Er, “Your position”. I hate wayward apostrophes.
Essentially, yes. What problem do you identify - beyond the one your libertarian/partisan blindness tells you, which is its very existence?
Been there, done that, ya know. It adds a cost burden to the recipients. That’s a cut.
Etc. Consider that everyone else just might be right, and you alone might be wrong. Bush didn’t do that, and, as blindly loyal as you are, you don’t even consider that it’s a possibility.
To keep up what we’d been doing. It was working fine. But that’s been explained to you ad nauseam without effect, either.
Of course not (and it’s getting hard to keep this GD-worthy). Nor did I mention that, either - where the hell did you get that straw man? Getting the chief murder conspirator and bringing him to justice is necessary, of course - but since Bush doesn’t think so, neither do you. :rolleyes: There is no “end game”, of course - there is only constant carrot-and-sticking and constant containment of threats.
Of course I see some unfairness in any regressive tax. One solution is to raise the cap so it is, if not progressive, at least less recessive. There are obviously other ways to do that. I already mentioned that - why would you disagree, except perhaps out of blind hatred? What, btw, do you think of eliminating Bush’s deficits to reduce pressure to borrow from the trust fund - is that another example of your highest principle being sheer partisanism, which in your case is extremely unusual?
You’d been doing so well recently. Don’t fuck it up.
The national Democratic Party needs some things, like a new and improved spine in its leaders. One thing is doesn’t need is to pay any attention to David Horowitz. Or for that matter, Sam Stone.
ElvisL1ves: I’m through talking to you. You can’t learn to play nicely.
Sam, I agree with everything you wrote to me except about SS. While I don’t think the Democrats are being anything but reactionary and obstructionist, I also don’t think Republicans are being even remotely sincere about this issue being an invitation to discuss ideas. I’m still not clear what their idea for fixing SS is. Private accounts is a “solution” that makes about as much sense as declaring that you can now pay taxes into a special government fund that will be used to buy food stamps for you. If its all about people wanting to invest their own money, cut their payroll taxes outright, period.
This isn’t really the place to debate Social Security, but I think it’s pretty hard to maintain that the he is just trying to start a debate when he has pre-framed it and pulled a bait-n-switch about the insolvency of the fund to a program which has nothing to do with addressing that insolvency.
That’s all fair, and I agree with you. For whatever reason, Bush is refusing to talk about private accounts for the reasons he wants them, and instead is trying to sell them as a ‘fix’ for social security, which they are not. What they are is a way to move a downstream liability upstream, which will cost more now and save some later. But mostly, they are part of his ‘ownership society’, in which he is trying to restructure social programs so that the ownership of the assets is held by the people instead of the government. He thinks this is a good thing (and so do I, at least in principle), but if so, that’s what he should talk about.
No, Sam, you don’t hear any ideas out of the Democrats any more – no more than you heard new ideas out of the Republicans from the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution. And the “left” you hardly hear at all, because, compared with the right-wingers, centrists and liberals, it hardly has a voice. But if a leftist faction or left-liberal coalition took over the Democrats, as Horowitz purports to fear, then I think you would start hearing some new ideas. Many of which I’ve discussed in this forum, and you can find more on the websites of the “leftist” groups Horowitz names and, even more, those he doesn’t.
He isn’t, of course – taking out one man will not cripple a decentralized organization like al-Qaeda. But Saddam Hussein’s regime never had anything to do with “what is going on.”
Which is exactly the point … the pubs, and certainly the true-believer conservatives – were the next thing to politically irrelevant that whole period.
Um, the “Contract with America” stuff was part of the so-called “Republican Revolution” of 1994, and is widely credited for what was called “a tidal wave of Republican victories” in Congress and in gubernatorial seats.
So yeah, in fact, the Republicans have moved to the right, and it’s worked pretty well for them politically. (What didn’t work well for them in 1992 was the recession and Bush I’s perceived cluelessness about the economy.) I think it’s a bit misleading to point to the failure of some of their wilder schemes as evidence that there’s been no overall rightward shift among the Republicans.
I do tend to agree, though, that of recent years (excepting religious right-wingers like Ashcroft and the gay-marriage amendment flap, and similar PR issues), the Republicans have been less flamboyant about embracing social conservatism, and more dedicated to the pursuit of crony capitalism. At present it’s less about ideological fervor, as in the Contract with America days, and more about strategic maneuvering.
Neither would Bush’s plan, though. According to his proposal, you have to annuitize at least a minimum amount of your savings upon retirement, and any unused portion of it disappears when you die. For the poor, that minimum amount would cover everything they’ve got. There is no currently proposed modification of SS that would “allow the poor to pass saved wealth on to future generations”, and IMO it would be just about impossible to design such a modification and make the system solvent. Talking about how privatized SS accounts would be a great asset-builder for the poor is basically snake oil, as far as I can see.
And for good reason, furt - those “ideas” had been rejected. But we changed - the success of the New Deal, and even more so of the attitudes and senses of responsibility it entailed, enforced by the WW2 spirit, led a large part of the population so far out of poverty that they forgot about it. The average person with his own house and a stable job and a car and a guaranteed pension had enough upward mobility, thanks to the Democrats, that he could actually identify more with the wealthy. The party offering “We’ll cut your taxes, so what if the government goes into debt, it doesn’t mean anything, it’ll turn out all right somehow, and anyone further down the ladder got there by their own fault so don’t worry about them” got to be attractive to those who had lost their sense of social responsibility. Many of us got complacent, and at some point we’ll pay the price.
So how *do * you “sell” responsibility to each other and to future generations, against a movement that says you don’t have to, facts notwithstanding? Do you let things collapse first and try not to get blamed? Or do you simply hammer home the message that the policies that have worked so well for so long are right for everyone, appealing to people’s *higher * nature instead of their selfishness?
P.S. Translation from Stonese: “You’re right but I can’t make myself admit it to you”. Nothing new here.
I would agree with some of Horowitz’s analysis but with a very different twist. I think what these new groups are doing is trying to pull the Democrats back toward the Left, mainly on economics issues, after the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) pulled them to the Right on these issues in order to try to make the Democratic Party more amenable to corporate donations.
And, I think to the extent that this is helping to pull the Democrats away a little bit from the corporate feeding trough and toward a more grassroots fundraising strategy, that is a most excellent thing.
Note that there is zero…absolutely zero…evidence that I know of that the Dems lost because they were too far Left on economics issues, despite what the libertarian-leaning conservatives on this board would like to believe. Rather, the evidence is that many people who agreed more with the Dems on economics issues voted for the Republicans instead because they agreed with the Republicans on the social issues. (Of course, the Republicans also got the more corporate and libertarian-leaning folks too…But, let’s face it, those folks are always going to tend to vote Republican in the end. Libertarians may want the government out of both their bedroom and their wallet, but they seem to vote more with their wallet in mind.)
And the Pubs didn’t become politically relevant again until they dragged the party hard right. My point is, the Dems should learn from that example and go hard left, willingly. And they should take a lot of other lessons from the conservative resurgence, too. It didn’t just happen. It didn’t result from something predictable and inevitable like a “political pendulum.” It resulted from a conscious, directed effort that started about the time Goldwater got creamed in 1964. It took a lot of work and money, over the course of decades, by millionaires like Scaife and Mellon who set up right-wing foundations and think-tanks, and the ideologue scholars who staffed them, and millionaires like Murdoch who set up right-wing media outlets, and the journalists who worked for them, and above all footsoldiers – grassroots activists of various right-wing factions who worked hard to take over their local Republican Executive Committees and to get out the vote for Reagan or whoever, swamp their local newspapers with letters-to-the-editor, make a mighty noise in the blogosphere, etc., etc. (As I said in the OP, Wooldridge and Mickelthwait tell the story very well.) Substantially what Horowitz accuses the “Shadow Party” of trying to do, and we can only hope; but it hasn’t really taken off yet.
Actually, there is such a proposal in the air, although it’s not a modification of Social Security and not something you’re likely to hear from either party in the next few election cycles. See these links: http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=1146; http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=section&secID=14.
OK, you seem to be talking about since 1994; I was thinking 1964. I agree that the GOP hasn’t moved a whole lot to the right since 1994, but that’s because they were almost to the edge of the flat earth by then.
USED to be?? You mention Falwell further down; he’s repeatedly been invited to the White House by this Administration, even though he’s not only yesterday’s news, but a fruitcake to boot. James Dobson of Focus on the Family is considered the Religious Right’s main influence-wielder these days, replacing Pat Robertson, who in turn replaced Falwell during the Bush I Administration.
Worked, didn’t it?
So they overreached on a few specifics. Hasn’t seemed to reduce their power much.
Say what?? They didn’t have the Presidency to lose, in 1994. When they lost the Presidency in 1992, Bush Sr., who wasn’t a flaming right-winger, was President. And they may have lost a few seats in Congress in 1996, but far fewer than they won in 1994. 1996 was an adjustment, not a repudiation of the Gingrich Revolution.
Maybe you missed 1998. A high-tech lynching of a President over a blowjob (yeah, I know, it was the lying, not the sex; I’m looking for the NK-Pakistan-Libya thread and coming up empty) wasn’t exactly moving toward the center, especially when they went full-speed-ahead with impeachment after the voters repudiated the idea in November 1998.
Other than the fact that isolationism is out of style on the right at present, the names have changed, but the same stuff is being pushed. Including vouchers.
You’ve got a funny idea of ‘center’. Cutting taxes on wealth and unearned income, while leaving the working American’s tax burden more or less unchanged, isn’t centrist. Gutting Social Security isn’t centrist. Bush’s judicial appointments damned sure aren’t centrist. The bankruptcy legislation wasn’t centrist, nor was the gutting of the right to file class actions.
So, what’s he changed his mind on, in the past few months?
No, the Clintons know what it takes for them to be elected.
Please compare the number of Democrats in Congress in 1991 v. the number of Democrats in Congress in 2001. (Or 1991 v. 1999, or 1993 v. 2001, or however you want to do it.) Bill Clinton did NOT build up his party; he left it weaker when he left office than when he arrived. He did nothing to give it a focus and a direction in the wake of 1994, despite being President for another six years.
You do realize that you’ve just said, “This is what the Republicans did to win. So let’s do the opposite!” 
Regards,
Shodan
No. What the Republicans did to win was move away from the center and in the direction appropriate for their party. I recommend the Democrats do the same.
Plus, in our case (and unlike the Republicans’), our moving that way would be the best thing for the American people. So we get to have our cake and eat it! 
If the principle you want to propound is “The further from the center, the more likely Americans are to vote for you”, I find that hard to believe. If it were true, nobody would vote Democratic, they would all be members of the Socialist Worker’s party, and Pat Buchanan would have picked up support as he moved further to the fringes.
Entirely true. The more marginalized and extreme the liberal parties in America, the better for us all!
As I have mentioned in other threads, I warmly encourage the Democrats to move as far left as is recommended by many Dopers. By all means - go for it!
Regards,
Shodan
I was wondering if anyone esle noticed that. It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s only movement away from the center that counts, and not the DIRECTION that the party moves.
BrainGlutton, per your OP:
While I can’t say for certain that this is how Horowitz means it, “Shadow” does not necessarily mean a secretive organization. It’s also used in the sense of a “copy” - a shadow that does everything the body does. In this context, a “Shadow party” would have (whether officially declared or merely tacitly acknowledged) its own party structure and hierarchy while remaining under the umbrella of the Democratic party which has said structures of its own. The term “Shadow government” has been used sometime to refer to governments-in-exile such as those of Tibet, or a set of government positions that non-governmental organizations might assign to members in anticipation for eventually assuming governmental responsibilities, e.g., the PLO, the ANC pre-1993.