Say What?

by digby

I don’t know how I missed this, but it came to my attention this morning via this post. Peter Beinert actually wrote this for all the world to see:

By essentially sacrificing abortion and immigrant rights to get conservative Democrats to vote for expanded health-care coverage, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi restored the old hierarchy that between the 1930s and the 1960s helped Democrats establish dominance on Capitol Hill. Today, to a degree we haven’t seen since then, the Democratic Party is about economic protection first, and cultural freedom second. ..

Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was a big tent—a big, ugly, tent. In Congress, liberals coexisted with all manner of racists, nativists, misogynists and morons. “History shows that nations composed of a mongrel race lose their strength and become weak, lazy and indifferent,” declared Georgia Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge in 1955, in a statement that placed him firmly in the mainstream among Southern Democrats at the time. In 1964, less than two-thirds of the Democrats in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act. Yet it was that big, ugly Democratic Party that from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson pushed through Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Food Stamps, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid (with occasional help from the then-extant progressive wing of the GOP). Some of the Democratic bigots opposed these economic reforms, to be sure. But others backed them; they genuinely wanted to curb the savagery and chaos of unfettered capitalism. They just wanted to preserve white, male supremacy too. This was the devil’s pact that defined the Democratic Party for more than three decades, until the civil rights and women’s movement forced party leaders to choose. They reluctantly chose racial and gender equality, and so the racists and the misogynists drifted away. The Democratic Party became culturally liberal: pro-affirmative action, pro-choice, and smaller, since the old racists and sexists, now repackaged as racial and sexual conservatives, flocked to the GOP. Starting in 1968, Democrats began consistently losing the presidency. And in 1994, the realignment finally trickled down to the House of Representatives, and the Democrats lost that, too.

He goes on to explain that the Democrats have been trying to lure back these racists and misogynists who want to preserve white privilege for decades now and have finally succeeded (with the blessing of the netroots!) as triumphantly demonstrated by the passage of the Stupak Amendment in the House:

For cultural liberals, it was ugly. They had better get used to it: Big parties are ugly. But if you want to rebuild the American welfare state, there is no alternative. A profound shift is under way, one that will likely endure even if Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections next year. The Republican Party is growing smaller and more ideologically pristine; the Democratic Party has grown larger and more untidy. Conservative activists seem positively thrilled by their party’s newfound purity. I hope they enjoy it. Meanwhile, in the messy real world, the party of FDR and LBJ is back.

No it isn’t. The party of FDR and LBJ didn’t have blacks in it and women had no power at all. Hispanics didn’t even figure into it, much less gays. That’s because it was a different world. And not incidentally, a much worse world for well over half the population.

Nonetheless, he evidently believes that the 60% of the party that is female, the members of the fastest growing demographic (Hispanics) and the 90+% of African Americans who vote Democratic are going to just allow the white male privilege people to turn back the clock in the name of the Big Tent. What nonsense. Today’s balance of power calls for compromises on these issues to be borne by the straight, white, male privilege set in order to advance everyone’s economic agenda, not the other way around.

The days of white male privilege are nearly over and those who want to recreate them are going to find themselves stymied in a party in which the majority are women, Hispanic, black or gay — or often a combination of all of those. I can’t imagine why anyone would even think of saying they shouldn’t be. Economic issues and “cultural issues” (if you want to describe human rights in such a dry way) aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are mutually dependent. The Party that gets that right will be the Party that can form a majority for a long time to come.

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