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madfloridian (78,699 posts) Repost from 3 years ago about Dem's rightward trend. Note how little has changed.I posted this here in 2010. I happened upon it again today, and I was really stunned at how many things remain the same. The post was about how a nation can change drastically if there is too much bipartisanship, if there is not a party voicing opposition when things go wrong. It was a post about how much things changed from 2000 when our party did not realize in time that the election was being snatched out from under them. It had been a drastic change from the year 2000. I came to DU in 2002, and I really got a good understanding beyond my own little conservative area. I came here as a moderate, but I have grown more liberal since then. In 2000 we saw a side of our neighbors and friends we had never seen before. The election was divisive enough to bring out the radical side of people we had known for years. In 2003 it was a nightmare. I grew up in this conservative religious area, and I had never seen it come out like this into the public venue. It got awkward and uncomfortable, and sometimes downright ugly. Our neighbors had signs in their yards supporting the president and the war. We found out local churches were providing many of those signs. Hubby and I realized our neighbors were conservatives, we were not. It had never mattered before. It had not come up in all my years of teaching. No one threw their religion in our faces, it was a private thing usually. In 2003 the Southern Baptist churches in our area came out for the holy war in Iraq...the war between good and evil they called it. They called us unpatriotic, and we took our names off the roll then.(UPDATE: Nothing in the above 4 paragraphs has changed. Most of our neighbors now call themselves Tea Party Patriots.) More: This section is about Howard Dean, and why we supported his campaign. In 2003 we got excited because someone in our party was speaking out and saying that it was wrong to go to war when the truth was not being told. He wondered out loud why out Democratic leaders were voting for Bush's unilateral war on Iraq. He wondered why we were supported Bush's tax cuts, wondered how we could afford them with our huge deficit. In fact that guy was on Rachel Maddow tonight saying the same thing. He said something else tonight also on her show. He said that President Obama needed to be a leader, that he needed to stand up and take firm stands...that he was the only one who could do it because he has the bully pulpit. He said we would lose the House and the White House if we did not start taking stands. Hubby and I both got tears at that because we know he is right. He tried to change the system, and was chair when we took back the House, the Senate, and the White House. Then the party leaders made sure there was no place for him among them. The cut off started at once, and it was swift and to the point.UPDATE: Hard to forget Dean was in American Samoa when Tim Kaine was announced as the new DNC chair. Dean had not even been informed of the announcement. UPDATE 2: Dean is now sometimes sounding like he did back then. Just not often enough. I guess that happens when your own party nearly shuts you out. UPDATE 3: Most of those paragraphs still remain true, but I think most of us detect a little uptick or perhaps a heads up to liberals....that they are hearing us on some issues. More: Now we are seeing the wobbly words on the tax cuts. There is no one saying let's stop giving in to the religious zealots on faith-based initiatives, on gay rights, on women's reproductive rights. There is no clear message. There is a fear of the right wing that seems to be paralyzing our party and our president. There has been a movement by our party to continue the education policies of George Bush which amount to turning our schools over to private companies...while giving them our taxpayer money to make them richer. Teachers have spoken out, but they are not being heard, not even being listened to by this administration. I used to feel safe and secure that Americans would fight back when certain things like Social Security and Medicare were threatened. I always felt comfortable that things would not get too bad here, that our leaders would step in and stop things from going too far in any directions. I never thought our nation would get to the point that teachers were made to feel ashamed, that seniors would be called "the greediest generation" by a man appointed by our Democratic president. Or worse, that not a single Democratic leader would speak up for them and point out how they had paid into the system during their lifetimes. I never thought that two men who had such contempt for seniors would be put in charge of a commission to "fix" Social Security.UPDATE: There has been advancement on the gay rights issues, and that is encouraging. As to teachers, Social Security, Medicare....those paragraphs are as true now as they were then. In fact teachers are treated with even more disdain. Still no one in leadership really taking a stand for public education versus privatization. More: I always felt that our senior safety nets were untouchable. Now I realize they are not. I always felt our country would have the public school system that helped make it great...but we won't. It never occurred to me that the unions who helped build the middle class in this country would be treated badly by a Democratic administration. I see that the very same centrists who helped run the DLC and the Third Way are forming a new party. They are calling it a centrist party, and the official name is the No Labels party. That is the bipartisanship they want. They think the Democratic party as it exists now has been taken over by liberals, I guess. It just shows how what was once the right, a normal fairly moderate right....has kept moving to the extremes. And our party, instead of standing with its so-called liberals...has denounced them and moved right as well. They have twisted meanings and words until there is no longer any understanding of them.We have kept going along with them, fearful of bucking the rightward trend, not wanting to hurt the feelings of the ones who took this country down in the Bush years. There should have been someone to stop it. There has not been.UPDATE: The DLC declared itself defunct, the Third Way claimed to have taken its place, the No Labels party seems to be a website with lots of pictures. Haven't heard much about them. UPDATE: There is an occasional moment now from the president and from other Democrats that they recognize they must stand up to the extremists. I am happy for that. I hope they continue. Words don't matter much anymore, actions do. In 1985 Al From, a founder of the DLC, wrote of the new agenda for the party. They have scrubbed all the articles, but I still have excerpts. In his "Saving the Democratic Party" memo of January 1985, From advocated the formation of a "governing council" that would draft a "blueprint" for reforming the party. According to From, the new leadership should aim to create distance from "the new bosses"-organized labor, feminists, and other progressive constituency groups-that were keeping the party from modernizing. From's memo sparked the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in early 1985. According to Balz and Brownstein, "Within a few weeks, it counted 75 members, primarily governors and members of Congress, most of them from the Sunbelt, and almost all of them white; liberal critics instantly dubbed the group 'the white male caucus.'"For several decades many in the party adopted the policy of distancing themselves from the traditional constituents. I think we are making ourselves heard, but still not loudly enough.
marsis (244 posts) 1. Seems to me that it really acceleratedafter Paul Wellstone was assassinated.
Wellstoning can lead to tombstoning.
