Why This Is So! (continued III)

I concluded my last installment with, “Next time, how Reagan takes the Republican Party and the country to the right and makes this respectable, as Democrats have no answer and as the Union movement crumbles.

When the country elected Reagan I think few realized what a radical departure this constituted for the country. During all the years of Democratic ascendancy the Republican Party for the most part did not take serious issue with the direction the Democrats were taking the country. To be sure, there were many of wealth who looked upon both Roosevelts as traitors to their class and dreamed of undoing all that they stood for and all they had accomplished. But the Republican Party knew that such a position would be political suicide and so basically ran on platforms that only opposed Democratic reforms on the periphery. They argued that they wanted to do the same thing only they could do it better. They opposed some measures because ”they went too far”; they opposed others on the basis of defending states rights, they opposed others on the basis that they were too expensive and therefore fiscally irresponsible, but they never opposed the basic concept of the welfare state and that the government had a responsibility to provide a safety net, to protect the environment and to treat working people as something other than a component of industry to be treated no different than a widget. 

In other words they ran as Democrats light or as some dubbed it, “The Me Too Party. They did make some viscous attacks on Democrats, which in the short run did little damage but in the long took its toll. Beginning as early as 1947 they began a campaign to weaken the Labor movement when they passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. They attacked Democrats as being, “soft on communism” and Joe McCarthy as the leader of the red baiting Republicans dubbed the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, a label that has stuck to this day. They accused Democrats of having lost China to communism and being anti-defense.

At the same time they recognized that they had no intellectual base and while attacking intellectuals as eggheads, they systematically formed think tanks so that today right-wing think tanks outnumber liberal ones by a significant multiple. 

They vowed that newscasts would be more too their liking or they would buy them and in time all three major networks were bought by large corporations and they formed their own network and cable news channel, i.e. Fox. They took over radio as their propaganda organ.

But until Goldwater came along they didn’t represent a true alternative to the Democratic Party initiatives. Goldwater brought the party sharply to the right but in doing so he gave the Party an identity and a passion that it never had before. Goldwater was defeated in a landslide, but he gave the party passion and purpose, which Reagan inherited and exploited. This was not true of the McGovern candidacy, which only served to strengthen stereotypes of Democrats as being, in the words of Spiro Agnew, “effete.” 

At the same time the Union movement, which at one time had the almost universal support of the American people, was losing its image as the bulwark of all working people. At the height of the Union movement few people would cross a picket line. Unfortunately, the image of unions over the years, fairly or not, became of groups that supported featherbedding and had contempt for the public. This was exemplified by the by the strike waged by the Transport Workers Union in 1966, who went out on strike days before the new Mayor, John Lindsay, was sworn in and tied up public transportation for 12 days. Today unions are associated more with wealthy sports figures than with ordinary laboring people and union membership which reached its peak at about 35% of the total work force in 1945, declined to about 15% by 1995 and has held steady at that level for the past ten years. While the reasons for this decline are varied its effect on the Democratic Party and the progressive movement has been negative.

At least as important it appears that after Humphrey’s defeat by Nixon in 1969 The Democratic Party showed itself as a party that no longer had a real agenda. Whatever significant progress which was made thereafter was done by the Supreme Court (e.g. See Roe vs. Wade 1973) and the Democratic Party essentially became a conservative party fighting to keep the status quo, as a backlash against many of the achievements of the Great Society gathered steam.

Next: What Reagan did and what the Democratic Party should have done.