>Age 52, I saw the Nixon era up close and in person, and I'm amazed that
this
>rightwing hobgoblin of my youth could be perceived these many years later
as
>such a champion -- in a relative sense -- of enlightened thinking. How
much
>politics and the nation as a whole have degenerated since then. After all
>the student arm-waving about social justice in the '60s, it's sad
>baby-boomers weren't even able to sustain the modest advances in social
>policy made by the WWII generation.
Which is again this ridiculous idea that all social advances have ground to a halt, an almost willful wallowing in the idea of left failure when the reality is a much more mixed bag. New civil rights laws have been passed from the 1991 general civil rights act to the American with Disabilities Act. Gay rights had no legislative protection twenty-five years ago-- today, many states have gay rights provisions. While we have lost ground on welfare, we have had large expansions of the earned income tax credit. We have failed to get universal health care but have made new inroads in fuller health care insurance for children. The list goes on in most fields-- some losses, some gains, a continuting struggle.
The Gingrichites seized full power in the Congress in 1995 and tried to enact the full wacko rightwing agenda and ultimately failed-- they disabled AFDC, but failed to dismantle Medicaid and Food Stamps as they initially hoped. They ran into the reality that their is broad public support for these social policies that they could not dare face down in public view. So they continue to play their dishonest game of bankrupting the budget through massive tax cuts to leave no money for social spending-- David Stockman's original trick-- because they have given up on making the honest intellectual argument against the welfare state. They seek to win tactically where they have largely lost intellectually and morally. Honest conservatives bemoan this periodically.
One of the problems is that spending on the elderly takes up a much larger portion of the budget than it did a quarter century ago, so we need to tax a larger percentage of national income to have the same money available for non-elderly social programs. That is doable, but it's worth being honest that liberal social policy in the boom decades before the mid-70s global crisis was easier to sell with wages escalating. When wages turned stagnant, personal economic fears were easier for conservatives to manipulate into the tax revolt, racial scapegoating and other tools for conservative policy regression.
So nostalgia for Nixon is really nostalgia for the last gasp of the golden years of American wage growth-driven liberalism.
Nathan newman