Who else would like politics to be humdrum?

[Eric the Green]

(01-27-2022, 05:30 PM)Anthony Wrote: Democracy should not be 51 wolves and 50 lambs deciding what's for dinner - and the only reason that we are in this situation is because of the New Left of the 1960s and the backlash they provoked, which directly led to Reaganomics, which has remained palpably intact for four decades despite having been debunked as totally fallacious.

And a comparison to the situation that we're in and the situation that Ukraine was in 80 years ago is eerily analogous: In the wake of the Holomodor, when the Nazis facilitated Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Ukrainians regarded the Nazis as the enemies of their enemies, and therefore, their friends.  This in turn led to the Ukrainians regarding the Jews as the enemies of the enemies of their enemies, and therefore, their enemies too - which is why the Ukrainians enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis, volunteering to guard Nazi death camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, and participating in such massacres as the one at Babi Yar.

In a similar vein, those who voted for Ronald Reagan openly cheered Reagan's mass firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981, on the same theory that the enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, too.

If the people had been wise, there should have been no Reagan backlash to the New Left. The New Left had almost no power. 

I don't think there was much of a backlash against the New Left. But there was a backlash when taxes got too high, and when people were convinced by such demagogues as Reagan that blacks and other poor people should not get support from their tax money. It was a reaction not just against the New Left, but the entire liberal agenda, which was dominant, including high taxes on rich people, massive government projects, the dishonest and deadly war in Vietnam, and civil rights and the Great Society that supported poor people and the environment. The right-wing also contributed to the breakdown of this faith in government through the Watergate scandal, the CIA scandals and other scandals. The conspiracy theory culture begun by Mark Lane and the JFK assassination conspiracy theory in 1966 also ramped up in the 1990s and further spread skepticism of government.

I saw a documentary called "The First Angry Man" yesterday about Howard Jarvis, who started the tax revolt in 1978. His influence and his tax revolt was great nationwide, but was soon superceded by Ronald Reagan who was already a well-known anti-tax, anti social-government politician and who won the presidency in 1980. His momentum was also given by the neoliberal economists. 1978 was also the year of Jonestown and of the Moral Majority social-conservative right-wing religious movement, also adopted by Reagan and the Republicans, as well as the Iran takeover by the Islamic religious-right and the resulting nationalist backlash and scandals.

The thrust of "Reaganomics" was reaction against taxes and welfare. Jarvis was a former member of the John Birch Society; he was a right-wing extremist who was against his taxes going to support black people. Some taxes were indeed too high in California, especially property taxes that were ballooned by rising home prices that were driving people out of their homes. Some reform was needed, and to that extent the backlash was justified; but the legislature was too slow as legislatures often are. This tax revolt and racist resentment was the main driver of the reaction and the backlash. The legislature proposed an alternative only after the Jarvis-Gann initiative was already on the ballot. The legislature's proposal was called Proposition 8, an alternative to the Jarvis-Gann Proposition 13. I voted against Prop.13 and in favor of Prop.8. Both passed, but Prop.13 got more votes and so became law instead of Prop.8.

What was concealed until just prior to the election was that Jarvis was a huge owner and landlord of apartment buildings, and that Prop. 13, though it made massive cuts to property taxes for individual homeowners, as long as they stayed in their homes, also made huge tax cuts for corporations and huge landlords. The result of Prop.13 was decline in the schools and other services and infrastructure. When Reaganomics got going, boosted in part by the nationwide tax revolt started by Jarvis, inequality got going and wealth was concentrated more and more into the 1% richest people. 

That was the real agenda of Prop.13, neoliberalism and Reaganomics, along with racism and depriving people of the support that government provided and the restrictions on labor unions. CA had been a big government state, which supported free college and projects that brought prosperity and excellent education to the state and led to the formation of space and aeronautics industries and the computer industry of Silicon Valley.

Now CA is trending the other way, back toward the liberal agenda, as parcel taxes and property tax rates have gone up, since for several decades now people have routinely voted to tax themselves here to support schools and other services, especially in urban counties like the Bay Area. Property values have kept rising high, so the state is flushed with cash because property taxes go up upon the sale of homes as per Prop.13. CA Governor Jerry Brown, who had opposed Prop.13 in 1978, but pledged to make it work when it passed, and who was a frugal spender and skeptic of big government projects, came back into power in 2010 and supported an initiative to raise income taxes that passed. 

CA, which voted for its former governor Reagan (elected in the 1966 midterms) by a huge margin in 1980, became a strong "blue state" in 1992 with Clinton and has been so ever since. Restrictive initiatives aimed at hispanics by Republican CA Governor Wilson helped move the rising hispanic voters into the Democratic Party. But red states continue to support Jarvis/Reagan/neoliberalism, and the neoliberal Republicans are desperate to cheat and gerrymander the purple states to stay in power while the majority of voters are trending the other way nationally. But the people have withdrawn support from Democratic presidents after just 2 years or less in power ever since the 1966 and 1978 midterms, and this is happening again, and so whatever Democratic reforms are possible must be done this year. Politics may not be boring, but it sure is frustrating.

Such right-wing, anti-government backlashes are to be blamed mostly on the people who vote for them, not usually on the needed and helpful liberal and New Left agendas, and which always deserve support--- even though some mismanagement of them may contribute to a backlash, which may be justified-- if moderate and temporary.





Howard Jarvis’s 1978 ballot initiative, Proposition 13, changed everything in the nation. “The First Angry Man” unpacks the campaign that slashed property taxes in California and launched a nationwide tax revolt that continues unabated today. In the 40 years since Proposition 13, the nation has witnessed historic growth in economic inequality and the unraveling of America’s safety net.