By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, February 3, 2022
In Jane Coaston’s The Argument podcast
over at the New York Times, Democrats have been debating the future
of their party and Republicans — and former Republicans — have been debating
the future of the GOP.
National Review’s Rich Lowry and the Bulwark’s
Charlie Sykes had a discussion that was, for me at least,
considerably more interesting than the Democratic debate, in which Lanae Erickson of Third Way
made the case for politics-as-engineering while Steve Phillips of Democracy in
Color made the case that everybody who disagrees with him politically is a
racist. That the Republican intramural brawl is more interesting is maybe to be
expected, since there is just a lot of new and horrible stuff going on in the
Republican Party. Nobody slows down to look at a train that didn’t go careering
off the tracks.
But there is something to be learned — not least by
conservatives — from the current Democratic angst. “Are Democrats the Party of
Joe Manchin, or AOC?” asks the headline over Coaston’s writeup. And that, of
course, is the real question. In a more normal political time, the Democratic
Party would be happy to represent such a wide swath of political opinion that
both left-wing New Yorkers and Appalachian moderates felt at home there. But
these are not normal times, and our political factions define themselves not by
what they believe but by what — whom — they exclude.
Implicit in the “Manchin or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” formulation is that the
Democrats are going to be one or the other, even if, at the moment, they are
both.
There is a similar and more urgent question in front of
Republicans, of course: Are they going to be the Trumpist party or something
else?
I wrote above of normal political times,
which is not the same as boring or low-stakes political times. Consider the
performance of the Democratic Party in the 93rd Congress, which sat from
January 3, 1973, to January 3, 1975. Those were very dramatic times, with a
presidential inauguration, an unscheduled change in the presidency as Richard
Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandal, and another presidential
inauguration, that of Gerald Ford.
Congressional Democrats accomplished a great deal in that
Congress on behalf of progressive causes. In addition to taking up the matter
of the impeachment (Nixon was not formally impeached but almost certainly would
have been both impeached and removed from office if he had not resigned),
Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and other important pieces of
environmental legislation; it created the Legal Services Corporation; it
enacted the Case–Church Amendment, which cut off U.S. military support for
operations in Cambodia and Laos; it opened up Highways Trust Fund money for
mass-transit use; it updated and rationalized federal disaster-relief
procedures; it regulated pension plans under the Employee Retirement Income
Security Act; it regulated consumer warranties; it imposed reforms on the
juvenile criminal-justice system and codified the federal rules of evidence; it
passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; and, of
course, Senator Kennedy solved the nation’s health-care problems by instituting
the HMO, which turned out so famously well.
If the main criterion is policy, then progressives should
consider the 93rd Congress a banner year for the Democratic Party and its
agenda. But if the main criterion is who makes policy
— who is in and who is excluded — then progressives must consider the Democrats
of that time a vexing bunch. There was a great deal of diversity within the
party, which was not “the party of James Eastland or Hubert
Humphrey” but the party of both. And while Steve Phillips of
Democracy in Color argues that white supremacy is the most important driving
force in American politics today (which is preposterous, but, stay with me),
the high-water mark of progressivism in the 1970s happened under a Democratic
leadership that was full of out-and-out, unapologetic racists, men
(overwhelmingly) who could not hope to have comparable political careers today
even if they hailed from the most bigoted and atavistic corners of the country,
such as Minnesota.
The president pro tempore of the Senate
was Eastland, the Mississippian “Voice of the White South” and as ghastly a
creature as the Democratic Party has ever coughed up. The Democratic Senate
whip was Robert Byrd, who had held the title “Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux
Klan.” The Democratic Caucus chairman voted against every piece of civil-rights
legislation he ever had the chance to oppose; segregationists such as William
Fulbright and Sam Ervin were prominent figures in that Congress, and Senator
Russell Long, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had boycotted the
1964 Democratic convention over civil-rights legislation. Senator Herman
Talmadge of Georgia had, as governor of that state, shut down the schools
rather than see them desegregated. House Democrats included such staunch
opponents of civil rights as Omar Burleson.
But the Democratic caucus of that time also included
left-wing figures such as Bella Abzug and George McGovern, big-city
progressives such as Barbara Jordan, western liberals such as Frank Church,
old-fashioned labor pols such as Walter Mondale, and party-machine operators
such as Tip O’Neill. If it ever occurred to the new senator from Delaware, Joe
Biden, to wonder whether his Democrats were to be the party of his good buddy
the Exalted Cyclops or the party of Bella Abzug, he never thought to ask the
question out loud.
There was more diversity on the Republican side, too, of
course, with Barry Goldwater serving alongside Nelson Rockefeller and Lowell
Weicker, while the sainted junior senator from New York was formally a
member of the Conservative Party.
Call it the politics of cooties — I do not think I would
want to be in the same political party as James Eastland. But a party that can
accommodate a thick slice of the surprisingly broad spectrum of diverse
political opinion that actually exists in these United States
— as opposed to the narrow spectrum of opinion that has the imprimatur of
the New York Times and the sanction of polite society — is a
party that can get things done. Of course, getting things done requires caring
more about what those things are than about who is doing them. Democrats once
understood that. Republicans, too.
But that was the republic of and. This is the
dictatorship of or.
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