in. Some hours of the day I am. Some days in the week I am. Like you, I sometimes feel “numb” to it all, too. But to give in is a win for the deplorables, whoever they are and whatever their numbers. And I, for one, cannot bear the thought of telling my little granddaughter, not quite eight years old, that I gave up the fight for her future, gave up the fight for her kids’ future. I may be ashamed of what is going on now in our country, but I would be more ashamed if I weren’t part of the resistance to what is going on.

And that is why, despite all of its problems and imperfections and shortcomings, I remain a strong believer in the Democratic Party. As I have said many times, it is the only institution that can harness, much like a labor union does, our individual resistance to indecency and empower us with the collective ability to change what we see. And while you and I may have an “innate desire for something new and different,” what we really need is an old and familiar idea, expressed by Franklin Roosevelt in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in July of 1932:

My program…is based upon this simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.

As old as those words are, the fight today is pretty much that simple for me.

Duane

new deal remedies.jpg

by R. Duane Graham on June 27, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on June 27, 2017

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/a-pep-talk-mostly-to-myself/

No Bull

Douglas Brinkley is, among other things, a professor of history at Rice University in Houston. Besides particular events and eras in American history, he has written books about past presidents, about foreign policy, about war.

He recently interviewed President Obama for Rolling Stone magazine, and the quote heard most often from the piece so far is this one, as relayed by The Guardian:

Brinkley’s interview recorded a conversation between Obama and Eric Bates, the executive editor of Rolling Stone. Bates told Obama that his six-year-old daughter had a message for the president: “Tell him: you can do it.” Obama replied with a grin:

You know, kids have good instincts. They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell’.

Bullshitter. Bullshitter. Bullshitter. That’s all I’ve heard about the interview, except that in our too-polite media it is presented as “bulls****er.” How kind of the media to cover for Obama like that.

In any case, besides Obama’s stunningly accurate characterization of Romney’s shtick, Brinkley’s interview was full of other worthy quotes, and I mean quotes from the historian, Brinkley:

Barack Obama can no longer preach the bright 2008 certitudes of “Hope and Change.” He has a record to defend this time around. And, considering the lousy hand he was dealt by George W. Bush and an obstructionist Congress, his record of achievement, from universal health care to equal pay for women, is astonishingly solid.

Now, when is the last time you heard anyone in the media bidness refer to “an obstructionist Congress” ? Particularly in the context of Obama’s accomplishments? When one thinks about it, what the President has been able to accomplish has been remarkable, and remarkably progressive, given the times we live in.

Brinkley, the historian, continued:

Viewed through the lens of history, Obama represents a new type of 21st-century politician: the Progressive Firewall. Obama, simply put, is the curator-in-chief of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society. When he talks about continued subsidies for Big Bird or contraceptives for Sandra Fluke, he is the inheritor of the Progressive movement’s agenda, the last line of defense that prevents America’s hard-won social contract from being defunded into oblivion.

Since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, Brinkley asserted, “the federal government has aimed to improve the daily lives of average Americans.” TR fought “Big Money interests”; Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and re-established the federal income tax; FDR brought the country the New Deal, Social Security, laws to protect workers and give them the right to bargain collectively, regulation of Wall Street, unemployment compensation and the FDIC, which brought confidence to depositors that their money was safe, even if banks weren’t.

But in between Wilson and FDR came “the GOP Big Three of Harding-Coolidge-Hoover,” who “made ‘business’ the business of America, once more allowing profiteers to flourish at the expense of the vulnerable.” It was the policies and resulting disaster from those three Republican presidents that FDR was elected to fix.

And it took him a while to do it. But he did it. And as Brinkley wrote,

The America we know and love today sprung directly from the New Deal.

Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, what Brinkley calls the “Grand Reversal,” an assault on the New Deal  has been ongoing, even including to some degree Democrat Bill Clinton, who “survived two terms only by co-opting traditional GOP issues like welfare reform and balanced budgets.”

And Brinkley makes another essential point in anaylzing President Obama in terms of the historical trend to unravel “the America we know and love today” :

Paul Nitze, the foreign-policy guru of the Truman administration, once told me that the problem with historians like myself is that we’re always hunting for a cache of documents to analyze. What our ilk tends to forget, he chided, is that inaction is also policy. Under this criterion, Obama must also be judged by the things he won’t allow to happen on his watch: Wall Street thieving, Bush-style fiscal irresponsibility, a new war in the Middle East, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the dismantling of Medicare into a voucher program – the list is long. The offense-driven, Yes-We-Can candidate of 2008 has become the No-You-Won’t defensive champion of 2012. Obama has less a grand plan to get America working than a NO TRESPASSING sign to prevent 100 years of progressive accomplishments from being swept away, courtesy of Team Romney, in a Katrina-like deluge of anti-regulatory measures.

That analysis might not appeal all that much to undecided voters who are apparently pathologically unable to make up their minds about this election, but it should damn well appeal to unenthusiastic liberals, unionists, and other Democrats who have been angry with Obama because, like FDR before him, he hasn’t been able to do everything he set out to do, or done things exactly the way various interest groups wish he would have done them.

When we cast our votes for the leader of this country, we are casting votes for someone with the instincts we most desire in a leader, with the instincts to not only do good things, but to protect the good that has been done. The one thing we know about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is that they both have very different instincts about what is good and what should be preserved.

Brinkley again:

If Obama wins re-election, his domestic agenda will be anchored around a guarantee to all Americans that civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, affordable health care, public education, clean air and water, and a woman’s right to choose will be protected, no matter how poorly the economy performs. Obama has grappled with two of the last puzzle pieces of the Progressive agenda – health care and gay rights – with success. If he is re-elected in November and makes his health care program permanent, it will take root in the history books as a seminal achievement. If he loses, Romney and Ryan will crush his initiatives without remorse.

If that isn’t enough to get Democrats to run not walk to the polls, then they—those who sit on the sidelines and allow Republicans to win, to govern, to destroy what we value as Democrats, as Americans—are a miserable lot.

by R. Duane Graham on October 25, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on October 25, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/no-bull/

The Party Of “The Struggling Masses”

A gifted orator and presidential candidate once said the following:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Obviously that wasn’t Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, since it was uttered in, well, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention. That’s how long Americans have been fighting the fight against trickle-down economics, and that’s how long the Democratic Party has associated itself with the masses, “those below.”

But Democrats weren’t always defenders of the low-flying hoi polloi. Before William Jennings Bryan, who at 36 became the youngest presidential candidate in history, Democrats tended to be conservative and favor a teensy-weensy government, a government so small that moneyed interests could have their way with the country.

Oddly, it was Bryan who brought the Democratic Party into the 20th century as a progressive institution. He was The Great Commoner. But he also was a fundamentalist Presbyterian, a pacifist, hater of evolution and the drink, most famous these days for an epic battle with Clarence Darrow over the teaching of evolution in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. The fundamentalism that had stained part of his mind has also stained his reputation.

Unfortunately, Bryan is not much known for being a transformative advocate of liberalism, as The Washington Post pointed out last year:

Bryan, who saw religion as a force for progressive reform, is sometimes portrayed as a simpleton, even a reactionary, because of his crusade against the teaching of evolution as fact. Yet in many ways he was far ahead of his time. In 1896 and in his subsequent presidential campaigns in 1900 and 1908, he advocated for women’s suffrage, creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a progressive income tax, to name a few reforms. When Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, Herbert Hoover sniffed that it was just Bryanism by another name.

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, representing two very different opinions about the New Deal, are getting ready for a high-stakes debate, we should remember, when President Obama takes the stage Wednesday night as a Democrat, he will be representing a party that had its compass reset by a man with faults, a man who was never destined to be president—he lost three times—but a gifted man who was destined to make the Democratic Party the defender of “those below,” as opposed to the guardian of America’s wealthy class.

Here is another excerpt from Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech, given at his party’s convention in 1896, but which serves always as an appeal to the spirit of the Democratic Party:

…it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital, or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer first; and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

by R. Duane Graham on October 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on October 2, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/the-party-of-the-struggling-masses/

Will It Take A President Romney To Ultimately Fix America?

“One might feel better about inequality if there were a grain of truth in trickle-down economics.”

—Joseph Stiglitz

 recent poll found that about 60% of all Americans think (falsely) that no matter who sits in the White’s House next January 21st, it won’t matter a whit to the economy or unemployment.

While it clearly will matter whether Romney-Ryan budget thinking prevails in November, perhaps there is at least a partially rational explanation for such public despair. Economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote, in a piece disturbingly titled, “America is no longer a land of opportunity,” the following:

US inequality is at its highest point for nearly a century. Those at the top – no matter how you slice it – are enjoying a larger share of the national pie; the number below the poverty level is growing. The gap between those with the median income and those at the top is growing, too. The US used to think of itself as a middle-class country – but this is no longer true.

Now, admittedly, I have been saying such things for years, but I don’t have a Nobel Prize in Economics. Stiglitz does and he adds:

…the median income of Americans today is lower than it was a decade and a half ago; and the median income of a full-time male worker is lower than it was more than four decades ago. Meanwhile, those at the top have never had it so good.

Here’s how it all happened:

Markets are shaped by the rules of the game. Our political system has written rules that benefit the rich at the expense of others. Financial regulations allow predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices that transfer money from the bottom to the top. So do bankruptcy laws that provide priority for derivatives. The rules of globalisation – where capital is freely mobile but workers are not – enhance an already large asymmetry of bargaining: businesses threaten to leave the country unless workers make strong concessions.

Stiglitz points out that the conservative argument that “increased inequality is an inevitable byproduct of the market” is demonstrably false:

Textbooks teach us that we can have a more egalitarian society only if we give up growth or efficiency. However, closer analysis shows that we are paying a high price for inequality: it contributes to social, economic and political instability, and to lower growth. Western countries with the healthiest economies (for example those in Scandinavia) are also the countries with the highest degree of equality.

The US grew far faster in the decades after the second world war, when inequality was lower, than it did after 1980, since when the gains have gone disproportionately to the top. There is growing evidence looking across countries over time that suggests a link between equality, growth and stability.

Mentioning that there is a real difference between Obama and Romney, in terms of whether America will “once again become a land of opportunity,” Stiglitz ends with a theme I find fascinating and have thought about frequently these days:

The country will have to make a choice: if it continues as it has in recent decades, the lack of opportunity will mean a more divided society, marked by lower growth and higher social, political and economic instability. Or it can recognise that the economy has lost its balance. The gilded age led to the progressive era, the excesses of the Roaring Twenties led to the Depression, which in turn led to the New Deal. Each time, the country saw the extremes to which it was going and pulled back. The question is, will it do so once again?

Are we yet to the point where a “new progressive” era or a “new New Deal era” can be born? Or will it be a President Mitt Romney—a genuine Gilded Ager— who finally impregnates America with enough despair and disgust and determination to produce one?

by R. Duane Graham on June 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on June 26, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/will-it-take-a-president-romney-to-ultimately-fix-america/

How To Talk To The Tea Party

Here’s the way some future historian might describe our times:

Millions were still unemployed; lavish government expenditures had not restored prosperity; the budget was unbalanced, and the national debt was mounting; taxes and government restrictions alarmed businessmen; many conservatives saw constitutional government in danger.  There were signs also of restiveness in Congress.

That future historian was Eugene Roseboom writing in 1957—about the 1936 presidential election, which essentially was a referendum on the New Deal and the form of democratic socialism that it represented.

And for the record, still in the midst of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate in 1936—after three and a half years of Franklin Roosevelt’s first administration—was a staggering 16.9%.  Think about that.

Roseboom included in his brief analysis of that first post-Social Security election a look at  the Republican Party platform of 1936, which began:

America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of their political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time are threatened by Government itself.

Here are some of the charges leveled in the platform against FDR and his administration:

♦ “The rights and liberties of American citizens have been violated.”

♦ “It has insisted on the passage of laws contrary to the Constitution.”

♦ “It has dishonored our country by repudiating its most sacred obligations.”

♦ “It has bred fear and hesitation in commerce and industry, thus discouraging new enterprises, preventing employment and prolonging the depression.”

♦ “It has destroyed the morale of our people and made them dependent upon government.”

♦ “Appeals to passion and class prejudice have replaced reason and tolerance.”

♦ “The New Deal Administration has been characterized by shameful waste, and general financial irresponsibility. It has piled deficit upon deficit. It threatens national bankruptcy… We pledge ourselves to: Stop the folly of uncontrolled spending. Balance the budget—not by increasing taxes but by cutting expenditures, drastically and immediately.”

If that doesn’t sound familiar, you haven’t been paying attention.

For his part, FDR didn’t shrink from the fight with the reactionaries. If Mr. Obama and 2012 Democrats want to know how to talk to the country, how to defend government from the Tea Party hordes, they could do no better than heed the 1936 Roosevelt—”the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them“—as he accepted the Democratic Party nomination.

Roosevelt said:

…government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster…

And:

Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

It’s no accident that the leading candidate in today’s Republican primary is a man named Rick Perry, whose icy indifference to the value of Social Security in particular and government programs in general is stunning, though not surprising or new. 

Perry recently said he will “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” Such would-be presidential philosophy, which the other GOP candidates obviously share—is rooted in or at least resonates with the reactionary Republican response to Social Security and the New Deal in 1936.

The antithesis of that philosophy, as Roosevelt bellowed in Philadelphia loud enough for us to hear these 75 years later, amounts to this:

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives…

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government… The royalists of the economic order have…maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live…

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.

That’s what government does on behalf of the ordinary American citizen: takes away the power of those who would enslave us, whether abroad or at home.

The 2012 election cycle, which is upon us, will be President Obama’s last chance to become a truly transformative president.  He must not only defend his first term accomplishments—from averting an economic meltdown to health care reform to financial reform to a dead bin Laden—but much more important he must vigorously and vociferously defend the role of government in the lives of ordinary people. 

He must demonstrate that he is outraged by what the leaders of the patron party of the moneyed class have done to the country, as a consequence of their hatred for him. Of that party and of that moneyed class, FDR famously said in October of 1936:

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

Despite two and a half years of deliberate and constant obstruction of  his efforts to fix the economy—sabotage by any other name—despite the attempt to gain politically from such citizen-damaging obstruction, we have yet to see Mr. Obama express appropriate outrage at what has happened, at what is happening still.

Despite constant attacks that he is destroying the country and undermining our system, Mr. Obama has largely ignored the damaging criticism.  A Republican presidential candidate said during the last debate:

We know that President Obama stole over $500 billion out of Medicare to switch it over to Obamacare.

Where’s the outrage over that?  Stole? When faced with similar lies, lies which undermine public confidence in our system, Roosevelt didn’t mince words about the people who perpetrated them:

…they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

Can anyone imagine Mr. Obama saying that?

No, and that’s the point.

[Obama as Roosevelt image from Time magazine, Nov, 2008]
by R. Duane Graham on September 15, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on September 15, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/how-to-talk-to-the-tea-party/

Spare-A-Dime Shift?

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

—Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?  Harburg and Gorney, 1931

I heard Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, say last night that because of the Republican victory in the contrived crisis over the debt ceiling, which was initially led by Tea Party types but consummated by the GOP establishment, there has been a “paradigm shift” in American politics.

I thought about that.  A paradigm shift is essentially a revolution in thinking, or “a radical change in underlying beliefs or theory.”  And what follows the change in underlying beliefs is a change in subsequent actions.

In the case of American politics, it can only mean a dramatic change in assumptions about how America should be governed, what kind of society should result from that governance, and who should be the governors.

Two popular versions of one of the great songs of the Great Depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? by Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, were released in 1932, just before the election of Franklin Roosevelt, whose ascent to the White House certainly represented a paradigm shift in American politics.

That song, as Wikipedia summarizes it,

asks why the men who built the nation – built the railroads, built the skyscrapers – who fought in the war (World War I), who tilled the earth, who did what their nation asked of them should, now that the work is done and their labor no longer necessary, find themselves abandoned, in bread lines.

Roosevelt’s answer, of course, was that such men should not find themselves abandoned. Thus, the New Deal began in 1933 with the lofty goals of helping the poor and those without jobs, fixing the broken economy, and reforming the financial system that had let so many Americans down.

If those lofty goals sound familiar to post-2008 crash ears, what doesn’t jibe with history, as we battle the continuing economic slump, is the response from today’s Republican Party, which essentially distills to,

No, brother, we can’t spare a dime.

In that sense, Mr. Steele is right. There has been a revolution in the character of today’s Republican Party, a collection of extremists that the putative Father of the teapartiers, Ronald Reagan, wouldn’t even recognize.

But have the wider assumptions about American governance that have prevailed since 1933 suddenly disappeared?  Has there been a mainstream paradigm shift?

No.

There has been, since the election of President Reagan in 1980, certain abstract and ambiguous ideas buzzing about the American electorate that government has grown “too big” and taxes are “too high.” 

But a noisy schizophrenia has always accompanied those comfortingly vague ideas: A swath of Americans hold that they want smaller government and lower taxes but they don’t want to cut down the pillars of the New Deal or its child, the Great Society.

Poll after poll demonstrate that Americans refuse to part with cherished programs, no matter what their abstract ideas about the size of government may be.  A CNN/ORC poll recently asked Americans if they would favor or oppose the following as a way to reduce the deficit:

                                 Favor cutting              Oppose cutting

Social Security:             16                           84 (81% of Republicans)

Medicare:                      12                           87 (85% of Republicans)

Medicaid:                       22                           77 (64% of Republicans)

Given numbers like these, the uninitiated might ask: How have budget-cutting and New Deal-threatening Republicans managed to be so successful?

Generalities.  They speak in generalities about the size of government and high taxes and the strange liberal man in the White’s House that wants to steal your freedom and take all your money and give it to the undeserving.

That’s how they do it.

But hopefully—now that President Obama and the Democrats perhaps finally understand the nature of the Tea Party beast they are confronting—they will use the tactics and budget votes of Republicans against them.  Tactics and votes that seriously threaten to kill the New Deal—which, if successful, would be a real paradigm shift.

by R. Duane Graham on August 2, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on August 2, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/spare-a-dime-shift/

Cut, Cap, and Kill

“The Cut, Cap and Balance plan that the House will vote on next week is a solid plan for moving forward. Let’s get through that vote, and then we’ll make decisions about what will come after.”

— John Boehner, July 15, 2011

“Next week” is here. 

Tomorrow, Republicans in the House of Representatives will vote on and pass HR 2560, The Cut, Cap, and Balance Act of 2011, the latest gimmick the GOP has concocted to keep its attack on the New Deal and the Great Society alive and well.

Now, no one seriously believes this bill will come within a Limbaugh butt cheek of passing. After all, the bill,

Requires the passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment before raising the nation’s debt limit.

As they say out here in the hinterlands, that aint gonna happen.

So, while the country is begging for something to be done about jobs, the House is taking up valuable legislating time with this nonsense.  Why?  

The conventional wisdom has it that the futile vote is designed  to give hard-headed teapartiers in the House a political reach-around, to eventually soften them up so GOP leadership can push through the Mitch McConnell compromise on the debt ceiling increase.  Republican leadership is hearing from the business community and Wall Street about the calamitous effects of defaulting, and they are listening.

But I believe there is more going on here than giving the Ozark Billy Long’s in the House a feel-good day in D.C.  It is also about selling this dangerous elixir to the public in 2012.

The Cut, Cap, and Balance Act is barely dry behind the legislation ears. It was dreamed up in June of this year by the Republican Study Committee, which its website describes as:

…a group of over 175 House Republicans organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives. The Republican Study Committee is dedicated to a limited and Constitutional role for the federal government, a strong national defense, the protection of individual and property rights, and the preservation of traditional family values.

In other words, the RSC is the voice of the Tea Party extremists in the House.  Area members include, of course, Missouri Representatives Billy Long and Vicki Hartzler, as well as Kansas Rep. Lynn Jenkins and Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack.

The basis for the RSC’s adoption of the draconian Cut, Cap, and Balance Act seems to be the conviction that the public supports the idea. I extracted the following from a summary of the bill I found on the RSC’s website:

In an On Message, Inc. survey of 1,000 likely voters nationwide, large majorities support: 

Cutting next year’s deficit in half through spending cuts. (Favored 69%-20%) 

Capping federal spending to no more than 18% of GDP. (Favored 66%-17%) 

A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. (Favored 81%-13%) 

The survey also found that Americans support a supermajority requirement to raise taxes (Favored 60%-30%).

Thus, the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act was designed to and would essentially do all those things, were it to become law.  

Now, the “survey” conducted by On Message, Inc –a campaign consultant firm that specializes in electing Tea Party Republicans—is what it is, whatever it is. But there can be no doubt that there is considerable angst among the hoi polloi regarding our debt situation. That’s understandable, given all that Republicans, using consultants like On Message, have done to scare the public.

And having sufficiently scared the public, conservative Republicans sense it is time to mount their final assault on Big Government, using, oddly enough, the public to justify and support its dirty work, a public that benefits in so many ways from the size of our government, as a lot of folks in Joplin have discovered recently.

It is true that the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act technically exempts Social Security and Medicare (but not Medicaid) from budget cuts—which is how the bill is being sold—but as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out,

The legislation would inexorably subject Social Security and Medicare to deep reductions.

The reason it would is that the massive cuts in other parts of the budget necessary to meet mandatory spending caps would cripple “key government functions.” Thus, politicians would have to make cuts to Medicare and Social Security to keep those other key government functions alive.

But more important for those most vulnerable in our society is this, from CBPP:

Adding to the extreme nature of the measure, the legislation also reverses a feature of every law of the past quarter-century that has contained a fiscal target or standard enforced by across-the-board cuts.  Since the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law of 1985, all such laws have exempted the core basic assistance programs for the poorest Americans from such across-the-board cuts.  “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” by contrast, specifically subjects all such programs to across-the-board cuts if its spending caps would be exceeded.

It is an ingenious scheme, the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act. It uses the considerable debt-angst Republicans have ginned up to accomplish something that conservatives have yearned for since November of 1980, when the radical Ronald Reagan was first elected. 

The Act’s mandatory caps and the supermajority provision to prevent tax increases, especially on the wealthy, would essentially shrink government to a size small enough that Grover Norquist could indeed drown it, and the poor and the working class, in his bathtub.

And despite the fact the Act is doomed to fail this year, Republicans intend on using it as a bludgeon to pummel Democrats next year, as the GOP attempts once again to convince anxious Americans to vote against their own economic interests and elect representatives of the moneyed class.

More than anything, that’s what the vote tomorrow is about.

by R. Duane Graham on July 18, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on July 18, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/cut-cap-and-kill/

Just Who Are The Malcontents These Days?

When I was a conservative, one of my heroes was the wonderfully eloquent right-wing writer, Joseph Sobran.  If you’re not familiar with him, think: Pat Buchanan, also a Sobran admirer.  Probably more than any single writer, with maybe the exception of the great William F. Buckley, Joe Sobran shaped the way I thought and reasoned as a conservative, and still shapes the way I think and reason as a liberal.

As you might imagine, he was a severe critic of liberals and the liberal mind, of the “malcontents.” The theme that permeated his most philosophical writings was that liberals “fail to appreciate” our “normal life,” a life lived outside the boundaries of politics. To him, a conservative was one “who regards this world with a basic affection,” and liberals simply lacked that basic affection for things.

He was wrong, of course.  But I won’t go into that now.  What I want to do is bring attention to an important question he asked, which I have never forgotten:

What we really ought to ask the liberal, before we even begin addressing his agenda, is this: In what kind of society would he be a conservative?

This idea—that one’s philosophical views might not be static, might need some adjustment—so bothered me, that I once phoned Mr. Sobran, while he was still working for Bill Buckley’s National Review, before Sobran was given the left foot of fellowship by the serious members of the conservative movement (believe it or not, serious conservatives policed themselves in those days) for his attitude toward Israel and what he considered to be the too-strong Jewish lobby in the United States (I told you, think: Pat Buchanan).

I asked my conservative hero about the idea of finding ourselves, as conservatives, in the kind of society we don’t wish to preserve, don’t wish to “conserve,” and finding ourselves wanting to dismantle the welfare state rather than see it continue.  How, I asked him, can we continue to call ourselves conservatives when we essentially are radicals who want to fundamentally change the course of our country? 

His answer was underwhelming.  In fact, he didn’t have an answer.  As I realize now, he could not answer that question because much of what Sobran so eloquently wrote could actually be used to defend today’s “big government” reality, at least in terms of what he called “an appreciation of the role of appreciation.”

He wrote,

Habits of conservation depend heavily on our affection for the way of life we are born to, which always includes far more than we can ever be simultaneously conscious of at a given moment. We speak our language and observe our laws by habit. It would be too much of a strain to have to learn a new language or a new set of laws every day. Habit allows a multitude of things to remain implicit; it lets us deal with ordinary situations without fully understanding them. It allows us to trust our milieu.

Only a madman, one might think, would dare to speak of changing the entire milieu— “building a new society”—or even to speak as if such a thing were possible. And yet this is the current political idiom. It is seriously out of touch with a set of traditions whose good effects it takes too much for granted; it fails to appreciate them, as it fails to appreciate the human situation.

Sobran wrote that in 1985.

That “set of traditions,” to the chagrin of the modern and brutal conservative movement, is now the New Deal and the Great Society, traditions and programs engrained in our way of life, a way of life people are loath to give up.  “Conservation is a labor, not indolence,” Sobran wrote, “and it takes discrimination to identify and save a few strands of tradition in the incessant flow of mutability.” Yes, it does take labor. Hard labor.

Sometimes, as we watch the struggle to keep alive the institutions that represent our social safety net, as we watch Republicans try to tear down those institutions of stability, as we watch shaky Democrats try to preserve—conserve—our traditions, it seems like the labor is not only hard, but impossible.  

And it seems that in terms of the kind of conservatism that Sobran and Edmund Burke and the Old Guard wrote about, Democrats today are the conservatives, and Republicans today are the radicals who fail to appreciate the things of this—our modern—world. 

Just watch Barack Obama as he desperately tries to defend New Deal and Great Society institutions and tell me who the real conservative player is in the “negotiations” on how to save our country from the irresponsible politics of the Right.

You see, we now have the answer to that wonderfully insightful question Joe Sobran asked liberals more than twenty-five years ago: In what kind of society would you be a conservative?

This one.  The one we are trying to save from the ravages of a radical Republican ideology, an ideology that inappropriately and inaccurately calls itself conservatism.

by R. Duane Graham on June 1, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on June 1, 2011

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/just-who-are-the-malcontents-these-days/