Hullabaloo

Thursday, August 18, 2011

 
Lying down on the tracks

by digby

Rick Perlstein has a great piece up in TIME today responding to the fact that Obama is reportedly reading his epic history Nixonland. He assumes the President is reading it because he's interested in learning about governance in a time of great political division. But he hopes he sees the other narrative in the book --- about how Democrats win, and why.

He boils it down to this:

It concerns the two major axes upon which major national elections get fought. Sometimes they become battles over the cultural and social anxieties ordinary Americans suffer. Other times they are showdowns about middle-class anxieties when the free market fails. Normally, in the former sort of election, Republicans win. In the latter, Democrats do—as we saw in 2008, when the tide turned after John McCain said that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

I think that's right. When people are anxious about cultural change they tend to vote for the conservative GOP, for obvious reasons. When they are anxious about their economic security, Democrats are the ones with the credibility. Or they used to be. For the last 60 years the Democrats would hold up their achievements and say, "this is the deal we got for you" --- and in times of economic hardship, the American people knew a good deal when they saw one.

I would never have thought that Democrats would greet a major economic downturn with promises to cut those programs. It increases people's anxiety about their personal future and takes away the most important rationale for trusting Democrats. It's extremely odd to see this happening.

Perlstein concludes with this:

Here’s what LBJ knew that ­McGovern didn’t: There are few or no historical instances in which saying clearly what you are for and what you are against makes Americans less divided. But there is plenty of evidence that attacking the wealthy has not made them more divided. After all, the man who said of his own day’s plutocrats, “I welcome their hatred,” also assembled the most enduring political coalition in U.S. history.

The Republicans will call it “class warfare.” Let them. Done right, economic populism cools the political climate. Just knowing that the people in power are willing to lie down on the tracks for them can make the middle much less frantic. Which makes America a better place. And incidentally makes Democrats win.

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digby 8/18/2011 10:30:00 AM |