The American Spectator

Political Hay

What Kansas Knows

By Peter Ferrara on 7.30.08 @ 12:08AM

Few outside the Democrat party understand what has just happened in the historic primary season that recently ended. But in those primaries, the party made a fundamental decision that marks a dramatic turning point in American politics.

Bill Clinton swept up the Democrats in 1992 based on the new politics of the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC), which he headed. The DLC sought to remake the Democrats based on recognition of what had then just happened in the real world of American politics. Reagan's Republicans had won three straight national elections, thrashing unreconstructed liberals like Mondale and Dukakis in landslides.

The DLC sought to accommodate what they saw as the valid components of the Reagan Revolution. The historic battle between capitalism and socialism was over, and capitalism had won. The Democrats had to modify their policies and their rhetoric to recognize that. Most importantly, they had to accommodate the essential vision that led to the political success of the Reagan Revolution -- the American people overwhelmingly favored the policies of economic growth over the policies of taxation and redistribution ("It's the economy, stupid").

This meant that Democrats had to build on, not reject, the essentials of free markets, and the realities of globalization. Democrats didn't have to swallow the whole libertarian agenda to succeed in this new environment. But they had to project an agenda that plausibly would advance economic growth, not ignore it and all of its possibilities and implications, or even actively undermine it. This became Bill Clinton's awkwardly expressed "Grow the Economy" theme, which was meant to imply that it was still the government that would be producing the economic growth through its wise policies, not the decentralized free market by itself.

This meant, in turn, that the Democrats were not going back to income tax rates of 70% and even 90% as in the heyday of the Left. They could still raise tax rates somewhat on "the rich," especially if they promised at the same time to cut taxes for the middle class, a central theme of Clinton's 1992 campaign that was completely forgotten after the election. But it was also time to recognize and embrace the realities of free trade, and the desirability and overwhelming popularity of welfare reform based on work requirements. It was also time to recognize and extend the successes of deregulation.

The Democrats went along with it because having lost 3 straight national elections, and 5 of the last 6, they were hungry for power. President Clinton stumbled out of the gate because he didn't initially lead with this vision that won him the election, but rather with Hillary's old 1930s warhorse vision of socialized medicine. That produced the historic Gingrich Revolution of 1994. The insight that made Clinton's presidency a success is that he then went along with the policies of the Gingrich congressional majorities, attacking and trimming only what could be projected as its excesses. The result was robust economic growth, and even a booming budget surplus, vindicating Clinton's DLC vision. Thus Clinton became the only Democrat since Roosevelt to serve two consecutive terms, with only one more Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, having accomplished that since Andrew Jackson.

BUT THE DEMOCRAT IDEOLOGUES, what Howard Dean later described as the Democrat wing of the Democrat party, hated and despised what they saw as Clinton's sellout. It was these people who, once Dean self-destructed, nominated the ultraliberal John Kerry in 2004. Right after departing service in Vietnam, Kerry had actually falsely accused his fellow American servicemen, on an international media stage, of committing war atrocities. Somehow, the Democrats to this day cannot understand why that came back to bite him.

The great showdown for the soul of the Democrats came in the 2008 primaries. Barack Obama, the most left-wing of all elected national Democrats, ultimately captured the hearts of the Democrat ideologues. Hillary never really believed in her husband's neoliberal DLC policies. Personally, she herself was still with Eleanor Roosevelt and the Old Left of the 1930s. But recognizing the political success of her husband's vision, and the political failures of the more left-wing candidates, she tried to project neoliberal responsibility and rhetorically hearkened back to the DLC successes of her husband's administration. That made her the target of the Democrat ideologues, resulting in her defeat.

Elections have consequences. Obama's left-wingers have now completely routed the DLC out of today's Democrat party. Make no mistake about it. The New Left is now in charge of the Democrats, with Obama, Pelosi and Dean at the helm. This is not your father's Democrat party, or Bill Clinton's.

The political bible of this left-wing resurgence is a 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, a left-wing writer. Frank reviews in detail the politics of his home state of Kansas to argue his thesis that Republicans have successfully used distracting social conservative issues like abortion, guns, and gay marriage to win majority support from working-class voters for conservative candidates who support free-market policies contrary to the economic interests of that same working class. This book is widely credited with inspiring the strategic vision that led to the Democrat takeover of Congress in 2006. It has also led some putatively conservative writers to argue for a new lefty version of conservative economics so Republicans and conservatives can stay in the game in competing for working-class votes.

The social conservative movement, Frank writes, "rallies citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism." But once those conservatives are elected, what do they do?

Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people.

The conservative "solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education." Frank continues regarding this conservative movement,

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.

THIS IS A REVEALING book about what is happening in American politics today, though in none of the ways intended by the author. For one thing, as the above quotes show, it reveals that the lefty Democrat base of Obama, Dean, and Pelosi is not living in the real world. Now that the conservatives have "smashed the welfare state," why is it that spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is at record levels for each program, the highest in history, with the three programs now slated to lead over the next 35 years to the Federal government doubling in size relative to the economy (GDP)? Having rolled back the War on Poverty, why are we still spending close to $700 billion each year on means-tested welfare programs, more than we spend on national defense? Add up Federal, state and local spending on education, and you will find that total is higher than spending on national defense as well, at record levels, higher than ever.

American corporations now suffer the second highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. The top 1% of income earners now pay 40% of all income taxes, almost twice their share of the national income. It is the Democrat Left that wants to roll back historic labor law reforms, seeking laws to deny workers their longstanding right to secret ballot elections on unionization, which would allow union thugs to beat them, literally, into publicly signing cards to recognize union control over their jobs. The latest farm bill was for $300 billion, even though farmers earn more than the national average, with most of that taxpayer money actually going to the richest agribusinesses. Theodore Roosevelt's vision of antitrust was rolled back almost 30 years ago now, based on extensive academic research in the 1970s showing that the original version of antitrust during the "progressive era" was mostly emotional nonsense. Robust antitrust law now focuses on actual restraints of trade, such as price fixing.

Frank also reports to us that conservatives in Kansas had cut state taxes so "compulsively through the nineties" that "the only route remaining" for the state government "is the one conservatives have insisted we take all along, on the state as well as the national level: government, that hated entity, will simply have to wither away." The Tax Foundation reports that Kansas has the 25th-lowest tax burden among the 50 states.

In 250 pages, the book never actually gets around to arguing for its essential foundation that free-market economics is contrary to the interests of the working class. It simply assumes that point, as revealed on the first page, where Frank recounts a discussion with a friend about an "impoverished" Great Plains county that had voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2000. "How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?" his friend asked. End of discussion. Frank saw that as a brilliant insight into political economy to open his analysis, indeed, "the preeminent question of our times."

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Education, Trade, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Economics, Business, Social Security, Medicaid, Religion, Abortion, Environment, Law, Russia, NATO, North Korea, Socialism, Conservatism, Medicare