Information these days is chaotic, complex and urgent. It comes with the force of a tsunami…and another tsunami …and then another…and it never, ever stops.
It’s hard to maintain conceptual footing in the face of this never-ending deluge of data, reaction and messaging.
One of the first things to go is composure – that just adds to the noise and washes out useful signal.
Another is a sense of proportion – after all, when everything is treated as an emergency, how do you make sound judgments at all?
A third is a loss of historical perspective –After all, the never-ending tsunamis have washed all that history stuff away, right? When we’re thinking like that, we find ourselves treating every new news cycle as Day Zero of the Year Zero…and our politics (and political discussions) start looking an awful lot like the conversations amongst the castaway children in Lord of the Flies. Not a happy place.
Now, before the hairs on the backs of your necks start rising, relax. This is NOT meta, per se – it’s history. It's a discussion of why Democrats are a fundamentally centrist party, have been for quite some time (Like, 70 or 80 years) and why decade after decade of electoral success with this paradigm means, sorry, if you are looking for a radical departure from status quo public policy you simply aren’t going to get it with the blue team. There’s too much winning that’s happened with centrism – and too many past lessons of the dangers of betting that the country is ready for a swing of the pendulum, rightwise or leftwise.
Now, the Republicans have learned radically different lessons in their party’s history, starting with the Civil War. But that’s their story.
This is ours…and it starts with the Civil War, as well.
No one in the modern Democratic party likes to think that there is any institutional connection between the party of today and the long-ago pro-slavery, pro-plantation Democratic Party of the mid-19th century. And in 90-plus percent of instances, this is perfectly appropriate thought – the people I think of as the Jim Crow Refugees – white Southern conservatives who responded to Nixon’s Southern Strategy – are not just proud Republicans but the framers of every single thing the Republican Party has become over the past four decades – extremist conservative, reactionary, xenophobic, vengeful against the rising tide of progress that has raised all too many boats – not just their own.
Republicans crow in nationalist terms - but are they really inviting anyone else to the party? Um...no, not really. Theirs is a non-proselytizing prosperity. They want to celebrate a very restrictive definition of The American Way, then wall off everyone but an exclusive set from being members of that elect. And that membership is ever more racist, restrictive by class and reactionary in ways that frighten even the conservative movement’s participants … but all of them fall on bended knee before the altar of movement conservatism. None of them wish to lose their membership amongst the GOP-defined elect.
And they got this way from ideas that once held sway over our own party.
Yep. All of these attitudes are direct descendants from the Democratic Party of the Civil War era…obviously, the forms are quite different. After all, we live in an emerging technological society that exports industrial productivity, not a newly industrializing one that exports agricultural products. We don’t trade in slaves, once vaunted as the most significant repository of capital in the United States - our contemporary serious persons mock the very notion of human capital. You literally couldn’t sell yourself into slavery these days, even if the laws of the land allowed it – you’re too expensive to care for. There is nothing you, as a bipedal food-fueled machine, could do that commoditized labor in a global market can’t do for vastly less expense.
Now, sure, there are specialty niches for slavery in the world these days – but consider what the purported price for a slave is these days: on the order of thousands of time less per slave than the case was 150 years ago in the markets of cities like Richmond and Charleston.
OK, so we know Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House happened. We know who lost the Civil War. We know the tale of the Reconstruction…and the Jim Crow revival and the rollback of civil rights…and how kicking that crap to curb continues to be a struggle.
But never forget – you don’t have to go all the way back to the 1800s to find Democrats behaving poorly – extremely poorly. They just did it from the right flank…and that flank, for many decades dominated the discussions within the party.
Suffice to say that well into the 20th Century, Southern Democrats spent no small amount of effort both being extremely right-wing and working to convince the rest of the country that they were not really that conservative. (This approach, too, would migrate with the Jim Crow Refugees to the Republican Party).
On to the other side of the Democratic Party - Despite Lincoln’s own writings on the topic of labor, his party was loathe to embraced unions. The GOP was all capital, all captains of industry, all the time. This created opportunity for Democrats in the North to make some political hay – by hitching their fortunes to the industrial working class. Which was done. A sort of understanding came about between the two wings of the Democratic Party – you all down there do your thing, us guys up here will do ours.
Just in time for unionizing came the October Revolution, World War I, the first Red Scare – and suddenly Democrats were doing double time as a party – not just convincing voters they weren't TOO reactionary to trust with power but not TOO radical to trust at the same time! (If you ever wonder why it seems Dems get the beatdown from both sides, then wonder no longer – this has been a problem for Dems for close to a century.)
That’s right – Democrats at the national level could be neither too overt about their support for arcane social order nor for labor. This would lead to much consternation and if you think schisms with the left are bad now you should have seen things back when the Wobblies were on the move.
The party must have felt very off-balance, working its regionally-compartmented electoral strategies. Even more than now, Democrats could not win just on Southern votes – the population was far more heavily concentrated in the North and Midwest, and much of the West was a hard place to run as a Democrat. But this compartmentalization strategy would have a legacy to this day, in one key respect: the big-tent party approach. It would also lock the Democratic Party, for all time, into a mode where people who voted the same way on Election Day rarely spoke to one another, and rarely nicely when they did. (Meta – it looks like it's been on the menu for a long, long time. But I did say this was not about meta...) So long as the country was rich, there were enough slices of pie to pass around to different factions (as those factions saw fit...which wasn't always very equitably.)
Ultimately the one topic pre-New Deal Democrats never ever wanted to discuss in detail – if at all- was social policy. Southern Democrats were perfectly comfortable with public spending, so long as it did not raise African-Americans’ social or political expectations. Which brings us to the moment of truth when it was no longer possible for delegates from different states to smile s—t-eating grins at the Democratic national conventions – because there was a lot less pie to pass around, there were a lot of desperate people of all varieties to look after, and out on the margins and in the wider worlds, extremist movements left and right were on the move.
I speak, of course, of the Great Depression, the run-up to World War II, the rise of fascism and Communism to world power (and world-threatening) status, and the last time the entire American way of life was questioned, and serious alternative answers were being entertained (some of them very unpleasant ones, for not everyone looked at Hitler and Stalin with disfavor).
It is interesting that a man born of wealth and status, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would become the architect of a vast renegotiation of the social contract between American citizens and their national government. Lincoln, a lawyer from what was still an outback state in his youth, was similarly unlikely as the final arbiter of the interminable slavery question. Both Presidents led the country in times of existential danger to the Republic, not only as a nation state but as a regime. In both cases, the dangers were equally internal and external. Such times are seedbeds of change.
And in both presidencies, only so much change as had to be implemented was implemented.
FDR in theory had carte blanche to do as he would. The Republicans, closely tied to Hoover and the actual happenstance of the Crash, could only have watched in dismay. In practice the strongest resistance that Roosevelt faced was from Democrats in Congress (let me know if that sounds agonizingly familiar).
And what was that resistance about? Fear of infringement on turf – the Democrats as a party liked their compartmentalization. States’ rights (read: to box out AAs from participation in any fruitful fashion in political and social and economic life) were of course dear to the Southern delegation’s heart. And on a fundamental level, people read the newspapers, heard the rumors leaking out from Europe about the new corporatist and totalitarian regimes coming into their own there, and it terrified them to think anything even vaguely akin to such strong central-government approaches would, could, should ever take root here in America.
And yet people were destitute in large numbers, flocking if they could to the countryside, looking to eke out any kind of living they could. People who had moved to the cities looking for a better life, cities that were the signal achievement of industrialization – taken by despair and taking to the road because the alternative was starvation. Kids shipped off in train cars by the thousands. Families broken up.
Many who might have otherwise starved did not. It could have been vastly worse – and it might have been, if not for the steps undertaken, against stubborn resistance to help people even if it made them hopping mad at first.
Even in its incrementalism, the New Deal was a vast transformation – and it only took place because the alternatives – even doing nothing at all – were much more terrifying. Could a whole-hog switch away from a heavily-privatized social economy done right by America? In the context of the 1930s – it was never going to happen like that. It would have risked civil war and contemplation of harsh measures to put down insurrections – at least one of which we know was being plotted (a right-wing one, and one happily quashed) but it’s not like there weren’t Communists in America at the time. A very conscious effort was made by the Democratic leadership to thread the needle – and more than a little soul searching before, during and after World War II about just what good racism was for (read: nothing, say it again) given the horror show of the Third Reich… though even once the fight against Hitler was joined, racism persisted. Regardless, practical necessities – pragmatism – chipped away at institution that no amount of persuasion could overcome. (See: Tuskegee Airmen.)
It’s difficult to say if the United States was really such a thing – united that is – before World War II. The divisions, the strife between states, races, classes and parties – was so endemic that notions of “American” were at best vague. Yet it was more than just the war – and the oft-cited event of Pearl Harbor as an attack on all – that accelerated the rise of a genuine American nationalism. Make no mistake – accounts from that time are clear: Pearl Harbor was the moment people from Maine to California all listened to the same radio broadcast, read essentially the same headlines, and had the same nationwide reaction: WE have been attacked.
But the cultivation of a WE – that took place over decades of shared suffering, discussions (many mediated by the fireside chat broadcasts) and implementation (sometimes acerbically) of the various public works and relief programs.
We entered World War II as one nation. For that reason, I am convinced, we left World War II as a victorious one… not because we were attacked, but because, for the better part of ten years, we pulled together and pulled ourselves up. And the primary reason why this happened at all was because, in very grimace-worthy ways, the Democratic Party learned the hard lesson of NOT placing big bets on big changes in electoral mood, swinging either way.
We were an extremist right party long ago. That was sufficient lesson to not go there twice – though it would take decades – more than a century, in fact – to truly repudiate the racist, slaveholding legacy of the Civil War-era Democrats. But it taught the party caution and, I am proud to say, ultimately it taught the party its errors, and that the time had come to repudiate them completely.
That might be why the Solid South of the past is no more. But unlike our brethren on the right, we learned long ago to change from the heart – from the center – and let the merits of that action spread gently and firmly outward through the entire body politic.
It’s how FDR did it.
And Republicans hate him for it to this day.
It’s how Clinton did it.
Ditto their opinion of the Big Dog.
I’ll give you one guess what they think of the current incumbent of the Oval Office.
As for why they hate him so much, it's the same as why they hate the others above.The Republicans have taken up the banner of extremism (in their rhetoric, in defense of liberty, extremism is no vice) even as the Democrats have repudiated it, in favor of working a hard-learned, highly-successful public policy approach that’s been time-tested for three going on four generations.
And that is why the party you love to hate gets hated on so dutifully by friends and foes alike. It's not dramatic. It's not revolutionary. But it fracking works.
And, there truly is no America, no United States of America, without the Things Democrats Do. Every crumb of hyper-patriotism some right winger espouses is plagiarized on the hard work that Democrats have done, for decades now, to fashion a truly American consciousness and culture than binds all this great country's disparate threads together.
It's not easy work. It's hard work. There's an awful lot of drama to endure to get that simple message through but, damn it all, we're all Americans. Get used to it.
And even the ugly hateful shameful turns of our party history ultimately contributed to a formula that works, and works well, for Americans of every stripe.
Even the current quarrels pave the way to future gains. It's part of the grinding dramatic aspect of the important conversations we simply must slog through to set the stage for the simple, achievable, practical turning of rough stony soil into a fruitful garden for our liberty - and theirs, as well (even if our conservative brethren aren't especially jazzed at the idea of more people being able to vote and take care of their families with their heads held high). But remember - once upon a time, it was Democrats who felt likewise...people and parties do change, and for the better. Maybe... maybe... (or not) the same will in time happen to our Republican friends.
But until it does.. well, politics isn't all altruism. We're a political party. We like being in power.
But we long ago recognized the best way to hold power is to hold the interests of the public to heart.
And I just don’t see our brethren on the right being there just yet.
For that reason, I have no doubt whatsoever their 2010 renaissance will be very, very short-lived.
But they’ll learn eventually – they’ll just learn belatedy. But then again (as our once-reactionary party forebears learned) that’s how conservatives roll.
As for how we roll now - it's nothing new. It's a formula that we've cleaved to since the 1930s. It's something the Republicans once knew about (in the days of Lincoln) but the wisdom of Lincoln got away from them.
We've been worse as a party, much worse. But we got over it. We'll get better - but we'll do it a way that's not just good for America but why people now identify themselves first, if not exclusively, as Americans - the Democratic Way.
And that's a good thing.