The Party’s Over

Part Two

CHANGING TIMES

There was a ten year hiatus after the end of WW!! in which Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower served as Presidents over an America in transition from a war status to one of growth and prosperity.

Money made during the War by both industry and working people built America’s first middle class and the Bill of Rights legislation sent tens of thousands of young Americans to college on the government. Education of American young people was at its peak and the inherent problems of society were kept well in check and essentially out of sight.

The advertisements of the day based on the creativity of the Mad Men on Madison Avenue, glistened with smiling, young housewives thrilled with their new homes and kitchen appliances, two children happily enjoying school and homework at the kitchen table and young men in suits, ties and hats off to the commuter trains to work in cities getting bigger as the suburbs grew around them.

This was a bubble of pure delight that went on so long…almost boring.

And then came the 1960’s and an explosion of social fury and a war nobody seemed to understand.

America elected its first Catholic President, Democrat John F. Kennedy; who defeated Vice President Richard Nixon; the first contraceptive pill was introduced which would so quickly influence the course of women’s lives; Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba as we misunderstood his eventual motives; his Russian support led to a crisis that brought us to the brink of conflict; we seemed to stumble into a war between the North and South Vietnamese in an attempt, we were told, to halt the spread of communism; the response – an extreme agitation against the

War by young men who did not want to fight for something they did not understand as college campuses became a hotbed of noise and disruption.

Amid all of this came Martin Luther King, his Freedom Marchers and the Southern Christian Leadership and their determined struggle to end the open racial discrimination in the South.

The assassination of President Kennedy after only a thousand days in office stunned an already struggling America and the ascension of Lyndon Johnson left it uncertain.

Johnson, the most powerful Senate Majority leader in history, coming from a hardscrabble life in Texas was determined to continue what Kennedy had started in regard to King and his cause and pushed hard for the passage of the Civil Rights bill and then later the Voting Rights bill.

He won his fight. But by winning the Democratic Party lost the entire southern tier of its political strength. The Southern States, furious that one of their own, LBJ, had actually moved to ease racial injustice, left the Democratic Party en masse. Every Southern State would no longer support Democratic policies in either State or National elections. What is so important in American politics – a sure thing – was gone.

Anxious to take advantage of the Democratic Party’s sudden turn of events, the Republican Party looked West to find a new voice. And it did

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Richard Nixon was not it.

His reputation as a fierce anti-communist a time when America was uncertain about communist influences at home and the fear of war abroad – almost carried him to the Presidency against Kennedy. But he had little interest in political philosophy and growing the Republican Party.

But a Republican leader did appear bringing with him a ruling philosophy which became the Republican Party’s essence.

Barry Moses Goldwater would single-handedly alter the power base of the Republican Party from the wealthy Eastern states to the West.

He would become a five term Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee in 1964. Goldwater came to epitomize the true meaning of conservative. Many Republicans today say that they are fiscally conservation and socially liberal. That definition came from Goldwater. Goldwater’s views on the Constitution – that it limited the role of government, on the right of freedom and justice for all Americans regardless of color or station, on the place of the religious right in this country which he thought was all wrong and destructive… made him without question what political historians called the conscience of true conservatism and libertarianism.

He believed in limited government but with strong fiscal constraints He believed that welfare was wrong because it bred dependency on government. He was a member of the NAACP and voted for the first Civil Rights Act as he worked to desegregate Phoenix. He said that you didn’t have to be straight to serve in the Army, just shoot straight.

He told Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, leaders of the evangelical movement in the Republican Party that they were no good for anyone but themselves and to get out of politics.

There was a serious intensity about him that bordered on that of a Minister preaching to his congregation and it influenced those Americans who came to see him through fearful eyes…though his actual views carried no such promise.

The best example of this disconnect- what he was not who he seemed to be – was his famous statement: “Extremism in the defense of liberty if no vice” at the Republican Party’s 1964 Presidential Convention. The delegates exploded in a roar of support …the noise drowning out the rest of that sentence “And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”.

America was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Barry Goldwater said that if he were President he would turn North Vietnam into a mud puddle in one week. Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats painted him as a warmonger and someone not to be trusted with his finger on the Atomic Bomb …and it worked.

Goldwater had built a Presidential campaign against the man he thought would be President, John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson was an entirely different opponent. Goldwater made the cardinal political sin by letting his opponent make his public image for him…and was crushed at the polls.

But he maintained his influence on the Republican Party. In 1980, years after his defeat, the Republican Party saw his enthusiastic endorsement of California Governor Ronald Reagan for President as a passing of the torch.

But Reagan was no Barry Goldwater; not even close. His conservatism seemed to have little to do with Goldwater’s views. In fact, they turned Goldwater’s views upside down and in so doing established the thinking of Republicans to this very day.

Goldwater wanted small government with controlled budgets. Reagan said government was the problem and as President began to starve it with sharp budget cuts even as he significantly lowered taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Reagan gave us David Stockman and Supply-side, trickle-down economics which insisted that wealthy corporations and individuals would do better with more money and the rest of the nation would do well because of it. He talked about erecting safety nets that would protect people at the bottom.

George HW Bush running against Reagan for the Presidential nomination called that voo-doo economics. Years later Stockman would repudiate his own theories as being unworkable.

And yet Republicans today still insist feeding the wealthy is the way to make America great again..and that government should not exist to help people.

As Governor of California Reagan left the State in debt for more than a generation. By the end of his eight years as President the government had amassed the greatest debt America’s history.

But when he received the Republican nomination his team had seen where Goldwater had lost votes and knew how to win them.

As a former head of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan appealed to union members across the Midwest and South. Democratic President Jimmy Carter was anything but a liberal and had little time for strong labor relations as he seemed to lose focus midway into his first term When the votes were counter the Blue-Dog Democrats in unions across the country had switched their votes to Reagan.

As President Reagan would break the Air Traffic Control Union in Washington when they went on strike for better working conditions and pay.

Reagan understood the essential racism in America and the resentments that existed when blacks were helped by the Civil Rights Act and moved quickly to capitalize. He saw welfare as a perfect foil claiming that women receiving welfare…black women now twenty years after government welfare was designed to help white war widows, were “welfare Queens” taking money and driving Cadillacs.

Surrounded by Hollywood leading men who hid their true sexual identities to protect their careers, Reagan knew about the gay life and its perils. Yet his own son, a gay man, said his Father did nothing to help that community when AIDS began to ravage the lives of hundreds and then thousands of men. It took him two years to finally simply acknowledge the problem.

And he fully opened the Republican Party’s door to the Falwells and Robertsons welcoming the religious right with all his might.

Reagan, serving two terms, gave the Republican Party a strong philosophical base…taking their views in the 19th Century to new heights.

The Democrats went in a very different direction.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

The Democratic Party first under two southern Democratic Governors, Jimmy Carter and then Bill Clinton did nothing to retain the best of the New Deal approach to government helping people. In fact, it seemed to lose touch with working people entirely.

Carter got lost as President and served but one term. Bill Clinton, spoke of “feeling our pain” and was a born politician. But he was a conservative Southern Governor with a gift for reaching people with policies that clung to the middle of the road favoring wealth but carefully, yet doing little for working Americans.

With the help of Wall Street friends, he did finally end the crushing debt run up by Reagan, but in so doing did four things that would live beyond his personal travails: he ended the legislated division between investment banks and commercial banks which would result in the 2008 financial crisis which almost brought down our economy; he made certain that student debt would hold throughout life and death until it was repaid; he passed a crime bill that incarcerated hundreds of thousands of black men for which he apologized years later; he ended welfare provisions which brought 40% of poor children under the poverty level.

His “triangulated” policies carried the Democratic Party philosophy out of any meaning whatsoever.

By the end of Clinton’s term the role of government remained as Reagan left it: money talked, the free market would reign, working and small business America would continue to get less help from the government and while America remained the most powerful nation the World had ever seen, its political parties would be little more than a shadow of themselves…little more than two colors on an election night map…fixed in place…representing the power structure first…and last.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Once, political parties mattered because they gave favored people jobs.

Once the news media found intelligent ways of presenting what political parties meant and how they operated.

But time and a diminished public education system took its toll and the news media no longer was America’s “fourth estate” helping us understand what we were seeing and hearing from the political system.

And in that vacuum came the computer and social media’s ability to bring ANY MESSAGE RIGHT INTO THE HOME OF MOST Americans…so acutely targeted that they are able to know so much about us it seems they know each of us personally.

Political messages from candidates flow at us that way. Money raised by political parties help fund those messages…but they belong to the candidates themselves not a political party.

In New York City where the political affiliations matter less than on a statewide or national basis, social media capabilities are the key to success.

WHERE WE ARE

Today in a totally new national environment, sick and dying from a very different disease than the World has known but fighting back despite greater losses than anywhere in the World, America has become a debtor nation, producing little in the way of goods for sale besides weapons and certain farm products.

Its once astounding education system has produced a nation so fundamentally ignorant of basic facts that it can sincerely believe the most fantastic claims about what is fact as if a fact has two definitions.

The Republican Party sits fundamentally quiet as a new Democratic President known for his essentially centrist views and his ability to compromise has exploded the Reagan philosophy of government into 1.9 trillion pieces in a nation which has spent more money to fight Covid than it did in two World Wars, Vietnam and the 9/11 fallout.

Perhaps the Democratic Party will now focus again on what Americans need and how government can help them.

Perhaps now the Republican Party will concentrate on the society and its culture…its ’cancel culture’ a kind of simplistic attempt to counter the insistence of our racist caste system.

Without knowing we would like to predict that America will do what no other society has ever done in the recorded history of time: return to the top once it has lost its place. If so, it has a long way to go.