Conservative Republican hopes were utterly dashed by Eisenhower. Unions survived as did Social Security. American bases remained open all over the planet. There were more huge governmental projects—like the superhighway system and the beginning of the space race. We went right on participating in the Cold War.
Two interesting points about Eisenhower: his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was trained under Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state—as was Kennedy and Johnson’s secretary of state. It was called—validly—bipartisan foreign policy.
Secondly, Eisenhower offered the conservatives some red meat by naming Dick Nixon (at easterner Tom Dewey’s insistence) as Vice President. Nixon was an interesting study in contradiction: he was a master at “red baiting” (winning by calling the other guy a communist). He had found the contradictions in Alger Hiss’s testimony that sent him to prison for perjury. Yet he was also a very intelligent, bone deep pragmatist.
As President, Nixon signed the law that permitted women of whatever income to buy a car without a husband or father to co-sign. He opened the door to China after 23 years of non-recognition. He allowed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to live after LBJ tried to gut it. (Yes, Johnson did. I was on staff at the time.) Nixon was at home with the eastern wing of the party and, all in all, I would have to place him there.
So the conservative Republicans sat and seethed while the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations presided over an internationalist foreign policy and ever bigger government. They were so far out of power and had been for so long it looked as if they would never see the inside of the oval office or the Speaker of the House’s dais again.
In 1973, the Supreme Court handed them a winning issue. Claiming that the 14th Amendment’s “due process clause” grants an absolute right to privacy, the Court struck down state laws against abortion and made it a federally guaranteed right.
Even some progressive (modern “liberal”) legal scholars were horrified at the court’s reasoning, but, no matter. The issue was on the table. Clever political operatives would use it to forge an alliance between evangelical Christians and economically conservative politicians.
It was scarcely made in heaven. Conservative Christians had basically stayed out of politics since the end of World War II. (They snored through the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, allowing him to lose by the largest landslide ever.) But the long out of power conservative (Neo-liberal) Republicans woke them up by harping on issues like abortion and by flattering the Christians into believing they were the “silent majority” who only needed to begin voting to set everything right.
The Party managed to convince large numbers of evangelicals that Reagan was really one of them—that their issues were his issues. They believed it and poured out of their pews in huge numbers to elect the first conservative Republican since Herbert Hoover.
Of course Mr. Reagan’s issues weren’t really those of the so-called “religious right”. He paid lip-service to issues (especially abortion) dear to the no longer silent minority, but he did very little to advance any of them. HIS issues were economic and governmental.
Unfortunately the evangelicals were unable to recognize this until they had been thoroughly suborned and made to look ridiculous if not vicious. Some day someone will do a real study on the damage done to American Christianity by its dalliance with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But that isn’t our purpose here.
The point is—by using Christian outrage over Roe v Wade and Christian votes—the Hoover/Taft/Dirksen wing of the party returned to power after 50 years. For the moment it was only a limited power, but its impact would grow over the next thirty years. More later.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Neo-liberalism--Rage of the Unempowered
During the 1952 Presidential campaign, columnist Joseph Alsop made an interesting and thought provoking observation. He wrote in a private letter that the campaign had convinced him that Adlai Stevenson (Democrat) was more qualified to be President than Eisenhower. But!
“I find myself constantly blackmailed,” Alsop continued, “by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats [after twenty uninterrupted years in power] but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.” (Halberstam, “The Fifties”, pp 235-236)
He was talking about the rage of those who felt they were unempowered. These were the isolationists, small government people, classic Nineteenth Century liberals who felt run over by events (the Depression, World War II, the new Cold War)—and by the ever bigger government response to these events: The New Deal, the vast new defense establishment.
They wanted their voice back—a sense they had something to say about our national destiny, a sense they had not enjoyed since the first two years of the Hoover administration (1929-30). Their deepest desire was to return to the days of Coolidge or even Grover Cleveland.
It was essentially a “Back to the ‘20’s” movement. Let’s pretend Hitler and Pearl Harbor never happened—that the stock market never crashed, that there never was a day when 25% of Americans were out of work and the GNP never fell 50% in four years.
(It’s first worth noting that, in the 1920s , the Ku Klux Klan was truly powerful—not just in the South but as far north as Indiana and Michigan, with a large membership. About ten years ago, a list of KKK members was found in an attic in the town where Gerber Baby Food is made.
(Included in the list was most of the law enforcement personnel in Western Michigan. It took Roosevelt’s New Deal to take the edge off the pain of the Depression [which began years before 1929 in rural areas] and take the wind out of the sails of angry radicals.
(Had Roosevelt and the New Deal not come along, I am convinced that our political sympathies—at least in Europe—would very likely have been with the Axis. These same people were still unhappy in 1952, and they were increasingly gathered under the “big Republican tent”.)
The Republican Party has always been double minded throughout its history. Industrialists and bankers, Abolitionists, radical racists and Midwestern conservatives [who hated eastern bankers and industrialists] united to create the Party in the 1850s.
That double mindedness was never more apparent than it was in the 1952 convention. On the one side stood the easterners—Eisenhower, the Rockefellers, Dewey, representing everything from Wall Street to the most progressive elements in the Republican Party.
On the other side stood the conservative Midwesterners—represented by MacArthur, Taft, Dirksen, representing everything from denial that the Twentieth Century had ever occurred to a rigid kind of religiosity mixed with horror at the spectre of a government able to function well enough to deal with national and world issues.
Leaving the conservatives to sputter in outrage, the progressive wing of the Republican Party won the nomination and got the “sobering experience of responsibility”. To conservative horror, Eisenhower, the elected Republican, allowed most of the New Deal legislation to stand.
Radical conservatism would be out of power for nearly 30 more years. It would take the Supreme Court to put them back in control of the nation. More tomorrow.
“I find myself constantly blackmailed,” Alsop continued, “by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats [after twenty uninterrupted years in power] but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.” (Halberstam, “The Fifties”, pp 235-236)
He was talking about the rage of those who felt they were unempowered. These were the isolationists, small government people, classic Nineteenth Century liberals who felt run over by events (the Depression, World War II, the new Cold War)—and by the ever bigger government response to these events: The New Deal, the vast new defense establishment.
They wanted their voice back—a sense they had something to say about our national destiny, a sense they had not enjoyed since the first two years of the Hoover administration (1929-30). Their deepest desire was to return to the days of Coolidge or even Grover Cleveland.
It was essentially a “Back to the ‘20’s” movement. Let’s pretend Hitler and Pearl Harbor never happened—that the stock market never crashed, that there never was a day when 25% of Americans were out of work and the GNP never fell 50% in four years.
(It’s first worth noting that, in the 1920s , the Ku Klux Klan was truly powerful—not just in the South but as far north as Indiana and Michigan, with a large membership. About ten years ago, a list of KKK members was found in an attic in the town where Gerber Baby Food is made.
(Included in the list was most of the law enforcement personnel in Western Michigan. It took Roosevelt’s New Deal to take the edge off the pain of the Depression [which began years before 1929 in rural areas] and take the wind out of the sails of angry radicals.
(Had Roosevelt and the New Deal not come along, I am convinced that our political sympathies—at least in Europe—would very likely have been with the Axis. These same people were still unhappy in 1952, and they were increasingly gathered under the “big Republican tent”.)
The Republican Party has always been double minded throughout its history. Industrialists and bankers, Abolitionists, radical racists and Midwestern conservatives [who hated eastern bankers and industrialists] united to create the Party in the 1850s.
That double mindedness was never more apparent than it was in the 1952 convention. On the one side stood the easterners—Eisenhower, the Rockefellers, Dewey, representing everything from Wall Street to the most progressive elements in the Republican Party.
On the other side stood the conservative Midwesterners—represented by MacArthur, Taft, Dirksen, representing everything from denial that the Twentieth Century had ever occurred to a rigid kind of religiosity mixed with horror at the spectre of a government able to function well enough to deal with national and world issues.
Leaving the conservatives to sputter in outrage, the progressive wing of the Republican Party won the nomination and got the “sobering experience of responsibility”. To conservative horror, Eisenhower, the elected Republican, allowed most of the New Deal legislation to stand.
Radical conservatism would be out of power for nearly 30 more years. It would take the Supreme Court to put them back in control of the nation. More tomorrow.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Katrina, New Orleans and Reality
It’s been four years since I was traveling through the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on a delightful vacation when a newspaper headline caught my eye. “New Orleans Evacuated!” That will make you buy a paper no matter how oblivious vacation has made you.
Katrina. We read. We bought more papers (we were camping that trip—no motel TV). Gas prices spiked to the then unthinkable $3.75 a gallon. A waitress told us her brother managed a service station nearby and he had been told he would soon be out of gas.
We filled our tank—not waiting to get to the Indian Reservation where it would be cheaper. We had enough to drive all the way across the Bridge to the Lower Peninsula where there would be more. That was my experience with Katrina.
We were a thousand miles away, only reading about the hell the people in New Orleans experienced. For us in Michigan a lot of water has gone over our dams since then. Detroit’s unemployment has reached 29% (nearly one out of three out of work). The nearby Little Caesars Pizza just closed up for good. The kid next door who had a construction job now works part time cleaning out garbage cans for the local trash hauler. He’s going back to school. A friend just sold his house for what he put into it four years ago. He had to write a cheque to pay closing costs before the deal could go through. He was glad to do it.
I don’t think much about Katrina or New Orleans, I admit. Probably a lot of us here in Michigan or other places caught in the recession don’t. The recession was already starting in 2005. I put a house in Grand Rapids up for sale three months before Katrina. By the time we sold it, thirty days later—were we blessed! Somebody really, really wanted that particular house--the price for comparable homes in the area had dropped over ten percent. The number of properties on the market was rising by the thousands each month.
Katrina did not pick a good time to happen for New Orleans. For the first time in over a century, if the nation wanted to do something it had to think about cost and viability. (The next time this may happen is when a hurricane slams into the expensive homes built on the barrier islands along the lower east coast. We won’t be rebuilding them quickly either.)
What makes the New Orleans situation particularly tricky is the fact that not rebuilding some of the exposed (and thus non-viable neighborhoods in that city) opens you to charges of racism. That makes the whole situation much harder to deal with rationally.
We’re luckier here in Michigan along the flood plain of the Grand River. Most of the folks who insist on building right down next to the river—and who get flooded out every two or three years—are white. We can save their sorry butts by hauling them out and then leave them pretty much to their and their insurance companies own devices.
They aren’t rich, by the most part, but they do somehow manage to have flood insurance and/or the means to rebuild after the water goes away. No newspapers or TV stations yell, “Bigotry!” and no Congressman cries, “Racism!” No one accuses national or local political figures of “just trying to get rid of a lot of Democratic votes”.
Let’s face it, those houses are not in a viable neighborhood. No one’s going to open a Walmart, a McDonalds, a gas station or a hardware store down on the river flats. If you want those amenities, you’re going to have to drive upland to where sane people invest money.
Let’s talk for a second about how New Orleans is situated. On the banks of the Mississippi—one of the mightiest rivers on earth. When it floods, we’re not talking about the little trickle our Grand River can muster. Nope. We’re talking WHOOOOOOOOSHHH!!!
This is a river that over the centuries has twisted and turned, creating whole new channels throughout the millennias it has rushed down the center of our continent. It has flooded the plains of New Orleans since long before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees.
It is wonderfully arrogant of human beings to imagine that they can tame by dyke and levee such a vast force forever. As the character says in the movie “Jurassic Park”, nature will find a way. My Dutch forefathers who have wrested their land from the water still live in real fear of the North Sea—and spend tons of money on the everlasting fight to hold it back—more money than Louisiana ever thought to spend on New Orleans!
The Dutch have to. They live in one of the most incredibly crowded countries on Earth, on land that only barely ceases to be sea floor—they have nowhere else to go. The people of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans do—the rest of the US. THAT’S how we should be helping them.
In all of New Orleans there is only one spot that’s truly viable. That’s the “mound” that stayed above the floods before there were levees. The French built their small city there; that’s why we call it the “French Quarter”. It doesn’t flood; it didn’t flood four years ago.
It’s back in action today. Tourists and residents see little sign of Katrina there. This really isn’t because the people in the Quarter are racists. It’s because, for hundreds of years, it’s been the only sensible place to put a house, a warehouse or a business.
I really have only this to say to those who insist that Bush was heartless, that all the rest of us are racists because we won’t spend billions to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward: when YOU are ready to take all of your retirement funds and invest them in businesses and housing on that flood plain, then I will listen as you castigate me for not doing the same.
I don’t see Walmart doing it. I don’t see McDonalds or Lowes or Sears putting their businesses down in the lowlands. They don’t think it’s rational. I agree with them. Why should I want my tax dollars to go there either? If the 9th Ward insists on rebuilding right where the river wants to come, that’s their business—just like it is along the Grand River.
Sanity and fiscal good sense do not necessarily always equal racism.
Katrina. We read. We bought more papers (we were camping that trip—no motel TV). Gas prices spiked to the then unthinkable $3.75 a gallon. A waitress told us her brother managed a service station nearby and he had been told he would soon be out of gas.
We filled our tank—not waiting to get to the Indian Reservation where it would be cheaper. We had enough to drive all the way across the Bridge to the Lower Peninsula where there would be more. That was my experience with Katrina.
We were a thousand miles away, only reading about the hell the people in New Orleans experienced. For us in Michigan a lot of water has gone over our dams since then. Detroit’s unemployment has reached 29% (nearly one out of three out of work). The nearby Little Caesars Pizza just closed up for good. The kid next door who had a construction job now works part time cleaning out garbage cans for the local trash hauler. He’s going back to school. A friend just sold his house for what he put into it four years ago. He had to write a cheque to pay closing costs before the deal could go through. He was glad to do it.
I don’t think much about Katrina or New Orleans, I admit. Probably a lot of us here in Michigan or other places caught in the recession don’t. The recession was already starting in 2005. I put a house in Grand Rapids up for sale three months before Katrina. By the time we sold it, thirty days later—were we blessed! Somebody really, really wanted that particular house--the price for comparable homes in the area had dropped over ten percent. The number of properties on the market was rising by the thousands each month.
Katrina did not pick a good time to happen for New Orleans. For the first time in over a century, if the nation wanted to do something it had to think about cost and viability. (The next time this may happen is when a hurricane slams into the expensive homes built on the barrier islands along the lower east coast. We won’t be rebuilding them quickly either.)
What makes the New Orleans situation particularly tricky is the fact that not rebuilding some of the exposed (and thus non-viable neighborhoods in that city) opens you to charges of racism. That makes the whole situation much harder to deal with rationally.
We’re luckier here in Michigan along the flood plain of the Grand River. Most of the folks who insist on building right down next to the river—and who get flooded out every two or three years—are white. We can save their sorry butts by hauling them out and then leave them pretty much to their and their insurance companies own devices.
They aren’t rich, by the most part, but they do somehow manage to have flood insurance and/or the means to rebuild after the water goes away. No newspapers or TV stations yell, “Bigotry!” and no Congressman cries, “Racism!” No one accuses national or local political figures of “just trying to get rid of a lot of Democratic votes”.
Let’s face it, those houses are not in a viable neighborhood. No one’s going to open a Walmart, a McDonalds, a gas station or a hardware store down on the river flats. If you want those amenities, you’re going to have to drive upland to where sane people invest money.
Let’s talk for a second about how New Orleans is situated. On the banks of the Mississippi—one of the mightiest rivers on earth. When it floods, we’re not talking about the little trickle our Grand River can muster. Nope. We’re talking WHOOOOOOOOSHHH!!!
This is a river that over the centuries has twisted and turned, creating whole new channels throughout the millennias it has rushed down the center of our continent. It has flooded the plains of New Orleans since long before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees.
It is wonderfully arrogant of human beings to imagine that they can tame by dyke and levee such a vast force forever. As the character says in the movie “Jurassic Park”, nature will find a way. My Dutch forefathers who have wrested their land from the water still live in real fear of the North Sea—and spend tons of money on the everlasting fight to hold it back—more money than Louisiana ever thought to spend on New Orleans!
The Dutch have to. They live in one of the most incredibly crowded countries on Earth, on land that only barely ceases to be sea floor—they have nowhere else to go. The people of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans do—the rest of the US. THAT’S how we should be helping them.
In all of New Orleans there is only one spot that’s truly viable. That’s the “mound” that stayed above the floods before there were levees. The French built their small city there; that’s why we call it the “French Quarter”. It doesn’t flood; it didn’t flood four years ago.
It’s back in action today. Tourists and residents see little sign of Katrina there. This really isn’t because the people in the Quarter are racists. It’s because, for hundreds of years, it’s been the only sensible place to put a house, a warehouse or a business.
I really have only this to say to those who insist that Bush was heartless, that all the rest of us are racists because we won’t spend billions to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward: when YOU are ready to take all of your retirement funds and invest them in businesses and housing on that flood plain, then I will listen as you castigate me for not doing the same.
I don’t see Walmart doing it. I don’t see McDonalds or Lowes or Sears putting their businesses down in the lowlands. They don’t think it’s rational. I agree with them. Why should I want my tax dollars to go there either? If the 9th Ward insists on rebuilding right where the river wants to come, that’s their business—just like it is along the Grand River.
Sanity and fiscal good sense do not necessarily always equal racism.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Republicans and Post War Neo-Liberalism
We came out of World War II with a whole lot of (primarily Midwestern) Republican Neo-liberals who hated Roosevelt, hated the New Deal, hated the government that doled out Social Security and welfare, were convinced that our war in the Pacific was a Communist Plot engineered by Roosevelt to destroy Russia’s main enemy in the East, the Japanese.
They saw the war in Europe as us pulling British chestnuts out of the fire and destroying another major Communist enemy, Nazi Germany. These throw-back liberals had been out of power for a long, long time and they blamed a lot of that on the more moderate Republicans from the coastal regions who had backed useless candidates like Dewey.
When Tom Dewey couldn’t even beat a machine hack from Missouri who, the polls assured them, had no chance to win in 1948, they were ready to tear something or someone limb from limb.
Big government had grown huge since Roosevelt took office. It had brought electricity to isolated farm houses, it had fed starving and hopeless families. It had supported the arts and planted whole new forests. It HAD to be stopped, to be rolled back.
To do this would mean that two things would have to be accomplished. One, the Eastern—and more “liberal” (in the modern sense)—wing of the Republican Party would have to be supplanted. There had been bitter tension between Eastern Republicans and Midwestern Republicans since Lincoln took office. The easterners had tried to take the presidency away from him—right in his own cabinet room.
Lincoln had repulsed them—even going so far as to offer the Confederates the right to keep their slaves if they would come back into the Union, and Congress, and counterweight the east coast Republicans. He had failed—and died under suspicious circumstances shortly after.
Midwestern Republicans often had a hard time accepting the fact that there was a world beyond their own fields—let alone one on the other side of the ocean. They liked their life, isolated in places like Iowa, Indiana, Kansas and Michigan. They wanted nothing to change.
Eastern Republicans were businessmen. They well understood that there were markets and sources of raw materials far beyond our shores. They understood that as the nation grew and its interests clashed more openly with those of foreign nations, change had to occur.
Even if Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat, he came out of this milieu—as had his cousin, Teddy. These men were empire builders. They were prepared to expand and defend that empire with blood and treasure. The Iowans and Hoosiers were deeply suspicious of this.
Many mid-westerners saw the wars of the Twentieth Century as merely a plot by easterners (and west coasters) to make the eastern banks (that had oppressed the Midwest since before Lincoln!) even more powerful. They wanted no part of it.
These were unabashed isolationists. They refused to see any reason why Americans needed to look or think beyond the ocean coast lines. Even as it became possible for new and hugely destructive weapon systems to rain death upon them from other continents, they wanted no part of foreign involvements.
Dewey had been an easterner. His ineptitude (and arrogance) made the Midwesterners desperate to rip the nomination out of eastern hands. Their champion would be Bob Taft of Ohio—son of a president and a supreme court justice.
A second thing needed to be done in 1952. Some part of the “Roosevelt Coalition” that had allowed the Democrats to rule since 1932 would have to be drawn into the Republican Party. That coalition had four legs: simplistically, the Ku Klux Klan (white southerners) and the three groups the KKK hated, all forged by a political genius (FDR) into a single party.
Three legs were unassailable, Jews, blacks and Catholics. Truman bought the Jewish vote by backing Israel in 1948. Black loyalty had been bought by Eleanor Roosevelt, the integration of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 convention, and Republican distain.
When urban, immigrant Catholics moved out into the suburbs they often became Republicans. But not enough had moved out by 1952. There were also strong memories of the anti-Catholic No Nothings, one of the roots of the Republican Party.
That left the Southern Whites. Historically southerners and Midwesterners shared a common resentment for sophisticated east coast bankers. And there was too much noise being made among the northern Democrats in favor of Civil Rights. Southerners were ripe to be picked.
Conservative Republicans came into the convention ready for bear. Taft, their candidate had a majority of the votes (but not enough for the nomination). It went three ballots. The easterners (with Dewey doing a masterful job of campaign managing) had picked an unbeatable candidate.
General Eisenhower had declared himself a Republican in January of that year. In April he had resigned his post as the first commander of NATO and returned to run for president. His stature and his legend swept the convention. Dirksen glared down at Dewey and spat out, “You led us to defeat before!” Fist fights broke out on the floor. No matter. Once again the easterners, the internationalists, the “moderates” had outdone the Midwesterners.
They stayed in command of the party for nearly thirty more years. Moderates ran and won in 1952, 1956, 1968 and ’72 (Nixon/Ford). Midwesterners got Barry Goldwater nominated in 1964, but he was before his time and the Democrats pounded him into the ground in the greatest landslide in the history of the republic.
In 1980 the Conservative Republicans found a movie actor who could do for them what Ike had done for the easterners thirty years before. (George H.W. Bush actually was a moderate in Reaganite clothing and when he had a momentary lapse and raised taxes, his own party drove him out in favor of Clinton, a Democrat who sounded like a Neo-liberal Republican much of the time.)
In 1994 a Conservative Republican who was as good at infighting as the Kennedys had been, took Congress back for the Republicans for the first time since 1954. Clinton was smart enough not to try to change what he couldn’t and basically let them have their head.
He was, after all, a southerner—with some very deep sympathy with the Midwestern view of the nation and the world. Like a Tsunami, the tidal wave economic excess would begin to build. Even Alan Greenspan, a devote’ of Ayn Rand would try to sound a note of caution. But the wave built on and up until it finally crashed down upon us in the latter have of George W. Bush’s administration.
Let’s look a bit more at the Neo-liberals another time.
They saw the war in Europe as us pulling British chestnuts out of the fire and destroying another major Communist enemy, Nazi Germany. These throw-back liberals had been out of power for a long, long time and they blamed a lot of that on the more moderate Republicans from the coastal regions who had backed useless candidates like Dewey.
When Tom Dewey couldn’t even beat a machine hack from Missouri who, the polls assured them, had no chance to win in 1948, they were ready to tear something or someone limb from limb.
Big government had grown huge since Roosevelt took office. It had brought electricity to isolated farm houses, it had fed starving and hopeless families. It had supported the arts and planted whole new forests. It HAD to be stopped, to be rolled back.
To do this would mean that two things would have to be accomplished. One, the Eastern—and more “liberal” (in the modern sense)—wing of the Republican Party would have to be supplanted. There had been bitter tension between Eastern Republicans and Midwestern Republicans since Lincoln took office. The easterners had tried to take the presidency away from him—right in his own cabinet room.
Lincoln had repulsed them—even going so far as to offer the Confederates the right to keep their slaves if they would come back into the Union, and Congress, and counterweight the east coast Republicans. He had failed—and died under suspicious circumstances shortly after.
Midwestern Republicans often had a hard time accepting the fact that there was a world beyond their own fields—let alone one on the other side of the ocean. They liked their life, isolated in places like Iowa, Indiana, Kansas and Michigan. They wanted nothing to change.
Eastern Republicans were businessmen. They well understood that there were markets and sources of raw materials far beyond our shores. They understood that as the nation grew and its interests clashed more openly with those of foreign nations, change had to occur.
Even if Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat, he came out of this milieu—as had his cousin, Teddy. These men were empire builders. They were prepared to expand and defend that empire with blood and treasure. The Iowans and Hoosiers were deeply suspicious of this.
Many mid-westerners saw the wars of the Twentieth Century as merely a plot by easterners (and west coasters) to make the eastern banks (that had oppressed the Midwest since before Lincoln!) even more powerful. They wanted no part of it.
These were unabashed isolationists. They refused to see any reason why Americans needed to look or think beyond the ocean coast lines. Even as it became possible for new and hugely destructive weapon systems to rain death upon them from other continents, they wanted no part of foreign involvements.
Dewey had been an easterner. His ineptitude (and arrogance) made the Midwesterners desperate to rip the nomination out of eastern hands. Their champion would be Bob Taft of Ohio—son of a president and a supreme court justice.
A second thing needed to be done in 1952. Some part of the “Roosevelt Coalition” that had allowed the Democrats to rule since 1932 would have to be drawn into the Republican Party. That coalition had four legs: simplistically, the Ku Klux Klan (white southerners) and the three groups the KKK hated, all forged by a political genius (FDR) into a single party.
Three legs were unassailable, Jews, blacks and Catholics. Truman bought the Jewish vote by backing Israel in 1948. Black loyalty had been bought by Eleanor Roosevelt, the integration of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 convention, and Republican distain.
When urban, immigrant Catholics moved out into the suburbs they often became Republicans. But not enough had moved out by 1952. There were also strong memories of the anti-Catholic No Nothings, one of the roots of the Republican Party.
That left the Southern Whites. Historically southerners and Midwesterners shared a common resentment for sophisticated east coast bankers. And there was too much noise being made among the northern Democrats in favor of Civil Rights. Southerners were ripe to be picked.
Conservative Republicans came into the convention ready for bear. Taft, their candidate had a majority of the votes (but not enough for the nomination). It went three ballots. The easterners (with Dewey doing a masterful job of campaign managing) had picked an unbeatable candidate.
General Eisenhower had declared himself a Republican in January of that year. In April he had resigned his post as the first commander of NATO and returned to run for president. His stature and his legend swept the convention. Dirksen glared down at Dewey and spat out, “You led us to defeat before!” Fist fights broke out on the floor. No matter. Once again the easterners, the internationalists, the “moderates” had outdone the Midwesterners.
They stayed in command of the party for nearly thirty more years. Moderates ran and won in 1952, 1956, 1968 and ’72 (Nixon/Ford). Midwesterners got Barry Goldwater nominated in 1964, but he was before his time and the Democrats pounded him into the ground in the greatest landslide in the history of the republic.
In 1980 the Conservative Republicans found a movie actor who could do for them what Ike had done for the easterners thirty years before. (George H.W. Bush actually was a moderate in Reaganite clothing and when he had a momentary lapse and raised taxes, his own party drove him out in favor of Clinton, a Democrat who sounded like a Neo-liberal Republican much of the time.)
In 1994 a Conservative Republican who was as good at infighting as the Kennedys had been, took Congress back for the Republicans for the first time since 1954. Clinton was smart enough not to try to change what he couldn’t and basically let them have their head.
He was, after all, a southerner—with some very deep sympathy with the Midwestern view of the nation and the world. Like a Tsunami, the tidal wave economic excess would begin to build. Even Alan Greenspan, a devote’ of Ayn Rand would try to sound a note of caution. But the wave built on and up until it finally crashed down upon us in the latter have of George W. Bush’s administration.
Let’s look a bit more at the Neo-liberals another time.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Ted Kennedy: Fare Thee Well
Teddy may be the last of the old Irish pols. He drank well, perhaps a wee bit too much. But that’s what God made good whiskey for, did he not? In the Senate they called him the “liberal lion”, but actually he was more of a Nineteenth Century urban Democrat than a modern “liberal”.
His causes showed the man—health care for those who couldn’t afford it, not a far step for a man whose ancestors built political machines by distributing patronage and sacks of coal (or getting a poor lad paroled from a protestant jail cell) to immigrants who couldn’t afford to meet their own needs . Or education—for a poor lad looking to better himself.
He was a last bridge to an era and a type of politician that no longer really exists today. They were bare knuckle political infighters (none of the finesse we associate with Ivy league trained lawyers and politicians today. They kicked you and gouged you until you couldn’t get back up.)
Nixon learned in 1960. It left him so paranoid that he committed a “high crime and misdemeanor” in 1972 at Watergate just to figure out what they were planning this time around. They outmaneuvered Tammany Hall during the primaries of 1960 and left a shattered DeSapio in the dust.
Hubert Humphrey went back to his campaign bus in West Virginia and wept when he realized how many more votes the Kennedys (the Irish Mafia they were called) could afford to buy than he could. Who else but a Kennedy in-law (Steve Smith, who ran the Kennedy fortune after Joe got too old) could forget a suitcase full of ten dollar bills (for buying votes) in a barber shop and have to wire Boston for another case of tens.
Joe Kennedy sent it—along with one of the more immortal telegrams in American political history—“I’m not buying a landslide”! Lyndon Johnson learned what Boston Irish kicking and shoving was all about that same year. He’d been planning on being president since the 1930s. When the Kennedys were through with him, he settled for Vice President.
Johnson was no slouch at kicking and gouging—but the “Irish Mafia” was a different league altogether. They had tons more money, and they wielded it like a Shillelagh. They had connections—in the Mafia, in Chicago city hall—and there was no rule against clipping from behind in their kind of football.
Joe, father to Ted, Bobby, Jack and Joe Jr., was far enough removed from the “shanty Irish” that he went through Boston Latin and Harvard. He made his money investing in stocks, real estate and commodities (there are unproven hints that some of these “commodities” may have been bootleg liquor). There is no question that when Prohibition was repealed, Kennedy was ready with vast stocks of liquor from European distilleries.
He also made lots of money reorganizing and financing Hollywood studios—beginning a dynasty long love affair with movies and movie starlets. He bought the largest office building in America—Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. This gave the family their in with powerful people in the midwest.
As ambassador to England during the Nazi blitz of London, Joe remained Irish enough to let his anti-English and pro-German bias show. After the election of 1940, Roosevelt (who had been a friend of Joe’s since World War I) was forced to remove him.
He had one major ambition politically—to have one of his sons be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. The eldest, Joe Jr., was killed in World War II. Joe then groomed his second son, Jack, for the job. They kicked and scrabbled their way into the White House.
Jack did have to meet with a group of Baptist ministers and promise them he would not, as a Catholic, subvert our very Protestant/Calvinistic constitution. But he made it. He made his brother, Bobby, Attorney General.
Two years later, 30 year old Teddy wanted to run for Jack’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts. The other two boys were not thrilled. They felt it might produce a feeling in Washington of too many Kennedys. Joe told them, “You’ve got yours; now it’s Ted’s turn.”
He ran and won in 1962—picking up the last two years in Jack’s term. By the time he ran again, Jack was dead; Johnson was president, and Bobby had moved quickly to New York to run for senator there. Ted was nearly killed in a plane crash in 1964, but he won anyway.
Johnson did get a bit of his own back in ’64. He dangled the Vice-Presidency (which Jack and Bobby had made him accept in 1960) in front of various Kennedy family members and friends. Sargent Shriver nibbled at the bait. It was a trap.
Needless to say a serious offer never materialized (Johnson resented the Kennedys far too much for that!), but Johnson had opened a wedge in the once formidable Kennedy front that took a while to heal. (I learned this from one of Ted Kennedy’s former staff members.)
In 1968 Bobby made his try for the White House—after Gene McCarthy had shown Johnson could be beaten. Johnson pulled out of the race two weeks later and another Kennedy march to the White House seemed to be on. Bobby was assassinated immediately after he won the California primary. Richard Nixon, Jack’s old opponent, went on to win the election.
People immediately began to pressure Ted to take up the Kennedy banner and run for president in the next race. I sensed very strongly that he did not want to. One) he was comfortable in the Senate, a more collegial environment. Two) he had watched three brothers die violently and had a strong sense that he had a lot of orphaned nephews and nieces to help raise. He may even have had a most understandable personal fear for himself. There was real hatred for Kennedys out there.
Whatever his private feelings, the incident at Chappaquiddick in which a female aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, mysteriously drowned and Ted got a suspended sentence, ended presidential speculation for a few years. He was induced to try the primaries in 1980, ran an inept campaign, and settled down to the Senate for the rest of his life.
Here, securely at home—the last of the Kennedys—he became a giant. He worked across the aisle, with the Republican enemy and against the Republican enemy. We may not quickly see his like again. For me it is a shock to know he’s dead—the Kennedys have been part of my political awareness since 1953 when the “Saturday Evening Post” ran an article on Jack—“the most eligible bachelor in the Senate”.
Of course, telling everyone that he was already engaged to Jackie when the story came out would have spoiled it. So, as the Kennedys were so skilled at doing, that pesky little fact was ignored and never mentioned.
It may indeed be Teddy—the one for whom daddy had to say, “It’s his turn now”—that leaves the most significant legacy. Jack, Joe, Joe Jr., Bobby have all been dead so long it’s almost hard to remember them. But Ted passed some laws that changed lives.
For Teddy, I finish with the old blessing: May ye be an hour in Heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.
His causes showed the man—health care for those who couldn’t afford it, not a far step for a man whose ancestors built political machines by distributing patronage and sacks of coal (or getting a poor lad paroled from a protestant jail cell) to immigrants who couldn’t afford to meet their own needs . Or education—for a poor lad looking to better himself.
He was a last bridge to an era and a type of politician that no longer really exists today. They were bare knuckle political infighters (none of the finesse we associate with Ivy league trained lawyers and politicians today. They kicked you and gouged you until you couldn’t get back up.)
Nixon learned in 1960. It left him so paranoid that he committed a “high crime and misdemeanor” in 1972 at Watergate just to figure out what they were planning this time around. They outmaneuvered Tammany Hall during the primaries of 1960 and left a shattered DeSapio in the dust.
Hubert Humphrey went back to his campaign bus in West Virginia and wept when he realized how many more votes the Kennedys (the Irish Mafia they were called) could afford to buy than he could. Who else but a Kennedy in-law (Steve Smith, who ran the Kennedy fortune after Joe got too old) could forget a suitcase full of ten dollar bills (for buying votes) in a barber shop and have to wire Boston for another case of tens.
Joe Kennedy sent it—along with one of the more immortal telegrams in American political history—“I’m not buying a landslide”! Lyndon Johnson learned what Boston Irish kicking and shoving was all about that same year. He’d been planning on being president since the 1930s. When the Kennedys were through with him, he settled for Vice President.
Johnson was no slouch at kicking and gouging—but the “Irish Mafia” was a different league altogether. They had tons more money, and they wielded it like a Shillelagh. They had connections—in the Mafia, in Chicago city hall—and there was no rule against clipping from behind in their kind of football.
Joe, father to Ted, Bobby, Jack and Joe Jr., was far enough removed from the “shanty Irish” that he went through Boston Latin and Harvard. He made his money investing in stocks, real estate and commodities (there are unproven hints that some of these “commodities” may have been bootleg liquor). There is no question that when Prohibition was repealed, Kennedy was ready with vast stocks of liquor from European distilleries.
He also made lots of money reorganizing and financing Hollywood studios—beginning a dynasty long love affair with movies and movie starlets. He bought the largest office building in America—Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. This gave the family their in with powerful people in the midwest.
As ambassador to England during the Nazi blitz of London, Joe remained Irish enough to let his anti-English and pro-German bias show. After the election of 1940, Roosevelt (who had been a friend of Joe’s since World War I) was forced to remove him.
He had one major ambition politically—to have one of his sons be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. The eldest, Joe Jr., was killed in World War II. Joe then groomed his second son, Jack, for the job. They kicked and scrabbled their way into the White House.
Jack did have to meet with a group of Baptist ministers and promise them he would not, as a Catholic, subvert our very Protestant/Calvinistic constitution. But he made it. He made his brother, Bobby, Attorney General.
Two years later, 30 year old Teddy wanted to run for Jack’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts. The other two boys were not thrilled. They felt it might produce a feeling in Washington of too many Kennedys. Joe told them, “You’ve got yours; now it’s Ted’s turn.”
He ran and won in 1962—picking up the last two years in Jack’s term. By the time he ran again, Jack was dead; Johnson was president, and Bobby had moved quickly to New York to run for senator there. Ted was nearly killed in a plane crash in 1964, but he won anyway.
Johnson did get a bit of his own back in ’64. He dangled the Vice-Presidency (which Jack and Bobby had made him accept in 1960) in front of various Kennedy family members and friends. Sargent Shriver nibbled at the bait. It was a trap.
Needless to say a serious offer never materialized (Johnson resented the Kennedys far too much for that!), but Johnson had opened a wedge in the once formidable Kennedy front that took a while to heal. (I learned this from one of Ted Kennedy’s former staff members.)
In 1968 Bobby made his try for the White House—after Gene McCarthy had shown Johnson could be beaten. Johnson pulled out of the race two weeks later and another Kennedy march to the White House seemed to be on. Bobby was assassinated immediately after he won the California primary. Richard Nixon, Jack’s old opponent, went on to win the election.
People immediately began to pressure Ted to take up the Kennedy banner and run for president in the next race. I sensed very strongly that he did not want to. One) he was comfortable in the Senate, a more collegial environment. Two) he had watched three brothers die violently and had a strong sense that he had a lot of orphaned nephews and nieces to help raise. He may even have had a most understandable personal fear for himself. There was real hatred for Kennedys out there.
Whatever his private feelings, the incident at Chappaquiddick in which a female aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, mysteriously drowned and Ted got a suspended sentence, ended presidential speculation for a few years. He was induced to try the primaries in 1980, ran an inept campaign, and settled down to the Senate for the rest of his life.
Here, securely at home—the last of the Kennedys—he became a giant. He worked across the aisle, with the Republican enemy and against the Republican enemy. We may not quickly see his like again. For me it is a shock to know he’s dead—the Kennedys have been part of my political awareness since 1953 when the “Saturday Evening Post” ran an article on Jack—“the most eligible bachelor in the Senate”.
Of course, telling everyone that he was already engaged to Jackie when the story came out would have spoiled it. So, as the Kennedys were so skilled at doing, that pesky little fact was ignored and never mentioned.
It may indeed be Teddy—the one for whom daddy had to say, “It’s his turn now”—that leaves the most significant legacy. Jack, Joe, Joe Jr., Bobby have all been dead so long it’s almost hard to remember them. But Ted passed some laws that changed lives.
For Teddy, I finish with the old blessing: May ye be an hour in Heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Obama and The Neo-liberals
What actually crashed down upon us last fall when brokerages, car companies, mortgages and house prices all came a cropper was the era of “Neo-liberalism”. And, as our current president would no doubt be the first to tell us, Neo-liberals are not going quietly into that good night.
Oblivious to any sign that their own philosophy might have any flaws, let alone be guilty of unsustainability, our Neo-liberal friends proclaim everyone who disagrees with them to be solely guilty of causing the crash/recession of 2008 and early 2009.
Their point of view seems to that of a person caught standing over a corpse holding a smoking pistol, still busily insisting that his gun was merely a harmless instrument, available for the good of mankind—that guns to not kill people.
Classic American liberalism arises out of two strains in American culture. (It must not be confused with the political philosophy associated with presidents like Barak Obama, Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, which rose out of a fusion of the Progressive Reform impulse and classic Hamiltonian/Republican theory in the late 1800s).
The first strain is the historic American lust for the “free lunch”. We got into a shooting war over this as early as 1775 when we demanded the protection of the British government (from the French and Indians) and vehemently refused to be taxed to pay for it.
Ever since this has been a classic liberal (NOT Obama “liberalism”!) position. We demand more and more government services—loans to businesses, loans to individuals, ever larger Social Security cheques, etc.)—and lower and fewer taxes in support of them.
The liberal is thus somewhat like the older dependent child, absolutely needing parental funds for every necessity of life—yet demanding more and more freedom of action in what he does with those funds. There seems to be a disconnect in our understanding of both parts of the old phrase—who has the geld calls the tune.
We want government benefits; we do not want any government restrictions. We repeal laws that keep banks from ludicrous speculation; we demand that government protect our deposits when these speculations threaten to drag the banks underwater along with them.
The second strain is just pure American cussedness. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do!” Historically it showed up vividly when headstrong American settlers violated treaties and moved onto Indian lands, incurring violent reaction from the owners.
The settlers demanded two things: one) government must never tell us what land we cannot occupy and, two) it must send the army to protect us from what we caused. This began in the Virginia and Massachusetts settlements of the early 1600s. It went on to the Pacific coast.
Andrew Jackson personified this attitude. He was the ultimate American liberal. He sent the army to drive all Native Americans west of the Mississippi (your tax dollars at work); he destroyed the only agency capable of maintaining a viable American currency, the national bank—because it also imposed restrictions on land speculators.
From 1836 to the Civil War, we had no national currency at all. Nor did we have any real regulation over land speculation. This is true American liberalism. No government regulation or limits; unrestrained personal freedom in business, banking and land speculation.
This was the fundamental position of the Eighteenth Century Democratic Party. (It strongly reinforced the slave owner’s belief that no one had a right to infringe upon his right to enjoy the benefits of his “peculiar institution”.) From Jefferson through Cleveland, the Democrats were basically the party of total business freedom. George W. Bush, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would have been comfortable in that party.
The fitful impulses toward any sort of cooperation between government and the private sector—few as they were—came from the Whigs and their successors, the Republicans. The Whigs/Republicans had a few Hamiltonian roots among their antecedents.
Admittedly most of this cooperation in America primarily if not exclusively benefitted business—not society in general. By and large, nobody looked out for the “little guy” who labored most of the century for a dollar a day with absolutely no safety net.
That began to change because of appalling corruption among URBAN democrats as new waves of immigrants arrived. The urban Democrats quickly recognized that here—among the unwashed and increasingly Jewish and Catholic immigrants—was a vast pool of votes.
There was no safety net for the injured, the ill, the aged or anyone. The Democratic urban machine provided one. City jobs (some of which you didn’t even have to show up for), a bag of coal, a sack of food, help with a burial bought votes.
The urban poor—who had only one thing of value to his name, his vote—was happy to sell it in return for survival. The Democratic machines soon had a lock on the cities. Republicans may have held power in state capitals; but in city halls, Democrats ruled.
Republicans countered by becoming reformers. No better way to break the death grip the machines had on urban voters than by declaring many of their practices expressly illegal—AND, often just incidentally, by providing a bit of real relief to the voters.
(Ironically, it would be a Democratic president who would break the power of the machines. Franklin Roosevelt would take up the program outlined in Teddy Roosevelt’s last two State of Union addresses [Teddy was a Republican, remember] and launch them as the New Deal.
(With welfare and social security—and legalized unions to force a living wage—available to the urban voter, the machine no longer had any lock on his loyalty. Ten years after FDR”s New Deal, many urban machines were out of business. A few, like New York’s Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine held on into the 1960s)
By the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Republican Progressives were into the reform business full time. Woodrow Wilson—a man who, oddly enough, loathed blacks and southern European immigrants got elected as a Democrat in 1912 and stole their thunder.
By 1920, Republicans had essentially stolen the 19th Century Democratic laissez-faire liberalism and, by 1933, Democrats had switched to a view of government as something heavily involved in our individual lives—and become the reformers, pre-empting Teddy Roosevelt for good..
Politically it was the equivalent of the “X” in a model train’s track. Here one train crosses over from right to left and the other train goes from left to right. By winning five presidential elections in a row and by controlling Congress for twenty out of twenty-two years in that time, the New Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) view of an activist government had become entrenched.
Beginning in 1952, Republicans came roaring back as “Neo-liberals”, Andrew Jackson resurrected as a Whig/Republican as it were. Let’s look at that tomorrow.
Oblivious to any sign that their own philosophy might have any flaws, let alone be guilty of unsustainability, our Neo-liberal friends proclaim everyone who disagrees with them to be solely guilty of causing the crash/recession of 2008 and early 2009.
Their point of view seems to that of a person caught standing over a corpse holding a smoking pistol, still busily insisting that his gun was merely a harmless instrument, available for the good of mankind—that guns to not kill people.
Classic American liberalism arises out of two strains in American culture. (It must not be confused with the political philosophy associated with presidents like Barak Obama, Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, which rose out of a fusion of the Progressive Reform impulse and classic Hamiltonian/Republican theory in the late 1800s).
The first strain is the historic American lust for the “free lunch”. We got into a shooting war over this as early as 1775 when we demanded the protection of the British government (from the French and Indians) and vehemently refused to be taxed to pay for it.
Ever since this has been a classic liberal (NOT Obama “liberalism”!) position. We demand more and more government services—loans to businesses, loans to individuals, ever larger Social Security cheques, etc.)—and lower and fewer taxes in support of them.
The liberal is thus somewhat like the older dependent child, absolutely needing parental funds for every necessity of life—yet demanding more and more freedom of action in what he does with those funds. There seems to be a disconnect in our understanding of both parts of the old phrase—who has the geld calls the tune.
We want government benefits; we do not want any government restrictions. We repeal laws that keep banks from ludicrous speculation; we demand that government protect our deposits when these speculations threaten to drag the banks underwater along with them.
The second strain is just pure American cussedness. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do!” Historically it showed up vividly when headstrong American settlers violated treaties and moved onto Indian lands, incurring violent reaction from the owners.
The settlers demanded two things: one) government must never tell us what land we cannot occupy and, two) it must send the army to protect us from what we caused. This began in the Virginia and Massachusetts settlements of the early 1600s. It went on to the Pacific coast.
Andrew Jackson personified this attitude. He was the ultimate American liberal. He sent the army to drive all Native Americans west of the Mississippi (your tax dollars at work); he destroyed the only agency capable of maintaining a viable American currency, the national bank—because it also imposed restrictions on land speculators.
From 1836 to the Civil War, we had no national currency at all. Nor did we have any real regulation over land speculation. This is true American liberalism. No government regulation or limits; unrestrained personal freedom in business, banking and land speculation.
This was the fundamental position of the Eighteenth Century Democratic Party. (It strongly reinforced the slave owner’s belief that no one had a right to infringe upon his right to enjoy the benefits of his “peculiar institution”.) From Jefferson through Cleveland, the Democrats were basically the party of total business freedom. George W. Bush, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would have been comfortable in that party.
The fitful impulses toward any sort of cooperation between government and the private sector—few as they were—came from the Whigs and their successors, the Republicans. The Whigs/Republicans had a few Hamiltonian roots among their antecedents.
Admittedly most of this cooperation in America primarily if not exclusively benefitted business—not society in general. By and large, nobody looked out for the “little guy” who labored most of the century for a dollar a day with absolutely no safety net.
That began to change because of appalling corruption among URBAN democrats as new waves of immigrants arrived. The urban Democrats quickly recognized that here—among the unwashed and increasingly Jewish and Catholic immigrants—was a vast pool of votes.
There was no safety net for the injured, the ill, the aged or anyone. The Democratic urban machine provided one. City jobs (some of which you didn’t even have to show up for), a bag of coal, a sack of food, help with a burial bought votes.
The urban poor—who had only one thing of value to his name, his vote—was happy to sell it in return for survival. The Democratic machines soon had a lock on the cities. Republicans may have held power in state capitals; but in city halls, Democrats ruled.
Republicans countered by becoming reformers. No better way to break the death grip the machines had on urban voters than by declaring many of their practices expressly illegal—AND, often just incidentally, by providing a bit of real relief to the voters.
(Ironically, it would be a Democratic president who would break the power of the machines. Franklin Roosevelt would take up the program outlined in Teddy Roosevelt’s last two State of Union addresses [Teddy was a Republican, remember] and launch them as the New Deal.
(With welfare and social security—and legalized unions to force a living wage—available to the urban voter, the machine no longer had any lock on his loyalty. Ten years after FDR”s New Deal, many urban machines were out of business. A few, like New York’s Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine held on into the 1960s)
By the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Republican Progressives were into the reform business full time. Woodrow Wilson—a man who, oddly enough, loathed blacks and southern European immigrants got elected as a Democrat in 1912 and stole their thunder.
By 1920, Republicans had essentially stolen the 19th Century Democratic laissez-faire liberalism and, by 1933, Democrats had switched to a view of government as something heavily involved in our individual lives—and become the reformers, pre-empting Teddy Roosevelt for good..
Politically it was the equivalent of the “X” in a model train’s track. Here one train crosses over from right to left and the other train goes from left to right. By winning five presidential elections in a row and by controlling Congress for twenty out of twenty-two years in that time, the New Deal (Teddy Roosevelt) view of an activist government had become entrenched.
Beginning in 1952, Republicans came roaring back as “Neo-liberals”, Andrew Jackson resurrected as a Whig/Republican as it were. Let’s look at that tomorrow.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Obama--Here a Trillion, There a Trillion
Okay, the White House has quietly conceded that our national debt will rise by NINE trillion dollars over the next ten years—instead of the 7.1 trillion it had projected in January. This is in line with what the Congressional Budget Office has been saying.
That’s because fewer people are working and paying taxes (the White House predicted that unemployment would not go above 8%) and fewer businesses are making big and taxable profits. So there’s less coming in and a whole lot going out.
This can be a problem for anybody’s budget. We all have months like that—but this is years and years into the future. Now, we are told, our shortfall will be 27% percent higher than we thought. That’s like being told by the mechanic that fixing your car will cost an additional 27% more than the original estimate.
We’ve all gotten off the phone after a conversation like that and thought, Omigod. Where is the money going to come from? We can skip the mortgage this month. Or a car payment. We can eat only beans and rice for a few weeks. Maybe we can apply for another credit card?
Our government is backed up into the same kind of hole. China—which has been loaning us the money to live on for a decade—is all of a sudden scared of how much American debt it is holding. The Chinese are dumping American treasuries at an unprecedented rate.
If foreigners stop buying treasury bonds at the present rate of interest, we are going to have to raise the interest rates. That will reset all interest rates—housing, autos, credit cards, college, you name it. You want to kill a housing boom fast? Raise payments (interest rates) a couple hundred a month.
Otherwise we can raise taxes. Probably quite a bit. That cuts back consumer spending and corporate hiring. That doesn’t do a lot to encourage any economic rebound. These are the alternatives if we wish to keep spending at our present rate.
Borrow more, tax more and/or jack up the interest rate. None of the three is going to benefit the American economy in the long run. That leaves just one other option.
We can cut spending. I can hear the Republican side of the aisle cheering madly. Okay, wonderful idea. Just where and what are you going to cut. We’ve been paring back the federal side of government expenditures since the 1970s.
We’ve dumped a whole lot of federal mandates on the state and city budgets. We tell them what programs they MUST put in place—unless they want to lose even more federal dollars—and we tell them to pay for it themselves.
(This is done under a new economic theory called “Neo-liberalism”. Under it, states and cities supposedly have much more freedom of action because they are no longer dependent on federal dollars. You may want to ask how being ever more broke increases your freedom of action. Not a bad question.
(The theory is a reversion to 19th Century liberalism. [In this country, Cleveland Democrats.] Under Keynesian theory—which replaced classic liberalism--government controlled and directed society by mandating programs and paying for them. Under old fashioned liberalism, government made no attempt to direct society and it paid for little more than national defense.
(The new liberalism makes a kind of perverted sense if you understand its intent. Reagan, a classic neo-liberal, spelled it out. He has often been accused of trying to destroy the federal government by slicing off its revenue. In other words, it will eventually have to stop functioning because it can no longer afford to function. The same thing began to be done to the states and cities starting in the 1970s—a decade before Reagan.
(George W. Bush was a dyed-in-the-wool neo-liberal. He essentially out-Reaganed Reagan. His policies—and those of every president since Nixon—may finally be coming home to roost. The federal government may at last be forced to cease many of its functions.
(If the Chinese cut off our credit and we cannot afford to raise interest rates and taxes enough to compensate, Neo-liberalism—the ultimate in “laissez faire” government—will be everywhere triumphant.)
But what will the federal government be forced to cut? Some national defense items—we may no longer be able to go play war in far off climes. (That will cost us. Try oil, for instance.) Big budget items like Social Security will have to be cut back—classic liberals have wanted to get rid of that program since 1935.
Medicaid and Medicare will have to be slashed if not eliminated. (This would be an absolute Neo-liberal wet dream; forgive the crassness. I cannot come up with a better analogy.) Educational programs that are still being funded by Washington will have to go. Another cause for joy in the classic liberal camp! Air pollution abatement, clean water, national parks, medical research, funding for the arts, and other fripperies like climate change studies will have to be cut way back.
We’ll be left with a government that doesn’t do much more than keep a naval presence in the hemisphere, maintain roads needed for business, and service the interest on our HUGE national debt. Don’t be shocked. Lots of Third World countries live like that.
That will start to knock back some of the nine trillion in debt we owe. It will be the final triumph of Reaganomics—and Bushenomics while we’re at it.
Everybody will blame Obama and his stimulus package. They’ll look back to Bush, Clinton and Reagan as the good old days. But it’s the wicked, Keynesian Obama who will take the hit. I do feel sorry for him. I wrack my brain to think of what I might have done differently had someone stuck me with the presidency a year ago.
I honestly don’t have a cleverer solution. His may not have been good—but THERE WAS NO GOOD SOLUTION. He landed up to his neck in a hole other people had dug. He honestly did his best to try to crawl out of it—and to drag you and me up with him.
Would McClain have done better? He would have had the same teaspoon with which to try to empty out the ocean. I don’t hear him suggesting any miracles today—he didn’t suggest any a year ago.
You can, at worst, accuse Obama of having made a bad situation a bit worse. But he, sure as the world spins, didn’t create what’s likely to come.
That’s because fewer people are working and paying taxes (the White House predicted that unemployment would not go above 8%) and fewer businesses are making big and taxable profits. So there’s less coming in and a whole lot going out.
This can be a problem for anybody’s budget. We all have months like that—but this is years and years into the future. Now, we are told, our shortfall will be 27% percent higher than we thought. That’s like being told by the mechanic that fixing your car will cost an additional 27% more than the original estimate.
We’ve all gotten off the phone after a conversation like that and thought, Omigod. Where is the money going to come from? We can skip the mortgage this month. Or a car payment. We can eat only beans and rice for a few weeks. Maybe we can apply for another credit card?
Our government is backed up into the same kind of hole. China—which has been loaning us the money to live on for a decade—is all of a sudden scared of how much American debt it is holding. The Chinese are dumping American treasuries at an unprecedented rate.
If foreigners stop buying treasury bonds at the present rate of interest, we are going to have to raise the interest rates. That will reset all interest rates—housing, autos, credit cards, college, you name it. You want to kill a housing boom fast? Raise payments (interest rates) a couple hundred a month.
Otherwise we can raise taxes. Probably quite a bit. That cuts back consumer spending and corporate hiring. That doesn’t do a lot to encourage any economic rebound. These are the alternatives if we wish to keep spending at our present rate.
Borrow more, tax more and/or jack up the interest rate. None of the three is going to benefit the American economy in the long run. That leaves just one other option.
We can cut spending. I can hear the Republican side of the aisle cheering madly. Okay, wonderful idea. Just where and what are you going to cut. We’ve been paring back the federal side of government expenditures since the 1970s.
We’ve dumped a whole lot of federal mandates on the state and city budgets. We tell them what programs they MUST put in place—unless they want to lose even more federal dollars—and we tell them to pay for it themselves.
(This is done under a new economic theory called “Neo-liberalism”. Under it, states and cities supposedly have much more freedom of action because they are no longer dependent on federal dollars. You may want to ask how being ever more broke increases your freedom of action. Not a bad question.
(The theory is a reversion to 19th Century liberalism. [In this country, Cleveland Democrats.] Under Keynesian theory—which replaced classic liberalism--government controlled and directed society by mandating programs and paying for them. Under old fashioned liberalism, government made no attempt to direct society and it paid for little more than national defense.
(The new liberalism makes a kind of perverted sense if you understand its intent. Reagan, a classic neo-liberal, spelled it out. He has often been accused of trying to destroy the federal government by slicing off its revenue. In other words, it will eventually have to stop functioning because it can no longer afford to function. The same thing began to be done to the states and cities starting in the 1970s—a decade before Reagan.
(George W. Bush was a dyed-in-the-wool neo-liberal. He essentially out-Reaganed Reagan. His policies—and those of every president since Nixon—may finally be coming home to roost. The federal government may at last be forced to cease many of its functions.
(If the Chinese cut off our credit and we cannot afford to raise interest rates and taxes enough to compensate, Neo-liberalism—the ultimate in “laissez faire” government—will be everywhere triumphant.)
But what will the federal government be forced to cut? Some national defense items—we may no longer be able to go play war in far off climes. (That will cost us. Try oil, for instance.) Big budget items like Social Security will have to be cut back—classic liberals have wanted to get rid of that program since 1935.
Medicaid and Medicare will have to be slashed if not eliminated. (This would be an absolute Neo-liberal wet dream; forgive the crassness. I cannot come up with a better analogy.) Educational programs that are still being funded by Washington will have to go. Another cause for joy in the classic liberal camp! Air pollution abatement, clean water, national parks, medical research, funding for the arts, and other fripperies like climate change studies will have to be cut way back.
We’ll be left with a government that doesn’t do much more than keep a naval presence in the hemisphere, maintain roads needed for business, and service the interest on our HUGE national debt. Don’t be shocked. Lots of Third World countries live like that.
That will start to knock back some of the nine trillion in debt we owe. It will be the final triumph of Reaganomics—and Bushenomics while we’re at it.
Everybody will blame Obama and his stimulus package. They’ll look back to Bush, Clinton and Reagan as the good old days. But it’s the wicked, Keynesian Obama who will take the hit. I do feel sorry for him. I wrack my brain to think of what I might have done differently had someone stuck me with the presidency a year ago.
I honestly don’t have a cleverer solution. His may not have been good—but THERE WAS NO GOOD SOLUTION. He landed up to his neck in a hole other people had dug. He honestly did his best to try to crawl out of it—and to drag you and me up with him.
Would McClain have done better? He would have had the same teaspoon with which to try to empty out the ocean. I don’t hear him suggesting any miracles today—he didn’t suggest any a year ago.
You can, at worst, accuse Obama of having made a bad situation a bit worse. But he, sure as the world spins, didn’t create what’s likely to come.
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