"Pushing" is a wrong metaphor here - a better one is "chasing after."
I write:
I don't think it's a matter of "push" OR "pulled." And the formula "push" AND "pulled" doesn't even do justice to the complexity of the situation. You of all people, Mister "path dependency," should recognize this. Circumstances (i.e. courageous civil rights mobilization) compelled the Oval Office under Kennedy and Johnson, at first reluctantly and then more proactively, to eviscerate the Jim Crow order in the South. Divested of the "solid South" and given the antiquated and retrograde nature of the US electoral college, it became clear by 1972 (when Nixon swamped McGovern) that the Democratic Party could not win national-level elections on the basis of a social democratic lite (very lite) political platform. This became apparent just as the global-systemic conditions for social democracy (lite) were drying up anyway, with myriad forms of Third Worldist independence and militance on the wax in the mid-to-late 1970's (Vietnam, frontline states, Nicaragua, Iran, the NIEO getting a serious hearing, and "Benedict Arnold" TNB's showering free credit on spendthrift NIC's). As has been repeated ad nauseum on this very site, it was post-1978 Jimmy Carter who set the stage for Reaganite revanchism, especially in the monetary and foreign policy arenas (appointing Volcker, letting Brezezinski run amuck in Afghanistan, etc.). By the early 1980's, with recesssion and the super-dollar euthanizing what remained of the US' Fordist industrial base and hence the last remnants of the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition, the stage was set for the rise of the DLC. I don't see how a pithy concoction of "push" AND/OR "pulled" captures this.
John Gulick Knoxville, TN
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