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Tomasky's blathering essay is fundamentally an exercise in deceit. While advocating a 'return' to a principled philosophy of governance, it offers a familiar but ludicrous distortion of the history of this country in recent decades, in which the '60's-launched New Left and 'identity politics' activists have fouled up the Democratic Party, and 'centrists' (read DLC) have come riding to the rescue. The ideas and approaches of the 'centrists' need tweaking, according to Tomasky, but they're on the right track. In the end, he employs his rhetoric about principles as a veil for his own specific positions on vital issues, which would not sell at all well to the current American electorate, and stand at odds with the positions which have recently bolstered Democrats.
Tomasky starts out by pointing to current Democratic advantage over the Bush administration and Repigs on specific issues. But something is missing, he says: an overarching philosophy. He asserts that the Democratic Party's traditional agenda in the past had been about self-sacrifice in pursuit of a common good:
"For many years -- during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society -- the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today’s. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea -- the philosophical principle -- that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest."
Whether this really amount to a "philosophical principle," rather than a point of rhetoric, is debatable. But the reason Tomasky pitches this notion here becomes plain further on - it serves as backdrop to the tired canard about how everything went wrong in the damned '60's because of the damned New Left. In sum, the "old liberalism" was "shattered," and
"...Democrats were now asking many people to sacrifice for a greater good of which they were not always a part."
Thus, according to this familiar "centrist" dogma, the radicalization of left-liberals which took place in the era of the Vietnam War (mentioned only in passing here!) and in the wake of desegregation destroyed "the old liberalism" and its focus on "the common good." Never mind that the most lastingly significant political development that began in the mid-'60's was not left-wing radicalization or the fragmentation of 'identity politics,' but right-wing reaction, which came not fundamentally in opposition to radical left movements, but against LBJ's Civil Rights legislation itself, which Tomasky still tries to pitch as exemplifying an adherence to "the common good" for all Americans.
Sorry, but the plain truth is, a whole lot of reactionary white Americans didn't see it that way, especially but not only in the South. Their resentful sentiments about desegregation and civil rights legislation in general led to the Republicans' tremendously successful 'Southern strategy,' which resulted in mass defections of white racists, especially in the South, to the Republican Party. In this move, they followed after SC Senator Strom Thurmond, who had created a southern 'Dixiecrat' splinter party in 1948 to oppose President Truman's re-election, largely because of the desegregation Truman had ordered of the US military.
It's very important to make note of the fact that labor union leaders and other observers, back in '48, argued that the Dixiecrat movement had a hidden agenda: to set out to undermine New Deal and Fair Deal legislation. In times to come, that same hidden agenda was employed by the reborn Republican Party in the course of mobilizing 'the Southern Strategy,' propagating a corporatist anti-"big government" line to segue with widespread resentment of civil rights gains for black Americans. "Big government" made your kids go to school with a bunch of damned Negroes. THIS is where the undermining of popular support for liberalism in American politics REALLY came from, sadly enough.
By the 1980's, supposed "centrist" Democrats were peddling the same corporatist agenda to members of their own party, which had been overlaid upon an increasingly-closeted racism, arguing that this was the direction we HAD to go in - or else the Republicans would keep winning! Thus came the DLC ilk's attempts to 'Dixiecratize' the Democratic Party.
Thus, according to the line Tomasky is serving up, adherence to a concept of pursuing the "common good" was left behind throughout the '70's by a faltering Democratic Party, and was resurrected by -- guess who? -- President RONALD REAGAN:
"By 1980, Reagan had seized the idea of the common good. To be sure, it was a harshly conservative variant that quite actively depended on white middle-class resentment. But to its intended audience, his narrative was powerful, a clean punch landed squarely on the Democratic glass jaw. The liberals had come to ask too much of regular people: You, he said to the middle-class (and probably white) American, have to work hard and pay high taxes while welfare cheats lie around the house all day, getting the checks liberal politicians make sure they get; you follow the rules while the criminals go on their sprees and then get sprung by shifty liberal lawyers. For a lot of (white) people, it was powerful. And, let’s face it, manipulative as it was, it wasn’t entirely untrue, either!"
The last sentence makes clear where Tomasky is really coming from. That "white middle class resentment," unlike the activism of liberals after 1965, comes under no criticism from him. And "it wasn't entirely untrue, either!" Thus, liberal Democrats of the era were wrong, and Republican reactionaries were righteous - and the Reagan administration, which put in place so much of the program which has transferred wealth from the middle-class to the ultra-rich, were advocates of defending the common good. It would be really good for you to be poorer so that the rich can be richer, rube!
There's also NO mention here of the well-funded think-tank and media propaganda industry, which, in the era being dealt with, has been developed to endeavor to manipulate US public opinion in a reactionary direction, largely through the use of wedge issues.
Tomasky jumps to the Clinton era, in which, he says, the president attempted to "recapture
the notion of the common good," without all that much success. But, take heart! The DLC appears over the horizon:
"Here, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) enters the story. The DLC did have its own conception of the common good; indeed, the DLC, along with the communitarians, introduced the vocabulary of “rights and responsibilities” as a way to restore a civic-republican impulse to Democratic politics. Adding that word “responsibilities” was seen by many liberals as racial code, but, to be fair, the DLC also proposed, for example, an aggressive corporate-welfare program in the 1990s (that is, responsibility for the corporate body, too)."
Unsurprisingly, Tomasky doesn't bother describing that "aggressive" program of corporate responsibility, proposed by the most shameless and servile organization of corporatists which has ever plagued the Democratic Party. He does offer some tepid criticism of the DLC's past approaches, as being overly reluctant to support government interventionism. Seeking more heroes, Tomasky looks to the corporate elite themselves, whom he claims held back 'anti-diversity' legislation promoted by Gingrich-era Republicans.
How hypocritical and self-contradictory can you get? How can 'identity politics' be the Democrats' big problem if 'diversity' is accepted and protected today by the money-mob, who play the tune the politicians dance to? Does Tomasky mean to suggest that the forces that gained dominance over American politics through the exploitation of wedge issues have become enlightened? Or do they, perhaps, feel entrenched enough now to do without those wedges? A glance at the latest Cynthia McKinney smear on the CNN site today instructs that NEITHER is the case.
Finally, while Tomasky doesn't come out and propose any specific positions on issues, his advocacy is revealed in this paragraph, after nitpicking criticisms of various Democratic politicians and beaucoup rambling generalizations:
"...Voters respond to ideas, and Democrats can stand for an idea: the idea that we’re all in this -- post-industrial America, the globalized world, and especially the post–9-11 world in which free peoples have to unite to fight new threats -- together, and that we have to pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future."
Let me come out and put plainly what Tomasky advocates: capitulation to "globalization," which is currently undermining middle-class Americans' standard-of-living; faith that we'll be saved by the New Economy of service jobs and information technology now that we're "post-industrial" (remember those fabulous '90's?); and adherence to the neocon agenda of imperialist war-making and conquest, in the name of fighting 'post 9/11 threats.' Far from a principled adherence to the common good, this is the old hidden agenda of corporatism in full flower. That agenda was never truly anti-government, but only wished to use governmental power strictly to its own ends. In brief, it's the DLC program, and it is definitely a LOSER with the disillusioned American electorate today and increasingly in the foreseeable future, whatever bogus, high-falutin' rhetoric that program is wrapped up in.
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