Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia

[ancianita]

26. I hear you.

However what's happened during those 30 years shows the clear lines of neoliberal ownership, and that we were never all in.

Reagan Democrats and the white South led to the final collapse of the New Deal coalition when Reagan's small government/austerity agenda carried 49 states against Mondale in 1984.

Even though the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) tried to move the party rightward, MA's Dukakis still lost in a 1988 landslide to HGW Bush. GOTV was on the Republican side.

Only in the 90's did the Democratic Party revived itself with Clinton, by moving to the right on economic policy.
But he still managed to sign a ban on some kinds of semi-automatic firearms.
His Family and Medical Leave Act, covered near 40 million Americans, offered workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-guaranteed leave for childbirth or a personal or family illness.
So the left's socialism still existed in the party.
Republican neoliberals' tort reform Private Securities Litigation Reform Act did get passed over Clinton's veto. Then with union memberships sliding after Reagan's previous firing of the whole air traffickers union, Clinton signed NAFTA over big union objections. He got impeached for a blow job, won a galvanized GOTV for his second term, continued Jimmy Carter's move toward deregulation, balanced budgets and supply-side free market stuff.

When Gore lost to FL brooks brothers machinations, Kavanaugh among the lawyer mob, the losses by electoral college votes due to jiggering vote counting became Repubs' new goal, while character assassination and racist dog whistle dirty tricks became their political norm, not just a campaign norm.
2003, the four most populous states had Republican governors: California, Texas, New York and Florida, and Democratic leadership and we voters suffered under Repubs always busy attacking liberalism in Congress and media.

When Howard Dean ran his 50-state strategy to regain populist politics, and Harry Reid got Democratic Senators to vote as a bloc against the Repubs' attempt to privatize Social Security, the left returned in 2008 to beat off Repub voters and gain both houses. Neoliberal-driven corruption was Howard Dean's winning issue for many voters. He was a great liberal of the party. When Nancy Pelosi got elected as the first female House speaker, she immediately pushed for passage of the 100-Hour Plan of eight new liberal programs.
Liberal momentum against neoliberalism.

Obama wasn't all in, either, renewing Saturday equivalents of FDR's fireside radio chats.
His first 100 days: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, CHIPS, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, reversed Bush's policies by supporting the UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity, relaxed enforcement of cannabis laws, lifted the 7½-year ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Left wing cultural momentum. And Biden was there after having written the first climate change bill and the first signed Violence Against Women Act.

By sayin' that "a minute" or "toe dipping" in neoliberalism, I mean that neoliberalism was never even co-owned by Democrats and was never at the heart of Democratic Party politics. We fought off the worst of neoliberalism with a go-along-to-get-along politics until we could convince Americans -- which Bernie Sanders did -- that neoliberalism wasn't working for America. Then last year he joined up with Joe Biden and the Transition Team.

So no. No one of either party can hang the neoliberalism taint on Democrats. Overall, we're not perfect, but Democratic voters always had the moral compass when Dem leaders led from behind. And as you know, there weren't that many Democratic leaders over that 30 years. More proof that we won for our resistance to neoliberalism.

Trumpcult has lost all the arguments and become a do-nothing person-as-platform party, and we Democrats now stand victorious against neoliberalism.