Times and Parties Change

Please help me discover the origins of this brilliant party platform:

We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs‰ÛÓexpansion of social security‰ÛÓbroadened coverage in unemployment insurance ‰ÛÓimproved housing‰ÛÓand better health protection for all our people.

Read the rest of the entry and you will be astonished by its liberal and progressive tone.

Naturally the catch is that this platform is that of the Republican Party in 1956 under Eisenhower.

Isn’t it sad that the country has drifted so far to the right that current members of the GOP’s activist wing would eviscerate the sentiments expressed in that platform as being socialist and anti-American? Indeed judging by the actions of some of the Tea Party wing of the GOP they would go further: they would hoard weapons and start plotting to repel the expected attack of jack booted Federal troops sent specifically to take away their guns and infringe on their civil liberties.

That the Eisenhower years are often recalled by those same folks as a long lost era, when the ‘true America’ expressed itself in all its rugged individualistic glory, before the socialists started to crush the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that made America great back then, seems an irony beyond words.

Those were days of a robust social contract, explicit trade offs were made to bolster the middle class and businesses accepted lower profits in the short term by paying higher wages in order to foster consumption in the future. It was a model that produced the greatest surge in wealth ever experienced by any nation in history. The gains of the New Deal were protected and revered by both parties. The middle ground was home to both sides of the aisle and differences were more nuanced than real.

My read of history is that three events tore the consensus up.

First was civil rights. Racism ran so deep that the notion of inclusion did not, indeed could not, extend to all in major areas of the country. The white South choked on the activism and the results of the civil rights movement. As a result it began a steady, and so far unstoppable, march towards right wing extremism. That the Tea Party movement and other expressions of right wing extremism have risen to new heights this past year, the first under a black president, can be no coincidence.

The second big event was the end of American oil independence and the affront it caused to the American way of life. The American economy has never recovered from its addiction to oil and the consequences of having to rely on foreign sources. This has forced the US to engage in foreign wars and diplomacy that contorts its natural interests. Even today, more than thirty years after the first oil crisis, the American economy is less energy efficient than its main competitors – it still is based upon a ‘cheap energy’ model, which is the enduring legacy of its oil industry past. As a result of the energy crisis American industry suffered its first loss of competitiveness, and the first dent was made in the myth of greatness carried over from World War II.

Dissatisfaction with the stagflation unleashed by the oil crisis, and made worse by rising global competition, spurred the rise of militant Republicanism in the form of Ronald Reagan, whose rise to power is the third rupture in the post war consensus. His presidency marks the beginning of the sharp division in politics that exists today. His rejection of all the economics and politics upon which the ‘golden era’ had been built is ironic because his rise to power was enabled by the voters yearning to return exactly to that golden era. He used short term problems in the economy to enact long term shifts in ideology. He ignored the longer term problems of American competitiveness and threw the country into a gathering debt from which it has never escaped. His simplistic view, based upon an idyllic interpretation of individualism unattainable in a modern economy, undermined much of the basis upon which the post war middle class was constructed. Instead of adding to the patrimony of the nation he invited its erosion by avoiding infrastructure investment and long term thinking. He initiated, or at least facilitated, the short term way of thinking that has infested the country ever since. In many ways the recent crisis and our likely long term diminution of potential, are directly caused by his glossy and shallow vision with its concomitant acceptance of social divisions between the wealthy and the poor. The much discussed decline of the American middle class began when it elected to follow the extreme right wing ideology Reagan represented but masked so well.

Events subsequently have simply served to shove the country further right. The erosion of American supremacy continues not as a function of the incapacity of its workers, or the loss of invention by its businesses, but by the divisions exposed in its value system as expressed in its deeply dysfunctional political system. America lost its tolerance and diversity – so long its foundational strength.

America lost its diversity exactly at the moment that it tried to integrate itself. The trauma of that integration forced into existence self regarding and self justifying camps from which the inhabitants rarely sally forth, so at the very instance of integration the nation fragmented. A large sullen and alienated group, its ‘values’ rejected by the ‘radical whole’, sought slowly to undermine all the works of those it saw as ‘un-American’. Without the strength that diversity brings America will wallow towards further failure. It will get even more cynical. It will lose touch with then heady idealism upon which it was founded. The rise to power of Reagan and the continued attack on ‘liberalism’ that he launched has rendered America incapable of solving many of its major issues: to discuss health care reform is to advocate an un-American socialism, even though the entire world has embraced variants of such reform and largely dealt with this issue. The phrase ‘culture wars’ masks a whole array of deep divisions that will not go away. America remains the world’s most religious nation and so rejects much of modern science – teaching evolution in schools is virtually impossible despite its total dominance of biological research. Is it any wonder we need to import scientists and engineers to keep up with our foreign competitors? We have deliberately sought to dumb down our children. We used to decry the brainwashing of Chinese children or the outrages of the Taliban and their objection to education for girls. Yet we tolerate the doctoring and dumbing down of our own science books in the name of religion.

The fragmentation of the social contract reflected in that Republican platform from 1956 is the the root cause of our current inability to solve problems. The breakdown of consensus has led to a breakdown in civil discourse and in politics generally. We need reform and we need it badly. The Reagan era experiment led directly to the implosion we experienced last year and the decline of the middle class that undergirds our social cohesion. Yet we find it impossible to rally around any constructive way forward. Every move is blocked by a recalcitrantminority that wants to throw us even further back than did Reagan.

Looking back through the lens of the Vietnam and civil rights convulsions, the 1950’s look impossibly naive. But maybe much of what we accept today as sophistication is simply a cynical avoidance of reality. All we have done is to put a cheap and thin veneer over the cracks in the hope that the problems will go away. This veneer is epitomized by Palin, whose ability to get near to high office ought to shake us from that cynicism. This is not a joke. The most powerful nation on earth nearly fell into the hands of one of the least qualified people it has ever produced. How did that happen?

Look at that Republican platform and wonder at the gulf that divides us from those years, and at the extremism that has invaded our politics.

Therein is the explanation of our current national demise.