Re: The Stupid Party
- From: "stuthalblum@xxxxxxxxxxx" <stuthalblum@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:54:54 -0700
On Oct 13, 9:32 pm, SETI2...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The Stupid Party
How the Democrats earned the epithet previously reserved for
Republicans.
by James W. Ceaser
10/22/2007
Twice during the past half century, the Democratic party has faced a
challenge from its left wing. In the late 1960s, it was the mass
movement of the New Left that rose up to defy the party's liberal-
progressive core. Following a contest of ideas and of wills, the
liberal center collapsed and briefly yielded control to its radical
critics. The struggle today is strikingly different in tone, with the
party's mainstream being bullied by a network of techno-thugs,
spearheaded by MoveOn.org. Nothing remotely resembling an idea or a
sustained argument has surfaced in this conflict, and there is no
danger that one ever will.
The Democratic party's convulsion in the 1960s can fairly be called
tragic, in that it involved the fall of something worthy, however
flawed. The party was the carrier of the great progressive tradition
that stretched back from LBJ and JFK to FDR and ultimately to the
progressive intellectuals John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Charles
Beard. These thinkers introduced the transforming idea of "social
intelligence," a concept that demanded the continuous application of
rational government planning, under the aegis of social science, to
the ills of the modern industrial age. Social intelligence was
intended to direct and accelerate the forward course of history. The
conviction that progress was certain, so long as social intelligence
was deployed, was the premise underlying the entire project.
This way of thinking was largely intact in the 1960s, when hundreds of
social scientists took leave from their universities to make the great
trek to Washington to serve their nation and party. It is true that by
this time the theoretical premise had lost its deepest support.
Charles Beard, who shared the limelight with Dewey and Croly in the
pages of the New Republic in its early years from 1914 to 1917,
famously pronounced as early as 1933 that the idea of an objective
movement of history in a progressive direction (or any direction, for
that matter) was a fiction--at most, a mere belief or subjective leap.
Beard consoled his readers by announcing his own continued adherence
to progress as a value or an article of personal faith, rather than a
fact.
For a time, this "subjective" position seemed to satisfy most
liberals. It is touching to recall the enthusiasm that "the best and
the brightest" brought with them to Washington in their vision of the
Great Society, with its stirring images of new housing projects, model
cities, clean parks, and refitted classrooms. The project partook of a
secular religion complete with a clerical class of social scientists
to minister to every problem and cure every public ill. In a
remarkable passage from his memoir, Harry McPherson, LBJ's chief
adviser and speechwriter, testified to the faith that the architects
of the Democratic programs had in "social intelligence":
People were suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of
anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well to do as much as it
did the poor. Middle class women, bored and friendless in the suburban
afternoons; fathers working at "meaningless" jobs, or slumped before
the television sets; sons and daughters desperate for relevance--all
were in need of community, relevance, purpose. . . . What would change
all of this was a creative public effort: for the middle class new
parks, conservation, the removal of billboards and junk, better
television, aid to the arts; for the poor job training, Head Start,
decent housing, medical care, civil rights; for both, and for bridging
the gap between them, VISTA, the teacher corps, the community action
agencies, mass transportation, model cities.
But the absence of a firm theoretical foundation for liberalism left
these Democrats' position increasingly vulnerable to doubts and
criticisms. Was the nation really moving in a progressive direction,
and was the Democratic party truly a force for progress? Ironically,
it was not the conservatives but a movement from the left within the
Democratic party that emerged to shake up the great liberal consensus.
For those in the party's mainstream, the revolt of the New Left and
the "counterculture" came as an enormous shock. It was as if their own
offspring had suddenly and unnaturally turned on their progenitors and
set about mercilessly to devour them. The New Left called into
question almost everything liberals had deemed to be progress:
material well-being, American power, and especially the enlightened
motives of the leaders of the American nation. Liberalism was part of
the problem, not the solution. In the words of the movement's
political manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, "What we had originally
seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era."
The moral disaster over which liberalism had presided, culminating in
the Vietnam war, was so fundamental, so interwoven into the fabric of
American life, that only a revolution could save us. The New Left
married a deep pessimism about America to an unbounded optimism about
the transforming power of revolution.
Those who look at the writings of the New Left today will find very
little if anything that stands the test of time. None of the
movement's intellectual luminaries, from Norman O. Brown to Tom Hayden
to Charles Reich, can be counted a substantial thinker. Nevertheless,
many leaders of the movement engaged in concerted argument--indeed,
felt obliged in their political action to expose the theoretical
problems of the liberal tradition and to advance their own ideas.
Thought mattered to them. Their arguments evidently had an impact,
too, as many liberal intellectuals succumbed before the theoretical
onslaught. It turned out there was no theoretical position the
liberals believed was true. The "best and the brightest" proved
lacking in conviction, while the radicals were full of passionate
intensity.
This split between the liberals and the radicals in the late 1960s and
early 1970s cost the Democratic party its confidence, and the party
has never been quite the same since. The New Left did not take over
permanently, a task for which it was morally, intellectually, and
above all politically unfit. Once it became clear--as it did in the
1972 election--that the majority of the American people had no
sympathy for the New Left's cause, especially "revolution," the old
liberal mainstream was in effect asked to step back in and serve as
the public face of the party, and it did so in the persons of Walter
Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
But the New Left didn't disappear. Renamed the cultural (or
multicultural) left, it decamped from center stage and repaired to
safer quarters in the universities, where it managed to carry out much
of its program. Inside the Democratic party, it ceded actual
leadership, but maintained an impressive power base and exercised
enormous influence on the policy agenda. Usually, the old liberals
found the cultural left too dangerous to embrace, but too powerful to
resist.
The result by the 1980s was a much weakened liberalism that was no
match for a renewed conservative movement. Sapped of energy,
liberalism had become, in Paul Starr's words, mostly "defensive" and
"oppositional." Liberals tried to stick to the catechism of the older
values, but were often pushed off course by the conflicting priorities
championed by the cultural left. Liberals lacked any clear conception
of first principles or anchoring ideas to guide them. Except for the
fact that the Democratic party remained the home of almost all of the
intelligentsia, it had now become the "stupid party" of American
politics, an honor previously reserved for Republicans. Not even the
two Clintons, with their high IQ's and a new generation of policy
wonks to serve them, could change this. The "New Democrat" thrust was
wholly strategic and practical: to move the Democratic party to the
center and to "reinvent" government. Whatever other contributions may
be ascribed to the Clinton Democrats, deep reflection about the
party's theoretical foundations was not among them.
Thoughtful Democrats have reacted to their situation in two different
ways in the last decade. Some have resisted siren pleas to embrace any
big new theory and instead have returned to what inspired the liberal
project when the liberals were on top. As Paul Starr has maintained,
"American liberals do not have to invent something new or import a
philosophical tradition from abroad. They have only to reclaim the
idea of America's greatness as their own." Democrats, according to
this view, should reaffirm the basic values of their past, but with
more confidence and a greater willingness to stand up to the cultural
left. Some in this camp reject not only the need for a new theory, but
also the need for any theoretical foundation or first principle at
all. Overconcern with abstractions, they argue, leads to rigid,
doctrinaire approaches of the kind the Republicans are accused of
embracing. Liberalism, to use the philosophical term, should adopt a
position of "non-foundationalism." By the same token, in international
affairs, liberals should take the world as they find it, not look at
it through any ideological lens. Thus, these liberals--even with their
commitment to a long list of values, from humanitarianism to equality
to global justice--often fancy themselves the great "realists" in
American politics today, dismissing the project of liberal democratic
expansion and attaching themselves to "order" of almost any kind.
In a variation on this same approach, some liberals have argued that
liberalism could stage its comeback with better packaging--or, as
social scientists like to say, better "framing"--of what they stand
for. This has been the premise of the new California School of
political thought, headed by the linguist-sophist George Lakoff of the
University of California at Berkeley. ...
read more »
This article has it completely backwards. The Repugnicans have always
been the EVIL party and the Democrats have ALWAYS been the stupid
party.
Will Rogers said it first and best: "Do you belong to any organized
political party?" "No, I'm a Democrat."
.
- References:
- The Stupid Party
- From: SETI2001
- The Stupid Party
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