From guns to Social Security to FISA, the real majority party prevails while liberals lose out again.
There is more than may appear in President Obama’s plan to cut the social safety net in his new budget proposal. The offer, on the face of it, reflects a significant violation of a major liberal creed, discarding the strongest liberal political card and Obama’s peculiar negotiation style of making major concessions at the opening of a give-and-take session. But it also reflects the sad but true fact that the dynamics of American politics cannot be understood in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans. Party labels aside, the nation is still being ruled by what I call a majority “conservative party.”...
Some argue that the president is trying to build up a broad following so that, come the 2014 elections, the Democrats will carry the House and he will be able to push through a progressive agenda in the second half of his term. These doe-eyed optimists disregard the fact that, even if the Democrats hold both chambers, the additional Democrats elected in 2014 will largely be from so-called red (i.e., conservative) districts. The situation then will be much like it was in 2009 when the Democrats had a majority in the House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a president in the White House and yet still could enact very little progressive legislation. The reason? Very much the same: conservative Democrats voting with the GOP to extend the Bush tax cuts, cut social spending, weaken financial regulations and so on....
We have a conservative majority and a liberal minority, not two more or less equal parties. How we may change this line-up is the political challenge of the generation. But one thing is for sure: Simply voting for Democrats will not do the trick.AlterNet
How Right-Wingers Still Run America, Despite Losing Elections
Amitai Etzioni | first University Professor at The George Washington University and Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies
7 comments:
Part of the problem is the lame term "liberal". Everywhere in the world "liberalism" is used to indicate something more or less equivalent to classical liberalism, the doctrine of "free markets and free ideas" vaunted by Reason magazine and the like. The fact that Americans use this term for what they imagine to be the "left" side of the political debate reflects the pervasive confusion, ambivalence and historical illiteracy among Americans. So it's not as though if we got rid of the dominance of conservatism (whatever that is!) we would then be left with some pure, true and coherent progressive doctrine called "liberalism".
Maybe, just maybe, Obama is doing us all a favor by messing with SS and Medicare. Time at last to exit this nonsense they call the Democratic Party.
I think that the thing for progressives and FDR Democrats to do is follow what the Tea Party did quite successfully. Guarantee incumbents that they will face a primary challenge if the stray form the reservation. I suspect that this is already in the works. This is only way to end the Bill Clinton triangulation strategy of moving to the right that Clinton got from Dick Morris, yes, that Dick Morris, who was so out of touch that Fox canned him.
The above quote is pretty much 180 degrees from my reading of the situation.
@ vimothy
Maybe but Prof. Eztioni's view are far more influential than any of us here. :o
In 1958 he received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his degree in the record time of 18 months. He then became a professor of sociology at Columbia University for twenty years, serving as chair of the department for part of his time there. He joined theBrookings Institution as a guest scholar in 1978 and then went on to serve as Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980 he was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University,[2] where he currently serves as the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. In 1989 he founded the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics (SASE), an international, interdisciplinary organization, and served as its first President. He leads the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization which is dedicated to support the moral, social and political foundations of society. It is based in Washington, D.C. He also held a faculty position at Harvard Business School from 1987 to 1990 serving as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor. He served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1995. Etzioni is known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. In 2001, Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.[3] He was the founder of the communitarian movement in the early 1990s and established the Communitarian Network to disseminate the movement’s ideas. His writings emphasize the importance for all societies of a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and between autonomy and order. Wikipedia
I've never quite bought into the "Red-State conservative Democrat" myth. I live in a rural area in Oregon and come election years, I always have yuppie politicos coming around telling me how "moderate" they are. I always ask them what makes you think I was looking for a "moderate?" The liberal-conservative thing in rural areas is often mostly cultural. Does he look like me? The point is, I think economic populism could work just fine, at the retail level in "red" states or reddish districts. It's largely identity politics and shoe leather campaigning. Unfortunately, they've got to get their money from somewhere, and it ain't from us. That's the important thing and the rest of it is cop-out.
Right, they get funded by the donors and then do and say what it takes to get elected. Then, of course, they need to be funded for the next reelection so they do the donors bidding. Legalized bribery, pure and simple.
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