Showing posts with label American political history. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The Real Crisis in American Politics in the Ominous Age of Trump

The Major Ongoing Crisis in American Politics (and Society) and Why Virtually No One Really Wants To Honestly Acknowledge And/Or Seriously Deal With It

by Kofi Natambu

February 13, 2018

The Panopticon Review

The conventional historical narratives governing the "nature and meaning” of modern American politics (i.e. since 1945) are often brazenly distorted and stubbornly ill-informed analyses that far too often over emphasizes how the two major national political parties (and the various intensely ambitious and obsessively media focused individual “candidates and leaders” of these institutions) shape and influence our system of government and thereby impact the pervasive social, economic, and cultural fallout stemming from their involvement and participation in the normative rituals of this system. What is blatantly missing from the larger discourse however is a much broader and far more detailed and critical assessment and interpretation of how fundamentally existential factors and dynamics of U.S. history and social reality go far beyond those of self serving media personalities and careerist politicians within the structural and institutionally based bureaucratic parameters of mainstream political activity. What needs to be critically identified and examined instead is how the larger society and culture itself—its values, motives, ideas, desires, fears, anxieties, perceptions, behavior, and perspectives not only ‘influence' but in many cases actually determine how and why major decisions are made regarding what happens to the general polity via the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government.

Nowhere is this major influence and determined intervention of large demographic groups of American citizens in the affairs of government and the political economy generally felt more intensely or pervasively than in the ideological and political minefields (boobytraps?) of “race and gender” (or more accurately the omnipresent roles that the varying doctrines and practices of white and male supremacy—as well as state sanctioned xenophobia— plays in American society and culture generally at the levels of both material reality and ideological/social activity). The empirical evidence of these factors and their actual role can be found most tellingly and dramatically in the historical voting patterns of white American citizens of every demographic class group in U.S. national and statewide elections over the past seven decades. What is revealed time and again is just how consistently and incessantly these voting patterns have determined not merely the perennial outcomes of these elections but how they have in turn shaped the very form and content of the national discourse on what American politics "is and should be” with respect to the social and economic policy investment issues of labor, education, housing, energy, environmental protections, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and fiscal/budgetary management. Furthermore the ways in which these voting patterns reveal how American citizens generally perceive and thus participate in its rituals on the basis of seeking and demanding social, political, and economic status that openly advantages their relative position(s) in the structural and institutional hierarchies that systemically rules and dominates via specific demographic segments of our national population over that of “others" they deem are “not worthy” of social, political, and economic parity and equality in the society as a whole (e.g. oppressed national minorities as defined by the coercive and ideologically imposed white supremacist category of “inferior races”, and the sexist, misogynist and patriarchal domination and control of women generally).

For example it is painfully clear given the overwhelmingly well documented empirical evidence that generally speaking white American voters in particular are not by any stretch of the imagination either progressive or liberal and are certainly not even remotely leftwing in their fundamental political positions, values, beliefs, and attitudes. In fact since 1945 the United States has been quite distinctive and even unique among so-called advanced and highly developed Western nations in that such a large major swath of their national population of voters are so consistently conservative to openly rightwing politically and their voting records at both the federal and state levels as well as locally reflect this blatant fact (by contrast European nations like England, France, Germany, and Italy not to mention politically progressive and social democratic scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a far wider range of ideological and political positions and representatives than are customary in the United States. Thus it is no mystery why in the past half century since 1968 the Republican Party has dominated national politics (most ominously revealing stat: As of this very moment in 2018 Republicans have now been the occupants of the White House a commanding 60% of the time (30 out of the past 50 years or 8 out of 13 elections) and if not for the national black vote of over 90% on behalf of the Democratic Party in the specific elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012 the Republicans would have won every single national presidential election in the past 50 years!

In that light no one needs to ask how we all got here in the deadly Orwellian dystopian dungeon known as the 'Age of Trump.'

"What's Past is Prologue..."

https://www.poynter.org/news/ta-nehisi-coates-trump-and-duty-we-have-connect-dots

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump and the duty we have to connect the dots

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945

NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:

THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review

...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.

For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated 71% of the black vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.

What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.

So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020)...

Friday, September 16, 2011

Historian Cary Fraser On Unending Crises in the United States in the 21st Century

Tea Partiers in Madison, Wisconsin.

(Photo: Rob Chandanais / Flickr)

http://www.truth-out.org/unending-crisis-america-21st-century/1312898719

All,

This is an incisive, informative, and well argued essay by Cary Fraser on how and why the first decade of the 21st century has become one of the most contentious, divisive, and dangerous periods in the history of what we all know has always been a very violent and divided Republic. The paramount reason for this both now and in the past is the unyielding reactionary and deeply racist/sexist/classist nature of American politics wherein the majority of the white American electorate consistently prosletyzes and votes for solidly white conservative and/or far rightwing candidates in nearly all local, state, and national elections. For example: Since 1952--a period of nearly 60 years--white American voters have cast the majority of their votes in national presidential elections for Republican candidates an astonishing 93% of the time or 14 out of the last 15 elections! (the only exception was the national "sympathy vote" for the Texas Democrat and former Vice President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 a year following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In every other election during this historical period no other Democratic Party has ever gotten more than 47% of the white vote (which only happened once following the Watergate scandal and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon) in the election of 1976 for the Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter. Other than that every single Democratic candidate since 1952 has gotten less than 45% of the national white vote for President (Obama got 43%). What this means of course is painfully obvious and has been of deadly consequence for the country as the following article points out.

What it also means--and this is crucial to understanding how and why Obama was elected despite losing the national white vote in a landslide to John McCain--who received 55% of the votes from this demographic in 2008!--is that the vote of national minorities (especially African Americans) have been absolutely essential the few elections where a Democratic Party "liberal" actually won (1960, 1964, 1976, 1992, 1996, and 2008). Notice too that of the five (5) politicians to be RE-ELECTED since 1952 only ONE (1) has been a Democrat (Bill Clinton in 1996, an election in which he only received 43% of the white vote; the other four (4) politicians were all deeply conservative/reactionary Republicans: Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952-1960), Richard M. Nixon (1968-1976 with his VP Gerald Ford completing his truncated second term from 1974-1976), Ronald W. Reagan (1980-1988) and George W. Bush (2000-2008).

Kofi

An Unending Crisis - America in the 21st Century

by Cary Fraser

10 September 2011

Truthout | News Analysis

For much of the 20th century, the United States of America was perceived as the pre-eminent symbol of the Western vision of modernity and, after 1945, with the exception of the Soviet Union and its ideological kin, that image was largely unchallenged across the globe. However, the election of the Bush-Cheney administration in 2000, on the cusp of the 21st century, laid bare the failure of the United States to maintain its capacity to withstand increasing concern about the quality of American political life and its claim to international leadership. The erosion of American legitimacy had already become evident during the decade of the 1960s with the assassinations of four very prominent Americans - President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy - as America grappled with the domestic and international repercussions of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. However, the disputed 2000 presidential election drew increased global attention to the signs of dysfunction in American politics. The resolution of that election in favor of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, against the sitting Democratic Vice President, Al Gore, by a deeply divided US Supreme Court provided a bird's eye view of a deeply flawed American electoral system.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 2000 presidential election was an early indicator of the dysfunctional democracy that has become institutionalized in American political life and culture since the 1960s. In 1968, the victory of Richard Nixon came in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, who had become vigorous critics of the failed war in Vietnam pursued by the Johnson administration. The election also revealed the depth of popular antipathy to that war and to Johnson, which Nixon skillfully exploited to win the election. It is arguable that, since 1968, every American president has left office under a cloud of popular doubt - Johnson over Vietnam, Nixon over Watergate, Ford over his controversial pardon of Nixon after the latter's resignation under the threat of impeachment, Carter over the Iran Hostage crisis, Reagan over the Iran-Contra scandal, George H.W. Bush over the Savings and Loan scandal, Clinton over the scandal triggered by his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and George W. Bush over the strategic blunder of pursuing two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Wall Street debacle that triggered the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

For more than four decades, the American political system has been defined by a growing gap between the electorate and the presidency as a symbol of good governance and political legitimacy. It would appear that the serial crises affecting presidents since 1968 have served to entrench a "credibility" gap within American politics. That gap is now a bellwether of the American political system and it is an indicator of the political polarization that has overtaken the American political system. The fissures in American politics have been provoked by and contributed to, the escalating conflicts among the three branches of government - the legislature, the judiciary and the executive - and internecine war within the two major political parties. The "credibility" gap has also spread from the presidency to the entire political system. The shifting majorities in the Congress over the last two decades - from Democratic to Republican and back again - serve as a barometer of political discontent within the electorate. The lack of stable governing coalitions has been exacerbated by ideological conflict that accompanied the realignment of American politics after 1968 when the Southern states shifted into the ranks of the Republican Party as the region spurned the progressive civil rights policies adopted by the Democratic Party in the 1960s. Thereafter, the Republican Party became the shelter for a wide range of constituencies and groups, which resented and continue to resent the erosion of white supremacist ideas that were the cornerstones of American life and legal systems until the mid-1960s. In 1968, Richard Nixon showed it was possible for the Republicans to build a majority coalition in which Southern conservatives like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms could be key players. Every Republican victory in presidential elections since 1968 has been built upon winning decisively in the South by advocating conservative and religious themes that invoke the white Christian nationalism that has defined much of the South after the American Civil War. It is noteworthy that before Barack Obama's victory in 2008, the only Democratic candidates who won the presidency between 1968 and 2008, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were both Southern sons of the soil, who were able to compete effectively against the Republicans in the region. However, since the 2008 presidential election campaign when Barack Obama became the first African-American president, following the failures and excesses of the Bush-Cheney administration, the fissures within American political life have become even worse. The backlash against the Obama administration has spawned the Tea Party movement with roots in the deep currents of xenophobia and racism that have periodically shaken American politics. The Tea Party's campaign against Obama, its pursuit of a hysterical campaign challenging tax increases on the wealthy and its opposition to the use of Keynesian responses to the current economic crisis have allowed it to redefine political debates in contemporary America. It has been able to mount a serious effort to prevent or circumvent debates about the most effective strategy for dealing with an economic crisis triggered by a mix of greed and recklessness on Wall Street and the simple-minded economic prescriptions that shaped the Bush-Cheney administration's economic and fiscal policies. American public debates thus reflect an unwillingness to engage in serious reflection about the return to economic policies that have created severe economic disparities across the society and have succeeded in restoring a social order in which populations of color are placed at a serious disadvantage.

The Tea Party's campaign to fan the flames of hysteria that emerged from the post-2008 backlash against the election of Barack Obama and its mobilization of the populist rhetoric of anti-government sentiment has brought it electoral success and institutional power in the Republican Party. That power was vigorously deployed in the recent debates over raising the debt ceiling to push the negotiations within a hair's breadth from a default on the American government's debt. It is striking that the Tea Party has become a symbol of the rising tide of American anti-intellectual tendencies as a frame of reference for shaping American policies. The stunning display of Tea Party influence in the 2011 debate over raising the debt ceiling should give pause to both the American leadership across the major parties and to the international community, which has operated on the assumption that American leadership is a sine qua non in the international system.

The former Secretaries of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, and Timothy Geithner as the secretary for the Obama administration, apparently helped to craft a seamless web of influence by advocates of Wall Street in the early years of the Obama administration. The policies that were adopted created a climate where salvaging the financial houses remained a priority and signaled continuity with the Bush-Cheney administration. It was a message that key players in the financial sector that had lost their sense of accountability to the wider society would be allowed to continue with the illusion that American financial leadership in the global context would not be tarnished. Despite the Obama administration's protestations about the Standard & Poor's decision to downgrade the American debt rating from AAA to AA-plus, in the wake of the debt ceiling debates, it is clear that the US government's approach to debt management and, ultimately, the central role of the US dollar in international economic affairs, are under increasing question. The long-term costs of the debt ceiling debates are yet to be determined, but the Obama administration's deference to Wall Street cannot be discounted as a factor in the shift in perceptions of American international leadership. In addition, it has become evident that the American commitment to military intervention around the world as a cornerstone of its foreign policy has also raised serious questions about the thrust of American foreign policy on the global stage. More important, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been an enormous drain on the American Treasury over the past decade. Inevitably, it is becoming clear that cuts in military budgets and deployments will have to be instituted to introduce corrective economic policies that will promote new investments to prepare the American economy to be competitive with its global partners and rivals into the future. The redefinition of America's military goals and its role in the international system will also have to be considered in light of the growing military capability of other states, including China.

America's financial weakness provides no sure guarantee that it can sustain the global role that it played after 1945, and American policymakers will have to address the structural problems that arise from its military ambitions and financial burdens. The killing of Osama bin Laden has not provided an easy solution to dealing with Afghanistan, and the "Arab Spring" provokes memories of the consequences of the fall of the shah of Iran for American policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf after 1979. The American dependence upon the stability of oil exports from the region will require a redesign of foreign and military policies to deal with the new realities in a region that is pivotal in the global political economy. In effect, the crisis of credibility in American politics over both domestic politics and military misadventures since the 1960s and the increasing evidence that fringe tendencies have gained enough traction to shift the terrain of American politics in the contemporary context pose fundamental challenges to American leadership aspirations into the future. Like the perestroika era in Soviet politics when Mikhail Gorbachev sought to promote change in an ossified Soviet system, the Obama administration has been unable to make a decisive break with the past amid signs of political decay, economic crisis and intellectual paralysis. Recent events suggest that America's 20th-century odyssey as a model of Western modernity has been placed at risk. Is America's relative decline now irreversible?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cary Fraser is a historian of international relations, who teaches the history of American foreign policy, American and Caribbean history in the 20th century and the history of the African Diaspora in the Atlantic world at Penn State University. He is the author of "Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism" (Greenwood Press, 1994), and his essays and articles have been published in Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is currently writing a study of race in American politics and foreign policy in the mid-20th century.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Rick Perlstein On The Historical Necessity of A Bold, Aggressive Approach to Progressive Reform vs. the Crippling Limitations of Incrementalism

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=a_liberal_shock_doctrine

All,

Exactly three years ago on August 18, 2008 the following very prescient and prophetic article was written and published by Rick Perlstein in American Prospect magazine. Perlstein is the 42 year old author of the profound and critically acclaimed book Nixonland: The Rise of A President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2008) a 750 page masterpiece that I and many others consider to be by far the best one volume work on American politics during the 1960s ever written (and trust me I've read most of the voluminous literature on this ever fascinating and highly idiosyncratic subject). In the following piece that appeared only 10 weeks before Obama was elected President Perlstein lays out a brilliantly argued and airtight analysis of what the new President and the Democratic Party absolutely needed to do and why from the highly informative prism of modern American social, economic, and political history. That this piece so accurately and trenchantly indicated both what needed to be done and what immediate and long range consequences lay in store for us all if these suggestions were not taken seriously or were simply ignored is not only a testament to Perlstein's acute knowledge and understanding of this history but stands as a powerful and-- most importantly for us-- useful guide to what WE must do in response now that the President and his governing party have for the most part passively surrendered to the fiercely oppositional forces of the right. This article and Perlstein's book strongly reminds us that if we as citizens don't put up and support the necessary organized national fight-back that is desperately needed at this point, we will ultimately be defeated by our sworn, extremely wealthy, and highly organized enemies, either now or in the very near future...

Kofi

A Liberal Shock Doctrine

History teaches us that presidents have to move quickly to enact progressive reforms before the window of opportunity closes forever. It’s a lesson Barack Obama should take to heart.

by RICK PERLSTEIN
August 18, 2008
American Prospect

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity—which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points—our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests—to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state—banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights—had not happened fast, they wouldn’t have happened at all?

I hope so. Because if Barack Obama is elected president with a significant popular mandate, a number of Democrats riding his coattails to the House, and enough senators to scuttle the filibuster of his legislative agenda—all of which seem entirely possible—he will inherit a historical opportunity to civilize the United States in ways not seen in a generation. To achieve the change he seeks—the monumental trio of universal health care, a sustainable energy policy, and a sane and secure internationalism—he has to completely reverse the way Democrats have habituated themselves to doing business. If they want true progress, they have to be juggernauts. American precedent gives them no other way.

***

Let Franklin Roosevelt be our guide. We take for granted now one of his signature political innovations: the idea of an executive “legislative agenda,” a specific set of White House proposals, by which the success or failure of a presidency can be judged. FDR’s was the first and most spectacular. He understood that the New Deal would pass quickly or it would not pass at all. And so, politically, he yoked Congress’ willingness to pass his program without obstruction to Congress’ willingness to address the national emergency tout court.

We’re not facing a Great Depression–level emergency now. But with an unprecedented 77 percent of respondents in an Associated Press poll saying they believe the nation is on the “wrong track,” and 9 percent telling the Gallup organization they approve of Congress’ job performance, Obama is not without leverage. Ideally, Obama’s Washington would resemble FDR’s in 1935. “The stories of that period always seemed to follow the same pattern,” Thomas Frank writes in his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, “how the bright young man arrived in the city, fresh from law school, where he was put to work immediately on business of utmost urgency; how he went for days without sleep.”

One of those exhausted bright young men, of course, was bright-eyed Lyndon B. Johnson of the Texas Hill Country. The 1930s Washington culture in which LBJ thrived was not merely a function of the New Dealers’ scramble to redeem a national emergency. It was a function of the fact that they understood the reality of America as “the frozen republic,” as Daniel Lazare has called it. By the time Johnson got his accidental opportunity to occupy his hero FDR’s chair, progressives understood implicitly that the unique constitutional system, conceived to protect the minority interests of slaveholders, gives the upper hand to obstructers. This, and not the supposed necessity of trimming ideological sails to placate some notional conservative majority, guided their strategizing. James MacGregor Burns’ book on the subject, The Deadlock of Democracy, was not merely what every progressive in Washington was reading during the Kennedy years, it was what every progressive was living. The House Rules Committee, dominated by reactionary Southerners, kept Kennedy from passing even an increase in the minimum wage, let alone his campaign promise—the cornerstone of his legislative agenda—to extend Social Security to cover medical care for the elderly. It was, as historians G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot write in their fine recent study, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, “a lesson fully understood by the Southerners in Congress. They didn’t need to have majorities on their side, they didn’t need to have public opinion on their side, they didn’t need the president on their side. They only needed to have the rules on their side.”

Three accidents of history followed in quick succession to break the deadlock. First, in the most important turning point in history you’ve never heard of, Kennedy narrowly won a vote to dynamite the House Rules Committee’s role as a tar pit for liberal legislation by expanding its membership. Second, the Supreme Court’s first “one man, one vote” decision, Baker v. Carr (1962), outlawed Southern electoral systems, which, for instance, gave the three smallest counties in Georgia, with a total population of 69,800, as much voting strength as the largest county in the state, with a population of 556,326. And finally, Kennedy was shot. The national trauma was a blunt political opportunity from whose import Johnson did not flinch. “Let us continue,” he intoned in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Then, before this tragic but miraculous once-in-a-lifetime store of political capital drained away, he started passing the liberal legislative agenda that had been little more than a shadow during Kennedy’s lifetime.

Less than a month into his presidency, Johnson wrangled from a recalcitrant Congress a loan guarantee to help our mortal enemies, the Soviets, buy grain before he had been in office a month, convincing 38 legislators to return to Washington during their Christmas vacations to approve the loan. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964—the “war on poverty”—passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. Johnson advocated for a tax cut that conservatives called a budget-buster, bringing Dwight D. Eisenhower out of retirement to campaign against it. But Johnson passed that, too. Then came Medicare. Then the Civil Rights Act. “I’m not going to cavil, and I’m not going to compromise,” Johnson told Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia as the landmark bill Kennedy introduced to no avail in the summer of 1963 was steamrolling its way to completion.

In 1965 Johnson passed new legislation for preschool for poor children, college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, redevelopment funds for lagging economic regions, landmark immigration reform, a new Department of Housing and Urban Development, and national endowments for the humanities and art. He even added a whole new category to the liberal agenda with the passage of the Highway Beautification Act, the Water Quality Act, and the Clean Air Act. He insisted to his congressional leadership that the House’s bill for federal aid to education pass the Senate “literally without a comma changed,” aide Eric Goldman recalled. It did indeed, two weeks later, with only 18 votes in opposition.

His insistence on ramming through bills “without a comma changed” wasn’t a function of Johnson’s natural aggressiveness or ego (or at least not only that). It was, in the American legislative context, a necessary sort of pragmatism. The 36th president saw that his opportunity to move the country forward could end any day and that he must act before America lurched back into a state of fearful reaction. He was right. During the span of just a few weeks in the summer of 1965, Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to sign Medicare—the reform JFK had run on in 1960—and to Washington to sign the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, on Aug. 11, the Watts Riots brought down the curtain on the liberal hour. After that, he couldn’t even get Congress to approve $60 million for rodent control in the slums.

The right and Democratic centrists have taught us to think of the Great Society in terms of its failures, like the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program, which drove a wedge between Washington and local Democratic municipal administrations and supposedly empowered all manner of swindlers and “poverty pimps.” We should focus instead on Johnson’s remarkable number of broad-based accomplishments in those first 22 months. We now take for granted the notion that the elderly have a right to medical care, that the government should provide aid for education, that immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government should concern itself with clean air. It would be unimaginable to see them reversed—in part because of the constitutional inertia that made them so difficult to achieve in the first place. They are the kind of things Republicans now pretend they were in favor of all along. This is the way social change works. It is the responsibility of the next progressive president to crash through a similar set of reforms for the next generation to take for granted.

***
Conservatives understand these stakes, which is why obstructionism is the rock upon which they have built their political church. Not for nothing was Jesse Helms celebrated so unequivocally by conservatives upon his death this summer: He was “Senator No.” They know that a single well-placed roadblock, whether within the news cycle or behind closed doors in the legislative process, can stop progress cold—even in the face of a Democratic Congress united with a Democratic president and a friendly judiciary. They understand that in America, Democratic (and democratic) mandates are tailor-made for sabotage and that the sabotage must come early, quick, and hard.

This was the reliable formula that brought down such progressive initiatives as Clinton’s health-care program. But it was Jimmy Carter’s attempt to fix American energy policy that really set the precedent for failed reform. It is easy to forget how progressive hopes were soaring on January 20, 1977. A Republican president had resigned in disgrace. His replacement had proven hapless and tainted. A slew of young liberal lions had been swept into office in 1974 on the wave of disgust, and Jimmy Carter was elected to give America “a government as good as its people.” Even the pundits’ affection was in his pocket.

In retrospect, of course, we remember how badly Carter mishandled the job of pushing his own legislative agenda. He couldn’t work with Congress. He alienated key Democratic constituencies. Maybe such deficiencies won’t hobble Barack Obama, who appears an infinitely more skilled politician. But despite his skill, Obama will not be available to avoid the fact that the right also learned from the early years of FDR and LBJ. They know the lessons in their bones: Strike hard and fast by any means necessary to degrade a popular new Democratic president’s capability to pass anything big right away, because once something is passed, it might never go away. Carter started out with a bang, just as FDR and LBJ would have counseled. He immediately proposed, as Sean Wilentz records in his new book, The Age of Reagan, “an enormously ambitious legislative agenda on matters ranging from national energy policy to streamlining the federal government.” He “demanded and received emergency authorization to deregulate natural gas prices,” then handed down unconditional amnesty for draft evaders and “weathered the storm and enhanced his reputation for decisiveness and independence”—shades of the bold strokes of Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days. Through April, his approval rating was 75 percent. “For the moment,” Wilentz concludes, “it looked as if the country had found the leader it had been searching for since Richard Nixon’s downfall.” And it also looked as if that something big might happen before circumstances slammed shut the window of opportunity. The energy program, an effort Carter announced as “the moral equivalent of war,” passed the House comfortably in April. But by the end of the year, the Senate eliminated it with extreme prejudice. Partly, again, it was Carter’s poor political skill. It also had plenty to do with the fact that Republicans managed to destroy Carter’s public goodwill in his first year as president.

A literary assassin played an outsize role in this project. Former Nixon operative William Safire was ensconced on The New York Times op-ed page. Sloppy record-keeping and the sort of petty favoritism endemic to provincial banking had brought Carter’s close friend and budget director Bert Lance, a former banker in Georgia, before a Senate subcommittee for minor questioning. Safire raised a series of where-there’s-smoke-there-must-be-fire insinuations. He hinted that the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund (which “the Labor Department says corruptly bankrolls Las Vegas mobsters,” Safire helpfully reminded readers) played a role, along with, of course, the Chicago Democratic Machine—and Arabs!

Safire penned eight Lance columns over the next four months, sometimes twice a week. He repeated the original charges, dropping ones others debunked, ever implying that the charges he still mentioned were the only ones he had made all along, counting on the public’s short memory to cover the fact that his original case was falling apart. Most often, his columns baited reporters: Why were they “refusing” to investigate Lance like they had hounded past Republicans? More cunningly, Safire larded the columns with less-than-subliminal linguistic references to Watergate. “Lancegate,” he implied, was exactly the same. He even declared a memo by the Manufacturers of Hanover Trust was “the ‘smoking gun.’” (Readers were counted on to vaguely recall that the “smoking gun” tape that had brought down Nixon two years earlier also involved the derailing of an FBI investigation.)

It worked, at least where it counted: in the court of political cartoons. Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herblock gave Carter a “Checkers Award,” after the infamous cocker spaniel Richard Nixon used to save his hide in a famous 1952 speech. Syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant went with a more straightforward depiction of Carter as Nixon: “Stonewall it. … They’re out to get us.” Lance resigned; the Justice Department handed down indictments. Even though Lance was eventually completely exonerated, the damage was done. Carter, like Obama, had run as a “different kind of Democrat”—pure, unsullied. So saboteurs like Safire had a clear challenge: “prove” that Carter was just another impure politician, if even on the shakiest of pretexts.

That, of course, is what the right will try on the next Democratic president. They will take the possibility that Obama might break through the icy seas of conservative stasis and try to render it an absurdity. There is now an army of Safires and a Republican Party full of Senator No’s. Recall William Kristol’s famous memo enjoining congressional Republicans to refuse to deal with President Clinton’s proposed health-care reforms. “The plan should not be amended,” he wrote, “it should be erased.” The right might not be at its strongest, but it certainly understands that the American system favors fell swoops, on offense as well as on defense. The system provides conservatives with opportunities for obstruction in profusion—no matter how low their approval ratings.

***
Barack Obama has not run as a policy maximalist. By and large, his big proposals have all been in that safe spot where liberals can’t quite get mad and the Beltway wise men can’t quite get scared. He has advocated for not-quite-universal health care rather than single-payer, and promised tax cuts, not massive new social outlays. But this shouldn’t worry progressives. There may be no better way to achieve an operational liberalism than to appeal to America’s rhetorical conservatism. That, after all, was how the balanced-budget-promising Franklin Roosevelt ran in 1932 and how the let-us-continue Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964.

But when it comes time to govern, an ingrained habit of incrementalism may be a very profound problem indeed. Stopped in our tracks time and time again in attempts to assure Americans the basic social rights taken for granted by citizens of every other industrialized nation, progressives have made virtue of necessity—we have learned to think of strategic incrementalism as a positive good, even an end in itself. If, on the morning of January 20, 2009, Barack Obama should wake up to find himself president, with 60 senators and 250 representatives, plus 60 percent of the public firmly in favor of passing universal health care, would his instincts direct him to ram the legislation through as quickly as possible? No one can say for sure. This attitude is so dormant in progressive thinking that it’s hard to know whether we can revive it.

Weisbrot and Mackenzie’s The Liberal Hour is a very aptly named book: a splendid evocation of just how evanescent American moments of reform truly are. They are not unlike an action movie starring Bruce Willis, who has 60 minutes left to defuse a time bomb before everything blows up. Take immediate action, and you might just get reforms that had seemed impossible the day before but are impossible to imagine America without just one and two generations later. Take it slow, however, and you might not get anything at all.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008) and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001). He is a senior fellow and blogger at the Campaign for America's Future.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Obama, Race, and the Future of U.S. Politics

A Political essay by Bob Wing

Bob Wing is a writer and organizer in South Los Angeles, and former editor of ColorLines magazine and War Times newspaper

Barack Obama’s victory is indeed an historic breakthrough for U.S. politics. In a country that enforced a system of legalized racism until just 40 years ago, and that was founded on white supremacy, black slavery and Native genocide, the election of the first black president is cause for jubilation.

The significance of Obama’s victory is accentuated by the fact that not only is he an outstanding individual with liberal politics and a community organizer’s instincts, but he is also leading a potentially historic realignment of U.S. politics.

Such realignment could not come at a better time. Beset by a deep economic crisis, now is the time for progressive structural changes to the international and national socio-economic landscape. But such changes will be impossible without enormous political strength.

Whether President Obama can help orchestrate a turnaround of the economic crisis now facing the country, indeed the world, will be revealed in the coming years. But he has already made a major contribution to changing the pattern of U.S. politics, a pattern that was set by slavery and enabled conservative Republicans to dominate the presidency for the last forty years.

However, the development of a mass progressive movement with its own agenda will be critical to consolidating that realignment, and to winning systemic change in the year s to come.

The Color of Election 2008

The enormity of Obama’s victory has led to much hyperbole about the end of racism and the advent of a colorblind society. This notion deserves closer examination lest Obama’s victory become an obstacle, rather than an opening, to future racial progress.

Much of the press has focused on celebrating the willingness of many whites to elect a black president. But just how colorblind is the U.S. electorate?

Despite the fact that the Republicans had failed miserably, even on their own terms, and run the country virtually into the ground, whites still voted for McCain by 55 to 43. In stark contrast, blacks voted for Obama by 95 to 4, Latinos went for Obama by 66 to 32 and Asians backed Obama by 61 to 35. (1)

In 2008, the white vote was virtually identical to election 2000 and continued to exert a strong conservative pull on the electorate while the votes of peoples of color and young people of all races headed powerfully in a more progressive direction.

The color lines, in life and politics, are alive and well.

Indeed, peoples of color made the biggest shifts in their voting between 2004 and 2008. It was they who proved decisive in Obama’s victory. Left to white voters, John McCain would have won a landslide twelve-point victory.

African Americans voted for Obama by an astonishing 95 to 4, a fourteen-point swing for the Democrats compared to 2004. (2) Many a pundit has d ismissed this result as a knee-jerk racial solid arity vote for Obama. How soon they forget that the majority of black voters favored Hillary Clinton for the many months leading up to the Iowa primary.

Much of the mainstream media declared that Latinos were too racist to vote for Obama. They pointed to the large Latino primary vote for Clinton as “proof.”

Latinos resoundingly put the lie to these cynics by voting for Obama by 66 to 32, a huge sixteen-point swing to the Democrats compared to 2004. Even a 58 percent majority of Cubans in Florida, traditionally solidly Republican, went for Obama.

Latinas led the way toward Obama, casting 68 percent of their votes for him and only 30 percent for McCain. Latino voters under 30 went for Obama by 76 to 24, perhaps indicating the direction of future Latino voting patterns.

Asians swung Democratic by fourteen points over 2004, voting for Obama 61 to 35. The political trajectory of Asian voters has been striking. In 1992, Bill Clinton received only 31 percent of the Asian vote. Since then Asians have steadily moved Democratic, reaching a highpoint this year.

So much for the pundits who believed that Latinos and Asians would never unite behind black leadership. These results amount to a massive progressive motion by peoples of color.

Meanwhile the white vote swung toward Obama and the Democrats by five points compared to 2004. White voters under 30 were the only age group among whites to favor Oba ma. They voted for him by 54 to 44. All=2 0other whites voted for McCain by about 57 to 41.

The most anemic swing was made by white women, who voted for McCain by 53 to 46, moving a mere four points toward the Democrats, This was particularly disappointing in light of their ten point swing to Bush from 2000 to 2004, a change that accounted for Bush’s victory in that year.

White men favored McCain by a bigger margin, 57 to 41, but this represented a sizable nine-point swing to the Democrats compared to 2004 when they voted for Bush overwhelmingly, 62 to 37.

Overall, Obama carried the white vote in only 18 states, mostly in the Northeast and the West Coast.

The Changing Color of the Electorate

From a long-range point of view, the change in the racial composition of the electorate as a whole is perhaps even more important than the recent shifts towards the Democrats. In 1976 whites constituted 90 percent of the vote; in 2000 they still accounted for 81 percent. This year the white share of the vote fell to 74 percent, quite a dramatic change in a short time.

Just as surprising, the main group increasing its share of the electorate is not Latinos, but African Americans. Blacks constituted thirty percent of all new voters in 2004, and an even greater mobilization this year brought them to 13 percent of the overall vote, a thirty percent increase over 2000.

The sheer numbers of Latino and Asian voters have risen significan tly over the same period, but their percen tage share of the overall vote is virtually unchanged since 2000: nine percent for Latinos and two percent for Asians. (3)

Surprisingly, the percentage of the electorate that is under thirty years of age, regardless of color, also remained stable, at 17-18 percent. However, these voters increased their Democratic vote by 12 points compared to 2004, voting for Obama by 66 to 32. Young voters were also the main corps of Obama field organizers and their energy gave the campaign much of its movement-like quality.

Historic Realignment?

The true maverick in the 2008 campaign was not McCain who pursued the same old reactionary Republican Southern Strategy, but Obama whose bold strategy of fighting for the South and the Southwest, indeed all fifty states, ran counter to all previous electoral “common sense.”

His success was both astonishing and history making. He won the southwestern states of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and the former Confederate slave states of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, as well as former slave states Maryland and Delaware. The Latino vote was decisive for Obama in Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

In all, nine states switched from red to blue from 2004 to 2008: Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa. Obama lost Missouri by the narrowest of margins.

The historic nature of these victories is brought into sharp relief by the ac companying maps.

The first is=2 0the map of slave versus free states and territories just prior to the Civil War. The other is the electoral map of the 2004 election. Depressingly, they are almost identical: the former slave areas are almost universally Republican and the former free areas, with a couple of exceptions, are Democratic.

Almost 150 years after the abolition of slavery, the political patterns wrought by the “peculiar institution” still shape U.S. politics. Barack Obama’s campaign may mark the beginning of the end of this historic pattern, with tremendous implications for the future of U.S. politics. The main window into this change is the Electoral College.

Electoral College: a Pillar of Racism

It is not so surprising that slavery set the pattern of U.S. politics if one knows that the Electoral College itself was a product of slavery.

The Founding Fathers, led by slaveholders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, invented the Electoral College out of thin air to serve their interests.

They codified the notorious idea that slaves were non-humans, and thus deserving of no constitutional or human rights. The one exception to this rule was the stipulation that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person, solely for the purpose of determining how many congressional representatives each state would be allotted. The three-fifths rule vastly increased the slave power in the House of Representatives20and therefore the Congress.

Th e Electoral College, in which each state receives a number of Electors equal to their congressional delegation, was invented as the institutional means to transfer that same pro-slavery congressional allocation to determining the presidency. Slaveholders held the presidency for 50 of the 72 years before Abraham Lincoln, who was elected in 1860, became the first U.S. president to oppose the expansion of slavery. The South, used to wielding political power through the selective enumeration of slaves, promptly seceded.

Since the end of slavery the Electoral College has remained a racist and conservative instrument. It has given the Republicans a running head start to win the presidency ever since reactionary Southerners switched en masse from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in protest of the 1960s civil rights legislation.

As then-Republican strategist Kevin Phillips put it in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are.”

Based on that switch, the Republicans adopted the notorious Southern Strategy that has enabled them to dominate the presidency for the last forty years. The Republicans learned to skillfully fashion a winning combination of the solidly Republican white southern voters with conservative and moderate whites in the Midwest and Southwest, through barely coded racist appeals.

The Southern Strategy has been (20) the glue with which the Republican Party20has united powerful corporate capitalists to conservative white workers, farmers, gun aficionados, small business owners and suburban homeowners.

Negating the Southern Black Vote

The racial bias embedded in the Electoral College system is the structural basis of the Republican’s Southern Strategy. The winner-take-all Electoral College system ensures, even requires, that about half of all voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored. (4)

About 53 percent of all blacks live in the southern states, and in 2000 and 2004 they voted about 90 percent Democratic. However, in those elections white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state and every border state except Maryland.

As a result, every single southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While whites voted 54-42 for Bush nationally in 2000, southern whites gave him over 70 percent of their votes in both 2000 and 2004. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black vote for the Democrats in that region.

The Electoral College result was the same as if blacks, and other Democrats, in the South had not voted at all.

Similarly negated were the votes of millions of Native American and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana and Texas. Further, the peoples of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam, territories ruled by the U.S., get no Elector al College votes at all. The tyranny o f the white, conservative majority prevailed.

Compounding the reactionary and pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College, the system gives as much as three times as much weight to the mainly conservative and white Republicans in the rural states compared to states with large, racially diverse and majority Democratic populations.

For example, Wyoming has a little more than 240,000 voters and has three Electoral College votes: one for every 80,000 or so voters. By comparison large population states like California have about one Electoral College vote for every 220,000 voters.

Thus, the Electoral College system violates the principle of one person, one vote, drastically undermines the impact of the black vote and gives the Republicans a major advantage in presidential contests. Its abolition should be a key part of the progressive agenda.

Final Thoughts

Although the political dynamics of each of the nine states that turned from red to blue in 2008 need to be examined closely in their own right, it is likely that a minimum of three or four will move decisively into the Democratic column. A number of others that swung Democratic in 2008 have moved from being solidly red states to battleground states.

The solid Republican South and Southwest may be a thing of the past. In the wake of Obama’s hard-won victories, the Democrats have no excuse for essentially conceding these regions, as they have done for decades.

This will qualitatively shift the Electoral College math. Since 1968 the Electoral College has clearly favored the Republicans and the Democrats had to pull off an upset to win. Indeed, Bill Clinton won only because of the third party candidacy of Ross Perot. In the future, it may be that the Electoral College math will favor the Democrats, and that the Republicans can only win by staging an upset.

Just as important, for the first time in U.S. history the two political parties clearly represent the two broad wings of U.S. politics. At the national level, the southern reactionaries no longer hold the Democratic Party hostage.

This augurs well for the possibility that an Obama presidency may be able to gather the political strength to undertake a major restructuring of the economy in favor of working people and peoples of color in general, and to reorganize our foreign policy in a positive direction.

However, there is still a major political element missing from the political equation: a powerful independent peoples’ movement. In the 1930s the union movement, and especially the newly formed, radical CIO, was key to the New Deal. In the 1960s the civil rights movement was the driving force of the War on Poverty.

Herein lies the principal task of progressives in the coming period: to forge powerful independent, mass movements and organizations that can help shape the Obama coalition in a positive way. Our relative success or failure at this task may determine the future o f the U.S. and the world every bit20as much as President Obama himself.

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Footnotes

1. Unless otherwise noted all voting figures are drawn from the National Exit Polls for 2000, 2004 and 2008, as reported by CNN.

2. I calculate the “swing” or “change” in the vote in the traditional but rather confusing manner as the change in the vote differential. For example, in 2004 blacks voted Democratic by 88 to 11, a 77 point differential. In 2008, they voted Democratic by 95 to 4, a 91 point differential. The vote differential thus changed from 77 points to 91 points, so I report a 14-point “swing” or “change.”

3. No national exit poll numbers are available about Arab or Native American voters for any year.

4. Only Nebraska and Maine allocate their electoral votes more or less proportionate to the vote rather than on a statewide winner-take-all basis.