Yesterday leading necon and Sarah Palin backer Bill Kristol offered up another striking opinion piece in the platform handed to him by the Washington Post. In an essay entitled "Republicans' Day of Reckoning" Kristol responded to Obama's almost state-of-the-union speech and in a surprisingly cogent manner he laid out the reasons why the Republican Party as we know it is doomed to wither and fade away into dust.
Follow me below the fold for the explanation:
Obama's speech to Congress on Tuesday was universally hailed as a masterpiece and broadly successful effort at framing the terms of the debate for a progressive agenda that will move forward on health care, energy and the environment, and education. The successful command performance in combination with Obama's highly favorable poll numbers (and coupled with Bobby Jindal's disastrous rebuttal) has Republicans running scared.
While Obama characterized today as a day of reckoning for the nation Kristol rightly sees that now also represents a day of reckoning for Republicans as well.
Kristol's call to arms, his plan for Republicans meeting this challenge is to offer a full-throated and robust obstructionism to anything and everything that Obama and the Democrats try to advance. While there is much to criticize in Kristol's line of reasoning (mentioned already by DKOSers here and here) the most striking aspect of Kristol's rationale for obstructionism lies in a curious and tortured conservative reading (or misreading) of history:
Perhaps -- if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can't allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can't win politically right now. But they can raise doubts, they can point out other issues that we can't ignore (especially in national security and foreign policy), they can pick other fights -- and they can try in any way possible to break Obama's momentum. Only if this happens will conservatives be able to get a hearing for their (compelling, in my view) arguments against big-government, liberal-nanny-state social engineering -- and for their preferred alternatives.
OK, do you have the moments of Kristol's historical comparisons in mind: 1933 and 1965 -- the starts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term in office and the start of Lyndon Bains Johnson's first term as an independently elected president OR the start of the New Deal and the Great Society. Kristol explicitly characterizes these eras as bad for Republicans but he also implicitly argues that these epochs ushered in events and legislation that was harmful for the nation as a whole. If only Republicans then had been more organized, forceful and ideologically coherent in their thinking and tactics then the nation could have avoided the tragedies that emerged from legislative successes of FDR and LBJ.
So, I thought it might be important to actually take a look at what happened during those moments so that we might understand more specifically the kind of legislation and approach to governing that Kristol and his conservative lemmings on Capitol Hill really want this nation to stand against.
The New Deal
So FDR's 1st 100 day New Deal Legislation included:
- Emergency Banking Act
- Civilian Conservation Corps Act
- Agriculture Adjustment Act
- Federal Emergency Relief Act
- Tennessee Valley Authority Act
- National Industrial Recovery Act
- Glass-Steagal Banking Act
Without going into too much detail here you have a flurry of emergency relief programs designed to address the staggering 25% unemployment rate, provisions to boost unionization and the collective bargaining rights of workers, along with some important structural reforms to the banking system. It should also be noted that many have argued that it was in part the repeal of Glass-Steagal (advocated strongly by Republicans in Congress and signed by Bill Clinton as he left office) that lead to the current financial mess we are in now.
Presumably, though Kristol would also disapprove of the major pieces of New Deal legislation that followed. For had Depression-era Republicans offered a successful opposition in 1933 it is hard to see how other elements of the New Deal would have gained traction. Notably this would have meant no National Labor Relations Board (1934), no Social Security Act (1935), and no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and no Securities Exchange Commission.
Ok, so do you have that? Kristol is worshiping at the alter of Herbert Hoover. He pines for an alternate history where the hard working Americans of the Great Depression were not interfered with so mightily by their intrusive government and instead were left to their own creativity, entrepreneurial ingenuity and unique can-do American pluck to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and out of the economic mess they were in.
Kristol knows that the New Deal programs once passed were embraced by practically all Americans. The partial and halting safety-net that FDR established became enmeshed in American economic and political life because people actually do want their government to help out folks in troubled economic times. It took all the way up to Ronald Reagan and the 1980s before any Republican could seriously consider running against the social and economic warrant established by New Deal liberalism.
The Great Society
So LBJ's 1965 Great Society Programs include:
- Medical Care Act (created Medicare and Medicaid)
- Voting Rights Act
- Air Quality Act
- Higher Education Act
- Department of Housing and Urban Development Act
OK, are you with me here. Kristol thinks that Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act are all unfortunate pieces of legislation and that Americans would all be so much better off had obstructionist Republicans have found their voice and a tactical way to upend these acts. This is what he is really saying when he bemoans the failed opposition in 1933 and 1965. AND it is an indication of his fear (and Republicans' fears) of how a successful Obama administration might re-configure the social contract between Washington and the country.
The great irony of Kristol's essay is that the legislation he implicitly rails against (social security, Medicare/aide, the voting rights act) are among the most successful, popular, and transformative pieces of 20th century legislation. Oh, I might add a few others here and there: the Pure Food and Drug act (1906), the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), the 1964 Civil Rights Act, etc.
I would love to see a politician run for office (especially a national office) by taking a stand against such legislation:
My Fellow Americans I know these are dire economic times. So vote for me and I will abolish Social Security as we know it. I will end payments to Medicare and Medicaid. I will overturn the bothersome legislation that led to the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement. I promise that your government will cast you adrift in a churning sea of economic calamity to figure things out by yourself. Oh, we probably should have some tax cuts for the very rich too. [cue wild cheering]
As thousands of people today find themselves without a job and unable to make their mortgage payments and others still find their nest eggs have evaporated and now have only social security and Medicaid as their only trustworthy retirement benefits, yeah I bet that ending these programs would be a winning election platform.
So, I really really hope that Republicans follow Kristol's lead because it is a prescription for political party suicide. The call for obstructionism is politically tone deaf and the historical analogy suggests that Republicans are swimming against the arc of change. The exciting thing is I think that they might actually do it anyway.