The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(01-29-2020, 08:28 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-29-2020, 07:05 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(01-28-2020, 11:13 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(01-28-2020, 07:23 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(01-28-2020, 05:47 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The way I read it, there was a progressive era from FDR to LBJ.  The conservative policies dominated between Nixon and at least Trump, crashing America’s greatness.  The impeachment of Trump and the ‘OK Boomer’ meme hint that another progressive time may be coming.  Even if so, it is not here yet.

I do believe the reds are more independent, could survive a bad time cleaner.  On the other hand blues work together better, could make a good time better.  The latter seems more likely.

-- l would argue progressive from Roosevelt 2 Jimmy Carter. Jimmy was the last old school dem Prez.  lnterestingly he backs Bernie, who despite calling himself a democratic socialist is really an old school dem, like from back in the 60s & 70s

I would extend it to Obama.

Obama may have an admiration for the New Deal, but he could not wave some rhetorical version of a magic wand and bring it back. he could at most prepare Americans for an updated version suited to an America in which the original constituency for the New Deal is practically obsolete, and technology and culture no longer fit the 1930's. Obama could at best co-opt Reagan-style rhetoric and Eisenhower-style behavior in support of some much-needed reforms that the Master Class thwarted with deep-pockets support for reactionary causes.

If Obama is to have any role in shaping any new era it will be as a portent laying the intellectual and ideological foundation. Trump will be (according to the Skowronek cycle) an unambiguous demonstration of how not to do things.

I would say the democratic presidents through the see saw unraveling period all had a respect for the New Deal approach and pulled towards restoring America to its past greatness.  They all failed.  They each may have succeeded at something or another.  Cinton 42 tried to balance the budget.  Obama passed health care.  Yet while they might moderate a little part of the conservative agenda, they might undo a little bit of the damage done by the conservative presidents between, they did not overturn the overall mood of the country.  If many of them relieved the US from a disaster of the conservative excesses, the people voted right back to trying to make the unravelling memes work.

Eventually the conservatives will stop trying and we might see another progressive period.  Judging from Classic, not yet.

From another thread:

Quote:pbrower2a

(01-23-2020, 07:26 PM)jleagans Wrote: Great read!

https://medium.com/@mishaley/how-history...04e6ac19bd

Excellent! For those who despair of the offensive, catastrophic Presidency of Donald Trump, this gives hope. 

I see Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter without the intelligence, integrity, moral compass, and personal decency: without those, Jimmy Carter would have been an unspeakable nightmare as President. 




Maybe it is not comfortable to compare Barack Obama to Richard Nixon; if anything I would more likely compare him to Dwight Eisenhower for being similar in temperament and style and having squeaky-clean administrations. Obama proves to have been more of a hawk than Eisenhower -- then again, Osama bin Laden was still an infant when "the torch has been passed to a new generation". It could be the difference between a Civic type who thought wrongly that he could get away with almost anything (Nixon) as long as he got the desired results and a mature Reactive (Obama) who knew that he could get away with practically nothing -- as House and in turn Senate majorities for the other, increasingly-authoritarian Party made clear. That is a generational difference.  

Going back to the establishment of the Constitutional union:




The Founding era may be unclear, but it is safe to say that 

(1) each political era ranges from 32 to 48 years
(2) two of them make a generational cycle out of Howe and Strauss
(3) each political era begins with either great promise (Awakening era) or great threat (Crisis era)
(4) the last leader of the era is a tired or pathological expression of what started the era.  

So Washington establishes the norms of the Republic and John Quincy Adams is as far as it can go before a populist, Jacksonian era that never tolerates a meaningful challenge to the cancer of chattel slavery. Jackson was a colorful populist and James Buchanan tried to keep the Republic from (imploding? exploding?) by appeasing the slave interests (Hey, Northerners -- you can keep your liberal ideas, but you must enforce the reality of slavery by arresting fugitive slaves!) Lincoln won the Civil War and restored the Union by treating the defeated South in as kindly a way as possible; the industrial basis that gave the North a compelling edge in the Civil War fostered the rise of Gilded Age plutocrats who fostered economic and technological progress that those plutocrats arrogated for themselves in a winner-take-all system. By the time of Teddy Roosevelt, America needed to drop its social myopia and its tolerance for bad business (child labor, horrible patent medicines, free-for-all for polluters)... and got the change. Had TR not done that, then maybe Taft would. Theodore Roosevelt's modest reforms petered out with the return of politics of the disastrous Harding-Coolidge-Hoover return to a "New Era" best compared to another Gilded Age with a bit more gilding. That Little Gilded Age ended with something commonplace in the Gilded Age -- a speculative boom that led to the very nasty economic meltdown that always ensues. (Paradoxically FDR took much from the Progressive Era and enhanced it, so he may be more a throwback to Theodore Roosevelt than to Woodrow Wilson... but that is practically a quibble.

The oddity about Nixon seemed that he was more a throwback to Teddy Roosevelt in his agenda than to Gilded Age or New Gilded Age politics. Reagan started America in earnest into the neoliberal ethos in which enrichment of economic elites would become the sole economic purpose while deprecation of the intellect (ensues) -- fine. If one wanted to be a dolt in the Individualist Era, then such was as much an expression of individualism as was indulging oneself like an aristocrat on executive compensation... or having a huge audio-video collection.

If Dubya seems like a telescoping of the three awful Presidencies of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover into eight years with a costly and inconclusive war thrown in, and Obama seems to have tried to be another FDR... Trump is beyond any question a moral and political disaster. Trump is Ronald Reagan (even down to possible senility) with far more personal cruelty, less regard for legal niceties, more contempt for learning and expertise, and no loyalty except to his own self esteem. Trump has been appeasing some nasty dictators overseas much as Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan appeased the slave-owning planters; I do not see that going well. 

With the exception of McKinley (who came close to being a one-term President, if through assassination instead of electoral defeat), the last Presidents in these cycles are one-term Presidents, Presidents associated with something tired (J Q Adams, Carter), unworkable (Buchanan, Hoover) or corrupt (Trump). Corruption and incompetence on the scale of Donald Trump is rare at the federal level in America; even at the state level it is not good for staying in office. We have no precedent for Trump for his scale of corruption, cruelty, and incompetence. 

Maybe I lack the imagination to see how Trump can redeem himself and establish himself as a pattern for the next forty or so years... but it is now about time for a President who can break some of the objectionable patterns of American life, make life good for more Americans, and create a consensus that completely repudiates what the Individualist Era became -- starting with a flawed, if transformational President (Reagan) and ending with a sick parody (Trump) of the transformational President of the era. America will want an antithesis of Trump very soon if not already. The generational constellation is ill suited for any maintenance of exploitative individualism of the Trump style.

If I follow the thread -- both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were in no position in which to shake things up politically. The individualist, profits-first ethos was extremely strong. Clinton could do little more than piecemeal change to the overall pattern, and Obama tried to get a national health-care system  but that is all that they got. Foreign policy? Both were orthodox, so neither changed anything -- both fully endorsed the Bush 41 Presidency as a model for foreign policy for a lack of viable alternatives, which was safer than what we now have. (If anything, Obama is the conservative on foreign policy and Trump is a dangerous radical. 

Trump, according to this model, is an unmitigated disaster -- but nearly inevitable. He may have gotten a worse result than Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, or Ted Cruz -- but any Republican elected in 2016 was going to offer at best a tired version of the Reagan agenda. Hillary Clinton might have extended the Obama 'session' four years only to be defeated in 2020 for a Republican to win the Presidency and have a solid hold on the House and Senate at least in 2021 and 2022 just as things go catastrophically wrong -- such as a 1929-style crash. 

It could be that the bigger a disaster that President Trump is, the more ready Americans will be for a sharp change at the least in domestic policy and economic patterns. The idea that nothing matters except the power, indulgence, and gain of economics elites leaves pointless hardships for most -- at the time in which Millennial parents might accept poverty as a necessary reality for creating capital but supreme cruelty to the children that they cherish. Trump is the downer, the hangover, of the Individualist Age.  It is better to give up excessive drinking because of hangovers than because of cirrhosis...  

The past greatness of America was that anyone who worked diligently and with integrity could live well. Although America experiencing a catching-up by other countries, things over the last forty years or so have gotten worse for most people, especially in contrast to Silent or first-wave Boomer parents. Most of us are making the sacrifices necessary for economic 'greatness' without getting the rewards. For someone who has spend almost his entire adult life in the Individualist era (the past 3T and the current 4T), elderhood could get very bleak. Poverty in a society that measures human character solely by his spending power is a nightmare. No technological fix can solve that. If I could live up to the economic promise that I thought that I had in the late 1970's, I could live with the technology and most of the economic patterns (like paying high retail for stuff) of the 1950's.  No microwave ovens, no personal computers, early stereo, vinyl discs? Better those than poverty. (OK, some of the medical technologies and the absence of leaded gasoline, as well as Interstate highways, are good things -- and minority rights, better treatment of women and the handicapped, and LGBT rights are not to be abandoned; they are simply right.   The greatness of America isn't castles and palaces of the elites; it is instead that workers are not obliged to live like livestock on behalf of exploiters such as those aristocrats who owned the castles and palaces due to their exploitation of the masses.