Remainder Bin

by digby

I haven’t read Matt Bai’s book new about what’s wrong the with the Democratic party (bloggers and billionaires apparently) and I probably won’t since from what I can tell he makes such a fundamental mistake from the beginning that his entire thesis is tainted by it. According to Joan Walsh, who reviewed the book for Salon today:

… for all its love of big bold ideas, “The Argument” is premised on a big, bold idea that’s simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they’d do instead.

Bai’s book is flawed by his failure to grapple with the negativity, lo, the hatred behind the Republican revolution of the ’70s and ’80s, some of which is still politically operative today. Does he really think Reagan rode to power on the Laffer curve, not by bashing Cadillac-driving welfare queens, scruffy war protesters and big bad government? Both Nixon and Reagan (George Bush I was merely Reagan’s long tail) were the political beneficiaries of a resentful, sometimes racist reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s and ’70s, associated with the Democrats, far more than they were the avatars of a wildly popular new way of running the country.

That is correct. Reagan’s great gift was his ability to make the ugly politics of resentment feel sunny and bright. Aside from the perennially popular idea of a free lunch, GOP “Big Ideas” were window dressing at best. It’s all about teh hate. That Bai projects the 40 years of extreme, relentless liberal bashing onto lefty bloggers who allegedly suffer a “debilitating hatred” of Bush says much more about him than it does about us.

The rest of Bai’s book sounds similarly wrong, certainly as concerns the blogosphere. From Walsh’s description it seems to have been conceived some time in 2004, at a moment of extreme disappointment and disequilibrium in progressive circles. It was temporary. Here on the internets things move very quickly. I’m afraid that even if his insights were valid, they’re already out of date. I’ll pass.

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