@Granma

[comment:body]

@jobu

conservative Democrats have always existed. Bourbon Democrats, Dixiecrats, Democrats of the Conservative Coalition, Blue Dogs, Conservadems, DLCers, Third Wayers, whatever. All the same thing: the right of the left.

The Democratic Party was never all liberal. In fact, I'm not at all sure that the Democratic Party was ever liberal. That is the point of this two-part series. Of the three paradigms described at the end of the above essay, the first is the one that I probably agree with least.

HenryAWallace, of course, was liberal. However, as FDR became likelier to pass on and be succeeded by a Vice President, the Party got FDR to drop him from the ticket and replace him with Truman, for whom FDR had no use whatsoever. Fortunately for Henry, he ended up a billionaire, when a billion bucks actually meant something.

HAW!

...are the reincarnation of Bourbon Democrats.

What was old is New. Its our job to make it old again.

@Johnny Q

a couple of them were beheaded and some lasted another 50 or so years.

It all depends which part of the film you walk in at
(No sense ending a sentence with only one preposition!)

The "Bourbon Democrats" should remember what happened to the actual Bourbons.
So should we.

@Shockwave

just as a Democratic Party panicked by external circumstances a couple of times, but that's me.

The Democrats are fighting back against Bernie's "Revolution" fairly hard, as evidenced by Perez and so many other things. Another example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/progressive-democr...

If a few get elected, I expect the Borg to hive them.

And now we have the new Old Dems, i.e. Bernie supporters who will continue the fight for the 99% against the New Dems.

@Battle of Blair Mountain

under control and in good order. NASA, law enforcement cameras on streets, private security cameras, listening devices that can hear inside buildings from the street, militarized state and local police, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI and, apparently, 15 other intel agencies I found out about only because they're saying 17 intel agencies confirmed that Russia broke America.

Even though a Republican majority Supreme Court struck down parts of the Patriot Act and Snowden got Congress to vote some changes, it's all under control. We're safe at last. Not safe from being killed, of course, but safe knowing they'll I.D. and arrest or kill the perps after we're gone, like the Tsarnaevs (who, ironically, the Russian government had I.D.d for us twice before they blew anyone up).

Except for that pesky war with Eastasia, life is now good. Finally.

XOXO,
Winston Smith

Which is what prompted the CIA to start the whole nonviolence movement.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

he ever meant it--and FDR didn't even say it.

I don't think FDR set out to change the Party nor do I think he did change it. I think he and LBJ both reacted to fear. And he did unspeakable things to the interned (what a euphemism!) Americans and was incredibly cynical and callous about African Americasns.

In any case, if you take away the New Deal and the Great Society, the Democratic Party was not that different from Wilson Democrats or from Republicans, except that the Great Migration and the Supreme Court backed Democrats into action re: Civil Rights (and that backed the Party of Lincoln into the "Southern Strategy"). In fact, Wilson was more of a regulator than a number of his successors. (Then again, Wilson was kind of Eisenhower in reverse in that both of them took office after a long period of control by their opposite Party--in Wilson's case, the run of Republicans had been almost unbroken since Lincoln--and Wilson likely won only because TR ran against the incumbent Republican President! Now, that was a really weird election.

Robert Kennedy might have been a transformational Democrat. I think he really believed the stuff, whereas I don't think the others did, including JFK. However, we will never know whether or not he did or whether or not he would have been transformation or just the third blip on the screen

remade the Democratic party and redefined what it was/should be, and that he was able to get away with that because of his phenomenal political success. 4 times a President, responsible for the rule that we can't have a President more than twice, convinced America to get involved in WWII (was not necessarily 100% moral in all the ways he did that, but politically it was extraordinarily impressive, regardless of how you feel about the policy)--he had immense impact and reach. It shows in the fact that even Republicans, up to and including Nixon, didn't dare do anything but call themselves Keynesians. It's only the post-Powell Memo, post-Milt Friedman Republicans that have been able to leave his shadow, and, despite the fact that FDR was no saint, I don't consider that a good thing.

So it's not so much that the Democratic party is essentially the party of the worker, of the New Deal, of all the things we like to associate with "old" Democrats--it's that FDR had a mighty political and historical impact, and was so successful that it took a while before anybody was willing to openly and blatantly challenge the philosophy he governed under. Challenges of a more quiet kind were, of course, made sooner, and even FDR himself (as I think you noted above) started backing away from the spending in 1937. The economy immediately started to get worse.

But anyway, there's no solid moral or cultural foundation, no essential moral character, that makes the Democrats the advocate of the working man, or of high taxes on the rich, or of the rich being subject to the rule of law, or of spending programs that use taxation on the rich to fund a better society, or any of the things we like to associate with the Democratic party.

Apart from his morally reprehensible internment of Japanese-Americans, which is unforgivable, I don't have many serious problems with FDR, despite the fact I know he's not a saint. Even not extending Soc Sec benefits to African-Americans, while racist and immoral, actually meant he could get the thing passed, and within roughly a generation, the benefits were extended to them; if he had not passed it when he did, it's possible Soc Sec would never have been passed (God knows people have been trying to get rid of it pretty much since it was passed in the first place), and the Black people who now have access to it would not have it, because it wouldn't exist. I'm willing to accept that as a possibility.

The awful thing about FDR is that I would have been one of the people to make the mistake of shaking his hand and accepting his deal, because he was smart and sensible and advocating for the same position you referenced in the Joe Kennedy quote: I'll give up half my wealth to keep the other half in peace (subtext: we're all really fucking rich anyway, and I'd rather live in a civilization than a barbaric, violent world where I'm constantly trying to get my way in all things; I get my way a lot of the time anyway). This is so eminently sensible that I'd be delighted to find a politician advocating that view. The problem is, as those on the left who didn't like the deal said at the time, what are you going to do when the rich stop keeping their end of the bargain?

The answer appears to be, Die, in large numbers.

We absolutely should have had a revolution in the 30s rather than taking FDR's hand. It was a bad, bad mistake, and ultimately, his good qualities (he did have some) ended up serving evil, sort of like Robert E Lee's good qualities (he did have some) ended up making the Civil War far worse than it needed to be (probably; of course there's the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't happen till 1863, and maybe if the war had ended in 2 years or less, we wouldn't have had an Emancipation Proclamation. In that case, ironically, Lee becomes an important piece of moving this country toward abolition!)

But we needed to have a revolution against capitalism in the 30s, while we still could. We sure as hell wouldn't be in the horrible place we're in now if we'd done that. The extent to which FDR was trustworthy, which is less than the mythology of FDR implies, but which is still a hell of a lot more than a lot of his fellow aristocrats, both then and now, actually worked against a good outcome.

The rich, ultimately, seem incapable of being decent or keeping their word. To a lunatic extent.

I don't know why it has to be that way.

I suspect that FDR would be almost as horrified at how things turned out as I am. But again, that doesn't mean I think he's Jesus, or even Martin Luther King. It's just that he wanted both capitalism and civilization to survive, with at least a modicum of rule of law and political representation for the workers ("democracy"), and what's happened instead is that the forces represented by the Dulles brothers have wreaked havoc on the country and the world.

I like the fact that you historicize our understanding of the Democratic party. It's better that we don't essentialize it or put leaders on pedestals that are too high.

By the way, I tried to make the Huey Long argument to a bunch of upper-middle-class liberal Democrats once (in Olney, MD). It wasn't received well.