August 04, 2004
Another "70-Year Cycle" thought...
In the previous post, Ron Hardin commented:
...The 70-year cycle theory unfortunately focuses on the wrong thing. What has to be accounted for is why anybody gives Kerry the time of day. Somehow absolute phoniness slips through the normal filters of half of the nation. Is this every 70 years?...Well, yes. Exactly that. I think the Democrats have become like a religion repeating rituals which have lost their meaning. (Same for Republicans in the 30's. This is all entirely apart from whether the ideas involved are right or wrong.) It isn't just Kerry who is phony, it's the Party.
A good example is the way Democrats cling to the Civil Rights Movement. For them it's always Selma. It's like my daughter said, about her expensive private school, "Black History Month comes four times a year." Similarly, I once heard a sermon by an Episcopal minister who spoke glowingly about how his college roommate's brother, or some such, a seminary student, was killed while on a march in the South. The connection was obviously an important point of pride and validation for the minister. The victim was actually described as "an Episcopal saint!" (If he had been killed while preaching the Gospel, they wouldn't have cared a fig for him.)
At the same time they are mostly blind to the real "civil rights" battle happening now, the battle to liberate minorities from the dependence-thinking that Democrats have fostered, and to liberate them from catastrophically bad big-city public schools. Battles which Dems are on the wrong side of, and George Bush is on the right side of.
Senator Kerry is, in fact, the perfect Democrat candidate right now. He thinks political power is his by right and inheritance. He thinks the mantle of JFK and FDR will descend on him automatically. He's a millionaire bashing the rich. He can give a "Black Power salute," but has no real connection with black Americans. He claims to represent the "little guy," but is in fact contemptuous of ordinary Americans, and can't even fake it when faced with a cheese-steak, or a deer hunt, or throwing a baseball.. He, like his party, is passionately "against," but can't tell us clearly what they are FOR. The Party and the man are phony in just the same ways.
Now that I think about it, every 70-year shift in our history has involved the question of race. The generation of the Revolution and the Constitution made the decision to not tackle the problem of slavery, because the survival of the Union was more urgent. (And I think that decision was much harder than we realize, and the lack of major debate was precisely because it was the biggest hot-potato of all.) The Republicans arose in the 1850's mostly in order to deal with slavery, and the Democrats took power in the 1930's with an obvious mandate to go the next step, where the Republicans had failed. And now I think Republicans are tasked with what one hopes will be the last step...
Posted by John Weidner at August 4, 2004 09:48 AM | TrackBack"The grandfather makes the fortune, the father inherits the fortune, the son spends the fortune"?
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at August 5, 2004 02:44 PMSo what you're saying is that the sons and daughters of a group of people who fostered an individual who killed a Civil Rights marcher are going to lead on to that last step? I guess that last step is to say "No more!"
And what exactly is it that Republicans are FOR if not being "against" the accomplishments of the last 70 years? It would do well to remember that Emancipation Republicans were liberals not too unlike today's Massachussetts Democrats. And post-Civil War Democrats were the party of white supremacy, waving the bloody shirt and creating myths of the Lost Cause not too unlike today's Mississippi Republicans. How does that factor into your 70-year cycle theory?
Posted by: Buffoon at August 5, 2004 08:32 PMBoth parties have lots of grandparents who were racists; it used to be a normal attitude. (And the civil rights workers were probably killed by Democrats. Bull Connor was on the DNC.)
The "next step" (hopefully the last step) is to go beyond the politics of groups, and for minorities to just become ordinary Americans. To get to the point where we help people who are poor (regardless of race) by giving them better education, job training, health or retirement plans, whatever. But not in the form of favors to particular races. Dems can't do that--their very successes have wedded them to group-based policies.
Republicans are NOT against the accomplishments of the past 70 years. That's a cliché, not the reality. That sort of Goldwater Republican stuff has become quite rare. (Same with Mississippi Repubicans who still think about the "lost cause.") No one is talking of getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, or the Civil Rights Act. We ARE talking about REFORMS. Social Security, for instance, has huge problems, which Dems are institutionally incapable of tackling.
I don't think Republicans are any better people than Dems. It's just that the energy of reform and renewal gradually moves to the party that is out of power, as the party IN power becomes attached to its past successes, and psychologically incapable of change.
The party that's out of power gradually becomes "liberal," (in the older sense of being energized for reform and improvement) and the party in power gradually becomes "reactionary." Your comment has exactly that flavor. You are thinking about preserving the accomplishments of the past, rather than starting something new.
The attitude of "We've done the job--now we just have to preserve it." is exactly why it's time for some new blood.
Posted by: John Weidner at August 6, 2004 07:56 AMI'm sympathetic. But I'm not ready to subscribe to the liberal-conservative party shift this time. What I see is a once youthful nation getting older and more resistant to change, settling down into a pattern of minor liberal-conservative fluctuations. I'd also add that the Civil Rights Movement is a powerful statement and inspiration to the rest of the world, establishing America's bona fides for selling freedom. We should flaunt it at every opportunity.
Posted by: Buffoon at August 7, 2004 03:46 PM
