The Port Huron statement and the Southern Strategy

That aside: note that the bald consumerism toward ‘pseudo-needs’ that the statement was railing against in – 1962 – would have included inventions like the washing-machine and the dishwasher. Back then, the students simply took the cleaning labours of housewives for granted.

LBJ used the shock and sympathy originating from the assassination to pass through a lot of his agenda.

Oddly enough, precisely because partisan politics is so new in the US, the Dems seem to be more willing to engage in it than their Social Democratic counterparts in Europe

This makes it seem like you don’t know what either “social democratic” or “partisan politics” means. The Democrats are well to the right of anything remotely social-democratic, and if the US ever got proper partisan politics they’d either shut down the government permanently or make some kind of “coalition agreement” to enable cross-issue bargaining.

@3

Evidence? Um. The washing machine market boomed in the US across the 1950s. Dishwashers came a little later, across the 1960s.

These took on an ideological gloss with the so-called ‘kitchen debates’ between Nixon and Khrushchev, when Nixon visited Moscow in 1959. This was before the Prague Spring and Western socialists still felt obliged to defend the Moscow line. The model kitchen the Americans had built featured, yes, a washing machine and dried soap powders, amongst other goods, and Khrushchev argued that these were frippery: that the ‘gadgets’ had no useful purpose, that Americans were making things that were not built to last.

In short order, every American socialist group was announcing that (1) planned obsolescence was a capitalist conspiracy, and (2) consumer demand (through ‘pseudo-need’; these terms stem from Galbraith’s 1958 The Affluent Society, I think) was a capitalist conspiracy. You see exactly both in the Port Huron statement.

This was a major ideological contest in the 1960s: whether consumer electronics was actually going to go somewhere, or whether a bigger Heavy Press Programme would be more useful. The answer was hardly obvious, at the time. I’m not sure what you want me to prove.

@ David: “I’m not sure what you want me to prove.”

This: “Back then, the students simply took the cleaning labours of housewives for granted.”

“any thoughts?”

A teeny one. How come the DPP isn’t called the MCT? I think it’s ’cause shit happens.

On Europe moving to the right …. well I think it is a bit more complicated than that. First of all, the incumbents in 2008 got punished for it and that meant some losses for the traditional left-wing parties (in UK, Spain). Second, there are two moves to the right in Europe that don’t have a lot to do with one another (a) Eurocrat neoliberal austerity and (b) nativist populism (UKIP, Wilders, FN etc). Hard to see that a coalition between a+b is possible as a decades-long project.

A brief history of US party labels

“Republican” was the name Jefferson chose for his anti-Federalist movement that won in 1800, and dominated at the federal level until the rise of the Whigs. The idea for this label was that the Federalists believed that the US was actually one country, while the Republicans upheld the provisions of the Constitution that narrowly define the US republic as a confederation of sovereign states, with careful limits on federal power.

Federalists in some states where there was a property requirement to vote referred to these Republicans as “Democrats”, because the Republicans of that era tended to support removing these requirements. What was intended as an insult pleased at least some of its victims, who willingly took the name to themselves. Parties had no real organization back then, so there was no official name for decades. Historians sometimes call it the “Democratic-Republican” party in this era, but I don’t know if that term was used back then by actual “D-R”s.

Andrew Jackson’s populism emphasized the democratic aspect, so Democratic became the label the party has gone by since a few decades before the Civil War.

The new anti-Slavocrat party consciously chose the label “Republican” to hark back to Jefferson. The point was that the Slavocrats had made the federal govt into a power that trampled on the restrictions the Constitution put on it, so the rules of our republic needed to be reasserted to get the Democrats and the federal govt they controlled back in line. It is sometimes forgotten that several Republican states and municipalities nullified the Fugitive Slave Act. The initial orientation of the Republicans was anti-federal power, because they did not control the federal govt, and had meager immediate prospects of doing so.

The Grand Old Party nickname started after the Civil War. I assume the Rs put it forward because the phrase was reminiscent of Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization. The party of that time had as its main selling point to the average voter, as opposed to the Malefactors of Great Wealth, that it had saved the Union, so it wished to bask in the glory of the Union militant. I imagine the Ds of the time objected to the nickname for exactly the same reason, but in later eras when memory of the Grand Army of the Republic faded, “GOP” lost its polemic force and became a neutral term.

The Ds lack such a neutral nickname, though Rs lately have taken to referring to us as the “Democrat” party rather than “Democratic”, the point being, as nearly as I can tell, that they begrudge us any descriptor they have to even pretend is positive, and “democratic” is something they do have to pretend is a positive label. So they would have that we are just the party of the Democrats, an empty label, rather than a party devoted to democratic principles.

Oddly enough, and to bring this discussion full circle, lately they have tended to find the sort of meaning in their party’s name — beyond a mere label — that they deny the Ds. If it is pointed out that the filibuster, or gerrymandered Congressional Districts, etc., frustrate the principle of majority rule, they respond that we live in a republic, not a democracy. The Constitution set rules for the operation of our republican form of govt that sometimes frustrate democracy, and that has to be a good thing, because that’s how the Founders designed it. This has always been the leading idea of their Federalist Society, and lately some of them have even come out for getting rid of the popular election of Senators. Any day now I expect them to advocate for the restoration of property requirements for voting.

Nothing is ever permanently settled in this democratic republic of ours.

“Realignment” as shorthand for moving the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party and the liberal Republicans into the Democratic Party had been mooted for years before Port Huron; I recall discussions in the latter 1950’s, the fluid period examined in Maurice Isserman’s “If I Had a Hammer: the Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left.” People on the Left had long been uneasy with the New Deal’s reliance on the support of Southern Democrats and looked for ways to build a reconfigured coalition that wouldn’t need to placate them. In those golden years of the postwar social compact, it wasn’t unreasonable to see Northern working-class voters as a more than adequate counterweight to a reconfigured GOP that would take aboard the Southern states. What the Left generally missed (under George Wallace made it un-missable) was the virulence of white racism.

I do think David has a point up there at 2. It’s a lot easier to reject materialism if your wife does the donkey work.

Beyond that, I’ve long thought that consumerism is operationally defined as the stuff your wife spends money on. Its opposite – producerism, if that is a word – is marked as manly and as associated with the work ethic. Consumerism, on the other hand, is marked as sinful, weak, lazy, and feminine.

Both Say and Keynes would object that consumption and production are two sides of the same coin, of course.

@ 20 –
there is certainly some truth in what you say here, but you can’t make the delineation nearly as clean as your statement implies. some of the most glaring examples of consumerism are sports cars and yachts, which are traditionally understood as male status symbols and markers of some type of masculine virility. there certainly was (is?) a leftist line that follows the produce/consume :: masculine/feminine logic you highlight, but there is an equally operative critique that labels consumerism as a stand-in for older forms of masculine status competition.

My name links to a recent on-topic article in Jacobin.

I just read John Q’s comment and sorry for contributing to the derail. BUT I think this issue is a serious one for any movement that relies on anticonsumerism and on convincing the broader public to take on anticonsumerist attitudes.

John@24: it’s pretty clear, nonetheless, that part of the criticism of “consumerism” involves a devaluation of the work of women. Marx and Engels, as well as the socialist women of their time, were aware of amount of labor that fell down on women (as indeed modern materialist historians are) but later activists glossed it over. This may have been a major part of the failure of socialism; a movement which focuses on the pre-feminist workplace leaves out half of humanity. I wonder if the political success of post-war capitalism was in part a result of genuine material improvements in the lives of women.

To the broader issue, the young leaders of the SDS were unaware of the depth of the reactionary, not only racist, thinking in the USA. Old left activists, who had lived through the McCarthy era and remembered Charles Lindbergh, knew more of the appeal of fascism in the USA.

To an even broader issue, I would say that Marxism failed in part because Marx’s economics was wrong, conclusions drawn from it were wrong, and strategies derived from it were wrong. The emergence of technocratic economics and management, the ancestors of big data, poses a huge challenge to political activists of all stripes. On the one hand, it has become clear that national economies, and the global economy as a whole, can be governed without a minute, invasive ordering of individual lives. On the other hand, if cycles of boom and bust, as well as environment catastrophe, are to be avoided, the economies must be governed, to the horror of people who would much prefer not to think about that. How we are to govern in the face of these realities is an unanswered question.

@32 – hah, no end of contemporary confident assertions in that link that these things are false pseudo-needs and those things are the real human needs, and let me, the True Leftist and prophet of Free Pursuit of Self-Actualization, instruct you as to what they are.

I guess we never learn.

John@32: consider what running a kitchen without running water, refrigeration, controllable light, and so on was like. “Woman’s work” used to be every bit as hard as factory labor. Honestly, the amount of housework we have have now is minor by comparison.

Taking into account William Timberman’s observation about those of us who lived through those days, and respectfully ignoring John Quiggin’s request to remain on the topic of political parties, I must say a few things about the situation of women and housework in 1962, along with the probable mindset of the drafters of the Port Huron Statement.

Most people at that time simply assumed that housework was women’s work. It wasn’t something we much thought about; that was the way it was. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique would not appear until 1963. That is not to say there was some unrest, but it became explicit later; women’s objections provoked Stokely Carmichael’s famous put-down in 1964.

Those of us who lived in suburbia, the origin of most of the Port Huron authors, had running water, refrigeration, controllable light, and washing machines. A few had dishwashing machines; my mother had three little dishwashers in her children. Dryers were not totally uncommon, and many families had freezers, particularly in rural areas.

Not having been directly involved with the SDS, but watching from a distance, I suspect that the young men never even considered the women they may have been involved with in terms of housework. Their reference point was more likely their mothers, if they thought of the issue at all. Probably most of their female partners were quietly doing the housework, as their mothers did.

…introduction of the ‘conspiracy theory’ smear into his discussion of the critique of calculated obsolescence and manufactured want.

Cheryl Rofer @ 38

Very true. I suppose we were a bit like Jefferson, congratulating ourselves on the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence while ignoring the slaves hoeing in the kitchen garden. Unlike him, however, we were still alive when the bill came due — in our case in the 70’s. I still wince when I remember those days….

We could also imagine that Nixon read the Port Huron Statement, and that idea later helped him formulate the Southern Strategy for his own ends. He read his opposition very carefully. I expect he read through all of Mao too; it was his business and his nature to do so. To him, ideas mattered — because ideas are expressed in words, and words can be twisted. He was nothing if not one hell of a great devious Machiavellian politician. I read through every one of his post-presidency books about domestic and world affairs, and it shocked me, because I didn’t realize how intellectually prolific he was, and how clearly he was able to see everything, except himself.

Regarding the SDS wanting realignment, I don’t think it was wrong of them to want it, it’s just that what realignment happened didn’t happen on progressive terms: there really wasn’t a whole-sale movement of liberal Republicans into the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s (arguably, 2006-2008, in which the Republican party was all but wiped out in New England, shows that it happened a generation or two later), and working class white voters weren’t kept in the coalition to the degree necessary to maintain a working majority (as people have pointed out in the wake of 2012, the demographic coalition that McGovern wanted to put together in 1972 now actually has the numbers to be viable).

My critique would be that SDS didn’t do much to make realignment happen.

The lack of a nickname for the Democratic party may well be due to its historic lack of unity, as memorialized in the Will Rogers quip, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.” Its essential dysfunction was demonstrated in the first election it won, where the tie between running mates Jefferson and Burr had to be decided by the House of Representatives.

“This is a republic, not a democracy” goes back to the 1960’s at least; it’s almost certainly much older.

I dispute the assertion that this isn’t primarily a Confederate problem. The conservative east of California was settled by Okies and other Southerners. The South metastasized. Bakersfield is part of the heartland for country music. Religion is not the only reliable cultural marker.

Here we take cheer in the gradual replacement of catsup by salsa, one bottle of Tapatío at a time.

@Chris, 51 Iianm, France is not representative of much since the CP was fairly marginal before WWII and it was their connection to the resistance that legitimized them.

In between the observations about the importance of washing machines [and, yes, I can actually remember sitting on the basement stairs, watching my mother use a ringer washer, turning a crank to squeeze out the water garment by garment, and hanging each on clotheslines strung across the (fairly filthy) basement (Winter in Michigan). Should we mention the proper uses of lye soap, chlorine bleach, ammonia, bluing agents and starch? Talk about your chemical hazards!], there have been a few interesting points peaking out of comments on the actual topic of OP.

Political realignments are a cyclical feature of American partisan politics, and, yes, John Quiggin, Americans have had some experience with partisan politics — longer experience, in fact, than any major European state. The Democratic Party claims to be the oldest political party in the world, tracing its founding to Jefferson and Jackson. The Republican Party, founded around 1854, is older than the vast majority of national European parties. What’s relatively new is the more strictly ideological and issue divisions overlaying the partisan identifications. That’s a strange business, and not, imho, healthy.

Any democratic system has to find ways to reconcile popular ambivalence about political choices, with the policy choices actually made by the people elected to office. Political parties, regardless of other aspects of their makeup, are always “coalitions” of people, who seek office and the status and opportunities (for lack of a broad, general term) that go with office, and people, who are concerned with ideas and issues. The former are the more reliable base of support; the latter, often ill-informed and mercurial. If a country has more numerous political parties, then it is possible to have nominally more ideological parties (or parties based on other aspects of personal identity), but governance will still tend to whittle policy things down to binary choices, at best, or no choice, among grand coalitions.

The ineffectualness of the American Left can be traced to its blindness to the importance of patronage in maintaining an effective Party organization. “Partisan” is never about ideology, per se; “partisan” is identifying with a political party, for the tangible benefits it can produce for the members, who identify with it and support it, for the “pork barrel” benefits and jobs it can deliver. Only a minority in any population have anything like a political philosophy, and only a minority of them, anything like a coherent political worldview, founded on critical observation and reason — to the extent that ideas matter, it is because of effective propaganda and indoctrination. At best, political ideas matter because they provide a credible rationalization for why a particular policy matters, why that policy has particular consequences that an individual citizen or community of interest should care about. As a foundation for believing in an idea about policy among large groups, at least, the critical elements are the attitudes of political psychology and the emotional responses associated with those psychologies.

Nixon, bless his black heart, was a master of the politics of resentment.

Resentment. Not racism per se, though the legacy of racial resentments would be exploited ruthlessly in implementing the so-called Southern Strategy (which, in Reagan’s hands, was especially effective in northern states, with weakening union movements and suburbanizing Catholics).

I think the college-educated, privileged New Left, though exhibiting resentments of their own, simply failed to appreciate resentment as a political tool, and the numbers resentment could mobilize with relatively simple propaganda tactics, and that, combined with a failure to appreciate the implications of a goo-goo politics targeting patronage and pork barrel willy-nilly, left the country without any effective opposition to the so-called “Southern Strategy”. And, oddly, “racism” is now as effective in keeping those identified with the Democratic Party corralled as it supposedly is among the Tea Partiers.

The “Southern Strategy” describes a propaganda strategy for using resentment, tactically. The policy strategy, though, was to destroy the economic foundation for a liberal (or social democratic) politics. The economic basis for a union movement, or a free press staffed by professional journalists, or a banking system to support a middle class, or a liberal academy independent of business interests, or . . . fill in the blank. The policy goal wasn’t to re-establish the segregation of a semi-feudal white supremacy, and no effort was ever made in that direction.

“Hot-button” propaganda tactics, without economic pillage, tend to wear out, and I think much of the social progress that the U.S. has experienced, even as it has sunk into a plutocratic pit unimpeded by either Party, has to do with the way the politics of resentment — which has always been primarily symbolic and dependent on keeping its more fervent adherents frustrated victims, and pointedly never delivering dispositive policy substance — has accelerated changing social attitude adjustments. If this changes — if the stealing and pillage identifies victims, in a way the victims recognize, provoking reactionary organization in self-defense, then politics changes; it might be a politics of prison guards against prisoners — that seems to be the emerging design, the Plan B, for when Obama is gone — and, maybe the Republican theocrats and Tea Partiers will compete for the prison guard / vigilante jobs in that American dystopia. Even then, we may be waiting for a Left.

Bruce Wilder @ 54

The ineffectualness of the American Left can be traced to its blindness to the importance of patronage in maintaining an effective Party organization

I’m not certain that this wasn’t recognized negatively, even if it was not recognized positively. (The “Makers vs Takers”/democratic plantation memes is a statement of belief that it is recognized positively.)

By “recognized negatively”, I mean that a primary project of the Left over the past two generations has been breaking down the traditional systems and sources of patronage for their opponents. Churches have been largely driven out of public life with Abington and Lemon; small businesses have been greatly diminished relative to larger ones by a general increase in regulation, and their distinctiveness reduced by the Civil Rights Acts; separatist schools have been crippled by the >i>Bob Jones/Hillsdale cases; traditional family and sexual norms have been pressured by a whole row of decisions (Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Levy, Lawrence). (Note that most of these couldn’t have been passed democratically–they were either court innovations or administrative agency rulings.) (This breakdown drives a lot of the populist anger of the Tea Party. )

SamChevre @ 56

Wow! I’m going to thank you sincerely for your comment.

It seems to me that the anger, and willingness to fight, on the Tea Party Right is fundamentally justified, but wrongly focused — even wrongly labeled — in ways that make it impossible to form political coalitions or work toward incremental policy change in sensible political compromises.

“Churches have been largely driven out of public life . . .”

I do not even know what you are talking about. I don’t think Churches have left public life, let alone been driven out. And, that’s before I even consider the specific consequences of eliminating official, ceremonial public school bible readings.

In the bad old days, many people, I suppose, commonly believed some morally regrettable things — they had viciously racist beliefs to rationalize, say, white supremacy — but not many thought the sun rises in the northwest.

“small businesses have been greatly diminished relative to larger ones by a general increase in regulation”

Small or local businesses have been diminished relative to larger, national and global ones in some important sectors. That, at least, seems to relate an observable fact, and a fact that causes a lot of concern among liberals and progressives. Does it make sense to attribute that to “a general increase in regulation”? There’s been secular change in economic regulatory policy. On the left and in the center, the common way to label it, has been to call the general policy trend, one of de-regulation, market liberalization or globalization.

If I think of the 30-year trend in banking and finance, media, retail distribution and high-tech, it is hard to make a case for a label of “increasing regulation” in a narrative analysis. Maybe, where intellectual property (IP) is concerned, but it is hard to make the case that the rise of CostCo, WalMart and the other big box stores is due to “increasing regulation”. The absence, say, of effective labor law enforcement vis a vis WalMart might be a subplot, and “free-trade” and financial policies, which transferred production to China, might be a big factor. The concentration of media and banking and finance is pretty dramatically tied in to deliberate regulatory change, which removed and reduced restrictions and oversight.

I absolutely get that both Tea Party leaders and followers might feel considerable resentment about the effects of these trends. It pisses me off, too. But, why adopt labels or narratives, which seem to deny what would otherwise be commonly observable facts?

“Increased regulation” isn’t just a different set of values or a different point of view on the facts, it is a different set of facts — a narrative so divorced in its references from the commonly recognized recent history, as to be equivalent to just making stuff up. And, that’s before mourning the restoration of common law expectations of public accommodation as a loss of local color.

The Tea Party is hardly unique or alone in this. In many ways, the “mainstream” in the U.S. (and even more so, in Europe) appears to be trapped in a neoliberal delusional fantasy, with regard to economic policy, with no more substantial theory than a cargo cult. But, that just raises the stakes on figuring out how to talk and disagree, but with a common grasp on reality. Without it, there’s only a politics of bullying and breaking things. Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up Ted Cruz’ politics.

To Bruce Wilder, not sure exactly what you mean by “The ineffectualness of the American Left can be traced to its blindness to the importance of patronage in maintaining an effective Party organization.”

The hippy left was not capable of this kind of patronage, but the left-leaning Democratic mayors certainly understood patronage. And used it well to maintain power. Unless you want to consider men like Boss Daley to be radical conservatives.

And yes, as you note, “the “Southern Strategy” describes a propaganda strategy for using resentment, tactically.”

The strategy was to use racism to inspire that resentment – to use racism as an appeal for the white voters who once were solidly Democratic. The goal may not have been to prop up the Klan once again, but it has certainly created a monster in the Tea Party.

“I don’t think America’s turning into a social democracy in the next 50 years.”

I think social democracy is the only future that is possible, anyway. But social democracy may be a looser category to me, than to most, because within it, I see a continued role for markets: for personal choice, innovation and economic growth. (Economic growth appears to be about one-half due to specialization and trade, and one-half due to reduction of trade/transform costs by centers of control:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXr5VjQ0OXE

But the guess at the timeframe of 50 years depends on whether Obamacare is a success (i.e., is a qualified success that can be improved upon). If this question, which ought to be answered within a few years, is answered in the affirmative, then the U.S. will already be half-way to a social democracy.

Why? Because the key to the puzzle is to make a change in individual preferences.

As it stands now, most people would describe something vaguely like neoliberalism as their default belief. (“Most” people, not the readers of Crooked Timber.) Why is that? Because they never learned anything else. Almost all of the high priests of society, i.e. the mainstream media economists and op-edders, have been promoting it for over 30 years, and they are still banging away at it. Even most Democrats will answer this way. But it is still a belief, and it can start to change.

I think that is why the billionaire rightwing nuts are so adamantly opposed to universal healthcare. Indeed this fear stretches across the right; we read it often in rightwing comments. They think that if the move toward universal healthcare changes enough individual preferences about the role of the state, then, after that, all the disproportionality and gerrymandering in the world will not be able to stop it. In other words, if there can be a big new “government program”, yet we still have economic growth afterward, that basically destroys their simple message as it is understood by most voters. The conversation will then get complicated, and complicated conversations are not something that the rightwing can withstand.

Rick Perlstein points out that the Democratic coalition foundered on the attempt to pass a fair housing act. Nixon, sensing the trouble went all in for 1966, campaigning for every Republican who was in a seat occupied by a dem that had been waved in during the 1964 elections. He took the credit for the Republican success in 1966. SDS were overly optimistic about political realignment. And in 1963, they identified as anti- anti-communists (that is, they cared not a whit for events in the USSR one way or another and focussed instead on combatting conservatism in the US).

GOP is definitely a reference to GAR whose veterans carried the party to electoral victories for about 4o years.