IMPress Polly
10-19-2013, 08:50 AM
Now that the second-longest government shutdown in the history of this country (which turned out pretty much the way I predicted it would (http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/17139-The-U-S-Government-Shutdown-is-a-Preview)) is finally over, I figured I'd offer my commentary.
There has been much talk of the divisions in the Republican Party that have been laid bare of late. Little has been said though of what's actually new about these divides, so let me try and sum up the essence of what's new. Now of course we should well understand that this will be a considerable oversimplification, reality being much more complex, but here I'm just going to be speaking in very broad and sweeping terms as to what the overall picture is. We can largely divide the Republican Party into three sections:
1) The oil industry and "small" business faction. This is the libertarian wing and the main group that controls the Tea Party movement. These people typically make far more than the average American and are well-educated.
2) The churches. The main organization thereof is the Faith and Freedom Coalition (once known as the Christian Coalition in the days of Reagan) and their annual Values Voters Summit. This is where the Republican working class primarily congregates and it's mostly defined by right wing positions on social issues. On economic matters, this is the most "left wing" section of the party. People belonging to this section are the most likely amongst the Republicans to sympathize with labor unions and to be union members, namely.
Those first two sections make up the Tea Party movement.
3) The Wall Street faction. This is where the so-called "pragmatic moderates" in the party congregate. They're controlled by the financial aristocracy of the Northeast. These are is the more traditional Republicans; the remains of the pre-Southern-strategy GOP.
The Tea Party movement is a sort of strategic coalition against the Wall Street Republicans, the latter being known as "the party establishment". However, this coalition largely broke apart in the course of the 2012 election cycle after Newt Gingrich's famous video railing against Mitt Romney's "vulture capitalism" in Bain Capital. Romney (absurdly) denounced Gingrich as a socialist and that proved the rallying cry for the libertarians. (One must remember that Occupy Wall Street was fresh in people's memories at the time.) The libertarians switched to the Romney camp after that, so the campaign wound up taking the form of a class conflict of sorts between the party's minority working class section represented by Rick Santorum (obviously the candidate of the churches) and its majority business sections represented by Romney (a Wall Street multimillionaire). Clearly the former could not stand up to the latter combination of richer people alone, being that the GOP is basically a bourgeois party (i.e. party of property owners), after all.
Even after the nomination was decided, the rift remained. Whenever one of the religious people would make some ridiculous remark on a social issue (e.g. "legitimate rape"), they would be denounced as quickly by most of the Tea Party organizations as by the Romney campaign. One notes that only the churches and their political arms didn't follow suit. And after the electoral defeat of Romney, the whole Republican Party seemed to be in a state of disarray. Then there arose the IRS "scandal" that turned out not to even be a scandal. Initially it was thought that the Tea Party movement was singled out though and that belief revived the movement to some degree, as did the summer campaign that followed against the Affordable Care Act, which finally culminated in Ted Cruz's recent move, which has solidified the old alliance anew. That's what's new about the divisions in the Republican Party. In the case of the late Cruzade against the ACA, the Wall Street Republicans (who care only minimally about the ACA) in the end strategically united with Democrats in order to force negotiations on what they believe the more important issue to be: as John Boehner put it, "the spending problem". Their deal to reopen the government for a few months and temporarily avoid a catastrophic national default was contingent not on either a repeal or delay in the implementation of the ACA, but on the convening of negotiations on the future of the main entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare in particular) and tax policy. Represented by Paul Ryan and others, their aim therein will be to privatize the main entitlements at least partially and to lower the tax rates of the wealthy while driving them up for the poorer and middle strata. That is now Washington's agenda hence. And so progressives absurdly celebrate while they remain on the defensive, as Republicans continue to set the national agenda despite last year's Democratic victory at the polls. :rollseyes:
Since the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in the Democratic Party after Mondale's defeat in the 1984 presidential race, this section of the Democrats has sought to respond to the then-declining electoral prospects of the party by trying to win over Wall Street. The party's subsequent presidential candidates -- Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry -- all embodied that objective to one degree or another. Three of them were DLC members. Obama, who had opposed Hillary Clinton from her right in 2008) managed to get Wall Street's endorsement that year by beating McCain to the bank bailout proposal. But after the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, they abandoned him for the GOP once more, especially after the Republicans made such a clear effort to woo back the financial sector by nominating one of its own for the presidency. As indicated by the stock exchanges (often Wall Street's way of indicating their collective opinion on public policy matters) the world of finance capital is increasingly upset though about all this fiscal tumult the Tea Party has putting the nation through of late. They want a more solid guarantee they'll get their debt payments from the government (as if there's any doubt). People like NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, are typical of this the financial people, and the erratic nature of his party allegiances shows you that they're undecided when it comes to party allegiances. These days shift back and forth, endorsing Republicans here and Democrats there based upon their own interests (which shows that the DLC's efforts have had some success over the years), but mostly Republicans. How are they responding to the recent threat of default, you ask? By leading most of the business community not away from the Republican Party, but to a position of explicitly favoring, and campaigning for, their candidates for GOP nominations; the so-called moderate Wall Street Republicans (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/business-groups-stand-by-boehner-plot-against-tea-party/2013/10/17/ed951f0c-350a-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html). The various political arms of the oil industry (think those of the Koch family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family)) and of course the churches, meanwhile, will aid the Tea Party movement in their resistance.
What should the position of progressives be on all this? In the view of yours truly, progressives should maintain an independent, populist (i.e. anti-corporate) position and accordingly oppose any cuts to, or restructuring of, the main entitlement programs that may be negotiated by this new committee the aforementioned deal establishes. Nothing on the agenda of the likes of Paul Ryan will be good for poor and working class people and must accordingly be resolutely opposed and resisted. One should not trust the president to defend these highly popular programs, for he has demonstrated his willingness to sell them out in the past.
There has been much talk of the divisions in the Republican Party that have been laid bare of late. Little has been said though of what's actually new about these divides, so let me try and sum up the essence of what's new. Now of course we should well understand that this will be a considerable oversimplification, reality being much more complex, but here I'm just going to be speaking in very broad and sweeping terms as to what the overall picture is. We can largely divide the Republican Party into three sections:
1) The oil industry and "small" business faction. This is the libertarian wing and the main group that controls the Tea Party movement. These people typically make far more than the average American and are well-educated.
2) The churches. The main organization thereof is the Faith and Freedom Coalition (once known as the Christian Coalition in the days of Reagan) and their annual Values Voters Summit. This is where the Republican working class primarily congregates and it's mostly defined by right wing positions on social issues. On economic matters, this is the most "left wing" section of the party. People belonging to this section are the most likely amongst the Republicans to sympathize with labor unions and to be union members, namely.
Those first two sections make up the Tea Party movement.
3) The Wall Street faction. This is where the so-called "pragmatic moderates" in the party congregate. They're controlled by the financial aristocracy of the Northeast. These are is the more traditional Republicans; the remains of the pre-Southern-strategy GOP.
The Tea Party movement is a sort of strategic coalition against the Wall Street Republicans, the latter being known as "the party establishment". However, this coalition largely broke apart in the course of the 2012 election cycle after Newt Gingrich's famous video railing against Mitt Romney's "vulture capitalism" in Bain Capital. Romney (absurdly) denounced Gingrich as a socialist and that proved the rallying cry for the libertarians. (One must remember that Occupy Wall Street was fresh in people's memories at the time.) The libertarians switched to the Romney camp after that, so the campaign wound up taking the form of a class conflict of sorts between the party's minority working class section represented by Rick Santorum (obviously the candidate of the churches) and its majority business sections represented by Romney (a Wall Street multimillionaire). Clearly the former could not stand up to the latter combination of richer people alone, being that the GOP is basically a bourgeois party (i.e. party of property owners), after all.
Even after the nomination was decided, the rift remained. Whenever one of the religious people would make some ridiculous remark on a social issue (e.g. "legitimate rape"), they would be denounced as quickly by most of the Tea Party organizations as by the Romney campaign. One notes that only the churches and their political arms didn't follow suit. And after the electoral defeat of Romney, the whole Republican Party seemed to be in a state of disarray. Then there arose the IRS "scandal" that turned out not to even be a scandal. Initially it was thought that the Tea Party movement was singled out though and that belief revived the movement to some degree, as did the summer campaign that followed against the Affordable Care Act, which finally culminated in Ted Cruz's recent move, which has solidified the old alliance anew. That's what's new about the divisions in the Republican Party. In the case of the late Cruzade against the ACA, the Wall Street Republicans (who care only minimally about the ACA) in the end strategically united with Democrats in order to force negotiations on what they believe the more important issue to be: as John Boehner put it, "the spending problem". Their deal to reopen the government for a few months and temporarily avoid a catastrophic national default was contingent not on either a repeal or delay in the implementation of the ACA, but on the convening of negotiations on the future of the main entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare in particular) and tax policy. Represented by Paul Ryan and others, their aim therein will be to privatize the main entitlements at least partially and to lower the tax rates of the wealthy while driving them up for the poorer and middle strata. That is now Washington's agenda hence. And so progressives absurdly celebrate while they remain on the defensive, as Republicans continue to set the national agenda despite last year's Democratic victory at the polls. :rollseyes:
Since the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in the Democratic Party after Mondale's defeat in the 1984 presidential race, this section of the Democrats has sought to respond to the then-declining electoral prospects of the party by trying to win over Wall Street. The party's subsequent presidential candidates -- Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry -- all embodied that objective to one degree or another. Three of them were DLC members. Obama, who had opposed Hillary Clinton from her right in 2008) managed to get Wall Street's endorsement that year by beating McCain to the bank bailout proposal. But after the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, they abandoned him for the GOP once more, especially after the Republicans made such a clear effort to woo back the financial sector by nominating one of its own for the presidency. As indicated by the stock exchanges (often Wall Street's way of indicating their collective opinion on public policy matters) the world of finance capital is increasingly upset though about all this fiscal tumult the Tea Party has putting the nation through of late. They want a more solid guarantee they'll get their debt payments from the government (as if there's any doubt). People like NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, are typical of this the financial people, and the erratic nature of his party allegiances shows you that they're undecided when it comes to party allegiances. These days shift back and forth, endorsing Republicans here and Democrats there based upon their own interests (which shows that the DLC's efforts have had some success over the years), but mostly Republicans. How are they responding to the recent threat of default, you ask? By leading most of the business community not away from the Republican Party, but to a position of explicitly favoring, and campaigning for, their candidates for GOP nominations; the so-called moderate Wall Street Republicans (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/business-groups-stand-by-boehner-plot-against-tea-party/2013/10/17/ed951f0c-350a-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html). The various political arms of the oil industry (think those of the Koch family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family)) and of course the churches, meanwhile, will aid the Tea Party movement in their resistance.
What should the position of progressives be on all this? In the view of yours truly, progressives should maintain an independent, populist (i.e. anti-corporate) position and accordingly oppose any cuts to, or restructuring of, the main entitlement programs that may be negotiated by this new committee the aforementioned deal establishes. Nothing on the agenda of the likes of Paul Ryan will be good for poor and working class people and must accordingly be resolutely opposed and resisted. One should not trust the president to defend these highly popular programs, for he has demonstrated his willingness to sell them out in the past.