The 15% Solution: Chapter 20: “What Might Have Been Done”
Introductory note (5/23/20): This is chapter 20 of my book “The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S. 1981-2022.” The book, written in 1994-95, was originally published in 1996. The third version was published in 2013 by the Punto Press, Brewster, N.Y., and is available on Amazon. However, the book, which I called “a fictional future history,” is purportedly published in 2048 (following the fascist period) on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the United States. From that historical perspective it purports to provide an overview of how fascism gradually came to the United States, beginning with advent of the Reagan Presidency in 1981.
As in the chapter’s title, it provides a speculation (again from the fictional perspective of 2048) about what might have been done during the proto-fascist period leading up to the formation of the apartheid state called “The New American Republics” in 2011. I immodestly think that some of the thoughts I had on that subject in 1994-95 might have some applicability now, as we try to stave off the establishment of a fascist U.S. state under Donald Trump and the ruling class sector to which he is beholden.
The 15% Solution:
From Fiction to Fact in the Political History of the United States, 2001-2022
Section 2: The History
Chapter 20, “What Might Have Been Done”
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Professor
Department of Preventive Medicine
Stony Book University School of Medicine
Stony Brook, NY
August 27, 2012
Author's Commentary
Introduction
Hindsight is almost always 20/20. From the vantage point of 2048, it is easy to look back 50 years and lay out "what might have been." And I must admit to you, dear reader, that I cannot resist doing just that. In this chapter, I present for your consideration some approaches to the development of liberal/progressive political processes that might have been effective in protecting, preserving, and expanding Constitutional democracy in the old U.S. during the Transition Era, thus preventing the onset of fascism.
Factors in the Onset of Fascism in the Old U.S.: A Review
The Causes of Rising Unrest
Towards the end of the Transition Era (1981-2001), as noted on several previous occasions, the country faced increasing, and increasingly severe, economic difficulties (Wright). They were characterized by steadily declining real wages, real personal incomes, and job security, steadily increasing public and private debt, a steadily widening gap in both wealth and income between the rich and everyone else, steadily increasing permanent un- and under-employment concentrated in certain portions of the population. There were many causes of this state of affairs. It is now understood that the central element, the most important cause of this state of affairs, was the disordered public and private investment policy resulting from the use of the so-called "free market" to determine capital investment decisions.
Unrest and the Right-Wing Reactionary Response
This economic situation led to rising unrest in many sectors of the population. Some focused on the real causes of the problems. But many others were searching for easy, simplistic solutions to the national dilemma. Right-Wing Reaction was only too happy to supply such generalizations and non-answers as: "it's because of a decline in moral values." The trend in simplisticism then was aggravated by the increasingly vigorous exploitation by Right-Wing Reaction for political purposes of religion and religious prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. The common denominator of the several approaches was blaming "The Other" for the nation's difficulties (Wright). Eventually, however, these measures failed to adequately damp down the unrest.
The Political Destruction of Constitutional Democracy
The forces of Right-Wing Reaction then had to move to a second stage: the political destruction of Constitutional democracy. Since the beginning of the Transition Era, Right-Wing Reaction had been gradually but inexorably destroying by political means the bulwarks of Constitutional democracy: the Courts, the Congress, and the media. Under the NAR, they were physically destroyed or neutralized, and the organized use of broad-based repression and force was broadly employed as well, of course.) During the Transition Era, Right-Wing Reactionary political leadership did its best to undermine the Constitutional concept of the "United States," as well as destroy the concept of a Constitutionally-based national government with broad authority and responsibility. This was directly contrary to the word and meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution. It states clearly that there is a nation, that there is a national government, and what its purposes are:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Pretending that it didn’t, or perhaps not knowing that such a statement begins the Constitutional text, leading Transition Era Right-Wing figures tried to very significantly narrow the scope of the national government. For example, Richard Armey, the House of Representatives Republican Majority Leader in the 104th Congress, when asked about the functions of the Federal government, said (Sanger):
"Defend our shores, build a system of justice and construct some infrastructure."
At about the same time, the Republican Speaker of the House Newton Gingrich put it more broadly (Kelly):
"It [the Federal government] is powerful in foreign policy, it's powerful in keeping the dollar stable, it's powerful in stopping all drugs from coming into the country, it's powerful in doing those things we give to the central government. And then it says, you know, frankly: `You've got a lot of things to do back home. Don't even call me. I don't want to know. There's no reason I have to pay attention.'"
Well, there was a reason to "pay attention." It was called the Preamble to the Constitution. But few people of the time were aware of it or its import. And the positions taken by the likes of Armey and Gingrich made it more certain that ever fewer people would know what the responsibility and authority of the Federal government, under the Constitution, was. One way to insure the death of something is to ignore it. A sign on the wall of my dentist's office says, "Ignore your teeth, and they will just go away." The Right-Wing Reactionary attack on the Constitution was both active and passive. It succeeded all too well. (It must be noted that there is no evidence that either Mr. Armey or Mr. Gingrich would have approved of what eventually happened in fact to Constitutional democracy in the United States.)
No Effective Political Opposition
While this process was occurring, in many sectors of the population an abiding faith was maintained that Democratic forms, without content, would protect the American way of life. We know now that while democracy is the principal political weapon for the defense of Constitutional government and the rule of law against fascism, as a process it cannot stand by itself. It can be effective in that regard only if used in the promotion of a concrete ideology and a comprehensive political and economic program that stands in contrast to those of the fascists. That did not happen. Thus there was no effective political opposition to the eventual fascist takeover. (Note, however, as in the case of Nazi Germany, the existence of an Opposition, even a strong one, is no guarantee that the fascists will not take power in any case if the conditions for such a takeover are right.) Furthermore, many people simply did not believe that Right-Wing Reaction would do what it said they would do if they took power --- but it did. (The same thing had happened in 20th century Germany. In Adolf Hitler's prophetic book Mein Kampf he laid out exactly what he would do if he took power, including the extermination of European Jewry. Few took him seriously.)
The Failure of Opposition Leadership
As the process of fascist development proceeded, liberals of whatever party tended to "take a balanced view" and see "two sides of every question" until it was much too late to organize against the onslaught. As early as the 1992 Republican National Convention, the Right-Wing Reactionaries had declared that there was a "war on for power and control of the American spirit." The Democrats and other liberals failed to grasp just what they meant ("it's our way or the highway), until it was too late.
Even within social groupings that would appear to have been natural opponents of Right-Wing Reaction, for example the Jews and the blacks, there were major splits. Although most Jews were liberals or progressives, Right-wing, so-called "neo-conservative" (known in the vernacular of the time as "self-hating") Jews, were among the most vocal supporters of Right-Wing Reaction. Black leadership was split as well. As surprising as it may seem, during the late Transition Era and the early Fascist Period certain blacks in government, academic, and religious circles carried out some of the most important Right-Wing Reactionary work in promoting both anti-black racism and black anti-Semitism, as well as the general Right-Wing Reactionary line.
At the other end of the spectrum, there were multiple, small left-wing "third parties." But they could never get together and sometimes spent much more time and energy fighting each other and the Democratic Party than fighting the common enemy. Finally, a major factor in the relatively easy success of the Right-Wing Reactionaries was the gradual destruction of the American labor movement. Post-Second Civil War historians have traced that process back to the day after the passage in 1938 of the Wagner Act, that for the first time legalized collective bargaining in the old U.S. The American economic decision-makers just never accepted their loss in that one. They kept fighting until that defeat was turned into victory. American labor, which decades before had been robbed of any effective leadership by Federal labor legislation known as the Taft-Hartley Law, offered little in the way of effective opposition to the fascist takeover.
Thus the majority liberal and progressive forces failed to:
Recognize that they indeed held a majority of the electorate if they only would and could mobilize it.
Recognize the clear and present danger to the future of Constitutional democracy and the maintenance of true Americanism that the Right-Wing Reactionaries represented.
Develop a comprehensive, consistent, progressive, broad-based, socially-conscious truly American, politically-salable ideology to put up against the Bible-based, fundamentalist ideology and Right Wing anti-social individualism upon which Right-Wing Reaction were fundamentally based, to fight for the preservation and expansion of American Constitutional democracy. But, as noted, the liberal and progressive forces did nothing along these lines. The Right-wing Reactionaries of course developed, and implemented, "The 15% Solution." It worked. They won. And the rest, as they say, is history. (Again, it should be noted that there is no evidence that any of the original conceivers of the "The 15% Solution" would have sanctioned any of the policies developed under it or approved of any of the outcomes that occurred following its electoral success.)
The Importance of the Past and the Future
To implement fascism, both the past and the future must be wiped from public consciousness. I once saw a cartoon entitled "Diary of a Cat." It illustrated several entries in such a diary. The first was, "Today. Today I got some food in a bowl. It was great! I slept some too." The next was, "Today. Played with yarn. Got some food in a bowl. Had a good nap." And next, "Today. Slept, food, yarn. Fun!" And so forth. The cartoonist knew that cats live entirely in the present. For them there is no past, no future, no calendar. Only now, only today. One of the features that distinguishes humans from all of the other animals is that we have pasts and futures that we know and are aware of, or at least can be. We have the ability to learn from the past and apply that learning to formulating our conduct for the future. However, not all of us use, or can use, that ability. In that, some of us are quite animal-like. As one Joe Klein, a political writer for the old New York magazine, noted (1991):
"The essential failing of the Reagan-Bush years has been a near-total lack of interest in the future."
He might have added:
"Since learning from the past is necessary to support an interest in the future, there has been no interest in the past and its lessons either."
For the Right-Wing Reactionaries, life came in discrete time parcels. Like the cat in the cartoon, they lived day by day, only in "Today." And of course they made policy on that basis. They generally did what seemed to work at the time, to achieve some political gain or secure short term profits for one or another of their special economic interest support groups. There was no public attention to, and no apparent political interest in or concern with, the long-term negative outcomes of any policy. But in the pay of a major sector of the economic decision-maker group, they plowed ahead.
What Happened in Nazi Germany
We have seen from the history recounted briefly in this book that in the old U.S. the progression to fascism did not occur by great revolutionary leaps. Rather, there was a step by almost imperceptible step progression to it. And although, by looking backwards we can see that that progression was inexorable from the late Transition Era onwards to the founding of the NAR, to most observers at the time it appeared to be anything but. The primary lesson to be learned from the pre-fascist American experience with the development of fascism was that its prevention would have required early action. In this case that action would have centered on the early disruption of the progression of "The 15% Solution" itself. As in Nazi Germany, once it gained power through Constitutional means, the Right-Wing Reactionary coalition that instituted fascism in the old U.S. never relinquished that power until it was defeated militarily.
Recall that the German Nazis had come to power in 1933 in the first instance by democratic means. It happened that within 24 hours of Adolf Hitler's accession to the German Chancellorship, his police and para-military forces had begun moving to secure that power indefinitely, by the suppression of democratic processes, suspension of individual rights and liberties, and the use of terror. But the initial accession to power was constitutional and non-violent. Unlike the Nazi Germans, in major part because there was no significant or effective opposition, the American fascists did not need to use force widely at the beginning of their reign. They were able to rely on electoral victories and seemingly Constitutional government until they had been in power for a number of years. Of course, by that time conditions had deteriorated so much that they had no choice but to turn to the violent repression and terror that became so characteristic of the NAR.
American Neo-Exceptionalism and Historical Exactism
Those persons who during the Transition Era warned of the possible development of fascism in the old U.S. had to deal with two common schools of thought both labeling such voices as nothing but alarmist. One school was what we now call "American neo-exceptionalism." It said that what happened in those countries that became fascist during the pre-World War II period was unique to those countries, primarily the result of the accession to power of persons with twisted characters. The other school of thought was "historical exactism." It said that what happened during the pre-World War II fascist period, while not uniquely "German," or "Italian," or "Japanese," was uniquely a product of the circumstances of the time, and that they could not recur. Both theories were interpreted to mean "it can't happen here."
Both arguments needed to be countered. But the subject was a delicate one. Politically it had to be treated with great care. The old U.S. was not a "nation of innocence." For example, slavery had existed in it followed by legal discrimination against persons of color in the states of the former Confederacy and social discrimination against them throughout the country; virtually complete suppression of the Native American political economy and cultures had been carried out; Japanese-American citizens, accused of nothing more than being of Japanese descent, had been arbitrarily imprisoned during World War II without the benefit of judicial proceedings of any sort; terror aerial bombing against civilian targets in foreign wars had been developed to its highest degree of sophistication; in foreign countries with democratically-elected governments that adopted policies considered inimical to U.S. economic and political interests, those governments were routinely overthrown.
Despite these facts, many Americans persisted in the belief that nothing bad like fascism could come to pass in the old U.S. But of course it did. Among many other things, no one in the Opposition had ever figured out before it was too late how to counter either Neo-Exceptionalism or Historical Exactism in a politically effective way. Admittedly, it would have been difficult.
Developing an Effective Political Opposition
The Dual-Track Approach to Opposition Development
A political strategy that might have been effective in preventing the onslaught of fascism was following a dual track approach to developing the Opposition. The necessary measures of attempting to convert the Democratic Party to a liberal/progressive party and developing a single left-wing third party should not have been seen as mutually exclusive. Both goals should have been pursued, as long as the focus of attack was the common enemy, Right-wing Reaction, not each other. Unfortunately, as noted, the latter pattern was a trap liberals and progressives of various stripes often fell into.
Controlling the Agenda
Assuming that a political candidate is intelligent, well-qualified, personally attractive, a good speaker, has good name-recognition, and is comfortable in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, the most important element in winning the Presidency in the poltico-electronic age that marked the old U.S. in the second half of the 20th century was control of the political agenda. Some of the many real problems faced by the country during the Transition Era were the result of historical forces beyond anyone's control. However, many of them were the result of disastrous Right-Wing Reactionary policies. For obvious reasons, the Right-Wing Reactionaries wanted to retain control of the political agenda.
What Republican Goals Really Were
Just imagine running for political office, even during the Right-Wing Reactionary-dominated Transition Era, on a platform that included such planks as:
Providing more income to the rich.
Increasing the burden of state and local taxation, especially regressive taxation.
Priming the economic pump with increased military but not needed national domestic spending.
Creating the highest real interest rates in history.
Cutting aid to education at all levels.
Punishing the poor for being poor by eliminating programs aimed at overcoming or compensating for poverty.
Ravaging the environment for the benefit of developers' profits.
Breaking what was left of the American trade union movement for the benefit of corporate profits.
Encouraging concentration of industrial ownership and the decline of competition: the contraction of the free market for goods and services.
Encouraging the export of capital.
Exacerbating racial antagonisms for political gain.
Undermining the Bill of Rights, especially on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and right to privacy issues.
Now, that would be a winner, wouldn't it? Well, based upon twelve years of Reaganite/Bushism (1981-93) and the Grinchism of the "Contract on America" (1994-5), it was clear to anyone who cared to look past the smokescreens that that was what the Republican platform really was. But the Democrats were never able to cast a clear, bright focus on that agenda and keep it there. Nor were they able to paint a clear picture of what the real problems faced by the country were, how Republican policies did nothing but make them worse, and how a comprehensive liberal/progressive political and economic program could solve them.
The Negatives of Reaganite Economic Policies.
By the mid-90s, the Right-Wing Reactionaries were pretending the Reagan Era never happened, even though the Presidency had been in their hands for all but four years from 1969 to 1993 (and some observers felt, given the performance of President Jimmy Carter, 1977-81, all of those years). They consistently traced all of the country's economic problems back to the so-called Great Society of Lyndon Johnson (never more than partially-implemented) and even more ludicrously to the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt, a set of policies that happened to have rescued American capitalism from itself. The Republicans never talked about, and why should they have, the facts of "Reaganomics.”
The tax cuts for the rich did not produce the projected increases in national revenues predicted by the economic theories of the so-called "Supply-Siders," properly-labeled “Voodoo Economics" by none other than the man who would later become Reagan's most loyal acolyte, Vice-President under Reagan, then President, George Bush. Actually, those cuts produced quite the opposite effect.
The so-called "Reagan boom" was the product of Federal deficit spending on a scale never even closely equaled in the past by either party, the deficit spending, however, being pumped into the non-productive (but highly profitable) military sector. This policy left the country with a huge national debt, the interest payments for which put an enormous burden on the Federal budget (probably the result of Republican intent), and an annual Federal deficit problem highly resistant to solution other than by the draconian methods eventually adopted.
Partly because of Federal fiscal policy and partly because of the active encouragement of deindustrialization and the export of capital by Reaganite policies, within three years of accession to office the Reaganites had converted the U.S. from the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation, putting an enormous private debt service burden on the economy to accompany the public debt service one.
For these and other reasons such as its energy policy (that, as noted, encouraged increasing dependence on foreign oil, to benefit the large international oil companies), "Reaganomics" also lead to an explosion in the U.S. balance of payments deficit. Reaganomics also created the highest true interest rates seen in the U.S. for a very long time. Finally, Reaganomics and Reaganite deregulation were responsible for the most expensive scandal ever in the American economy: the Savings and Loan disaster.
And the Democrats let them get away with all this.
The Need to Frontally Attack Racism and its Political Usage
Racism, usually unspoken but well-symbolized by them, was the bedrock of Republican politics. The Democrats should have exposed the Republicans for using the issue politically, and developing ways to show white people how they were being used by it. President Bill Clinton began this line of attack during his first campaign. In the speech with which he declared for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency on October 3, 1991, he said (1991):
"For 12 years, Republicans have tried to divide us --- race against race --- so we get mad at each other and not at them. They want us to look at each other across a racial divide so we don't turn and look to the White House and ask, why are all of our incomes going down, why are all of losing jobs? Why are we losing our future?"
Clinton unfortunately did not continue with this line of attack during his Presidency. But these words are an example of what could have been done. The argument "racism hurts everyone, first in the pocketbook (excess costs in the criminal justice system), and here's how," could have been exploited by the Democrats as well.
Progressive Attack Politics
“Progressive Attack Politics,” related to what he called the Local Problems Bank, was a strategy developed by Dino Louis during the mid-Transition Era. But he was never able to successfully promote it. (Perhaps the reason it never "sold" was the acronym. "PAP" is just not a good one.) It was a proposed progressive response to Right-Wing Reactionary "negative campaigning." The latter was a sophisticated version of traditional American negative campaigning, which had been part of the American political scene since the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800.
Traditional negative campaigning attacked the person of the opponent, from the charge that Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child to the quiet, but persistent reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as nothing but a sick cripple. The Right-Wing Reactionary variety did engage in traditional American political negative crudities on occasion, slinging some old-fashioned mud, especially "manufactured" mud. For example, in the 1988 Presidential campaign Republican political operatives spread completely unsubstantiated rumors that the Democratic Presidential candidate, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, had been treated by a psycho-therapist and that his wife Kitty had burned a flag. But the stuff that really worked for the Republicans was very much issue-oriented, on their mythological issues.
They played to and exacerbated racism, "gut-feelings," and empty "patriotism" (as in "revere the flag"). This was not negative campaigning as much as it is distractive campaigning. One of the early practitioners of the art, President Ronald Reagan, had actually been for things, like the touchy-feely saying “it’s morning in America" and "standing tall in the saddle," or the mis-leading "cut your taxes," "build up our defenses," and “get the government off your back." Newton Gingrich's Contract on America (see Chapter one) was for such things too (many of the same things that Reagan went for).
What was really going on here? The touchy-feelies were irrelevant to the real problems facing the nation. And as pointed out in Chapter one, most of the Right-Wing Reactionary program components, whether Reaganite or Grinchite, were irrelevant to solving the real problems the country faced, from underinvestment to racism. In fact, the use of the term "negative campaigning" to describe this strategy that was so central to Transition Era Republican politics was itself a distractor. The term "negative campaigning" was used to get the focus of the debate that arose on its use away from the real objective of the strategy. That objective was not primarily to attack the person of the opponent, even though it might have seemed so. Rather, it was to get the focus of the political debate off what was really important, and especially off the Republican record.
Progressive Attack Politics, according to Louis, was not to be negative campaigning. It was not to engage in ad hominem attacks. When it criticized specific Republican policies, the critique was always to be accompanied by a positive recommendation for meeting an identified challenge/need. Just as the objective of distractive campaigning was to get on the offensive and stay there, so was that the objective of Progressive Attack Politics. Elections cannot be won while on the defensive.
There was also a generalized basis for attack, which could have been used against all distractive campaign elements put forward by the other side, simply revealing them for what they were attempts to distract the electorate from the real problems at hand, and their causes. Further, the charge could have been laid on that distractive campaigning was nothing but a sign of weakness, designed to deflect the voters' attention from the real campaign issues.
To be effective, Progressive Attack Politics needed a large data-base, just like the Local Problems Bank did. A major share of campaign resources would had to have been put into issues, positions, and historical research. A sophisticated, cross-referenced computer-based positions/data files library that could have been accessed at secure terminals all across the country would have to have been developed. This would have been expensive, but absolutely essential to the success of progressive attack politics. It could easily and cost-effectively been linked to the development of the Local Problems Bank as well.
Language
An important element of Progressive Attack Politics would have been the careful, planned use of language. The Republicans were very successful in this regard. For example, they managed to turn the rather benign, gentle term "liberal" into a dirty word by clever references to it as the "L" word (cf. "the `F' word"). Newton Gingrich once put together an extensive guide to using the language for political purposes, to bash his liberal opponents (EXTRA!Update). The liberals could have done the same thing.
The term we now use to describe the Reaganite/Bushists, the Grinchites, the Hagueites and the other fascists, "Right-Wing Reactionaries," could have been used with effectiveness back then too. For too long the rightists got away with labeling themselves with the rather comfortable word "conservative." They were often not the least bit conservative, for example when it came to the environment, or maintaining the U.S. position as the world's leading industrial power, or conserving progress in civil rights, or in maintaining civil liberties or legal precedent. Some other examples? Rather than "defense spending," "military spending" should have been used. Similarly, the term "national domestic spending" might have been substituted for "social spending." The latter has a soft, "socialistic," dirty-word sound; the former has the toughness of "national." "Personally Sensitive," P.S., could have been substituted for the phrase "Politically Correct," P.C. so prostituted by the Right-Wing Reactionaries. “Social issues” should have been called what they really were: “religious issues.”
When progressives did from time to time attack the Republicans for their proto-fascist policies and fascist tendencies, in the political climate of the time it might have been helpful to substitute the cooler word "authoritarian" for the hot-button word fascist, if only so that the Republicans could not make an issue out of the use of the word, thus once again avoiding debate on substantive issues.
The Restructuring and Redirection of the Democratic Party
Finally, desperately needed was a carefully planned and consistent electoral strategy, which in turn eventually would have required a restructuring of the Democratic Party. In essence, Democrats needed to act like Democrats, not like Republicans. To do so would have been good government and also would have been good politics. The Democratic Party would once again have been appealing to its primary constituencies. For example, in late 1995, Senator Edward Kennedy sent a memorandum to the Senate Minority Leader, Thomas Daschle (1995). Senator Kennedy had polled his "key supporters" on vital issues then facing the nation. Almost unanimously they: rejected seeking a "middle ground" with the radical right-wing Republican legislative agenda of the time, advocating rather a strong political education campaign on what the real issues and positions were; supported denial of further tax cuts for the wealthy in favor of maintaining the integrity of the Medicare program (tax-based partial payment for health services for the elderly); rejected compromise of basic, traditional Democratic principles, in favor of fighting the Republicans on matters of principle, even if it meant taking the blame for legislative "gridlock."
The Democratic Party needed to institutionalize a lesson that it was learning the hard way through the elections of the mid-90s: it could no longer rely on the set of policies and political practices advocated by the reactionary Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). This set was nothing more than a pale imitation of the race-based "Southern Strategy" originally developed for the Republican Party by one of the founding modern Right-Wing Reactionaries, former Senator from Arizona and Republican presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater. It was brought to full maturity by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (Lind, [a]). By the late 1980s, the DLC was trying to develop a Democratic version of it that might have best been called the "Alienated White Male Strategy," AWMAS.
A good many white males in the country had good reasons to feel alienated from the Federal government and the political process. Primarily, they had been economically abandoned by that process which began with the export of capital and deindustrialization, augmented by the wide-spread but little talked about computer revolution. However, the AWMAS did nothing for white men, other than maintain their alienation. For the AWMAS was a code term for running a campaign designed to appeal to the classic "Southern white male," (read "xenophobic, chauvinist, homophobic, militaristic, racist"), now, fed by Right-Wing Reactionary propaganda, found all over the country.
The DLC's attempt to develop a modern, sophisticated, Democratic-coded AWMAS was couched in terms of a "return to traditional values." It turned out the values referred to were not those of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Rather they were the Americanized version of Hitler's "Kinder, Kuche, und Kirchen" so beloved by the Right-Wing Reactionaries. The AWMAS strategy was based on The Politics of Difference rather than the truly American Politics of Inclusion.
Translated, this version of "traditional values" meant reliance primarily on jingoistic false patriotism; support for the military and military spending without a clear definition of goals, role, and function; "dedication to family" while using the term "family" primarily to deal with issues of sex and intra-family male power; "fiscal responsibility" without detailing just who benefits from the pro-rich policies carried out under that rubric. Most important was the strong underlying, although unstated, theme of racism. The original Southern Strategy had worked well for the Republicans since 1968, primarily because when certain Democrats were not ineffectually trying to use it themselves, the national Democratic Party came up with nothing effective to counter it.
There were three reasons why the AWMAS should have been abandoned by the Democrats and no attempt to develop a Democratic version of it made. First, and most important, it caved into racism, the most serious, divisive, demoralizing, and money-wasting national domestic issue faced by the old U.S. during the Transition Era. Second, since its original version, the "Southern Strategy," clearly was the property of the Republican Party, the AWMAS could not possibly work for Democrats, whatever it was called. Third, the results of many state and local elections showed that the voters would only infrequently elect a Democratic candidate who adopted it and the motto: "Let's try to out-Republican the Republicans." As noted before, why should voters who wanted to elect a Republican choose anything other than the real thing? Fourth, even if it could work, the voting margins in the South were too wide to be overcome by such a strategy.
But in any case, why should the Democrats have developed a strategy which appealed to the worst, rather than the best, instincts of any voting group? Why in the South, for instance, should the Democratic Party not have attempted to revive the Post- First Civil War alliance between blacks and white workers/small farmers? This was the alliance that so terrified the Southern white power structure that it created the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and institutional racism to break it up and keep the two groups permanently apart. The trying to be all things to all people strategy of the recent Presidential campaigns did not work either. It was time for something new, the Politics of Inclusion.
Primarily it was necessary for the Democratic Party to focus on policies not aimed at winning back the racist "Reagan Democrats" all over the country. But rather the focus needed to be on developing policies that would appeal to those millions of eligible voters so alienated by a political process and government that simply did not respond to their needs. Such large worker and minority populations could have been expected to respond to a strong anti-racism cast. It would have aimed at the old core of progressive Democrats who could see how they had been betrayed, the minorities, as well as the large untapped pool of then non-voters who would have voted for a real progressive alternative if they saw one.
As part of this whole progressive strategy, the Democrats needed to return to old-fashioned "shoe-leather" politics. One of the reasons they strayed further and further to the Right during the Transition Era is that as television-based political campaigning became more and more expensive, they became more and more beholden to corporate-based political campaign contributions (Ferguson). In a little-noticed election campaign in Baltimore in 1995, the black Mayor, one Kurt Schmoke, running an underdog, underfinanced campaign for a third term, went back to political techniques of an earlier era (Janofsky). They worked. To wit:
"Rather than bombard voters in the modern mode of clever sound bites [1] in television commercials, Mr. Gibson [the campaign director] said the campaign decided to sell Mr. Schmoke's accomplishments through more low-tech means, including a 155-page book called `Reasons to be Proud,' a tabloid called `Baltimore Progress' that reviewed the Mayor's contribution to each of 50 areas of the city, Kurt Schmoke trading cards and a
flier of voting recommendations that Mr. Gibson called `the wordiest Election Day ballot I've ever seen.’
"`We had to combat the image The Sun was presenting, that the city was going to hell in a hand basket,' Mr. Gibson said. `I've been doing campaigns since 1968, and I've never run anything like this before, anything so information intensive. I think people appreciated our appeals to their intelligence [emphasis added].'"
No further comment is required.
Finally, Democrats needed to welcome and indeed encourage the defection of their own reactionaries from their Congressional delegation to that of the Republican Party. The attitude should have been: good riddance to bad rubbish. The Democrats needed to down-size, dropping its own reactionary baggage that put such a drag on progressive policy development. For example, Right-Wing, health care industry funded, Democrats were a major factor in the 1994 defeat of a modest reform called the “Clinton Health Plan.” The Democrats could have been liberated to become a truly liberal/progressive party. (In this instance, following the Grinchite/Republican example, but going the other way.) This process should have been accompanied by active attempts to recruit the few remaining liberal Republicans in the Congress.
Conclusion
So here we are in 2048. Ah yes, hindsight is always 20/20. But it does seem, from the perspective of close to 70 years, that what needed to be done was so obvious that it should have been done. But, what was the number one “but?” That in the 1980s and 90s, gathered around the Democratic Leadership Council and the leadership of President “Bill” (as they called him back then) Clinton most of the elements of the Democratic Party of the time really represented the same economic and political interests that the Republican Party did, that is before the Republican Party started going off the deep end in responding to the Rightward Imperative. By the time the majority of the people in the nation realized what was happening, which way the Republican Party now firmly under the control of the Radical Religious Right and beneath them the Corporate State that made sure that they stayed in control of the Party and its policies, was now firmly in control of the state apparatus of government, national, state and local, it was too late.
And so the story that has been told in this book. It is to be hoped that should our great nation ever face such a threat again that the lessons of the past would this time have been learned and the “cowboys,” as the Rampant Capitalists of the time of “The 15% Solution” were sometimes called, would be turned back at the pass.
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Author’s Notes:
1. "Sound-bite" was the term given to a very brief, one-three sentence explication of some political thought, that fit the very short time-requirements of the standard television news broadcast of the time.