Just so you know, ransom and I are planning to get up a new thread today when we’re both awake and churning on the proper cylinders. Thanks. Mary
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/is_a_second_civil_war_coming.html
Is a Second Civil War Coming?
By Jeff Lukens
FTA:
...
Beyond the media, there is an entire theory from the academy and coffee houses of Cambridge, Berkeley, and Madison to the effect that Democrats have been too far to the right for a long long time. Maybe my favorite example of leftists determined to brew up the Kool Aid for the 2020 campaign comes from The New Republic, a former magazine, where Alex Sheppard writes of “The Overdue Death of Democratic ‘Pragmatism.’”
Now I’d be the first to celebrate the death of capital-P “Pragmatism,” on the grounds that it doesn’t work, but what Sheppard really means is the kind of “moderation” under people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that is now despised on the left as “neoliberalism.” This paragraph strikes me as especially wacko:
The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats, but proceeded in earnest in the 1980s due to Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the wake of Walter Mondale’s defeat in 1984, pushed Democrats to embrace balanced budgets, welfare reform, and other centrist policies. The argument was that the Democratic Party must meet American voters where they were. This neoliberal turn also led Democrats to embrace technocratic policy as an engine for social change: markets, not governments, would solve the major challenges of our time. The kind of imagination and ambition that drove the New Deal and the Great Society became passé.
First of all, losing 44 states in 1980 and then 49 states in 1984 does have a way of concentrating the mind about how to win an election, and high-octane leftism didn’t seem like the way.
But it is this sentence that really jumps out: “The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats. . .”
Sheppard has it exactly backwards. The so-called “Watergate babies” of 1974 marked the beginning of a major step change to the left for the Democratic Party, as I explained in volume 1 of The Age of Reagan:
Watergate had provided the impetus for organizing and accelerating the generational transition within the Democratic Party. Seventy-five of the 292 House Democrats—a quarter—were freshmen; half of the Democratic caucus in the House had been elected since 1970. The “Watergate babies,” as they became known, were infused with a liberal and in a few cases radical reformist zeal formed in the crucible of the antiwar movement and tempered by the convulsion of Watergate. The official Democratic Party magazine, The Democratic Review, estimated that the incoming representatives were more than twice a liberal as the Democratic members they replaced. A Washington Post survey asked the incoming Democrats, “What nation, if any, do you consider a threat to world peace?” The largest plurality, 27 percent, thought the United States was the leading threat to peace, with only 20 percent naming America’s principal adversary, the Soviet Union, along with Israel.
I hope (and expect) that liberals will continue to indulge their revisionist history and slouch toward a suicidal campaign, even as I stock up on popcorn.
And to prove why this ISN’T the right time and I’m not on the right cylinders, here’s the correct name of the previous article and url. Sigh.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/02/are-the-dems-committing-suicide.php
Are the Dems Committing Suicide?
by Steven Hayward
FTA:
...
Beyond the media, there is an entire theory from the academy and coffee houses of Cambridge, Berkeley, and Madison to the effect that Democrats have been too far to the right for a long long time. Maybe my favorite example of leftists determined to brew up the Kool Aid for the 2020 campaign comes from The New Republic, a former magazine, where Alex Sheppard writes of “The Overdue Death of Democratic ‘Pragmatism.’”
Now I’d be the first to celebrate the death of capital-P “Pragmatism,” on the grounds that it doesn’t work, but what Sheppard really means is the kind of “moderation” under people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that is now despised on the left as “neoliberalism.” This paragraph strikes me as especially wacko:
The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats, but proceeded in earnest in the 1980s due to Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the wake of Walter Mondale’s defeat in 1984, pushed Democrats to embrace balanced budgets, welfare reform, and other centrist policies. The argument was that the Democratic Party must meet American voters where they were. This neoliberal turn also led Democrats to embrace technocratic policy as an engine for social change: markets, not governments, would solve the major challenges of our time. The kind of imagination and ambition that drove the New Deal and the Great Society became passé.
First of all, losing 44 states in 1980 and then 49 states in 1984 does have a way of concentrating the mind about how to win an election, and high-octane leftism didn’t seem like the way.
But it is this sentence that really jumps out: “The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats. . .”
Sheppard has it exactly backwards. The so-called “Watergate babies” of 1974 marked the beginning of a major step change to the left for the Democratic Party, as I explained in volume 1 of The Age of Reagan:
Watergate had provided the impetus for organizing and accelerating the generational transition within the Democratic Party. Seventy-five of the 292 House Democrats—a quarter—were freshmen; half of the Democratic caucus in the House had been elected since 1970. The “Watergate babies,” as they became known, were infused with a liberal and in a few cases radical reformist zeal formed in the crucible of the antiwar movement and tempered by the convulsion of Watergate. The official Democratic Party magazine, The Democratic Review, estimated that the incoming representatives were more than twice a liberal as the Democratic members they replaced. A Washington Post survey asked the incoming Democrats, “What nation, if any, do you consider a threat to world peace?” The largest plurality, 27 percent, thought the United States was the leading threat to peace, with only 20 percent naming America’s principal adversary, the Soviet Union, along with Israel.
I hope (and expect) that liberals will continue to indulge their revisionist history and slouch toward a suicidal campaign, even as I stock up on popcorn.
bbb