US partisan politics - is anything different now?

[ElvisL1ves]

Just for a reminder, I looked up the text of Mario Cuomo’s “Shining City on a Hill” address to the 1984 Democratic convention, one of history’s finest speeches, to see what if anything had really changed in the interim. I’d like your thoughts as well.

Some excerpts:

But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one, where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

Not any different now, really.

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places. Maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds, maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel.

There’s a difference. This administration is using tariffs instead of subsidies. But the US steel industry is just as moribund.

maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.

Score.

You know, the Republicans called it trickle-down when Hoover tried it. Now they call it supply side. But it’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods.

Tried it, failed miserably, still paying for it, but it’s back anyway, as strong as ever.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail.

The strong, the strong they tell us will inherit the land. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact. And, we have more than once…
Their policies divide the nation - into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.

Rhetoric only, not cite-able, but is or isn’t this a fair description of attitudes even today?

We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security - their Social Security - is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.

The enemies have changed, but the attitudes?

Now we’re proud of this diversity as Democrats. We’re grateful for it. We don’t have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor.

The 2000 GOP convention wasn’t in Dallas, but they had a “Negro Night” again anyway. The Black and Hispanic Republican Caucuses in Congress have zero members anyway.

The president’s deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his promise to balance our budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the largest in the history of this universe; President Carter’s last budget had a deficit of less than one-third of this deficit. It is a deficit that, according to the president’s own fiscal adviser, may grow as high as $300 billion a year for “as far as the eye can see.”…Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think the chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they’re not too embarrassed to tell you the truth, they’ll say that they are appalled and frightened by the president’s deficit.

The deficit was gone as recently as 2 years ago. Now, just change the dates and increase the numbers.

Of course Democrats are for a strong defense. Of course Democrats believe that there are times when we must stand and fight. And we have. Thousands of us have paid for freedom with our lives. But always - when this country has been at its best - our purposes were clear. Now they’re not. Now our allies are as confused as our enemies. Now we have no real commitment to our friends or to our ideals - not to human rights, not to the refuseniks, not to Sakharov, not to Bishop Tutu and the others struggling for freedom in South Africa.

Just change a few names.

Any dissenting thoughts?

[Freddy_the_Pig]

*Originally posted by ElvisL1ves *
But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one, where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

If the government were controlled by Democrats, and pursuing different policies–and, presumably, the policies you would favor would be higher taxes and more government spending–do you think it’s likely that every person in America would be able to pay their mortgage? And that every young person could afford one? Is it the norm in this country that parents watch their dreams for their children evaporate? Can you point to another country where children usually do better, relative to their parents, than they do in the United States?

[december]

*Originally posted by ElvisL1ves *
There’s a difference. This administration is using tariffs instead of subsidies. But the US steel industry is just as moribund.

Uh, Elvis, Cuomo was complaining that the US was subsidizing foreign steel, which hurts US workers and businesses. OTOH tariffs are designed to burden foreign companies and thereby help US workers and businesses. So tariffs are the opposite of subsidizing foreign steel.

[Polycarp]

On the broader question, things haven’t changed much in 200 years. Jeffersonians demonized Adams; Federalists charged, more or less, that Jefferson would throw out the entire idea of why we moved to the Constitution in the first place. Somebody started a thread, I think in MPSIMS, with 14 parallels between John and John Quincy Adams, on the one hand, and George H.W. and George W. Bush, on the other, that is really worth reading. One party charged the other with being the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” in the 1840s. We won’t even get into the other time a President was impeached, and why. I can remember as a kid the Republicans charging the Truman Administration with being soft on Communism and coddling corrupt bureaucrats. FDR was going to sell the country to the Communists, as I recall, according to the more hard-core conservatives I knew as a child. Le plus çe change, le plus ç’est le même chose.

[ElvisL1ves]

jklann, the point I think Cuomo was making wasn’t that the Democrats had a magic wand to wave over the problem, but that the Republican leadership was not concerned with such trifling matters at all.

december - Duh. I pointed that out as a difference.

Polycarp - Good points, all. Thanks. Perhaps one could have said, fairly recently, that the tone had risen, but it doesn’t look like it anymore.