The Rise of The New New Left

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The Rise of the New New Left

by Peter Beinart
Sep 12, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
Bill de Blasios win in New Yorks Democratic primary isnt a local story. Its part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking. By Peter Beinart
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Maybe Bill de Blasio got lucky. Maybe he only won because he cut a sweet ad featuring his biracial son. Or because his rivals were either spectacularly boring, spectacularly pathological, or running for Michael Bloombergs fourth term. But I dont think so. The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasios victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of Americas next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left. Its a challenge Hillary Clinton should start worrying about now.
Bill de Blasio, center, and his son Dante greet commuters at the Staten Island ferry terminal on September 4, 2013 in New York. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html[9/14/2013 6:44:15 PM]
To understand why that challenge may prove so destabilizing, start with this core truth: For the past two decades, American politics has been largely a contest between Reaganism and Clintonism. In 1981, Ronald Reagan shattered decades of New Deal consensus by seeking to radically scale back governments role in the economy. In 1993, Bill Clinton brought the Democrats back to power by accepting that they must live in the world Reagan had made. Located somewhere between Reagans anti-government conservatism and the pro-government liberalism that preceded it, Clinton articulated an ideological third way: Inclined toward market solutions, not government bureaucracy, focused on economic growth, not economic redistribution, and dedicated to equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. By the end of Clintons presidency, government spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product was lower than it had been when Reagan left office.
For a time, small flocks of pre-Reagan Republicans and pre-Clinton Democrats endured, unaware that their species were marked for extinction. Hard as they tried, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole could never muster much rage against the welfare state. Ted Kennedy never understood why Democrats should declare the era of big government over. But over time, the older generation in both parties passed from the scene and the younger politicians who took their place could scarcely conceive of a Republican Party that did not bear Reagans stamp or a Democratic Party that did not bear Clintons. These Republican children of Reagan and Democratic children of Clinton comprise Americas reigning political generation.
By political generation, I mean something particular. Pollsters slice Americans into generations at roughly 20-year intervals: Baby Boomers (born mid-1940s to mid1960s); Generation X (mid-1960s to early 1980s); Millennials (early 1980s to 2000). But politically, these distinctions are arbitrary. To understand what constitutes a political generation , it makes more sense to follow the definition laid out by the early20th-century sociologist Karl Mannheim. For Mannheim, generations were born from historical disruption. As he arguedand later scholars have confirmedpeople are disproportionately influenced by events that occur between their late teens and midtwenties. During that periodbetween the time they leave their parents home and the time they create a stable home of their ownindividuals are most prone to change cities, religions, political parties, brands of toothpaste. After that, lifestyles and attitudes calcify. For Mannheim, what defined a generation was the particular slice of history people experienced during those plastic years. A generation had no set length. A new one could emerge every year, every thirty, every hundred. What mattered was whether the events people experienced while at their most malleable were sufficiently different from those experienced by people older or younger than themselves.
Mannheim didnt believe that everyone who experienced the same formative events would interpret them the same way. Germans who came of age in the early 1800s, he argued, were shaped by the Napoleonic wars. Some responded by becoming romantic-conservatives, others by becoming liberal-rationalists. What they shared
was a distinct generational experience, which became the basis for a distinct intragenerational argument.
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton share a moment at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. (Getty Images)
If Mannheims Germans constituted a political generation because in their plastic years they experienced the Napoleonic Wars, the men and women who today dominate American politics constitute a political generation because during their plastic years they experienced some part of the Reagan-Clinton era. That era lasted a long time. If you are in your late 50s, you are probably too young to remember the high tide of Kennedy-Johnson big government liberalism. You came of age during its collapse, a collapse that culminated with the defeat of Jimmy Carter. Then you watched Reagan rewrite Americas political rules. If you are in your early 40s, you may have caught the tail end of Reagan. But even if you didnt, you were shaped by Clinton, who maneuvered within the constraints Reagan had built. To pollsters, a late 50-something is a Baby Boomer and an early 40-something is a Gen-Xer. But in Mannheims terms, they constitute a single generation because no great disruption in American politics divides them. They came of age as Reagan defined a new political era and Clinton ratified it. And as a rule, they play out their political struggles between the ideological poles that Reagan and Clinton set out.
To understand how this plays out in practice, look at the rising, younger politicians in both parties. Start with the GOP. If you look at the political biographies of nationally prominent 40-something RepublicansBobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruzwhat they all have in common is Reagan. Jindal has said about growing up in Louisiana, I grew up in a time when there werent a whole lot of Republicans in this state. But I identified with President Reagan. At age 17, Scott Walker was chosen to represent his home state of Colorado in a Boys Nation trip to Washington. There he met his hero, Ronald Reagan, who played a big role in inspiring me. At age 21, Paul Ryan interned for Robert Kasten, who had ridden into the Senate in 1980 on Reagans coattails. Two years later he took a job with Jack Kemp, whose 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut had helped usher in Reaganomics. Growing up in a fiercely anti-communist Cuban exile family in Miami, Marco Rubio writes in his autobiography that Reagans election and my grandfathers allegiance to him were defining influences on me politically. Ted Cruz is most explicit of all. I was 10 when Reagan became president, he told a conservative group earlier this year. I was 18 when he left the White House Ill go to my grave with Ronald Wilson Reagan defining what it means to be president and when I look at this new generation of [Republican] leaders I see leaders that are all echoing Reagan.
Younger Democratic politicians are less worshipful of Clinton. Yet his influence on their worldview is no less profound. Start with the most famous, still-youngish Democrat, a man who although a decade older than Rubio, Jindal, and Cruz, hails from the same Reagan-Clinton generation: Barack Obama. Because he opposed the Iraq War, and sometimes critiqued the Clintons as too cautious when running against Hillary in 2008, some commentators depicted Obamas victory as a rejection of Clintonism. But to read The Audacity of Hope Obamas most detailed exposition of his political outlookis to be reminded how much of a Clintonian Obama actually is. At Clintonisms core was the conviction that to revive their party, Democrats must first acknowledge what Reagan got right.
Obama, in describing his own political evolution, does that again and again: as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagans election I understood his appeal (page 31). Reagans central insight contained a good deal of truth (page 157). In arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagans worldview (page 289). Having given Reagan his due, Obama then sketches out a worldview in between the Reaganite right and unreconstructed, pre-Reagan left. The explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other (page 24), he declares in a chapter in which he derides either/or thinking (page 40). It was Bill Clintons singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock (page 34). Had the term not already been taken, Obama might well have called his intermediary path the third way.
The nationally visible Democrats rising behind Obama generally share his procapitalist, anti-bureaucratic, Reaganized liberalism. The most prominent is 43-yearold Cory Booker, who is famously close to Wall Street and supports introducing market competition into education via government-funded vouchers for private schools. In the words of New York magazine, Booker is essentially a Clinton Democrat. Gavin Newsom, the 45-year-old lieutenant governor of California, has embraced Silicon Valley in the same way Booker has embraced Wall Street. His book, Citizenville, calls for Americans to reinvent government, a phrase cribbed from Al Gores effort to strip away government bureaucracy in the 1990s. In the private sector, he told Time, leaders are willing to take risks and find innovative solutions. In the public sector, politicians are risk-averse. Julian Castro, the 39year-old mayor of San Antonio and 2012 Democratic convention keynote speaker, is a fiscal conservative who supports NAFTA.
The argument between the children of Reagan and the children of Clinton is fierce, but ideologically, it tilts toward the right. Even after the financial crisis, the Clinton Democrats who lead their party dont want to nationalize the banks, institute a single-payer health-care system, raise the top tax rate back to its pre-Reagan high, stop negotiating free-trade deals, launch a war on poverty, or appoint labor leaders rather than Wall Streeters to top economic posts. They want to regulate capitalism modestly. Their Reaganite Republican adversaries, by contrast, want to deregulate it radically. By pre-Reagan standards, the economic debate is taking place on the conservative side of the field. Butand this is the key point--theres reason to believe that Americas next political generation will challenge those limits in ways
that cause the leaders of both parties fits.
Americas youngest adults are called Millennials because the 21st century was dawning as they entered their plastic years. Coming of age in the 21st century is of no inherent political significance. But this calendric shift has coincided with a genuine historical disruption. Compared to their Reagan-Clinton generation elders, Millennials are entering adulthood in an America where government provides much less economic security. And their economic experience in this newly deregulated America has been horrendous. This experience has not produced a common generational outlook. No such thing ever exists. But it is producing a distinct intragenerational argument, one that does not respect the ideological boundaries to which Americans have become accustomed. The Millennials are unlikely to play out their political conflicts between the yard lines Reagan and Clinton set out.
See which celebrities support Bill de Blasio, one of the rising stars of the new new left.
Even if they are only a decade older than Millennials, politicians like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker hail from a different political generation.
In 2001, just as the first Millennials were entering the workforce, the United States fell into recession. By 2007 the unemployment rate had still not returned to its prerecession level. Then the financial crisis hit. By 2012, data showed how economically bleak the Millennials first decade of adulthood had been. Between 1989 and 2000, when younger members of the Reagan-Clinton generation were entering the job market, inflation-adjusted wages for recent college graduates rose almost 11 percent, and wages for recent high school graduates rose 12 percent. Between 2000 and 2012, it was the reverse. Inflation-adjusted wages dropped 13 percent among
recent high school graduates and 8 percent among recent graduates of college.
But it was worse than that. If Millennials were victims of a 21st-century downward slide in wages, they were also victims of a longer-term downward slide in benefits. The percentage of recent college graduates with employer-provided health care, for instance, dropped by half between 1989 and 2011.
Christine Quinn and Hillary Clinton meet in Manhattan. (Getty Images)
The Great Recession hurt older Americans, too. But because they were more likely to already have secured some foothold in the job market, they were more cushioned from the blow. By 2009, the net worth of households headed by someone over 65 was 47 times the net worth of households headed by someone under 35, almost five times the margin that existed in 1984.
One reason is that in addition to coming of age in a terrible economy, Millennials have come of age at a time when the government safety net is far more threadbare for the young than for the middle-aged and old. As the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, younger Americans are less likely than their elders to qualify for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Not to mention Medicare and Social Security.)
Millennials have also borne the brunt of declines in government spending on higher education. In 2012, according to The New York Times, state and local spending per college student hit a 25-year low. As government has cut back, universities have passed on the (ever-increasing) costs of college to students. Nationally, the share of households owing student debt doubled between 1989 and 2010, and the average amount of debt per household tripled, to $26,000.
Economic hardship has not always pushed Americans to the left. In the ClintonReagan era, for instance, the right often used culture and foreign policy to convince economically struggling Americans to vote against bigger government. But a mountain of survey dataplus the heavily Democratic tilt of Millennials in every national election in which they have votedsuggests that they are less susceptible to these right-wing populist appeals. For one thing, right-wing populism generally requires rousing white, Christian, straight, native-born Americans against Americans who are not all those things. But among Millennials, there are fewer white, Christian
non-immigrants to rouse. Forty percent of Millennials are racial or ethnic minorities. Less than half say religion is very important to their lives.
And even those Millennials who are white, Christian, straight, and native-born are less resentful of people who are not. According to a 2010 Pew survey, whites under the age of 30 were more than 50 points more likely than whites over 65 to say they were comfortable with someone in their family marrying someone of another ethnicity or race. A 2011 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that almost 50 percent of evangelicals under the age of 30 back gay marriage.
Of course, new racial, ethnic, and sexual fault lines could emerge. But today, a Republican seeking to divert Millennial frustrations in a conservative cultural direction must reckon with the fact that Millennials are dramatically more liberal than the elderly and substantially more liberal than the Reagan-Clinton generation on every major culture war issue except abortion (where there is no significant generational divide).
They are also more dovish on foreign policy. According to the Pew Research Center, Millennials are close to half as likely as the Reagan-Clinton generation to accept sacrificing civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and much less likely to say the best way to fight terrorism is through military force.
A protester carries a flag at Occupy Wall Street. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
It is these two factorstheir economic hardship in an age of limited government protection and their resistance to right-wing cultural populismthat best explain why on economic issues, Millennials lean so far left. In 2010, Pew found that two-thirds of Millennials favored a bigger government with more services over a cheaper one with fewer services, a margin 25 points above the rest of the population. While large majorities of older and middle-aged Americans favored repealing Obamacare in late 2012, Millennials favored expanding it, by 17 points. Millennials are substantially more prolabor union than the population at large .
The only economic issue on which Millennials show much libertarian instinct is the privatization of Social Security, which they disproportionately favor. But this may be less significant than it first appears. Historically, younger voters have long been more proSocial Security privatization than older ones, with support dropping as they near
retirement age. In fact, when asked if the government should spend more money on Social Security, Millennials are significantly more likely than past cohorts of young people to say yes.
Most striking of all, Millennials are more willing than their elders to challenge cherished American myths about capitalism and class. According to a 2011 Pew study, Americans under 30 are the only segment of the population to describe themselves as have nots rather than haves. They are far more likely than older Americans to say that business enjoys more control over their lives than government. And unlike older Americans, who favor capitalism over socialism by roughly 25 points, Millennials, narrowly, favor socialism.
There is more reason to believe these attitudes will persist as Millennials age than to believe they will change. For starters, the liberalism of Millennials cannot be explained merely by the fact that they are young, because young Americans have not always been liberal. In recent years, polls have shown young Americans to be the segment of the population most supportive of government-run health care. But in 1978, they were the least supportive. In the last two elections, young Americans voted heavily for Obama. But in 1984 and 1988, Americans under 30 voted Republican for president.
Getty
Nor is it true that Americans necessarily grow more conservative as they age. Sometimes they do. But academic studies suggest that party identification, once forged in young adulthood, is more likely to persist than to change. Theres also strong evidence from a 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper that people who experience a recession in their plastic years support a larger state role in the economy throughout their lives.
The economic circumstances that have pushed Millennials left are also unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon. A 2010 study by Yale economist Lisa Kahn found that even 17 years later, people who had entered the workforce during a recession still earned 10 percent less than those who entered when the economy was strong. In other words, even if the economy booms tomorrow, Millennials will still be suffering the Great Recessions aftershocks for decades.
And the economy is not likely to boom. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesnt believe the unemployment rate will reach 6 percent until 2016, and even that will be higher than the 1990s average. Nor are the government protections Millennials crave likely to appear anytime soon. To the contrary, as a result of the spending cuts signed into law in 2010 and the sequester that began this year, nondefense discretionary spending is set to decline by decades end to its lowest level in 50 years.
If Millennials remain on the left, the consequences for American politics over the next two decades could be profound. In the 2008 presidential election, Millennials constituted one-fifth of Americas voters. In 2012, they were one-quarter. In 2016, according to predictions by political demographer Ruy Teixeira, they will be onethird. And they will go on constituting between one-third and two-fifths of Americas voters through at least 2028.
This rise will challenge each party, but in different ways. In the runup to 2016, the media will likely feature stories about how 40-something Republicans like Marco Rubio, who blasts Snoop Dog from his car, or Paul Ryan, who enjoys Rage Against the Machine, may appeal to Millennials in ways that geezers like McCain and Romney did not. Dont believe it. According to a 2012 Harvard survey, young Americans were more than twice as likely to say Mitt Romneys selection of Ryan made them feel more negative about the ticket than more positive. In his 2010 Senate race, Rubio fared worse among young voters than any other age group. The same goes for Rand Paul in his Senate race that year in Kentucky, and Scott Walker in his 2010 race for governor of Wisconsin and his recall battle in 2012.
Pre-election polls in Ted Cruzs 2012 senate race in Texas (there were no exit polls) also showed him faring worst among the young.
The likeliest explanation for this is that while younger Republican candidates may have a greater cultural connection to young voters, the ideological gulf is vast. Even if they are only a decade older than Millennials, politicians like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker hail from a different political generation both because they came of age at a time of relative prosperity and because they were shaped by Reagan, whom Millennials dont remember. In fact, the militantly anti-government vision espoused by ultra-Reaganites like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker isnt even that popular among Millennial Republicans . As a July Pew survey notes, Republicans under 30 are more hostile to the Tea Party than any other Republican age group. By double digits, theyre also more likely than other Republicans to support increasing the minimum wage.
Republicans may modestly increase their standing among young voters by becoming more tolerant on cultural issues and less hawkish on foreign policy, but its unlikely they will become truly competitive unless they follow the counsel of conservative commentators Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam and adapt to a new reality namely, that today, Americans are increasingly worried about their economic security. If theres hope for the GOP, its that Millennials, while hungry for government to provide them that economic security, are also distrustful of its capacity to do so. As a result of growing up in what Chris Hayes has called the fail decade the decade of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis Millennials are even more cynical about government than the past generations of young Americans who wanted less from it. If a Republican presidential candidate could match his Democratic opponent as a champion of economic security and yet
do so in a way that required less faith in Washingtons competence and benevolence, he might boost the GOP with young voters in a way no number of pop-culture references ever could.
If the Millennials challenge Reaganite orthodoxy, they will likely challenge Clintonian orthodoxy, too. Over the past three decades, Democratic politicians have grown accustomed to campaigning and governing in the absence of a mobilized left. This absence has weakened them: Unlike Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could never credibly threaten American conservatives that if they didnt pass liberal reforms, left-wing radicals might disrupt social order. But Democrats of the Reagan-Clinton generation have also grown comfortable with that absence. From Tony Coelho, who during the Reagan years taught House Democrats to raise money from corporate lobbyists to Bill Clinton, who made Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, to Barack Obama, who gave the job to Rubins former deputy and alter ego, Larry Summers, Democrats have found it easier to forge relationships with the conservative worlds of big business and high finance because they have not faced much countervailing pressure from an independent movement of the left.
But that may be changing. Look at the forces that created Occupy Wall Street. The men and women who assembled in September 2011 in Zuccotti Park bore three key characteristics. First, they were young. According to a survey published by City University of New Yorks Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor, 40 percent of the core activists involved taking over the park were under 30 years old. Second, they were highly educated. Eighty percent possessed at least a bachelors degree, more than twice the percentage of New Yorkers overall. Third, they were frustrated economically. According to the CUNY study, more than half the Occupy activists under 30 owed at least $1,000 in student debt. More than a one-third had lost a job or been laid off in the previous five years. In the words of David Graeber, the man widely credited with coining the slogan We are the 99 percent, the Occupy activists were forward-looking people who had been stopped dead in their tracks by bad economic times.
Occupy Wall Street protesters picket during a May Day rally in front of the Bank of America building in 2012. (Monika Graff/Getty Images)
For a moment, Occupy shook the country. At one point in December 2011, Todd Gitlin points out in Occupy Nation , the movement had branches in one-third of the cities and towns in California. Then it collapsed. But as the political scientist Frances
Fox Piven has argued, The great protest movements of history did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Its impossible to know whether the protest against inequality will be such a movement. But the forces that drove it are unlikely to subside. Many young Americans feel that economic unfairness is costing them a shot at a decent life. Such sentiments have long been widespread among the poor. Whats new is their prevalence among people who saw their parents achieveand expected for themselvessome measure of prosperity, the people Chris Hayes calls the newly radicalized upper-middle class.
If history is any guide, the sentiments behind Occupy will find their way into the political process, just as the anti-Vietnam movement helped create Eugene McCarthys presidential bid in 1968, and the civil-rights movement bred politicians like Andrew Young, Tom Bradley, and Jesse Jackson. Thats especially likely because Occupys message enjoys significant support among the young. A November 2011 Public Policy Polling survey found that while Americans over 30 opposed Occupys goals by close to 20 points, Millennials supported them by 12.
Bill de Blasios mayoral campaign offers a glimpse into what an Occupy-inspired challenge to Clintonism might look like. In important ways, New York politics has mirrored national politics in the Reagan-Clinton era. Since 1978, the mayoralty has been dominated by three menEd Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg who although liberal on many cultural issues have closely identified Wall Streets interests with the citys. During their time in office, New York has become far safer, cleaner, more expensive, and more unequal. In Bloombergs words, New York is now a high-end product.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, despite her roots on the left as a housing and LGBT activist, became Bloombergs heir apparent by stymieing bills that would have required businesses to give their employees paid sick leave and mandated a higher minimum wage for companies that receive government subsidies. Early in the campaign, many commentators considered this a wise strategy and anticipated that as New Yorks first lesbian mayor, Quinn would symbolize the citys unprecedented cultural tolerance while continuing its Clintonian economic policies.
Then strange things happened. First, Anthony Weiner entered the race and snatched support from Quinn before exploding in a blaze of late-night comedy. But when Weiner crashed, his support went not back to Quinn but to de Blasio, the candidate who most bluntly challenged Bloombergs economic philosophy. Calling it an act of equalization in a city that is desperately falling into the habit of disparity, de Blasio made his central proposal a tax on people making over $500,000 to fund universal childcare. He also called for requiring developers to build more affordable housing and ending the New York Police Departments stop and frisk policies that had angered many African-Americans and Latinos. Bloombergs deputy mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted that de Blasios agenda is clear: higher taxes, bigger govt, more biz mandates. A u-turn back to the 70s.
But in truth, it was Wolfson who was out of date: Fewer and fewer New Yorkers remember the 1970s, when economic stagnation, rising crime, and bloated government helped elect both Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan. What concerns them
more today is that, as The New Yorker recently noted, If the borough of Manhattan were a country, the income gap between the richest twenty per cent and the poorest twenty per cent would be on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia, and Lesotho. In Tuesdays Democratic primary, Quinn defeated de Blasio in those parts of New York where average income tops $175,000 per year. But he beat her by 25 points overall.
Democrats in New York are more liberal than Democrats nationally. Still, the right presidential candidate, following de Blasios model, could seriously challenge Hillary Clinton. If that sounds far-fetched, consider the last two Democratic presidential primary campaigns. In October 2002, Howard Dean was so obscure that at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin repeatedly referred to him as John. But in the summer of 2003, running against the Iraq War amidst a field of Washington Democrats who had voted to authorize it, Dean caught fire. In the first quarter of the year he raised just under $3 million, less than one-third of John Kerrys total. In the second quarter, he shocked insiders by beating Kerry and raising over $7 million. In the third quarter, he raised almost $15 million, far more than any Democrat ever had. By November, Harkin, Al Gore, and the nations two most powerful labor unions had endorsed Dean and he was well ahead in the Iowa polls.
At the last minute, Dean flamed out, undone by harsh attacks from his rivals and his campaigns lack of discipline. Still, he established a template for toppling a Democratic frontrunner: inspire young voters, raise vast funds via small donations over the Web, and attack those elements of Clintonian orthodoxy that are accepted by Democratic elites but loathed by liberal activists on the ground.
In 2008, that became the template for Barack Obama. As late as October 2007, Hillary enjoyed a 33-point lead in national polls. But Obama made her support for the Iraq War a symbol of her alleged timidity in challenging the right-leaning consensus in Washington. As liberals began to see him as embodying the historic change they sought, Obama started raising ungodly amounts via small donors over the Internet, which in turned won him credibility with insiders in Washington. He overwhelmed Hillary Clinton in caucus states, where liberal activists wield greater power. And he overwhelmed her among younger voters. In the 2008 Iowa caucuses, youth turnout rose 30 percent and among voters under the age of 30, Obama beat Hillary by 46 points.
Hillary starts the 2016 race with formidable strengths. After a widely applauded term as secretary of state, her approval rating is 10 points higher than it was when she began running in 2008. Her vote to authorize Iraq will be less of a liability this time. Her campaign cannot possibly be as poorly managed. And she wont have to run against Barack Obama.
Still, Hillary is vulnerable to a candidate who can inspire passion and embody fundamental change, especially on the subject of economic inequality and corporate power, a subject with deep resonance among Millennial Democrats. And the candidate who best fits that description is Elizabeth Warren.
A crowd watches Azealia Banks onstage during the Coachella Festival. (Karl Walter/Getty Images)
First, as a woman, Warren would drain the deepest reservoir of pro-Hillary passion: the prospect of a female president. While Hillary would raise vast sums, Dean and Obama have both shown that in the digital age, an insurgent can compete financially by inspiring huge numbers of small donations. Elizabeth Warren can do that. Shes already shown a knack for going viral. A video of her first Senate banking committee hearing, where she scolded regulators that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-fortrial, garnered 1 million hits on YouTube. In her 2012 Senate race, despite never before having sought elected office, she raised $42 million, more than twice as much as the second-highest-raising Democrat. After Bill Clinton and the Obamas, no other speaker at last summers Democratic convention so electrified the crowd.
Warren has done it by challenging corporate power with an intensity Clinton Democrats rarely muster. At the convention, she attacked the Wall Street CEOs the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs[who] still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.
And in one of the biggest applause lines of the entire convention, taken straight from Occupy, she thundered that we dont run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
Dont be fooled by Warrens advanced age. If she runs, Millennials will be her base. No candidate is as well positioned to appeal to the young and economically insecure. Warren won her Senate race by eight points overall, but by 30 points among the young. The first bill she introduced in the Senate was a proposal to charge college students the same interest rates for their loans that the Federal Reserve offers big banks. It soon garnered 100,000 hits on YouTube.
A big reason Warrens speech went viral was its promotion by Upworthy, a website dedicated to publicizing progressive narratives. And that speaks to another, underappreciated, advantage Warren would enjoy. Clinton Democrats once boasted a potent intellectual and media infrastructure. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, were the Democratic Partys hottest ideas shops, and they dedicated themselves to restoring the partys reputation as business-friendly. Influential New Democratic aligned magazines like The New Republic and Washington Monthly also
championed the cause.
Today, that New Democratic infrastructure barely exists. The DLC has closed down. The New Republic and Washington Monthly have moved left. And all the new powerhouses of the liberal mediafrom Paul Krugman (who was radicalized during the Bush years) to Jon Stewart (who took over The Daily Show in 1999) to MSNBC (which as late as 2008 still carried a show hosted by Tucker Carlson)believe the Democrats are too soft on Wall Street.
You can see that shift in the race for governor of the Federal Reserve, where the liberal media has rallied behind Janet Yellen and against the more Wall Street identified Larry Summers. In the age of MSNBC, populist Democrats enjoy a media echo chamber that gives them an advantage over pro-business Democrats that did not exist a decade ago. And if Clinton, who liberal pundits respect, runs against Warren, who liberal pundits revere, that echo chamber will benefit Warren.
Of course, Warren might not run. Or she might prove unready for the national stage. (She has no foreign-policy experience). But the youthful, anti-corporate passion that could propel her candidacy will be there either way. If Hillary Clinton is shrewd, she will embrace it, and thus narrow the path for a populist challenger. Just as New York by electing Ed Koch in 1978 foreshadowed a national shift to the right, New York in 2013 is foreshadowing a national shift to the left. The door is closing on the Reagan-Clinton era. It would be ironic if it was a Clinton herself who sealed it shut.
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Greg Sargent @ThePlumLineGS If you haven't read it yet, @PeterBeinart on the "new new left" is great, especially on de Blasio/Warren: thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/
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Anne Turner @anneturner79 Fascinating. How the gap generation (b. 1975-1985) and Millennials (b. 1985-2000) will reshape politics: thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/
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Northside DFA @Northside_DFA A great article on how progressive politics is starting to shift back to the left. thebea.st/18RsE8Y fb.me/M4DsyQ1H
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Joanna Larson @JoannaLLarson

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long. Peter Beinart, is the editor of OpenZion.comand writes about domestic politics and foreign policy at The Daily Beast. He is also an associate professor of journalism and political science at CUNY andauthor of The Crisis of Zionism . For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
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GCJMN
1 hour ago
That article gave me more hope for the future of this country than I have had for a while. My fear, however, is that millennials don't respect the power of their vote. I think the election of Obama was a seminal event in its own way. A lot of young liberals thought his election would bring about massive change, or any change really, but it didn't. We saw Obama remain tied to big business, expand aspects of the war on terror, and do little to curb inequality (the 1% earned the greatest share of the US income since 1928 this year). While he is light-years away from Bush, he doesn't feel light-years away. So, I fear, a lot of my generation will think that government is not the pathway to change. They will try to change things in the non-profit and corporate sectors. And so, the greatest leverage point of power will remain in the hands of the right. One of my friends literally said, "My vote is meaningless, my dollar is my vote." I don't think that we have properly learnt the lesson that government can be the solution.
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catpark4

4 hours ago
Imagine a Clinton-Warren ticket in 2016.
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LisaP
2 hours ago
@catpark4 Meh.
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missingpoint
6 hours ago
Strangely, this concept of a third path seems to ideologically reflect the the duality of the original two. It is a compromise position, not an alternative position. Everyone involved must give up something to get a little bit of what they want, rather than coming together to envision solutions attractive to everyone involved. It is either or thinking cloaked in the language of and. And people are tired of it. The manufactured crisis after crisis, the constant conflict, is an intentional distraction away from what is possible. perhaps the changing electorate is more than the Democrats bargained for. What if those so passionately mobilized to vote by the attacks on their rights refuse to back down? What if they move beyond this protective stance to mobilize for the expansion of those rights? What if they shift en masse from a strategy of simply making demands on those in power to one of development and mobilization of their own alternatives, and start using those alternatives to withdraw their consent from the status quo? What if they are no longer satisfied with voting every four (two, four, six) years? What if they choose instead to vote every day? More here: http://whatisthemissingpoint.blogspot.com/2012/12/vote-every-day.html
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Steamdude
7 hours ago
Frankly, I'm surprised I did not see the terms "neocon" and "neolib" in this article, which is by far the best description I have yet to see for the political state of affairs in the U.S. Thanks for your insight.
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newshound1
13 hours ago
no trickle down, only cost of living going up as infrastructure goes down along with wages. Benefits now are coupon clipping.
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bettysdad
14 hours ago
As the son of parents who were both blacklisted back in the day, the "new, new left" is actually the "old left" in more interesting clothes. And thank God, it's about time we ground the Clintons, et al, into the dirt.
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chris nw
19 hours ago
@Dirty_Choneez That makes no sense.

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logicrules
19 hours ago
@chris nw @Dirty_Choneez Thats a goober for ya.
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bettysdad
14 hours ago
@Dirty_Choneez All sex crimes are at a higher rate in red states. Enjoy those little boys.
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anarchitek
19 hours ago
Why anyone in their right mind would vote for republikkkans is beyond my ability to comprehend. Other than self-interest, the party has offered nothing to the average citizen since Dwight Eisenhower left office, with the Interstate Highway project yet to be built. Most young people today face an uncertain future than in main to "republikkkan" policies and Ronnie RayGun's idiotic "trickle-down economics". The world has changed, not for the better, thanks to relentless attacks by republikkkans, on the banks, Savings & Loan industry, and Wall Street. During the 80's, a horde of locusts called "junk bond kings" DEVASTATED American business, SHREDDING wholesale companies whose ONLY fault was NOT making Wall Street "enough" money! They bought up control of companies, then idled work forces, sending most to unemployment, finding CS reasons to "fire" others, so they couldn't collect their pensions, then LOOTING those pension funds, to pay the USURIOUS loans on their "junk bonds". What happened was MILLIONS of MIDDLE-CLASS jobs were DESTROYED, never to be replaced, except by MINIMUM wage jobs, with NO benefits, and NO future! The "meltdown" of 2008 was just the LATEST outrage from a party that embraced GREED as a mantra. The scam created by AEG should have resulted in LONG jail sentences for the most egregious offenders, but it didn't. Instead, AMERICA took it on the chin, just as they'd paid for the S&L looting, and the miscreants were soon hopping around, telling big lies about who did what, passing the buck and avoiding all blame. In an instance of monumental hubris, one of the offenders thought he should be President, and couldn't understand why so few agreed! The coming generation has seen their future shrink to one in which they will face a lifetime of struggling to make ends meet, thanks to the overweening GREED of the party of the few. It's a bleak and uncomfortable future, and one that should never have come to pass, so the party will have to suck it up and take its medicine. I doubt few, if any, will be willing to offer mea culpas, so this may well be the death song of the republikkkan party, not that very many will attend the funeral. The party belongs on the scrap heap of history, along with its partner-in-crime, the Communist Party, who also were only concerned with the few, and the self-absorbed. No one will mourn the loss of either of these exercises in self-delusion.
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3monkeys
21 hours ago
Today's brand of conservatism is toxic to everyone that is not wealthy. Those supporting it like they Teabaggers are unable to see this, they are in denial. The Left must rise up; if
they don't then an ugly revolution will be the result.....

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manapp99
6 hours ago
@3monkeys The left DID rise up and first they swept congress in 06. Then the economy fell and they bailed out Wall Street. Then they elected Obama. Then they passed health care reform that benefits the Insurance industry. It is no coincidence that Democrats now get more campaign contributions from the 1% than do the GOP. Now we have worse income inequality than we did when the GOP ran DC.
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LisaP
2 hours ago
@3monkeys There won't be a revolution. That's the ugly truth.
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LisaP
22 hours ago
The Castro brothers from Texas. Brought up in a strong Labor household. These guys, and other men and women like them, I hope, are the future. As experienced as Hillary Clinton is, I'm just not a fan. I wish I felt differently, but I'm afraid there won't be a single Democrat to challenge her and give it a good run.
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depressionbaby
22 hours ago
Not local? Bloomberg! Colorado!

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daveinboise
23 hours ago
God, you guys are still at this?
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AlanD2
23 hours ago
@daveinboise Why the surprise, Dave. After all the fur flying last night?
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Rickinindiana
23 hours ago
@AlanD2@daveinboise a furry frenzy? I must have missed it. I was too worn out from George Bush Day on Wednesday
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
It was like two days ago, but I noted that one way a candidate can appeal to young voters is passion, particularly combined with candor: I cited the example of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. He gave a speech to grad students (not exactly an underprivileged bunch), and then one of them asked where he was going to get the money for all the good stuff he wanted to do.
"From you", RFK said.
One of the late Henry Hyde's best speeches was to tell incoming GOP Representatives in 1993 to go home, and write down on a piece of paper the issue on which they were willing to LOSE -- and to be honest about it: no fair pledging your undying commitment to national defense when you're from a district with a US Navy shipyard and an Air Force base. You might be pro-choice from a pro-life district, or believe in gay rights in a rural district with lots of evangelicals - but if you don't know what the issue is on which you are willing to openly disagree with your employers, the voters, and just walk away when they fire you, you'll do no good in Congress, Hyde told 'em.
So, here's a challenge for our gullible, fact-challenged brethren on the Right: NAME three examples of Republican candidates who openly told the voters they were wrong, on any issue -- and were willing to lose over it. Or, put another way, cite examples of Republicans in office who did things for the good of the country, even though it hurt their personal political future.
A couple paradigms (which is another better word for BC's mumbling misuse of "synecdoche", btw): Carter realized that inflation was the grave threat to America's economic future. So as soon as he got the chance, he nominated Paul Volcker, BECAUSE he was going to take the prime rate up over 16%. That this would explode unemployment and probably cost him his election is to Carter's credit -- and I am challenging you guys to come up with REPUBLICAN examples. Another one -- Gore after the Supreme Court stole his election. There was literally NO precedent for what Republican Justices did in the Florida case, and they took pains to say that they weren't setting one, either -- which, of course, is the ONLY job SCOTUS has. It was as naked an abuse of judicial power as is even POSSIBLE in this country -- and all Gore had to do was say so, to confirm the irrevocable damage partisan politics on the Supreme Court had done to the country. He didn't do it. He sacrificed his own political future -- which was downright imminent, after all -- for the good of the country. Got a Republican example?
Last one: Marjorie Margolies (at the time, Margolies-Mezvinsky) knew that if she voted for the Clinton economic plan in 1993, she would quite probably lose her re-election bid in 1994. She voted yes anyway, the decisive vote (it was close, she got to be the SYMBOL -- note the proper use of the word), and was promptly defeated: she sacrificed her political career, to make certain that Clinton's economic plan would get the chance to succeed -which it did, yielding FOUR budget surpluses and a long run of peace and prosperity that W promptly halted. Killed her career for that -- got a REPUBLICAN example?
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spanky_2
1 day ago
@theAmericanist "Our gullible, fact-challenged brethren on the Right"... "the Supreme Court stole his election"... "Hyde told 'em"... "That this would explode unemployment and probably cost him his election is to Carter's credit"... "Clinton's economic plan would get the chance to succeed -- which it did, yielding FOUR budget surpluses and a long run of peace and prosperity that W promptly halted."...
"gullible"... "fact-challenged"... Lol, somebody didn't just drink the Kool-aid but rather chugged the whole barrel. It's hard to argue with someone who's so completely abandoned reality for a cultish fantasy narrative.
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Miskatonic
1 day ago
@spanky_2 @theAmericanist You didn't offer up ant counter arguments of your own. Just an insult. What makes your take so laughable is that two of the examples don't really need to be researched. They are clear in memory. Al Gore never made any attempt to challenge the courts ruling which he could have done in congress and W. did halt the budget surpluses as soon as possible by cutting taxes without cutting spending.
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AlanD2
23 hours ago
@Miskatonic Sparky's post is a classic example of trolling, Misk. It's clear our conservative friends hate the facts that Americanist has posted on this thread.
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Miskatonic
23 hours ago
@spanky_2 @theAmericanist Oops. I should not have said "cutting taxes without cutting spending." I should have said cutting taxes while putting spending through the roof.
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theAmericanist
23 hours ago
@spanky_2 @theAmericanist LOL -- for the record, I KNEW Henry Hyde. (His wife was from my hometown.) His speech is why I challenged folks on the Right to come up with examples. See, it is something of a myth that 'the American character', if you think in such terms, is bold and uncompromising. In fact, much of what has made us America is self-sacrifice -- Washington first gave up the Army before he let himself be elected President; he deliberately set the two-term precedent; Lincoln was scrupulous about keeping within his powers as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief during the Civil War (the recent film is pretty good at showing that, even if it does wrong Connecticut); Teddy Roosevelt (this COULD have been one of your examples, but I'm claiming it) honored an offhand pledge not to run for a second term after serving just one in his own right, having served three years of McKinley's first term), and so on.
Note that I didn't make (although I could have) the charge that contemporary Republicans ACTIVELY erode the national interest to serve their own political goals. I'm just challenging you guys to come up with THREE examples of Republicans openly disagreeing with their employers, the voters; OR of clearly doing the right thing by the country (as they see it, mind), KNOWING that it will harm their immediate political prospects.
Examples, folks. You really want to admit even to yourselves that you got nothing?
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AJ-0000
20 hours ago
@theAmericanist@spanky_2 Or maybe nobody gives a crap about your post?
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theAmericanist
9 hours ago
@AJ-0000@theAmericanist@spanky_2 Makes my point: THIS is all ya got -- dissing folks who've thought stuff through, ESPECIALLY if they challenge you directly.
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dhfabian
16 hours ago
@theAmericanist Yikes! RFK would be rejected by this generation because of his focus on actually growing the middle class by making it possible for the poor to work their way up, i.e., having rungs on a ladder out of poverty. Sorry, folks, Kennedy did not wave the banner for the bourgeoisie alone. In most basic terms, you can't get a job without a home address, phone, bus fare. What's left of the middle class rejects this, obviously. You are also clearly not cognizant of the impact of Clinton, but I have no doubt that you will understand over time. Clinton bought a new car for his middle class mistress by using the money that needed for such things as insurance, house payment, etc. We're living with the consequences, as NAFTA and workfare labor have so successfully been phasing out the middle class. On top of that, he very successfully divided those who would have otherwise united to push back against the rt. wing agenda. Even those that call themselves "the left" have been deeply divided by class, ending any possibility of the movement that they want. Altogether, what Clinton did was to saw part way through the legs of a chair, told America to sit down in it, and is giggling, waiting for the chair to collapse, dumping America on the floor.
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dhfabian
1 day ago
No, there is no movement on the left today. Politically, left and right designate socioeconomic ideologies. No matter how you repackage it, the current trend of waving the banner for the bourgeoisie alone is absolutely not leftist. I can understand Obama seeing the necessity of appearances with an ex-president of the same party, but the reality (as his policies proved) is that Clinton is far to the right of such historic "staunch conservatives" as Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan. Obama is not. (Interestingly, when asked if he had plans to end welfare, Reagan said that welfare was vital to protecting the overall security of wages/economy, maintaining the middle class. We do see the consequences since Clinton ended aid/implemented cheap workfare replacement labor. What we see in media marketed to liberals (with rare exception, such as Greg Kaufman)
is middle class, middle of the road conservative Democrat ideology.
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Jay_2
1 day ago
While we have the new new liberals philosophies outlined above, here's a peak into the newish right, AKA The Tealiban... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6jU_Yfv_Ow
St. Clairsville Massive Overpasses To Impeach Obama Rally
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chris nw
22 hours ago
@Jay_2 Glenn Beck and Fox are where these people get their news. Is anybody surprised?
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dhfabian
16 hours ago
@chris nw @Jay_2 They're still around?
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highcarry
1 day ago
gotta go. everyone have a great weekend and stay safe.

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AlanD2
1 day ago
@highcarry You too, High...
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
This article perfectly encapsulates why I've become so pessimistic about our country. The one thing keeping me reasonably content even in the face of utter rout in the culture wars was the certainty that there was a broad consensus in favor of sane economics in this country. That certainty evaporated about when I found out that the Occupy movement had a net positive approval rating in late 2011. Of course, that's done now, but seriously, America? And then I did some reading on the supposed Radical Right-Wing Reagan Baby-Eating Neoliberal Revolution that supposedly so drastically shifted the American philosophy of governance. Did you know that our government these days (%GDP) is already the largest it has been in peacetime American history? Did you know that even at the post-1980 trough, circa late Clinton, it was barely at the level it was right before Carter created the Department of Education? It took a Reagan, a Bush, and a Clinton to reverse half of a Carter. Twelve years later, eight under a Republican president, we're worse than where we started. And now the American people want to "reverse" their way into ever-higher heights of poor governance. Congratulations, Mr. de Blasio. You have the keys. Tell the last businessman leaving the country to turn out the lights, will you? Forwarding address is Switzerland.
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Jimbo_3
1 day ago
@Bonchamps And where do you get that Reagan reversed Carter? He increased the size of the federal government, he did not decrease it. In Carter's last year, federal spending was 27.9% of national income. In Reagan's last year it was 28.7%. He increased spending on education, social security, medicare, foreign aid, and certainly of course defense. The number of non-military federal employees when Carter left was 2.8M, and when Reagan left it was 3M. By the way, Carter actually decreased his number of employees.
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Marmee
1 day ago
@Jimbo_3 And don't forget taxes were raised 11 times during Reagan's Presidency. 2600 banks failed as well.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@Marmee @Jimbo_3 I don't care about taxes. Short-run taxation is just a poor attempt at a stimulus, per Keynesian theory. Long-run taxation is pretty much just the level of spending. Attack spending, and you attack taxes.
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dhfabian
16 hours ago
@Bonchamps @Marmee @Jimbo_3 Yep. Our greatest expense by far is the military. We spend more than the next 15 nations combined when it comes to the military. We've remained engaged in war almost constantly since WWll, even though we don't win any, and leave nations far worse off. Slash military spending at least in half to reduce the incentive to invade other countries. Focus on defense,
end offense. As for taxes, Americans pay far lower taxes than the advanced nations, and have less to show for it. Reducing one's personal taxes is easy. Reduce your income and assets, and focus on the basics. Want to increase overall wealth, therefore bringing in more tax dollars from a broader range of the population? Start DEMANDING Congress to stop giving corporations money . Since Reagan, several trillion taxpayer dollars have been redistributed upward, mainly to corporations, "vital to job creation." Results: It didn't work. We now have a fraction of the jobs, at worsening wages.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Jimbo_3 Oy -- it is amazing that folks will sorta leap up and announce how little they know in public. 1) Reagan was not a "neoliberal'. 2) It was Carter, not Reagan, who hired Volcker to kill inflation -- in fact, Carter deserves serious credit for suicidal political courage, in that not only did he hire Volcker ON PURPOSE to raise interest rates so high that it would wring inflation out of the economy, he also stuck with Volcker's 16% prime rate KNOWING it would cost him the election. (For those who think it was the hostages in Iran, recall that Carter kept the Argo story secret, even though leaking it might have saved his campaign, AND he ordered the rescue mission, which if it had succeeded, would have probably ensured his re-election. Not to mention that William Casey was meeting secretly with the Iranians, to make certain that they KEPT American diplomats hostage until after the election.)
3) As noted below, the US economy ALWAYS does better under Democratic Presidents. Period. Full stop. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.
4) "Conservative" ideologues are uniformly gobSMACKingly ignorant of actual economics, history, or even ordinary business practices. As just a simple f'r instance -- the paradigm for a "socialist" Democratic economic program is rural electrification, a centerpiece of the New Deal. Before FDR, electric companies refused to invest in building power lines to the countryside, because they insisted that farmers did not need, did not want, could not afford and would not use electricity. Then when FDR over-ruled them and financed electricity to the country, farmers used so much electricity that rates dropped to nearly nothing, while (after winning WW2), Democratic economic leadership enabled folks living in rural areas to buy so many refrigerators, washers, dryers, and electric stoves (not to mention lightbulbs) that durable household goods drove the American job creating machine of the 50s and 60s.
Facts.
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AlanD2
1 day ago
@theAmericanist I've often thought that Reagan's intervention in the Iraq hostage mess prior to his taking office was actually treason, Americanist...
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Jimbo_3 Like I said, I'm not trying to demonize Carter. I admire Volcker, and I admire Carter's courage for appointing him. Of course, I disagree with his post-1982 monetary policy, but that goes down to the fact that he's a disciplined Keynesian (not a bad thing, IMO the oft-overlooked other half of Keynesianism is having the courage to tamp down on things when they overheat) while I lean more monetarist. As for (3), that's really just ignorant posturing on your part. "ALWAYS"? Really? I seem to recall the economy did better under Bush than Obama, Reagan than Carter, Coolidge and Harding than Wilson, and I could go on. Really, a president has fairly minimal influence on things. Besides, I'm not being partisan about this. Haven't I just spent several paragraphs eviscerating Reagan and Bush's record on cutting government? None of them were Maggie Thatcher. Re: (4), I'd like a citation for an actual academic paper on that, if you would. How do we know it wouldn't have happened anyway? Every experiment needs a control, after all. I'm not convinced the South wouldn't have developed anyway due to natural convergence economics, and of course, at that point, the electric companies would be chomping at the bit to route out electrical power. Everything in its time. Again, that's an interesting academic case study, if you have a genuine (non-ideological hack) paper on it.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @theAmericanist @Jimbo_3 LOL -- wow. You "recall" the economy did better under Bush than Obama? Up until the total worldwide collapse of credit on W's watch, under his leadership, and utterly mishandled by HIS appointees? "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln: How did you like the play?" Dude -- you are both too ignorant, and too ideological (denoting a fundamental dishonesty) to educate for free. If you really want to LEARN something about rural electrification, study the career of Leland Olds -- one place to start would be Caro's massive multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which deals with Olds in "Master of the Senate". There's an extensive bibliography.
You're welcome.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 I see. You haven't addressed a single one of my points. Because I'm "ignorant" or something. Convenient that that absolves you from any responsibility to defend your point. And yes, GDP growth per capita was higher on average during the Bush administration than the Obama administration. I'm not saying Obama is at fault for that, I'm saying that it's an irrelevant measure for something as
short-lived as a presidency. But thanks for the Caro recommendation. I will look into that. I doubt it addresses my critique, though - I was looking for a specific counterfactual.
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francoprussian
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 Too simplistic by half Did the economy do better under Carter or Reagan? Under Bush I or Obama? Under Eisenhower or Truman? You're the guy who assured us (in all caps) that Florida law MANDATED that Zimmerman be CONVICTED on MURDER TWO charges. It's nice to see you back!
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@francoprussian@theAmericanist @Bonchamps @Ji mbo_3 It was getting to be a bit of a donkey-fest here. Well met, sir.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @theAmericanist @Jimbo_3 Your points aren't worth addressing, because ALL of your premises are wrong. That's why I pointed to ACTUAL examples -- a practice I'd commend to you. F'r instance, it was one of W's signature domestic policies to promote home ownership. HIS nominees ran the US Department of the Treasury, the SEC, and the CFTC. All of the primary regulators of the derivatives' market were W's choices, following W's policies. When Bear, Stearns went down, it was W's guys who decided they wouldn't step in: good or bad, that choice was their responsibility. When Lehman was next, same thing. Why were W's guys at Treasury, the SEC, and the CFTC so surprised when AIG meant that literally the WORLD's access to credit threw a rod?
It was THEIR job to keep the engine lubricated and make certain it wasn't running too hot.
That's why I note that you're dishonest -- not just the first year (which is still the prior President's budget), nor general economic conditions in the first two years (which is always, more or less, the momentum from the previous Administration, e.g., Volcker started beating inflation to death in 1979-80, and killed it dead in 1981-3), but Obama;s ENTIRE administration has had to drag the economic carcass of W's errors.
That's not an opinion -- it's a fact.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@Jimbo_3 I'm talking purely domestic expenditures. The military sphere is separate enough that I'm willing to forgive Reagan spending money to face down Gorbachev as long as, and this was borne out, the spending was temporary and did not set any long-run precedents. See this site: http://www.cato.org/blog/five-decadesfederal-spending. I'd give a non-advocate source, but the chart is objective enough. Feel free to ignore the commentary. As for Carter, I'm really using him as more a synecdoche for postwar liberalism than as any particular villain (he's actually kind of underrated in domestic policy, the Dept. of Education aside). But you see my point in general, right? The EPA, Medicare, most of the War on Poverty, all Nixon and Johnson's pet programs, and not one of them was even slightly reversed post-1980.
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Jay_2
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 not one of them was even slightly reversed post-1980. ______________________________________________ Are you kidding me? What about the welfare reform that went through under Clinton?
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 Yeah --- why would we need an EPA? Air that doesn't give you cancer is over-rated.
BTW -- I doubt you actually meant "synecdoche", which means a container for the thing contained. You meant "symbol".
The two words "synecdoche" and "synendoche" are easily distinguished (even though hardly anybody knows how), as follows: a container for the thing contained occurs when you say -- ya want a beer? You give the guy a BOTTLE, with the beer inside; you don't pour it in his hand.
OTOH, there is the old vaudeville joke about the bad comic who comes backstage, with the boos still ringing in the theater, his face all bruised and cut. Anotehr performer says: OMG what happened to you? The comic says: They threw tomatoes at me!" The other guy points to the gash over his eye -- TOMATOES did that?
Comic says: They were in a can.
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AlanD2
1 day ago
@theAmericanist Cute, Americanist... :-)
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 Cute, trying to trip me up, but I know what synecdoche means. It's the part referring to the whole. "Greybeard" referring to an old man, or similar. Of course, the container is a part, and it can be a synecdoche, but it need not be the container. As for the EPA, I'm not specifically talking about that. I'm talking about the fact that the broad evidence of domestic federal spending is such that it hasn't declined at all since 1972. The entire heyday of liberalism stands unreversed, specific cases notwithstanding. That is something that all you with all your legerdemain cannot escape.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps@theAmericanist@Jimbo_3 The middle part "ec" denotes the container, whcih is why the word means 'for the thing contained". For synENdoche, it's the opposite -- the thing contained for the container: the can which cut the comic's face contained the 'tomatoes did that?'
Also, as a general rule, when somebody mocks you for something you said, e.g. "But you see my point in general, right? The EPA....", it helps not to deny that you said it: "As for the EPA, I'm not specifically talking about that." We can READ what you've said, yanno.
Face it: your ideology has made you even more dishonest, than you are dumb -- and you've been caught out.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3Per Wikipedia: "A synecdoche ( /s n kd k i/, si-NEK -d-kee; from Greek synekdoche (), meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech[1] in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice-versa. [2] For example, referring to a congregation as the church or workers as hired hands ." It's generally poor form to call someone ignorant when one isn't apprised of all the facts.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
Besides, my argument wasn't that postwar liberalism is BAD. In fact, as you point out with the EPA, it can often be quite good. My point was that, as a broad influence on government spending, postwar liberalism stands almost entirely unreversed.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @theAmericanist @Jimbo_3 Try again. Note the distinction I observed between "synecdoche" and "synendoche", and come back when you know more than you get from BS wiktionary. I'd suggest the OED.
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Bonchamps
1 day ago
@theAmericanist@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 I've just googled "synendoche," and for the most part, the first 5 pages are typoes of the Charlie Kaufman movie. Checked Merriam-Webster, Britannia, and my copy of Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence," and they all agree with me. I've come to the conclusion that you're not debating in good faith. Enjoy your day. I'm not in the habit of wasting my time.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @theAmericanist @Jimbo_3 LOL -- not exactly a long list of sources ya got there. I had suggested the OED.
Try Here Lies Miss Groby, by James Thurber -- and learn when somebody is NOT wasting your time. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1942/03/21/1942_03_ 21_014_TNY_CARDS_000188451
Cuz I ain't.
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theAmericanist
1 day ago
@Bonchamps @Jimbo_3 Fair use! " Here Lies Miss Groby "Here Lies Miss Groby" appeared in The New Yorker of March 21, 1942, and was first collected in book form in My World and Welcome to It. It was also included in The Thurber Carnival . Miss Groby taught me English composition thirty years ago. It wasn't what prose said that interested Miss Groby; it was the way prose said it. The shape of a sentence crucified on a blackboard (parsed, she called it) brought a light to her eye. She hunted for Topic Sentences and Transitional Sentences the way little girls hunt for white violets in springtime. What she loved most of all were Figures of Speech. You remember her. You must have had her, too. Her influence will never die out of the land. A small schoolgirl asked me the other day if I could give her an example of metonymy. (There are several kinds of metonymies, you may recall, but the one that will come to mind most easily, I think, is Container for the Thing Contained.) The vision of Miss Groby came clearly before me when the little girl mentioned the old, familiar word. I saw her sitting at her desk, taking the rubber band off the roll-call cards, running it back upon the fingers of her right hand, and surveying us all separately with quick little henlike turns of her head. Here lies Miss Groby, not dead, I think, but put away on a shelf with the other T squares and rulers whose edges had lost their certainty. The fierce light that Miss Groby brought to English literature was the light of Identification. Perhaps, at the end, she could no longer retain the dates of the birth and death of one of the Lake poets. That would have sent her to the principal of the school with her resignation. Or perhaps she could not remember, finally, exactly how many Cornishmen there were who had sworn that Trelawny should not die, or precisely how many springs were left to Housman's lad in which to go about the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow. Verse was one of Miss Groby's delights because there was so much in both its form and content that could be counted. I believe she would have got an enormous thrill out of Wordsworth's famous lines about Lucy if they had been written this way: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye, Fair as a star when ninety-eight Are shining in the sky. It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any famous work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines, hunting for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott. Night after night, for homework, Miss Groby set us to searching in "Ivanhoe" and "Julius Caesar" for metaphors, similes, metonymies, apostrophes, personifications, and all the rest. It got so that figures of speech jumped out of the pages at you, obscuring the sense and pattern of the novel or play you were trying to read. "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." Take that, for instance. There is an unusual but perfect example of Container for the Thing Contained. If you read the funeral oration unwarily -- that is to say, for its meaning -- you might
easily miss the C.F.T.T.C. Antony is, of course, not asking for their ears in the sense that he wants them cut off and handed over; he is asking for the function of those ears, for their power to hear, for, in a word, the thing they contain. At first I began to fear that all the characters in Shakespeare and Scott were crazy. They confused cause with effect, the sign for the thing signified, the thing held for the thing holding it. But after a while I began to suspect that it was I myself who was crazy. I would find myself lying awake at night saying over and over, "The thinger for the thing contained." In a great but probably misguided attempt to keep my mind on its hinges, I would stare at the ceiling and try to think of an example of the Thing Contained for the Container. It struck me as odd that Miss Groby had never thought of that inversion. I finally hit on one, which I still remember. If a woman were to grab up a bottle of Grade A and say to her husband, "Get away from me or I'll hit you with the milk," that would be a Thing Contained for the Container. The next day in class I raised my hand and brought my curious discovery straight out before Miss Groby and my astonished schoolmates. I was eager and serious about it and it never occurred to me that the other children would laugh. They laughed loudly and long. When Miss Groby had quieted them she said to me rather coldly, "That was not really amusing, James." That's the mixed-up kind of thing that happened to me in my teens. In later years I came across another excellent example of this figure of speech in a joke long since familiar to people who know vaudeville or burlesque (or radio, for that matter). It goes something like this: A: B: A: B: What's your head all bandaged up for? I got hit with some tomatoes. How could that bruise you up so bad? These tomatoes were in a can.
I wonder what Miss Groby would have thought of that one. I dream of my old English teacher occasionally. It seems that we are always in Sherwood Forest and that from far away I can hear Robin Hood winding his silver horn. "Drat that man for making such a racket on his cornet!" cries Miss Groby. "He scared away a perfectly darling Container for the Thing Contained, a great, big, beautiful one. It leaped right back into its context when that man blew that cornet. It was the most wonderful Container for the Thing Contained I ever saw here in the Forest of Arden." "This is Sherwood Forest," I say to her. "That doesn't make any difference at all that I can see," she says to me. Then I wake up, tossing and moaning."
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francoprussian
1 day ago
@Jimbo_3 Carter slashed the military budget and left us essentially unprepared to do anything when Iran took our citizens hostage. Reagan reversed that. He won the Cold War -- his signature accomplishment -- without firing a shot, by outspending the Russians. When he took office, the "misery index" (combined inflation and unemployment rate) was about 20 percent. When he left office it
was about half that. GDP grew by 80 percent and the economy added 16 million new jobs while he was in office. Not bad, if you ask me. Lots of failures, ethical lapses, bad decisions, sure. A good, perhaps not great president. I would say the same about Bush I and Clinton. It's been all downhill from there.
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dhfabian
16 hours ago
@Bonchamps Think about what America did. We looked at the policies that took the US to its height of shared wealth AND productivity from WWll until 1980, making the US the leading world power, and reversed course. The results were inevitable.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html[9/14/2013 6:44:15 PM]