Unpacking Michael Lind on Who Runs the Democratic Party

     For those who have not read Lind, I have one suggestion: read him. He's a very good and thoughtful writer with a just tremendous amount of historical knowledge and perspective on American politics as it's developed over the past 200 years-actually, if I recall one of his books, maybe even the last 400 years. 

    http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=michael+lind&sprefix=michael+lind%2Caps%2C274

     I would go as far as saying that he more than anyone else I could possibly name has influence my formative political philosophy such that it is. The only other person I would site on his level of influence in my own views is another great political philosopher and historian, Garry Wills. 

    http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=garry+wills&sprefix=garry+wills%2Caps%2C237&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Agarry+wills

     I would also give some honorable mention to Kevin Phillips; there's irony as well as he was the one that crafted the modern GOP's Southern Strategy. He has long since disowned his progeny on that one. He was a Nixon Republican but never a Reagan one. 

      http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_14?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=kevin+phillips&sprefix=kevin+phillips%2Caps%2C1138

     What I learn from reading both of these men, is that I am basically a whig, which is why I'm a Democrat. I tend to agree with Lind that the greatest Founding Father just may have been Alexander Hamilton. What I get from Wills-is paradoxical as it sounds coming from a Republican hating liberal Democrat, I'm actually probably a conservative. In reality nothing is more unconservative than the Tea Party lead by iconic figures like Michelle Bachman, Ted Cruz, and Steve King. 

     All this is to say that I like and admire Lind a lot and agree with him on overarching goals. However, I have to say that this piece he wrote here for Salon at least could be misconstrued. If you will indulge me, I'm going to go through-if not a line by line analysis-at least a paragraph by paragraph analysis as I think this is important relating as it does to the future of the Democratic party. 

      The piece is titled 'Democrats vs. the New Deal: Who really runs the Democratic party-and why it may surprise you?' There is an ominous picture of President Obama with FDR in the background-the impression is already clear-that Obama is anti FDR. Yes I know people are going to rush in with his 2009 comments about FDR as if that cinches it. Obama is anti-New Deal. 

 http://www.salon.com/2014/12/09/democrats_vs_the_new_deal_who_really_runs_the_party_and_why_it_might_surprise_you

      Lind starts:

      "In the aftermath of the shellacking they took in the midterm congressional and state elections, many Democrats are calling for their party to return to its New Deal roots."

      "This is inadvertently comical.  The present-day Democratic Party has next to nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  Today’s Democratic Party is a completely different party, which coalesced between 1968 and 1980.  And this half-century-old party has been anti-New Deal from the very beginning."

      "Now that I have your attention, allow me to explain."

     He thinks then his answer must be jarring to readers. Maybe for those who aren't familiar with him. As I've been reading him since his 1995 published 'Up From Conservatism' this doesn't sound unfamiliar to me. 

      "While there have been two parties called “the Democrats” and “the Republicans” since the mid-19th century, these enduring labels mask the fact that party coalitions change every generation or two.  Franklin Roosevelt created a new party under the old name of “the Democrats” by welding ex-Republican Progressives in the North together with the old Jacksonian Farmer-Labor coalition.  The contentious issue of civil rights nearly destroyed the Roosevelt Democrats in 1948 — and finally wrecked it in 1968, when George Wallace’s third party campaign proved to be a way-station for many working-class whites en route from the Democrats to the Republicans."

      "Today’s Democratic Party, in contrast, took shape between 1968 and 1980.  Although George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential race to Richard Nixon in a landslide, the McGovernites of the “New Politics” movement wrested control of the Democratic Party from the old state politicians and urban bosses of the Roosevelt-to-Johnson New Deal coalition.  Robert Kennedy’s aide Fred Dutton, one of the architects of the disempowerment of the old New Deal elite, called for a new coalition of young people, college-educated suburbanites and minorities in his 1971 book “Changing Sources of Power: Politics in the 1970s.”  Sound familiar?  That’s because, nearly half a century later, the same groups are the core constituents of today’s Democrats."

     This is just a sample of what Lind does so well-he has this uncanny knowledge of historical demographics that I have always really appreciated in him. Still, while there is nothing to disagree with in the first paragraph, I already have some misgivings about the second.  I'm not at all sure that this is still the party of 'New Politics' and his suggestion that McGovern, Carter, Clinton, and Obama are all just birds of a-New Politics-feather. 

     "Jimmy Carter was the first New Politics president (or New Democrat or neoliberal, as they were later called).  He was a center-right Southern governor who ran against big government and touted his credentials as a rich businessman.  He did not get along with organized labor, one of the key constituencies of the Roosevelt Democrats.  His major domestic policy achievement was dismantling New Deal regulation of transportation like trucking and air travel.  He appointed a Federal Reserve chairman from Wall Street, Paul Volcker, who created an artificial recession, the worst between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, to cripple American unions, whose wage demands were blamed for inflation."

     "Even before Carter’s election, the Democratic “class of ’74” in Congress wrested power from the old largely Southern politicians of the New Deal era. The  northern Irish Catholic-Southern alliance, symbolized by House Speakers Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, gave way among congressional Democrats to a new Northeastern-West Coast domination, beginning with Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley, of the state of Washington.  Many of these younger Democrats were deficit hawks, like Bill Bradley of New York and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts.  Democrats like these supported the 1983 Social Security “reform,” which cut Social Security benefits by raising the formal retirement age from 65 to 67.  In his 1984 presidential campaign, Carter’s former vice-president, Fritz Mondale, made deficit reduction his central issue."

     I agree with him if he's critical of the Dems for taking up the mantle of deficit reduction-though I think if anything the party has certainly not been religious about this during Obama's term as they were in the 90s. Obama did pass the biggest stimulus in US history-bigger than anything FDR ever did and he has called for more stimulus since. I think maybe his term was where they have gotten a chance to rethink this a little.

   What I just wonder about is linking Clinton, Obama, and Carter to McGovern. 

   "Bill Clinton had worked for McGovern’s campaign in 1972.  A center-right Southern governor like Carter, he too combined moderate economic conservatism with social liberalism.  Like Carter, Clinton attacked a major New Deal program, teaming up with the Republicans in Congress to abolish a New Deal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and replacing it with what conservatives wanted: federal grants to state-based programs.  Clinton made deficit reduction rather than public investment central to his presidency. Clinton also supported the dismantling of New Deal regulations of the financial sector, completing the dismantling of the New Deal in the economy that Carter had begun.  In the 1994 midterms, many of the remaining Southern “blue dog” Democrats were replaced by Republicans, shifting the regional base of the party even more to the former liberal Republican states of the Northeast and West Coast."

    Was McGovern a deficit hawk? I ask this in all sincerity as I don't know. I think Lind misses the whole rise of the 'New Democrats' that ushered from Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council-something I can understand many Democrats having mixed feelings about. McGovern caused a storm with his campaign by coming against America in the Vietnam war. The DLC was in many ways a desire to repudiate what was seen as the Democrats 'McGovern problem' in that the GOP tied every Democrat that ran for President as like McGovern-too weak on defense to trust during the Cold War. 

    "Barack Obama is the third New Politics Democrat in the White House, following Carter and Clinton.  His base is the Fred Dutton constituency — young people, some college-educated whites, and blacks and Latinos.  Like Carter and Clinton, he went after a major New Deal program — the most iconic of them all, Social Security.  Obama proposed cutting Social Security by means of inflation adjustments or “chained CPI” as part of a “grand  bargain” with Republican conservatives.  He backed off only after a rebellion from what remains of the Democratic left.  Those who call him an “Eisenhower Democrat” recognize that he is closer in outlook to penny-pinching, dovish mid-20th century liberal Republicanism than to “guns and butter” Rooseveltian liberalism."

     "The New Politics Democrats, in class terms, are an “hourglass party,” uniting the disproportionately nonwhite working poor with affluent whites who are drawn to the Democrats by non-economic issues like environmentalism and feminism and gay rights, not the bread-and-butter issues of the older Rooseveltian New Dealers.  While the New Dealers preferred universal jobs programs and universal social programs like Social Security and Medicare to means-tested “welfare,” all of the social insurance programs pushed by the New Politics Democrats since the 1970s — SCHIP, the earned income tax credit, Obamacare — have been means-tested welfare programs targeted at the working poor, not at the better-paid but still struggling working class or middle class."

      I still think Obama takes too much flak for chained CPI-he was trying to prevent a default on the nation's debt which would have been cataclysmic. I know that all the fireaggers feel they saw into his evil soul there but I think this is alarmist: the important thing is it didn't happen. Obama-as documented by Laurence O'Donnell at the time-outwitted the GOP there. He offered it-that doesn't mean he thought they would take it which they didn't. 

     There are possibly some good things you could do for SS like taking off the low cap on taxation-though I admit this could be problematic politically. 

     Lind compares the Dems today vs. what he says their positions were during the New Deal era. 

     "Foreign policy.  The New Deal Democrats were more hawkish than mid-century Republicans. New Politics Democrats, from McGovern to the present, have been more dovish than post-Reagan Republicans.  Even the hawks in the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s distanced themselves from the greatest New Deal presidents — FDR and his protégé LBJ.  Instead, they tried to rehabilitate Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman.  Because of Vietnam, the erasure of LBJ by embittered antiwar baby boomers is understandable.  But didn’t FDR win World War II, while Truman’s Korean policy was a bloody debacle?  It is bizarre that partisan Democrats created the Truman National Security Project instead of a Roosevelt National Security Project."

     It's true that the GOP was isolationist during the rise of Hitler and didn't really become hyper hawkish till Goldwater. Still, I sure hope no one thinks-I assume Lind doesn't think-that it's a pity that the Dems are more hawkish than today's GOP? I mean I don't see how anyone can be more hawkish than Dick Bruce Cheney and not be in a mental institution. 

    The former vice president said he's particularly bothered by criticism over the treatment of Khalid Sheilk Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. “He is in our possession, we know he’s the architect [of the attacks], what are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks?“ Cheney said.

“How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 people on 9/11?”

     http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/vice-president-dick-cheney-cia-torture-report-full/story?id=27513355

      Cheney tells us that he didn't read the piece but that it's full of crap. Surely we don't want a Democratic party more hawkish than this? Just as Obama once assured Hillary that she is likable enough, I think today's Democratic party is certainly hawkish enough. 

       "Civil rights.  The liberal rather than radical proponents of desegregation in the mid-20th century, like Bayard Rustin and Hubert Humphrey, favored race-neutral remedies, instead of race-based affirmative action (Martin Luther King Jr. was ambiguous).  Today any Democrat who questioned race-based affirmative action — including preferential policies for Latinos who arrived following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — would be ostracized"

        Affirmative action is controversial. I actually believe it does some good-quotas is just one kind of AA-and think all the scare talk of 'reverse racism' is overdone. I also see this as something that is much less a concern than the 90s. I just don't see it as something worth fighting over today. 

         As he himself chronicles above, the New Deal coalition was always precarious in trying to keep the old Southern Democratic base together. Once the Dems embraced civil rights as they should have,, the Dems lost 'the South for a generation' just as LBJ predicted. 

       "Immigration.  To protect the working class from wage-lowering immigrant competition, the New Deal Democrats abolished the Bracero program (a Mexican guest-worker program).  The Hesburgh and Jordan commissions, appointed by President Carter and President Clinton, respectively, reflected this older pro-labor emphasis by calling for reductions in low-wage immigration.  Today’s orthodox Democratic position favors not only an amnesty for undocumented immigrants already here, but also more legal immigration and fewer penalties for “illegal” immigration.  This was, and still is, the position of Republican business elites, who want to use immigration policy to create a buyer’s market in labor.

     I don't agree that immigration reform is only for Republican business elites-on this one they are right. Yet and still, they Repub business guys can't get the GOP to pass it. It's a rather fascinating piece of schizophrenia by the WSJ editorial page. They have to at least nominally pretend to be outraged by Obama's executive order when there is nothing materially that he did that they have any problem with and would probably be fine with a much more pronounced amnesty. 

      Still, I think the Dems should support immigration reform. For one, it's about civil rights and the kind of country we want to be. Surely we don't want the Dems joining with the Tea Party to build a fence. 

       There are many economic and social benefits for immigration reform: one is that the illegal immigrants after amnesty actually increases their wages and reduces the drag on American citizens' wages. 

      "The white working class.  The loss of the white working class to the Democrats is hardly a new development. It goes back to George Wallace in 1968. Every decade since then there has been a debate in the New Politics party about whether to try to get the white working class back."

      "You get the point. Today’s Democrats have no more in common with Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson than today’s Republicans have in common with Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower.  From its origins in the 1970s to the present, the contemporary Democratic Party has had deficit reduction, cutbacks of New Deal-era entitlements and regulations and identity politics in its DNA. This is a party that is not only post-New Deal but in many ways anti-New Deal. It was born that way."

      Why did the Dems lose the 'white working class?' Let's face it for an ugly reason: racism. The claim that they lost it because they stopped being populist ignores the fact that they stopped being populist as it was no longer working. 

      I also think while his analogy to the GOP and Lincoln is interesting, it's overstated. The GOP has gone as far as embracing the Confederate flag. The Dems are still the party that will protect the New Deal. Obama did just get us a new entitlement. Yes, I understand Lind's point about means tested programs but the Dems had tried universal care a number of times and saw it fail. 

     I think if you compare the Dems of today to the old New Deal machine, there are ways that today's version is much better-in terms of civil rights, social rights, cultureally, etc. I would agree that the economic message has gotten a little conservative though I think that Obama was less conservative than Clinton and that the Dems right are taking up the question of frozen wages, economic inequality, and the minimum wage more seriously than in some time. 

     P.S. Again, I think Lind is a really brilliant guy. He has shown me that I'm for Hamilton rather than Jefferson philosophically-Jefferson localism basically has been a recipe for slavery, segregation-and today the big roll back in voting rights and the crackdown on abortion clinics.