Senate The Bundy Standoff

That seems like a bizarre accounting of recent events for me.

Take the Occupy movement, for example. Do you think it's a coincidence that Elizabeth Warren was able to ride a massive wave of popularity based solely off her critiques of the financial system? Recall that the architects of Dodd-Frank, which was similarly addressed at enhancing market stability but declined to engage on the broader questions of inequality, never enjoyed such a reputation. Likewise, does President Obama's Osawatomie speech sound remotely like anything he would've given during his Presidency prior to Occupy? Even in examining the Democrat's legislative agenda, there are many agendas they could have chosen that have broad popular appeal and economic relevance to the middle class. For instance, in running for office the first time, his signature was a "Making Work Pay" tax cut. Now, however, the major focus has become increasing the minimum wage. Are you honestly going to argue that the one's impact on the national dialogue didn't influence the other?

I think your reading of Republican politics is flawed, too. In point of fact, Republican rhetoric did become much more racialized in the last few years than it had been trending previously. How else do you read the long embrace of birtherism? Likewise, what do you make of increasingly racialized voting patterns, and the decision to decry the "Black Panther case" as some vast conspiracy that is key to the history of the entire administration? Or even consider the increasing tendency to question the legitimacy of major civil rights legislation, as contrasted with the full-throated support for renewal of the Voting Rights Act during the Bush years. The discourse was simply not the same.

But that's an aside. I don't think anyone here has tried to argue the Republican Party will adopt segregation as part of its platform or something. But while that's one strain of the Tea Party, that's not all its about. They have a radically diminished view about the proper role of government even relative to Republicans that came to power in the mid-90s. They are also much more obstinate. Accordingly, the Republican Party has become more radical in its opposition to basic functions of government, and dramatically more obstructionist as well. Stated plainly, Rand Paul would never have held a seat in the US Senate except for the zeitgeist among conservatives started by the Tea Party movement. To survey all this and claim there's been no effect is silly.

 

If and when Elizabeth Warren becomes a legitimately national figure in even the same way that a Ted Cruz is, you might have a point (if you could draw a line between her and occupy in a more concrete way). You are hugely overstating the case by pretending that she has somehow become a shooting star within the Democratic party and by drawing a connection between her and Occupy that is mostly illusory. I haven't seen her have much of any effect at all. You are a bit too beholden to the narratives of the news cycle there, Wocky.

This is poorly argued. Obama came to the Presidency with the main issue, as Dems before him, of reforming the Health Care system. That was what he chose to blow the massive political capital of his initial victory on.

As to Occupy itself, I hardly think you can draw a causal line between a movement of Trotskyists, Anarchists, and radical left wing agitators and the fairly banal Social Liberal move of increasing the minimum wage, nor to a rhetoric which constantly refers to the "Middle Class", as though that were the focus of Left politics. Is Obama eager to present a face that says he cares about inequality in the country? Yes, but so are all of the figures of the Left establishment like Krugman,et al. Reducing economic inequality is the raison d'etre of the Left wing of politics. You have to make a way stronger case to say that Occupy was the dog wagging the tail, and not the tail being wagged by the dog of actually increasing economic inequality that has been noted for decades at least.

I would read the "birtherism" thing as by and large the same as any right leaning chain mail letter-cum-urban legend. It was usually treated a cooky thing that the Republican elite chose to avoid commenting on to avoid upsetting its own base. The Republicans, no doubt, ride a line wherein they silently tolerate hard right nonsense within the rank and file without actively reflecting such things in their national discourse.

As for the opposition to voting rights and the like, that is, of course, more of a tactical move on the part of the Republican party to avoid electoral irrelevance. Any party with its back to the wall as far as demographics goes would do the same - it reflects the current party's inability to reinvent itself and shift to the Left without losing a significant part of its base that it, at best, pays lip service to. So they are desperate. Bush and co. would have done the same if it seemed they could no longer hold their own in national elections. You seem to be confusing strategy for moral intent of policies.

The problem with this entire line of argument is that it is clear that Rand Paul came to the Republican Party, and not vice versa. He plays the timeless game in politics of talking big to the local base, but the second he comes to Washington he starts backing off of his main viewpoints. Rand Paul is not a moron, and as such the radicalism you seem to have imbued him with in your imagination generally isn't there. And people like Paul come to Congress, as I said earlier, by appealing to a regional base that is significantly to the Right of the mainstream Republican party, but these regional bases don't reflect a shift in national discourse anymore than the election of a Green Party-er or a Socialist in Vermont would.

You could have made a better case with Ted Cruz but he mostly seems to have been shunned, and is now heading down the same Paulite path of reconciliation with the mainstream Republican Party.

The Center-Right keeps devouring these "stars" after they make a few rabble pleasing headlines.They are sell outs, fortunately.
And whatever obstinacy the general Republican Party showed in their wilderness years it was largely tactical matter of having nothing to lose in complete opposition to Obama.

 

What exactly are you looking for? Elizabeth Warren is winning plaudits for her objectively good fundraising numbers. Even in her first campaign, she broke into the top 5 fundraisers for a Senatorial campaign of all time, easily surpassing Hillary Clinton, despite the latter's much better name recognition and contacts. She's being deployed as a key surrogate in high profile and important races. This is pretty solid evidence in support of her popularity. The media isn't "spinning" checks into her campaign accounts. Come on.

This is a weak rebuttal. I never argued that this was or should have been the central cause of his Presidency. Neither was the "Making Work Pay" tax cut. What I said about the Osawatomie speech (and, one might add, last year's State of the Union address) is that in content and rhetoric, it was more openly liberal/progressive than his previous Presidential speeches had been. This shift in his tone is reflective of the shift in national tone to give more attention to these issues after Occupy.

You then go on to make my case for me. You're precisely right the economic inequality has been increasing for decades. Paul Krugman has been beating this drum loudly and publicly for at least half a decade. Why, suddenly, does everyone care? Even the financial crisis itself didn't stir much discussion along these lines. But you're positing that something other than the months long, nationally covered protests around economic inequality were responsible for this change? What else were you thinking of, exactly?

Finally, I think you're getting lost in the trees here. The argument is not that Occupy featured Marxists and therefore in order to have impacted national policy or dialogue we must also be discussing marxism. Indeed, that the broader society would take up a much watered-down version of the original complaint is entirely consistent with historical trends. Consider American abolitionism again. The millennial evangelical Protestantism of the key white abolitionists was not even touched. Indeed, the willingness to use force was if anything a direct repudiation of Garrison's pacificist theories of moral suasion, repentance, and Christian reformation as bringing about the end to slavery. Nor did anyone show much interest in the vision of a fully co-mingled multi-racial society where everyone was equal. I'm not sure the public at large is entirely comfortable with that dream even now. Even in the Reconstruction, the actual resources the Federal government put into the project fell far short of what the Radical Republicans in Congress hoped for. But none of these discontinuities mean that the radical edge of race issues in the US didn't profoundly influence the debate on slavery.

Your argument keeps taking on very strange contours. The Republican Party, by your telling is demographically trapped, and unable to re-invent itself. Why can't it? Again, it seemed perfectly able to move in that direction during the Bush years, by playing up ties of religious conservatism and down-playing ethnic animosities. Why has it suddenly abandoned that approach? Likewise, how is it that they cam to have nothing to lose from total opposition? That currently wasn't the case prior. What magically changed? Are you really saying that it had nothing at all to do with the rise of an conservative backlash movement that is highly ethnocentric, expressly prefers complete opposition, and calls itself the Tea Party?

Overall, you seem to be taking my argument far too specifically, or else simply arguing against something I've never said. Fringe movements are never successful in that they actually take over. The particulars of their views often aren't even adopted or discussed. But they absolutely can be and have been successful in moving the national debate on their particular issues in the general direction of their views. Both the Tea Party and Occupy demonstrate this tendency to varying extents in the present day.

 

Oh, so she is raising funds from the sort of Left Wing Democrats who belong to regions that generally would support Left of Mainstream propositions anyway. Ok, color me blown away.

Never argued that you argued that. But...thanks I guess.

Meh. Having skimmed the Osawatomie speech it seems roughly in keeping with generic Social Liberal rhetoric. Can you point towards anything unique about it that isn't a part of the general Democratic Party reportoire? Because general pablum about helping the Middle Class succeed is fodder for Democrats and Republicans alike. One can even remember John Edwards pre-scandal talking about (gasp) WORKING CLASS people. You seem to want to advance your Pro-Occupy argument with vague associations that are all undermined by the obvious fact that anti-inequality rhetoric is the Democrats' job, and it has not gotten more virulent nor changed in any actually meaningful way that can be directly attributed to the Occupy movement, which the Democrats largely ignored and used police force to shut down in the wake of Occupy's rejection of Democratic sponsorship.

That wasn't what I was saying either, but by now I am rather tired of belaboring the point.

As I have already explained, and you apparently chose not to read, because their base is angry white people, and they have to keep their platform mainstream respectable without alienating the angry white population.

You have to make the case beyond bare assertions that the Republicans are playing up ethnic animosities in mainstream politics in a way that they were not before. Frankly and objectively, what you see is a national party that is terrified of being tarred with the racist label, and so squelches or ignores more extremist rhetoric coming from the provinces, but when it feels that it is strategically wise, will play up these topics to regional audiences it knows will approve of it.

You saw that kind of thing under the Bush Administration as well, as you have seen it under every Republican administration since the Civil Rights Era if not before.

Because they lost very badly in two straight elections, due to Bush's vast unpopularity, and were so outnumbered that their only way to make a difference was to make a "show" of their opposition to drum up outrage.

Yes, I am really saying that (except, as I noted before, that I am downplaying the effect of the Tea Party, not your strawmannish position that they are utterly and totally irrelevant.) And I explained why previously and you ignored it for more generic potted history.

You are actually the one taking my argument far too specifically. I didn't say that the Tea Party had absolutely zero effect. Rather, what effect they have is mostly negligible in terms of the NATIONAL discussion, and will be short lasting. The spinning of the Tea Party into some evil force in American politics is part of the partisan Democratic Party-centric strategy that emphasizes the harm of the opposing party in order to prevent criticism of Obama's policies from an objective standpoint. It is buying into overly sensationalist and emotionalist mainstream analysis that prefers good guy bad guy narratives over wise dissection.

 

Your analysis is flatly incorrect here. Neither Warren nor anyone else achieves her kind of numbers by fundraising solely from local donors. Nor would she be an effective surrogate if these were the only people she could appeal to. Warren has a national fundraising base, and national appeal among liberals, in much the same way that Cruz has a national appeal to conservatives and a national fundraising base among them.

You very much did. When I pointed out that the focus on income inequality is newly arisen, you said the following.

How did I mistake your argument? You were just mentioning his focus on healthcare as a complete non-sequitur?

Asking for this sort of thing in the first place is far off the mark. Especially in parties as ideologically flexible as those found in the American system, there is a very broad intellectual history. There are elements of almost every possible intellectual movement at one point or another. Even just looking at their present incarnations, each Party has multiple "issues" that rotate in and out of being a core concern for them. However, the key is that not all elements of a Party platform are equally important at all times.

For instance, during the Bush Presidency, opposition to gay marriage was given quite a prominent place in the party's messaging. The President was comfortable discussing it, and they arranged ballot initiatives to coincide with elections in hopes of boosting turnout. However, while opposition to gay marriage is still found in the Party's formal platform, this is much less highlighted by the leadership and major surrogates. Instead, they are eager to discuss the few openly gay Republicans that are in politics or running for office. Did anything actually "change?" No, the party's position has always been what it was, and there have always been homosexuals among the Republican ranks.

What changed is the way they are talking about the issue. The way they are talking about the issue now reflects changes in national opinion polling on that issue. Even though there is nothing "new" here from a historical path, it is definitely distinct from what immediately preceded it, and is an example of the way you can see evidence of changes in the national consensus based purely on changes in the political rhetoric deployed by both parties.

Applied to Obama, of course these things are standard liberal orthodoxy. But as President, Obama had always left them implicit and unstated in his speeches. They were being relatively down-played in the same way that Republicans now downplay their opposition to gay marriage. Suddenly, after Occupy Wall Street, President Obama stopped leaving these values implied, and started advertising them as a major part of his appeal. There are even plans to use ballot initiatives in some areas in hopes of ginning up Democratic voter turnout during 2014. What new factor explains the change in rhetoric about something that's always been there?

As above, I'd say the answer is that something has changed in our national dialogue. The question is how this happened? I don't think crediting the huge protest movement about income inequality is really that unreasonable of a theory for how people started to pay more attention to income inequality. Nor do I apparently find it so inconceivable as you that an organization (the Democratic Party) could largely help squelch a spontaneous protest around one issue only to take up the mantle of the selfsame issue themselves.

I understand this perfectly. But the point I am making to you is that when their base is less angry--as it was during the Bush years--they can afford to talk in a more conciliatory tone, and even pursue more conciliatory policies, without alienating said base.

I haven't claimed they are playing them up. I said that in the Bush years, they down-played potential animosity between Hispanics and Caucasians, and have since stopped. That's quite easily demonstrable. They were almost solely invoked in those years in terms of their commitment to hard work, their deep religiosity, and their traditional family values. These were all things that conservatives like, and was meant to introduce them in a positive fashion. Likewise, in terms of policy, Bush spearheaded and almost won a major immigration overhaul. Now, the Republican led-House is exclusively responsible for killing any attempted immigration reform.

The case has already been made beyond bare assertions. In both rhetoric and policy, the Republicans are behaving differently now than they did before.

Again, this is just factually untrue. The Republicans have been in far worse straights before. Their reputation after Hoover was terrible, and they were less than one quarter of the US Senate after New Deal legislation began to take hold. In the case of both FDR and Obama's serial victories, they had more options than mindless opposition. Previously, while opposing him sometimes, they chose a path of cooperation combined with new policy prescriptions that allowed them to rebuild a support base in the country as a whole. It's also the case that at that time, the Republican base would've frowned on such naked and complete obstructionism. In 2012, they cheered it. That's something that changed about their base.

1. How does scuttling an entire immigration overhaul qualify as "mostly negligible?"

2. Your argument is incredibly weird to me. Explain this one point. Over and over again, you keep explaining changes in Republican behavior by referring to their "angry white" base. How is that meaningfully different than my attributing changes to the Tea Party, which is the most visible present expression of the aforementioned "angry white base."

I've never spun it as a "force of evil." I spun it as a force of conservatism. The impact of the Tea Party tends to move the national debate rightward. Occupy Wall Street tended to move it leftward. It seems pretty clear to me that policy prescriptions and rhetoric change in response to the national mood. The national mood, in response, can be changed by radical movements, even when those movements fail to achieve their original goals. Are you saying that this can't or doesn't happen? Or is it your argument that such changes in policy are not reflective of anything, and just happen at random? What?

 

Emphasizing the region was a bad way to put it. Rather, she has become a pet Democrat associated with a certain cause, in the Piketty/Krugman mode. But the case is not being made that she has converted anyone to the cause in a way that counts as "changing the national conversation", and it is also not being made that she represents the interests of Occupy Wall Street, except in the laziest way possible.

I was making a. a factual correction, b. making a subtler point about another facet of Democratic policy that is related to income inequality. I wasn't arguing whatever you seem to think I was.

Yes, asking for evidence beyond insinuations and arguments from incredulity is so petty.

I would say here you are wrong. Take a second to read this article from the People's View that refutes your thesis: http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/epeoplesview.net/2011/12/president-obama-at-osawatamie-and.html

And, yes, I see no reason to attribute the push for a raise in minimum wage and the push for immigration as anything other than a "Gotcha" to use against the Republicans in the elections, especially knowing that they will fail. (We aren't exactly seeing an "in earnest" push here, we are seeing politicking.)

And the Democrats are free to keep Guantanamo open and pursue other right wing nonsense when a Democrat is in office. Having "your party" in tends to reduce dissent considerably.

This is pretty obvious - the Republicans initially hoped that the Hispanics would make up a reliable Republican voting bloc, and in the last two national elections this has been shown not to be the case. Now the mainstream Republicans of the national party want to do what they can to win over minority votes, while they are being hampered by hardline Republicans who fear it is a bad strategy and their allies, white nativists.

Yes, they literally could have chosen another tact, but rather than explaining the opposition through some magical Tea Party led change in the zeitgeist, it is better to explain the Tea Party through what has happened to the Republican Party since the Reagan Years. There has arisen a tendency, due to many, many different aspects of the Republican base, to see American politics in a Manichean light where the Democrats are totally evil and illegitimate.

The Right has been largely triumphant on fiscal issues for years now, increasing their bellicosity and self-confidence. Their ideology is different than the Paleoconservatives, and the tenor of politics in general has changed.

In the long run these initiatives come and go, just like the Gun Debate did. They are mostly about interparty posturing.

I addressed this above.

Strawmanning. Rather what I said and have maintained throughout is that, for various reasons, the Tea Party and Occupy have not been SUCCESSFUL in a material way, not that these things happen "at random." Radical movements CAN affect national discourse, OWS and the TeaPartiers just aren't good at it, although for entirely different reasons between the two.

 

I have literally never said any of those things. My original comment about Warren was as follows.

I only invoked Warren to note her popularity. My suggestion was that a person of her views would not have been as widely popular in years past as she in fact is now. I attributed that popularity to the increased profile of her specialty issues, and in turn attributed that increased profile to the Occupy Wall Street protests around the same issue. That doesn't mean she "represents their interest" and it doesn't mean that she's changed anything. It means that her popularity is evidence of a change that has already happened.

Making a factual correction about what? I never stated that anything besides healthcare was Obama's primary legislative focus during his first term, so you can't have been "correcting" me to note that it was.

Does it?

Let's count.

Laborfest: 14/65=21.58% paragraphs discuss income inequality or restructuring society to support "middle class" success and upward mobility

Osawatomie: 36/73=49.31% paragraphs discuss income inequality or restructuring society to support "middle class" success and upward mobility

You're welcome to do your own count, but by mine, he more than doubled his focus on these issues between 2010 and 2012. That makes it perfectly legitimate to say the issue had been "relatively downplayed" in years prior.

That's not really an answer. This isn't an either/or scenario. A politician's sincerity is totally irrelevant to my points. It's also why most of your answers to date have seemed insufficient and circular. You essentially just keep explaining actions by saying that the group in question is doing what's politically advantageous right now. Yes, we know that. We all understand that politicians act in ways that advantage themselves. The question is why those particular actions suddenly become advantageous when they previously weren't? These changes in perception reflect the public mood, and therefore explaining the changes allows us to pinpoint the factors that influence public mood. I'm saying that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements can be counted among the events/forces that have had such impact in recent years.

I sharply disagree. Yes, many iterations of an initiative can succeed or fail without dooming the overall project. But it's stupid to pretend that the particulars of each proposal doesn't matter. Obamacare is a different proposal than Clinton's in the early 90s or the Dole alternative, and both those are different than Nixon's plan. Yes, we eventually got legislation that moves us definitively towards the path of health insurance coverage as a responsibility of government, but the ways to get their are very different, and will have profoundly different impacts on people's lives. Likewise, consider immigration. Yes, we will at some point have an immigration reform initiative. But its particulars will have enduring and meaningful consequences. The Obama proposal endorses family reunification, whereas every Republican plan imagines a skills-based alternative. That makes a difference for millions of people in terms of who gains citizenship and how their lives progress once here.

Yes, these are elements of political posturing. But they also have real consequences. You can't hand wave the Tea Party's successes away when they do things like this, because the impacts will continue to be felt even after there is an immigration compromise of some kind.