Nothing New Under the Sun

This post by Digby really got me thinking, because his political development closely tracks my own. In the early 1990's I was an enthusiastic supporter of DLC ideas, because I thought they had the potential to both improve Democratic electoral prospects and were creative solutions to a new era. And like Digby, I eventually realized that that both these benefits had been substantially oversold.

People like Jeff Klein, on the other hand, are dazzled by the economic successes and political victories of Bill Clinton and still can't seem grasp the limits of Clintonism. Bill had aimed to fundamentally re-balance the political equation in American politics, to restore liberalism electoral and policy initiative. He patently failed to do so. While he did narrow the gap in Presidential elections, he lost Congress and allowed the debate to continue to shift to the right.

There are a lot of reasons for this failure, which I and others have talked about a great deal. But I think the major problems with incremental Clintonism (the post-1994 variety, not the 1993 version) are that, politically, it does not comes to grips with the reactionary and ruthless right, and in policy, it fails to grapple with the real fundamental challenges facing the U.S. polity.

Let me say something controversial: we are not living in a new, unprecedented era. Oh, there are technological differences between now and the past, but I believe that many people are falling prey to the fallacy "Appeal to Novelty." They think that just because an idea seems new it is a good idea. This is a fallacy that liberals (including myself) have a tempremental weakness for, in the same way that conservatives are prone to committing the Appeal to Tradition fallacy.

In reality, all we are living in is the next logical phase of the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, economic activity was localized, small proprietors were able to compete with any other organization, and local government were able effectively manage their own destinies. With the advent of improved communications and transportations technology, independent economic agents and governments(the keystone of the middle class, and hence democracy itself), came under enormous pressure. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this economic transformation became regional in scope. The response by the left was to shift the locus of economic management upward to the national level, and to craft institutions to protect small proprietors and labor from the race-to-the-bottom tendencies and abusive corporate practices. They supported re-distribution, regulation, the social safety net, and labor unions. All of this worked. For the time being.

What the New Dealers failed to recognize was that 1) the momentum of industrialization made their solutions temporary, and 2) that a large constituency had never accepted these reforms. As technology has continued to improve, economics has now gone global, and the old arrangements have broken down just as they have come under new attack from their old right-wing opponents. So our new situation isn't new at old. It is just old problems on a larger scale.

In order to respond to these developments, the left doesn't need to abandon the New Deal but extend it. We need to go global too. This means that we need international economic institutions than can check the worst effects of globalization. The DLC strategy was to ape the changes in corporations and to individualize public services, turning citizens into customers. All this does is accelerate a downward shift, because what is needed is to strengthen collective institutions and create new ones that stretch across national lines. The DLC's contempt for unions is a key indicator of its fundamental misguidedness.

Incremental changes won't work. We need to Think Big, and Act Big. Late Clintonism simply adapted to the contemporary political environment rather than re-shaping it, which is why its accomplishments were so ephemeral. We need create a global New Deal, reformed of its old technocratic biases, because it is the only way were are going to save the American middle class, or our democracy.