Democrats are a paradoxical combination of being on the right side of history regarding policy while bordering on incompetence in winning national elections.
Consider the historic achievements over the decades accomplished by Democrats. All but forgotten are the policies of FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression that brought some relief to those suffering in an economy that had collapsed. Many people were looking for more than a New Deal — how about a new deck of cards?
Public expenditures on public works programs, post office buildings and dams, for example, provided the only source of employment for many. Democrats were responsible for giving organized labor a seat at the table. Financial regulation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Glass-Stegall Act brought stability to financial markets and restored confidence in the nation’s banking system — that is, until much of this was ignorantly undone some eight decades later, leading to the Great Recession.
Democrats enacted the Social Security system, fashioned on recommendations of a couple of economists from UW Madison’s Economics Department. Republicans denigrated this program as “Socialism.” Some still do, insisting on privatizing it, the chief result of which would be to destabilize it.
Keynesian style spending on planes, tanks, guns, and the rest of it propelled the American economy to prosperity during WWII. Thanks to friendly neighbors, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the limited range of enemy bombers at the time, even with shortages and rationing, American civilians lived better during WWII than they did during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Democratic leadership in the White House and the Congress was responsible for post WWII accomplishments that paved the way for much of what we take for granted today. The Bretton-Woods conference, familiar mainly to economists, set rules for the post WWII international monetary system. NATO checked Soviet ambitions for expansion of Communism in Europe. The Marshall Plan was key to rebuilding Europe, including former enemies Italy and Germany, insuring that the US would have strong, prosperous allies.
Democrat Harry Truman integrated the Armed Forces in 1949. Truman made the difficult and controversial decision to intervene when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. While critics denounce the Korean War, now known as the “Forgotten War,” as a “tie,” it kept South Korea in the capitalist sphere, enabling its eventual amazing economic prosperity.
Another Democrat, President LBJ, almost single-handedly accomplished three major historic accomplishments, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sure, it took the Democratic Congress, with the help of now-extinct moderate Republicans, to pass these laws. But only the masterful LBJ could have convinced those white, conservative, southern Democrats to go along. Without having escalated American involvement in the Vietnamese anti-colonialist civil war, LBJ would surely go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. With passage of time, he might yet.
These Democratic accomplishments are taken for granted and neglected, all but forgotten, even by current Democratic politicians, who act as if they are ignorant of their own history.
How about more recent Democratic accomplishments, such as the big enchilada, increasing access to affordable health care?
President Obama staked his presidency on what prior presidents talked about, but failed to accomplish — access to affordable health care. Even though basing the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) on principles that the GOP had outlined a decade earlier, Republicans — every one of them, including those hailed by the accommodative media as “moderates” — fought the Democrats tooth and nail, trashing the program with lies and half-truths, vowing to make Obama a one-term president.
The ACA was enacted without a single Republican vote. The GOP beat the Democrats bloody over the next three election cycles, acknowledging that the unpopularity of the ACA was responsible for their success.
The anti-Obama health care Republicans did not succeed in making Obama a “one term President,” but they gained power in congressional, and the all-important state legislative, races so crucial for the redistricting process.
Trump and his Republicans came perilously close to ending the ACA and its protection for pre-existing conditions. Only then did the sleep-walking mainstream media that had previously repeated and augmented Republican talking points even acknowledge that there were beneficiaries of the ACA.
The battle to make access to health care available to all people continues, led by Democrats. On these and many other issues, Democrats continue to be on the right side of history. But here’s the paradoxical inconsistency. Democrats have proven themselves time and again unable to make their own case — to the point of gross incompetence.
Much is made of the handful of votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that gave Trump the Electoral College victory. Yes, that’s part of it. Had Hillary showed up even once in Wisconsin, and spent some time in Michigan and rural Pennsylvania, it might have helped, but who knows?
Much more should be made of the fact that, not just Hillary, but the entire field of high-level Democrats totally neglected the importance of the Federal Court system. With the countless speeches and op-ed pieces by Hillary; by Senators Warren, Sanders, and Kaine; by VP Biden; and all the rest of them, if the Supreme Court was even mentioned, it was only in passing.
Upon Justice Scalia’s untimely death, Senator McConnell’s refusal to even hold hearings on Obama’s nominee should have been a wake-up call for Democrats. It was crystal clear that, with a Trump victory, the Court would be conservative for generations.
Meanwhile, Trump made clear his intention to stack the court with right wingers. While Democrats slept, Republicans hammered home to their voters the importance of voting for Trump because of the Supreme Court.
It did not take a prescient prognosticator to predict that a conservative Supreme Court would approve the blatant gerrymandering that stacks the deck in favor of Republicans.
Next week: Evils of gerrymandering
— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.
