There is still junk in the lefty magazines discouraging people from voting for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, here is my answer to a piece appearing yesterday on In These Times.
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What if they are the most progressive people who can be elected in the United States in 2016? Looking at the list of presidents and of who won and who lost in the past half century would be instructive about what is possible at any given time. Politicians either try to figure out what is possible and how they can win office to do it or they take stands that lose them elections and they never get to do what they wanted to, no matter how good that sounded.
If other liberals don't like that, and I don't, the fault lies primarily with the permission given to the media to lie us into a state where liberalism has been so vilified, so demonized, so heaped with hate that any politician who wants to do what can be done will not support the In These Times agenda because it can't win. And the permission given to the media to lie us into this state was a direct result of pseudo-leftist, media hired, media libertarians such as Joel Gora and the ACLU. If you want politics in which liberals can win, in which liberal ideas can win you elections, the media will have to stop getting to tell the lies that have lied us into this position, the media which has so corrupted any good-will out of enough voters that a Donald Trump could get a major party nomination. Nixon failed to win the election in 1960, he won the next election after the Sullivan Decision gave a carte blanche to the media to lie. When Reagan won in 1980, he, with the support of "civil libertarians" gutted the remnants of requirements for responsibility placed on the media, the remains of what presidents, starting with Herbert Hoover had come up with to prevent media from producing self-serving tyranny.
Blaming Clinton and Kaine for being realistic about what is politically possible and what isn't is just plain stupid. They've got the choice between facing those possibilities, winning office and doing what they can or never getting elected to office and watching the Republicans doing what they do.
Been watching films on PBS about Johnson and civil rights legislation. Popular history tells it that LBJ walked into the Oval Office, said "Make it so!", and civil rights legislation was passed because of his magic presidential powers.
ReplyDeleteWhich is an insult to the (black) civil rights movement which pressured Eisenhower and then Kennedy to promote civil rights legislation (the act of '64 was Kennedy's, not LBJ's), and the violence in Alabama that gave LBJ the push he needed to get the VRA passed.
In fact, a great deal of the legislation he passed was due to public support. That, an LBJ's determination to make it so. But the idea that he did it in spite of Congress or because his liberal credentials were so pure (they weren't; at all. Many were suspicious of him, including many blacks, until they saw what he wanted to do, and that he got it done), is pure moonshine. Much of his political career involved doing what it took to stay in office (from Texas!), as Texas shifted from a populist state to a conservative one as oil made us rich instead of poor. LBJ went from an ardent New Deal Democrat to a very conservative Democrat; he became the LBJ of legend when he became President, and knew the power he had could either be used or wasted.
Had he been more doctrinaire as a liberal, he'd never have made it to the White House. And then what?