Yeah, I wasn’t sure whether they were talkin about another New D’eal in the sense of a policy agenda or another New Deal coalition in the sense of a long-lasting majority.
So I’ll take the latter first: it’s not clear. Everyone can see the demographic writing on the wall that was at the heart of Tuxiera’s Emerging Majority thesis, but turnout takes work to translate potential voters into actual votes ( t’s clearly possible to turn out the so-called Obama Coalition, but it’s not guaranteed) and it doesn’t get easier when state legislators do their level best to suppress voting by populations they don’t like, and cto gerrymander like hell to diminish their impact.
In terms of the former, I’m less pessimistic than my colleague Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money about whether good policy makes for good politics, and I think it’s more a matter of policy design than a binary yes-no. Some policies work better to fuse a connection between the electorate and the government than others, and it revolves around key issues of visibility, tangibility, salience, and benefit levels.
The giant fly in the ointment on this, of course, is that… okay, I’m just a layman. I read a lot, and I have a big mouth, but I am not formally educated in either political science or history.
Having said that? It seems to me that there’s no fundamental society-wide agreement as to what good policy actually is, and the dirty secret of American politics is and always has been “there’s an enormous chunk of the population, mostly white, that will never define as ‘good policy’ any platform that doesn’t include either implied or explicit white supremacy. It doesn’t matter what else you offer them. White supremacy is their single-issue dealbreaker.”
The New Deal coalition kicked the shit out of the depression, won WWII, and ushered in thirty years of peace and plenty with rising standards of living and vastly more equitable distribution of wealth than anything we’d seen heretofore. It was, in terms of “promoting the general welfare,” an enormous success.
And it cracked up when it was decided to extend the full benefits of citizenship and humanity to folks who weren’t white. Didn’t matter that it was delivering the goods to everyone and in spades; it let non-whites in the door, and that was utterly unacceptable to enough people to destroy it and usher in Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, then Bush, and now Trump.
We got lucky with the New Deal coalition; it just so happened that the faction of the Democratic Party concerned with economic and social justice became ascendant while at the same time the Democratic Party could count on the votes of a shit-ton of deeply racist southern whites because of tribalism. (”Vote for the party of LINCOLN? Never!”) That partnership was fundamentally unstable, largely an accident, and probably cannot be replicated.
It’s a fair argument, but it’s over-extended. Social Security didn’t become less popular because it integrated; Medicare wasn’t less popular because it was integrated. I think it’s more accurate to say that there are many factors influence poltiics, and it’s extremely rare for any of them to be that determinative.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 