Obama once said, “my policies are so mainstream that if I said them in the 1980s, I’d be considered a moderate Republican.”
Obama knew what he was saying.
The oddity of American political history is that the Republican party lost, entirely, its moderate wing. Without a home, those moderates attached themselves to the Democratic party. And naturally tried to dominate it.
This is a damn shame. Many Democrats today should be in the Republican party, fighting for the soul of the party that once included Teddy Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie. Governor Newsom, for instance, that California deep fake of a Democrat, is planning on running, apparently, for the Democratic Party nomination when, really, he should be running for the Republican Party nomination. Democrats like to say, as Pelosi has said, we need a “strong” Republican Party. Indeed, those are Democrats who should have long ago jumped ship and made a play for the Republican Party.
One of the unremarked and very dire consequences of Nixon’s Southern Strategy is that the Republican party got stacked with ex-Democrats who were Dixiecrats – the most racist and anti-communist people in the country. Yet the South, up until the seventies, had its share of very moderate Ds. These people did not jump ship. Hence, the battle in many solid South states are now between the ultra right and the ultra ultra right in the Republican party, with the Dems siphoning off the moderate votes that could, actually, have gone to winning rightleaning Republican candidates of the type that used to be common when the South was solidly Democratic. The George Bush/Bo Calloway type.
I am envisioning, here, a counter-factual history in which the Republican party did not go the way of Goldwater. But in fact the Teddy Roosevelt tradition was entirely eviscerated from the way the Republican Party evolved from Nixon to Ford to Reagan – and this in turn has effected the way the Democratic Party has evolved. There is no reason that a Republican voter, whose issues are less taxes and a smaller government, should end up having as his candidate either a shithead racist misogynist or a extreme shithead racist misogynist. After all, Roe came about through conservative, Nixon appointed justices.
But history is what happens in spite of reason, contra Mr. Hegel.
Progressives, who used to be at the center of the Democratic party, are now far, far from any kind of power there. At best, we have to make do with “mainstream politics” of the “moderate Republican” type. And thus the popular dissatisfaction, which now stretches over decades, with Congress and with the parties. The low rating of the Democratic party, even as Trump achieves his usual level of minority approval, is not surprising. Who among us feels that the Democrats would make our lives better if they get into office? The hope is that they will slow the getting-worse. Dem millionaires, for whom Dem voters vote, clearly prefer their own kind, and have developed a politics of devising, cleverly, with much nudgery, a politics of giving us the scraps. This has recently been anointed as “abundance” by the products of the nepo generation – and of course it is total shit.
Meanwhile, on the whacky GOP side, racism goes shoulder to shoulder with a surprisingly aggressive attitude of government’s relationship to business. Trump telling Walmart to “eat” his taxes has been passed around by the good neo-liberals as worth a giggle. Actually, though this warning comes more from the balance of gastric juices in our Duce minor’s belly, it is a reminder that in the great post-Covid inflation, the Dems entirely ignored the power vested in the government to control prices and wages. If ever there was a time to revisit the post-WWII policy of price control, 2021 was that time. And that time passed without this option ever being even discussed. Because, apparently, we now have technocrats in the machinery who, with a point added to the interest rate here and a clever tax provision there, can keep everything going. It is a lovely machine, except for those in the bottom 80 percent. As proof, we can look at our oligarchs, whose wealth during the Biden years became an oligarchic Disneyland of no limits. The wealth of the oligarchy, the 1 percent, hit 44 trillion dollars in 2024, according to the U.S. Fed. Applause, Applause! We know that this will have absoooolutely no effect on our politics, our justice system, our environment, etc.
That is, if we are neo-libs. If we are normally people, we know the 1 percent with 44 trillion dollars will shit all over the rest of us, endlessly. This happened under a supposedly “liberal” president who his flacks liked to say was the most “progressive” since FDR. That is, the FDR who loved the 1 percent gaining thirty four percent of the wealth of the U.S. That FDR. Funny, he looks a lot like Ronald Reagan.
The party system is one of those mutant evolutions that accompanied the move to universal suffrage, and which has never really been theorized in a satisfactory way. And that party system, a weak and ridiculous contraption, is taking us all down. Bad news for our kids, and their kids. And this, they will ask, is the best we could do?
No comments:
Post a Comment