To argue that taxes on the working middle class must continue even as incomes contracted is to virtually guarantee a revival of conservatism and anti-government sentiments of the kind that now characterize our politics.
To argue that taxes on the working middle class must continue even as incomes contracted is to virtually guarantee a revival of conservatism and anti-government sentiments of the kind that now characterize our politics.
-- Gary Hart
The Democratic Road Not Taken
By GARY HART
For more than four decades most Americans identified the Democratic Party with a social contract and safety net, equality of justice and opportunity, and progressive -- yes, even liberal -- causes. Sometime in the last 30 years the party of progress and change -- Emerson's party of hope -- became the party of reactionary liberalism.
This phrase would be an oxymoron were it not for the fact that merely defending social programs, liberal programs, is reactionary. Those programs included Roosevelt's social safety net, as expanded by Johnson's Great Society, and the expansion of minority rights and women's rights after that. They include the framework of environmental laws of the 1960s and '70s, often supported and occasionally created by what were then moderate Republicans.
But beginning dramatically in the 1970s things changed. Things being: globalization and foreign competition; the decline of the manufacturing base; petroleum-producing nations controlling the price of oil; and the unsustainable costs of cold war military engagements and deployments.
The OPEC oil embargoes of 1974 and 1979 contributed to the combination of stagnation and inflation and to the flattening of household incomes for the first time since the beginning of World War II. Meanwhile, the numbers of people qualifying for assistance under New Deal and Great Society programs increased, as did the overall costs of operating those programs, especially in the area of health care.
The Democratic Party during this period had the opportunity to develop a new economic platform but failed to do so. Having no constructive response to a tide of economic and social revolutions, it clung to the defense of its historic social agenda, which required taxation of working class and middle income people to finance that agenda at a time when their own economic security was endangered. As Todd S. Purdum described this phenomenon recently in Vanity Fair, "the Democrats came across more and more as the crouched consolidators and defenders of past gains." Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein echoed this conclusion in their new book, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks." The Democrats, they write, "have become the more status-quo oriented, centrist protectors of government."