>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.
-Initiatives of Bush I . . . .
Again- Presidential-oriented bullshit; Bush I fought like hell to restrain the 1991 Civil Rights Act, passed to overrule bad Supreme Court interpretations of earlier laws. The impulse and support came overwhelmingly from Dems in Congress, just as Renhquist's vote leading the terrible Supreme Court decisions on civil rights came straight from Nixon.
Which emphasizes looking at Supreme Court picks (and don't mention Blackmun who was supposed to be a conservative when picked and went renegade against expectations). New books and articles have analyzed how deliberate Nixon's pick of Rehnquist was as a way to fuck liberalism-- and Nixon's dead hand lives on in the chambers of the Court, striking down large swathes of civil rights and other laws in the name of states rights and takings. Unlike the EPA or most other laws mistakenly attributed to Nixon, Rehnquist was solely a Presidential initiative and is much more truly emblematic of Nixon's racist, rightwing politics.
>The list goes on in most fields-- some
>losses, some gains, a continuting struggle.
-True, but can you really deny that there have been more losses than gains, -and the tendency is towards even more losses, over the period since Noxon -left office?
It's not clear to me that the losses outweigh the gains, either in the US or in the global context, in a world where back then blacks and latinos had barely wrested even the basics of equality and Nixon was propping up death squad regimes in places ranging from Greece to Iran to Latin America. If you look at local politics around the world, from the South of the US to developing nations, democratic progressive organizations unquestionably have a freer voice and have pushed some amazing initiatives. There are still big problems, but blacks, women, latinos and others unquestionably have more rights and equality in our workplaces today than they did twenty-five years ago. I grew up in New Jersey and was born in Cleveland and I am acutely aware of very real progress that has been made on environmental cleanup around the country-- I still find it unbelieveable that people can fish in Lake Erie today.
What is true is that the national and global economic environment turned harshly against new progressive initiatives. Global economic crisis in the 70s led corporations to accellerate globalization of their operations and new technology made it easier to coordinate farflung operations, creating a new environment where the threat of runaway shops could limit the basic ability of local policy to restrain corporate abuses and raise taxes.
Here is my point in the discussion-- you end up comparing apples and oranges if you don't measure politics against the context of changing challenges. At the height of US economic supremacy and before the recent beginnings of accelerated globaliazation and the "age wave", it was relatively easy for liberals to pick off money through taxes for Great Society style programs. With globalization, taxing the wealthy and corporations had to be balanced with the threat of exit of the money to be taxed to other countries, while the age wave meant that taxes on wages were increasingly needed for aid for the eldery.
And the Right organized tactically for power in a period when the Left largely abandoned the struggle; the Left dissolved into endless single interest organizations at exactly the point when the Right built its increasingly unified "Counter-Establishment" (in Sidney Blumenthal's phrase) and its grassroots build institutions like the Christian Coalition, where the left failed to create a viable alternative in the Rainbow Coalition.
When I wrote:
>but the tactical advance of the GOP into control of Congress,
>largely due to the movement of southern white conservatives into their
>column.
Justin responded: -And the New Democrats and the DLC had nothing to do with it. Nathan. -Your arguments would be more persuasive if they were not so relentlessly -partisan.
Yes, and my point is that it is the relentless partisanship of the Right in the last few decades and the abandonment of partisanship by the Left that helped the Right take power.
Who were the "New Democrats"? They were Democrats out of power for the first time in over three decades tryng to figure out how to get it back; they were not southern racists like the old conservative wing of the Dems. Most of them were far more liberal in their politics than JFK and far, far more liberal than the Democratic Congressional leadership of the 1950s. As has been noted, people like Richard Gephardt, with a nearly 100% pro-union rating, were founding members. They were unquestionably the rightwing of the Democratic Party, which shows how much more liberal the party had become, since the old rightwing had actively opposed unions, opposed civil rights, opposed the right to abortion, and so on.
Clinton was a new Democrat, typical in being a former McGovernite and extremely liberal governor in his first term, before being thrown out of office in the harsh environment of the late 70s. He tactically moved to the right in the belief that this was the only way to survive. And I won't go into my list of reasons why I think Clinton was by far the most liberal President of the post-WWII period, despite his failures on NAFTA and welfare reform, other than to note that a similar list of failures by other Dems is far, far worse (Truman- launching McCarthyism inside government, the Cold War; Kennedy- rightwing tax cuts, starting Vietnam; Johnson- Vietnam, Vietnam; Carter- deregulation; Volcker; beginning military buildup).
The "conservatism" of New Democrats reflected a politics of the swing vote. Clinton passed his initial budget plan by ONE VOTE in both the House and the Senate and couldn't pass his initial job-creating stimlus package; compare that to the supermajorities of Democrats Johnson had to work with in passing the Great Society. And after he lost even that thin working majority in 1994, he also twice vetoed welfare plans that were dramatically worse than the final plan he approved, which was itself far worse than the plan he actually supported initially, which had some very liberal elements. And shut down the whole government to stop the Gingrich whole-sale assault on liberal policies.
I know folks think that black folks praising Clinton as the best President of the 20th century are fools and dupes, but I frankly think they know more than the intellectuals on this list.
>So nostalgia for Nixon is really nostalgia for the last gasp of the golden
>years of American wage growth-driven liberalism.
-Fair enough. My point is that Nixon was, however unwillingly, a liberal. -Clinton and Gore were not.
Which is where your definition is completely screwed up. Nixon fought liberal policies and watered them down where he could, appointed righwing judges like Rehnquist, and supported racist coalitions through Kevin Phillips "Southern Strategy" that would soon bear fruit in Reagan's election.
Clinton fought rightwing policies and watered them down, appointed liberal (and at worst moderate) judges, and worked closely with emerging latino, black and other progressive forces, which are now bearing fruit in places like California and the southwest.
The issue is intention and environment. I don't agree with Clinton on many of his strategies, but I recognize that he is far more liberal than JFK, Carter and, yes, Nixon. Given a harsher political environment, the legislative results may not be as good, but the real question is what they would have been absent the person in question.
Remove Nixon and his veto and the legislation passed would have been far more liberal. Remove Clinton and his veto and the 1990s would have been a nightmare of rightwing regression under the Gngrich agenda.
So it's pretty clear to me who was more liberal.
-- Nathan Newman