10-27-2016, 07:54 AM
(10-26-2016, 06:32 AM)Odin Wrote:(10-24-2016, 05:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The article is an exaggeration of the Democratic Party's contribution to trickle-down, pro-corporate/finance politics in the last 40 years. The principle honor in that transformation goes to Ronald Reagan, with the Bush's as top co-conspirators. It was they and their supporters in congress and in campaigns who led deregulation of the banks and the "free market" ideology that has caused as much tolerance for monopoly and free trade as for different races, genders, etc. Democrats have led such opposition as there has been.
There was no way that Patman could be acceptable to any genuine liberals, with his support for the War in Vietnam and segregation. Those were deal-breakers. The Bill Clinton/Democratic Leadership Council late 1980s/90s Democrats were not the product of the young liberal lawmakers from Nov.1974; they were the product of Reagan's success and Democrats' pragmatic (but unfortunate) decision to adapt to his popularity.
It's not at all an exaggeration. You are incapable of comprehending this article exactly because you are the type of college-educated big-city middle class progressive this article is talking about, who came of age during that period and is contemptuous of us "backward hicks" in Middle America. It shows in every condescending post about how you "enlightened" people on the coasts know better than us and that we should just follow the lead of our "betters". Folks like you replaced the egalitarian community-centered populism of the New Deal with a new hierarchy based on the top-down centralized rule of an intellectual elite.
I think you're wrong about that.
Eric there is a hippie. The hippies, the New Left, etc. aren't the same as the DLC/Third Wayers; the only way I think you can confuse them is if you lump all of the "Blue Boomers" into a single whole.
The only time the New Left exerted power in the Democratic Party was in 1972, with obvious results. Carter was a New South governor, Mondale a New Deal throwback, Dukakis a centrist technocrat, and the Clintons are basically struck from the Tsongas/Dukakis centrist mold.
If you want to blame a demographic for the "elitization" of the Democratic Party, blame the yuppies. I mean, sure, some of the hippie concern for alternative lifestyles and the like bled over into that mindset, but the hippies were earnest about being populists.
Really, the Democratic Party became "elitist" in an attempt to compete with Reagan for the white upper-middle-class suburban vote. That's not at all the same thing as accepting EtG's worldview.