08-11-2016, 02:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-11-2016, 02:30 PM by Eric the Green.)
Rolling Stone is with her!
Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America
While Trump's rise wrecks the GOP, Clinton's success marks the resilience of the Democratic center
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...ca-w433768
Hillary Clinton's candidacy can be traced back to the New Deal era.
By Sean Wilentz
The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.
(Hillary and Bernie have waged campaigns full of vision, ideas and promise — and have shown us the best in American politics)
This year's political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party's rank and file, affirming how much the party has changed over the past half century. The 1964 convention in Atlantic City that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson was roiled by the unsuccessful efforts of black voting-rights campaigners to seat a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi – the last stand inside the party of the old Democratic Solid South. Five decades later, the convention hall was a sea of brown and black and white faces as well as LGBT rainbows. And, of course, the convention was nominating the first female presidential candidate of a major party in American history – a connection that Clinton, who toned down the gender angle in her 2008 bid for the nomination, has now made central to her campaign.
Yet the convention also pulled its multicultural celebrations together into a patriotic whole, overcoming the inchoate diversity that has too often bedeviled the Democrats in recent years. As a direct challenge to the Republican nativists' nationalism, the Democrats proclaimed their own pro-immigrant nationalism, at once of this moment and a reprise of traditional Democratic themes. The sight of Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant father of an American soldier slain in Iraq, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Constitution and then contemptuously but calmly asking whether Trump had ever read it stopped the proceedings cold and dramatized the Democrats' rearticulated national pride. In the face of Trump's isolationism, the Democrats celebrated America's indispensable role in global affairs, not least in the NATO alliance, which elicited American flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!," reviving the kind of liberal internationalism that was central to the party of FDR and Harry Truman but had receded in the aftermath of Vietnam. And throughout the convention, there were other reminders of a fortified living connection with the past.
The Democrats repeatedly entwined diversity and inclusion with their party's old-time convictions about economic inequality and opportunity, convictions that have badly needed refurbishing and restating in the wake of the Great Recession, convictions that Sen. Bernie Sanders' stunning primary challenge forced to the very center of the debate. There on the convention stage was Sanders himself, railing against "the 40-year decline of our middle class" and "the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience." There was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, explaining how the system is rigged for CEOs and predators like Trump. And there, too, was Hillary Clinton, proclaiming that "Democrats are the party of working people," but the party needed to show it better; then saying, "Our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should"; and touting a government program funded by targeted tax hikes on the rich, the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II," to rebuild America's infrastructure.
Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine pointed to the Democrats' ownership of change and continuity in his acceptance speech when he talked of writing "the next chapter in our great and proud story," from Thomas Jefferson to JFK and LBJ, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to Bill and Barack, and, finally, to Hillary Clinton.
The opposite was true for the Republicans in Cleveland. Unlike the Democrats', the Republicans' nearly lily-white gathering looked a lot like long-ago Republican conventions. Yet there was virtually nothing in the nobler aspirations of the GOP's past, including the Reagan years, that Trump could hold up as his own. The negative tone of the speeches brought to mind instead the acrid paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan at the 1992 convention, vowing to "take our country back" from the forces of depravity, block by inner-city block. The closest that Trump came to quoting a Republican president in his own acceptance speech was his channeling of Richard Nixon's fearsome, racially charged invocation of "law and order" from 1968. Clinton, however, in her acceptance speech, was able to sum up her case against Trump with the words of "a great Democratic president" at "a much more perilous time," the founder of modern Democratic politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In that rhetorical difference, and all clashing politics behind it, lies the essential choice Americans will face in November.
Politics, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, is divided between the party of Conservatism and the party of Innovation, a distinction that corresponds to deeper divisions in the human soul between the Past and the Future, between Memory and Hope. Emerson would have been appalled at the degradation of recent American politics, but we can still see in this year's election, refracted, the eternal struggle between Memory and Hope. Yet Trump's politics of Memory are hardly Conservative, apart from the turbocharged tax cuts; they are a concoction of bigoted, insular fantasies that Reagan-era Republicans repudiated. And Clinton's politics of Innovation and Hope are not at all divorced from the Past – they are deeply rooted in the long traditions of her party.
The fury of the campaign has something to do with Memory (or, more exactly, Nostalgia) and something to do with Hope. But the creation of the chasm in 2016 has more to do with history. Trump's rise depended on the hollowing out of the Republican Party over the past 25 years, beginning with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich, in which successive waves of increasingly right-wing insurgents, backed by reactionary plutocrats like the Koch brothers, drove away the party's moderates and rattled many of its traditional conservatives. Trump took the trend to the outer limits of politics by appealing directly to nativist and isolationist sentiments – and he handily defeated for the nomination both the remnants of the old GOP establishment, above all Jeb Bush, and fire-eating darlings of the Tea Party like Ted Cruz. Clinton's candidacy, meanwhile, also has to do with history, in particular her role in the contentious evolution of the Democratic Party going all the way back to the New Deal era.
As much as Trump's rise catalyzed the collapse of the Republican center, Clinton's success marked the resilience of the Democratic center. Clinton won the primaries because vital, loyal constituents inside the Democratic base, above all nonwhite voters, backed her convincingly. Most important, she enjoyed the overwhelming support of self-identified Democrats, on the order of 64 percent to 35 percent. Although sometimes cast as a victory of the party establishment over a rank-and-file insurgency, Clinton's triumph showed that she was the strong favorite of the party's base.
Clinton's politics were also in line with the main themes of the Democratic Party's as they have developed over the past 80-odd years. Assembling various strains of reformist politics, Roosevelt's New Deal expounded a greatly enlarged conception of federal power to address the emergency of the Great Depression, to attack economic inequality and the power of those FDR called "economic royalists," and to expand public works for public benefits. Successive Democratic presidents adapted New Deal principles to the changing situation of a more affluent America after World War II, and put their own stamp on FDR's legacy, from Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal to John F. Kennedy's New Frontier to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.....
Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America
While Trump's rise wrecks the GOP, Clinton's success marks the resilience of the Democratic center
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fea...ca-w433768
Hillary Clinton's candidacy can be traced back to the New Deal era.
By Sean Wilentz
The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.
(Hillary and Bernie have waged campaigns full of vision, ideas and promise — and have shown us the best in American politics)
This year's political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party's rank and file, affirming how much the party has changed over the past half century. The 1964 convention in Atlantic City that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson was roiled by the unsuccessful efforts of black voting-rights campaigners to seat a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi – the last stand inside the party of the old Democratic Solid South. Five decades later, the convention hall was a sea of brown and black and white faces as well as LGBT rainbows. And, of course, the convention was nominating the first female presidential candidate of a major party in American history – a connection that Clinton, who toned down the gender angle in her 2008 bid for the nomination, has now made central to her campaign.
Yet the convention also pulled its multicultural celebrations together into a patriotic whole, overcoming the inchoate diversity that has too often bedeviled the Democrats in recent years. As a direct challenge to the Republican nativists' nationalism, the Democrats proclaimed their own pro-immigrant nationalism, at once of this moment and a reprise of traditional Democratic themes. The sight of Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant father of an American soldier slain in Iraq, pulling from his pocket a copy of the Constitution and then contemptuously but calmly asking whether Trump had ever read it stopped the proceedings cold and dramatized the Democrats' rearticulated national pride. In the face of Trump's isolationism, the Democrats celebrated America's indispensable role in global affairs, not least in the NATO alliance, which elicited American flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!," reviving the kind of liberal internationalism that was central to the party of FDR and Harry Truman but had receded in the aftermath of Vietnam. And throughout the convention, there were other reminders of a fortified living connection with the past.
The Democrats repeatedly entwined diversity and inclusion with their party's old-time convictions about economic inequality and opportunity, convictions that have badly needed refurbishing and restating in the wake of the Great Recession, convictions that Sen. Bernie Sanders' stunning primary challenge forced to the very center of the debate. There on the convention stage was Sanders himself, railing against "the 40-year decline of our middle class" and "the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience." There was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, explaining how the system is rigged for CEOs and predators like Trump. And there, too, was Hillary Clinton, proclaiming that "Democrats are the party of working people," but the party needed to show it better; then saying, "Our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should"; and touting a government program funded by targeted tax hikes on the rich, the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II," to rebuild America's infrastructure.
Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine pointed to the Democrats' ownership of change and continuity in his acceptance speech when he talked of writing "the next chapter in our great and proud story," from Thomas Jefferson to JFK and LBJ, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to Bill and Barack, and, finally, to Hillary Clinton.
The opposite was true for the Republicans in Cleveland. Unlike the Democrats', the Republicans' nearly lily-white gathering looked a lot like long-ago Republican conventions. Yet there was virtually nothing in the nobler aspirations of the GOP's past, including the Reagan years, that Trump could hold up as his own. The negative tone of the speeches brought to mind instead the acrid paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan at the 1992 convention, vowing to "take our country back" from the forces of depravity, block by inner-city block. The closest that Trump came to quoting a Republican president in his own acceptance speech was his channeling of Richard Nixon's fearsome, racially charged invocation of "law and order" from 1968. Clinton, however, in her acceptance speech, was able to sum up her case against Trump with the words of "a great Democratic president" at "a much more perilous time," the founder of modern Democratic politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In that rhetorical difference, and all clashing politics behind it, lies the essential choice Americans will face in November.
Politics, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, is divided between the party of Conservatism and the party of Innovation, a distinction that corresponds to deeper divisions in the human soul between the Past and the Future, between Memory and Hope. Emerson would have been appalled at the degradation of recent American politics, but we can still see in this year's election, refracted, the eternal struggle between Memory and Hope. Yet Trump's politics of Memory are hardly Conservative, apart from the turbocharged tax cuts; they are a concoction of bigoted, insular fantasies that Reagan-era Republicans repudiated. And Clinton's politics of Innovation and Hope are not at all divorced from the Past – they are deeply rooted in the long traditions of her party.
The fury of the campaign has something to do with Memory (or, more exactly, Nostalgia) and something to do with Hope. But the creation of the chasm in 2016 has more to do with history. Trump's rise depended on the hollowing out of the Republican Party over the past 25 years, beginning with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich, in which successive waves of increasingly right-wing insurgents, backed by reactionary plutocrats like the Koch brothers, drove away the party's moderates and rattled many of its traditional conservatives. Trump took the trend to the outer limits of politics by appealing directly to nativist and isolationist sentiments – and he handily defeated for the nomination both the remnants of the old GOP establishment, above all Jeb Bush, and fire-eating darlings of the Tea Party like Ted Cruz. Clinton's candidacy, meanwhile, also has to do with history, in particular her role in the contentious evolution of the Democratic Party going all the way back to the New Deal era.
As much as Trump's rise catalyzed the collapse of the Republican center, Clinton's success marked the resilience of the Democratic center. Clinton won the primaries because vital, loyal constituents inside the Democratic base, above all nonwhite voters, backed her convincingly. Most important, she enjoyed the overwhelming support of self-identified Democrats, on the order of 64 percent to 35 percent. Although sometimes cast as a victory of the party establishment over a rank-and-file insurgency, Clinton's triumph showed that she was the strong favorite of the party's base.
Clinton's politics were also in line with the main themes of the Democratic Party's as they have developed over the past 80-odd years. Assembling various strains of reformist politics, Roosevelt's New Deal expounded a greatly enlarged conception of federal power to address the emergency of the Great Depression, to attack economic inequality and the power of those FDR called "economic royalists," and to expand public works for public benefits. Successive Democratic presidents adapted New Deal principles to the changing situation of a more affluent America after World War II, and put their own stamp on FDR's legacy, from Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal to John F. Kennedy's New Frontier to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.....