What Reagan Did & What the Democratic Party Should Have Done

On January 11, I circulated my last commentary. I concluded with, “Next: What Reagan did and what the Democratic Party should have done.

In discussing what Reagan did, I could focus on the outrageous things he did such as creating a huge tax cut focused mostly on the rich, and creating a huge deficit which so shocked his budget director, David Stockman, that he resigned and wrote, “The Triumph of Politics” pointing out the irresponsibility of these policies. (Even at this late date the book is worth reading.) 

What Stockman, however, failed to understand was that there was method to this madness. For years, the right, which before Reagan was not the uniform face of the Republican Party (The Republican Party in days of yore contained such liberals as Fiorello LaGuardia, Jack Javits and John Lindsey in New York, Senator Case in New Jersey and Senator Morse of Oregon to mention a few.) was intend on destroying the gains made during the Administration of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson all of whom had put a check on the unbridled power of wealth, and created for 90% of the rest of the people a new empowerment through anti-trust laws, regulations of health, safety and the environment, working conditions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to mention a few. 

For years, repeated attempts had been made to eviscerate these programs but the public would have none of it. Now for the first time a new strategy was unfolding. Until then the cry was if we cut or abolish these programs we will be able to cut taxes. Now the motto was cut taxes, which is always popular even if the bulk of the cuts benefit few, and then faced with a crisis of debt make the cutting of programs a matter of fiscal necessity. (Democrats opposed these initiatives but they had no positive program in response. They feared the label, “The tax and spend party.)

These irresponsible tax-cutting measures were a clever plan but the country had not yet been sold on either, that large deficits could be sustained, or that cutting taxes would generate more revenue for the government. The famous Laffer curve turned out to be laughable and Bush’s pére’s claim during the previous primary that supply side economics was voodoo economics, seemed well founded. Reagan succumbed to the pressure and in 1982 an increase in taxes which repealed 1/3 of the previous reduction was signed by Reagan resulting in a boom and his overwhelming re-election vis a vis McGovern.

As the deficits grew Republican spinmeisters supported by the popular press continued to foster the misconception that Democrats were an irresponsible spendthrift party and that the deficit was not caused by Reagan tax cutting. A check of the facts reveals that The Democratic Congress during Reagan years authorized spending very close to what was called for in the Reagan budgets but with different priorities. It is also to be noted that during the Carter years spending as authorized by Congress was substantially below the period of the Reagan years. But Democrats, neither then nor now, seem inept at getting the truth out. Whether this is because of a press that has no interest in the truth, or because of Democratic ineptness is hard to determine. When the 1982 recession hit, Reagan blamed Carter and the popular press fostered this myth. To this day the myth of a highly successful Reagan administration is maintained and rarely challenged.

But the cleverness of Reagan and the ineptness of Democrats can best be found in two items that Reagan initiated. One was indexing, of tax rates. Democrats had always been the champions of a graduated income tax but inflation was pushing more and more middle class people into ever higher tax brackets thus undermining the principle of a graduated tax. Democrats never focused on this problem. Reagan who had no attachment to this principle, pushed through a clause in the tax code indexing tax brackets to inflation, and thereby became, in the eyes of the middle class, the man who protected them against creeping tax increases. This should have been a Democratic initiative but this like many others was too much to expect from a party that was suffering from arterial sclerosis and had run out of ideas.

During the Reagan years it became apparent that Social Security would face a crisis within a matter of decades unless fresh income injected into the system but it was on Reagan’s initiative that the cap on SS payroll taxes was raised, and taxes were increased on a portion of Social Security payments to people in the higher brackets, which was to be plowed back into the Social Security Trust fund, thus postponing the crisis date by decades. It should have been Democrats who were pushing for this but as I have said, Democrats have run out of ideas and initiatives. UNTIL DEMOCRATS STOP BEING THE PARTY OF CONSERVATISM AND AGAIN BECOME THE PARTY WITH SOLUTIONS, THE ASCENDANCY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT WILL CONTINUE AND ACCELERATE.

At the same time the Right has fostered a propaganda campaign that has gone on for decades that nothing can save Social Security and that the young are paying into a system from which they will never see a penny. A survey some years ago found that more young people believe in UFOs than believe they will ever see a penny from Social Security. In this kind of atmosphere it is no wonder that Bush, Jr. can work toward the abolition of Social Security and anybody who thinks that the present plan for private accounts is anything less than the first step toward that end is naïve.

The ineptness of the Democrats on this issue can best be seen by putting their emphasis on there being no immediate crisis. Well, it may not be immediate but it is looming and the sooner it is addressed the less painful it will be. 

Kerry epitomized this paralysis when during the campaign he recognized a potential problem but then ruled out all possible solutions. He then suggested a commission to come up with a plan after he is elected. It is obvious that if an increase in taxes and a reduction in benefits are ruled out there is not much for a commission to do. But Kerry was busy pandering to his audience as he did when he opposed Yucca mountain in Nevada for which he had voted. 

Bush is very good at identifying problems and then proposing solutions which would only exacerbate them, or abolish programs that need minor surgery. But Democrats and the American people will lose, until and unless, Democrats offer real alternatives and real solutions rather than only angry denunciations.

Next time: Reagan and the Air traffic controllers strike, Clinton and “the end of welfare as we know it”, and Bush initiatives and Democratic ineffective responses.  

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.

Why This Is So! (continued II)

In my last analysis of why this is so I concluded with the comment, “To me, Carter’s greatest fault was that he was a conservative in many ways and started the trend to deregulate, making it fashionable; thereby laying the groundwork for the Republican massive assault on regulations in the years to come.” But Carter had other faults, which had not so much to do with his effectiveness as President, but rather with the image he projected. 

Carter image of the Presidency was the opposite of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the Imperial Presidency or as Camelot during the Kennedy administration. Carter saw himself as a man of the people. His style was to emphasize modesty rather than grandiosity. He walked to his inauguration. He wore cardigan sweaters. He never understood that deep down the American people want their President to have the trappings of Monarchy. They feel that to the extent that the image of the President is diminished the image of the country is diminished.

At the same time Carter inherited from the Nixon/Ford administration the malaise not only of Watergate but the stagflation that was gripping the country. Carter did not have the imagination to rouse the country, to present imaginative programs ala the New Deal or the Fair Deal or even of the tax cuts championed by Jack Kennedy. Instead he spoke of the need to come to grips with diminishing expectations, something the public was not about to accept.
 
Above all Carter wanted his legacy to be the spread of human rights throughout the world, at a time when the Cold War often required us to take allies where we could find them, and where history handed him irrevocable commitments. The Shah of Iran who had been placed on his throne by the Eisenhower administration in an overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadeg, had no support in his country and had been ruling it as a viscous tyrant (while trying to modernize it, to be sure) was now dying of cancer and appealed to Carter for asylum and medical treatment in the United States. Carter found himself unable to turn his back on him both for humanitarian reasons and because of the U.S. commitment which had been made to him as an ally. Carter correctly feared that an abandonment of this man in the hour of his need would send the wrong signal to our allies. He therefore gave him asylum in the U.S. as his regime was in the process of being over thrown by the Ayatollah. But this only fueled the enmity of the Iranians toward the U.S. and soon the Embassy was overrun and hostages taken. There was nothing Carter could do other than what he did do, but the failure of the military to carry out a rescue plan was turned into Carter’s failure.

Nevertheless, as the election against Reagan approached Carter held a large lead in the polls because Reagan was perceived as an extremist who the public was wary. Reagan’s sunny personality and his slogan, “Its morning in America” reassured a wary public. As Election Day approached the polls narrowed and it became apparent that the hostages held the key to who would win the election. Carter hoped and Reagan feared a release of the hostages before the election, which meant that the next President would in effect be chosen by the Ayatollah in Iran. Either, that radical government felt that the election of Reagan would serve its interests, or as has been rumored (though never proven) Reagan cut a deal with Teheran that if they would keep the hostages till after the election he would supply them with arms, (which in fact he did in what came to be known as the Iran/Contra scandal.

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.

Why This Is So! (continued)

In my last two commentaries I first explained, why I believe that things are worse than they seem and then set forth my views as to why is so. 

Now I wish to continue my comments on why this so. All these problems were still manageable and in the election of 1968 Johnson won a landslide victory over the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. This was a cataclysmic event not so much because of the overwhelming victory by Johnson but because it marked the transformation of the Republican party from an East Coast dominated conservative party to a radical Libertarian party which in its avowed radicalism tended to frighten voters and by comparison made Johnson into the peace candidate. But events and decisions by Johnson and other Democrats worked against Democratic strengths. First by the time the election of 1972 rolled around the Vietnam War had become increasingly unpopular. As a result Johnson, after his humiliation by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, withdrew and Hubert Humphrey had the nomination within his grasp. There is every indication that Humphrey would have run as a peace candidate, but Johnson feeling that this would amount to a repudiation of his stewardship threatened to withdraw his support of Humphrey, which would have doomed his candidacy. As a result, Humphrey ended up antagonizing the peace movement, which resulted in huge peace demonstrations in Chicago. Chicago’s Democratic Mayor, Richard Daley, was not going to stand for the demonstrations and called out the riot police who were extremely hostile to the demonstrators, resulting in what many considered a police riot. The images in the media conveyed demonstrators, many of whom were rioting, as well as the brutality of the police against peaceful demonstrators, thoroughly damaging the Democrats in general, and Humphrey in particular. I voted for Humphrey, but at the time wrote an open letter to Humphrey, which was neither published nor responded to. 

The result was that Humphrey lost to Nixon (who had claimed that he had a secret plan to end the war) but who prolonged the war and caused untold casualties to American troops as well as Vietnam and Cambodian civilians. (Anyone who saw the movie “The Killing Fields” is well acquainted with the horrors that resulted. But despite this and even though Watergate was already brewing, Nixon won the next election beating McGovern the committed peace candidate by a landslide and Nixon, instead of being remembered as the man who prolonged the war and finally lost it, is remembered by many as the man who ended it.

Watergate ended Nixon’s career, but not the Southern strategy, and allowed him to pick his own successor, the Nixon loyalist Gerald Ford. Carter beat Ford, but not because Democrats were in the ascendancy or because Carter was a strong candidate, but because the smell of Watergate was still too strong in the nostrils of the electorate.

Carter is often dismissed as a failure because, it is asserted, he was too focused on details but there is little to support this other then the press’s penchant for caricaturing public figures, just as they caricatured Ford as not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

To me, Carter’s greatest fault was that he was a conservative in many ways and started the trend to deregulate making it fashionable; thereby laying the groundwork for the Republican massive assault on regulations in the years to come.

Why This Is So!

In my last column, entitled, “Things are worse than they seem,” I set forth my rather pessimistic views as to the state of the Democratic Party, (not Democrat Party) (more on this in a later essay) and the state of the progressive movement in general. I did not mention in that article two other disturbing factors which bear mention, namely that the percentage of the Latino and over 65 vote for Kerry, both declined from the percentages of the previous four years. I concluded my article with the promise that in my next analysis I will discuss why I think this is so and in a third installment I will discuss what I believe must be done to reverse the trend.

So here is why I think this is so! I believe that the seeds for demise of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, which has its roots in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt early in the twentieth century, were sown during the Administration of Lyndon Johnson and in the Civil Rights movement. Until then the Democratic Party held its dominance based on a coalition of what used to be the Confederacy whose representatives, for the most part, were segregationists and anti-union factions, and the industrial states centered on the East and West coasts and around the Great Lakes. Franklin Roosevelt, held this coalition together by never touching what he saw as the third rail of politics, namely the plight of African-American’s in the South. 

Truman endangered this coalition to some extent, when he desegregated the military, but the South, which associated the Republican Party, with Lincoln and emancipation, could not bring itself to even consider any association with this old enemy. Johnson, who but for Vietnam, might have gone down in history as the greatest of twentieth century Presidents, totally shattered this image by pushing through a recalcitrant Congress the greatest change in racial relations since the Emancipation Proclamation. What Johnson did may in fact have done more to free the Black man than Lincoln because Lincoln legacy left the Black man in something equivalent to slavery, known as “share cropping.” 

While the South was not immediately lost to the Democrats (voting habits die hard) the South gradually fell away from the Democratic party and when Nixon took advantage of this with his “Southern strategy” the die was cast, particularly when it became apparent that the party of Lincoln was now embracing the most rabid of the segregationists and welcoming them into its bosom. Strum Thurmond, who ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket was only the most egregious of these. Not only was the South lost, but since then not a single Democratic candidate for president ever received a majority of the White, or more accurately, the Caucasian vote. 

Johnson did more than this. He enacted the programs of the Great Society, which with their great appeal to the poor and most of the middle class had the potential to overcome the loss of the segregationist vote. Johnson led a revolution, which in its scope dwarfed the achievements of the New Deal. Under his leadership, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, Public Housing, and Aid to Dependent Children, to mention only the most important of his “War on Poverty.” Unfortunately, The Vietnam war not only tarnished his and the Democratic parties legacy but forced an underfunding of many of his programs, thus making many of them ineffective.

Things Are Worse Than They Seem

The election is behind us and once again the Democratic Party lost. 

I don’t know how many of those on my circulation list are Republicans but to those who are I offer my congratulations, though I think that in time you too may realize that you have made a grave error. 

Be that as it may, I here address those who felt passionately that Bush was the head of an Administration that represented the worse approach to almost every aspect of policy that one can conceive of whether foreign or domestic. It was a bitter pill to swallow and many came away angry and hostile. As for me I felt no anger, only sadness.

My sadness is enhanced because I believe the situation is even more dire than at first appears. Many take comfort in the fact that the election was close; that a relatively few votes going the other way in Ohio could have swung the election the other way; that in the election four years before Gore actually won the popular vote and but for some flukes in Florida might have won the Presidency. Unfortunately this ignores some very unpleasant facts. 

In 1977, more than half of the public (51%) identified themselves as Democrats, compared with barely one-in-five who called themselves Republicans (21%). The parties drew nearly even by the end of the 1980s and have remained almost even since then. (Source The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press) 

Since 1969 to the present time and including the period to the end of the next Bush term in in 2008, Democrats will have held the Presidency for a total of 12 years while Republicans will have held that office for a total of 26 years. 

Since 1969 Democrats held both houses of Congress until 1980. Following that period no party held the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, except for the first two years of the Clinton Presidency. Since then Republicans have held both Houses of Congress except for a short period of time when the Senate was tied following the defection of Senator Jeffords and in this election they increased their majorities in both Houses of Congress.

It is highly likely that at the end of the Bush term Republicans or more accurately right wing activists will control the Judiciary. 

Even if Gore or Kerry had won election they would not have been successful in pushing through a progressive program because a Republican Congress with the help of right wing Democrats, such as Zell Miller or even such as Senator Breaux of Louisiana, would have blocked them at every turn. Kerry’s election would have put a brake on the radical policies of the Bush Administration but it could not have reversed them.

To put it another way the tide of history is against us. In my next analysis I will discuss why I think this is so and in a third installment I will discuss what I believe must be done to reverse the trend.

At this point I would like to urge you to read an article published in the prestigious British Journal the Economist before the election entitled, "Last chance for the Democrats?"  and with the sub-title:

"The presidential election says a lot about the unequal state of America's two parties" which can be found here.