The Vanishing Middle in America

I am increasingly disturbed by what I perceive as the vanishing middle in America. Of course, many will differ as to what constitutes the middle. The media, that institution so vital to our Democracy, increasingly caters to popular opinion, and too often fails in its responsibility to inform. Too often they seek to reinforce what might be called “the conventional wisdom” without questioning its validity or even its basis in fact.

Thus the conventional wisdom on the “middle” might be those many, who proudly claim to be independents, affiliate with no party and claim they vote on the merits of individual candidates, but when we examine their philosophical orientation we find they have none, and that too often they vote on the basis of the candidates charisma, charm, or whether they once met him and found him a “fellow well met”. It was this kind of thinking that brought many voters into the camp of George W. Bush because as was said at the time of his first election, by Chris Mathews of MSNBC among others, that he was a person one would feel more comfortable drinking beer with. Is this a sound criterion for choosing our President?

As can be seen from the positions of the political parties in the Congress they are now so far apart that the filibuster has become a matter of Republican Party policy and compromise has become a dirty word. The “conventional wisdom” is that the filibuster has always been used and that it protects the rights of the minority. But like so many concepts falling into the category of conventional wisdom it is a myth. To be sure the filibuster was at one time used by devoted segregationists and defenders of the right of states to in effect legalize lynching, but it was never used by any political party as a tool of party policy. Thus in 1957 Senator Strom Thurmond, at that time a segregationist Southern Democrat (later the candidate for President on the Dixiecrat slate and finally a Republican) conducted a one man filibuster, talking against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

But while that was dramatic it was also unusual, and Thurmond was unsuccessful. It was so unusual that there was only an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. But when the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, and even though they still had a Republican President who could veto legislation, they used a record 112 filibusters, and so far in this Congress they have already used this tactic over 40 times and we still have eight months to go.

See also this article in US News & World Report.

Republican voters are so unforgiving of compromise that George H.W. Bush was defeated for agreeing to a compromise with Democrats in order to reduce a looming budget deficit which called for both spending cuts and tax increases, thus violating the party’s commitment to never increasing taxes.

Thus with no middle ground between the parties those who claim to straddle between two irreconcilable philosophies can only be compared to a person with one foot on land and the other in a boat well away from the shore and moving further away. They can only drown. They may swing elections, but they will never bring about a positive legislative agenda for they lack a political philosophy.

There is a great misunderstanding about how much things have changed. I keep hearing about how President Lyndon Johnson was able to get Medicare passed with 68 votes, but bills that have the votes to pass attract more votes than they would otherwise get. That is still true today as can be seen from the passage of the jobs bill where only five Republican Senators voted to end the filibuster but eleven voted for the bill on final passage, the idea being to stop the bill if possible, but record a positive vote for a popular bill if it is going to pass anyway.

The fact is that Johnson only had 55 votes for Medicare that he could count on or to quote from a letter written at the time “Thus if all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45.”

At that time it would have taken 67 votes to stop a filibuster, but the Republican Party never contemplated using that unsavory device. How times have changed!

And how has the media and this so called middle greeted this outrage. They have accepted Republican claims that it is the intent of the founders that it should take 60 votes to pass anything, or even to confirm a Presidential appointment, and that attempts to circumvent such obstructionism, whether by reconciliation, or any other means is in some way unsavory.

And some are even trying to pass of the Tea Partiers as a grass roots movement. Thus Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader, who more than anyone else founded and is leading the movement tries to pass them off as, “These are folks who don't care about politics and don't like politics and don't like politicians. They're skeptical and cynical about all of them…” but ignores that these are the same people, or at least the political heirs to the John Birch Society or as one article described them, they are “white, male, older, less educated, Southern and religious…”.

But even now the movement is already the subject of a power struggle between Armey, who resists its nativists impulses as led by Tom Tancredo, or in Armey’s words, “… bungling the issue in a way that would alienate much of the electorate, by failing to keep a lid on such anti-immigrant crusaders as Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman.” And Armey has good reason to be concerned about this for as George Will, one of the so-called intellectual spokesmen of the Right has pointed out, “Demography often is political destiny, and 47 percent of children under 5 are minorities. Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority.”

So where do we find the true middle?

It may or may not surprise the reader to hear that I put a claim on that designation. For if the middle is to be found somewhere between FOX and MSNBC, I fit that description. But in order not to burden the reader with too much verbiage in one post, I will defer an exposition on this claim for a few days. In the meantime I hope the readers will take the time to read at least some of my source material.