Using the Past to Control the Future

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

One of the most difficult aspects of imposing a new political thesis is that, when you start, there's no vocabulary to describe it.

Every political era develops  its own vocabulary as well as its own belief system. Once these are imposed, a generation has a common set of touchstones with which to discuss policy.

• Lincoln's concept of Union meant southerners were subservient to the north's political will, and could only take command of the government through a loose coalition that included northern political machines and political reformers. Republicans could “wave the bloody shirt” if Democrats became too overt, and did.
• Theodore Roosevelt's concept of Progressivism offered a common vocabulary based on progress, on the public good, on the need to balance the interests of the rich and the poor slowly and carefully. In practice this is very close to the Obama Thesis of Consensus.
• Franklin Roosevelt's concept of Unity meant that “politics stops at the water's edge,” and that all groups had a stake in what the nation was doing through the growth of the middle class, that everyone in fact was part of the middle class.
• Richard Nixon's concept of Conflict held that majorities had to protect themselves from various minorities. Only those who were inside the Thesis deserved protection. Outsiders (and this concept eventually extended to all Democrats) were suspect. Their motives were not those of “us,” they were “them” and they had to be defeated for “us” to be safe.

In practice the Nixon Thesis worked by constantly narrowing the definition of “us” when the coalition grew too large. This was necessary to maintain the sense of being surrounded necessary for the assumptions to be maintained.

It was easy to be a Republican in 1970, in other words. You just had to not be a Democrat. Gradually moderates, feminists, mainstream protestants, blacks and browns were thrown over in favor of tightly-controlled groups I call Wall Street (economic), Church Street (social) and Easy Street (military-industrial) Republicans.

The final coalition, under George W. Bush, wound up having a lot in common with coalitions of church, oligarchs, and soldiers who have controlled Latin America under caudillos for two centuries, with disastrous results. It was no surprise that America ran off the rails. You run your country like Argentina and you're going to get Argentine results.

This is a long-winded way of saying that there is no present vocabulary for how President Obama wants politics to work. The Roosevelts are dead and can't be resurrected.

So when the President tried to bring Washington together around a conference table recently, what he got was not a negotiation, but political theater. John McCain went off on an irrelevant rant that dominated the news. Eric Cantor brought props, John Boehner offered rhetorical talking points. Theater is how we do politics under the Nixon Thesis.

The irony is that Health Care Reform should be a no-brainer. If Republicans really believe that health care is a privilege, a choice, how can they accept the existence of Medicare and Medicaid? In rhetoric, they can't, even if in practice they must. Even the cost-benefit success of the VA and military health systems must be questioned, because it conflicts with ideology.

What grassroots Republicans wind up endorsing is a system where the poor are taken care of, and the elderly are taken care of, and even children are taken care of as a matter of right, but the broad middle class – the people their Thesis was supposedly designed to defend – are left without real health care of any kind. Working people can no longer afford what insurers and hospitals must charge in order to make up for losses those for whom an entitlement exists.

It's really crazy. An unemployed New Yorker has better access to, and a greater entitlement to health care, than a hard-working middle class family in Atlanta or Houston. In practice it's indefensible.

But ideology is not about practice. It's not about reality. It's about an ideal. Those who support the ideal will be protected, those who oppose it must be destroyed.

But here's the lesson. At a time of crisis you may proclaim a new set of rules, but you must play with the rules as you're given them by the past. Only the past can control the future.

Nixon was “The One” as in a man who could re-create an FDR-like unity of purpose. FDR himself ran in 1932 as a “Progressive Democrat,” as an heir to his distant cousin Theodore's legacy of slow, steady progress. Teddy himself came in as a Vice President, the hero of San Juan Hill, a military leader in the mold of Republicans like U.S. Grant. And Lincoln sought, throughout his term, to echo the sense of common purpose espoused by his own political mentor. Henry Clay.

Barack Obama has no choice. He must play this hand by Nixon's rules. You can't impose new rules until you've won enough hands that the old rules no longer apply. That means narrow, partisan majorities, and intense organization of his own people against the common enemy that is the modern Republican Party.

Even though he doesn't believe Republicans have any ill motives, he must in the near term convince the rest of us they do, or we go back to Argentina and America will never come back.