While I’d maintain my earlier contention that political rhetoric is, on the whole, better than it has been for most of our history, the last couple of years have seen a new tactic: staging large protests outside the private homes of political figures, presumably to intimidate and “make it personal.” And while it’s not those evil conservatives inventing it, if it works you can bet they’ll follow suit.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/group-targets-speaker-boehner-s-small-h-house
I find this fascinating, and upon consideration, seemingly true. A lot of ‘Blue Dogs’ did lose in the last election, which I find interesting, considering that the ‘majority of voters’ are “independence” or “moderates” which is closer to what Blue Dogs are then the far left.
Which is actually the point of the whole system. Checks and balances and so forth.
I think the GOP’s ideological center-of-gravity back in FDR’s day was pretty well represented by Harold Gray, author of Little Orphan Annie, who has been described as a kind of “proto-Objectivist.” In the strip, Daddy Warbucks sometimes served as an Author Tract mouthpiece for rants about “That Man!” and on one occasion, I believe, even committed suicide (or appeared to – he came back later, of course) because FDR had been re-elected. Labor organizers are never anything but scruffy, bearded foreigners running a self-serving racket, populist politicians are never anything but “irresponsible mountebanks,” and at one point Annie, taken in by a family that treats her like a slave, brightly reflects, “Well, at least I’m not in an orphanage sponging off the taxpayers!”
Harry Truman is supposed to have noted that given a choice between a Democrat acting like a Republican and an actual Republican, people will pick the real thing most of the time. Studies have been done that show that, when progressive goals are asked about separately (and without saying “This is a progressive goal”), they were overwhelmingly popular. It was only after the poll-takers lumped them under the label of “liberal” or “progressive” that their popularity fell.
This has a lot to do with how the general public fits into it. Politicians have been hating each other forever, but it’s never been easier for the rest of us to jump on one bandwagon or the other.
Keeping with the OP’s “spark” analogy, I’d say there’s always been a bonfire burning in Washington; in the last couple of decades, the news media has helped it spread into a nationwide brush fire.
That isn’t particularly unusual. A Blue Dog in a district got elected in the first place in a district because it was a conservative district, which means their seats are going to be the most vulnerable. I don’t think it’s a matter of “given a choice between a Democrat acting like a Republican and an actual Republican, people will pick the real thing most of the time.” It’s that “a Democrat acting like a Republican” is the only Democrat who can get elected in a district like that.
My impression was that it went something like this:
a) Nixon held the Presidency for two terms; his reelection in '72 was a blowout and culturally it was associated not only with rejection of the liberalism of the Kennedy/Johnson era but also rejection of the authority-questioning war-opposing drug-using free-loving hippie counterculture; it was about the Establishment trying to bury and undo a lot of cultural change that shocked and horrified them in its upending of what had been established norms and values.
b) Nixon, of course, got impeached, Ford took over to complete the term but there was reaction in the air and Carter (narrowly) beat Ford. But only held the Presidency for one term and it was not thought to have gone well for him overall. When Reagan got eleced, and then reelected, there was a… certain belief or certain attitude or expectation among Republican-leaning voters that there had been a permanent sea-change in American politics and that the White House was going to be theirs from then on. When George Bush (I) kept it in Republican hands, that belief was reinforced, that it wasn’t just something propelled by the popularity of Ronald Reagan.
c) Then Clinton bumped off George Bush. This wasn’t supposed to happen, that damn Democrat stole our White House. Worse, he was popular. Unlike Carter, he didn’t seem out of place up there and was making policy changes. There was this very tangible sense that many Republican-sympathetic portions of the electorate didn’t consider this presidency legitimate, somehow. In the years since Johnson, they’d only been out of power for 4 years and they thought of that as an anomaly (caused by Nixon and Watergate, not by the voters selecting a liberal agenda). There were enough of them that the pandering types began to play along as if they, too, wanted to lynch Bill Clinton; behaving that way made them popular with some folks who were fervent with their backing.
d) Then Gore made a race of it against Bush (II) after the press had all but declared Bush an inevitability after 8 Democratic years. You know how that election turned out! This is where the left acquired its own set of people who felt that the game had not been played fair, that Gore had won, or that the Republicans and Supremes had bent and fractured laws to get their guy elected at any cost. Then the foreign-policy stuff (mostly beginning with Iraq, not so much Afghanistan) they became convinced that Bush was dangerous, should be impeached, tried for war crimes, etc; the failure of Kerry to knock him office did not sit well with them. (I was among them, I was very bitter about it at the time).
It has always been about the war between the rich and the poor. Union busting, siccing the police and military on demonstrators, and many other heavy handed and violent shows of force have been used against the people and workers. Some people still don’t know who the police work for. You did not see them wading into wall street and busting heads when the bankers looted billions of dollars. Hell. they were not even prosecuted.
When Reagan came in ,they decided to play hardball. The super rich were going to invest in taking over the newspaper, TV news and all media. When the internet came along it threw a screw into their plans. But in case you have not noticed, they are working hard at controlling that too. they are succeeding because most people are passive. The rich are not passive. They have worked hard at destroying unions and worker power structures. It was not very hard to do.
There is a spot in the Nixon tapes that is very revealing. The Repubs were always making promises to the poor because they felt they had to get some blacks to vote for them. But as his brain trust sat around the table they made a revelation, they don’t need them anymore. They can win with the rich and the middle class who can be convinced they will always share the American dream. That is while they are gutting the American dream for the masses. It worked. It always works.
We fight against each other while the rich organize and buy up institutions like the house and senate. We don’t need no stinking campaign laws. We need to have the laws removed so the poor corporations can have a fair voice in politics. They have been shut out for so long. Poor babies.
Yes, I was going to say it goes back to the Adams - Jefferson campaign.
Naw, it started with the New Left in the 60s when hip fascism became popular on campus and so-called progressives adopted unscrupulous and unprincipled tactics of intimidation and harassment. That was when neo-Leninism became standard operating procedure for lefties, as exemplified by the likes of Saul Alinsky, H. Rap Brown, and Abbie Hoffman.
In the modern era, and especially on the SDMB, this is quite true.
Democrats believed they were morally entitled to win in 2000. They didn’t, under the rules agreed to ahead of time, and weren’t able successfully to sue their way into the White House. Then along came 2004, and they were even more sure they were going to win - after all, Bush is badbadbad. Then he won, and by an absolute majority, which no Democrat since Carter was able to bring off (and he only by the slimmest of margins).
This bothers people, and when people’s expectations are not met, they tend to raise the rhetoric. Then in 2006 Dems grabbed Congress, and in 2008 the White House, and there was a certain amount of satisfaction that, at last, the Dems had a permanent majority - it’s the end of the Republican party, etc. Then 2010 came around. Oops.
Another factor is related to what Sam Stone mentions. Back when the left had a monopoly on the media, they could set the agenda, even to the point where they could credit themselves for bringing down a President they hated. Then along came Reagan, who handled the media rather than vice versa. They hate that. A natural reaction when your rhetoric doesn’t work is to up the ante.
It happens on the right, too, but there has only been a few years of the last thirty or so where the GOP didn’t control at least one part of the federal government, and at least two out of three since 1994. So they aren’t feeling as shut out.
Regards,
Shodan
Oooh…the hallucinations have begun. I LOVE this part of the show!
It’s the other side’s fault. Our side is filled with men and women of reason. We seek the best for this country, and wish to address the issues through civil debate. Unfortunately the other side is composed of criminals and fools wedded to a hateful lunatic ideology. If anything we’re too nice to them.
The whole thing started with the presidential race that occured in my late teens or early twenties. Before that there was hardly any politics at all. What an innocent time that was!
Remarkable. It’s as though we all learned our history from two contradictory sets of textbooks!
Quite the reverse, it was the Pubs who seemed to think they had a moral claim on the WH – especially after the Clinton years and Fellatiogate, but the attitude actually goes back a lot further than that. For any Dem to win after the Reagan Revolution seemed to them an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
I agree with the general theory that this stuff has always been around under the two-party system - and was arguably worse in the past, but is being amplified in reach by the 24-hour press and the Internet. As brain dead as Birtherism and 9/11 Trutherism are, I don’t know that it’s worse than the claims that FDR was a socialist Jew who allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, or [in the social context of the time] the Jefferson-Sally Hemmings story. (I know it’s very likely that one was true.) Birtherism and Trutherism and Vince Fosterism and such at least appear to be of a piece with those kinds of smears.
I have zero recollection of this, and I’m pretty sure that’s because it never happened. The storyline I remember in that election was that Gore was an inveterate liar and Bush was a moron. The race between them was always close and Bush’s election was never portrayed as a sure thing. Gore was the sitting VP for a popular two-term president. The weird thing was not that he made the election competitive, it’s that he could not use those things to his advantage (or felt he could not).
I think this is accurate, and it’s unfortunate so much of the rest of what you said is more nonsense about how the Democrats are sore losers.
I know some people said this, including a few people here, but I think very few people are fanatical or naive enough to think that their party is going to be in power forever. I realize Karl Rove talked about creating a “permanent Republican majority,” but he’s an ideologue and in any case that was his job. The same goes for the Democrats in 2008. It’s ridiculous to attribute those views to a significant number of people.
As far as the 'net goes - and this also speaks to Smitty’s subsequent post about computers - the maxim that all politics is local is less and less true. These days national partisan groups often throw their weight into individual local elections, so getting and keeping the support of those groups and playing to a national audience can be important even if you’re running for dogcatcher in Tofu, Oregon.
Well now that the usual suspects have had time for their entirely predictable paranoid whingeing about the big, bad right, let’s have some reality.
The simple fact is that hyper-partisanship can, to a large extent, be blamed on computers. As technology allows for more precise demographics to be calculated, more precise gerrymandering became the rule. Once you could safely make a district overwhelmingly one party, moderation became a liability. Politicians used to have to appeal to a more diverse constituency. Now that the people electing them are mostly all of a similar mindset, it becomes a race to the fringes for both sides.
Just as in economics where bad money chases out good; the loudest, most vitriolic voices grab the most attention in the marketplace of ideas. Hence, Ronald Reagan’s admonition of, “We have opponents, not enemies,” has given way to what we have today from (brace yourself) both sides.
That’s about it exactly.
The house yesterday stuck a provision in the budget that removes the paying of salaries for Elizabeth Warren’s ,Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her bureau simply protects the people who buy financial services from being fleeced by contracts that obfuscate and hide the terms under over verbose language . That is for the advantage of the banks and credit card industries that created the financial bubble that crippled the economies of the industrial countries . Who does that help, the banks or the people?
They also made a provision to overturn the internet protection deal the Dems had put in place. You just can not put regulation in place. The Repubs will fight against it, harming the people and helping the giants.