the combo of JFK’s just-martyred brightest-and-best high-technocrat aura with LBJ’s actual vicious old-school street-fighting political skills was for a season or three very powerful and effective

then—catastrophically—LBJ’s nasty but useful gifts were shipwrecked on the war that JFK’s technocracy had bequeathed him: and everything that had (implausibly) worked together turned in on itself…

nixon really did have his revenge on JFK: he turned every part of his legacy into a weapon against kennedy’s own party

Anyway, as I said I’m certainly not an expert on US party political tactics and this discussion is a long way from the issues I was interested in thinking about, ie. ideological/class tendencies of political blogging in general (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Passion is a tool for Republicans, not a motivator. Part of their game is just manoeuvring the Democrats into looking cold-blooded and gutless—e.g. the Dukakis “What if they were raping your wife?” question.

For a lot of Republicans, liberal moral neutrality and equanimity are a.) infuriatingly wrong and inhuman and b.) a poltical weakspot and c.) a complete justification for the use of unethical political tactics. There is no God, everything is permitted.

You say:

I was not conceding that the majority of Americans are conservative.

Which is nice, but then you end with:

A lot of Americans have a much more favorable view of the Democrats than history can justify.

Meaning probably that you can be sure you’re right on history (and most other points), AND believe that a lot of people can disagree with you on it despite the fact that they’d agree with you if given a proper chance. Or, in your words:

It’s not either/or, and good luck on your war on testosterone.

I’m sure I don’t need luck by the way: testosterone is self-defeating. A winning strategy consists in letting it battle it out with itself, enjoy a good critical rest before quietly and with good humour setting some matters straight whilst it is exhausted. Sure, it’ll rest as well but: not to worry, Rome was not built in a day.

I’ll consider my comment exempt from the ‘thumbsucking’ criticism, then, since this was exactly and precisely the point I was making (except that I also pointed out that the liberalism of the pre-1914 GOP wasn’t fake either). The point of dragging in Europe is that it’s an area where there are identifiable Left and Right parties which are reasonably consistent over time. The two USAn parties aren’t either of those things, which strikes me as unusual.

Bianca, this thread discusses two articles about American politics, specifically about the role of the internet in American politics. I totally agree that America’s British dependencies should have an their own place on the internet to go to discuss their own little concerns.

Basically my view of the Democratic Party is a merger of two well-known views of American political history: the view represented by Zinn (who I haven’t read, but would probably mostly agree with except for the optimism), and the orthodox technocratic-Democratic view, as first stated by Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and many others and institutionalized in decades of Pol Sci 101 courses.

Democratic technocrats explicitly do not want popular involvement (“populism”) in policy-making. They want to deal with voters indirectly through such large vote-contracting institutions as unions, the AFT, the TV networks, etc. This is another, quite deliberate step away from direct democracy, piled on top of the indirectness institutionalized in the Constitution.

My difference from the Hofstadter gang is just to say, as Zinn would, that without the populist / leftist / progressive anti-Party movements, the Democrats all along would have been a conservative party pure and simple.

There’s evidence that Hofstadter himself might have ended up having doubts about the technocratic transformation of the Democratic Party he helped define in his three polemical anti-populist books. He hoped for a party where Intellectuals had a major role and the docile, stupid masses were carefully managed, but what we got was a fundraising machine run by wonks and hacks.

To sum up: I think that the internet has had a very favorable impact on American politics, and I am puzzled by the animus that there seems to be against it. I am suggesting that Obama’s unfriendliness to the netroots (not my term, BTW) is in no way surprising. Party leadership is always hostile to anything that seems capable of shaking their control, even if the new forces are initially helpful to the party. And no, I don’t think that everyone knows that. I think that Kos, Hampsher, and many of the others are just now figuring out how hard the line is.

And finally, I’m not proposing a third party, at least not nationally. But progressives have to learn an inside-outside strategy, with a stress on the outside, and should stop being surprised and hurt when their adversaries do them harm.

Not necessarily explicitly on this thread, but IIRC the issue has come up in the past.

Zinn’s book, if you’re not familiar with it, is precisely a chronicle of those radical movements.

I don’t agree with a lot of your account of the history. I’m sure you could document it from a certain range of sources and authorities. Really, if I had time to document an alternative account that I believed to be more accurate, I’d write a book, not spend minutes here and there (which I also don’t have, with a 9-mo in the house) sparring with you. In fact, I would bet such a book exists already.

I don’t see that (most) people are trying to compare European and US versions of their political systems. What I see is British people expressing a natural resentment of the US-centric nature of the discussions that usually take place on CT (Henry is not American either, after all), and I totally agree with them that they deserve to have a place for themselves to discuss topics of interest to them.