Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
As is often the case with New York Times’ columns by Mr. Thomas B. Edsall, I strongly disagree with his spin, his pleading for tepid solutions — and temperaments to match — for our intemperate times. Times which are “On Fire” as in the “The (Burning Case for a Green New Deal)” the title of Naomi Klein’s latest book.
Here is Edsall’s column from Wednesday, November 6, 2019: “Is Politics A War of ideas or of Us Against Them?” www.nytimes.com/…
Let me set the table for you and my title question, by sharing the first four paragraphs of his article, which give you a pretty good sense of what follows:
Is the deepening animosity between Democrats and Republicans based on genuine differences over policy and ideology or is it a form of tribal warfare rooted in an atavistic us-versus-them mentality?
Is American political conflict relatively content-free — emotionally motivated electoral competition — or is it primarily a war of ideas, a matter of feuding visions both of what America is and what it should become?
Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, recently put the issue this way in an essay at the National Affairs website: “Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?”
This debate has both strategic and substantive consequences. If left and right are split mainly because of differences over policy, the chances of achieving compromise and overcoming gridlock are higher than if the two sides believe that their values, their freedom, their right to express themselves, their very identity, are all at stake. It’s easier to bend on principle than to give up a piece of yourself.
Editor’s Note: My emphasis.
Edsall has written with, as is his usual style, a myriad of pollsters and political scientists who give answers to the question he poses: what is driving the polarization of American politics, is it policy issues or the deep partisanship of the parties themselves, what is termed “Elite Partisan Polarization”?
If it’s mere policy disagreements, well, heck, that’s a solvable one in his and their views, which just reaffirms my sense he has no idea of the time he is now living in. The American political tradition has been famous for its ability to contain conflict and reach compromises, with its ideologically and geographically diverse party system, as it did in the famous ones to stave off the pending Civil War. Or today’s Democratic model, “Here’s the Deal” Joe Biden sense, thinking of his juggling the remnants of the labor based old New Deal with the corporate Democrats of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council .
But the professors cited here, most of them, underestimate the inseparability of emotions, often deeply buried, and hidden, from the public ideas themselves. What generates ideas and ideologies? Often large and traumatic events: our Great Depression, which led to the long lasting New Deal governing coalition, from the election of 1936 until the election of Reagan in 1980, by my “accounting.” Then high unemployment and high inflation in the 1970’s, the economic riddle Keynesians couldn’t solve, gave the anti-statist Neoliberalism its opening and we have to sadly admit, though appearing to be more and more hanging “on the ropes,” it is still the dominant unspoken value system behind kitchen table economics, even preached by Rev. Obama: Markets over state intervention; tax cuts over a new CCC and Green New Deal; globalized opportunity/mobility over restoring rural America and our national manufacturing base, and de-regulation even at the price of destroying Nature at the hands of free market ideology, inviting the whole world to feast at an accelerated carbon “bonfire.”
At a higher level of generalization, the role of government in the economy, which has haunted the mind of the democratic West since at least the French Revolution, it being the driving fear of political science’s darling, Alexis De Tocqueville himself: the fear of a government turning passionately to be on the side of the common man, not just the owners of property and capital, a turning which doesn’t happen very often in the capitalist West. It haunts Conservatives and Centrist Democrats today, conjured up by the whole thrust of the Green New Deal and the as yet unrealized potential of Modern Monetary Theory — it’s potential to shred the Green Curtain behind which the Federal Reserve hides its class-biased intervention tools to rescue mainly the top 10%, MMT thus being the leading challenger to Neoliberal austerity.
Here’s how I challenged the assumptions and assertions in Edsall’s article with my comment of November 6th in the New York Times:
Dear Thomas B. Edsall:
I have this recurring question for people like you, which has become, actually, a theme rather than a question: what time do we live in? What age? How do you characterize it? I say it is a time of radical economic inequality, with the accompanying feelings of powerlessness on the part of the losing end of that inequality, 60% or more of the working and lower middle classes. And a time of the radical inequality of Nature. What I mean by that - and I lived a life in policy and politics on the front burner where in questions of development, where to build and the nature of what to build, Nature and its systems usually lost out to economic, human centric proposals. The compromise position - “Green Capitalism,” popular with the Governor Whitman types when I worked in NJ - has been called the "God that Failed" as New York's own Richard Smith has told us in his fine book of that name. So where are these themes in your column? Nowhere to be found, banished like "class dismissed" by the political science academicians who you cite who could use a little Karl Polanyi to ground them in the basement fundamentals of political economy. Those who you would cite would wish away, dissolve the causes of the great revolutions and upheavals of Western history, our own Revolution, the French, our 1850's and Civil War and the Great Depression, Weimar Germany, and claim the ideas which drove them also had no grounding in reality. And that's why I'm for Bernie Sanders.
Karen commented 1 hour agoPhoenix1h ago@_______ the great revolutions and upheavals were by no means perfect; compromise and accommodation was made each and every time and accompanied with a dark side (The Reign of Terror, for example). My question for you is within our own party, can you accept less than your perfect candidate as the parties nominee and vote to end this train wreck? I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary but in the end, I understood what was at risk should Trump get in office. And here we are; I wasn't imagining things.
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ShareFlagMaryland24m ago@Karen
I'm already on the record in public writings that yes I will support the party's nominee. Sorry, in the space allotted here at the Times I could not add the qualifications, warranted, indeed, which you did in your focus on compromise and moderation. I went to Lafayette College, named after an unusual French aristocrat who fought in Revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, and who was uncomfortable with French Court life...{he was, I think, the moderate you ask for who wound up in trouble with both the Jacobins on the left and later was locked in a foreign prison by the monarchical right}; I would not have been a Bolshevik either, I'm sure, in 1917.
Will you recognize that it is the failure of the Clinton wing of the party, so well represented by the fractured speech patterns of Joe Biden, their inability to formulate a national vision to beat the Right's — that has led to the economic and cultural alienation which made a Trump possible? Will you allow for the emotional range necessary to build a winning Left Populism to match the Right's? I doubt it from what I see of Dems in Maryland.
Let me flesh out for Daily Kos readers what I didn’t have space for in the tight space arrangements at the Times. In a way, this will be my modest attempt at “education” in political economy which Presidents Clinton and Obama declined to undertake, for reasons of their divided ideology and allegiances, the fruits of the new Democratic Party, fearful of anything big because of the chains of Neoliberal orthodoxy on budgets, deficits and debt — the feature which they thought would preserve the bargains they sometimes struck (Clinton more than Obama) with the Republican Right — mostly on terms dictated by the Right. A fiscal “probity” which the Right threw away whenever they had the chance to cut taxes, budgets be damned.
And when the two Democratic Presidents did speak as teachers on the political economy, we were left with the dramatic reminder of 1996 from Bill Clinton, that “the era of big government was over.” Remember, the 1990’s were also called the Roaring ‘90’s, the End of History with the triumph of free market capitalism, and TINA absolutism — “There is No Alternative.” And triumphantly balanced budgets at the end of the decade to punctuate their “We told you so” celebration of Neoliberalism, Clinton style. Forgotten was what Modern Monetary Theorists (MMTers) remind us of today: that every time in U.S. history the Federal Budget was balanced and the debt drawn down or eliminated, deep economic troubles followed. A Federal surplus meant private sector deficits, in private households and corporations, the troubled fueled by the vast bi-partisan program of de-regulation, all pointing towards the great crisis of 2008-2009, a collapse at the very heart of financialized capitalism. With the flows of income and wealth all headed in one direction - upward — in narrower and narrower elevated channels, it was this segment of our people who were the beneficiaries of the $29 trillion dollars which went out via the Federal Reserve’s keystroking of new “reserves” and loans, between 2008-2011, the heart and soul of what would become Quantitative Easing, here portrayed at Levy.org www.levyinstitute.org/…
One of the things which impressed me most about the Sunrise Movement (pictured above outside Speaker Pelosi’s office) which was bursting onto the national scene and directly placing their bodies in the corridors of power in late 2018, was their prior research and attention given to how “governing coalitions” are formed and break apart, both the old New Deal one and the Republican Right’s. But, as you can tell, I want to go deeper to the seminal events which generated the emotions which drove their construction in the first place. In other words, the major forces which enable “Elite Partisan Polarizers” to conduct their “musical” arrangements of resentment and scapegoating. At least from the Right. Is it an accident that what I remember from the Bill Clinton whom I voted for twice was that his outbursts of anger were directed to what remained of the American left - their clinging to the old New Deal ideals.
To me, at least, it has been pretty clear that at the heart of the political physics (“that every strong movement generates a counter-one — thanks to Ben Jealous’s formulation of that” ) driving the rise of the Right has been the small and medium size business anger against the New Deal regulatory state which they felt throttled them at every turn. It was as intense as Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech in 1964 in the Cow Palace in San Francisco, built by the WPA during the hated New Deal. That rising anger was most ably presented by Rick Perlstein in his 2001 book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.”
Indeed, Thomas Edsall himself made his reputation, with a lot of help from his wife, Mary D. Edsall, in portraying the Republican hot button linkage of paying taxes to support the black underclass to a powerful federal interventionist state. Harnessing these intense resentments against this portion of LBJ’s “The Great Society” helped propel the Right’s long-standing goal of dismantling everything the New Deal had built. That’s the heart of the message of Edsall’s 1991 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics.
Head’s up to moderate Democrats, yearning for compromise and reasonableness from the Right: the Republican Right and their Libertarian Allies have never given up the dream of tearing down every last remnant of what the first New Deal built, including Social Security. Grover Norquist’s infamous quote about shrinking the size of the federal government to the point where it could be drowned in a bathtub registers the emotional intensity — infanticide — behind his cooler, calculating anti-tax pledges, which have a Grand Inquisitor aura about them.
Forward next, chronologically, to Newt Gingrich’s address in Washington, DC just before Donald Trump’s Inaugural, in December of 2016. That’ where the Newt assured the Right gathered at the Heritage think tank that Trump was on board with this effort despite what he might have pledged not to do on the campaign trail. And prepared to break all the rules if necessary to upend the standing conventions of the political world.
Thus the American Right has had an abiding central focus since at least the founding of the Mt. Pelerin Society on April 1, 1947 in the mountains of Switzerland. They’ve been embarked on their own project of “climate change,” of reversing the social democratic climate encouraging state interventions into the Sacred Marketplace, the hallmark of the New Deal. (thanks to Kim Phillips-Fein’s fine 2009 book “Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan”)
The Republican Right has not shied away from undertaking grand, sweeping projects, even if their goals, and even tactics are not always, indeed, hardly ever, transparent. Yet this dream of overturning liberal democracy’s proudest achievement, the New Deal, gives them the strategic direction that the Democratic Party has lacked. That has been a tragic mistake on the part of the Democrats, not to defend what Ira Katznelson has portrayed this way:
I ascribe to the New Deal an import almost on a par with that of the French Revolution. It becomes here not merely an important event in the history of the United States but the most important twentieth-century testing ground for representative democracy in an age of mass politics. (in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, 2013.)
Much of the intensity and sheer calculation of the Right has been missed or deliberately downplayed by the Democrats since the Reagan Revolution. This became much clearer with the publication of Nancy MacLean’s 2017 book about Libertarian Patrick M. Buchanan’s career in political economy, his think tanks, academic posts and who supplied the money for his efforts. That would be “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” Let me put it this way: the book documents the Right’s long standing apprehension of what might happen if a Left Populism arose, shamefully inflaming the masses to vote in numbers that the bottom 50% of the economic ladder rarely do. That was a worry even in Alexis De Tocqueville’s day in the 19th century: what would restrain them? This book has some shocking revelations on the history of Democratic politics in Virginia, which should be even a more topical subject in light of the election results from just a few days ago in November of 2019. If you ever wondered about the origins of the Right’s attempt to suppress the Democratic Party vote, MacClean’s book spells that out for you, and provides the linkage to my comment above on both the Right’s and the Democratic Moderates fear of a “Populist Left,” which I am going to say manifests itself best in the Green New Deal — and the strategies to prevent it. This book is a great expose of the linkage between the red hot political passions driving the policy orientation of the Right, the deep hidden flow which drives the cold, methodical calculations and strategy, the patient “Long March” to achieve them through the reinterpretation of the Constitution and the law and when they can, through elections. And surely, by other means, anti-democratic ones, when that fails.
Only the deepening inegalitarian situation in our country since the Great Recession, 2007-2008, and the dramatic scientific reports on the collapse of Nature as we’ve known it, with the worst to come more rapidly than even most of the scientists have been so far willing to report, have, combined, generated the tectonic forces sufficient to launch the Sanders populist campaign and the movements behind the Green New Deal. And that invited Senator Elizabeth Warren to plunge into the crowded 2019 Democratic Primary field.