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Originally Posted by DVaut1
The bolded seem like the important claims here. There's a lot hinging on what you slipped in there.
What I'm hearing is: New Deal politics were bad and failed as prima facie, but there's a lot riding on the conclusion there. Did they inhibit growth? Hey, maybe? They valued equality of distribution as a priority instead. I have said my piece lately about romanticized nostalgia for the era but the United States and Europe were able to beat back the forces of socialist and revolutionary and extremist appeals with precisely the policies you're describing as failed.
Needless to say the solutions hearken back to older solutions but yet again we're confronted with an actual sort of old problem, where wealth is increasingly stratified, the middle class is feeling significant downward pressures on their labor value, the wages of segregation and inequality fomenting the old public passions. It's not a bad idea to go back to the past and determine how prior generations dealt with the problem.
Which brings up the important point: I'm not sure what we're comparing the failures to, either. The unquestioned successes of the last 30 years? I grant cheap technology abounds and lots of Chinese, Indians and others from southeast Asia have been rescued from abject poverty but OTOH look what they've done in Europe and the US: the rise of an angry populist response which seeks to undermine the global liberal order we sort of cherish, which empowers a narcissistic authoritarian sociopaths like Trump to power. Insert The Road "for the last time, son, there were emails" jpg meme with "for the last time, son, there was a 90% marginal top rate!" as we all flee America's cities irritated from nuclear war brought about by nascent authoritarian movements and we have to re-explain to our children the utter misery and failures of the total failures of New Deal politics.
At least we confront the problem. Say what you will about how mean FlyWf is to white guys on the internet, how disdainful we are of the teeming masses of angry whites trying to turn America into a walled fortress and unleash the cops on black people, but least we ultimately recognize the solution isn't the status quo. You had a funny quip about how the neoliberal globalist new Clintonian triangulocentrist stab-in-the-back Democratic party elite politics, but it was at least a movement that had ideas about how to respond to the manifest inadequacy of socialism, but what's the bobman/max/neoliberal solution to the manifest inadequacy of the status quo?
I don't pretend to have a clear understanding of how to save the liberal democratic order, let alone how to get voters to back the plan of salvation. I have a sneaking suspicion that the fact that everything is ruinously expensive these days (healthcare, education, infrastructure construction, housing, government services, etc.) is a big driver of populist discontent, but even if that's right, it's not a policy solution and it's certainly not a winning political platform. It's a tough question, which is why I wish people were thinking hard about it and trying to come up with innovative answers.
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Second, and as others mentioned, the "popular rejection" of those policies only arrived when the right tied them civil rights and painted the picture they were extravagances being lavished on black people. Taxing the wealthy and corporations remains incredibly popular. Dirigiste investment schemes in things like mass transit remain popular, up until right-wing infotainers remind them black people might get on the mass transit and start roaming where they don't belong, and the public appetite wanes. The mocking sarcastic part of me might now make yet more hand-waving gestures back to the New Deal Era and and praise the champions of unfettered capitalism that rolled back media and public decency regulations, now we have Rush Limbaugh and scads of right-wing infotainers, thank goodness for invisible hand provided there. But that's a digression.
It is a digression, but it's a bit irrelevant to complain that these policies lost because of racism. Racist voters still get to vote, so you still have to deal with them. (Unless, I suppose, you can convince someone to censor your least savory political opposition, which will work great until the GOP takes over the levers of censorship.) Another point to be made though is that racism, though deeply baked into the political scene, is not an immutable force. After all, the New Deal passed (with the support of Southern racists) and enacted lots of programs that help minorities today. I'm reminded of this great Noah Smith piece about homogeneity, which includes the suggestion that racial difference is socially constructed as a
response to competition:
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So we have big genetic differences not even being recognized in some parts of the world, and tiny, possibly undetectable genetic differences being the basis for genocide in other parts of the world. I'd say the thesis that "Diversity + Proximity = War" is, at the very least, suspiciously incomplete.
A better general theory, I think, is that most competition happens between groups of people that are pretty similar. Similar people have similar interests and desires, which naturally leads them to compete. But when people fight en masse, they need ways to organize themselves in order to motivate soldiers to kill others who look and act like them. Thus, they exaggerate any small differences they can find. "You're German, superior to those inferior Slavs; exterminate them!" Etc.
Under this theory, the "#whitegenocide" that some alt-right people fear - a term they use for race mixing - is actually the exact opposite of real genocide. Under this theory, race mixing happens when high social trust causes group differences to stop mattering, while genocide happens when low social trust causes previously insignificant group differences to start mattering.
If that's the right interpretation,
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Lastly, in a later point you suggested that what we're (and by we, I think you mean the neoliberal movement) suffering from is a failure of political entrepreneurship, not policy entrepreneurship, then pointed to how Matt Ygelsias is a personal hero because he has all these great ideas to sell to the public which were really just Ted Talk marketing metaphors about urban centers as engines of economic progress and opportunity. Which I think is supposed to stand in contrast with all the simpleton left ideas like raise the minimum wage and rent controls, I mean where are our white papers and podcasts and think-pieces and explainers, huh? Yet again I feel like it's the left that actually learned the lesson and accounted for new information here. Upon witnessing the right-wing accumulate more power and culminate it in the deeply wonky technocratic "we'll build the wall and make Mexico pay for it" and promising to Repeal ObamaCare Death Panels, I wonder aloud if you got the exact right diagnosis (suffering from a failure political entrepreneurship) and the most self-evidently contradictory treatment plan that will simply further the disease (more Ygeslias!).
Simplicity is a feature. Simple stories and narratives with a few clearly articulated principles is superior than inundating the public with policy details. Getting back to the New Deal, FDR sold America on simple stories with little details: Relief, Recovery, and Reform and a New Deal for the American people. When Alf Landon portrayed FDR as an elitist proto-socialist, he didn't respond with a lecture to people about the necessity of the Federal Crop Insurance and Drought Relief Service and the Soil Conservation Service because the demand for commodity crops produced overcultivation of marginal arid land. He simply communicated some simple principles about helping common people, emoted about the Dust Bowl, laid out some very broad policy outlines with almost comically little detail. All the actual technocractic wonkery happened elsewhere. It's not a virtue to need an explainer, policy details are pedantry for most people, and Matt Yglesias IS the political entrepreneurship failure. I think what the left has collectively learned over the past 10 years is NOT to fall down that rabbit hole, and that's what the populist right and Trump has demonstrated as well. What you're championing is actually bad politics; what you're criticizing (lol all this simplicity, it will never work!) is a virtue. Obviously between us chickens in the roost here, lots of this stuff is simply blue sky fantasies. Bear in mind significant amounts of people voted for a guy because he promised to build a 50 ft tall border wall. Fantasies and shared fictions we know aren't practical are how normal people commiserate and signal shared desires, it's actually an effective communication strategy. Most people aren't greatly desirous for a bunch of pedantry and details. The left does well by disabusing their need for detailed policy roll-outs and instead pivot to more broadly emotional appeals that simply rely on principles to tell the story.
I'm a little surprised that you are pointing to the ever-deepening intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party as a role model for the kind of change you want to see. Part of what worries me is the fear that the Democrats will follow the path the GOP took during the Tea Party era and end up where the GOP is now. I hear you objecting that the GOP just swept national elections, which is great for GOP politicians, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the party itself is hard-pressed to deliver anything for its voters, despite having lots of formal power, and it's largely down to having run on a policy-doesn't-matter basis for the last decade. I mean, the party's signature issue is Obamacare repeal, and they can't do it because no one has an Obamacare repeal that the party actually supports. The idea that the GOP is going to do tax reform or infrastructure is an absolute joke. And then there's the whole Trump thing.
Running on the idea that policy doesn't matter may or may not win you elections, but it certainly will cost you the ability to implement policies if you win. You can pine for FDR all you like, but he was able to enact whatever he wanted during the New Deal era because he had overwhelming public support. If your approach is going to get 60% of the presidential vote, sure, fine, go for it. In the modern era though, that's not going to happen, and a party that isn't built on good ideas is not going to implement good policy.
